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Leo Babauta of Zen Habits fame has ditched email and will primarily use Twitter:

… the people I communicate with the most are (mostly) on Twitter. What I love about Twitter is that it’s very limited (140 characters), so you have to keep things brief, and also there isn’t the expectation that you’ll respond to every message, as there is in email. Friends can DM me on Twitter for personal communication.

I find the using Twitter part more significant than the giving up email part.

Over the past year, I’ve observed that I’ve stayed in touch with friends and contacts from my undergrad and postgrad days (and former colleagues) who are on Twitter. I’ve found that I communicate at least once with everyone about once a week. Those who aren’t on Twitter have more or less fallen out of touch.

Twitter is definitely the best reflection of our expanding social networks and shortening attention spans. Telephone conversations lasted 15+ minutes. Reading and responding to an email takes perhaps 5 minutes; a tweet (or Facebook Wall post) takes seconds.

Finally, having these channels of communication has let us grade our social network according to closeness – I still call up my closest friends occasionally – those calls last upwards of an hour. I write to a slightly larger set of people with “what’s up lately” emails, and maintain a level of ambient Twitter-fed awareness of an even larger set.

Yesterday and today
The Web has been through two major evolutionary stages, and we are seeing some major activity in the third evolutionary stage.

The first was the “early web” – through most of the 90s and until the dot-com bust. People accessed content through directories and portals, and the content itself was static web pages.

The second was what was dubbed (retrospectively) “Web 1.0” [1] Search went mainstream, and we also began to see a lot of dynamic content (think classifieds on craigslist and books on Amazon).

The third stage is what we’ve called “Web 2.0” in its early forms and “social media” as focus has shifted from a loose set of open standards and technologies (RSS, OPML, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, CSS, HTML5, Webkit, Flash, SyncML, OAuth) to the services that have been built with them.

Within this latest stage of evolution, developments in the last three years or so have been about putting together the guts of what Tim O’Reilly called the “Internet Operating System” to truly integrate the Internet into our daily lives. We’re reaching a stage of maturity with these internals (that is, growth/focus/interest is slowing), and are seeing an acceleration in the activity around applications and services built on top of them.

Tomorrow and beyond
But I think there’s still tremendous competition for some platforms that will form the guts of the Internet Operating System. Fred Wilson talks about aspiring to be a platform:

I think, that if you don’t want to be [an Internet] platform, then I don’t know what you should be aspiring to be. I mean, I don’t know that there is anything else that you would want to be.

The search system is pretty much Google and the location system is Google Maps. The iTunes Music Store and YouTube are the digital entertainment system, and Twitter makes an extremely strong case for the messaging system. But there’s still no dominant payment system for the web. There’s still no dominant scheduling/calendaring system yet, no dominant remote storage system and most critically, no identity system. And this is nowhere close to being a complete list.

As a parent, can you subscribe to your child’s school’s football coaching team calendar with the playground location embedded, sign up for it by paying the fees through your mobile phone and have your car’s GPS give you turn-by-turn directions to the ground on practice days following the least-congested route based on real-time crowdsourced information? Not yet.

Until these systems are in place, there is an upper limit on what we can make applications do, how deeply we can integrate these applications into our physical world. The “next Google/Twitter/Facebook” is going to be a company that creates a credible missing platform.

The top-level applications that build upon existing platforms will be either be single-purpose applications (Evernote is one example) or “glue” companies, those that tie platforms together. Don’t expect to see a billion-dollar company out of them in their current form. [2]

[1] The analogy with the World Wars is hard to miss. Until WW2, the First World War was known just as the Great War. Until sometime in 2005, “Web 1.0″ was just the Web.

[2] That’s not to say that they’re not worth investing in. I’m saying that next-generation services can only become mainstream once the plumbing is in place – and to take advantage of new platforms, these top-level applications will need to evolve significantly.

Related stuff around the web you ought to read:

Techcrunch announced PubSubHubbub, a protocol to speed up delivery of RSS and Atom feeds (5 August 2009)

Dare Obasanjo on Google’s possible stab at an identity solution, the WebFinger protocol (15 August 2009)

(This post began as a reply to a comment question on my previous blog post about iPhone 3G. It’s also a complete re-write of an earlier post.)

My experience with the Internet on my Nokia N82 has been more than satisfying, but that might well be a result of my usage pattern. Your mileage may vary. And yes, my ideal internet-access device would be iPhone, but I’ve already written about why iPhone is a no-no for me.

Email

During my commute, I process email I received the previous evening and overnight. Since the ride is frequently too bumpy to type fast, I avoid replying until I’m in my office (though I send the occasional one-sentence reply through the app). I use the Gmail App to label, star, archive and delete email.

Bulk processing email like this is faster on the Gmail App than it is on the desktop! The Gmail App has handy shortcuts (press 7 twice to delete, 8 twice to mark as spam and delete, 9 twice to archive, “*” to mark as star. It also pre-fetches email so you don’t wait for minutes on end for pages to load.

Feeds and updates

The Google Reader interface for iPhone works just as fine on the S60 browser. With prefetching, ability to star, share, share with notes, and mark entire feeds and folders as read, I can process feeds as fast on my phone as I can from my laptop. I also catch up on Twitter with the S60 browser. m.twitter.com is fast, and doesn’t feel like you’re compromising on the experience because you’re using a mobile-adapted interface.

Microblogging

The same S60 browser and m.twitter.com let me send tweets while on the go. I’d love to post via SMS, but the facility seems to be “unavailable temporarily” since May at least.

News

I use Google News India and the New York Times mobile page for Indian and World news respectively. Both sites have awesome mobile interfaces, and render very well on the S60 browser.

Incidentally, you can view pages either in landscape or portrait mode by just tilting the phone using the built-in accelerometer on the N82. I scan tweets in portrait mode and my feeds and news in landscape mode.

Social Networking

A few months ago, Google release a mobile-adapted interface for Orkut. Like all of Google’s mobile services, Orkut mobile is simple and well-designed, with support for viewing profiles, photos, scrapbooks, birthday reminders and activity updates – all of what you’d use on the web. I don’t see much support for communities or applications, and I’d prefer it stay that way. I don’t like Orkut’s implementation of either.

