We had a TechStars picnic at my house yesterday afternoon. Given that there were 30+ software nerds hanging around, a little teeny tiny bit of the conversation was about computer stuff.
One of the conversations was about Google Apps vs. Microsoft Office with a big focus on Enterprise Gmail vs. Microsoft Exchange. I’m a heavy Exchange user (one of the things that prevents me from getting serious about using a Mac) but I’ve been paying a lot of attention to Google’s action around enterprise email on the heals of its acquisition of Postini.
I poked around a little this morning and found google-apps-for-your-domain-ldap-sync on Google Code (Google’s open source site.) The features include:
It’s a brilliant move that Google has open sourced a “package for synchronizing Google Apps for Your Domain with an LDAP server.” Cross-platform / cross-application data synchronization is one of the most challenging parts of enterprise proliferation of a lot of the cool stuff that has emerged in the past two years. While it’s not sexy, it’s critically important and its fascinating that Google is taking an open source approach to some of the integration points.
I am anti-software patents. Lest you think I’m simply a reactionary, I’ve been thinking about this since 1987 when I started studying sources of innovation under Eric von Hippel at MIT as my research in a Ph.D. program which I never completed. For the last 20 years, I’ve thought that copyright and trade secrets were adequate IP protection for software.
Fred Wilson’s VC Cliche “patents are like nuclear bombs, you just got to have some” has been my business philosophy – until the nonsense around software patents gets resolved and disarmament begins, the weapons stockpiles will continue to grow unchecked.
Last week The Patent Reform Act of 2007 passed the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. Don Dodge from Microsoft has a good summary of the major provisions of the act (primarily market test for damages; new patent review / mediation process; first to file.) While my proposal of simply abolishing software patents is good fantasy, it’s satisfying to see some baby steps being made to address patents.
I’m more fascinated with the Peer-to-Patent experiment that is being done in conjunction with the USPTO. 250 patents are undergoing a peer review process primarily focused on prior art (and the efficient peer submission of it.) After signing up, I got an email that tells me what I get out of it as a reviewer:
While I put a few of these in the cute category, after poking around for a few minutes I encourage anyone that’s interested in patents to create an account and participate in this project. There are eight applications currently under review:
While I expect the arguments and struggle over software patents to continue for a long time, it’s fun to imagine a world where this actually works effectively.
I’ve been fascinated with blog comments since I started blogging. The “blogging is a conversion meme” is a long standing one and the notion of engaging a real community around a blog is fascinating and a lot of fun.
However, the blog commenting infrastructure sucks. While data entry is fine, authentication and identity are miserable (anyone can be anyone just by entering a name), conversations are generally impossible to manage, blog spam is pervasive, and tracking conversations is difficult. Oh – and comments are rarely indexed so they have become the dark matter of the blogosphere. While there were some early attempts like TypeKey, nothing really stuck.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the comments – one of the most pervasive examples of user-generated content on the web today – actually were organized in a broadly useful way? Or if identity was actually managed, so you could look and see all the comments that Brad Feld made, regardless of which blogs they were on. Or – if you could search horizontally across all blog comments for topics like you can with the blogs themselves. Or you could rate comments and give them authority based on reputation?
Why is the comment infrastructure so different than the blog infrastructure in the first place? Joel Spolsky has a great rant on it and Dave Winer has some clear thoughts on it. Mark Andreesen quickly turned off comments on his brilliant new blog. Fred Wilson expressed the opposite perspective – “Comments are where it’s at in blogging.” And on and on it goes. Just like theoretical physics or politics – everyone has an opinion and they often conflict or – better yet – worlds collide.
Over the past year, I’ve made a few early stage investments in companies that address the comment infrastructure. While they are still all young, they are addressing different parts of the problem and I’m learning a ton from each of them. Intense Debate – one of the TechStars companies – is about to launch with a full replacement system for comments. BigSwerve is working on indexing all of the comments everywhere. Lijit is waiting patiently for the right data source to include within their search infrastructure. And TrustPlus is well positioned to address the authentication / trust part of the equation.
It feels like it’s time to shine some light on this dark matter.
