I just posted to Clear Ink’s company blog: The market for Internet skills. The post is about the market for skills on Elance, the ratio of developers to open projects and how it might affect your choice of technology–whether you’re a provider or a consumer.
There’s an ongoing conversation on the Gillmor Gang around Twitter’s disabled track functionality. This functionality allowed you to set a search term that would be applied to all messages (tweets) sent in Twitter. Matching tweets would be sent to you via the Google Talk interface. The user experience was that you could open up your IM client, tell Twitter that you want to get all messages that contain “core php” and they would appear in a chat window in real time.
Unfortunately, this functionality apparently wasn’t coded to scale with the popularity it attracted. Twitter took the feature away months ago and it hasn’t returned. You can get a similar experience by subscribing to a search in Summize, a search engine for tweets. In this model, you enter a search term and then subscribe to the results via RSS. Your RSS client can poll the feed regularly. But the experience is much slower. I understand that while track was working, Steve Gillmor would watch tweets flow in and carry on realtime conversations. This isn’t practical with saved searches. You can check your feed once a day or so. It’s a half solution.
The real weakness of both track and Summize is that they take an old school way of finding information. Remember when Web page search engines just indexed the content? It worked for a little while, then people optimized content to get undue attention. That is, they put a bunch of keywords on pages and pushed their results to the top. This wasn’t helpful to people looking for information.
A better search for tweets would involve gestures by listeners. Perhaps an impartial observer could contribute as well. Additionally, search is always behind. It’s a report in retrospect. The delay was short with track, but what we really want is a system that suggests information we might be interested in. That will allows us to learn things we don’t yet know we want to learn.
Here’s my vision. When I follow someone on twitter, I should also answer the question of why. I would do this with tags. When I subscribe to a feed in Google Reader, I put the feed into a folder that answers why I subscribed. Egg City Radio is in my “music” folder. Techcrunch is in my “vendor-sports” folder. With some minimal set of people, the gestures would add up to an aggregated rating of content topics.
I would expect that the system would also benefit from an analysis of the content. Someone who talks frequently on a topic should be tagged by an automatic process. This would fill in gaps before people discovered the speaker. Gestures by people would override any tags generated by content.
The user experience I’m looking for is to ask Twitter for people who talk about a topic I’m interested in, liberated bootlegs for example. Twitter would suggest 10 people I should follow. Google does this with Reader. My universe of topics I pay attention to in Reader probably would not match completely with the universe of topics I want in Twitter. I imagine I’d want more local news and politics in Twitter and less about big chunks of entertainment.
I don’t see what would prevent this system I describe except Twitter continuing to control the attention of microbloggers and refusing to implement it. Identi.ca certainly can implement this feature, but they better match Twitter’s features first. I suppose Google could ramp up Jaiku to include it, and it might be easy given it exists in Reader.
Computer science super genius and Python proselytizer JJ Behrens and I returned to LinuxWorld again this year. We’ve been doing this together for many years with only the pesky birth of a child interrupting my attendence. As JJ says, the conference was disappointing. It does seem like it’s on its last legs. The decline of this conference matches the shrinking posse that I bring with me. Two years ago I brought my entire department with me. It was pretty cool to have six Clear Ink technologist all running around hassling booth people. Last year, my department had shrunk a bit and this year, the one guy I’ve got reporting to me is didn’t come because he’s on vacation. At least I had JJ and Carl to hang out with.
One of the most enjoyable parts of LinuxWorld for me is the spectacle of JJ asking booth people really hard questions. The atrophying conference meant there were fewer people to put on the spot, although we did give the NYT guy and the mobius strip gal some trouble. When we passed the foot massaging shoe booth, I realized what this was–spam! My conference has been spammed! Yuck!
After the conference, I had the pleasure of chaperoning Dmitri Gaskin, Drupal wunderkind, to the PHP Meetup at the CNET building. Dmitri is 12 years old and the son of Igor Gasowski, with whom I’ve worked at Clear Ink for the past five years. JJ and I both had a lot of fun sitting in Starbucks and advising Dmitri on various computer science topics. There was a time when JJ was fresh out of college and I had a few things to teach him. I now find it hard to understand him half of the time. Fortunately, I can still understand the things Dmitri tells me, although when he first explained CCK to me a few months ago, it took me a bit.
One thing JJ and I agree on is that young programmers should read Hackers by Steven Levy
Dmitri and I had dinner with Lee Springer at Chevy’s and then headed over the CNET building for the PHP Meetup. Joe Stump talked about a new system in PEAR for hosting your own repository channels. It’s obvious how this can help keep code straight, especially for a company like Digg that has many production servers. PEAR’s system for installing modules is similar to Apt or RPM. Having been coding in PHP for so long (11 years!), my tendency is to do things the “old way”. So, while I’ve taken sips of the PEAR koolade, I’ve never taken a big gulp. I’m still trying to sort out PEAR versus Zend Framework versus sticking with my FreeEnergy codebase.
I’ve been casually repeating the following aphorism, and Rick Marazzani nudged me to blog it.
Microsoft is the new IBM. Google is the new Microsoft. Facebook is the new Google.