Instant Messaging

I’m not a big fan of instant messaging, and certainly not one of those who’s online but “Busy” all day long. If I do have to ping someone on Google Talk, though, Fring is the app I use. The competition (apart from Ebuddy) tends to be either horribly designed or terribly engineered. Or both. Fring lacks notification on the phone’s front screen (For Nokia, I can imagine using Active Standby to display “New IM from so-and-so”. Google’s managed it with their Search Box).

It’s also a VoIP client. Rohan writes in: “My phone is WiFi-enabled and I have a Skype unlimited connection. I’ve configured Skype within Fring, so when I connect my mobile through WiFi to the local LAN, I can make almost free voice calls (VoIP calls) to 32 countries using Skype on Fring.”

The Series 60 Browser

All of my mobile web access is now through the default vanilla yet stunningly capable S60 browser. It has support for multiple windows – invaluable for opening links to websites from Twitter, support for SSL (when I check Gmail from the browser), one-click zoom in/zoom out, and the mini-map feature – viewing the entire page, reduced, on your screen, and scrolling through it instead. Invaluable for scrolling through long pages.

What’s your mobile applications list? And how does it fit into your daily lifestyle?

Xobni is an Outlook plugin that has proven remarkably useful in managing managing bloated inboxes. It’s generated its fair share of buzz lately, and most users seem to love it. Apart from a clutch of very well-implemented features, what it is about Xobni that make it such a inherently popular tool?

Visibility: Xobni is a sidebar for Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007. With tens of millions of people using Outlook at work and, indeed, spending all day in it, Xobni is constantly in its users’ view. Contrast that with applications like Facebook, which live in a tab in your browser and will be out of view most of the time. (Serendipitiously, widescreen monitors are more popular than ever before, so a sidebar works well).

Ready-to-go: Unlike Facebook, xobni doesn’t need a first-time user to enter profile information, build a network over time by inviting friends, or accumulating wall posts or scraps. Xobni uses as fodder the tons and tons of information that’s already accumulated over the years in your inbox. That means once it’s done indexing, Xobni gets you up and running right away – discovering your network instead of you building it.

Intent-based: Xobni understands how you ‘do’ email. Users don’t view email as a chronological list of tasks at all – they either want to look at email as boxes of tasks (or projects or events), or as a collection of people whom they talk with. Xobni does the latter, and very well. So it’s a cinch looking up attachments from a contact, or the time of day you typically communicate with someone, or schedule time with someone.

Cool: Xobni’s done a terrific job of being viewed as something cool to transform drab old Outlook into. That’s why so many early adopters have turned passionate evangelists.

Do you use Outlook at work? Have you given Xobni a spin? What else (apart from specific features) do you think makes Xobni popular?

If you’re the kind who keeps track of information on the web by subscribing to RSS feeds, chances are things aren’t entirely satisfactory.

You’re probably swamped with an ever-growing backlog, yet reading your feeds takes too long. You’re annoyed at several feeds repeating the same news item. And your feed list looks like one chaotic mess.

Surely this wasn’t the way it promised to be – you thought you could wade through information effortlessly with RSS.

A few simple techniques and just a little but of discipline, though, can get you back in business. I’m assuming you’re using Google Reader.

Adding feeds:

• Subscribe, as far as possible, to blogs that do filtering for you. For example, instead of subscribing to several of the “official” Google blogs, I merely subscribe to “Googling Google”, “Google Blogoscoped”, and “Google Operating System” – they’ll give me all the news I need to know about Google, and other rumors/previews as well.
• Add feeds liberally, but label them smartly. If you see an interesting website add it to your feed list, but label it immediately.
• Label according to use/function, not topic. Labeling your feeds “politics”, “tech”, “humor” is no use. Something like this makes more sense:
  • A “News” label for your online newspaper/Google News feeds.
  • A “Daily” label for other, topical feeds you read once a day.
  • A “Evenings” label for humor blogs, cartoons, and the like.
  • A “DB” label for websites that spew information you’ll only need to refer to once in a while (techies, I’m talking Engadget, Ars Technica, Gizmodo and the like). Use Google Reader’s search function when digging out info later. (Thanks to Steve Rubel for this one.)

Processing feeds:

• Read different labels at different times of the day. From the above example, you’d read “News” as soon as you come in to work, “Evenings” to unwind, and so on.
• Use the “List” view. You can see more headlines that way, so if you don’t want to read it, there’s no need to scroll through it to reach the next item. Also, you don’t have to wait for images to load.
• Use “Mark all as read” liberally. After scanning 20 news headlines and reading 4, for instance, make all 20 read. The other 16 never mattered anyway.
• Use keyboard shortcuts. At a minimum, “n” and “p” are “next item” and “previous item”, and “u” hides/shows the feed list pane on the left.
• View entire labels instead of clicking and viewing individual blogs. For instance, simply click on “News” and sift through all your headlines – what do you care what order they’re in or what feed they came from? They’re all news.
• Star actionable posts. Once you’re done reading, see all your starred posts and take action for each of them.
• Go offline! The offline feature (at the top right of your GR page) downloads your latest 200 feed items. Then disconnect your computer from the network, and read through your feeds without distraction.

Maintaining feeds:

• Friends’ shared items can be useful/amusing. Or they can be a pain. Hide friends whose shared items you don’t want to view.
• Use the trends view in Google Reader to see which feeds you don’t read any more, or ones which haven’t been updated in ages. Unsubscribe from them.

Work smarter, not harder.

So my Thinkpad’s hard disk (a standard Hitachi 2.5″ 4200 RPM 80GB HDD) died Saturday evening. It began making ghastly noises all of a sudden, signaling imminent mechanical failure. I shut down the computer immediately, and on restarting, a BSOD informed me my boot volume was un-mountable.

I haven’t tried to recover any data yet, but that disk contains my entire music collection, and pretty much everything from my IIMK days. Tremendous loss. However, lessons have been learnt.

I’m going to use this post to chronicle how I’m getting my laptop functional again, the applications I use – both on the desktop and online, and strategies I’m using to move as much data online as possible.

