Category Archives: Tools

Bryan Person launches new blog: Exploring the iPad

Want to learn more about the iPad? I was pleased to read in Facebook this morning that my friend Bryan Person is launching a new blog:

Exploring the iPad

Now, Bryan has literally just started the blog up, so the content there is just a couple of posts, but being an iPad user and finding more uses for it every day, I’m looking forward to Bryan’s own explorations.

If you’re an iPad fan, do check it out…

P.S. Thanks, Bryan, for linking to my video about the Camera Connection Kit.

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Diaspora (Facebook alternative) provides a progress report and video – “One Month In”

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As I wrote about before (and also here), I think the Diaspora project is a great idea and regardless of whether or not the guys truly establish a open, distributed Facebook alternative, the reality is that we’re going to get some darn good research done into how open, distributed systems can be created.

They said they would keep us updated, and true to their word they now have a blog post out: “One Month In”

For starters, I was not aware that they had taken up residence at Pivotal Labs… which I view as a great move for all involved.

The post gives a view of what they are working on, lays out their plans for the rest of the summer and provides some screenshoots of a working Diaspora implementation.

They also include this video that shows messages propagating from one Diaspora node to six other ones. It’s not necessarily super compelling video… but it gives a glimpse into working code. And, as they note, this is communication happening without any browser refreshes and without an XMPP server in the background:

Diaspora Message Propagation (pre-alpha!) from daniel grippi on Vimeo.

All in all it’s cool stuff and I’ll continue to be interested to see what they come up with over the course of the summer!

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ProgrammableWeb.com acquired by Alcatel-Lucent

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In one of those strange cases that makes we wonder if I should really be merging this blog with Disruptive Telephony, the folks over at Programmableweb.com announced they had been acquired by Alcatel-Lucent. I’ve long been a fan of the ProgrammableWeb site and their long lists of APIs and mashups, so I’m thrilled for them that they have found a way to keep the site going and evolving.

Still, the marriage with ALU just seems a bit… odd… I’m admittedly still trying to wrap my brain around it a bit. The reality, though, is that the “real-time web” is one in which it is all about APIs, and making data accessible to people and developers through open APIs. To that end, it does make a certain amount of sense for a communication company like ALU to look at how it can gain more prominence in “the API game”. Perhaps this is a way to gain access to a developer community and, over time, help familiarize them with ALU products and services. We’ll see.

I hope for the ProgrammableWeb folks that it does work out like this:

This milestone is a great opportunity for ProgrammableWeb and our community to work with a global organization who gets what open APIs are about, who value the independence of ProgrammableWeb, and who want to grow the open API ecosystem both in the world of telecommunications and beyond. In the end this step will bring PW to a whole new level in terms of fulfilling our mission to be the go-to place for open API developers.

Congrats to the whole ProgrammableWeb team, and, for the sake of the “open Internet”, I do wish them all the best continuing to promote open APIs!

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Webinar tomorrow – Unified Self-Service – one app for voice, SMS, IM, web and Twitter

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Are you interested in how you can service customer requests across all the different communication channels they might use? Do you want to give your customers a choice in the way they interact with you? Rather than requiring them to call in to a customer service phone number, do you want to let them send you a text message? Or an IM? Or use Twitter?

If so, you may be interested in a free webinar I am giving tomorrow, Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 11:00 am US Eastern time titled “Unified Self-Service: Creating multi-channel communications apps using Voxeo tools“. You can register for free.

I’ll be talking about this concept we call “Unified Self-Service” where you can create a single application that interacts with customers across multiple communication channel (but not necessarily using the exact same user interface). It’s a topic I blog about on Voxeo’s site and mention in our various presentations.

Perhaps obviously to long-time readers, I have an interest in the “social” side of the communication, particularly as we talk about “Social CRM” and engaging with customers through social channels. You can naturally expect to hear me talk about that tomorrow as well.

Registration is free… and if you can’t attend, the session will be archived for later viewing from our Developer Jam Session page (and if you register, we’ll let you know when the archive is posted).

It’s a fun topic… and I’m looking forward to the conversation we’ll have tomorrow.

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Convert your old typewriters into iPad keyboards

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As a writer, I have an admittedly sentimental attachment to the ancient world of typewriters. I own several… in fact I went through a phase where I thought it would be a cool idea to “collect” them… and accumulated 4 or 5 from various antique stores and yard sales before I confronted the reality that they are very heavy and there is just no easy way to display them, especially in a smaller house.

