Happy Year of The Dog!

Posted by Jacob Harris Mon, 30 Jan 2006 17:01:00 GMT

Maybe it's because I like dogs, but I have a feeling this is going to be an auspicious year.

Posted in Silly | 1 comment

The Future of Feeds

Posted by Jacob Harris Wed, 25 Jan 2006 01:12:00 GMT

Earlier this year, I made a New Year’s Resolution to write more postings to the blog, but I have failed abjectly at that so far sadly. January is sadly a busy month for me, and I usually don’t feel like coming home after a long day to stare at a computer screen some more. But occaisionally inspiration strikes, and I feel like sharing some thoughts I have about the future of Syndication via RSS and Atom feeds in the next few years.

I have to agree with my company’s CEO Steve Goldstein when he says that increasing RSS/Atom adoption will be one of the big trends in the information industry in 2006. Speculating wildly, I think that 2006 will be The Year of RSS and Atom. And so, I’m going to make a few bold predictions of my own about the state of syndication and the software industry. To avoid spending even longer without posting to the blog, I have decided to not bother with research, so if something I have predicted has actually happened already, be sure to make a snarky comment about it to me below. Thanks. And now here are big things I see happening in the next year or so:

Mainstream Feed Adoption – Currently, most of the sites producing feeds are still blogs and news sites –- those for whom the article paradigm within feeds is a natural fit. However, non-newsy sites like del.icio.us and Flickr have earned a lot of buzz not just for their front-end interfaces but for their innovative and pervasive use of feeds everywhere and using syndication for non-article content. But this is still under the radar of the typical Internet user for now. I think this will change this year. I expect a major online site to follow suit this year and provide syndication of their data in a similar fashion. For instance, I would not be surprised if Amazon began to offer feeds for user wishlists or upcoming recommendations or music alerts. That would rock.

More People Will Embrace RSS, But Still Not Know It – A survey from last year by Yahoo! revealed that only 4% of Internet users knew what RSS was, but this will most certainly change. The name is obviously somewhat to blame (there’s a joke that if it were called SpeedFeed more people would use it), but I think it’s not the real problem. In truth, most people just don’t care. For your typical web user, the Web is a toy more than a place to siphon information from; they are therefore not exactly vexed enough by the slowness of visiting sites to want to setup an aggregator. Instead, I think some different killer app beyond mere aggregation will be the only thing to make most people want to use RSS. I have no idea what that app might be, but I’m sure one of you could think of something awesome.

RSS Is A Terrible Business Though – For companies that produce or sell content, RSS will be a good fit, providing additional ways for users to access the site and contributing a small boost in sales or page visits. But companies in the RSS software business (particularly online aggregators) will have a terrible time. There are just very few barriers to entry for competitors, and the whole we’ll make money through advertising model seems so very pre-boom to me. That said, there are still some promising markets for companies doing RSS software. Software that allows filters or other mechanisms for mitigating information overload from feeds will find a market. Bridges from the pull-based mechanism of RSS/Atom to push-based messaging services like SMS, Email, or IM will probably also do well. And of course, it would be smart for makers of web analytics software to also look at measuring conversions and clickthroughs from feed links.

Syndication Will Drive REST Web Services – One of the common complaints leveled against REST-based Web Services is that the simple model of REST does not specify the XML representation for data (unlike the case of XML-RPC and SOAP). This will never officially change, but I think it will become increasingly more common to see REST Web Services that return RSS-like data for searches. Indeed, throw in Amazon’s OpenSearch extensions for RSS and you have support for presenting pagination within RSS documents. The practical upshot of this is that programmers can use the exact same code for RSS, Search Engine Plugins (if any other engines besides A9.com support OpenSearch_), and REST-based Web Services. More significantly, this makes REST more compelling to these programmers, since supporting SOAP’s data encoding would require supporting an additional data format for searches and more code to implement. Similarly, the arrival of the Atom Publishing Protocol will also bring awareness of REST Web Services to a wider market of people who will be using it without even knowing it.

