Mark Andreesen and the IMG tag

The evening of February 23, 1993 was mostly unremarkable around the internet. But on that evening, a brash young man by the name of Marc Andreessen sent an email that would drastically alter the course of history. In order to fully understand what happens there, one has to think of the internet prior to that day.

Before that message made its way through several mail servers, the internet was a mostly text-based medium. HTML, the source code for the web, may have linked to images but the idea of mixing images and text was not part of the internet experience. In fact, the idea of mixing anything just didn’t exist: a movie stayed a movie and was linked to independently but embedding it into a page was a concept that would not come to fruition until several years later.

Sound, images, moving images, text were all living in separate silos. Yes, they could be linked to but they mostly worked as dead ends as they could not move forward from there (think of a browser that would link images instead of having them embedded into the page and when you got to that image, your only available navigation would be to move back). And because they were mostly dead ends, they forced the web into a relatively hierarchical model. Text was free to cross-link but other media were not.

Andreesen’s stance was that they would implement the tag as proposed and were sending it to be discussed as part of a future implementation of the HTML standard (remember that, at that time, HTML was not yet a standard).

Netscape proprietary approach and forward motion

A few years later, Andreesen would continue on the same course with the company he co-founded, Netscape, pushing for new extensions to the HTML standard and then extending the browser even further. With every new browser introduction, Netscape would push out new features.

With much of the internet being widely open and standard-based, Netscape’s introduction of new things at a fast and furious rate rankled some of the early maintainers of the web. There was widespread worry that Netscape was “breaking” the web through its use of non-standard implementation. Among some of the things Netscape would introduce over this period would be things we cannot imagine not existing on the web.

For example, Netscape was the first to introduce web-cookies, which not only gave rise to the kind of tracking that most of the advertising industry relies on but also simplified and sped up the way in which pages could be customized or logins were remembered.

https, which is used to ensure that communication between your web browser and a remote server is encrypted so no one can break into it, was another such innovation, which gave rise to e-commerce and e-banking.

And then, there’s Javascript. In December 1995, Netscape announced Javascript as a programming language for the web that could run either on a server (but only on Netscape’s brand of web servers) or on the client. The world of programming was in a furor over the announcement, calling the language a horrible kludge and generally being unhappy that they had not been consulted to make the language more pure.

Every step of the way, developers started adopting Netscape’s innovation, giving rise to sites showing a “Best viewed with Netscape” icon. This, in turn, led the Netscape browser to be the most used web browser on the Internet, at some point being used for nearly every 8 or 9 out of 10 web page views on the internet.

Most of Netscape’s inclusions eventually made it into other browsers as they tried to capture market share from Netscape, and eventually, most of those innovation were standardized, ensuring their continuation moving forward. Netscape’s leadership and willingness to stand up to the rest of the industry in order to move forward may have eventually led to its death as a company but its impact is still felt daily.

Microsoft and AJAX

One of the companies that tried to mimic Netscape’s strategy was Microsoft. In order to make its web browser, Internet Explorer, more relevant to developers, Microsoft tried to introduce changes that were mostly proprietary to its web browser. Among those was a technology called ActiveX, which was Microsoft’s proprietary approach to plug-ins. Trying to differentiate its Office suite and Exchange server, Microsoft introduced the XMLHTTP ActiveX component, which allowed web applications to become much more interactive, in 1999.

Whether it was hatred of Microsoft or lack of awareness, the technology did not really get widespread adoption until Jesse James Garrett named the technology AJAX, for Asynchronous Javascript And XML.

The lesson in this is that to break a standard is not enough to get things moving forward. A way to brand that standard so it becomes easily understandable to a wider public goes a long way to garnering support for new technologies, whether they are standardized or not.

HTML5 needs a posse

Previous history points to progress on the web being largely made because people were willing to take a stand and move things forward, standards be damned. But it seems that few are willing to move things forward in a drastic way. To date, complete support for existing standards has been a challenge and it seems there is some level of calcification around breaking new ground.

The wonderful set of underlying technologies making the core of what we know as HTML5 may not be perfect but it’s the best thing we have so instead of crying about the poor implementation of this or that component, instead of asking why it’s missing certain pieces, let’s go out, as developers and stretch the limits of what is possible in a browser.

Break new ground and break old browser. Once you’ve done so, ask the others to implement the features you’re leveraging.

To implement in a standard-compliant way may be smart if you want to cater to the masses but if you want your app to be exceptional, you have to be willing to take the hits. Go ahead and break new ground by looking forward instead of staying to the shores of yesterday’s standard compliance.

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

Methodology

One of the first thing in this effort was to get a decent list of sites. Unfortunately, it seems that it has become increasingly difficult to get a sense of which sites are the most popular when it comes to number of visits. I eventually settled down on Alexa’s Top Sites list because it featured most of the sites people think of when considering what large sites are and includes a few non-US sites.

I then used the W3C Validator against each of the top 25 sites. This allowed me to get 3 different pieces of information:

• Doctype: This is what the site declares as its HTML code version. In other words, how the site identifies what version of HTML it supports.
• Encoding: This is the language the site uses, which gives us a better understanding as to whether they are targeting a particular language or trying to offer a global site.
• Validation: This is how the site validated when tested for errors relating to the HTML version it purported to be offering. It gives us an idea as to how compliant with the standards the site truly is.

Surprisingly, a number of popular Web 2.0 sites were not in Alexa’s Top 25 so I created a separate list for them.

Top 25

Looking at the top 25, here are the results:

Looking at the data, the first thing that is interesting is how many sites have made the switch to HTML 5. Of the top 25 sites, 14 have made the switch to HTML 5. This means than in the last year, 56 percent of the largest sites on the internet have completely modified their code base to comply with a new standard. 6 sites are still left on the old HTML standard and 5 are sticking to the somewhat more recent XHTML standard.

However, it is also interesting to note that none of the sites which have made the transition comply with proper HTML standards. In fact, of the top 25 sites in the Alexa list, only MSN was found to provide completely valid code. Maybe Microsoft could point those people towards their other properties. Amazon was the worst offender, with 516 errors in their code, showing that disregard for standard compliance does not seem to have an impact on economic performance. However, Ebay and Yahoo came closely behind with hundreds of errors in their code, maybe highlighting Amazon as an exception.

Another interesting phenomenon is that most of the large sites have adopted UTF 8, the encoding type that support most languages, as their default language. Once again, over half (56%) of the sites have switched with Amazon and Google being among the rare exceptions. An interesting aside here is that the W3C validator may have issues when it comes to validating chinese sites as it was not able to finish the job.

Web 2.0 Companies

Looking at Web 2.0 companies, the data was surprising:

I captured the data for companies other than those in the top 25 and a few interesting trends seem to pop up. The first thing that came as a surprise is that there seems to be that a lower number of sites have made the transition to HTML 5, with only 5 sites out of 11 (or 45 percent) having completed the transition. There seems to still be a strong preference for XHTML as the way to encode pages.

