Internet Trends And Growth

The internet is as significant to the world as was the introduction of movable type in Europe. The internet’s ability to erase physical barriers and democratize information has been revolutionizing the way things have traditionally been done. Physical stores gave way to digital storefronts. People suddenly had the command of large workforces at just a click away. People are now better connected than ever before. But what in what direction will the internet be developing?

At its inception, the internet was simply a series of connected technological devices like servers, webcams and sensors. With this trend came the inevitable connection of people through the internet. Social networking is in fact the other half of the internet, because it connects people. The internet is now effectively complete with connected people and connected machines.

Machines have been connected, and people have been connected. What is missing is the integration between people and machines. When examined from this perspective, the current trends in data logging startups begins to make more sense. There is Twitter, Blippy, Foursquare, DailyBooth and many other websites that effectively serve as data loggers for what an individual is doing. All of these will culminate with lifelogging going mainstream.

The ultimate result of all of this development will culminate with the entire planet becoming one large, networked biomachine.

The Case For Diaspora And Open Source Social Networking

This April Facebook unveiled new default privacy settings which switched many personal details from private to public by default and removing many of the existing, granular controls in the privacy settings. All the while Facebook claimed the settings offered greater control. Articles questioning the modifications quickly spread from tech blogs to the mainstream media, resulting in a public relations train wreck for Facebook.

Meanwhile, open source social networking startups took the opportunity to capitalize on the controversy, the most prominent of which was Diaspora. After raising over $200,000 on Kickstarter, a distributed seed funding website, it has received the bulk of the press’s attention.

Despite all the positive press, many are skeptical of Diaspora’s ability to dent Facebook’s armor. Backupify just posted an article voicing similar ideas.

But many of the criticisms regarding Diaspora are flawed. First is the silly argument that a service or website isn’t dead until it’s completely offline. This is just a bit of semantics, and there is no doubt that MySpace and AOL are both effectively dead and of minimal influence. MySpace seemed unstoppable back in the day even with its disgusting user interface, glitter graphics and horrible themes until Facebook rolled in and demonstrated the importance of a quality user interface. AOL’s walled gardens appeared similarly impenetrable until they too fell. Times change, and even giants fall. Companies that deliver such few products are always fragile.

Second is the idea that users don’t care about privacy. Currently this is a possibility with a majority, but it could very well change in the future as people never know what they want until they see it. But privacy is only part of puzzle as user control of data is of equal importance. People also want to be in control of their documents. People want to own things. People like to know that something is completely theirs. Facebook does not meet any of these criteria.

Third is the idea that the service is a niche product that serves only geeks. This fact cannot be denied at the moment, but it is a hidden advantage. The first users of a product are typically the most passionate about it and thus have a tendency to champion the product. These people also tend to be more influential, and ironically it is these cool, geeky enthusiasts of Diaspora that will make it mainstream.

This is a pattern that has repeated itself many times. Products initially go through a niche phase, slowly gaining traction in the market before exploding into the mainstream as something hot, new and desirable once it gains sufficient positive recognition.

Facebook’s rise to dominance followed this exact pattern. Originally it was introduced to only college students, a small segment of the market. Being young adults, these people are seen as the “next generation” and thus representatives of all that is “cool”. The closed, @edu only walls of Facebook gave it the aura of a hip club that everyone wanted to be a part of. And people did. Once it had established sufficient cachet as the Mecca of Cool, the mainstream naturally wanted in. With its hip reputation and social networking effects, Facebook effectively transitioned from niche to mainstream by letting in more segments of the market before letting in everybody, resulting in the explosive growth today.

While Facebook seems invincible now, there are many problems with a centralized social networking model that make it vulnerable to competitors, such as less control over the website, loss of control over personal data and potential abuse of user data. None of these would be problems in a distributed system such as Diaspora. The superiority of Diaspora is obvious, and I predict that it will not languish as a niche product, but gain traction with the mainstream as it rolls out a hosted version that integrates with self hosted versions.