Recovery

I had an external 120GB HDD (the same Hitachi make), which I plugged into the Thinkpad. And installed my copy of Windows Vista on it. After that, I downloaded and installed several Windows Vista device drivers for the Thinkpad R50. It took me about 4 hours from crash to a working (but data-less) machine.

Local Applications

What I installed immediately afterward. All of these are freely download-able applications, most of which I’ve been using for several years now.

• Firefox 3 Beta 5
• PowerPro 4.8 – shell control software
• iTunes 7.6.2
• OpenOffice 2.4
• VLC Player- all-in-one media player
• Nokia PC Suite 6.86 – interfacing with my N73
• Filezilla FTP client
• Paint.NET – midway between MSPaint and Adobe Photoshop
• Foxit Reader – lightweight alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader
• WinRAR – archiver par excellence

The installers for all of these are now on my SanDisk 2GB USB pen drive (along with all the Thinkpad Vista drivers). I’m going to update these every six months. It’ll take me far less time to get back on my feet in the event of another crash.

The Online Life

Although I was a pretty heavy user of Web-based applications, it’s going to become a way of life now. I’m now going to move as much data as possible online (except for large files like MP3s and videos), given that I usually have access to a high-speed connection – at home, work and on my phone.

PIM – Email, Scheduling, Contacts and Notes

All my email from 2004 onwards is in my Gmail account. I forward email from my RahulGaitonde.org and IIM Kozhikode mailboxes into Gmail. I also used Gmail’s ability to import email via POP3 to pull old email from these accounts too. I had also configured Thunderbird for Gmail via IMAP, but will be using Gmail’sweb interface exclusively now. To send email from other accounts, I use Gmail’s ability to use a custom “from” address.

As an aside, does anyone know of a good Series 60 email client – with IMAP support – that I can use on my N73?

I’ve used Google Calendar extensively, right from its launch. I have three calendars – one for Work, another for Birthdays and Anniversaries and the default calendar for miscellaneous, casual events. I used to sync these calendars with Thunderbird using GCALDaemon, which I highly recommend.

Contacts is where I’ve got a problem. Outlook (and then Thunderbird) used to be my repository for contacts. Over the years, I had built up an extensive database of email addresses, phone numbers, blog URLs and work addresses, and used to sync this database with my N73. Thankfully, that syncing means my contacts are safe.

However, I’m not sure what my future setup will be. Most probably Gmail’s contacts will be my repository. But I don’t know how I’m going to sync that with my smartphone. I’d love to hear suggestions. (I hear GooSync’s paid service can do this)

Google Notebook is my trusty scrapbook. Although I don’t think much of the interface and its questionable integration with Google Bookmarks, it works well enough. I’d use it even more if it had an Offline mode (say, through Google Gears). That’d bring it close to MS Office OneNote (which is an excellent piece of work).

Finally, I use Google Bookmarks through the Google Toolbar, but ever since I’d started using the Firefox 3 Beta, my list of local bookmarks had grown – because you can now tag them and search them using the Address bar. Those recent bookmarks were lost in the crash – ironically, just days after I blogged about the need to integrate Google Bookmarks with Firefox’s local store!

Staying updated

Google Reader is the answer. Apart from friends’ blogs, I follow:

• Tech News and Opinion: GigaOM, Techcrunch, NY Times Bits, BBC’s dot.life, Startup Duniya, WATBlog, Google Blogoscoped.
• Tech Lifestyle: Lifehacker, Lenovo’s Design Matters
• News: RSS Feed for my Google News

There are several other technology bloggers whose blogs I subscribe to. For news and other non-tech material, once a fortnight, I’ll check up on the Economist and BusinessWeek.

To stay in touch with what I find interesting, visit my Google Reader Shared Items page, or subscribe to it via RSS.

Photos

Thankfully, I’ve been fairly regular uploading pictures into my Flickr Pro account. I have about 500 photos on Flickr now, tagged and categorized. In the future, Flickr will become my primary photo repository.

Blogging

RahulGaitonde.org is hosted on Wordpress 2.5 using TheWebBrains‘ hosting service. I’ve been with TWB since 2004, and they haven’t let me down.

I use Filezilla to manage files on the remote server. Here are the Wordpress plugins I use:

• Akismet for spam filtering
• FeedBurner’s FeedSmith to redirect my Wordpress RSS feed to a custom Feedburner one
• Twitter Tools for integration with my Twitter account
• Random Redirect for readers with some time on their hands
• Wordpress Database Backup
• I also have a list of my Google Reader Shared Items on my sidebar. The code for this is easily available through your Google Reader page.

Web traffic monitoring for RahulGaitonde.org is done through Google Analytics. Again, something I’ve used since it was available.

Office

I’ve always used Google Docs and Spreadsheets whenever possible, right since the Writely days. Most of term papers, plans, databases have been composed, created and stored on Google Docs – so they’ve survived the crash.

Whenever I don’t have access to the Internet, it’s always OpenOffice (although Office 2007 is a splendid piece of work, and at least three years ahead of OO.org). From now on, any document I create with OO.org will be imported into Google Docs as soon as I’m connected.

Issues

That’s the rosy bit. But what about my music collection and videos? I can either back them up on external storage (which I don’t trust right now), or on DVD (cumbersome adding files and preserving albums), or on remote bulk storage like Amazon’s S3 (bandwidth too costly in India). So large files are a problem.

What about file formats such as PDF and ZIP? Miscellaneous settings and configuration files? Right now the plan is to back them up manually, periodically, on RahulGaitonde.org. But that’s far from ideal; there are too many such files.

Finally, the volume of remote data is already so much (4+ GB in Gmail alone) that downloading all that data locally (should the need ever arise) is impractical. What if I need to move from Flickr to, say, Picasa Web Albums? Or what if I need a few dozen photos to take with me on a USB pen drive? It’s extremely cumbersome to download assorted photos, even in batch mode. It’s the same for documents, spreadsheets, notes, email.

It’s clear that making the move online is adopting a fundamentally different lifestyle – which implies moving back offline is a major task. It’s one that I’ve been driven towards by my recent massive loss of data. The move has been made easier because I was already half-way there. In the weeks to come, I’m going to cross the other half and go completely online.