Also of note is that all sides have plans for globalization, encoding their page in the UT-8 format that can support both western and non-western alphabets.

However, none of the sites successfully validate in any of their preferred standard. It looks like there is still much room for improvement in the world of HTML validation.

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 state of HTML validation. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Definition: What I mean by web

It appears that, as time moves on, many people have different definition of the web. Some look at it as a substitute for the word internet, others look at it as the sites that are sitting at a web address. My definition is a little more technical: to me, the web is a system that serves up HTML, CSS, and Javascript over the HTTP (or HTTPS) protocol.

Under that definition, it means that Facebook or Google cannot be seen as “the web” any more than iphone or android phone apps are.

Definition: What I mean by Open

Open is another tricky word to define.

Some people look to open as interoperable. To those people, an open web only exists when a site or page is accessible by everyone without requiring any kind of extra registration. In those people’s views, sites like Facebook are not open because they require a username and password to access them.

To others, open means that it can be accessed by all. Those people look to country firewalls or bandwidth caps as examples of the kind of restriction that keep the web from open. To some, as long as access to the internet is unfettered, then the internet remains open.

A third camp looks at open as relating to open source, meaning that the underlying code can be viewed and reviewed by anyone who so chooses.

When he created the first web browser, Tim Berners-Lee added one small world-changing (and I’m not using the term lightly here as you will see later) feature: View Source. This item, which allows any web browser user to pull up the HTML source code of any pages on the web. 20 years later, view source is still available in most web browser, still allowing anyone who cares to examine the HTML, CSS, and Javascript code that compose most of the interactions with a website. Some of the best web developers in the world initially learned their craft through this component and it is still one of the best way to learn how web pages are built.

In my view, the last two items are what represents open. Unfettered access AND ability to look at the innards.

Today’s world

Much of the interest around the internet field centers on two factors: social media and mobile access.

In the case of social media, people look to the ability to leverage one’s offline or online connections to augment the value of an application. In that sense, services like Twitter, Facebook, Zynga and Foursquare have created applications that would not be terribly interesting without people and their connection.

In the case of the mobile space, Apple has launched an explosion of access through mobile devices that was then followed by Google, with its Android operating system. When it first introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs asked developers to develop for the web, telling them that it was the best way to interact with the iPhone. However, the next year, he introduced the App Store and asked developers to start looking at developing native applications for devices running what came to be known as iOS.

Google followed suit, pushing developers to develop for their own operating system, Android.

The net result is that a lot of companies have developed applications that are running exclusively on those platforms, bypassing the web altogether.

An open web

Proponents of the open web, however, did not rest on their laurels and introduced html5 and css3, a set of changes to the building blocks of the web that can make it easier to developers richer, more interactive applications. Modern web browsers (ie. those that came out since 2010) tend to have some form of support for those changes.

Because html5 represents an evolution of html, css, and javascript, it goes without saying that the view-source element that Tim Berners-Lee had added to browsers 20 years ago can still be used to see how particular things were implemented.

To date, however, few of the startups that have committed to developing applications for mobile devices have leveraged the power of html5.

Why an open web matters: Education

For a generation, web developers have learned their craft through a tradition of enforced sharing: the open web, through its view-source ability, allowed anyone who wanted to learn how to develop like the masters to study their code and, in some case, mimic it before evolving it in their own way.

This has created a virtuous cycle, where good ideas are evolved and bad ones fall by the wayside. It’s also made it an interesting challenge as the ability to learn from the basic code has also led to people copying the code.

Why an open web matters: Evolved business model

The net result of such copying can be businesses that are basically xerox copies of an original. However, if you believe that the web is only but a component of a solid business offering, then copying of one’s website would not necessarily result in a total copy of a business.

If your business is so sensitive that making a xerox of your website will kill it, it is not yet a viable business. So the web, because it equalizes code forces businesses to improve themselves by building business advantages that are not fully dependent on the code. This is a good thing because it results in more reliant businesses.

Why an open web matters: Accessibility

The open web is generally easier to make accessible to people with disabilities. HTML, in itself, has certain built-in facilities that make it simpler to create sites that can be used by people with disabilities. Text-readers can actually read web-pages and/or interact with some web applications.

Furthermore, today’s web can often be backward compatible, meaning that older generation web browser can still interact with a lot of the content that is published there or deal with experiences that may be a little degraded compared to the latest offering but still working. For example, one can use gmail on a browser from a decade ago. That’s a testament to how endurable an open web can be, that it can be used on devices that stopped being produced BEFORE an application was made.

Why an open web matters: Freedom

Recently, the Financial Times decided to implement a web version of their app, leveraging html5 to bypass restrictions enforced in the Apple app store. The decision was hailed by many as a sign of things to come because it presented a rich offering outside of the traditional Apple ecosystem.

At a recent conference, someone said (and if you remember who it is, please tell as I couldn’t find the exact quote) that developers are essentially captive of the platforms they develop on. As a result, any changes in that platform and a developer could find his/her livelihood or product endangered.

Why an open web matters: Shaping the agenda

But no one owns the open web, as a result, few changes to the underlying platform can endanger web-based products. So it may make business sense, as a hedge against some of the things that could happen on a closed platform, to develop a business that runs on the open web as well as running as an app.

Last but not least, when it comes to freedom, is the ability to help influence the agenda.

If you develop for iOS or Android, most of the decisions as to where the OS is going are being made by either Apple or Google. If you develop for the open web, most of the decisions are being made by Apple, Google, Microsoft, the Firefox foundation, and Opera. As a result, it’s more likely that one of them will support new features in the open web as a business advantage. With 5 major players, there isn’t one that has a chance of becoming dominant for very long. By comparison, with 2 major players in the mobile market, it is likely that the community doesn’t get as much of a voice in shaping the agenda.

Business decisions vs. intellectual purity

Of course, I hear people dismiss the argument. They might say “But Tristan, if you are so enamored with the open web, why is your company, Keepskor, designing for platforms that are not open?”

It may indeed seem odd that I would tell people the open web matters while at the same time developing on some of the more restraining platform. However, I’d counter that argument with two simple statements:

• First of all, open and closed is not a binary issues. In our case, we will be offering an html5 version of our product to serve in parallel to the Android and iOS client.
• Second, intellectual purity is a fine thing but, as a businessperson, I must make decisions that benefit our business and our shareholders. To go with an open-only product would be to limit the markets we can reach and that’s just short-sighted, from a business standpoint.