Facebook

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Diaspora

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Windows Live Spaces Export

After almost 3 years of blogging on Windows Live Spaces, none of the nagging problems with the service have been resolved. While other platforms such as Blogger and WordPress have continuously improved, Spaces has not received any significant updates since its inception. Due to the service’s decline, I have ported my Windows Live Space to this website.

Windows Live Spaces has not always been the outdated service it is today. When it was originally released back in 2004, it had a competitive feature set. As a cornerstone of Windows Live, Spaces, rather than the activity feed, served as a user’s profile. Several years of inattention later, Spaces is nonfunctional in comparison to other platforms.

Following the Windows Live Wave 4 reveal, even the most dedicated Windows Live users have expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of updates to Spaces. Spaces is plagued with comment and private messaging spam. Rather than integrating a spam filter in the latest round of Wave refreshes, the Windows Live team decided to cut corners and limit the maximum comment length instead, effectively discouraging commenting. They were clearly aware of the PM spam problem, and now users who are not networked with somebody cannot sent that individual a PM. How they failed to see that the obvious alternative tactic of friend request spamming would immediately be employed is amusing. Needless to say, the addition of sorely needed core features such as integrated tagging, readable URLs, anonymous commenting and tracking were not added.

Like many other Windows Live projects, Spaces started off strong until inattention to the product left it uncompetitive. Worst of all is the growing possibility that Windows Live Spaces could be discontinued in the near future. Wave 3 ended Spaces as the profile page of users and Wave 4 eliminated Spaces from the main navigation, suggesting a gradual marginalization of Spaces. In addition, all of the Windows Live teams have stopped blogging on Spaces, opting for WindowsTeamBlog.com instead. A recent post on the Windows Team Blog implied that they do not even see potential in blogging, suggesting that more frequent update style posts are becoming the norm.

I had hoped that Wave 4 would bring solid improvements to Spaces, but instead it has only confirmed my doubts about the service’s future. As a result, I recommend transferring Spaces blogs to WordPress.

If you are looking to export your Space, there is a third party Windows Live Spaces export tool which exports all blog posts and dates into a WordPress compatible XML file. My export and subsequent import into WordPress 3.0 went flawlessly. The only issue is that it does not export post times or comments, so these will need to be transferred manually.

Windows Live Spaces could have been another great Windows Live offering, but now it’s just another service that might be phased out.

Windows Live Wave 4

Windows Live Wave 4 is finally public after months of anticipation. Once my initial positive reaction had passed, I quickly realized with a bit of browsing that there were few substantial improvements to speak of.

Windows Live SkyDrive

Windows Live SkyDrive has added incremental improvements to the interface such as different file views, but it still lacks crucial AJAX features like drag and drop that drastically improve usability. Functions such as file renaming and moving still rely on static pages. When combined with Windows Live Office, it suffers from a confusing navigation logic. When navigating to SkyDrive.Live.com, the breadcrumb navigation shows that SkyDrive is the root, but a click on any of the files it contains changes the file’s root to Office.Live.com. The focus on Photos as a pillar of Windows Live is arbitrary and creates the impression that only photos can be uploaded despite the improved video support. A more logical pillar would be Albums, but eliminating this pillar altogether would be best since it is contained within SkyDrive.

Windows Live Spaces

By the looks of it, Windows Live Spaces is nearing the end of the line. The blogs are plagued with spam and even a basic CAPTCHA remains absent. It lacks countless features that competing blogging platforms have. All the Windows Live Teams have jumped ship from Spaces to their own custom blogging platform.

Windows Live Office

This is the only bright spot in Wave 4, albeit another catch up service. The apps are great, although they are a bit laggy for some reason. Typing results in a noticeable hang before anything appears on the screen when compared to Google Docs, where text appears instantaneously.

Windows Live Profile

Windows Live Profile has added some great privacy improvements, so this was well executed. The new interface is intuitive and easy to use. One feature that was clearly missing was private messaging. Now users cannot private message others unless they are already networked. What’s the point of this if you can just use email? The purpose of private messaging is to make contact while forgoing actual friending. I got the distinct impression that this was a crude attempt to end private messaging spam, but what’s the point? Won’t spammers just begin friend request spamming now?

