Facebook.  MySpace.  LinkedIn.  Plaxo.  Gmail.  Email Contacts.  Bebo.  Every individual social networking software product that I use (Dogster, Shelfari, …)

Oh how I friend thee.  Let me count the ways.

I’m already seeing "predictions for 2008" that it will be the year of "friend consolidation."  How exciting.

Phase 1 (of at least 10) is starting to appear.  You can now see your LinkedIn data inside of Facebook (but you can’t really do much with it – yet.)  And of course this isn’t an "official LinkedIn app – just something someone else put together.)  Or – using Fuser – you can now see your MySpace data inside of Facebook.  Again – you can’t do much with it.

The dynamics this time around are pretty interesting to me.  Usually data follows apps.  This time the apps are following the data.  And the data is proliferating very quickly.  While OpenSocial theoretically "solves" this, we know that there are at least 9 phases to go before we get to a happy place with this.

Our friends at IBM are trying to patent the "progress bar."  EDN has an article about it titled U.S. patent office looking for prior art on IBM patent application.  As a result of the Peer-to-Patent: Community Patent Review process, there’s actually a chance that this stupid patent will not get granted.

There are 11 days left to comment on the Pre-Grant Publication Number: 20070220238.  If you don’t want to go through the brain damage of setting up an account, just leave a comment on this blog post and I’ll consolidate and post them on the Peer-to-Patent site.  If you really want to dig into this yourself because you’ve actually written the code for a progress board, you take a look at the overview and the claims (keep a barf bag handy.)

Dave – do you have any of that Clarion code from the late 1980’s with progress bars in them?  I know I’ve got some examples written in Basic for Petcom’s PCEconomics from 1984 – now all I’ve got to do is find something that can read a 5.25" floppy disk.  Nari – thanks for the heads up on this.

As my Quixotic adventure for abolishing software patents continues, I’m starting to come across essays, examples, and suggestions from software engineers that support and confirm my point of view.

Terry Gold of Gold Systems pointed me to an article from Art Reisman, the CEO / CTO at APConnections.  Terry is on Art’s advisory board.

Let’s start with Art’s recommendation

Patents should be allowed for:

• 1) devices with mechanical components
• 2) physical compounds that can be weighed on a scale.

Patents should never be awarded to:

• 1) Ideas
• 2) processes, recipes, software programs

I believe that these already have other appropriate means of protection (trade secrets, copyrights).

Perfect.  I strongly agree.  Art’s article in ExtremeTech is titled Analysis: Confessions of a Patent Holder starts with his fundamental problems with the Verizon patent that has caused Vonage so much difficulty.

The problem with this patent, like many others in a misguided flood of new filings, is that it describes an obvious process to solve a naturally occurring problem. Translating a phone number into an IP address must be accomplished by any provider offering Voice Over IP. Not only is it a common problem, it is a relatively simple problem to solve with multiple natural solutions — not that that was apparently made clear to the jury. So simple, a first-year computer science student could do it as a weekend homework assignment.

Art is also transparent about the "bigco patent manufacturing machine" problem.

In my time at major telco providers, all of the patents I was privy to were taken out for something that occurred in the natural course of finding a solution to a larger problem. I was never comfortable with being a part of this game, but a previous employer of mine provided an eager legal team to help in the process, and paid $1,000 to any engineer who won a patent. I had colleagues that were virtual patent mills. Patents sound impressive on a resume, so why not?

Art warms my heart with a nice punchline: "It’s like hate and war: nothing productive can come of it."

The Vonage decision is the ultimate example of a small player eating into the revenues of a larger player, and the underhanded techniques that the larger player can impose with an unchecked patent library. Vonage was brash, bold and constantly in the face of the big players trying to get market share. Although I give them little chance of competing in the long run, I hope that everyone at Verizon who was involved in winning this case realizes that their tactics undermine our ability to compete as a society and may backfire against them someday. It’s like hate and war: nothing productive can come of it.

Ah – it’s the 2008 tech predictions time again.  Mark Andreessen has a hilarious post dissecting the Economists 2008 tech predictions titled When non-technologists write about technology … They’re so CUTE!  Mark’s commentary is brilliant and has much more useful information than the predictions.

I predict 2008 will be the year that bloggers decimate all the 2008 tech predictions and reveal their fundamental flaws.  Hey Mark, can you take on the Read/WriteWeb 2008 Web Predictions next?

