Twitter tweets expiration

The foundation story of Twitter claims that the first tweet was made by Jack Dorsey and was “Just setting up my twttr”. But what was his second tweet? Or his third one? What was his first @ message? Today, it’s impossible to answer any of those questions because neither the Twitter search engine nor scrolling through the complete list of tweets from someone will provide you with all the results.

The Twitter search engine apparently expires content after a few days. Tweets become inaccessible after 3200 tweets or roughly three and a half days if you are tweeting at the top rate allowed on the service (users of Twitter are allowed a maximum of 1,000 tweets, which may explain why there have been so few uses of Twitter as a fully interactive type of service).

With Twitter now claiming an important role in events like the 2009 Iranian uprising or the 2011 events in the rest of the middle east, it seems that expiring tweets is a bad idea as it deletes an important historical record. At the current time, Facebook claims that developers can access “all of a user’s status” which might imply that their retention policy is stronger that Twitter’s.

Fun with Google searches

But social media may be the exception and not the rule so I decided to start looking at web pages, which have been around for almost two decades now. Searching the internet of the past is an interesting thing. For example, let’s look at the tech industry:

The Netscape IPO seen as the first big internet IPO, happened on August 10, 1995. Doing a search the week before and after returns 7 results.

Microsoft’s introduction of Internet Explorer was in August 1995, with a second big announcement in December of that year. A search for “Microsoft introduces internet explorer” in 1995 returns 40 results.

Some may claim that I am being unfair, picking events that happened before Google’s creation. So I decided to look at events after 1999, at a time that would be contemporary with Google’s existence.

For example, the presidential election of 2000 was one of the hottest political contest in American history. It pitted Al Gore (421 Google results between January 1, 2000 and January 1, 2001) against George Bush (418 results for the same time period) and left the country wondering who was the winner for several days. There wasn’t a 24 hour news channel or newspaper in the country that did not cover the events extensively. And yet, we are left with less than a thousand pages from the period.

Some of those pages in the Google index may not even be from that time period. For example, the last page in my search for “George Bush” in the time range of January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2001 returned a site called celebritytweet.com. Considering that twitter wouldn’t exist for a few more years, I have doubt that the site existed in 2000.

If politics may be too narrow a topic, maybe something like the attacks on the World Trade Center might have more impact. So doing a search for pages relating to the week it happened (I did a search with a date range between September 10, 2001 and September 18, 2001) would probably returns TONS of pages. The result, according to Google is 461 pages.

Let me repeat that figure: 461 pages of historical record for what is widely agreed as one of the most important historical event in our lifetime.

For a quick comparison, I decided to take a somewhat less important event from the past week. Sure, I could have gone for the raid on Bin Laden but instead I decided to go for something a little more inconsequential: Lady Gaga’s deal with Zynga. A search limited to the last week has returned 477 results.

So if Google is the arbitrer of what’s important and the repository of most of our collective memory, a visitor from another planet looking at it could easily conclude that Lady Gaga cutting a deal with Zynga was more important that the attacks of 9/11. I’m not one to pass judgment on the cultural importance of Lady Gaga but something tells me that either the Google algorithm is wrong here or the Internet tends to be a very forgetful place.

Conclusion

As more an more media becomes digital, the concept of media retention is becoming increasingly important. It should become a growing area of concern for most historian and archivists to see that large portion of the late 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century may be leaving behind a smaller footprint of data than previous era. Efforts like the Google Book Search project are making great strike making things like physical books more accessible by creating digital reproductions of that content but they should also start considering making more recent, already digitized data archived in some fashion. Otherwise, the lack of a past may make us more susceptible to creating a less perfect future.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Forever is a long time. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Found in the twitter archives from July 4, 1776:

• independence would be a good idea. #independencenow http://bit.ly/usdoi

• The government should not mess with our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. #abolishgov http://bit.ly/usdoi
• No one’s above the law #kinggeorge #fail #iblame http://bit.ly/usdoi
• He’s neglecting us #kinggeorge #fail #omgthatssotrue http://bit.ly/usdoi
• He wants us to give up our rights in exchange for help #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Tweetup was too far #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Our friends were pushed out #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• No representation for us #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• The king’s stealing our money and not letting us run things #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Judicial representation now! #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Stop gov corruption #kinggeorge #fail #gov20 http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Stop gov abuse #kinggeorge #fail #gov20 http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Why is there an army on my street? #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Why is the military not independent? #kinggeorge #fail #gov20 http://bit.ly/usdoi
• England armies out of colonies now! #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• stop english army abuse now #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• let our markets be free #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Stop english taxes in the colonies #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• We want juries of our peers #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Don’t change jurisdictions on us #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• We are not Canada #kinggeorge #fail #blamecanada http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Give us our laws and charters back!!! #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Give us our legislature back!!! #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• You want war? Then we quit! #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Say not to death and destruction #kinggeorge #fail #dead http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Mercenaries out of the colonies now! #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Friends should not be forced to turn on friends #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• The king’s not fostering law and order #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• We’ve tried talking this out but he won’t listen #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• We called, we wrote and only received insults as replies #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Our friends in the UK also tried but no one listened so war it is #politics #uk http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Independence now #politics #tweetup #gousa http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Let’s hope this works out #gousa http://bit.ly/usdoi

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title #140 Independence. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

“You’re not being ambitious enough.”

I was sitting across from a well-known VC, presenting a new dotcom startup in the content syndication arena with a plan to make US$100 million in yearly revenue by its fifth year. There was only one hitch: the date was Feburary 2000 and, as my VC puts it, “if it doesn’t say billions, we can’t take you public.”

The dotcom euphoria was in full swing and, for some of us, an uneasy feeling that we might have to pay the piper sooner or later was starting to take hold. But the markets kept proving us wrong. The NASDAQ kept hitting new highs, new record-breaking IPOs showed up everyday and everyone wanted to be in the internet industry.

With money being essentially free, Dotcoms were not offering a job but a lifestyle, looking to attract the best talent. We outfitted offices that were part office, part clubhouse, with the best of everything from furniture (the famed “aeron chair” was the default) to 24/7 food services and on-site chefs, to videogames station.

The new rules said work was fun and we were designing a new world to make that prophecy real, expanding to an ethos of work hard/play hard, with long hours in the office followed by over the top parties, thrown by every startup and including top music talent. It was all a little unreal, feeling like we were living through a movie.

At some of the parties, industry veterans (people with over 5 years of experience) were starting to whisper about over-heating. But that was far from the popular view and even the most conservative people doubted their own feelings about this, assuming that, since everything seemed to be moving along, their gut was wrong.

It turned out that our gut feel was right and the unreal state we were in would soon come to a crash. It would be the last time I wouldn’t trust my gut.

… and here’s the version after editing. I thought you might enjoy that recollection of a bygone era.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Dotcom crash was 10 years ago. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

A bit of history

In order to understand the importance of the current shift, one needs to study a bit of history. Since the dawn of the personal computer era, applications have been written and running largely on the user’s desktop. In the mid-90s, Sun Microsystems co-founder John Gage started claiming that “the network is the computer.” Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, the leading browser company at the time, was claiming that Netscape would “reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers.”

However, due to limitation in terms of bandwidth and computer power, this vision didn’t come to be until well into our current decade. Today, individuals still mostly use Windows, even if most use it primarily to launch their web browser.

In more recent times, the availability of always-on, higher speed internet access, has allowed companies like Google to start offering more powerful websites, which took on features of full-fledged software applications. Leveraging technology that first saw the light of day in the 1990s (Flash was born in 1995 and XMLhttp, which powers AJAX applications was created by Microsoft in 1999), those applications started offering compelling competitors to existing products.

One the leader in that revolution has been Google. First with the release of Gmail and then with the release of Google Apps, the company has been working on offering online version of tools like email, word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software. Leveraging its establish power in the advertising space, Google has figured that, by offering document and email management features to its users for free, it could create extra advertising inventory that it could then resell.

So Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Apps were born. Since they were consumer focused products, presenting them as products “in progress”, complete with a beta stamp and an advertising-based model. Jeff Jarvis warrants that such act was not only bourne out of humility but also as a  call to collaborate. This week, however, the company decided to shed the beta logo for most of its applications.