At the end of the day, it’s a tough dilema that most companies have to face. I first highlighted it the challenged faced by iOS developers before Keepskor existed and it seems it’s a challenge that still presents itself. The way I look at dealing with this challenge is to develop a web-based version of our tools that provides similar, if not exact, functionality to our iOS and Android clients. To do so is not just a matter of openness, it’s also a decision that makes business sense because it gives us a platform to support all the devices for which we do not offer a client. As such, it maximizes our market exposure at a relatively inexpensive extra cost. And THAT makes total business sense.

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

Many Questions

The mobile market is basically broken out in a 2 + 2 configuration: Android and iOS are the two contenders you can’t do without, while RIM and Microsoft are the two you might want to keep an eye on. Looking at this through the lens of limited resources, it makes for tough choices. If you only have resources for one platform, which should it be? If you have resources for more than 2, should you also try to reach a third platform (and if yes, which one) or should you pour more investments in the first two?

In order to better make those calls, one must assess the market position of each of the players and place some bets as to where those players will be in 12 months. While interesting from an intellectual challenge, it can be emotionally wrenching from a company standpoint as some of the bets you make today could help turn your company into a winner or loser.

App or web?

Mobile apps seem to be the largest trend here. While many new apps have come up over the last few years, there doesn’t seem to be much discussion of mobile web offerings. Curiously, the internet seems to be splintering into javascript-heavy apps running on users’ computers and mobile applications of the same apps running natively on mobile devices.

With HTML5, a lot of the benefits that mobile apps could offer seem to disappear: whether it is access to geo-location capabilities, local caching so the app can run when there is no signal, or even access to hardware capabilities like a camera (something Google is trying to bake into future versions of HTML), there appears to be an increasing array of possibilities that would ensure some parity between web-based offerings and apps-based ones.

However, the web has a few challenges to overcome. For starters, local notification, or the ability to throw some type of alert flag when the application is not running, is not available in web apps. One-click billing is not built-in by default. Access to local hardware devices is also limited. But ultimately, the problem web apps are going to encounter when compare to local apps have nothing to do with technology.

The main value of an iOS or Android app over a web app is largely a marketing issue. To a lot of thought leaders, the web is seen as yesterday’s invention and apps are seen as the current hot trend. To launch a web app in 2011 is seen as similar to trying to launch a CD-based offering in 1995: maybe interesting but probably not, and more likely outdated than up to the latest trend (or to put it in more brutal terms, it would be seen as “dead,” as per the criteria highlighted in Om Malik’s excellent post on the subject.)

Furthermore, the presence of an app in the respective app stores by Apple, Google (and now Amazon) represents marketing channels which cannot be matched in the open web. As restrictive as they are, those channels can represent a substantial advantage for new product offerings. The presence of your apps’ icon on a user’s phone is also another marketing marker that is hard to be matched by web application: yes, it true that bookmarks can be presented alongside applications but few users know how to do that and even fewer actually do make those links.

If an app is launched on a platform like iOS and Android, it gets more publicity than if it launches as a mobile web-based offering. This, by the way, is something I see as a reason for concerns in the long terms as it means that most of the debate is now centering not on a more open world but on one as to which walled garden is better: Apple’s or Google’s?

As a strong supporter for a more open web, I find myself conflicted: on the one hand, I see that getting into those walled gardens is bad for the web as a whole; on the other hand, in order to run a successful business, I have to be in those walled gardens. Almost a year ago, I covered this as Apple is the new China and things have gotten worse since, as Google is following a path similar to Apple. But in the end, one has to be realistic: the only way to influence this debate is to become successful enough that your voice gets amplified: so playing in the walled gardens is imperative for any new mobile company that wants to succeed.

iOS or Android first?

With apps as an obvious first step towards development, the next question in the decision tree is Android vs. iOS. Here, there are confusing signals in the marketplace: on the one hand, one can talk about market size and see that Android is becoming the most used operating system in the mobile world. On the other hand, one can see the fragmentation of the Android market as a developer’s nightmare.

Assuming the fact that most startups have limited resources, one could safely make the bet that a less fragmented market is easier to launch a successful product on and thus developing for iOS first would make the most sense. That is generally the rule that most developers follow and I want to challenge that rule.

According to Apple, there are over 350,000 apps in the app store. By comparison, the Android market has over 100,000 apps. So one can safely say that there are roughly 3 to 4 apps on iOS devices for every app on Android devices. Today, the path of most applications is to establish themselves on the iPhone, get the adulation of the Apple crowd and then move to migrate to Android devices.

This generally means that apps which were successful on the iPhone benefit from a lift when they finally make it to the Android marketplace as Android users are curious to see what all the hubbub was about. This situation has led to a situation whereas both top 10 lists are dominated by apps that first saw the light of day as iOS ones.

But what if one were to apply the amount of effort that goes into crafting a well-received app for iOS into developing a similar app for Android first? What if a company were to decide to prioritize its efforts on developing the best app for Android devices? All things being equal, a great app developed for iOS would have to be better than over 350,000 apps while a similar app being developed for Android would have to be better than 100,000 apps.

When looking at those numbers, combined with the fact that the Android marketplace is exploding, it seems that Android development makes more sense when first getting out the door but there is yet another catch.

Free or Paid?

Paid apps seem to fair better in the Apple world than in the Android world. I don’t know if it is due to the demographic profile of Apple users vs Android users (remember that Apple tends to market itself as a premium brand, probably creating a user community that is more affluent and more free-wheeling with its spending) but the fact of the matter is that if you are marketing a paid app, this is something you have to consider.

So if your monetization model is purely centered o selling apps, you may be better off using Apple’s offering (as long as you can figure out how to build a successful business 99 cents a time.)

On the other hand, few apps with hybrid strategies (social, web, mobile) are offered as paid ones. A few examples like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn all seem to show that app that also work as web-based platforms are generally free (as platforms though, they have created opportunities for others to market paid apps on top of their services). If your app is a social web app, the Android market seems to be a better place in the short run.

The key to this positioning will have to be around your company’s ability to present itself as breaking the mold. By going against the grain, you are likely to suffer the ire of Apple fan-boys but the ensuing controversy may get you marketing views you would not have gotten otherwise.

Danger to Android

Today, Android is indeed a fragmented market. So development for that platform is more complicated than development for iOS, where one only has to worry about 2 phones (iPhone 3GS and 4).

The challenge Google now has is balancing its openness while making it easier for developers to deal with the multitude of changes. Its recent efforts in trying to tighten up regulation of the platform can cut both ways. Developers on the Android platform should keep an eye on the impact of those efforts on carriers and device manufacturers support. If Google tightens the screws too much, it could lose some of the momentum it has built and give companies like Apple and Microsoft a chance to establish leadership in the space.

The second tier

Today, developers have to develop an offering for both the Android and iOS marketplace. Once they’ve done so, the next strategic question is whether to put any effort into RIM, HP (aka. Palm) or Microsoft’s offering.

