Social Software

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Bridging the gaps

December 21, 2005 in .Net, Commercial, Entrepreneur, Free and Open Source, Ideas, PHP, Social Software, Strategy | 2 comments

A long time ago, I got the chance to go to the Grand Canyon. It’s pretty amazing, I don’t really have the words to describe it adequately. It’s just amazing…at points it’s 10 miles from edge to edge, with a near vertical drop-off to the bottom. It’s huge. But at some places you can look across to the horizon and see flat land stretching outwards, then when you take a few more steps and see that there is an enormous chasm between you and the edge of the world.

Software seems like that to me at the moment.

We’ve discovered the power of the Internet, and being connected. We’ve discovered that we can devise new applications for groups of people, that we can aggregate information for something larger than the individual bits. We’ve found out that being able to access information from anywhere is hugely useful.

But our desktops and the Internet are two completely separate software worlds.

If we build a web-based system then it’s accessed through a browser and can’t interact with our desktop.

If we build a traditional bit of software then it has to be installed to be used, and it will be subject to platform quirks and problems with particular configurations.

There’s a chasm between the two worlds.

AJAX and Web 2.0 is better, but at the root it’s an attempt to make the browser behave like the desktop. And it’s subject to it’s own problems. Nevertheless, I think that this is a step towards the solution.

Here’s what I want:

  • I want to be able to make applications that are client-server in nature;
  • They should expose a web interface for when I’m not at my PC;
  • They should have a federated data-store behind them; that is, there is some data I don’t want to expose to the Internet but the data that is exposed to the net should be part of a bigger whole, rather than a copy. Alternatively if the data exposed to the net is a copy, then syncronisation should be 99.9% automatic;
  • I want to be able to run any application without being connected to the Internet, maybe with reduced functionality;
  • I want my applications to enjoy all the benefits of normal desktop interaction; the granularity of actions should be small; I don’t want to think of the world in pages, and I do want to be able to drag and drop;
  • I want to be able to try applications without an install. I’m willing to install if I decide that something is useful.
  • I want security; I don’t want my PC open to crackers.

Mostly, this vision is already achievable. (Microsoft is calling this sort of app a smart client.) But it takes hard work because you have to build the infrastructure by hand. In fact, most of the infrastructure is re-usable and should be abstracted into a tool and framework.

Now there are two or more environments that are partly suitable:

  • Java. Can run on the desktop. Can run on the server. Can run on multiple platforms. Can deliver responsive apps – witness Eclipse. But there’s no easy way to build dual-headed apps that I know of. Do you know of a way? There’s the ability to run from the web with Webstart.
  • .Net. Can run on many versions of Windows. Runs on client. Runs on server. Has good integration. Can build dual-headed apps. But it’s not great for delivering software if you don’t want the source to be readable. Granted you can get an obfuscator, but a industrial-strength obfuscator should be part of the basic package. A big downside: you need the giant 20MB runtimes to be on the client machine. There is no linker available as part of the MS package which would reduce the size of most apps and allow you to ship a single file, but you can buy one from Remotesoft. And lastly, .Net isn’t big on platforms other than Windows.

I’m sure that there are other ways of doing this too; for instance, if you install the PHP and GtK runtime on the client then you could use PHP locally and remotely. But other solutions are less integrated.

Overall, I don’t think that either of these solutions are great. It seems like it’s going to be write-n-times for a while.

What I want I

October 20, 2005 in Entrepreneur, Ideas, Social Software, Software development | No comments

I keep a ginormous todo document cum notebook cum scratchpad. Over time it’s been in different formats. It’s been a paper document, a text file, a Word document (that was a failure), currently it’s in an app called KeyNote.

I like KeyNote for a bunch of reasons:

  • It’s open source. Not very active, but if I ever want to get involved I could.
  • It sits in my system tray and is always available
  • It instantly saves changes. I don’t need to remember to press Save.
  • It saves all the notes in an open format, with all the notes in one file.

But I’ve got some annoyances and they are growing.

  • I want my notebook available all the time, wherever I am. If there’s a computer I should be able to use it. More about this below.
  • I want a much more dynamic categorisation system. KeyNote uses a tree and that’s good, it can make links. I like the wiki thing that links happen automagically. And I like to be able to tag to make links.
  • I’d like to be able to make portions available to other people.

Available all the time, everywhere. I want a system that works as a local application, but has a web repository and is useable via a web interface. The web interface must be slick. If there’s no internet connection then the software should continue to work. And it should sync up later.

(Actually there’s a general problem here: I want lots of software that has a web interface to the data and a local version which work on common data. It’s a problem that I keep thinking I should address, but there’s not much money in infrastructure. On the other hand maybe the solution could be embedded in a general tool like Dreamweaver embedded web design.)