With its direct language to IT manager and its message emerging from the enterprise group, Google is making it clear that this announcement is not targeted at the consumer space. In a sign of growing business maturity (most software company attempt to appeal to the enterprise space as they get older and need to develop more predictable financial groundings), the company is now trying to appeal to the enterprise space, aiming its offerings towards a space that has traditionally been controlled by Microsoft (with its Office Suite) and, to a lesser extent, IBM (with its Lotus division offerings).

Poorly debugged device drivers?

But Google realizes that much of what it does is dependent on the continued goodwill of the different operating system providers and browser suppliers. Were it not for web browsers or operating systems, Google could not exist. Last year, the company started reducing that dependency by introducing its own web browser, named Chrome. Chrome was actually quite interesting in terms of browser development as it was the first browser to treat each window session as a separate application, ensuring that if one web page failed, the other tabs would not. This could be seen as something not completely unlike the way an operating system (or kernel, etc) doles out memory and CPU power to each of the applications it deals with and orchestrate who gets what.

The unstated strategic goal of the Chrome browser is to help reduce the dominance of Internet Explorer in the online space while providing Google with more of a say in terms of where web standards were heading (I’m sure some people will try to debate that point but, if Chrome is not intended as an Internet Explorer competitor, why is the only “official” version of the browser a Windows one, with no such offering on OSX or Linux?)

Chrome is not only an attack on Microsoft’s browser dominance in the web space but also an attempt at ensuring that neither Microsoft NOR Adobe get control of the future of web applications. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt knows how trying to fight Microsoft can distract a company from very real threats by other unexpected contenders: he did come from Sun Microsystems and Novell before joining Google and saw, first-hand, how those two companies saw their focus on unseating Microsoft’s dominance in their respective areas blinded them to the threat that Linux came to be to both of them, ultimately dooming each of the companies’ efforts without Microsoft having to do too much.

So, as a veteran of the OS wars, Schmidt is now being careful in balancing its entry in the space. On one hand, he doesn’t want to offend existing partners like Apple and the open source community. On the other hand, he needs to ensure that his company’s offerings are actually going to appeal to hardware vendors. The OS will ultimately be little more than the minimum required to make the Chrome browser run. That means it will include an IP stack, some basic drivers to interact with the keyboard and screen (or a way for companies to offer those) and a UI that will be a full screen version of the Chrome web browser.

The description of the OS, as stated in the press release, describe it as such:

Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web… without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files… Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.

Put quite simply, this is a web browser with the basics to make it run online and offline (the offline components probably being based on Google Gears (already built into the Chrome browser) or some HTML 5 offline approach). Users will not really store much on their computer but everything will be sitting on Google’s servers, accessible from anywhere. Operating system upgrades will happen automatically in the background and everything will run in the browser. For those people expecting to run Firefox (or any other application) on this thing, sorry… it won’t happen.

Google’s view is that everything will run online and all data will be stored online. In technical terms, this is called sending information into “the cloud.”

However, there’s the question of how to plug components in there. I suspect that Google will lean heavily on its partners to release any device related drivers through the equivalent of an online application store, similar to the app store on the iphone, where Google controls the experience in terms of what gets installed on the user’s desktop and can recall or upgrade an install if needs be. The idea being that the hardware device does not need much power as most everything is coming from the web.

Developers will not be allowed to develop anything that runs on the machine itself:

For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser

With these few words, Google is taking the same approach as Apple first did when itintroduced the iPhone: don’t look to us to provide you with any SDK, the web is the platform. Build your application using HTML 5 and all will be OK. This basically means that right now, Google either has no intention to provide an SDK or will keep it accessible only to select partners who want to integrate with their OS. They will first provide access to the device makers and then, over time, will create an SDK and an app store that they may even be willing to share with partners by white-labeling that store to sweeten the deal for any partner willing to install the OS.

The reason I suspect this would be part of the strategy is that pricing will not be a heavy deciding factor in whether partners will adopt the new OS and Google desperately needs the new OS to be implemented as widely as possible.

Many have said that cost was a large part of their strategy but I suspect it cannot be: Consumers have already been trained to consider the operating system as a freebie or low cost tool. On the windows side, consumers see the OS as something that comes with their machine, not something they buy separately. This effectively brings the price to 0. Even Mac users, who generally tend to be more willing to pay for products offered by Apple, were grousing at pricing on OSX, forcing the company to take a deeply discounted approach when offering the next version of its operating system for about the price of dinner and a movie. And pricing has proven to be a contrarian indicator in the netbook market, as consumers decided to pay extra for the Windows XP version of devices that also offered the same hardware at a lower price point with Linux.

Interesting timing

Having established that the company is looking to get more control of its end to end experience, one big question is why do it now? Why not do this, for example, at their developer conference, as they did for Google Wave? Why announce something that will not be available in the near term?

My suspicion here is that part of the reason for this vaporwave release is that Microsoft is about to unveil a series of cloud focused initiatives at its WorldWide Partner Conference next week: those offerings will include a major push for their cloud platform, Microsoft Azure, along with announcements regarding the Gazelle project (their own browser as an OS offering), and Office 2010, a substantially revamped version of the popular suite that will move collaboration and synchronization front and center. At its core, the revamped Office suite will not only include the existing components and features of older version but its guts will have been rebuilt with some DNA acquired as part of the acquisition of Ray Ozzie’s Groove Networks and its offerings.

I suspect that Groove and Ozzie have Google shaking in its boots. Much of Google’s strategic message is that it is more collaboration friendly than Office and, by leaving one’s documents on Google’s servers, one doesn’t have to worry so much about revisions and versioning. With Office 2010, Microsoft is fixing these problems and telling corporations that while Google’s message is nice, your proprietary information will be sitting on Google’s server. How about getting the same type of functionality but keep the documents on your own servers. Because most corporate IT department tend to be paranoid when it comes to their corporate data, the Microsoft message will resonate better.

So Google is not starting to position itself in the consumer market, hoping that applications which can run in the consumer world will eventually help tear down the corporate walls (to date, few corporations have adopted Google Apps and, if Microsoft offers a competitive product, I suspect it could remain that way for at least a decade). Having to do something, they have now decided to attack a core tenet of the Microsoft empire: its windows OS division.

The battle lines are now drawing:

• Google is asserting that the world runs solely within a browser and all application logic is in the cloud; Microsoft will assert that substantial amounts of complex tasks require the power of the desktop and the cloud is there primarily as a tool for collaboration and synchronization.
• Google is asserting that desktop PCs are merely thin clients; Microsoft is asserting that desktops are still the center of the computing experience.
• Google is asserting that the net is safe enough a place to leave all your information; Microsoft is asserting its not.
• Google is asserting that developers don’t want to run applications natively on a machine; Microsoft is asserting that the tightest integration happens at the OS level.

Each company is presenting a different vision of the cloud. I can’t say which is right as both offering compelling advantages and substantial flaws but I can highlight one important feature: in the future the software you are running will be connected to the internet most of the time and still be able to work when offline. And in that future, I suspect that the notion of software as a product you buy will probably disappear, with software as a rental model becoming the emerging approach. And I also believe that this is the beginning of the cloud OS wars.

Update: As expected, Microsoft sends out its reply.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The Cloud Wars. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

So without further ado, here are my prepared remarks:

————————————

Good afternoon,

I know many of you are probably wondering why a history of currency would be on the program at a Web 2.0 conference. So let me first dispel a few concerns you may have:

• History can be a useful indicator of what may happen in the future. Under a historical lens, Web 2.0 is pretty easy to predict as the natural descendent of community organizing and lowered cost of communication and mediation.
• Web 2.0 will impact currencies and that will probably be the biggest thing historians of the future may remember about Web 2.0

So, in the next few minutes, I’m going to take you on a trip through roughly 60 centuries of history (just the highlights, I promise) and will show you how each major shift in the evolution of currency reflects what we consider pillars of the Web 2.0.

Having done so, I will attempt to take you through the next 25 years and project how Web 2.0 may fundamentally redefine how we think of currency, and present some of the challenges and opportunities this historical change may present.