Feed Extensions Will Get Wider Support – As RSS/Atom grows in its usage, it should be possible to find more aggregators and process that also support the more popular extensions to feeds (these are normally specified within the document in a separate namespace). I think a few extensions will become essential in the years ahead (and I don’t even know if they exist currently!): support for threading of RSS items (for feeds based on email lists); partial encryption of RSS documents to be decrypted in the reader (would allow banks to offer feeds for instance); geographic tagging for marking stories (see the breaking news/photos on a map). In any event, I think good aggregators will show in some fashion all tags embedded in the feed so that users could search or filter based upon them.

Syndication in the Enterprise – Finally, it is obvious that RSS/Atom will become more common within corporate intranets as well. And the credit for this belongs to Microsoft of all companies. Mainly, by placing RSS within all aspects of Windows Vista, Microsoft will drag all sorts of big IT Departments into accepting RSS as a solution for messaging and event notification. This will in turn make them more likely to also accept other solutions based on syndication. In fact, I’m optimistic enough to think that B2B Syndication-based products will do better than B2C (remember that vexing 4% recognition rate from above; CTOs can mandate use in their companies). Smaller companies will be quick to embrace the immediacy of RSS and larger companies will also enjoy it for Windows Vista integration.

Atom vs. RSS2.0 Holy Wars Won’t Matter I know it vexes some readers of this posting that I’m using RSS sometimes as a shorthand phrase for RSS2.0 or Atom-based syndication. And I agree with them that Atom is technically superior while RSS2.0 has better market share. But my ultimate feeling is that the differences between the two for the consumer will be largely academic (like caring about whether your audio player is playing MP3 or AAC), since any good aggregator or processor should just be able to handle both formats effortlessly.

I will probably follow up on some of these points in more depth anon, but feel free to comment and quibble in the comments section below. I am no industry expert, but I do so like to make guesses about the business. And I’m curious what you think as well. Check in next year and we’ll how well they turned out.

Posted in Web Services | Tags atom, prediction, rss, syndication | 1 comment

Xml Situps

Posted by Jacob Harris Tue, 24 Jan 2006 18:59:00 GMT

Courtesy of Camping, Why’s latest stroke of genius (he’s the creator of Hoodwink.d as well), comes this lovely little graphic.

Ever curious if you are an XML Geek? If that made you laugh, then yes. If you can also understand Sam Ruby’s XMLConf presentation you are a Super XML geek. Congratulations.

Posted in Markup | Tags xml | no comments

Good And Bad Customer Service

Posted by Jacob Harris Tue, 10 Jan 2006 02:41:00 GMT

This is just a short note to express my appreciation of Booq Bags for their astoundingly good customer service experience. My current laptop bag from them has developed a few rips in the outer nylon from general wear and tear, but they offer a trusting lifetime warranty program for their bags. And so, they’re sending me a new bag – a process made all easier that I was able to look up my original order on their site and submit a replacement claim electronically. I still had to send them a photo of the damage – they’re not naively trusting – but once they received that, I was cleared for a replacement. Furthermore, when my original bag was not available in the color I wanted, they shipped me a free upgrade, with all the decisions made by the person on the phone.

In contrast, my Canon S400 is unable to read any memory cards now (hence the lack of new photos). After reading over some boards, it seems the problem is related to a design defect within the camera itself, apparently fixable by replacing a cheap internal battery. Canon’s response has been customers out of warranty are out of luck and they should shell out $150 for a simple battery replacement procedure. It’s not the customer’s fault the camera has this specific defect, but Canon blames them anyway. What an excellent way to make money off existing customers without ever having to worry about keeping them… and of course, none of those customers will ever complain in online stores and forums. Right…

So, I’m violently annoyed at Canon, but passionately overjoyed with Booq. If anything, this experience illustrates the truly delightful thing about purchasing from small companies; they care intensely about the customer service experience and are willing to put their money where their mouths are. And they empower their employees to make the decisions to make that happen. Why do big companies get it so wrong?

