I’ve often said in the past that I’m not a conference guy so I recognize the irony of me helping organize a conference. Eric Norlin did all the work and as we head into the home stretch of day one of Defrag, I’m blown away. The quality of the attendees is stunning and the panels and side discussions are fascinating.
David Weinberger took us on a romp through his mind, Alex Iskold (AdaptiveBlue) discussed structured attention, Greg Reinacker (NewsGator) covered RSS in the enterprise, and Michael Barrett (Paypal’s CISO) told us why we are totally screwed.
Esther Dyson is up now, having followed a rapid fire presentation by Dick Hardt (on Identity). Esther just suggested that Facebook is encouraging extreme narcissicm, which I identify with. We’ve still got Doc Searls and Ross Mayfield (congrats Ross on your financing) to go before drinks.
On the way up the elevator this morning to the Defrag conference, Alex Iskold of Adaptive Blue and I were talking about Open Social. Or rather – we were whining about it. I anticipated that a lot of the conversation at Defray would be about the enterprise (and I was correct) – Alex suggested that the current rush to get v0.1 of stuff out wasn’t helpful in a broader context.
Alex suggested that we figure out how to create Closed Private. This was totally tongue-in-check, but not really. At our first Defrag Open Space session, I tossed ClosedPrivate up on the board and a group of about 30 of us grabbed a corner and created the ClosedPrivate Initiative.
I started the conversation with some sarcasm and irony. I was immediately met with significant pushback as we had a serious conversation about the challenges of mapping existing social network constructs to the enterprise.
ClosedPrivate is the future. Get on the bandwagon. If we chose to, we might tell you what it is.
Whenever Amy tries to explain fashion to me, she says something like “orange is the new pink.” I’m not color blind, but I never really understand this – partly because I don’t really like pink (or fashion.) Ok, ok – I get the metaphor.
I love the word “synchronization.” Early Lotus Notes users (and database geeks) will prefer “replication” which I did until I saw Blade Runner for the first time. So – synchronization – or sync (not “synch”) is my preferred word. The construct is the same.
There was a time – in the late 1990’s – where sync became popular. Microsoft Exchange promulgated the phrase into mainstream corporate IT while the Palm Pilot got folks like my dad saying the word “sync” on a regular basis. Sync was hot – and important – for a little while.
Post-bubble, sync wasn’t to be found anywhere. The emergence of broadband and the rise of the consumer Internet rendered sync less interesting and it faded. Exchange users still loved it most of the time (except when Outlook sat there and grinded away on a slow connection), but they stopped cherishing (and talking about) it.
I’ve never loved laptops as my only computer. I’ve got a desktop in each office I work in using almost exactly the same configuration as their fellow desktops. Today, almost all of my data lives in the cloud or on a server somewhere so I have these lovingly overpowered desktops with beautiful monitors to do email and browse the web. However, when it’s all seamless and works, it’s really nice and allows me to only have to carry my smartphone (running Windows Mobile) around with me.
All my friends that are “web only” – especially my Mac buddies – are suddenly starting to find that their data isn’t always where they want it to be. Specifically – it’s not on their laptop when they are offline (e.g. on a plane) or on their desktop at home (when they leave their laptop at work.) Oops.
Sync is coming on fast. Again. Mary Foley just wrote an article about Microsoft Sync Framework CTP1 titled Microsoft delivers first test build of its online-offline sync platform. Google Gears appeared six months ago and several of my friends at Google (and the Google Gears API site) suggest it’s going to be the automagic offline sync interface from Google. I remember the joy I had when I discovered the Google Browser Sync Firefox Extension.
Several really smart developers I know are working on “sync” applications – both at the file and object level. Everyone that I know that is working on sync talks about how important it is to make it invisible to the user. Well duh. It should have been built into the operating systems that were released in the past 12 months (you each know who you are) but it wasn’t (although the perversion referred to as Sync Center tries, but not very hard.) The window is still open for real sync solutions – at least for another major OS iteration.
Sync is the new pink.
Here’s the start of the conversation:
Nerd 1: “Man – those Facebook ads really suck. They are completely irrelevant. And – well – embarrassing (e.g. almost porn.)” I can’t imagine that they ever get clicked on (except the porn.)”
Nerd 2: “Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all CPM based so all that matters right now are page views.”
Nerd 3: (also co-founder of a generation one search engine): “Yeah – that worked really well the last time around – until the economy went south. Then – CPM rates became asymptotic with zero.”
It went on for a while (along with additional sushi and saki consumption.) It was interesting. And important. And chilling for anyone relying on CPM-based ads only. Maybe it’ll be different this time. But that’s what “they” said the last time. Don’t forget to be sitting in a chair when the music stops playing.