So here we go…

About 4000–5000 BC, the basis of most trading was something called barter. Barter is simple to understand, really. At its most basic level, it goes something like this:  “I have fish and you have some chickens. How many chickens will you trade me for my fish?”

The other guys says he will give me 5 chickens for my 10 fish and, if I feel it’s a fair trade, we make the exchange.

So that’s all good but one can’t live off fish and chicken alone. And eventually, I go back to the guy and he tells me he’s not interested in fish but if I can find a cow to sell him, he’d be willing to exchange 50 chickens for it. So now, I’m out looking for someone who will give me a cow in exchange of some fish.

That may work for a couple of goods but you can see how inefficient an approach it is.

Back then, people started realizing the same thing and so there was a move to find some way to simplify things. Communities started gathering around some goods that they would agree were useful as a basis for trade: grain, honey, rice, etc…

And, through these actions, the concept of money was born… and with it, the basis for what defines a currency was established:

• It provides a standard measure of value for goods and services
• It serves as a medium of exchange
• It serves as a method of storing value

Let me get into those points in more details before we move on.

A currency provides a standard measure of value for good and services. If I go back to my example of chickens and fish, I can look at currency as a go-between. By establishing that a fish is worth 1 pound of grain and a chicken is worth 5 pounds of grain, I can then extend the model to a cow is worth 100 pounds of grain and a house is worth 1 ton of grain. From this data, I can infer that a house is worth more than a cow, which is worth more than a chicken and so on…

However, none of this can happen if there isn’t an agreement amongst everyone that a particular currency has value. You could call that a certain wisdom of the crowds and that’s where currency starts overlapping with web 2.0. We’re going to get to more details about that later.

The second point is that a currency serves as a medium of exchange. Because everyone agrees that grain is a great way to make those comparisons, I don’t have to go around and try to make conversions from one item to another. I trade the item against grain and then can use the grain to “buy” something else. In that sense, I can exchange any good for grain and grain can be exchanged against any other goods.

Once again, this only works if people agree on it as a medium of exchange. And that, in turn, represents a form of metadata about a trade. Sort of like if people were to tag an item with the same term. And once again, we get to a position where it overlaps web 2.0 as the crowd is now working together to establish value and therefore define markets.

And because currency is metadata, it can also serve as a way to store value for future use. For example, if I fish, there’s only so long I can keep my fish before it spoils. By selling it immediately (ie. Trading it for its currency equivalent), I can avoid that spoilage and store its value for future use. So, in a sense, currency serves as a storage medium.

But the fact that it works as a storage medium can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. As storage for value, the currency itself become valuable. And when something is valuable, well, some people try to acquire it through means other than production. From here, we end up with theft, pillage, war, etc… And from all this carnage, we get to the point where people try to find ways to protect their currency (and, almost as often, their lives).

In around 3000 BC, in ancient Egypt, some people come to the insight that, by storing their currency together and agreeing to share the cost for an army to protect that currency (which, at the time, is grain), they may be protecting themselves from loss. Along the banks of the Nile, granaries start to appear and they become a place for storing currency: people come in with the grain they received as a form of payment for whatever it is that they sold. And the first accountants appear, keeping track of what amount of currency people have in their accounts.

Everybody is happy and celebrates as they have discovered a fantastic way to store their currency and keep people from threatening them. Across Egypt, people pat each others on the back until, well, until the first currency crisis.

Around 2200 BC, severe drought made grain more scarce. The result was that disbursements (taking grain out) started to move at a higher rates than deposits (putting grain in). And some people found themselves in a situation where they had spent all the grain they had and had a hard time producing anything they could sell. In this case, the value of the currency (grain) increased because the currency became more scarce.

Eventually, the problem affected the top of the economic food chain, aka. The pharaoh and, as a result, local people started opting out of pharaoh rule and attempting to take control of their own currency. When all was said and done, about 200 to 300 years later, grain was abandoned as a currency as it was considered that a currency that can be eaten is a currency that can have a problem. So metals, which could be turned into tools, which themselves could be melted again to turn them back to metals, started emerging as the dominant form of currency.

This is important because it finally moves currency to something that is more abstract. Metal may be a commodity that, without any work, could be considered of little value but, as an abstract construct of value, it works. And for the next few centuries, that’s the case.

Some interesting alterations in terms of the ways money is stored and carried happen during that era. For example, in a number of countries like China and Sweden initially, people realize that metal may not be the most portable of currency for large transaction and so places where currency is stored (now called banks, because, initially they were sitting on river banks) start issuing the equivalent of paper receipt for storage and people start trading those receipt. Here, we see the emergence of two key components of a more modern system:

• First, the concept of representative money, where a piece of paper can be redeemed for a certain amount of metal, therefore representing that metal.
• Second, the emergence of paper as money, creating another layer of abstraction in the transactions.

With the move to paper, currency becomes sort of an I.O.U., representing a certain value but not possessed of that value in itself. This shift, called the shift to representative currency, is important because it establishes currency as an even more abstract concept. The piece of paper you receive is basically a receipt that can be redeemed for some equivalent amount of metal but it isn’t the metal in itself. So here, we see currency basically becoming free-floating metadata, asserting worth without necessarily showing it.

The problem is that the distance from a bank where the paper note can be redeemed becomes a factor in terms of exchanging the banknote.

Enter John Law.

Law is an interesting character: he’s a Scottish economist who, at age 23, shoots a man, is tried and found guilty of murder. He’s thrown in jail, manages to escape and lands in France. While there, he gambles a lot and comes upon two major observations:

• People have taken to trading the paper bills as if they were coins
• Paper is divorced from the metal it represents

From there, he deducts that whoever could control the flow of paper bills could start issuing more IOUs than they have metal for.

With this, he comes up with the concept of a reserve bank, assuming that he could have a bank with only 75 of the cash reserve needed to cover the IOUs it had issued. But there’s a problem with that: in order to control the flow of paper bills, he needs support from a government. And initially, most people think it’s a crazy idea and won’t go for it. But Law convinces some more junior people that it’s a good idea and, eventually, one of his patrons hits the jackpot: Philip D’Orleans rises to power and quickly realizes that he’s running a country where the government has a substantial deficit. So he puts Law in charge of creating a national bank and law sets out to create the first government controlled reserve bank, issuing more paper than it has metal currency for.

It’s a pretty radical idea. Law is dealing with a society where everyone agrees that what you see is what you get as far as currency goes but then he leverages the agreement that paper is a representation of what you get and, after having taken over control of the currency flow, he turns that into what you see is what you get if no one rushes the bank.

Because with his second insight, John Law creates the concept of fractional reserve banking, which basically means that the bank, at any given time, only holds a fraction of its obligation.

But fractional reserves can be a little scary: they work well as long as people trust that the bank can repay them. And most of the time that’s not an issue because while a person needs to pick up their gold or silver or whatever other metal the currency is traded against, another person probably doesn’t need his or hers. So it balances itself out in some sort of common good.

Where the system can fail is when everyone decides to take their metal out at the same time: remember, the bank doesn’t have enough metal in its safe to cover all the currency it’s distributed. That problem is actually an echo chamber problem.

A run on a bank, the situation I’m talking about, generally begins with a whisper: somebody has heard that the bank is having problem and concludes that money you’ve deposited there is no longer safe. That whisper starts spreading and, thanks to an echo chamber type of effect, people worry that their money is no longer safe in this bank. Since they don’t want to lose that money, they run to the bank and withdraw all their money from the bank. Problem is, they are not alone and quickly tens of thousands or more people start doing the same. Because of that massive onslaught, the bank no longer can meet its financial obligation and actually does fail.

This happened in the 1920s with the great depression and it’s happening now (that’s why the government is busy bailing out a number of financial institutions.

But let’s return to history. In the 1940s, after World War II, the Bretton Woods accord established some global rules for currency exchange against gold. But most of the reconstruction of Europe ended up being backed by US dollars to the point where the US held somewhere around 65 percent of the global gold reserves. In 1960, an economist called Robert Triffin figured out a problem with what had happened: there were more dollars in the marketplace than there was gold to back it up. In the early 60s, an ounce of gold was worth about four to five dollars more in London than it was in New York.