If you are obsessed with Facebook, you should be reading Read/WriteWeb this week (as they’ve declared it the week of Facebook.) The first post is Facebook Week: Analyzing The Facebook Platform and Apps. Has anyone else noticed that Facebook Inbox doesn’t have a “Forward” (or – in Facebook land – “include more friends on thread”) feature? What’s with that?
On the heals of my friend Andy Sack giving up his switch over to a Mac, Fred Wilson blogged this morning that he has been unable to fulfill his New Years Resolution of getting rid of Microsoft software from his computing infrastructure. In Fred’s case, the culprit is Exchange + RIM. He’s given up on trying to use OSX for work and is going back to Windows / Parallels land.
As Amy likes to say, “why aren’t we still using MS-DOS – it was fine.” Oh – and as a special bonus, Dave McClure has an awesome post up titled Marketing Facebook Apps: All About the FEED, n00bs!.
My partner Ryan pointed me to Daniel Rozin’s Wooden Mirror. It’s a delightful example of humans + technology + art. All of this stuff is starting to “Blur” together (EricN – hint.)
Andy Sack just gave up on his switch from Microsoft to Apple. I’ve tried to make this switch twice over the past few years (once randomly, once on the eve of the Vista launch) and ended up in Vista land. Each time I write about it, I get comments from a bunch of Mac fans saying something to the effect of “Brad – the problem is you – you’re just stupid.” Ok – whatever. I think Andy said it better – “I guess I’m just a PC nerd.” Of course, my iBrick experience (and deep satisfaction with my Dash) just reinforces this. Now – the big question is whether I plan to get the Xbox 360 or the PS3 version of Harmonix’s Rock Band.
Wesabe just came out with an API. If you aren’t familiar with Wesabe, it’s a new investment by my friends at Union Square Ventures – Brad Burnham describes why they made the investment in his post Wesabe Is More Than A “Personal” Financial Service. A quick search on Fred Wilson’s blog (via Lijit) shows tons of chatter on the term “API” on both his blog and his network. API is also prevalent in my blog postings and my network.
Twittermania was partially driven by the API. Almost all of the web services companies that I’ve invested in, including FeedBurner, NewsGator, Technorati, and Rally Software have powerful APIs. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are obsessed with API’s. Remember the SDK? It’s now the API. Repeat after me: REST and SOAP.
This is not a new idea nor am I suggesting it is. But it’s a phenomenon that has become key to what’s going on around the web today. Some people – like the fine folks at the Programmable Web – are even cataloging this. Remember the phrase “information wants to be free.” Your computer programs do also, and an API is the way to help them.
I hate the 2.0 label. Hate it hate it hate it. Hate it. However, I’ve heard the phrase “Enterprise 2.0” 3,625 times in the past two weeks. All my enterprise friends are using it. All the big companies I work with have been using it. All the analysts have been using it. It’s even in Wikipedia. I yield.
Today’s Techmeme meme is based on Facebook advertising brings poor results.
Most of the posts are talking about the rotten clickthrough rate (0.04%) on Facebook. Some of the posts – like Scoble’s – have some constructive suggestions about how to make the advertising more relevant (note to self – “tie it to people, just like Google ties AdSense to search results.”)
In the past two weeks, I’ve seen or heard of four Facebook focused ad networks that are about to launch that are specifically aimed at Facebook apps. One of the TechStars companies – J-Squared Media – has a rapidly growing Facebook up (Sticky Notes – 232,137 users – ranked #52) so we are getting an inside look at the action, traffic dynamics, and advertising (oh yeah – and dealing with scale on short notice.)
So far, it’s all about the CPM. I’ve seen proposals ranging from $0.50 / CPM to $15.00 / CPM. Do the math – it’s interesting. I expect the CTR will be low (< 0.1%), but some of the CPM based ads that I’ve seen are awesome and – especially if they are interactive in page with a call to action – render CTR meaningless.
Remember also that Facebook doesn’t really want anyone to leave Facebook (at least I don’t think they do.) In a conversation yesterday at Me.dium, we were trying to figure out the correct way to describe it (e.g. “inverted AOL”, “walled fortress”, “AOL 2.0 without the fee.”) We never got satisfied with the label, but the concept is an important one if you are trying to figure out the really effective long-term advertising approach.