Questions? Suggestions? Comments? Do let me know.

In my previous post, I looked at how a social network “picks up” an application and “spreads” it to reach the audience that would be interested in using it. And I said that was because social networks make it easy to propagate information, but primarily because people with similar interests have numerous ways of “hooking up” – either via communities or interacting on these in-network applications.

That last point makes social networks a lot of like the communities of old – BBNs, chat rooms, IRC, forums. But since they’re the *new* craze, well, they’ve got to be different somehow. How?

One, profiles. Even as a new member of a group, find out a lot about the people you’re interacting with by looking at their profile pages – where they’re from, who they know, what they do, how they look like, what they like, what they’re up to lately, and a dozen other things. Because of this, interactions on social networks become richer sooner.

Two, you can, with a single profile page, be a member of multiple communities/groups/hangout spots. You don’t have to replicate your profile. With Facebook’s “mini-feed” (a summary of what your friends have been up to recently on FB), you can discover people who share several interests/lifestyle attributes with you. Also, because you *can’t* make different profiles for different communities, you’re the ‘real you’ throughout. Interactions are therefore more genuine, more real, and perhaps more trustworthy.

Three, marketers can build up impressively detailed profiles of users individually (via their communities and behavior), and communities themselves (via profiles of their users in aggregate). That enables far better, more granular targeting of ads than would be possible on forums, benefiting both users and advertisers.

Four, applications! Interactions between members are no longer limited to text-based discussions about action that happens elsewhere. Forum-like conversation and the actual application exist side-by-side.

Five (and this is mostly because of FB), communities are no longer silos but are deeply influenced by (and in turn influence) the rest of the Internet. For instance, the Digg.com application shows your friends your five most recently Dugg stories. Think of the added (and focused) traffic to Facebook from Digg and then from Facebook to Digg.

Social networks need to open their walled gardens to the rest of the Internet, instead of attempting to monetize only interactions within. As we’ve seen above, those very interactions will become richer as data flows into the network from outside (of course, at the cost of profile data flowing outwards in the short term). I think a network’s success will now depend on how much it is willing to open itself up.

Seth Godin quotes Gavin Potter about the 21st century being about ’sorting out demand’. “When your messages reach the right people at the right time in the right way, magic happens”, Seth says.

Social networks are changing that. In fact, Facebook and its ilk are obviating the very need for traditional STP (segmentation, targeting, positioning).

Why? Because one, Facebook has made it easy for developers to create applications that run inside of the social network itself. Think the ever-popular Scrabulous. Two, there is a massive swarm of people on Facebook that represent every possible demographic, spanning all sorts of likes, dislikes and tastes. Last, the viral nature of communication makes it easy for information to spread through the network.

This means that marketers can now stop thinking of how to segment and reach out to their audience. Once an application’s been created, simply “drop” it into the network; the swarm will pick it up. The network will figure out the target segment by itself. It’ll definitely reach the segment the marketer had in mind; chances are it’ll also reach several other audiences that the marketer didn’t anticipate.

The flip side is, of course, the utter lack of control. Apart from the application, both positive and negative feedback could spread alarmingly fast too. The latter could prove fatal in the early stages of distribution.

In a sense, this is similar to viral marketing campaigns carried out over email (Yahoo!’s and Hotmail’s campaigns about their own service by tagging on a small line at the end of every message) and other channels. However, back in those days, all a marketer could do was spread a message to “pull” the audience to the advertised service. Today it is the application/service itself that’s being spread.

There’s no Pull, no Push, only Release into the Wild.

… is the ability to add (and view) comments for a post.

Right now, I still need to navigate to the website (out of my RSS reader) and comment in the little form at the bottom of the page. That is *so* old-world Web!

Of course, several blogging platforms (Wordpress for one) offer RSS feeds for comments, but having separate feeds is non-optimal for two reasons. One, comments are only useful in the context of the parent post. Viewing it as an independent feed doesn’t fit in with that. Two, it still doesn’t solve the problem of adding comments.

An RSS reader is still a one-way street, funneling content from several websites into one location. Ideally, all of a user’s interactions with a website (read/write/view) could be done via RSS feeds. Because, after all, that was the intent of publishing a feed in the first place – to save the user the tedium of having to actually *visit* the website.

Imagine. Posts. Comments. Advertising. Live chat. All through the RSS reader.

Watched a few episodes of the GigaOM show over the last few days.

Video or audio is far more effective than text when it comes to expressing ideas or opinions. There’s so much you can tell from the tone and other nonverbal communication that you’d lose in a transcript.

Interactive/synchronous communication (think interviews) is also done much better with video/audio.

Recording a video is  quicker than typing a post! Think product reviews.

However, quoting a piece in a video is impossible. Linking to a specific part in a video is also impossible right now, although it could be implemented.

Bandwidth issues notwithstanding,  we’re going to see some websites migrate to pure-video formats; others will begin to include video occasionally. There will also be increasing pressure on blogging services to make video uploads/embeds easier.

Facebook’s Beacon brought some spice to the tech community, which had been longing for some juicy stuff to blog/discuss/pontificate about since the iPhone’s launch several months ago.

Beacon is (was?) part of Facebook’s new online ad system which shared a user’s actions on other (partner) websites with all his/her Facebook friends. (If you rent a movie on Blockbuster, your friends will be notified via Facebook’s mini-feed). Scary, eh?

So in addition to the flak that Facebook was already getting because of the havoc its “Applications” have wrought, it was criticized soundly for making Beacon the insidious nightmare that it was. I kind of lost track of that story after a few weeks (the tech blogosphere, like most of modern society, has an incredibly short attention span), but there were reports that Facebook had rectified most of what was wrong.

At around the same time, Google unveiled what it thought was a whole new chapter in social networking – now, your shared items in Google Reader would automatically show up in the Google Reader feed list of whoever was on your Google Talk list (and you could see their shared stuff). Privacy advocates made a tremendous amount of noise yet again.

However, Dave Winer at Scripting.com had a word for those who screamed blue murder when Beacon surfaced:

[t]here are thorny issues here, but we want these companies to give up control of our information, and we don’t want them to be overly scared of public opinion as they do it…[but] most important, I want them to give me control of my data.