Due to many political and economic events throughout the 60s, the possibility of a run on gold and a run on the dollar started increasing and on March 17, 1968, the possibility became reality, creating a substantial money crisis. The whole financial system teetered on the edge of collapse during that era and eventually, the Bretton Woods accord was abandoned. On August 15, 1971, US president Richard Nixon announced that the US would no longer convert dollars to gold. In fact, he added the US would not convert dollars to anything.

That announcement is appropriately called the “Nixon Shock” because with it, Nixon puts an end to the concept of a representative currency established by John Law. In its place is now the concept of a Fiat currency, a currency that is traded not because it has a guaranteed value but because the government says that this currency MUST be accepted as a form of payment.

And so currencies now float, not based on a physical value but based on what people think that value ought to be: today, dollars, euros, pounds, and yens have a particular value not because it is set against actual goods but because people believe that the government that backs those currencies will continue to do so in the future.

So let’s go back to our fundamentals of currencies: they have to be an agreement and that’s where we get to web 2.0 and its impact on currency.

Which gets us to more recent times. During web 1.0, a number of companies starting thinking that the internet, because it was global in nature, needed a global type of currency. So technologies like Digicash, Cybercash, Ecash, Flooz, Beenz, appeared in an attempt to mirror cash and create new currencies.

But they had many problems. First of all, the different systems were hard to use, often requiring software to be installed on the users’ machine. That limited participation and, if you remember one of the fundamental rules of currency creation is that users generally agree on using a common currency.
The second part was that the systems actually went too far in trying to emulate cash. So, just as you need to go to an ATM to get cash today, most of the system used the concept of a purse that was to be refilled from a different area. But why go to an ATM to withdraw cash when you’re on the Internet? Why not say, “I have money in my account, refill my wallet if it’s empty. ”

The third, and probably most important part, was that once spent, the currencies were transferred back into some real world currencies like the dollar or pound sterling (and no euros because this is all happening before the euro became a consumer currency.) That was the biggest mistake because currencies weren’t really traded.

The dotcom bubble crashed and, along with it, most of the virtual currencies that had been introduced. It wasn’t a very big deal because people didn’t hold much money in those currencies.

Meanwhile, a parallel development having absolutely nothing to do with currency creation took form across the internet: because of its global outreach, the net was a perfect place for people to play games together. At any given time of day or night, there was always someone interested in a game of chess or backgammon or something else. Some games went beyond the basic board games and leveraged the concept of role playing games that had been so attractive to so many computer geeks.

And over the years, as computers became more powerful, the quality of the graphics improved. And as the games improved, new point systems were created for each quest allowing to trade work (game-related achievements) for goods (better weapons, magic potions, housing, etc..)

Those points took various forms. So games like World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings online, which are set in a medieval-like type of environment, turned to gold as their achievement point systems. Linden Lab, with created Second Life, created the Linden Dollar, and so on and so forth.

But then… then something really unexpected by most of the game makers happened: people started exchanging those virtual currencies for real world ones. Looking back now, it seems to make total sense: the challenge, for a lot of those games, is that it takes a lot of time to acquire virtual currency.

Here, in the developed world, time tends to be at a premium. Most of us are multitasking constantly because we just don’t have enough time to do everything that we would like to. But because we spend a lot of time working or doing other things, we don’t have much time to play games. On the other hand, we tend to have more disposable income than people in underdeveloped countries.

For example, in 2005, the average annual salary (and let me make this clear, I’m talking average annual salary) for a Vietnamese worker was 1200 dollars. That’s 1200 dollars a year. That same year, in the Guangdong province of China, that number was $2,778.

Some of those people are in their early 20s and when they get out of work, they go out and spend some of their money to play video games. At some point, a few entrepreneurs around southeast Asia realized that if they paid ANYTHING to those players, they might be able to get past some of the more boring tasks and resell the accounts to people with little free time. A new economic model was born and all of a sudden, World of Warcraft gold started getting traded against US dollars and euros.

Students of currency history could have predicted this. Remember, currency is a social agreement on the value of something and here, those virtual currencies became an agreement on a value of time.

While initially the phenomenon was one of supply arising from southeast Asia to meet North American and European demand, it eventually went around full circle. When China decided to start requiring that people register their work occupation as “virtual workers” for people dealing with that type of trade, over 750,000 people applied in the first quarter. That’s three quarters of a million people in China alone claiming to make the majority of their living from creating goods they sell against virtual money.

And Asia is where it actually gets very interesting because frictions between the government and virtual currencies are becoming more common.

Meet Tencent. Cute little penguin, right? Well, that little penguin is currently at war with the Chinese government. It started relatively innocuously. Tencent provides an IM system and offered a virtual currency, the QQcoin, to be used so one could upgrade their online avatar (an avatar is basically what your online character looks like) and allow for people to give gifts to other avatars. Not a big problem until a few other web sites started accepted QQcoins as payment for services, and eventually for goods. In May 2007, the Chinese authorities started issuing warnings about the QQcoin. By November 2007, they were blaming it for impacting the Yuan, the national currency.

That industry, which people have called the virtual world economy, real money trade, or RMT, currently represents anywhere between 2 and 4 billion US dollars of transaction flow a year. That’s up from inexistent less than 5 years ago.

So let’s keep that number in our minds and move to the next set of influences Web 2.0 is having on currency. As you know, Web 2.0 in increasingly about giving power to the user and increasing peer to peer relationships.

I talked earlier about the virtual currencies that popped up during the web 1.0 phase. There was one company which, at that time, came up with the idea of moving currency from one Palm device to another. For those of you in the audience who may not remember that time, Palm devices where the spiritual grandfathers of the iphone or most smartphones today. Well, the Palm thing didn’t work out for them, so they figured they’d start moving money via email. Oh, and they renamed the company around the name of the product: Paypal.

I think everyone here knows the rest of the story. Paypal has become a leader in moving money on a person to person basis with something as simple as an email address in terms of identification. That simplified transactions and many people around the world are actually using paypal today to move money from one currency to another.

And while many may snicker at the idea that moving money from something as ridiculous as the Palm, well, it was just a question of timing and marketplace. Currently, in Kenya, M-PESA is doing the equivalent of 10 million US dollars in daily person to person transaction on mobile.phones. That 3.6 billion dollars a year.

That’s real currency right now but why does it have to be a real one? After all, it’s just virtual money as it moves from an electronic device to another.

Meanwhile, marketplaces like prosper.com and zopa have started allow users to make loans to each other via a web interface. It’s called peer-to-peer lending, basically, people lending money to other people, or as most of those companies claim, they’re Ebay for money.

According to the online banking report, it will be a US$9 billion a year business by 2017.

That’s real currency right now but why does it have to be a real one? After all, it’s just virtual money as it moves from an electronic device to another.

So if we take the trends we’ve just explored:

• Virtual currencies have grown to be traded as if they were real currencies
• People are moving money from one person to another via the internet or mobile devices

We may be able to come up with the conclusion that where this is going, in the long run, is an area where exchanges could be set up either online or on mobile devices to use virtual currencies are real currencies.

And if we assume that this first step is possible, then it’s not too far away from the next step, which is an explosion in the number of currency offerings we may see in this world.

What we’re seeing here is the first shot in what I think is the next evolutionary step in the history of currency and it’s an evolution that could either be a transitional phase without major disruption or a massive change in the way people are interfacing with currency: this could be our generation’s Nixon Shock.

The issues around this new world are significant.

The first issue is around who is controlling those currencies. For most of history, currency was under the control of the currency issuer. But in the last couple of centuries, there’s been an increasing trend towards government control of currency.

How will government react when their own currency is challenged? And will their reaction matter? After all, the Chinese governments actions to date, as far as the QQ is concerned haven’t stopped trading.

What will happen in terms of tax collections? Will government have to start accepting currencies beyond their own as agreed form of payments? And if they accept other forms of currency, will they have to accept other government-run currencies as form of payment?

How will criminal behavior be dealt with? Today, criminal elements can be tracked because whenever they have to deal with some currencies, they have to eventually deal with banks. And because banks are regulated, criminal behavior can be intercepted. What happens when those money flows move outside of the financial institution control? Shouldn’t governments think about regulating those institutions as money transfer operations ?