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags booq, canon | 3 comments

Stop Kicking The Enterprise

Posted by Jacob Harris Fri, 06 Jan 2006 21:13:00 GMT

I have to agree with Obie Fernandez when he complains in his posting Enterprise Is Not An Insult about some of the recent derision directed at the Enterprise lately from the avant garde in the Ruby On Rails community lately. The problem is most of the mockery comes over a misunderstanding that “enterprise” means “insanely large”, which Obie points out is completely different from any definition used by people who actually work in enterprise software:

Plenty of us say “enterprise” when referring to internal-facing systems written by corporate IT departments and it doesn’t carry a stigma for being too large or too small, too simple or too complex. Enterprise projects might be large, take years, straddle business units and have global effects or they might be small, departmental efforts with only a handful of end users. So many factors influence the success of enterprise software in a given organization, only few of which have anything to do with technology.

Yes, there are large products that call themselves “enterprise-class software”, but that doesn’t mean that all enterprise software has to be big, slow, and hard to develop. But unfortunately, mocking the state of enterprise software has become an oft repeated dumb joke lately. This is like when a comedian throws out a laugh line – like slamming Microsoft or calling France “surrender monkeys” – to get a quick laugh; it’s funny at first but soon loses its novelty.

Giving a definition of my own, “enterprise software” means “business software.” All businesses want to increase their profits, and they do that by reducing inefficiency (ie, “we can track all of our operations within Excel”) or expanding into new niches (ie, opening overseas offices or offereing new business). Enterprise or B2B software – whether shrink-wrapped or custom – is what helps them get there. The best enterprise software becomes as essential as the CEO or infrastructure to a company’s success. And smart companies look to develop such software as quickly as possible, both to increase their profits quicker and gain advantage over their competitors. Yes, there is slow and clunky enterprise software, but there is also lightweight and rapidly developed enterprise software too. Speaking from personal experience, at Alacra, we work with a lot of vendors both large and small, and I can assure you that agility and profitability are far more important than slavish adherence to some awkward and enormous toolkit. Consider that the agile methodologies of Extreme Programming and Scrum were first heavily used in such large enterprise environments as Chrysler and Honeywell respectively. And I would argue that the success of such radically-new-at-the-time technology like the Web, XML, or Java was entirely due to the B2B community recognizing their value early and embracing them fully.

Which is why I think the jokes have to stop; does Rails want to continue to present itself as a niche tool for small B2C development or does it want to be a B2B player? Why have we gone from Rails does too scale! to Uptime is overrated? Yeah, 99.9999% uptime is overkill for almost all software, but if you’re going to sell to business you shouldn’t mock people if they want 99% uptime. They’re not whinging; they want to make your product an essential tool for their business. And so I think Rails needs to embrace enterprise needs. I think David is right to resist such code additions to the core, but I think it has a place in third-party contributed plugins and code snippets. To be an enterprise player, people will want to plug Rails into working legacy database schemas, handling composite keys, potentially even interfacing with back-end service-oriented architectures; maybe even hacking lightweight support for such horrors as SOAP or CORBA. And I think such work is what Rails needs to really succeed. Maybe you think it’s selling out, but I’d rather see Ruby in the enterprise than C#. There is a middle ground between obscurity and (code) obesity; let’s not mock people for trying to find it.

Posted in Net Culture, Web Coding | Tags agile, enterprise, rails, ruby | no comments

I'm Finally With The Cool Kids

Posted by Jacob Harris Fri, 06 Jan 2006 04:11:00 GMT

It’s been an excellent week for my geeky self-esteem, with beta invitations to both Ma.gnolia (a new bookmarking site) and Measuremap (a blog statistics tracking program). Both are written in Ruby on Rails and both look pretty awesome. That’s all I’m going to say (not sure how much I can legally say yet), but I will close with the observation that there’s an energy for new projects on the web I haven’t seen in years and that the Ruby on Rails community is one of the nicest and most open I’ve ever seen.