In the 80s, it was said that no one was fired for picking IBM. Microsoft was the hot new innovator in the 80s. In the 90s, got stagnant and then beloved for embracing open source. Microsoft turned into a villian. Five years ago Google was the new innovator that everyone loved. Now they are playing the kind of tricks we used to expect from Microsoft, why Microsoft is earning new love, probably coming from new leadership from Ray Ozzie.
It might feel early to some, but I think it’s time to say that no one will be fired for picking Google for their IT services. Search engine and adwords aside, Google’s office suite (especially email) is strong enough for the enterprise. But while Google has awesome products–products that are more exciting than Windows and Office ever were–it’s also playing games in the market.
Case 1: Android. Is Google serious? Yeah, it’s a move against Apple and the iPhone, but where’s the beef? Android phones should have been here by now. It’s not too late for Android to make a mark, but it does seem like Google announced early to scare off competitors. Fortunately, it hasn’t worked. Nokia/Symbian going open source is a strong move. And Motorola had news recently about their Linux phones, which actually are coming out. The more people at the party, the better for us users.
Case 2: Knol. A lot of people have noticed over the past few years that the top link on many searches at Google point to Wikipedia. For whatever reason, Wikipedia does not use Google adsense. They don’t have any ads. I remember Jason Calacanis begging them to put ads there, but they didn’t listen. Google can’t have so much traffic going off into non-monetized land. Their solution is to clone wikipedia and put ads on it. And just to make sure the traffic is going there, they seem to have juiced their search results. Techcrunch reported last week that Google Knol entries are appearing high in search results much faster than should be expected. That’s the kind of behavior that inspires Justice Department types. But worse, it erodes confidence in Google search results.
Case 3: Friend Connect. Google has clearly blown it in the social space. I don’t count them out entirely, but they have not been winning. Orkut is insigificant. They’ve been sneaking social features into Gmail and Reader, which depending on your perspective either treads close to or steps over the social contract with users. With Friend Connect, they seem to be pushing Facebook towards being more open and letting users keep hold of their data. This is a net positive for users because Facebook didn’t blink. They accelerated their own Connect strategy. Still, Google comes out looking like a bully in this.
At F8 last month, Zuckerberg talking about how the mission of this company is to bring people closer together, the enable better understanding of each other. That’s a big goal that sounds a lot like Bill Gates’ mission to have a computer on every desktop. Google’s do-no-evil motto seemed hip a few years ago, but their misteps sometimes make it seem like a joke. Their stated mission is to connect people to information. Boring. Give me the world-changing missing every time.
Lest there be confusion, I am in no way suggesting that Google itself is evil. It’s a corporation. Individuals are judged by morality, not abstractions. And I’ll be the last person to indict business and businessmen. If I could offer humble advice, I’d suggest to Google’s leadership that they not allow their teams to pull these tricks even if they seem to make sense in the short run.
Late last year, I knocked out a little facebook app that pushed a random status message into your facebook account. I used it as an excuse to learn about the API. It was particularly good because it’s one thing to simply put content up into facebook. It’s another thing to update a user’s status. I got to the idea by way of suggestinon from my buddy, John Szeder. He wanted his status to update without having to log in.
For many months, my little app didn’t do that, exactly. You still had to log in, click into the app and then click a submit button. I knew exactly how to make it automatic, but I let myself be lazy. I thought that if a user never came to use my app, he would never think about my app or see a bit of advertisement. Although I have no expectations that this app will generate real revenue, it’s fun to pretend it might. It’s good practice.
I should take a second here to reveal a “secret”. It’s not really a secret, because it’s easy to find if you want. I’ll tell you now. You can learn a lot of good ideas if you pay attention to Steve Gillmor and his Gillmor Gang. I have had the fortune of having discovered him about three years ago, plus I have a 35-minute commute that gives me a ample time to listen to the podcasts. Sometimes the ideas shared on the show simply spark my imagination. This time they gave me an idea I could use.
The particular idea was that every message on Twitter is an advertisement. As is typical with a Gillmorism, the metaphorical nature of this idea encourages you to leave your dictionary on your desk. Steve went for at least a year straight saying that MS Office was dead. It’s not that it makes no money. It’s not that no one uses it. It’s just that it’s headed for anilation, but hardly anyone has noticed yet.
So, don’t try to take this too literally. A tweet is not a billboard shouting at you about cigarettes that you don’t care to smell, much less smoke. Twitter is a medium for transmitting ideas that you might be interested. It’s smart because it allows you to opt in for those ideas. You’re smart because you chose emitters that you hope will send the type of ideas you’re interested in.
If a tweet is an adverstisement, then so is a facebook status. I’m already funneling all of my tweets into my facebook status. Therefore, they are the same thing. Most people are using the status messages to advertise to their friends the trivia of what they are doing. Some people use them to share links. I’m using them to send people to a random Amazon search on the off chance it will be amusing and they will buy something.
Granted, it’s a fine line. I think my weird, random status messages are interesting. So do about 15 other people (right now). Maybe their friends like it. Maybe their friends find it annoying. Maybe those people like that their friends find it annoying. If I were pushing 20th century shout-style ads, I bet people would be angry.