What happens when the number of currency explodes? Sure, computer systems can do the conversion without problems but how will WE assess the worth of a currency?

And, as currency initially proliferate, there will eventually be a move towards an agreed upon set of new currencies because remember that currency is ultimately, about an agreement value by all of us. But when some of those currencies die, what will happen to the people holding them? Will the dead currencies be converted to emergent ones? And what happens if the dead currencies are ones that were controlled by governments? Will they fight for survival?

I unfortunately don’t have any of the answer to those questions but if there is one thing I know, it is that where questions exist, opportunities abound.

And with that said, I would now like to open up the floor for discussion.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Coins to QQ at Web 2.0. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Recently, though, TechMeme has gotten me thinking about the tech blogosphere conversations as a whole and their longer term relevance. To the small “web 2.0″ community, TechMeme serves as a bit of a paper of record; The subhead even claims that it represents the “Tech Web, page A1”, claiming to bring us the important stories. But how do those stories fare over time? Is today’s hot topic a step in understanding a longer term trend or is it just a temporary distraction that will be forgotten a month/3 months/6 months/a year from now.

Fortunately, Gabe Rivera, the founder of TechMeme must have anticipated such a question and provided a way to look at TechMeme as it was a particular point in its short history. Using the simple interface, it’s easy to see the page as it existed at a precise point in time. So I decided to start looking at the site at the same time in single month spaces. The middle of the night and middle of the day position ought to be good time stamps so I decided to look at the site at 12am and 12pm on the selected date. I also had to discount the fact that April 1st is April fool’s day so I could not use the first of the month as this fact could skew the data. Here are the dates and times I ended up with:

• Today: June 2nd 2008 at 12am and 12pm
• A week ago: May 26, 2008 at 12am and 12pm
• Two weeks ago: May 19, 2008 at 12am and 12pm
• One month ago: May 2, 2008 at 12am and 12pm
• Two months ago: April 2, 2008 at 12am and 12pm
• Three months ago: March 2, 2008 at 12am and 12pm
• Six months ago: December 2, 2007 at 12am and 12pm
• Nine months ago: September 2, 2007 at 12am and 12pm
• One Year ago: June 2 2007 at 12am and 12pm
• Two years ago: June 2, 2006 at 12am and 12pm

With 20 data points, here’s what I discovered.

Today

Based on today’s news at noon, it looks like the important subjects at noon in the blogosphere are Adobe’s latest move, combining Flash and Acrobat with their entry in the already crowded (Google, Microsoft, Zoho, etc..) web-based office suite market. At midnight, things were a little less exciting, with discussion around the privacy issues Google Maps is raising with their StreetView offering.

Of course, it’s still too early to tell whether those stories will have a long term impact so let’s roll the tape back a little.

One Week Ago: May 26, 2008

At noon, a week ago, the top story was about a new type of SSD, developed by Samsung. Since it’s hardware, I assume that the impact of this news can’t be felt initially but there could be longer term repercussions. Also of note on that page is a small item lower on the page about Paypal outages. An interesting trend in my research on this is that this story is slowly developing over a period of weeks and months and the noise level appears to be increasing on it.

At midnight, the discussion was around Google’s power and the needed for another organization to work as a counter balance to that powerful force in the search engine space. Coupled with the discussions last night about privacy issues relating to Google maps, it seems we are seeing an emerging pattern here.

Two Weeks Ago: May 19, 2008

Two weeks ago, at noontime, the claim that Microsoft would eventually buy Facebook and keep it close was dominating TechMeme. At this point, no announcement has been made so this is largely conjecture and, while an interesting opinion, it’s not really news. This editorial was largely in response to the news item that dominated the previous 12 hour cycle about Microsoft’s statements regarding pursuing a possible deals other than a full acquisition with Yahoo!

One Month Ago: May 2, 2008

On May 2, 2008 at noon, the big news was… that the Google RSS reader is now available for the iphone. I’m sure many people consider this event as a major turning point when… well, hmm… a big big deal. Amusingly, Adobe was also in the news that day, with news that its flash plugin would escape computers and appear in set top boxes and mobile phones.

Another big subject was Steve Ballmer’s mention that Microsoft could go it alone without Yahoo, a discussion that dominated the midnight page on that day. The Yahoo/Microsoft chat has been kind of the soap opera of our industry and this latest installment was remembered as a turning point (or not) by many.

A possibly interesting trend piece, around midnight, was also intriguing: Will Grand Theft Auto IV hurt Iron Man opening weekend sales. I haven’t seen a follow up on that piece yet, which could tell us whether video games are displacing movies as the primary form of entertainment but my guess is that the answer is no.

Two Months Ago: April 2, 2008

On April 2, 2008 at noon, the top story on techmeme was about Intel’s plan for chips that would power up more mobile devices. Interestingly, this story was largely driven by mainstream media as the lead was taken by john Markoff of the New York Times, followed by comments from Forbes magazine, and Infoworld. The other related story was the press release itself, which can be seen as bloggers pointing straight to the source of the news. I suspect that this story will probably have more legs moving forward. A cursory glance provides glances at developing stories ranging from the rumor stage (that all important Google/Skype partnership or acquisition… which didn’t happen) to the focus on process (like the approval of Office Open XML as an ISO standard).

The departure of Google’s CIO dominated the prior night’s news cycle and word of Apple’s 3G iphone started to filter through.

Three Months Ago: March 2, 2008

March 2, 2008 at noon provides us perspective on today’s news, thanks to Microsoft’s announcement of ITS entry into the web-based office suite market. When put side by side with today’s announcement by Adobe, it seems to start pointing to more of a trend. Beyond that, little news that seems to be of note from a memorable standpoint.

The interesting thing here is that the same subject was leading the previous night’s news cycle. This seems to establish a first rule for techmeme: subjects that survive on the front page more than 12 hours may be worth paying attention to.

Six Month Ago: December 2, 2007

There’s an all saying in journalism that 3 items make for a trend. In the case of this study, it looks like Web-based office suite are definitely the hottest trend around, as the top news on December 2, 2007 at noon was information about the future of Google’s offering in that space (either that or there is an unwritten rule in the technology field that information about web-based office suites MUST be introduced on the second day of the month or wait until the following month).

The subject was starting to climb the chart 12 hours earlier, even thought the discussion at the time was dominated by a Facebook misstep (remember Facebook Beacons? Well, that was around that time). From an interface standpoint, it also brings up something that I’d like to recommend to Gabe: could you add and up or down arrow to highlight if a subject is getting more play or not. On something like this, it would be nice to get an idea of the stickiness of a topic. It appears many topic appear low on the page and move up over time, the quicker and faster they move up seems to indicate the importance of the story and it would be a nice addition to have that info on the screen.

Nine Month Ago: September 2, 2007

September 2, 2007 was a quiet news day. I guess everyone was mourning the death of the newspaper, which was forced by Google on that day, according to the noon-time headlines. There doesn’t seem to have been any other major news around midnight either. This, however, could be an artifact in the data as September 2, 2007 was a Sunday, which is generally a pretty quiet news day as most people don’t work on Sunday.

Interestingly, a story that is just now starting to get more notice is the continuing brushfires around Paypal’s outages. Not that sexy a subject but one that started to be raised around that time. At the time, discussion of Google’s entry in the mobile market centered around the idea they would deliver a device instead of a platform.

Last Year and Two Years Ago

A year ago, at noon, the Techmeme conversation was around porn. During the night, though, the conversation was centering around the acquisition of Feedburner by Google. This is probably remembered by people in the industry as an important milestone and here, techmeme shines at organizing a package with the appropriate conversations.

Things do not improve much if you go further back: 2 years ago, at noon, and midnight, gives us little to mull over.

Conclusion

The data seems to point that the front page of TechMeme largely represents what’s hot right now but does not necessarily highlight stories which have a longer term type of impact. In that sense, it may also be highlighting that discussions in the tech blogosphere are largely centered on insider-type minutia while failing to put things in a larger context. This appears to present a myopic view of the tech world that leaves us with lots of data but preciously little information. So while TechMeme provides a useful tool in terms of getting an idea of the pulse of the conversation “right now,” it does little in providing data that would allow someone to understand the larger trends that are affecting our world as a result of the internet (and web 2.0 revolution).