I found EverNote last week, and I’m trying it out to see if it’s a viable replacement. It pretends it’s a never-ending roll of paper. You write new notes at the bottom, and group them by classifying them with tags.

It’s certainly got some of the features I want and there are lots of good things to recommend it. The basic version is free! (Not the code though.) It’s easy to add stuff. It’s pretty easy to tag. It sits in my system tray. It may be suitable. Sometime in the future it’s going to be able to sync, which suggests that it will be using a repository.

On the other hand, I’m finding the interface a finicky. And not pleasing on my eye. Maybe it’s because I don’t yet know how to use it. But it should be discoverable. Maybe they need a graphic designer on the team.

I had hopes that blogware would do the trick, but it’s not because the focus is on publishing. At least it’s not yet. Maybe things will change. 

So, some market research: If I build the software, is there a market? How many of you are looking for this sort of thing? If you read this, and you think it would be interesting, send me a mail at notebook at tanasity.com. Don’t worry if you are reading this a couple of years after it was written. I don’t expect to be writing the program tomorrow. Tell me what features you yearn for.  

Buy-out mini boom

October 18, 2005 in Entrepreneur, Social Software, Software development, Strategy | No comments

In the last few months there have been a number of buy-outs of, and investments in companies that you wouldn’t normally think were suitable. For instance I saw a few days ago that Konfabulator had been bought by Yahoo.

Why is this happening?

I think that they are strategic investments and that there are several reasons:

  1. To deny talent to the competition
  2. To position for The Next Big Thing
  3. To prepare for Windows Vista

Of the 3, I think that the third is the most important, so we’ll come back to that.

Buying up talent is a great way to blunt the development of companies who are working in the same space as you. There are numerous stories of technology companies going after the people who underpin their competition, offering them large salaries and interesting jobs. Often just before an important product announcement. The right talent is important in businesses based on intellectual property.

When I was at school, I used to avidly read Byte Magazine. I remember techno-lust for new and interesting software and insanely great hardware. And it was always just out of reach. Nothing drives lust more than what you can’t have.

Large companies know very well that they aren’t the likely place for innovative stuff to happen. In a large company, you are driven by ROI, not by tech. Large companies like predictability because so many people have jobs that depend on continued income. Large companies have problems tackling niches; why spend time and effort of highly-paid people on interesting ideas when you can’t immediately show payback. So large companies look for ideas at the right stage of ripeness and either buy out or take the idea and re-implement it. Bet you Microsoft has a desktop blogging tool under development. It’ll probably be delivered as part of Vista and tied to MSN Spaces. (Or maybe they’ve got it, and I just don’t know.)

The last and, in my opinion, most important reason has to do with Microsoft Vista (nee Longhorn). Sometime in the next few years (take those published release dates with a great big dose of salt), Microsoft will release Vista. They might even hit the latest schedule. Software development isn’t easy, so this is not a dig at them – it’s a fact of life. Vista is real enough for companies that depend upon Windows to start thinking about their future. That’s because when people install a new operating system, they expect big changes. You expect stuff to break. You don’t expect programs to stop working when you install fixes and updates. There’s a big transition event that Microsoft can take advantage of to change behaviours.Like maybe Yahoo or Google won’t be your home page in your browsers after installing Vista.

So there’s potentially a direct threat to Yahoo and Google and other companies that depend on Windows. And it’s dependency upon a competitor. That’s bad when they’ve got an opportunity to slip a knife in your back.

So what Google and Yahoo, and other Microsoft competition want is desktop applications that have a large installed base. They should have automatic update built in. They should be a part of users experience, so much so that Microsoft would have huge backlash from breaking them. They should be lightweight, ideally with regular updates. Because if you get shoved off the desktop, you need a mechanism to put yourself back in the right place, and automatic update which doesn’t depend on Microsoft will be the way.

I reckon it’s a key reason why Bram Cohen and Bittorrent managed to raise so much money; they have 45 million users and a hefty percentage of the internet traffic. Microsoft aren’t going to be keen to interrupt that.

Some obvious knock-ons:

Microsoft will probably improve their firewall. They’ll may put scary warnings in place about software contacting a server or downloading. Like imagine if you were working and you got a message that said ‘An unauthorised program is attempting a large download. This could be a virus. Press Stop to halt the download or Just this time to allow this program to continue.’ Most people are not going to be keen to carry on with the download.

There will be more buyouts of this sort of tool.

Google and Yahoo will be giving a lot of money to Mozilla.

Google will try to deliver more apps that integrate with the desktop

It’s a good space to be in for the next year or so.