At best, Windows Live Wave 4 offers features that catch up with the
competition but do little to surpass, resulting in a mediocre product. I’ll be porting my blog to WordPress soon.

Switching To Google Chrome

I just switched to Google Chrome, and it’s better than Firefox. The interface is clean, slick, free from distractions and maximizes the display area. It loads nearly instantaneously, extensions install instantly and do not require a restart. Pages are noticeably snappier than with Firefox. Memory usage is much higher, however, but things don’t slow to a crawl. It’s a missing some extensions that I would like, but Firefox just doesn’t do the job anymore.

Chrome Extensions Worth Installing Eventually

  • Chrome Reader
  • Chrome Sniffer
  • Google Translate
  • Proxy Switchy!
  • Speed Tracer (by Google)
  • Video Downloader
  • YouTube Auto Replay

Current Firefox Addons

Asterisks indicate Chrome equivalent availability.

  • Easy YouTube Video Downloader*
  • SEOQuake*
  • Colorzilla
  • Facebook Ads Manager
  • FireFTP
  • Greasemonkey
  • iMacros
  • LeechBlock
  • Screengrabber
  • Web Developer

Business, Marketing, Time And Microsoft

Business

I am badly out of touch with potentially profitable product ideas. Several weeks ago there was a Shark Tank episode in which an inventor demonstrated seat belt safety product that alerts the driver if the seat belt is not in use. After turning down all of the sharks’ offers, a recent episode revealed that he was able to find distribution through some car dealerships and was making a healthy profit.

During the initial presentation of the product, I immediately thought it was not particularly useful for several reasons.

  • I assumed that everyone uses their seat belts. A car is a massive hulk of metal moving at high speeds. There is a risk of injury and even death in the event of an accident. A seat belt has a decent chance of decreasing the risk of harm, therefore putting on a seat belt before hitting the roads would be reflexive.
  • It is excessive and prevents the driver from having control over the vehicle. A seat belt is already a safety feature, and this product tacks on another level of safety over the first level. If this was the ignition for an ICBM a few extra precautionary measures would be great, but it just seems silly for something as mundane as a seat belt.

Marketing

There’s nothing quite as horrifying as seeing a $200 loss within a day, especially when that money was eked out at near minimum wage. Once you see that level of spending for the first time, logic flies out the window and emotions take over. I have a bit more experience now, but it’s uninspiring. After so much effort, at the end of a good day you will be left with profit, but not much else to show for your efforts aside from a good campaign. Obviously the next step would be to diversify to leave the field, but when looking at just internet marketing, it’s the kind of pursuit that can be called dull. It’s the kind of pursuit that, if I were on my deathbed, I would look back and think, “I wasted all that effort with nothing to show for it but money. No real knowledge gained. No inspiring product created. I wasted so much time pushing leads for dating websites, insurance companies, and toolbar downloads.” The optimizing aspect is interesting, but aside from that there is not much else that is interesting.

Time

The passing of time seems to be accelerating. Years ago, the minutes would pass so slowly. Now time has slapped me across the face since it’s already February 2010. So cruel and unusual.

Microsoft

Windows Mobile will likely be dead soon. I can’t imagine what Windows Mobile 7 could possibly offer to regain lost market share. Internet Explorer is also as good as dead. It’s painfully slow, has security problems and I can’t think of any redeeming features. The Zune HD is actually an impressive offering, but an app store is pretty much critical with that kind of hardware, because without one it’s just a glorified MP3 player. Bing is innovative, but in the end it still comes down to the quality of search results, a front on which Bing fails to deliver. Its only real uses are the interesting homepage photos and its cache, which is around longer than those of other search engines due to its slow crawler. Windows 7 and Office 14 are the only bright spots.

Apple iPad

The iPad has been unveiled, but I’m not as impressed as I expected to be due to excessive hype and speculation prior to today’s event. Many of the comments regarding the iPad also hinted at disappointment, which is not typical at Apple product launches.

Prior to the unveiling, I was anticipating a revolutionary device such as the iPhone rather than the evolutionary device shown today. Despite this letdown, many of the criticisms about the device are without merit as they completely disregard what the iPad is meant to be, a casual use, portable media center rather than a full featured tablet PC. Some have cited lack of features such as keyboards, a full OS, a phone and USB ports as, but none of these features would improve the device when considering that touch screens are not especially conducive to work. If you need that level of functionality, buy a MacBook Air. The iPad leans more toward iPod rather than MacBook, and it strikes a good balance between portability and function.

Lack of Adobe Flash, multitasking and camera were also mentioned. If there’s anything the iPad isn’t missing, it’s Flash support. It runs slowly and is mostly used for advertisements and video players, the latter of which won’t be needed with HTML5. The only flaw with the iPad is its lack of multitasking. For a product with more emphasis on actual computing, it seems that multitasking would be important enough to include in the first release.

Also, why complain about missing features on an Apple product at all? The first iteration of all Apple products are invariably short on features so that they can be added in as hot new selling points in later models. It would seem that this would be obvious by now.

In other news, Microsoft is working on its Courier device, but as usual there’s no word on its status.

Phases Of Internet Development

With each transition the new overshadows, but does not entirely eliminate the old.

Yahoo!

First it was the portal. The internet was small, there wasn’t much information and people wanted to see everything that was the internet. Thus portals were created. They pretty much contained all there was to see.

Google

But the internet grew and portals became unwieldy. Search engines became necessary to sort through all the content portals could no longer contain. This marked a decline in portals.

Facebook

People are now tired of searching the internet all alone, and want to know that other people are also surfing and whatnot. Social networking sites are overlaid on existing websites to create a social, interactive component.

As for search engines, there is still so much that can be done to improve them. While the above are trends that encompass the entire internet, there are also trends within each of these individual categories.

Search engines are ever so slowly undergoing a transition. They are becoming smarter in the sense that they understand what you are searching for. Now you can type “weather”, for example, and Google won’t just give you results, but it will display the actual weather in your area based on your IP. Wolfram|Alpha is an example of an attempt to create search engines that provide accurate answers to what you are looking for. But the weather example is just the most basic example of what could be carried out on an even grander scale.

Why will this happen? While there’s lots of great content online, there’s also far too much garbage and with SEO, the system can be gamed. This means users are not getting what they want. For common queries, expect to see search engines generating their own results that dominate the page, rather than having third party results as is currently the case.

Facebook

It seems like there is a transition to a less anonymous internet with Facebook. Everyone’s got a Facebook, and a growing number of websites are utilizing the Facebook login feature.

Too many different platforms are competing – Windows Live, Google and Yahoo!. On a recent group project, every group member used a different platform, when someone suggested online collaboration. Ultimately, some people had to setup Google accounts. However, everyone had a Facebook. If productivity tools were added to its list of apps, Facebook would have some serious clout. Unlike other platforms, Facebook focuses on communication rather than services, making it a perfect platform for collaboration. Facebook also creates a real digital identity because everybody is identified by their name, and it might be the best new platform for productivity apps rather than Google or Windows Live.

Also, Facebook apps are big money. I don’t understand why the top games are so popular though. The mafia game has zero interactivity. It’s just a screen with stats that you click away at. It’s like crunching numbers in a cubicle. Lame. There is no real element of competition. The winners are the ones who spend (waste) the most time playing the game. The gardening game is lame too. Why would anybody waste time growing a digital garden when they could grow a real one?

All these games use the social element to become popular. However, there is a terrible lack of a competitive element. There’s a vaccum, a need for interactive, competitive games on social networking sites like Facebook. There is huge potential here. Games like Everquest and World Of Warcraft are notorious for their addictive qualities. Now add that and social networking (also addictive), and there’s an even bigger opportunity.