Ah well, two down, approximately 100 to go.

Posted in Web | Tags betas, ma.gnolia, measuremap, rails, ruby, web2.0 | 1 comment

Yahoo and Google's Recruitment Gambles

Posted by Jacob Harris Thu, 22 Dec 2005 06:07:00 GMT

Jason Kottke had a really interesting point earlier this month about Yahoo’s del.icio.us purchase that I just read today (been catching up), when he says:

There’s an interesting story in here somewhere about how Yahoo! is hiring/buying the “alpha geeks” (hackers, tinkerers, accidental entrepreneurs) and Google seemingly isn’t (Ph.Ds, computer scientists) and what effect that could have on each company’s development.

Spot on. It seems like Google has been focusing its efforts lately mainly on acquiring key smart people (even if that means buying their whole company), content acquisition (ie, Keyhole for satellite data, the sitemap protocol for deep web access), and advertising/advertising/advertising! Meanwhile, Yahoo has been looking for new talent with proven success to snap up. Their strategy could really be defined as platforms. Amazon has also been doing this to some degree through their internal Robot Coop front company, but I expect they might start buying outside sites as well if they prove successful (good luck there LibraryThing!). It’s nice for the big guys; someone else takes the risk of building the product and they can scoop it up – users and all – if it sticks.

This has been described as competing strategies of brains vs. hackers. Which is certainly true, but there are some interesting other dimensions to consider. I read an interview with Eric Schmidt of Google where he named the not invented here attitude as one of Google’s biggest concerns moving forward. And looking at their strategy, it seems like Google might be struggling with that problem now, preferring to create their own copies of existing successful products (Googlemaps and Gmail have done well, but what about Google Base or Orkut?). Of course, Yahoo is taking its own risks here (their strategy is essentially treating geeks like value stocks vs. Google’s growth stocks), but I ultimately feel they might succeed. A lot of radical web stuff lately has been done by the new people, the unknows (think Ruby on Rails or Del.icio.us), and Yahoo has been more poised to recognize it. Will their riskier unknowns best Google’s smart people with big reputations? I think so, unless Google’s hiding something really big up its sleeves to spring in 2006.

On a related note, John Battelle has published his industry predictions for 2006 and it’s an interesting read. Although he sometimes stumbles, he generally does a good job of being on the mark, as his review of 2005’s predictions shows. Check it out.

Posted in Search | Tags google, yahoo | 2 comments

Calculate Your NYTYIIH Score!

Posted by Jacob Harris Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:08:00 GMT

For the past 5 years, the New York Times has graced with an annual roundup article titled The Year In Ideas. The issue actually came out last week, but it’s a sign of my recent workload – and the excessive number of holiday parties I had to attend – that I only read it on the commute into work today.

It actually was rather boring. Not because of the ideas themselves, but because I had actually read many of them before on various blogs and other geeky websites (Sometimes, I long for a service like “del.icio.us” for feed subscriptions just so I can share how hip the feeds I read are). I am not an information omnivore by any means, but it was apparent that I was cued into some of the same idea sources as the editors of the New York Times. Which led to an idea of my own. Since the New York Times has declared its Year In Ideas issue to be an annual tradition, I’m going to start my own personal tradition of tabulating my personal New York Times Year In Ideas Hipness score (or NYTYIIH for short). The methodology is simple. Look at every idea listed and if you had heard of it before reading in the Times, give yourself a point. Okay, let’s get started then.

The following table lists the titles of the ideas in the 2005 Year in Ideas issue with bold ones being ideas I had encountered before. I know some of the titles are cryptic, but you can take that up with the New York Times editors and not me.