Still, though, there is something appealing about the old keys… the clicking sound… the ability to type text without batteries or any kind of power source…

Not that I want to return to those days, mind you. After several decades of word processing I think my brain is rather wired into typing text and then editing it later, rather than assembling it on paper or in your brain and typing it all out without errors. And I don’t miss whiteout…

Anyway, I was amused to read on Mashable this morning that someone has a kit to turn your typewriter into a USB keyboard. You can apparently buy converted typewriters directly from usbtypewriter.com … or you can buy a kit to convert your own. The site has step-by-step pictures of how to convert your typewriter.

Of course, as Gizmodo adds with snark… this means you can type even slower on your iPad… 🙂

I don’t know that I’ll do this… although I’m thinking that I have a small Underwood Portable that might be perfect for this… but it’s fun to see that someone has done this!

What do you think? Going to convert one of your old typewriters?

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Will Diaspora give us an “open Facebook”?

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Timing is everything.

Back on April 24th, four NYU students (pictured: Raphael, Ilya, Daniel and Maxwell), set themselves up on a site called Kickstarter with the goal of raising $10,000 so that they could devote themselves to working full-time through the summer on their idea for Diaspora, “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network”. Two of them were graduating, the other two had potential internships… but all they really wanted to do was code.

Three days later they had passed $2500 and were going to start some PR and outreach to relevant blogs.

What they couldn’t have necessarily known was that Facebook would choose this time to anger and alienate so many people with their privacy changes…

TAPPING INTO RAGE

Their one little idea for a project happened to hit the tech world’s radar at just the right time… and landed them with write-ups in tech sites like ReadWriteWeb: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook. Business insider discussed “Here’s The Privacy Line That Facebook Just Crossed…” and talked about challenges that Diaspora would have. Many other sites mentioned the project and developers tweeted about it.

Then came more mainstream coverage… the Chronicle of Higher Education… then a Huffington Post article… then a New York Times article, both online and in print: Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook… and then even more of the tech media world went crazy… a sampling:

TechCrunch: Diaspora, The Open Facebook Alternative, Soars Past $50,000 In Micro-Funding
GigaOm: Facebook Needs to Find Its Voice on Privacy
Mashable: NYU Students Raise More than $100,000 to Build Facebook Alternative
The Next Web: New Social Networking Darling Diaspora* Has An Idea Problem

And many, many, many, many more…

Tech superstar Leo Laporte deleted his Facebook account on his This Week in Google podcast and promoted Diaspora on the show – and went on to donate $100 to the project. Twitter was filled with comments and links about Diaspora… Very ironically, multiple Facebook pages are up – one by a fan and one by the team… the buzz was all over the tech space…

The end result is that the four guys FAR exceeded their goal… as of this morning they had 4774 backers pledging $174,334! The amount will undoubtedly be more by the time you read this article.

The team has been admittedly overwhelmed and written about how their “situation has changed a little“.

You think?

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Well… given that it’s just an idea that the guys are planning to work on, we don’t exactly know yet… but the ideas they describe are that of a “distributed, decentralized social network” that is much more in line with the “open internet” architecture. ReadWriteWeb had a nice explanation:

So what is Diaspora anyway? Instead of being a singular portal like Facebook, Diaspora is a distributed network where separate computers connect to each other directly, without going through a central server of some sort.

Once set up, the network could aggregate your information – including your Facebook profile, if you wanted. It could also import things like tweets, RSS feeds, photos, etc., similar to how the social aggregator FriendFeed does. A planned plugin framework could extend these possibilities even further.

Your computer, called a “seed” in the Diaspora setup, could even integrate the connected services in new ways. For example, a photo uploaded to Flickr could automatically be turned into a Twitter post using the caption and link.

When you “friend” another user, you’re actually “friending” that seed, technically speaking. There’s not a centralized server managing those friend connections as there is with Facebook – it’s just two computers talking to each other. Friends can then share their information, content, media and anything else with each other, privately using GPG encryption.

It’s about eliminating Single Points of Failure (SPOFs)… it’s about putting you in control.

Just as you can choose to operate your own email server or your own web server… or you can choose to use someone’s hosted email or web server… the idea would be that you could run your own “social network” server – or use someone else’s hosted social network.