Indeed. Almost all web-based applications we use today are personalized to some degree. So inured are we to this personalization; we don’t even notice it anymore. Until something like this pops up. Why do we love some applications and hate some? When does a feature cross the privacy line?

Here’s a look at some popular Internet applications/services:

Application/Service	User info collected?	Personalization requested?	Personally identifiable info shared by default?
Amazon’s recommendations	Y	N	N
iGoogle	Y	Y	N
Google’s personalized search	Y	N	N
Orkut/Flickr	Y	Y	Y
Google Reader’s shared items	Y	N	Y
Google News	Y	Y	N
Facebook Beacon	Y	N	Y
iTunes Music Store	Y	N	N
YouTube	Y	Y	Y
Digg/Del.icio.us	Y	Y	Y
Gmail	Y	Y	N

As we see, the only two applications that have run into privacy troubles (Google Reader’s shared items and Facebook’s Beacon) are the ones where personalization was not requested, but information was shared anyway. Then there are the annoyances like Google’s personalized search, that displays India-tailored results for me because it knows my location (and there are several times – more often than not – when I don’t want this). There are other beauties of design like Amazon’s recommendations – that give me personal, useful information without needing to know anything at all about me.

Making sense of it all:Internet application services seem to divide themselves into three degrees of personalization:

1.) Personalization based on viewed contentAmazon’s recommendations (“people who bought this also bought…”), eBay, Digg, del.icio.us. Here, user information in either aggregate or anonymous form is enough to offer a customized experience.

2.) Personalization based on purely personal informationMost of Google’s services offer this degree of personalization – iGoogle, personalized search results, Google News, Gmail. In all of these cases, the service provider (or application vendor, depending on how you look at it) has access to a ton of information about the user (think Gmail), but relies on that information bank alone for the experience.

3.) Personalization based on personal and group-level informationHere’s where both controversies have arisen, and, unfortunately, here’s where most of tomorrow’s applications will likely be slotted. Orkut, Flickr, YouTube and other community-based applications.

Concluding:An application can move from one degree of personalization to another. I can visualize Amazon, for instance, forming a community where individual book purchased can be used as recommendations (PQR in your friend network bought…). Or Google News, for that matter.Whether or not you land in a privacy soup will depend on where you choose to draw the line.

Some time later: What role does owning a lot of web real estate play in this game of personalization?

Steve Rubel talks about the significance about the new “Friends’ Shared Items ” feature on Google Reader. I was about to write about this, but Steve’s put it better than I’d planned.

The popular RSS reader now lets you easily see what your friends are sharing from their river of news and allows you to do the same. This turns Google Reader into a social network, complete with profiles… (Google) is tapping into the Gmail address book and using it to transform all of its static services into on-the-fly communities.

Well it’s true. I find myself logging in to Reader more often because I’m interested in reading what my friends have found interesting (in addition to what they’re blogging about). But most importantly,

Social networking isn’t just about a few standalone sites but a bunch of different address books that actually make the entire web more social.

Which is exactly what makes Facebook such an attractive acquisition. Not just for the opportunity to server ads on its pages (Microsoft’s planted its flag firmly there), but to drive traffic to _other_ properties for serving more advertising.

In a post several days ago , I had predicted that Yahoo! would sooner or later get out of the search business and concentrate on Community (since that’s what it is best at) and Personalization, which follows from the community focus.

I’ve been thinking of the difference (and similarities) between Y! Answers and Wikipedia, and then about Yahoo!’s true strength. Excerpts from an email I wrote a friend:

… if you can get inputs from not only patients, but medical practitioners, medical students, this could be huge. There are innumerable startups out there trying to build up a comprehensive directory of medical knowledge – the Answers model could complement a static medical database by being a naturally up-to-date, action-oriented database.

I am beginning to see Answers as a product that, if properly monetized, can be larger than Wikipedia, (an alive, multicolored, thriving Wikipedia) in that it can include topics that can never be adequately addressed on W.

Wikipedia is just that – an encyclopedia of facts. Answers is that as well as experiential.

I also see a grand intersection between this and a social network. In fact, Answers is one dimension on a massive online community… an ongoing series by Rajesh Jain on how Facebook is being construed by its founders to be a social Operating System, whereby services are being built on top of Facebook APIs. Perhaps Answers can build on top of this.

… Facebook would be a great acquisition for Yahoo! Y!’s advantage over Google (or MS or AOL or similar) is that it has always been community-based – right from the time Yang and Filo built their directory based on recommendations from their friend network, to more recent initiatives like My Yahoo!. What better than what has become the social network in the US?

One a broader level, the train of thought in last paragraph above is probably more in tune with Yahoo!’s true strength – its community. It has built an interactive community while Google hasn’t (the latter has legions of users, but little by way of a community). That’s why Flickr and del.icio.us have been Yahoo!’s most successful acquisitions, and which is also why Facebook and SixApart (Movable Type, LiveJournal) would make equally great buys for the big Y!.

DostPost.com is an interesting idea with great potential – a platform, they say, for sharing notes, projects, news, events, and collaborating across universities. They’ve sent out invitations to the IITs, the IIMs and IISc.

However, DostPost has one fatal flaw: this point from their “Terms of Use” page:

By posting Content to any public area of DostPost, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to DostPost an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, translate, reformat and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

Scary, almost.

This kind of licence goes beyond forcing you to put your work in the public domain. The only sweetener (if you can view it as that) is that the license is “non-exclusive”, meaning not only DostPost, but anyone at all can do whatever he/she likes with your content – without needing to give you, the creator, any credit at all for the work.

Isn’t it voluntary, though?

Of course, DostPost could quite easily argue that if a user’s agreed to put his/her work up in public in the first place, he/she is willing to let anyone use it – so all that DP is doing it formalizing it in its Terms and Conditions. I’m not sure if that argument washes: one, the simple act of making it publicly accessible does not imply that the author permits anyone to make any use of it. Simple analogy – books in print. Two, the author may not, in the first place, intend to make it available to “the public” – if he/she wanted to share it with a set of disparate people? With different permissions for each? Does DP allow that kind of flexibility? What if the author wishes to put his/her works up under his/her own license (or terms and conditions?) Will DP’s terms and conditions allow this?