I would argue that the answer to the question I posed in the title for that post is a resounding yes. Because it deals largely with the trivial and assess little value to longer type impact, TechMeme creates a self-imposed myopia on its readers and participants. A possible exception is when a story manages to survives through multiple 12-hour instances, providing many angles to the same events. But those events are few and far between.

Whether the lack of headlines with a major impact is a phenomenon that is unique to TechMeme or to the tech world in general is a question I’d like to leave to readers and I’d appreciate comments as to your thinking around this.

But all this comes down to a simple fact: if you’ve missed what happened on TechMeme in the last XX hours, days or weeks, you may not necessarily have missed much. so kick back, relax, step away from the computer and, if you need to catch up, you can always pick up a mainstream publication that may cover a distilled version of what happened if it’s of any particular significance.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Is Techmeme myopic?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Looking at the history

In order to look forward, it always pays to look back. The dominant standards for the web today are undeniably HTML (or its variances like XHTML) and HTTP. More recently, XML has emerged and, increasingly, RSS is becoming the dominant type of XML for sharing a variety of data.

How did each of those standards become a standard. It is obvious now (hindsight is always 20/20) that standards bodies have relatively little bearing when it comes to influencing the succes of a format. Take, for example, SGML, which was the dominant standardized format for document formatting. It was quickly superceded by HTML which, at the time, was not considered a standard.

The same is true of RSS and other standards for syndication. Formats like ICE, CDF, and NewsML were touted as the future when they were first introduced. However, they’ve recently been superceded by RSS.

And even within the RSS world, formats like RSS 1.0, which was supposed to be more semantically sound, and ATOM, which was supposed to be more forward thinking that RSS 2.0, have been losing the war to RSS 2.0.

Bootstrapping is a social phenomenon

What Dave Winer understood, when he sheperded RSS 2.0 into becoming the dominant mean of delivering syndicated content is that the life and death of a new format is predicated on its widespread adoption. And, in order to increase adoption, one has to make something generic, easy to understand, and simple.

Many of the people in the early days of the syndication space failed to see it as Dave did. We believed that a semantically sound format was better and we were wrong. Purity, it turns out is not always a good thing, especially if it gets in the way of people implementing something.

The same is true of HTML. I’d venture that, from a development standpoint, the biggest boost to HTML was a single menu feature that appeared in early browsers and remains there to this day: view source. In the early days of the web, countless developers learned how to do cool things with HTML by reading the source of pages designed by other people.

In a recent issue of ambidextrous magazine, Jeffrey Schox talks about the three stages of technological development: appropriation, early innovation, and sustainable innovation. Here’s how he describes the appropriation stage:

an issued pattent allows innovators to construct roadblocks behind them as they travel down a particular technological path… During the appropriation stage, patent roadblocks waste time and money… The countries, needing to catch up with the designs and technologies of other countries, should focus on collecting revenue and knowledge streams to fuel later stages of technology development.

While he focuses on hardware and electronics in a globalized marketplace, the same truth can be applied to standards. With few barriers in adopting a new standard and by fostering a culture of appropriation, one can easily establish a base of people who understand a new format. As more people understand it, they start implementing it and, after eventually getting smarter about it, start building on the efforts of previous creators. Eventually, those masses of tinkerers get to a critical point, pushing the new format into areas that were unexpected. Some companies eventually get smart to it and see growth in that area, which triggers them into experimenting with that new format.

Eventually, due to a general agreement among all developers, the format becomes a de facto standard. It does not have to have the imprimatur of a standard body (except for some very late adopters or pockets where such imprint is considered important) and moves forward.

What is interesting is the next stage, the one where standard bodies see the area as hot and decide that they need to play in that field. A good example of that is the ATOM format, which has been enshrined into an IETF approved format, and to date has failed to stop the RSS 2.0 juggernaut.

So what happened?

The amazing thing is how simple the issue is. The reason RSS 2.0 has been winning is that it has developed a following. With every new developer learning RSS 2.0, the format goes stronger and the same is true of every company implementing it. Because it is simple, it’s easy to pick up, which means that new developers can do interesting things with it relatively quickly, giving them a chance to become active members of the community and therefore become hooked on it.

The other issue is in keeping things relatively open, while still maintaining some level of control over the general direction. A successful future standard has to allow people a chance to contribute but, in the end, it also needs some gatekeepers who decide what goes in and what doesn’t. The same truth can be applied to any sofware development cycle: for example, Linux may be a widespread open source phenomenon but the number of people who decide what goes into the core kernel or doesn’t is still relatively limited. The same is true of any successful open source project: some level of centralized decision making and distribution of the work: anyone can contribute but not every contribution makes it into the final product.

I’m now seeing some of the same history repeat itself in the OPML space. It’s a format that is very simple and Dave is working very hard on getting people left and right to support it. It’s the same scenario he’s used to bootstrap the RSS format and to bootstrap concepts like blogging and podcasting into the mainstream. It’s a formula that works: keep it simple to implement, maintain some level of centralized control over the roadmap and then evangelize it left and right until it can no longer be stopped.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Standards as social contracts. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

How we got there?

Microsoft is not really a new player in the syndication space. With the release of Internet Explorer 4.0, in 1997, the Redmond giant introduced CDF, a format to push content and software to the operating system. With the craze around push deflating, CDF was pushed in the background.

While such efforts were not that successful, RSS moved stealthily towards the mainstream. As a plucky little standard, it is starting to dominate how a lot of notification is being done. So Microsoft decided, wisely, to join the RSS bandwagon.

However, old habits die hard and just embracing a standard is not enough. So Microsoft decided to extend the standard with some “enhancements” they created (known as Simple List Extensions). The fact that they are extending the standard is not something I have a problem with, even though it sounds like the old “embrace and extend” approach they took to HTML. However, what I have a problem with is what they decided to tackle.

Lists and RSS

The new proposed specification allows the ability to create lists. Yes, lists are a good idea if you want to use RSS for something other than distributing content. However, it’s a problem that’s already been solved, and one that has pained much of the RSS community. Let me explain.

In early 2000, when RSS was still in its infancy (version 0.92), a debate erupted on several mailing lists as to how RSS should evolve. The two sides to the debate were as follows:

• On one side were the hard core geeks, who believed that RSS should be reformulated as an RDF specification, tying it into the Semantic Web. Realize that, at the time, the concepts behind this were faily revolutionary: machine intelligence, etc…
• On the other side were the hard core hackers, who believed that the beauty of RSS would lie in its simplicity, and that its adoption would go along the same course as HTML if it were kept simple.

This ended up with two different formats: RSS 1.0 (which met the requirement of RDF integration) and RSS 2.0 (which met the requirement of simplicity).

Well, the irony is that it turned out both sides were correct: On the one hand, plugging RSS into a more formal structure, using things like namespaces and an orderly model could allow it to do more; on the other hand, keeping it simple allowed it to thrive.

Fast forward to today. RSS 2.0 is widely adopted, thanks to its simplicity. And Microsoft is announcing the use of extensions to create lists. RSS 1.0 also enjoys wide support (though nowhere near as wide as RSS 2.0) and supports lists natively. See the humor here: by endorsing RSS 2.0 and creating extra extensions, Microsoft has essentially added a feature that existed in RSS 1.0.

But wait! It gets better. The proponent for the RSS 2.0 specification was Dave Winer, who wrote the RSS 2.0 specifications and maintained it for a fair amount of time after that. However, Dave is pushing a new list and outline format called OPML and is pushing it as the next format he wants people to try out.