 

 

Idea for OpenDocument

October 17, 2005 in Entrepreneur, Ideas, Social Software, Software development, Uncategorized | No comments

One of the (many) things that bug me about software is the disconnect between design, documentation and the software itself. Some developers say that the source code is the documentation – and they’re right – the source code for a program tells you what it does in excrutiating detail. But source code usually doesn’t tell you what the program should be doing, or what the design decisions were when the software was being developed, or the ways that the software has been extended or the background to the problem. Most of these things are held in other documents or peoples’ heads.

That’s very annoying.

The documents get out of date as the program overtakes them. They get lost in the pile. They lose their relevance.

It’s not a new problem. Twenty years ago Donald Knuth came up with Literate Programming. His idea was that you should build the program as part of a narrative and the tools should understand which parts of the document are the program itself and which parts are the documentation. Actually, that’s the ideal, but you can use existing tools with only a little work, by writing a literate program, and then extracting the code and pushing through your normal tools. In Literate Programming this is called tangling.

He and his students built an excellent system, but it has never caught on widely. There are a number of likely reasons:

  • Literate programming introduces a new layer of development and requires discipline
  • IDE’s don’t support the style and the benefits in using an IDE outweigh the disadvantage of not having Literate Programming.
  • It’s not already a standard
  • There aren’t tools that support lots of programming languages, while many projects require the integration of several toolsets
  • The tools that do exist are often rudimentary
  • There’s a lack of comercial support

In the meantime XML has grown up. Now a while back, some smart people realised that a document based SGML or XML was a pretty good way to hold the elements of a Literate Program, the prose and the code. In fact some people went further and realised that it would be quite good if you could include a range of communication elements. Text, graphs, pictures and more

And now we come to OpenDocument. It’s got the markup for just about everything you need in order to create a workable Literate Programming environment, and it has the bonus that if you handled the document through a database-style manager, then you could have best-of-breed software to work on each part; you could write the code in your favourite IDE, the text in your favourite word processor, the diagrams with the most suitable diagram editor.

And everything would still be held in one place, accessible by many tools. With the added benefit that members of a team would all be able to work on the document at the same time.

Anyone interested in the details of what I think needs to go into to this to turn out a product?

 

FantasthishFighting.com – Fight back and take down the Phishers.

October 16, 2005 in Ideas, Social Software, Software development | No comments

PhishFighting.com is an excellent idea. It’s aimed at destroying the data that phishers collect by flooding it with false data. 

Whenever you get a phishing mail you copy the URL, and paste it into the PhishFighting form. Then PhishFighting goes to work, posting a new dummy login every 20 seconds or so, for as long as you like.

It’s not a Denial of Service attack if the page is hosted on some unfortunate person’s trojaned computer; it just taints the value of the data collected by phishers, hopefully making their life much, much harder.

Here’s an idea for a great enhancement: wouldn’t it be great if you could get ‘tripwire’ accounts from eBay and banks. Banks would let you generate fake account details – a username and password. You could then feed these to phishers, and when the phishers used a one of these fake tripwire accounts, the business would immediately know that a particular computer had been compromised or was the computer used by someone attempting fraud.

How could this be turned into a business? Perhaps by aggregating the data? If you provided a service to banks; as they got tripwre attempts, they’d send you the details, and you would share the list of all computers with a tripwire against them with the bank.

Potential problem: dial up users have IP address that change regularly, so you couldn’t blacklist indefinately. Otherwise someone  dialing in could find themselves blocked by their bank. Banks and other businesses would have to respond with notices that said that if you were using dial-in, to redial

If you read this and decide to turn it into a service, do keep me in mind when you trade-sale or IPO. 

Audioscrobbler, LastFM, Radio Paradise & more

October 12, 2005 in Entrepreneur, Social Software, Software development | No comments

I listen to Internet radio most of the day. I vary between BBC Radio 4, and music radio. I have eclectic tastes: I listen most often to Radio Paradise, which plays a huge range from Bach to the Pixies and everything in between. I also listen to a bloke who I think plays music from his home PC so that he can listen to it at work. I won’t list the URL here because he only has a couple of streams and I’d really like to continue listening.

For ages I’ve known about AudioScrobbler, which tracks the things you listen to, and can make recommendations. But I’ve never found the time to have a close look. Today on a whim I went to their site. I discovered that the team behind AudioScrobbler have started last.fm which plays exactly the music you like.

All of the time. For everyone.

What a terrific idea!

They are hiring. I have the skills they want, and more. They are in London. For a few moments I seriously considered sending them a CV because it’s exactly the sort of application of social software that interests me and this is going to grow exponentially. I’ll leave it for a few days and the feeling will wear off.

I’m interested in the finances. When you listen to Radio Paradise, they constantly appeal for money. How will last.fm make break even? Maybe they’ll insert personalised ads into the stream?