Content lock-in is dead.

Sadly, DP’s creators display the same intent to control content that have characterized the old, pre-Web-2.0-era applications. Audiences don’t buy lock-in any more. Flickr and Google Photo Albums will prevail over Webshots not just because they have a snazzier interface – but because Webshots will not allow you or your users to access the photos in their original format, original size. DP would do better to pay more careful attention to what is happening around them. What companies that have bet their future on “social applications”(or to use Yahoo’s disgusting term “user generated content”), are doing. DP needs to take a closer look at the licenses under the Creative Commons umbrella, and “permit” its users to define their licenses, if they wish to.

DP needs a change in the approach to their business – their revenue model, ought to make money by being a platform where this kind of academic content is shared – not to make money using that content. The revenue will come from the platform, not the content.

Repeat, platform, not content.

Here’s a report on CNN Money, on the way Bill Gates deals with information. The article does provide a rare glimpse into Gates’ office, but you come away with the feeling that this kind of article ought to have appeared on a technology website, like ZDNet, maybe – and ought to have been more in-depth. Can someone out there do an interview with Gates on this specific topic – Personal Information Management?

There are multiple issues about today’s increasingly high-tech workstyle that come forth in this piece by Gates. I’m going to go through a few of them here:

Desktop v/s Laptop v/s Mobile:
Gates works on a desktop PC, using a massive display spread across 3 21″ LCD monitors. What struck me was not the awesome display (I have experienced the joy of working with a 21″ LCD display before I switched to a ThinkPad), but the fact that for a person who travels a lot, and works from multiple locations, he uses a PC! I’d think his chief workstation would be a laptop. I couldn’t imagine life without a laptop now – I am so used to being able to access my documents whether I’m at work, home, at a conference, or at a speaking engagement. Gates says that “when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It’s fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need.” Well, I want to know more about this synchronization solution he’s using. I’d find it pretty difficult to sync all of my stuff on my Thinkpad to a PC, or the other way round – there’s just too many different types of things.

What’s interesting is that there’s nothing in there about mobile tools. Does Gates not use any? After all, the mobile world is now high on MS’ agenda. I would think that a touch-screen mobile device would be ideal for his meetings. I was speaking to a CEO of a technology company a few months ago, and he described how people used to walk into meetings these days without a laptop, TabletPC, or even a notebook. Then they’d whip out their Nokia smartphone and a foldable Bluetooth keyboard from their pocket, and type away!

I would think that Gates, who’s always championed the idea of “eating your own dog food” (witness how they migrated to Windows Server 2003 across MS internally even before the actual product launch), would use one of those Palm Treos that now run Windows Mobile 5.0:

Desktop Search:
“Another digital tool that has had a big effect on my productivity is desktop search”. Windows Desktop Search is probably (I hope!) what he uses, and although I don’t find it as snappy as Google Desktop Search, I can imagine what a huge productivity enhancer it can be for Gates. No filing, no browsing. As I had said previously, I do not use the Windows Start Menu anymore. I simply type the name of the application I want to in the Google Desktop search window, and click on it from the results list. Way faster.

The challenge for Gates is now to make Search the new paradigm for managing personal and public document repositories.

The Paperless Office:
The paperless office is now pretty much a reality with most tech companies now – we at IBM have digitzed almost all of our internal processes. There are a few instances where transactions are performed online but need to be printed out for approval – those are being addressed as you read this post. But the overall statement is true – it’s been a long time since the average technologist used a paper and a pen.

In his book, Business @ the Speed of Thought, Gates has covered the Paperless Office over an entire chapter. He points out that the only paper forms that remain at MS are the ones that deal with the Government. I’m certain that the situation is more acute here in India, where there’s no sustained, pan-department, nation-wide drive to cut down on paper. (Recall the ubiquitious sarkaari “file”!) That is where the most innovative minds must focus.

Sharepoint and Wikis:
Gates talks about collaboration using Sharepoint: “…SharePoint, a tool that creates websites for collaboration on specific projects. These sites contain plans, schedules, discussion boards, and other information, and they can be created by just about anyone in the company with a couple of clicks.” We at IBM use Wikis extensively. I haven’t had a chance to look at and evaluate Sharepoint, but Wikis do the same job with aplomb. Wikis are very scalable – two people working on an idea can use a wiki just as well as a multi-site, enterprise-level software development team with a staff of over a hundred – and very usable – no knowledge of HTML needed.

So we’re finally moving away from moulding our collaboration practices to fit in with existing tools, to building tools that are more suitable for efficient collaboration. For years, teams used email as a form of communication between teams, cc’ing everyone on the team to make sure everyone had the entire context. This is hugely inefficient! Think of the immense duplication of information – text, context, attachments. And speaking of context, it’s extrememly difficult to follow the flow of information by looking at multiple emails bottom-up. Wikis solve these problems with one stroke. The only shortcoming of a Wiki today is that representing tabular data is a bit of a pain.

Finally…
Finally, Gates talks about the “digital whiteboard” in a few MS offices, which takes a snapshot of the board and all its contents as an image. Hmm. We at IBM simply whip out our mobile cameras and take a photograph of the whiteboard! This remninds me of the story of NASA spending a lot of money on developing a pen that would work in Zero-gravity conditions, only to find that the Russians were doing fine with a pencil

The motivation for this piece began when Bill Gates, on a visit to Israel, commented on the difference in the technology industries of India, on the one hand, and Israel on the other. Gates said,

“There will be competitors for Microsoft and for Israeli companies coming out of those countries (India and China) although today the success, particularly in India, has mostly been in the software services area, outsourcing work, doing call centers and things like that,”

This is not how we want to be viewed by the world. “Outsourcing and call centers” should not be the focus of our technology industry; we ought to be aiming far higher. We do not want our Telecom minister saying things like “BPOs are the nation’s pride”, (as he did a few weeks ago). Because in contrast to India’s tech industry, here’s how Gates sees the U.S. and Israel:

“In contrast, Israel, along with the United States, is focused on inventing new, patented products and software.”