Accredited Bliss	Playoff Paradigm, The
The Anti-Paparazzi Flash	Pleistocene Rewilding
The Anti-Rape Condom	The Porn Suffix
Branding Nations	Preventing Suicide Bombing
Cartoon Empathy	The Readable Medicine Bottle
Celebrity Teeth	Republican Elitism
Cobblestones are Good for You	Robot Jockeys
Collapsing the Distribution Window	The Runaway Alarm Clock
Consensual Interruptions	Scientific Free-Throw Distraction
Conservative Blogs are More Effective	Seeing With Your Ears
Dialing Under the Influence	The Self-Fulfilling Trade Rumor
Do-It-Yourself Cartography	The Serialized Pop Song
Dolphin Culture	The Sitcom Loyalty Oath
Econophysics	Solar Sailing
Embryo Adoption	The Sonic Gunman Locator
Ergomorphic Footwear	Splogs
The Fair Employment Mark	The Stash Rocket
The False-Memory Diet	Stoic Redheads
The Fleeting Relationship	The Stream-of-Consciousness Newspaper
Folksonomy	Subadolescent Queen Bees
Forehead Billboards	The Suburban Loft
Gastronomic Reversals	The Synesthetic Cookbook
Genetic Theory of Harry Potter	Taxonomy Auctions
The Global Savings Glut	”The Crawl” Makes You Stupid
The His-and-Her TV	The Toothbrush That Sings
The Hollywood-Style Documentary	The Totally Religious, Absolutely Democratic Constitution
The Hypomanic American	Touch Screens That Touch Back
The Infrared Pet Dry Room	Trial-Transcript Dramaturgy
In Vitro Meat	Trust Spray
Juvenile Cynics	Two-Dimensional Food
The Laptop That Will Save the World	The Uneavesdroppable Phone Conversation
Localized Food Aid	The Urine-Powered Battery
Making Global Warming Work for You	Video Podcasts
Medical Maggots	Why Popcorn Doesn’t Pop
Microblindness	Worldwide Flat Taxes
Monkey Pay-Per-View	Yawn Contagion
National Smiles	The Yoo Presidency
Open-Source Reporting	The Zero-Emissions S.U.V.
Parking Meters That Don’t Give You a Break	Zombie Dogs

So, what is my final score? 51 out of 78, which gives me NYTYIIH score of 65.38%! I’m quite pleased with myself this year; since I have just started, I can unabashedly call this year’s score my personal best. Can you beat me?

Posted in Meta, Silly | Tags ideas, memes, nytimes | no comments

Amazon Shakes Things Up

Posted by Jacob Harris Thu, 15 Dec 2005 01:42:00 GMT

I really must hand it to Amazon/A9/Alexa. They have consistently delivered more innovation to the developer than those two combined. Amazon started to impress me when they allowed any application to search their extensive database of product information. Directly they have earned nothing from this, but it more than makes up for itself in good will and inspired purchases. Amazon understands Web Services.

Amazon also has a search engine. But here they are not the market leader like they are for books. Poor A9, always ignored while Google and Yahoo and MSN get copious amounts of press and praise. But this has been good to spur on Amazon and Alexa (their search company) into creative new territory for their search engine. A9 has already received some attention for their YellowPages data that includes photos of storefronts; that’s certainly cool, but it’s just content. On the other hand, OpenSearch is a cool change to the spider-driven notion of search content. Google may have specified their sitemap standard for giving hints to spiders. But A9 did that one better with their OpenSearch RSS extensions, which allowed any site to package itself as a channel for A9.com. This allows sites to handle search requests dynamically at the time of request, rather than creating documents to then be spidered and cached.

To illustrate why this is a cool idea, suppose I had a site that did hotel bookings. I could create an A9 channel that could accomodate search requests for things like “nyc hotels” with actual hotels and rates from that moment. If people had date information, I could be more clever, but the key of this is that Amazon is handing over control of their search results to the end sites. As long as a user is willing to trust a channel enough to add it, A9 is happy to get out of the way.