It’s not necessarily a new idea… it’s what the great folks at Status.Net are trying to do with an open source micro-blogging platform (I wrote earlier about why it matters) so that we can have a “distributed, decentralized Twitter”… and then with the follow-on “OStatus” effort (which the Diaspora guys reference in their latest post)…

The move toward more open communication is going on in other areas, too… it’s what has been going on in the world of XMPP for years to bring about distributed, decentralized instant messaging (IM)… it’s what the federation aspect of Google Wave could potentially bring us…

THE DIRECTORY CHALLENGE

In my mind, a key challenge the Diaspora team will need to address is:

How do I find someone in the Diaspora network?

In the centralized world of Facebook, I can do a search and with the right search terms easily find and get connected to some long-lost friend. Likewise, I can search in Twitter… or for another example, in Skype. All of these services have a centralized database.

Simple. Easy.

Contrast that to the distributed, decentralized world of the Web… or email… or Jabber/XMPP IM… you have to either know someone’s URL or address… or you have to look it up in a search engine like Google.

It’s not as easy as with a centralized service.

I’ve admittedly sent someone a message on Facebook purely because I didn’t know their “best” email address and didn’t have time to look it up anywhere. I knew that Facebook would provide that linkage – and I was already connected.

Somehow the Diaspora team needs to solve the directory challenge… not sure how, but I wish them the best with it and hope they do.

WILL DIASPORA SUCCEED?

Good question… First it sounds like the team needs to grapple with the overwhelming interest and sort out the best way forward.

Second, their going to have to grapple with the enormous expectations now being placed on them!

Third, we all who are watching are going to have to realize and understand that any project like this doesn’t just appear overnight… that the first iterations will probably need some work… that it won’t slice bread and do a zillion other things on the first day, etc., etc., etc.

Fourth, Facebook may very well make moves to change its privacy policies or make things better in some ways … and perhaps do just enough to calm people down and cool the fervor for an alternative.

Fifth, the reality is that with 400 million people on Facebook, with more signing up each day, there is an enormous inertia against any kind of change. The other reality is that many, many of those “regular” Facebook users don’t realized the importance of these issues and may just not care…

As an advocate for a more open internet, I certainly hope these guys succeed in building out some type of open, distributed, decentralized network… they’re off to a great start with $174K committed and perhaps more importantly a list of ~5,000 supporters passionate enough to give $$$… I’ll certainly watch the project and help in any way I can…

And if nothing else, they have already raised more awareness around why this is important…

Kudos to them for what they’ve done… best wishes to them for what sounds like will be a VERY busy summer for them… and I’m looking forward to seeing what they are able to do…

P.S. And yes, in full disclosure, I pledged $10.. it may or may not work out in the end… but I applaud their creativity and initiative… and I’d love to see it happen!

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Celebrating my 10th year of blogging!

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Ten years ago today, I entered the world of “blogging”, although that term wasn’t widely used yet.

On May 10, 2000, I was out visiting Linuxcare’s office (my employer at the time) in San Francisco and was just hanging out in the evening at the office. After hearing about and reading a site called Advogato.org for a while, I went that night and created my account. Advogato was and is a site whose mission is to be a community for free software developers. It was created by Raph Levien not only to help connect developers but also as a testbed for his research into trust metrics. From my point-of-view at the time, the key thing was that a significant number of the main Linux and other open source developers were starting to write at the site. By reading the “recentlog” (list of new blog posts) you could easily stay up on what was happening with many of the projects out there. Since I was the President of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) and active with Linux International at the time, it seemed a good place to start writing.

It’s somewhat amusing to read that very first entry I wrote. I had just picked up a print version of the Cluetrain Manifesto, was just learning about DocBook and CVS and was working on some other projects. I was amused to read this:

In any event, since it’s after 9pm and I’m still here in the Linuxcare office in SF, I decided to join this experiment… let’s see if I actually keep up with it.

I did keep up with it… writing there at Advogato for four years until the spring of 2004 when a server outage took the site offline for 5+ weeks. By that time, blogging was in my blood and part of my daily routine and so I had to find some outlet for the writing. I had previously started up a ‘dyork’ account on LiveJournal and so I moved my main writing there even after Advogato came back online. The major reasons I stayed at LiveJournal were:

I could use an “offline blog editor” to write my posts on my local computer and then publish them to LJ. (I continue to this day to use an offline editor for almost all my posting.)
LiveJournal had the ability for people to leave comments on a post, something Advogato lacked (and still lacks).

I continued with LiveJournal as my main blog site for a while, but around 2005 found myself struggling with a couple of issues:

I found my writing was really about two main areas: telecommunications/VoIP and PR/marketing/communications/social media – and that the people interested in one topic weren’t really interested in the other.
The comment facility was nice, but at the time it was limited to only other LJ users or “Anonymous”. There was no way for people to leave their URL as people could on other blogs.
LJ didn’t support TrackBacks and some of the other newer features that were emerging in the new world of “blogging” and “social media”.