That is where we ought to be – defining the industry, not servicing it.

The next giant leap for the technology industry in India is to create a Silicon Valley-like environment which produces great companies, people, and products. What made Silicon Valley the hotbed of technological revolutions? What made it build global giants? What made it throw up legends? If we understand the difference between Silicon Valley of the 70s and the Indian IT industry, we can usher in the technological revolution the IT industry has promised for so long, but failed to deliver.

Silicon Valley can be summed up in one word – Innovation.

That one characteristic defines the culture of Silicon Valley and persists to this day, making it the technology capital of the world. Services offer extremely low scope for innovation. And that is inherent to the business – a services firm is essentially doing something that it has been told to do by some other entity. This is in stark contrast to a product development company. Vivek Paul, former CEO of Wipro, in an interview to Knowledge@Wharton, said:

“Frankly, I feel that when people work in a service business like ours, it’s almost like we give them a lobotomy. I don’t think — and I hope I’m wrong — you will see a single successful product startup coming out of people who were working at Wipro or any other similar companies. You’ll find that innovation comes from people who worked for Intel India; they’ll go off and come up with a new chip. Or someone at Cisco India will come up with a new router.”

Let’s examine four points of difference between India’s IT industry and Silicon Valley, and we’ll see how innovation is at the core of each on of them. Each of these four points is inextricably linked to the others, and transforming today’s IT industry will mean tackling all four at once.

1.) Home-grown: Silicon Valley was constituted almost completely of home-grown startups which grew up to be the giants of today. Bangalore, in contrast, is home to the Indian development centers of those same companies. Therefore, the vision, strategy and tactics for the company are never going to be defined by an Indian board, and decisions are never going to be vetted by an Indian management. Even if the most high-end technical work is “moved” from the West to India, while the top management is non-Indian, the country can never define the direction of technology.

Vivek Paul, in the same interview, stressed the difference between going out and discovering something on your own, as opposed to implementing something that someone has told you to do. You may implement better than anyone else, but discovering something is a class apart. He was speaking for engineers; it’s the same for management.

The “Indian arm” of any Silicon Valley company will never be larger than the company itself. We can not create global giants out of subsidiaries. Sony would not have been Sony if it was the Japanese outsourcing center of Hewlett Packard.

2.) Entrepreneurship: The entrepreneurial spirit that swept the U.S. West Coast back then – when every Bill, Steve and Marc with half an idea set up a technology company – isn’t quite reflected here – yet. Entrepreneurship implies a certain amount of risk-taking, which seems to be a trait Indians as a society seem to lack. Gurcharan Das, in his seminal book “India Unbound” bemoans this too. He initially thought that it was simply a matter of Indians as individuals not taking risks, but over time has concluded that it might be a societal trait. In addition, the Government still makes it extremely difficult for an entrepreneur to set up a business quickly and easily. But great wealth can be only created when you own the company. You can only match world-class companies when you take them on in the marketplace, not be content doing some part of their work which they’d rather not do.

India’s flagship “old economy” companies – the Tata Group, the Birla conglomerate, Reliance, Bharat Forge – are all companies which have been founded by Indian entrepreneurs. These great institutions were also built in the age of excessive Government regulation, and before Globalization as we know it today. “New Economy” has been contrastingly risk-averse, creating services companies which work for larger Western companies. To actually create a new industry, define a new market, it needs entrepreneurs – people who bet on an idea, on a vision.

A culture of entrepreneurship necessarily implies a culture of innovation. Rajesh Jain, in his essay “India needs more entrepreneurs” outlines the three requisites for entrepreneurship: “People with Passion, Constructive Capital, and Big, Bold Ideas”. Personally, I have seen plenty of small-time innovation from bright young engineers around. Some have been process-oriented, some product-oriented, but no outrageous ideas to define new products and markets; nor with the vision to convert those ideas to products, products to businesses. Yahoo!, Intel, Lotus, Apple – all these companies dreamt big, and had the vision – and the guts – to realize those dreams.

3.) Universities: Silicon Valley firms were founded by graduate and post-graduate students from Universities in the area (think Google, Sun, and Yahoo). Surely it isn’t coincidence that Berkeley, USC, UCLA, Caltech and Stanford happen to be in California, and MIT and UMass Amherst happen to be in Massachusetts – the West and East Silicon Valleys? In contrast, there is no interaction between business and academia at all back home. And it’s a symptom that spans all industrial domains.

India tends to view its engineers as assets only once they graduate, unmindful of the fact that people are at their creative best when they are students. Faculty, senior technical staff and top management from the industry, and undergraduate/graduate students form a potent combination of ideas, application and capital. It is a model that Silicon Valley utilized to spectacular effect. It is only companies as large as IBM and GE that can afford to maintain their own Research departments. Other companies would do well to collaborate with Universities for their R&D needs, on a case-by-case basis, which could develop into more substantial relationships. The University gains handsomely in that it does research which is relevant to the industry, it gets better funding than it would if it relied solely on sources such as the Government. And of course, by performing research at that level, we can build world-class Graduate Schools like in the US. (The IITs, for instance, are only world-class Undergraduate schools).

The best business schools in the US also sprang up either as part of, or very close to, the best Universities. Think of Stanford Business School, Wharton (part of the University of Pennsylvania), and Harvard (adjacent to MIT). These schools provided the business know-how, support for budding entrepreneurs in the form of Venture Capital, legal skills, even Business Incubators, encouraging the best technical ideas to find the best business skills to form the best startups. In India, our premier business schools are often criticized for producing managers, not leaders, with too much emphasis on getting placed and too little on building businesses, teaching too much about management and too little business, too much theory and little application. And the practice of our technical institutions working along with our business schools is almost non-existent – other than students passing out of our technical institutions and entering our b-schools.

4.) Local Market: Most of those great companies started by concentrating on local markets, not those in Europe or South America or Asia. Why was that? It wasn’t that you were more likely to be successful if you went local, but because the opportunity was right at home, at the right time! As is the case in India – now! In the seventies, there were roughly 250-300 million Americans (probably smaller) – the initial market for Silicon Valley startups. Today’s Indian market is three times that size – and virtually untapped. The obsession with creating global players has made us ignore one-sixth of humanity back home!