If I were to follow the points above, logic might dictate that the smaller the platform, the better the way to shine out. However, at the current time, those platform look too small to cater to today. The recent announcement from Nokia may point to Microsoft becoming an emerging platform again but  the actual switch is not due for another couple of years. At that point, the marketplace may look radically different again.

So at the end of day, my recommendation (and what we’re betting on at Keepskor) is Android first, mobile web second, iOS third, and then figure out the next step.

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

Distribution Channels: More, more, more

Since the inception of the web, computers have been the best way to access it. Efforts around making the web accessible via mobile phones (WAP, HDML, etc…) or TV (web TV profiles, Microsoft WebTV) largely fell flat due to a combination of lack of bandwidth, lack of processing power on the devices, and costs of production for such device making them unaffordable to the masses.

With the introduction of the iPhone, Apple changed all that (and the subsequent entry of Google, with its Android operating system further validated the space.) For the first time, a new distribution channel for web-based application has become possible on phones.

With the iPad, Apple has struck again, breathing new life in a category (tablet PCs) that was considered dead by most people. And over the next few months, we will see a battle between Apple, Google, Microsoft, LG, and others  as to who will control access to the internet in your living room.

A few years ago, I wrote about what may happen when every signal we receive moved to an IP stack. Those predictions took longer than I expected to become reality but we are now moving to a world where everything is finally going through the Internet. This months, millions of people watched at least one world cup game over the net. As the largest event in the world, this is something that is being experienced by people outside of tech circles. Similarly, the explosion of smart-phones has moved the needle from access to the internet being a geeky thing to such thing becoming the norm.

While I do worry about the app stores (from any of the providers) potentially becoming chock-hold points of access to the internet, I do believe that the explosion of apps that are sitting on the device but getting information from the internet (something I’ve been waiting for a decade to happen) represents a substantial paradigm shift that will reinvigorate internet innovation.

Furthermore, the rise of the cloud and the availability of internet bandwidth at any time and from any place is making the desktop metaphors the computing industry has been used to since the mid-eighties irrelevant and, to some extent, moving the computing world back to where it was prior to the introduction of the PC, with applications running largely on remote servers. This phenomenon has two important impacts: first, it makes it possible for people to rent out applications and infrastructure instead of purchasing them outright, thus lowering costs in the short terms; second, it solidifies control of such applications in the hands of a few large players, making it difficult for new entrants to gain scales in those markets but creating potential acquirers for interesting features.

Tools: HTML5 and CSS3

For almost a decade, web standards were in the doldrums. There were a few pockets of innovation here and there but, for the most part, the internet industry spent the first decade of the 21st century digesting what had been created in the previous decade.

In 2009, HTML and CSS were finally updated, providing a new set of standards that keep up with modern applications. This may seem like an insignificant detail but the lack of new standard impeded the growth of the internet as it led to a browser market that was largely stagnant (with the dominant player of the time, Microsoft, introducing very little innovation in that space) and made it difficult to implement bleeding edge technologies because the browsers couldn’t follow.

The innovation in HTML5 in particular is astounding as HTML moves from being a largely representational language, great for static documents but not so good for interactive applications, and is now becoming a full-fledged programming language, allowing to simplify certain tasks that were, to date, only achievable through the implementation of substantial hacks.

Talent: Maturity in our industry

The internet industry is now over 15 years old. The net result of that is that we, as an industry, have grown substantial amounts of talent that has become increasingly specialized in particular areas. During the last boom, websites were designed with HTML and CSS (and, for the most extreme case, Javascript) but little attention was paid to things like user interaction, machine interaction, APIs, or channel targeting.

With the increased opportunities to target across different platforms and have web applications where the website is only a small part of the overall picture, the level of complexity has arisen and so has the level of sophistication of the experts working on such applications.

The great news is that experts from other fields can now join in and bring some of their expertise, hence enlarging our industry and its overall footprint on the economy.

The other great news is that many people in our industry now have well over a decade of experience, allowing them to have learned from mistakes made in the past and to establish some level of mentorship that didn’t exist in the early days of the industry.

This results in talent being fostered at a more rapid pace and innovation being increased as people can now learn a lot of the basics by following experts (either through blogs, twitter, or other online means or offline approaches like conferences, books, and magazines). Such talent can then turn around, having come up to speed at an accelerated rate, and innovate quickly, sharing their innovation with others at a speed that was not always possible before.

The economy: It sucks and that’s a good thing

From an economic standpoint, the times are also right for a number of reasons.

For starters, the state of the overall economy seems to mirror (or be even worse) than what we were experiencing in the early 1990s.

Let me roll the tape back a little for readers who didn’t experience this: Coming out of college in the early 1990s, the job market was horrible. Even prestigious programs had difficulties placing their students into jobs and the jobs that were offered were low-paying. This created a space for start-ups as there was little to loose financially by going into the internet space: in the worst case scenario, a new graduate may have forgone a chance at getting a job that paid in the low 5 figures for the opportunity to do something interesting and potentially rewarding.

I’d venture that the current unemployment rate is presenting this window again and many people are looking at the risk/reward of a startup in a more favorable light as a result.  I am not saying that all those new startups will succeed (in fact, I suspect that they will fit the normal economic model of a 8 or 9 out of 10 failing) but I am convinced that all this new energy will generate further innovation that can be mined by all.

This explosion of start-up also comes at a good time as the cost of launching a new company has dropped drastically. It used to be that one had to buy servers, memory, bandwidth, etc.. from different providers, creating substantial upfront costs. Today, one can rent that kind of infrastructure in a model that is purely based on the amount of traffic one receives. This means that bad ideas don’t cost quite as much. The net result of this is that, by the time an entrepreneur pitches investors, he or she can have real numbers to highlight the successful growth of his or her company.

Investments

The challenge for investors is that it also means that companies need a lot less in terms of investment (good for founders, not so good for investors as they don’t get as large an equity stake in companies; this also means that exit strategies leave more money to founders). On the flip side, the advantage for investors is that the ideas presented to them can be of higher quality than they were in the past and the startups that do get funding have a reasonable chance at good exits.

Speaking of exits, the investment exits scenario have changed. In the 1990s, the preferred way to return money to investors was to take your company public. The introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley act in 2002 has made it almost impossible to successfully take a company to the public markets in the United States and many have called for its repeal.

This means that the primary way for an internet company to successfully exit has become through a merger or acquisition. Fortunately, the larger players in the market have been very acquisitive. Today, it is pretty routine to hear that companies have been acquired by Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, or IAC. Players outside the industry have also been taking a little more of an interest, which results in further opportunities for acquisition (for example, companies like Disney and CBS often pick up startups for rich valuation)

Conclusion

All and all, the picture for internet startup creation is great. The last decade presented opportunities but I will go on the record now to say the teens will be a greater era of successful internet companies creation than the beginning of the last decade was.