Given all that I went looking at various other options and wound up on TypePad where I set up two new blogs in 2006:

Disruptive Conversations – how the
"social media" of blogs, podcasts, wikis, virtual worlds, etc. are changing the
way we communicate
Disruptive Telephony – how
Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is fundamentally changing the technology we use to communicate

I went on to become a paid TypePad member, set up the Blue Box Podcast there and a range of other blogs.

Today, 10 years after that first Advogato post, I’m writing these days on something like 10 different blogs … some of which I list on my ‘blogs’ page and others are listed on Voxeo’s list of blogs – posts across all of them I am now aggregating into my Friendfeed account (along with tweets, bookmarks and more). I still use TypePad and while I have a number of issues with the site, the work to move at this point would be more than I feel like undertaking right now. Most of the new work I’m creating these days is with WordPress (or WordPress MU) which I’m using both on the VOIPSA weblog and the Voxeo blog site as well as some other projects in development.

As I sit here and write all this, it’s really incredible to think about all the changes we’ve seen over the past 10 years both with regard to “blogging” and also to all the other tools and services that make up this larger space we’ve called “social media”, but is even now morphing into more of just plain old… “media”!

Some things don’t change, though… if I go back to the end of that first Advogato post:

Okay… my first diary entry… and a long one… typical… no one has ever praised me for my brevity!

Ten years later, I’m still working on that “brevity” thing… and using my Twitter account as a daily exercise in just that topic 😉

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Ning’s Phase-Out of Free Services – Smart Business Move? Or Utter Betrayal?

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Much has been made in the social media part of the blogosphere about Ning’s recent decision to end their free services. In a post to their Ning Creators Forum titled “NING UPDATE: PHASING OUT FREE SERVICES“, the company posted an email from their CEO that said most importantly this:

So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning.

The post outlined why they need to make the move – and disclosed the fact that they were laying off 69 people.

Some 700 comments later, they closed off comments to the post. The comments seemed to be a great number of very upset users of the free Ning service mixed in with a few folks defending Ning along with Ning employees who seemed to be trying to be genuinely helpful.

The comments across the blogosphere and Twittersphere raged quite strongly. ReadWriteWeb had a post listing alternatives, as did Mashable. TechCrunch reported on sites “welcoming Ning refugees”.

While the news sites may have reported it matter-of-factly, many other sites were full of passion. Many nonprofits and educational institutions wrote about how the were going to have to find some other home because they couldn’t afford fees. My friend Shel Holtz wrote a blistering post called “Ning reneges on its core promise, shatters customer trust“, which included this line:

But the word that keeps repeating in my mind is “betrayal.”

Strong stuff.

Betrayal? Or sound business decision? I understand the arguments on both sides.

IN THE BEGINNING

If you go back in time, Ning was launched with great fanfare in October 2005, a new startup by Marc Andresson of Netscape fame. Per the RWW article I just linked to, Ning’s FAQ (now gone) was:

“Our goal with Ning is to see what happens when you open things up and make it easy to create, share, and discover new social apps.”

I remember the launch… many of us tried it out. I think I even created a Ning network… although I can’t find any email or evidence that I really did. I know I joined a couple. The idea was cool… now anyone can create their own social network!

Over the years Ning raised over $120 million from investors and at one point was valued at over a half billion dollars. Mashable reported one year ago that there were over 1,000,000 networks created on Ning. Ning was one of the early supporters of OpenSocial and rolled out “Ning Apps” to Ning’s 1.5 million networks at that time. I know of many folks in the social media/marketing space who recommended Ning as a platform for people to build communities. I did to several groups. I was even considering using Ning as a platform for a community around my upcoming book like Steve Garfield did for his Get Seen book. (I opted for a blog and a Facebook page instead.)

IN THE END

It now seems rather clear that something was broken with the business model. $120 million dollars and 1.5 million networks later… they chopped 40% of the staff and dropped the free service that brought them so much attention and undoubtedly investment.

It sounds like from a company perspective they had little choice. As a recent Mashable post said (my emphasis added):

We’re not sure how pricing will change over the next few weeks, but what we do know is that the dotcom-era free-for-all of apps, services and content for end users is not-so-gradually coming to a halt. In the light of economic reality, nothing is free. Someone — be it an advertiser, an administrator, an investor or an entrepreneur — is footing the bill for every one and zero that’s electronically transmitted across this great Internet of ours. And at some point, most of those folks expect to see a return on their investment.