So we now have three different ways to create lists. And that’s not even considering the fact that you could use the Microformat concept and had a rel="list" to an HTML element and end up with another format.So Microsoft gets an A for embracing RSS, another A for using namespaces (instead of creating a new version of RSS) and releasing their extension under a Creative Commons license, but gets an F for poor research in terms of introducing a new format. There were a number of other useful things they could have introduced as part of this effort but just generating lists is attempting to reinvent the wheel without really providing any added value.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Microsoft Loves RSS. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Maybe people will not start to reassess that period in business history and realize that it was not really that different from any others, apart from the fact that so many new companies were created as a result of the new opportunities that cropped up thanks to technology advancements.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Reality sets in. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

This is not exactly the way Deja.com presented themselves but ultimately, this may be what transpires from their recent attempt to put the Usenet archives on sale.

Usenet History

For those of you who have never heard of Usenet, here’s a quick definition from the Usenet FAQ:

Usenet is a world-wide distributed discussion system. It consists of a set of “newsgroups” with names that are classified hierarchically by subject. “Articles” or “messages” are “posted” to these newsgroups by people on computers with the appropriate software — these articles are then broadcast to other interconnected computer systems via a wide variety of networks.Some newsgroups are “moderated”; in these newsgroups, the articles are first sent to a moderator for approval before appearing in the newsgroup. Usenet is available on a wide variety of computer systems and networks, but the bulk of modern Usenet traffic is transported over either the Internet or UUCP.

To put it simply, prior to the web, Usenet was what defined the Internet as a community. It covers subjects ranging from politics to computing, arts to news, and everything in between. Usenet, to the old timers was the town square. It was the place where jobs were posted, discussions about technical standards were going on and the latest movies or TV shows were dissected. It was on Usenet that Tim Berners Lee first announced his development of the World Wide Web, and it was also there that Marc Andreesen announced the release of Mosaic (the PC and Mac browser that popularized the web) and the subsequent launch of Netscape.

To put it quite simply, Usenet archives document the early days of the Internet (well, 1981-present anyways) in a way that no other place on the Internet does. As a result, I would venture to say that they are historically significant documents that should be held in the public domain, much like other historical records are. The Usenet Archives are not something that should be a private property.

In the mid-90s, Deja.com, then known as DejaNews, took on the mission and started archiving Usenet materials. The community was happy to find someone willing to do so and let Deja.com do it, assuming that it would remain faithful to the original code of sharing that then existed on the Internet. The model was Usenet plus ads, which would, according to a popular view on the net, help conserve these historical documents while covering costs and making a modest profit.

But Deja.com decided to shed its original mission, refashioning itself as a consumer advice portal instead of going the non-profit route as the Internet Archive did, and here the trouble started. Now moving away from conservation, Deja.com first started pushing the Usenet archives to the back. Then, during a system upgrade, Deja.com decided to take those archives offline. And now we learn that they are going to sell them off to the highest bidder.

In fairness to Deja.com, they did a great job in preserving material that may have otherwise disappeared. However there are several legal questions to deal with when considering such a sale. Today, we take a look at those issues.

Copyright Issues

According to 10 Big Myths about Copyright, most of the content on Usenet is covered by copyright law. But it is unlikely Deja.com holds copyright on that content. They are selling the intellectual property of the millions of people who have posted to Usenet. In doing so, they are breaking several laws, both in the United States and abroad.

For starters, they are in violation of Title 17 of the US Code, which covers copyright and copyright transfers in the United States and Title I of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which extends copyright protection to digital works. Under the provisions of both those acts, no one can profit from a Usenet post unless they have received an express grant to do so from the author of that post. As far as I know, I have never formally granted Deja a right to carry my Usenet postings and the people I surveyed had not done so either. I don’t want to over-generalize but it would be my guess that most of the people who have posted articles to Usenet have never granted Deja the right to reproduce them and, as such, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who are owed by Deja.com.

Going to an international level, they are in violation of Article 9 of the Berne Convention on Copyrights, Annex 1c of the 1994 WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, Article 5 of the Universal Copyright Convention. Those essentially all cover the same thing, which is the issue of copyright transfer (getting the right to reproduce content from the content creator) and the right to redistribute those copies.

Under both US and International status, Deja.com would be in violation of so many copyright rules that it would cost them more to defend a lawsuit arising from the violation than whatever proceeds they made from the sale. In order to fully comply with copyright law, Deja.com would have to obtain approval from every single person to have posted to Usenet during the period covered by the archives… or from their heirs if the person has died. See, the problem is that Copyright extends to 50 years beyond the life of a person. As we know, Usenet is less than 50 years old, which means that EVERY post on it is covered under copyright law. The exercise, though, seems to be one in futility as people may have changed email addresses or disappeared altogether from the net. As a result, it is impossible for Deja.com or the purchaser to be in compliance with copyright law. Seems to me that this is a class action lawsuit in waiting.

Privacy Law

In the United States, consumer data is not as well protected as it is in Europe. Germany and France, for example, have policies that forbid gathering any kind of data from consumers without their prior approval. This includes data that would be entered in a form as well as data that would be gathered through the use of a cookie.

The 1995 European Directive on Data Protection was enacted to control the use of personal information gathered on European citizens. It has already been put into law by eight of the fifteen European Union countries. The law does not allow American companies to gather any data on European consumers because there is a lack of protection for personal data in the United States. This means that any data gathered about Europeans has to stay in Europe. If you transfer that information from a customer based in Europe to a server based in the United States, you are in violation of that directive. Technically, each of the signatory countries could take you to court over that gathered data.

Since Usenet is a worldwide system, Deja.com is already in trouble for transferring information from Europe to the US. As far as the net was concerned, it was fine when Deja was collecting archives as a public service but now that money is involved, this could become a legal quagmire for the potential new owner.

Under the Directive, European consumers are also granted a number of important rights and may appeal to their local government if they consider their rights are not being respected. Among the rights covered are:

• The right to know what the data will be used for, including who will use it and how it will be used
• The right to access personal information upon request.
• The right to rectify information. This means that the customer must be able to change the information if it is incorrect.

The directive also says that in the case of sensitive data, such as an individual’s ethnic or racial origin, political or religious beliefs, trade union membership or data concerning health or sexual life, the Directive establishes that such data can only be processed with the explicit consent of the individual, subject to a number of exemptions for specific cases such as consent of the data subject or where there is an important public interest where alternative safeguards have to be established.

Now, what does this have to do with Usenet News? Well, based on the content that is posted to Usenet, a lot of personal data can be culled. This information can then be used for purposes other than originally planned. Under the European privacy dictums, the data on Usenet could be protected by privacy rules and represents another legal minefield.

Defamation and Linking Issues

Beyond the possible privacy implications at hand here, users could also complain about defamation of character in a Usenet newsgroup. A question that I have for the legal scholars on this list is whether Deja.com could be cited as a co-plaintiff in a lawsuit arising out of a defamatory post. Based on my cursory knowledge of the law, I think they could argue that they are covered under Lunney v. Prodigy Servs. Co., which said that Prodigy was just a common carrier and could not be held accountable for carrying defamatory content as long as it wasn’t editing the content. However, Brown v. City College of San Francisco, which arose out of the linking to defamatory comments could be and issue for Deja’s archives and their linking to defamatory comment.

Also of concern is DecSS. Buried deep inside Deja’s archives are links to sites that allow for DecSS to be downloaded. In the first interpretation of the DMCA, a judge ruled that linking to illegal code is a violation of copyright law. As a result, could Deja be held accountable for linking to DecSS download sites? Could they possibly be sued for not cutting those pages out of the archive? Once again, we are talking about tricky legal issues covering the right to link to certain software and the common carrier provisions. And that’s not even talking about links to illegal software emanating from the Deja.com site. By providing news groups that offer illegal passwords and links to copies of cracked software, doesn’t Deja break the law? Considering that Deja.com does not carry ALL newsgroups (for example, notice the missing talk.rumors newsgroup which is listed in Lizst but not Deja.com), does its selection of the newsgroups it support imply an endorsement of those newsgroups? And if that is the case, isn’t Deja.com then responsible for the content of those newsgroup?

All and all, it looks like Deja.com may be getting itself in hot water from a legal standpoint. Should it transfer the archive to a public organization, it might be able to sidestep a number of those issues by having the archives be held for the public good. However, a public institution will probably not be the highest bidder and the new owner may end up with more than it’s bargained for when making the purchase.