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 best time for start-ups — 5 Reasons. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

It has a relatively low but highly dedicated audience and is garnering good press both in the blogging community and the mainstream media.

The service is suffering from growth related issues which force it to be down at unexpected times but users put up with it because of its supposed transformational nature.

The service allows people to build things on top of it, offering external parties a greater chance to generate revenue than the company providing the service.

And, establishing further proof that service is going to be important in the future, a lot of mainstream stars are establishing presence quickly, only to slowly abandon those points of presence after a while.

But those stars are no different from most of the service’s users, which tend to abandon it only a month of two after trying it out.

What is that service called?

If you said Twitter, you are clearly reading this in 2009. But, only two years ago, the answer would have been Second Life (something I learned first hand, having been part of the hype around it back then).

of course, I have no doubt that this post will probably receive a high amount of flames because supporters will tell me how Twitter is different. But is it?

The Coral Reef

I’ve always had an affinity for Dave Winer’s Coral Reef analogy. However, even the coral reef analogy seems to eventually break down, leaving people like Winer to think of ways to move out (in a way, Winer fell into the same trap with Twitter as Scoble did with Friendfeed).

The issue here is that a lot of energy gets poured by developers into supporting an ultimately closed system. While artificial coral reefs exists, they are generally part of the larger ocean and tend to be pushed into creation by sinking boats or subway trains. But an important distinction is that the creator of an artificial reef is generally present at the creation but then lets the ecosystem take over and doesn’t try to control anything.

In the tech field, the best analogy for an artificial coral reef would be opening sourcing an important source of code (for example, the apache web server) or making a set of protocols or ideas open to all (eg. HTML or RSS) without requiring that the implementor cede any control to the party which made the code or idea available. Today, you can fok the httpd server if you feel like it or you can adapt parts of HTML or RSS to your heart’s content.

Fauxpenness

But there’s a different set of ecosystems out there that becomes more of a venus flytrap of technology. I would describe this as fauxpenness:

Fauxpenness: Calling a system or platform open while it is, when more closely scrutinized, under the tight control of its provider.

Fauxpen system (or fauxpen platform): a system or platform that claims to be open but, upon closer examination, isn’t.

It’s the kind of approach that pretends to be open but provides some level of lock-in.

In 2006–2007, we saw that happen with SecondLife, as many developers (myself included) built software code that could run within the SecondLife world but was ultimately stuck there because you could not run it outside that world and/or run SecondLife servers on your own machines.

in 2007–2008, we saw that happen with the F8 Facebook platform, which locks your applications inside of Facebook and, while many developers have pushed to force the company to open up, tends to stay there. In 2007-today, we’re seeing the same thing with Twitter, which allows you to build whatever you want on top of it but doesn’t decentralize their approach, leaving developers potential slaves to the whims of the company. The same is true of the iPhone, which provides unusual access to the phone operating system and allows to develop interesting software on top of it but still keep developers away from being able to access basic things like calendar information via an SDK.

The endless cycle

Interestingly enough, it’s not an unusual phenomenon in the technology world. It works like this:

It happened with SecondLife; it happened with F8; it will happen with Twitter and it will happen with the iPhone at some point. It appears that the natural course of locked API is to get to a point where the developers get so annoyed that they decide to go look somewhere else.

But there’s hope.

Breaking Free of Fauxpenness

Because of the lock-in, it is possible for companies to break free of the cycle. In order to do so, two things need to happen:

• First, the company needs to find a way to establish a business model that does not require lock-in
• Then, the company needs to start removing the lock-in components it offers.

I’m not saying that either of those step is an easy one. In fact, few companies have successfully managed them and, even when they do, the developer community will keep asking for more.

For example, Microsoft’s history is one of establishing initial lock-ins, weeding out the competition and, when its lead is established enough, relaxing the choke-hold it has on the developer community and playing a little nicer until it tries to enter another market. That was the case with Windows; it was the case with Office; and it is the case with IE today.

IBM also took the same approach, initially being a provider of proprietary systems and slowly, over the last 15–20 years, moving to become one of the largest supporters of the open source movement.

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

Strategic Position

Google lives on the web. Most of its application need a web layer in order to operate and, if it were to find itself in a position where the access to their application where to be compromised through the equivalent of a strategic man in the middle type of attack, their business would die off. So, if Microsoft, which currently still controls around 70 percent of the web browser market, were to decided to change their code to impact how Google applications function, Google would be in deep deep trouble.

Because Google realizes that the browser is sort of their achilles heel, they had to make a play into that space. The first thing they did was help the creation of an alternate offerings, by giving large subsidies to Microsoft competitors like Apple and the Mozilla foundation, largely dolled out as revenue for traffic generation through the search box. See, one of the thing not too many consumers are told about is that the search box in Safari or in Firefox are actually paid placements: Every time a user uses that box to perform a search, a little bit of revenue goes back to the browser creator. So that’s great because it allows those alternative browsers to develop and, as long as Google is people’s preferred choice anyways, no one is complaining.

Of course, there are certain issues with the arrangement: a lot of the people who have installed Safari or Firefox don’t like online ads and some developers were happy to provide tools allowing those users to remove ads from web pages. Google wasn’t too thrilled about that but it found the issue mostly OK as long as the arrangement didn’t hurt its advertising cash cow too much.

But over time, this model created a problem. The feature was tested by consumers who, having seen too much of their screen real estate polluted by ever larger ads, liked what they saw. And, as ads became smarter and started to target users individually, it spooked consumers. Being able to block certain ads became a product differentiator and started to cause some problems to Microsoft.

So, with IE8, Microsoft is starting to claim that it will help users and one of the trial baloons it has been floating is that the user may have more control over what ads they can see and possibly may be able to block some ads.

For Google, that’s not too happy a development: the idea of being able to provide free products is based on the fact that Google is really and advertising company with a side business in search. And if the advertising is blocked, then Google’s whole business model falls apart.

So now, Google needs to regain some level of control. For many years, it’s been going after bits and pieces of the Microsoft empire: a little bit of the office suite over here (Google Apps), a little bit of the enterprise space this way (Google Appliances), a little extra screen real estate (Google Widgets), an alternate application distribution network (Google Pack)… but the premise behind most of their offerings was that life was now in the “network cloud” (basically recalling Scott McNealy’s old “The Network is the Computer” concept with 2.0 flavor).

With Chrome, Google is now trying to bypass most of Windows. There’s still a few things that Windows will be allowed to do for now (connecting to the Internet, managing the communication layer) but it seems that this is the farthest Google has gone into addressing Microsoft head on. In the mid-1990s, Marc Andreesen, then at Netscape, said he wanted to relegate Windows to being just a set of basic libraries and, with this offering,  Google is trying very hard to do so though I am sure you’ll never hear them say so.

Will it work? I don’t know. At first glance, I’d say that their challenge will be to get the software installed on a lot of machine. For all their past efforts, it looks like it may take a while. Once they have gotten Google Chrome installed, the next thing will be to move up to a default setting. That will be another challenge.

What I suspect is that the company will soon offer a customizable version to cable and phone companies to ensure that they choose Chrome over Internet Explorer. And one thing I’m pretty sure about is that whatever happens, Google will ensure that ad blocking software will not work on Chrome.

Memory Management: Marketing or Truth?

One of the things that leaves me scratching my head is whether the memory management Google claims as an important piece of its offering is actually based more on marketing messages than reality. Buried in the developer’s menu is an item that supposedly offers a view into the memory and CPU usage of Google’s new browser. Yes, the browser feels fast so it’s clear that there are a number of improvements there but what is that costing in terms of memory. Here’s what the browser reports:

What you’re seeing here is the browser running two plain HTML pages and an instance of a richer web-based application (Google Reader, which, according to this, accounts for 40Mb of memory space used). Where I get a little puzzled is when I looked at what Microsoft reported through its task manager:

The same 5 processes appear (but since Windows only knows them as running as chrome, it can’t identifty which is which but the numbers are very different: Chrome reports an aggregate memory use of 96,300K while Windows reports an aggregate memory use of 121,544K or 25,244K more. To be very honest, I don’t know which number is correct but, with only 3 tabs open (and the tabs I have on here are the minimum I have open at any time), I don’t find it very reassuring to see this type of gap appear. Will it get worse as I add more tab? I don’t know but it’s something worth investigating.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Google unveils web-based OS. 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.

The New Gatekeepers

For all that is being said about the democratizing effect of the blogosphere, the truth is that systems of hierarchies that have existed for thousands of years still exist in the online world. It may be that humans are hard-wired for hierarchies and find an innate need to give more power to a certain amount of gatekeepers.

In the past, access to information was directly tied to monetary fortune. Before the advent of the printing press, books were very expensive so, as a result, the knowledge that was transferred through books was only accessible to one of two groups: rich people, knights and other people with some type of royal title, and religious leaders, including the people in monasteries who created those books. As a result, the information traded via books was largely centered on the creation and pursuit of religious ideas.

With the advent of the printing press, Gutenberg forced a certain level democratization in the information dispersal space. This new model allowed a wider group of people to create and consume written content. However, the creation costs were still high enough that they created a certain barrier of entry in the market due to the financial involvement required to publish a book. Over time, those barriers to entry were lowered but never to such a low level that everyone could create and distribute content.

In the early 80s, the introduction of the computer and of desktop publishing, along with some other technological changes in the printing business allowed for that barrier to drop even further. I remember starting a newspaper in college on a budget of only a few 100 dollars. For that price, I could actually print a few thousand copies of an 8 page newspapers.

With the advent of the web, those costs drop to even smaller level. While a newspaper or book could be created on the cheap, distribution was still expensive. With the advent of the public Internet, distribution costs became negligible. At that point, the new barrier to entry became a technological one: only people who knew HTML could actually create web pages.

With the advent of blogs, however, that technological barrier dropped to almost zero. Basically, know how to write and you too can become a publisher. This created an explosion of content which showed a true marketplace of idea forming.

However, it also created a sea of endless information that our current brains are unable to cope with and this is where a level of re-intermediation came in: because there was so much content being created, the blogosphere needed to have some guides that would help people navigate to what was considered good.
In a word, we created some new gatekeepers that we now know at the blogging A-list (and, to some extent, an equivalent B-list and C-list). Membership on it is limited and many have said that the way to disprove the power of the A-list is by showing that new members have appeared on it: what few are willing to admit is that the new members are really only allowed as one of these groups if they are vetted by enough existing members. This creates a self-fulfilling cycle where members of the small club of “blogs that matter” get to shape the agenda.

The Echo Effect

Because the group is relatively small, it has gained an increased importance in terms of defining what matters. Algorithmic solutions like Memeorandum (or even Google’s PageRank) help reinforce an echo effect from such small groups. Because the groups are within a category (whether it is politics or technology, the two prominent categories in that space), the impact of an individual can be increased through cross-linking between members of the blogging elite.

In the case of FON technologies, we have a company that has managed to show a wrinkle in the system: get endorsed by the core gatekeepers and you can influence the dialogue (I’ve noticed that effect myself, as my own presence within one of those groups seems to have magically opened some doors I didn’t know existed).

Because a core group of people are considered of higher relevance, what they consider important becomes the agenda. Because the blogosphere has also had some influence in terms of shaping what journalists decide to cover, this effect is now bleeding over into the non-blog world.

Creating Group Myopia?

The question, in all this, however, is whether we could be suffering from possible group myopia. What if a rumor is wrong and gets propagated by the gatekeepers? What is that impact?

The reason I am bringing this up is that I’m wondering if, by creating new gatekeepers, we could start creating a level of groupthink and ultimately increase group myopia. As the boundaries of different echo chambers are clearly defined (for example, few people on the left side of the political biosphere interact with people on the right side (and vice-versa)), are we going to see more polarization going forward.

The next question (and I’m not sure but I suspect that the same is true in non-blog media) is how we deal with this? Is there a way to ensure that all voices are given equal weight? Many people say that the problem is self-correcting but it still seems to me that issues could arise that would not only increase the power of top ranked bloggers but also help in force the dialogue in one direction or another.

I do not have answers for this but I hope that this entry will provoke discussion and would like to see what others have to offer as solutions to this problem. On the other hand, if I fail to influence the gatekeepers, I suspect that this entry will disappear into obscurity until a gatekeeper decides to discuss the same issue.

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 New Gatekeepers. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

TNL: so the rumors are true: Webjay acquired by Yahoo! You should post it on your blog.

Lucas Gonze: That’s right. It turns out that when they sign up new people, y! makes them put on this pointy hat that sorts them into “houses”. This makes no sense to me, but it turns out that I am “hufflepuff”

TNL: Hehe… stay away from Slitherins

Lucas Gonze: They’re over in the DRM group.

TNL: Tell me the reason for this acquisition.

Lucas Gonze: The point of it is playlists. It’s a sign that Y! takes playlists seriously. The point of playlists is that they are to internet media what RSS is to weblogs and HTML is to browsing. Playlists are the one vehicle for timed media; if it has an intrinsic sense of time, it’s a playlist, that’s an important category of functionality. Now, aside from Webjay and XSPF, the action is all over on the iPod.

TNL: So, if I understand you well, playlist + MediaRSS + content = new form of distribution channel?

Lucas Gonze: that’s about right. From the audio and video perspective, the meaning of playlists is that they’re the container format for the internet. CDs are over; mixtapes are only an analogy; Radio, television, movie theaters — not internet. So Webjay and my other playlist work is what Yahoo is about with this acquisition

TNL: If I understand well, playlists are somewhat of a reintegration item. Yahoo! is looking at them as a way to tie all the disparate bits that have come out of the breakout into podcasts, independent tunes, movies, shows, etc… to resort things into channels?