“And at some point, most of those folks expect to see a return on their investment.“… indeed. And $120 million of investment is a lot to seek a return on. I can understand that they didn’t have many great choices… and were undoubtedly running out of time.

TRUST AND BETRAYAL

On the other hand, I completely understand the anger, sadness, frustration and passion of all of those who built communities on Ning. Ning offered a great service … all you had to do was bear with seeing the ads that were displayed. In return you had powerful tools to build your own community.

You put your trust in Ning that they would provide this service for free – and now Ning has betrayed that trust.

I don’t envy all the nonprofits, schools, churches and other groups that used Ning as their community and built their communication infrastructure around that site. Sure, there are alternatives, but switching is a pain… you ideally want to move some or all of your content… and you have to bring all your users over with you… It is a lot of work.

It’s easy to say, as I’ve seen many commenters do, that “you get what you pay for“… and to chastise users of Ning’s free service to be so naive to think that it would be around for the long term. But why not? That was the promise made by the company. Build your community here and we’ll make it easy for you to maintain and grow – and so many networks did prosper there.

SPOFs AND “THE INTERNET WAY”

As Shel wrote in his post, I have this issue with “single points of failure” (SPOFs). I’ve written at great length about how Twitter and Facebook violate “The Internet Way” of distributed and decentralized services. I would add Ning to that list as well. It is a centralized service under the control of a single company… and a startup company at that.

The problem in relying on a single company/service/platform is that if you are locked in to that company/service/platform, you have a single point-of-failure.

They die… you die.

Compare the Ning situation to, say, garden-variety web hosting providers. You can get web hosting pretty much anywhere for an inexpensive amount of money. Upload your HTML files, point your domain there… ta da… your website is up and running.

Don’t like the web hosting provider? Or have too many service problems? Or have the web hosting provider fail as a business? No problem… sign up with another web hosting provider… upload your HTML files (you do have a backup, right?)… point your domain there… and ta da… you’re back in action. You have many, many, many choices for web hosting providers… it’s all distributed and decentralized.

CONTROL AND PORTABILITY

With a web hosting provider… or even an email provider… there is a fundamental feature:

YOU ARE IN CONTROL!

If you don’t like the provider, you can move. You aren’t locked in. Sure, it may be a pile of work… and moving your domain may be a hassle if you didn’t retain control of it… but it’s relatively straightforward to move. Even if you use PHP or other scripting languages, odds are that you can move your web site to another provider, because…

Web sites are portable as they are based on open standards.

Usually… unless, of course, the web hosting provider found some way to make your administration “simpler” and subsequently lock you in to their services.

When using Ning, though, you sacrifice that control and portability in the name of simplicity. It’s easy and simple (and free!) to set up a Ning community. It can be a lot harder to set up your own software on your own server – and it will probably cost you something. The same can be said of Facebook and using a Facebook Page or Group… or using any of the many other services out there that let you build communities.

A HARSH LESSON

Sadly, hundreds of thousands of actual users (perhaps millions) are learning about control and portability in a bitter and harsh lesson. They will soon learn about what pricing Ning will be offering… and they will have to make their choices. Pay some fee… move their community… or simply shut it down. I already know that one of the ones I am a member of will be moving. I expect many others will move as well.

I can only hope… and that is what it is – “hope”… that as Ning community administrators look at alternatives, they will ask those providers the tough questions, like:

How do I know you will be around in a while?
How can I trust you not to screw me like Ning just did?
What is your business model?
How easy is it for me to move my community OFF of your platform if I choose to do so?

And so on…

As for Ning, I wish them luck… I somehow think they’re going to need it.

UPDATE: John Cass has an excellent post tracking many good posts involved in the conversation about Ning’s changes.

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Video explanation of Hadoop, MapReduce and other cloud database trends (Scoble and Cloudera)

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As you learn about "cloud" services, even just services like Twitter and Facebook, those of us with a technical bent may hear terms thrown around like "Hadoop" and "MapReduce" when it comes to the underlying technologies and the massively distributed databases being used for these services. In this video, Robert Scoble interviews Cloudera CEO Mike Olson about the changes that have happened in database technology and while the video of course touches on what Cloudera does, I found it to actually be a really good primer on what Hadoop, MapReduce and other new database technologies are all about. If you want to understand the underlying technology behind "cloud services", it's well worth the 30 minutes in my opinion: