Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Meme map on Web 2.0

Tim O'Reilleys meme map on the Web 2.0 conference succinctly summarises how we are going to communicate, collaborate, share and do work in the future....

This has been a long time coming... but it starts to show how emergent systems and disruptive technologies are starting to show a template of how this may all get mashed up together.

companies like Google get it... companies like Microsoft will get there eventually and probably quicker than we think....
  • If we look at his map.... we see flickr, del.icio.us and craigslist representing the flat taxonomy school (tagging).
  • We then have GMail, Google Maps, start.com (they have earned some respect) and AJAX bigging up themselves on the web UI space (did you know that Sergey was really into HCI - figures -- right?)
  • We now understand the power of feedback loops and reputations systems and no one does it better than ebaY and amazon.
  • Power to the people -- enabling the long tail, Google Adesense and Google Local is an example of how to exploit the non-profitable 80% market..
  • Blogs -- are a way of recording chatter, lots of chatter, entwining hard and loose relationships through trackback/commenting. Cluster maps will allow us to see new relationships and correlations that we just wouldn't not have imagined.
  • Power to the people -- go forth and scribe!; Wikipedia; this is a classic example of anarchy; or as Tim O'Reilley puts it Radical Trust. It's not a perfect system; but imperfect systems are an important process in the grand cosmic scheme of things. And in the end this controlled chaos usually works out fine in the end.
  • Power to the nodes -- BitTorrent; is a peer-to-peer technology that scales up as more people use the network; perfectly designed for high performance peer2peer digital distribution. Again we see fault-tolerance and multi-node networks working together in harmony to deliver information in scaleable fashion.

Yet in all of this... as Scoble says no one mentioned RSS [and Podcasting]... surely the Tivo 'style' publish / subscribe model needs to be mentioned. RSS is being used in more ways than people had imagined (and probably in ways it shouldn't be used). Nevertheless, given the information overload we face and the urgency to get back in control, we are unwise to exclude RSS and (Podcasting with a healthy mixture of flat tagging thrown in) to radically sharpen our ability to control information.

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Talk about Google Talk

Ahh... Google.. What can you say about them?

Ive been using Google Talk (GTalk) for the last week or so... and i am a complete convert. I have now stopped using Yahoo! Messenger and will probably come off MSN Messenger in the next 6-months.

Why? -- I mean its just another friggin' IM Client and not that functional either, right?

Well its the principle. In each generation there has been a company that truly dominated and influenced the computing era. In the 70's it was IBM, in the 80's we went through this painful transformational phase -- where it seemed like nothing terribly exciting happened, but out of that pain came the 90's and the Internet which Microsoft dominated through Windows. But if we were to look today and to the future, to find the one company that will leaved a marked and lasting impression on our day-to-day lives, that company is surely Google.

We can dismiss efforts like Google Talk but that would be missing point. I genuinely believe that when Google puts its mind to a concept or an idea, it has the ability to execute. To support that execution it has a global infrastructure platform to deploy onto and fairly robust advertising business model based on AdWords. It makes the effort in creating these applications effortless and much like Windows, can create the network effect due to the large number of users that would adopt it. In short it has the power to be life-changing.

But here's the point, just creating software doesn't mean people will come. The trick is to build software (and Services) that are simple, easy, intuitive and innovative.

Yeah-- but what i fear Google? - The companies mantra "do not be evil" -- is a value based ideology that sits very comfortably with the open-source free-thinking Wikipedia Internet oneness of humanity. Google believes in being benevolent. There is no reason to fear Google.

So that's the difference with Google. They have bright smart people that 'get it' and they have the platform to execute.

Getting back to Google Talk (GTalk), I'd like to congratulate the GTalk Development team Joe Beda, Chad Thornton, Gayle Laakmann and David Bau on a brilliant start to unify IM/Voice/Mail.