Lucas Gonze: That is beautifully said, Tristan. I agree with that, except that reality is not quite as elegant. The point of this work is to create a truly healthy and robust internet media industry but one which is not just a transplant of the old ways of doing things. The new industry is going to be native to the internet (the playlist is a native format).
Playlists do resort things into channels and they do make possible all the sort of goodness we’re used to with weblogs — like Technorati and Del.icio.us — with multimedia Examples of the kinds of goodness I’m talking about:

• Interactivity wide open; anybody on the internet is a full participant
• Implementation wide open; anybody with the chops can write programs which contribute to the ecosystem
• and interoperability; anybody should be able to author content which anybody can render

TNL: This sounds dangerously like a lightnet. You seem to be offering a world that is widely open, while all the big portals are looking at locking things up.

Lucas Gonze: I think that the place we’re going is to a media industry which is perfectly at home on the internet. Given that I’m here to make money for Yahoo, it’s fine to lock things up by doing such a great job that users would be crazy to use any other software.

TNL: You mentioned interactivity as a key feature of playlists. Do you think that playlists merge multimedia with social software? And, if yes, is that a direction Yahoo! plans to take it into?

Lucas Gonze: That’s exactly the value. Social software is not an empty trend. It’s central to the value of the internet. So the question with regard to media is how do you make social media? How do you make songs which anybody can get inside of and interact with on their own terms? To some extent that’s what playlists accomplish.
About whether that’s the direction Yahoo! plans to take it into, I can’t speak for Yahoo!, given that I’ve only been an employee for about 45 minutes.

TNL: So what are you going to be doing at Yahoo! ?

Lucas Gonze: There’s a spacecraft which crash landed in the desert. My job is to investigate the dead lifeforms and attempt to make contact with their homeworld. But that’s off the record. On the record I can only say that we’ll be building best-of-breed internet-native social-software with tags.

TNL: can you throw a couple more buzzwords in there?

Lucas Gonze: I can enable that.

Lucas then had to run off but I wish him much luck on this venture. The obvious value of something like WebJay to a company like Yahoo! is in the social aspect of sharing multimedia. I believe that the real value, beyond the core tools being acquired in the organization and sharing of digital media. Over the last year, Yahoo! has been acquiring companies that relied on the wisdom of crowds to organize content of various types (del.icio.us for bookmarks, flickr for pictures). WebJay nows fills that space for music and could probably easily be extended to support other media types. In that sense, Google is now taking an early step in terms of merging social software and multimedia.

There are many opportunities in that space: Much as Flickr has shown that user-generated and organized pictures are a good way for people to share this type of media, something like WebJay could extent from sharing your music collection and/or tastes to an eventual basis for sharing larger media files (like videos of the family).

The tool also allows for auto-discovery of content: point it to a URL and it will find any songs that’s linked from it and organize them into an easy to use playlist. This could have some great implications for podcasters as it provides and easy tool to create archive pages.

Beyond the sharing and auto-discovery is also the openness of WebJay. What is most astounding, when you look at it, is how open it is. The system gives you the direct URL of the files that are shared, even though the files themselves are not stored on WebJay itself.

Update:

It’s now official.

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

To recap, I initially took the list of Top 100 blogs listed by Technorati on May 19th, 2005 and started doing side by side comparisons. I initially looked at distribution of links among the top 100, then followed up with an analysis of Technorati against Google, this brought me to a subsequent chapter on Technorati against Google and Yahoo! (then comparing Google and Yahoo! to each other). All this created some fair amount of buzz in the search world, with people saying it was interesting to other saying I was way off the mark. Either way, it’s time to take a look at MSN, in order to complete this round-up.

So, to create some benchmarks, let’s start taking a look at distribution of Technorati links against MSN’s:

Of course, no big surprise here. This seems to be pretty consistent with what I had found in dealing with Google and Yahoo!, showing that Technorati does a good but not complete job at indexing link-backs. What’s interesting, however, is that Technorati seems to have a different pattern when dealing with MSN than it does with Yahoo or Google. Let me show you what I’m talking about. Following is the pattern of Technorati differential with MSN:

… and now is the differential between Technorati and Yahoo..

.. and finally the same graph between Technorati and Google

I’ve been trying to understand why this is and still have no clear answer, to be fully honest. Could be something, could be nothing. I’m not sure at this point and this is, in large part, one of the thing that was frustrating in working on this entry. I’m not sure there is something there, to be very honest.

Comparing the Search Engines

However, the picture gets more interesting when you get the three search engines side by side. Here’s a quick spreadsheet of the results:

The most interesting thing here is that MSN seems to prove the assertion I had made regarding Google not providing as many links as Yahoo does. The same seems to be true between MSN and Google. There were, however, a few surprises here, as far as I’m concerned:

• Sites located in the United States seem to fair better, on MSN, than other sites. Google and Yahoo seem to have a stronger indexing presence outside the US than MSN does.
• MSN spaces sites are not getting particularly great representation in MSN search, compared to its competitors. I was surprised by this since they are part of the same service

Conclusions and more!

So there you have, no great insight here apart from the fact that this linking stuff is interesting and that even small scale analysis can bring up some interesting trends. As I mentioned before, I am not an expert on this and thought to put together the numbers and start an analysis. However, I know that this series has attracted experts so here’s a deal: I’m making the spreadsheet of data I compiled available under a Creative Commons License (By Attribution, Share Alike) here on TNL.net. If you manage to do anything interesting with it, drop me a note and please make sure that you share it with the wider public. Enjoy!

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Links and Search Engines: The MSN edition. 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.

Gated Community

The reason I decided to first ask people to register before being able to comment was based on the observation of several online communities. Metafilter, Slashdot and Kuro5hin all opted for solutions that required registration first. Granted, requiring that people register requires some extra work and slows down the amount of people commenting but it’s based on the concept that most people that read a particular site are returning visitors. A look at my server logs shows that this may largely be the case: Generally, I get traffic from roughly the same ratio of sites to visitor. There must be a golden mean in here somewhere as to how this works.

From there, I took one extra step, which is to require that people verify their email. TNL.net users are all verified based on an email connection. The logic behind this approach (which may seem cumbersome) is that no one can claim that they didn’t know about being registered for an account. The process is a two step process: you register on the site, a validation id is created and sent to the email address you provided and once you provide that validation id (by clicking on a URL in the email sent to you), you’re in. This creates a barrier of entry in that it gives me a valid email address for every user on the system.

This creates a mini-gated community, where users can easily be identified by the system itself.