On the other hand, Deja.com could try to spin the archive into a non-profit organization and ask for immunity from prosecution in exchange for maintenance of an important historical entity.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Double Trouble for Deja.com. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I had just moved to New York city the previous fall and was caught into the glory of Gotham. In the process, I had managed to start making friends in the online community there. This was the year Mosaic had been born and the first year of the modern net, as far as I see it. People outside of universities were starting to connect to BBSes that were connected to the Internet all the time (this was relatively new, as most BBSes used to be one or two modem systems, allowing only a couple of users to connect simultaneously) and a few enterprising souls had set out to create a global event: first night in cyberspace. Half international friendship fest, half educational effort, our goal was to teach the world about the Internet and meet some of the people we had exchanged flurries of emails with and chatted with online. In New York, ECHO (the East Coast Hangout) and the Dorsai Embassy had partnered to hook up Grand Central terminal with 5 computers. ECHO brought the in-crowd, a mix of artists, and online aficionados who created one of the top online communities in the world and Dorsai brought the geeks, people like myself who felt that spending a weekend installing in-house networks and debugging lines of a new OS called Linux was a worthy cause.

We were high on life and high on the possibilities of the Internet, eager to show the world that they too could join people from places as remote as London and San Francisco in the first global party. Stuck in a little corner, we had 5 computers (generally lent by ECHO users) and a mission: to change the world.

We did not know how much we would end up doing in the process. Meanwhile, in some dark recesses of Silicon Valley, the small group of programmers who had brought us Mosaic were working furiously on putting the finishing touch on a new version that would be even better. A few days before they had posted the first beta of the program.

The name of the company was Mosaic Communications. The new product was a faster web browser called Netscape. And everyone on the net could email marca@mcom.com, who probably didn’t expect he would be on the cover of Time magazine less than 24 months later.

As the event went on, tens of thousands of people logged on to celebrate together. At the time, the net was only a couple of million people worldwide.

Back then, I didn’t know that this night would change a lot of things for me. Back then, I was desperately trying to find a job that was somewhat related to the Internet but there just weren’t that many. That night, all that changed. I’ve been thinking back to the day when my career went into high speed and I got caught into the Internet wave. That night was the beginning as far as I am concerned.

I had made a reputation earlier that year by starting to get involved in a Usenet newsgroup called alt.internet.media-coverage. It was a place where anyone on the Internet could go and talk about coverage of the net in the media. In those days, that coverage was so scarce that we spent our time dissecting the few stories that were printed about the net.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, a lot of people in that group were also working reporters. One of those reporters was my friend Angela Gunn, whom I first met face to face on December 31st, 1993. She was at the event and our meeting ended up not only getting me my first legitimate magazine writing gig (for Web Week) but also my second job in the Internet industry and the one that eventually ended up in my helming internet.com and kick started my career.

Angela and I talked through the night about how the net was going to change everything. I think it would be honest to say that even we underestimated how sweeping a change it would end up being.

Fast forward to today. It’s only 6 years later and over half of the American population is now online. Abroad, the net is starting to catch up and massive amounts of people are starting to join in. Email addresses are as common as phone numbers, and E-commerce (a word that didn’t even exist 6 years ago) is redefining the way people buy and sell everything. Every business has a website or is considering getting one, from multinational corporations (who now have entire departments tending to their Internet and Intranet sites) to the guy around the corner.

Jeff Bezos, of Amazon.com (two names that were unknown to most people only a few years ago), is 1999 Time magazine man of the Year, and every other ad on TV is for a .company. Millions of new jobs have been created and the next great Internet business plan and the next great Internet IPO have become the new American obsession.

Back in 1994, there was no such thing as Amazon.com or Ebay. If you wanted to check out commerce on the web, you could buy hot sauce from HotHotHot (the site is still around at its original URL). Short of that, you were just out of luck.

Back then, you were lucky if you had a high-speed 28.8k modem. 56k was far down the road, DSL or cable modems just didn’t exist. Back then, to connect to the net required a fair amount of technical savvy as one had to configure their computer and make a number of different software packages work together since there was no drop-in-the-CD-and-follow-a-simple-set-of-instructions to get on the net kit and the concept of having and Internet-ready computer was unheard of.

Back then, if you told someone at a party that you worked in the Internet industry, you would have met blank stares and proceeded to explain what the Internet was, how it worked, and generally boring people in the process.

Back then, my parents were suspicious of what I was doing especially when I was explaining to them that companies would put their content on the Internet for free for everyone to read and that somehow, we would find a way to make it work economically but we were really quite sure how.

Back then, when I suggested to people at CNN that they should enhance their broadcast with extra content online and post the full transcripts of their broadcast on the Internet for free, I was pretty much laughed out of the place.

Back then, the only threat to Microsoft was Macintosh and the Mac had a much easier to use interface since Windows 95 was more vaporware than reality, having been delayed for the better part of a year. Linux was known to only a few people who had dared download it from some obscure server in Finland and had installed it on their 386s or 486s. The big advantage over windows 3.1 was not that it had a better interface but that you could telnet into it, just like you would into any regular Internet server… and it was Unix… and it was free. I personally had gotten exposed to it because a Dorsai user named Bob Young was specializing in selling CDs that had stuff you could download off the Internet on them. The big advantage of those CDs was that you could get a CD with a complete archive instead of spending hours or days downloading the same software. The name of the company was Red Hat and they were based in Westport, CT. A morning in 1995, that fact became very important to me personally: one of the machines at Internet.com was running off Linux and we needed to rebuild the whole system. I called Bob up and we drove over to his office to get a copy of the latest version of Linux he had received. He burned it on the CD right in front of us and saved the day for us. At the time, none of us realized that Linux was going to become the new threat to Microsoft and that Bob was going to become a billionaire on paper in the process.

Back then you could surf the whole web in a few days since there were less than 10,000 web sites. Yahoo didn’t yet have its own domain name and was sitting on Jerry Yang’s personal workstation at http://akebono.stanford.edu.

Back then, domain names were free. It would take another year before InterNIC started to charge $50 per year to own a domain and most were worth about that much. It would take until 1995 for the first sale of a domain name from one party to another, when Cnet bought TV.com for $15,000.

Back then, the net was still relatively quiet. Streaming media was still a thing of the future (RealAudio would debut streaming audio in 1995 and a small Israeli company called VDOnet would launch streaming video a few months later), as were Java, JavaScript, Shockwave, Flash, VBScript, and XML.

Back then, the most traffic the Internet was seeing was FTP data, and the web was still in fourth place as the most used application on the net, behind FTP, Email and Usenet. Also, spam didn’t exist yet. It would take a few extra months for two Arizona lawyers (Canter & Siegel a.k.a. “The Green Card Lawyers”) to spam Usenet.

The top online service in the country was CompuServe, followed by Prodigy, Genie, and AOL. None of them were connected to the Internet and all of them were expected to die off. While this was the case, other services were not connected to the net: we didn’t have Internet banking (although online banking was possible by using proprietary software the bank would give you) nor was there any online trading going on.

All this in 6 years. Oh my, how far we’ve gone. So with this in mind, I’d like to thank all of you for a wonderful six years and take this time to remind you that we still have a lot to do. After all, together, we are still working on creating the building blocks and moving them around.

Let’s see if we can do as much in the next 6 years as we have in the past ones.

We may have made a lot of money in the process. We may have made a lot of changes in the process. We definitely changed the world in the process.

But let’s not forget what we set out to do: to build something new, something that we could leave behind and proudly look at when we’re older.

I would like to challenge everyone on this list to come up with a way to give back to the community that has given us so much. Whether it is by spending a little time teaching a net beginner how to move around this world we created, help a school or non-profit organization to get online, or help make more data accessible through the net, please take some time off your busy schedule and go out and make a difference. We did in the last 6 years: why should we stop now.

As the year 2000 approaches, please do make that pledge to yourself and together, we’ll help this grow a little further.

That’s about it for my little sermon. As a closing note on this year, I’d like to renew my thanks to everyone I’ve worked or exchanged ideas with in the past year and I hope we’ll do some more of that. So have a great New Year’s eve celebration and I’ll see you on the other side of the calendar, the one that starts with a 2.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 1994–2000: How Things Have Changed. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.