My switch to the Mac is not going well.  The evidence for this is that both Amy and I are continuing to work on our PCs even though we have beautiful new Mac Laptops loaded up with software and fully configured.  Every few days I try again – and then bail after an hour or so of frustration.

One of my biggest barriers is Exchange integration.  Since we use Exchange extensively (including Tasks), there’s a meaningful switching cost to move off of it.  Microsoft Entourage 2004 sucks.  I’ve been a beta tester for Microsoft Entourage 2008 which is better, but still doesn’t support a bunch of basic Exchange integration (like Tasks) and has numerous UI yuckiness.

Yeah – I know that I can use Mac Mail and sync with Exchange, but that doesn’t get me very far in a mixed use environment (Calendar, Contacts, Tasks anyone?)  I know I can use Parallels or Fusion to run an XP or Vista image on my Mac to run Outlook, but if I’m going to do that I might as well just live with my PC.  And I know we could switch off Exchange, but I’m not going to begin to try to fathom that (although Ross is playing around with it.)

As I watch all my Mac friends "deal with this" (e.g. Ryan), they make it work but the cost is non-trivial.  It’d be so much easier if Apple would just decide to really support Exchange natively within their apps (and on the iPhone.)

Hmmm – maybe they are. 

I’m looking for a handful of the "best" Wii and Xbox 360 games for my super gaming rig in Keystone.  Any suggestions?

While John Furrier would like me to actually think and respond to Alex Iskold’s post titled Software Engineering Tips for Startups, I’d rather try to get into the holiday spirit and make some chocolate chip cookies.

Pete Warden demonstrates his programming versatility by giving us a program for how to bake cookies your friends will beg for.  Maybe #8 should be "must be able to make great chocolate chip cookies."

You are going to hear me talk a lot about user interfaces and human computer interaction in 2008.  It’s an area that I’m intensely interested in as I think the way we interact with computers 20 years from now will make our current UI / HCI paradigms look as quaint as DOS and 3270 emulation mode looks today.

One of my friends working in this area is Bruce Wyman, the director of technology at the Denver Art Museum.  Bruce periodically writes a blog called DAM Technology and recently put up a post titled The Sapir-WIMP Hypothesis.

""The more easily you can talk about a user interface, the more easily you can understand how to manipulate it." … it’s been a fundamental part to how we’ve approached a lot of our interface works in the galleries here at the museum. I think the amount of time someone is going to devote to whatever experience we create is pretty minimal and that having complex interfaces and interactions quickly chew into that engagement time. So, wherever we can make the interface immediately intuitable or simplify the experience so that are no incorrect actions, the better of we are and the quicker someone can get into an experience."

Sometimes you need a paragraph to describe the UI.  But keep it short. 

A few weeks ago, Slashdot pointed out that a Critic of Software Patents Wins [the] Nobel Prize in Economics.  I finally got around to reading the paper that Slashdot referred to – Sequential Innovation, Patents, and Imitation by James Bessen and Eric Maskin (the aforementioned Nobel Prize winner.)  The paper was written in 1999 and is an MIT Economics Department Working Paper #00-01 (one of first working papers to be published at MIT in 2000.)

The paper is a crunchy one (lots of equations that I wasn’t able to follow now that it has been 20 years since I took an economics class, although the abstract summarizes things nicely (as all good abstracts should).

"Abstract: How could such industries as software, semiconductors, and computers have been so innovative despite historically weak patent protection? We argue that if innovation is both sequential and complementary—as it certainly has been in those industries—competition can increase firms’ future profits thus offsetting short-term dissipation of rents. A simple model also shows that in such a dynamic industry, patent protection may reduce overall innovation and social welfare. The natural experiment that occurred when patent protection was extended to software in the 1980’s provides a test of this model. Standard arguments would predict that R&D intensity and productivity should have increased among patenting firms. Consistent with our model, however, these increases did not occur. Other evidence supporting our model includes a distinctive pattern of cross-licensing in these industries and a positive relationship between rates of innovation and firm entry."

Much of the stuff I read on software patents generally ignores (or hand waves) over the empirical data as well as any rigorous quantitative analysis of the real economic dynamics of software patents.  There is also an excellent and short section that discusses the pattern of cross-licensing entire patent portfolios within the software industry.

I also found a couple of other great software patent sites as a result of this, including the Research on Innovation Working papers (many papers by James Bessen and Michael Meurer discussing software patents), an overview of Bessen and Meurer’s upcoming book titled Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk (Princeton University Press: March 2008), and the summary from a conference from 2006 titled Software Patents: A Time for Change?