A few weeks ago MIT refreshed its OpenCourseWare project. This project – in which MIT shares curriculum, lecture notes, exams, and other material from over 1700 projects – is amazing.
The project was launched in 2002 by computer science professor Hal Abelson with 32 courses. I took 6.001: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs from Abelson in 1984. You can take it also – including working through the online version of the textbook!
While I don’t have a favorite MIT course (that would be an emotionally complex oxymoron), my most miserable was 18.700 Linear Algebra which I dropped about halfway through. Sloan (management) courses are well represented, including 15.351: Managing the Innovation Process which was my introduction to Eric von Hippel and my lifelong hatred of software patents.
Speaking of other amazing MIT feats, one of my fraternity brothers – Dan Tani – is current in outer space.
I also have a photo of Dan from a party dressed up as a piece of nigiri sushi, but I’ll spare you that.
If you are paying attention to the Google OpenSocial thing, I have two great blog posts for you.
The first is for the business people and users that are trying to get their mind around the implications of OpenSocial to Facebook. Don Dodge – who I’ve been friends with for a while – has an outstanding post up titled 50M Facebook users don’t care about OpenSocial APIs. Don unabashedly comes from the Microsoft side of the world (which is teamed up with Facebook) but cuts to the “user dynamics” of the situation very clearly.
The second is for the nerds. Dare Obasanjo is a Microsoft blogger who I read daily. I don’t know Dare well (I met him briefly at Gnomedex several years ago) but have plenty of respect for his abilities, both as the creator of RSS Bandit (an open source RSS newsreader) and for his long, thoughtful blog posts. In Google OpenSocial: Technical Overview and Critique he compares his first impression of OpenSocial API to the Facebook platform.
While both Don and Dare are coming at this with a Microsoft bias (and I expect everyone currently knows of the lack of love between Microsoft and Google these days) they are both very useful posts to help balance out the hyperbole of endless “wow – this is amazing” feedback that broke out over the last few days.
I expect this next week to be a flurry of additional information and critique (positive and negative) on OpenSocial along with at least one key upcoming Facebook announcement. These are good posts to read to ground you in reality before another crescendo builds.
I’d like to welcome and thank my friends at Gold Systems for joining The Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.
Terry Gold – the co-founder of Gold Systems – was one of the first entrepreneurs that I met in early 1996 shortly after Amy and I moved to Boulder. At the time Gold Systems was about 15 people. Terry, his partner Jim, and I went for plenty of long walks in 1996 and 1997 as they tried to navigate the waters of growing a young business. As I got to know Terry better, he came to epitomize the ideal of a thoughtful and generous entrepreneur and person.
Through Mobius, I invested in Gold Systems in 2000. Terry and his team grew quickly after the investment but then had to struggle with the telecommunications downturn in 2002. Due to Terry and his team’s perseverance, they survived and have gone on to build a solid member of the Boulder tech community.
I’m proud of what Terry and the team at Gold Systems have accomplished. I’m very pleased that have chosen to become a member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. Thanks Gold Systems.
My investment in Shelfari has been a lot of fun. Josh Hug and his team are monsters – they get stuff done incredibly quickly. Plus I get to play with my books virtually.
In addition to the Shelfari web service, they’ve got widgets up on Facebook and MySpace. Now they’ve got and OpenSocial implementation as well.
If you are looking for real examples of OpenSocial, here’s another one. Demo starts at minute 5. Josh – you look very serious – time for a smile. Nice belt btw.
I have very smart friends. They challenge me all the time. One of them sent me the following email in response to my recent posts about the enterprise such as Get Ready For Selling To The Enterprise To Be A Big Deal Again.
His question / comment was: What are the types of Web2.0 things you see moving into the enterprise? Or is it more “conceptually” rather than specific-product oriented? I see update of wikis; I think the EventVue type of nice app will be taken up; but the two biggest things in the last couple of years are the dominance of Google (which is already used in the enterprise), and Facebook, which just does not seem applicable in an enterprise sense (people use it, but kind of the same way they use LinkedIn.
I responded with: I describe it as “consumer Internet innovations migrating to the enterprise” rather than “Web 2.0 in the Enterprise” (although the second is how the pundits want to coin Enterprise 2.0.) The componentry is what is interesting.
When you think of enterprise, don’t think of < 1000 people. That’s SMB and can easily adopt the consumer facing and SaaS stuff. Think 10,000+ with an IT organization and a ton of legacy shit. That’s where the fun (and money) is.
He responded with: All these things make sense to me. It seems like the key is that the way you adapt them to the enterprise may actually be quite different than the way they are used and organized in consumer circles. The children that develop the consumer app will get hammered in the enterprise unless they bring in some gray.