Only a miniscule percentage of revenues of our IT services companies come from Indian clients. But their entire business model’s been optimized and tuned for cost arbitrage – and the cost advantage disappears once the client itself is in India. Companies successful in the Indian market will be very different from the current ones. They’ll be the ones who’ve been setup with this market in mind.

There is a huge latent demand for solutions to problems that are uniquely Indian – but we haven’t looked at them hard enough. The Simputer is a wonderful application gone wrong – it still costs too much (last heard it was about Rs. 12000), and has not been marketed well enough, despite the hype. But it could have been a fantastic tool with almost limitless applications in India.

The spread of mobile devices in semi-urban and rural India has meant that those populations have leapfrogged the fixed land-line era, moving on from the telegraph straight to mobile phones. This is one area; there are scores others. Most of these solutions will lie in the areas of cost-effective infrastructure development, like low-cost community wireless internet, so we don’t have to criss-cross the country with costly, ugly and cumbersome optical fiber connections. If you’re in the mechanical industry, solutions like faster and safer train designs on the same track infrastructure will be immensely successful. Again, for the mechanical industry: startups that deal in low-cost solar power generators, or wind turbines are great ideas – these are products where 1.) there is a demand, 2.) there is ample Government encouragement – there was news of some sort of tax benefits for organizations which invest in producing wind energy, 3.) there is a huge chance that it’ll work – given that wind and sunshine are in no shortage in the subcontinent! – So early-stage funding shouldn’t be a huge problem.

Finally, we need to remember that Innovation does not mean Improve, it means Transform! In the words of Guy Kawasaki, part of the team that built the most innovative product of them all – the Macintosh computer:

“Jump to the next curve. Too many companies duke it out on the same curve. If they were daisy wheel printer companies, they think innovation means adding Helvetica in 24 points. Instead, they should invent laser printing. True innovation happens when a company jumps to the next curve–or better still, invents the next curve, so set your goals high.”

So Go, Innovate!

Ah! My first Linux-related post for a long while! Anyways, the folks at Novell have finally decided to go the Redhat way, and open up SUSE to the community. Here’s what the OpenSUSE wiki says:

“The openSUSE project is a worldwide community program sponsored by Novell that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. The program provides anyone with free and easy access to the world’s most usable Linux distribution, SUSE Linux.”

This is the way to go. With the open-source business model that Redhat/SUSE have, it’s imperative to let your community access your products in the easiest manner possible. Restricting the availability of your product to retail, boxed-only sales is not going to work. (Who buys a SUSE Linux CD box from a computer store anyways? In fact, who even stocks them?) Nor is not putting up ISOs for free downloads and putting in artificial restrictions like FTP-only installs. It’s self-defeating. I, for one, was a Redhat/Fedora user mostly because I never had a chance to give SUSE a spin until Novell shipped me a SUSE Linux 9.1 DVD under some programme. And I loved it!

So SUSE finally remained the only distribution, major or minor, to have these kind of restrictions, and it had to give in. I hope this speeds up adoption of SUSE even more.

It’s a good, healthy ecosystem. All of Redhat’s and SUSE’s revenue comes from the sales of their Enterprise Linux versions, and the support for them. (And, of course, other services based upon these). The other, community version is their base for the whole community-based development bazaar. As the Fedora home page puts it:

“It (Fedora) is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products.”

So therefore you want as much community involvement as possible. It almost eliminates the huge investment that a traditional, commercial Operating System company (Microsoft, IBM, not Sun anymore!) makes in its OS development teams, for this now happens out in the Community. The core team of OS developers (who are Redhat/SUSE employees) play leadership roles in the community, since they’ve gained credibility and respect (absolutely crucial, cannot be stressed enough) as the original developers of the product, and guide the overall direction of the project. Major innovations and improvements to the product are integrated into the Enterprise versions of Redhat/SUSE, which are sold as boxed sets directly to customers (typically bundled with support).

In return, the community gets a mature, usable platform with quicker releases, a community who’s not driven by any factor other than technology, and more receptive to their contributions. Debian’s been that way; it’s focus has been only the community. Fedora was the first of the Big Two to wake up, and now SUSE. The other major entity to Open up was Sun. Solaris 10 is now as much a community-driven project as Fedora and OpenSUSE.

Jamie Zawinski’s (author of xscreensaver) has a post up on his blog (same article here), about how he talked Nat Friedman into changing the focus of Novell’s new calendar server project Hula. There’s one point that Jamie made in the article that set me thinking:

According to his article, Jamie told Nat that if all he was going to do was offer a free groupware server, it’d be attractive to corporations, no doubt, but unless it had a “coolness” factor about it, they’d never get any participation from the Open Source community. Groupware, in the traditional sense, he says, was all about ticking line items off checklists, popular among bureaucrats and committees. But their “focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use”.

Instead, Jamie went on,

“..narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?”

That set the gears turning in my mind. Novell has to balance two things here. It is a company whose products are overwhelmingly open source. That’s Novell’s new business model. For that, on the one hand, the company needs to build great, industry-strength products that large corporates will use, and will be willing to pay for support. But on the other, these products also need to be “cool” enough, “sexy” enough, for the average nerd to download, try out, and muck about with. To put it more succintly, Novell now needs to realise that the community needs to be looked at as the end user, regardless of which client base the revenue is going to come from. Indeed, how will this software get him laid? That’s what’ll get him started on hacking Hula.

Perhaps this model of development is going to herald a new genre of products: Products that are so well designed, they scale from casual, fun use to organisation-wide deployment. Jamie calls this “social software”. We’re also going to see companies coming up with interesting business models. Google is one such company. Novell is one which seems to be doing well too. And if you look at the product range of these companies, you’ll find a common thread – “coolness”, and a large community following. Gmail. Blogger. Picasa and Hello. SuSE Linux. Evolution. Now Hula. The future of software has never looked more promising!

The rest of the article is all about how Hula needs to include functionality that a group of students at University would find useful in their everyday lives. He’s drawn out a few great usage scenarios and don’t-dos. Defintely worth a read.