Of course, there is nothing to make syndicated OpenSearch sites obey search rules in the same way A9 does, but who cares? As Google’s success with a single bar shows, people care less about all the little details of searching (boolean vs. web syntax, stemming, relevance scoring) than just being able to find stuff. Amazon gets this, but Google seems to have forgotten it.

But Amazon/A9/Alexa’s latest move has really blown me away. In recent years, a lot of search providers have found additional revenue in peddling search appliances to companies. Essentially, you sign a contract with a company Google and buy a local web spider that crawls content you specify. You then pay Google a price based on support, how many documents you plan to index, and how many users will search your index. There are limitations to keep you from turning Google against themselves and all pricing is set up front rather than growing with use, and prices can approach up to $2 million up front. More importantly, you are not actually using Google’s index, just recreating part of it independently. And while Google has much vaunted data centers across the globe, enterprise customers get only a single box or two to place in their own data centers if they have them.

Amazon has been interested in entering the enterprise market, but they did not want to be in the business of creating hardware servers for enterprise clients (Google will always be better at that). And that’s when someone at Alexa had the brilliant idea of opening up their entire search index data to the outside world. And what makes it additionally brilliant is that you install nothing locally (everything is done via Web Services) and pricing is set by consumption and not by contract, meaning even the most modest users can do something with the backend data. Users can write programs to process data sets, implement their own additional indices on top of A9’s basic web search, or even just analyze a massive collection of web pages for statistical goals. In some sense, Amazone allows customers to not just outsource spidering but also maintenance of indices they’ve built.

It’s a brilliant move, and I must applaud Amazon for the creativity of their vision. Forget Google and Yahoo, Amazon is doing more to turn Search into a utility than the any other company around.

Posted in Web Services, Search | Tags a9, alexa, amazon | 2 comments

The Silliness of SOA

Posted by Jacob Harris Thu, 10 Nov 2005 17:06:00 GMT

There seems to be a lot of buzz around the concept of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), as long as you don’t ask any of its proponents what it actually means. For an example of the ways in which English can be mangled by technical jargon beyond recognition, check out some of the definitions from A Defining Moment for SOA and Revisiting the Definitive SOA Definition to see what I mean. My personal favorite from the bunch is

SOA is a form of technology architecture that adheres to the principles of service orientation. When realized through the Web services technology platform, SOA establishes the potential to support and promote these principles throughout the business process and automation domains of an enterprise.

which really tells me nothing at all about why this is cool and where you would start if your CEO suddenly decided you needed it. Cutting through the bombast and hype, it seems like SOA is basically

Wrapping a backend database or similar resource in a small component for business logic you can talk to with XML.

This is definitely cool for many reasons (loose coupling, security, building big things from small parts), but I don’t understand why there’s so much hype about it now. Not to boast, but we’ve been doing this at Alacra for 8 years now, and I’m really gobsmacked that this sort of architecture would be a revelation to anyone, especially since it builds on design patterns good sense and the older Unix and later Internet philosophy that Small Pieces Loosely Joined can make great things. And SOA is pretty much what the earliest XML-driven web services were.

I can only assume that the latest hype about SOA is less about what the technology is, but what it is not. Hint: add a P and you can see what businesses find so refreshing about SOA. SOAP is a heavyweight protocol that can be good for some external APIs, but is a lot more work than a simple quick and dirty internal application often needs. Imagine being able to drop the requirements of WSDL bindings, XML typing, even limited data structures to get the most lightweight, low-ceremony solutions you can feel comfortable with using. And since it’s internal, you don’t have to worry about the “shame” of not being fully SOAP+WS-whatever compliant for your API. Looking at it this way, no wonder they’re excited. I’d be excited too if I were able to stop documenting and start hacking for change.

Posted in Web Services | Tags alacra, soa, soap, xml | no comments