Spam Dis-incentive

The next step (and one that I’m still trying to figure out) is how to dis-incentivize spammers. Comment spamming is happening because URLs are supported in the comment field. My solution to this was to disallow HTML as part of the entry. That should take care of it but I’m not sure that’s the answer. One thing I am considering is to create a system based on the amount of commenting. If a user comments a lot over time, more services will become available to that user as he/she becomes a more trusted party on the system (this is similar to the moderation level in Slashdot, in some way, giving the user more rights/power as time goes on.) Other suggestions on this are welcomed (in the comment thread )

Monitoring

The next question is how does one monitor that no spam is getting is. This is easy. Every comment thread has a related RSS feed and I’ve created special RSS feed which tracks ALL the comments on the system. This allows me to monitor new threads in the system as a whole. Should a spamming incident happen, I will be notified in the feed reader of my choice.

Is my commenting system perfect?

No, it isn’t but it is something that will evolve over time. As more users sign-on, the system will become more useful. At the current time, it’s better than the alternative I had before (lack of commenting capability) but it is something that definitely will need work over time.

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

I’m still not convinced that blogs are that different from the web revolution that started in the early 90s. The discussion at BloggerCon was centering around a number of subjects that were discussed at the beginning of the commercialization of the Internet: how do we keep this honest? how do we make money at this? how do we get traditional institutions to recognize this as legitimate? To me, the only things blog add, compared to the rest of the web, is an ability to publish without knowing HTML.

Update:

Seth Finkelstein has posted an interesting entry highlighting how clubby the A-list is. It’s an interesting thought in terms of the power laws and something that was not touched on during the discussion of Shirky’s power laws. The antidote to this, of course, is to cut the A-list out. Many A-listers mention that they link to A-listers because the other guys link to them. What would happen if non-A-listers started to link to sources other than the A-list? Would more fluidity be created as part of the process?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Back from BloggerCon 2. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

While I do receive a fair amount of traffic on the RSS feeds (collectively, about 60,000 requests a day), it is hard to know which ones are new requests vs. which ones are regular subscribers. Going beyond that, it is also hard to know whether someone actually reads the stuff. HTML email allows for this kind of tracking but RSS is not mature enough to provide rich data that could be of use to marketers or stats fans like myself.

While the subscription to category feeds gives me an idea as to what people are interested in (and shows how few people are interested in my personal life, confirming a deep-seated suspicion that I’m as boring in the virtual world as I am in the real one ), it is hard to know whether people subscribed, read, or clicked on links. I guess I could set up some tracking info to trap that information but I’m sure that it would infuriate some people.

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

While the weblog world is generally very insular (thinking of blogs as a different beast from the rest of the web), the concepts surrounding a weblog are nothing new in terms of publishing. Basically, a blog is a tool that allows to publish content easily and presents it in a particular fashion (generally as a set of entries presented in reverse chronological order).

echo: the new RSS?

Part of the success of weblogs stems from the fact that they are generally offering syndication capabilities using one of the many flavors of RSS, a format first developed by Netscape, and then extended by Dave Winer. In 2000, a rift in the RSS community created two divergent standards, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. RSS 1.0 was developed as a lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata description and syndication format. It sounds suspiciously like what the echo crowd is trying to do and makes the name almost prescient (as in “is echo just an echo of RSS 1.0″)

According to the echo roadmap wiki, echo is a new weblog format (Echo) that is:

• 100% vendor neutral,
• implemented by everybody,
• freely extensible by anybody, and
• cleanly and thoroughly specified.

I find this interesting as those were some of the goals of RSS 1.0.

So the question remains as to whether developing a new standard from the ground up makes sense when other extensible standards are available and could be extended to meet new requirements.

echo is for entries?

However, echo stands for more than just syndication. As part of the model, there seems to be a clear drive to define what an entry is. Other efforts like newsML and ICE seem to be going after the same goals. When it comes down to it, an entry in a weblog is not that much different from an article or other piece of content. To come up with a new format will only further the insulation of the blog world from the rest of the world. Why not use and extend some of the appropriate formats?

echo is vendor-neutral?

This one actually amuses me. No successful standard has ever been vendor neutral. Even the current iterations of such web standards as HTML and CSS were born out of the will of larger players in the standard groups. To assume that a standard will ever be vendor neutral is like saying that alcohol is not bad for you. It may seem true on the surface but deep in the bowels of standard groups, vendors yield a tremendous amount of power. If, for example, one of the largest players in the blog tool world says that the format should head one way, that player will be listened to. If a smaller player makes the same suggestion, people will look to the largest player for initial approbation. It’s basic human nature.

echo will not be political

I wish I could share in the enthusiasm of the echo founders regarding this. However, sooner or later, I suspect it will get political. Standards groups always do and I fail to see how the echo world will be different. Eventually, something controversial will happen and everyone will look to Sam Ruby to make the call, as he was the one to set up the wiki. At that point, Sam will make some people unhappy. They’ll yell that it’s all because Sam is a tool of the other group and it will quickly degenerate from there. I hope I’m wrong on this and wish the best to all involved.

On supporting Echo

If something good comes out of it, I will eventually support echo. No, let me rephrase that, I will definitely support echo (I do, after all, support all the other major blog syndication formats out there) but am not sure of what will happen with it moving forward. I hope that something good will come out of it and only want to highlight that there are a few things to look at before thinking of building a new world.

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 there an Echo in here?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

For the past few years, Microsoft has been trying to figure out how to remain relevant in an era of increasing openness. The rise of HTML and of HTTP as the underlying protocol for distribution on the Internet have challenged the level of control that Microsoft had on the computing world. The initial control was borne out of a partnership between Intel and Microsoft, which allowed them to establish both companies as the essential players in the desktop computing world (the partnership often being recognized as the Wintel (Windows plus Intel) behemoth.

When the Internet started to rise, the network jeopardized that relationship as open standards offered the ability to move more of the software logic to servers and rely less on the client desktop, with HTML being pretty much the universal interface to those new systems. With the advent of Linux, a cheap alternative to Windows, Intel found itself remaining in a very strong position (as Linux can run on Intel boxes) and Microsoft sees the possibility of being increasingly marginalized. The problem comes from the fact that Microsoft, as holder of the software component is really only working as a middle tier in a relationship that involves processors, network bandwidth, software, and content. Let’s review why this development is significant in the new world.

Ten years ago, the big challenge in computing was processing power. Software was always coming out that needed to gobble up more processing power and more memory. In the last couple of years, though, the equation has shifted radically. Increasingly, users have more processing power on their desktop than they can use. Unless you are a hardcore gamer, the combination of Moore’s Law (which has pushed CPU speed to a point where any gain is of little relevance to most users) and the steady decline of prices for memory has meant that today’s user is finding himself/herself with a computer that is only gated by one factor: speed of access to the Internet. The challenge here is that, for most people, access to the Internet still happens over a regular modem, hence limiting what they can do online. While adoption of broadband access is growing, it still represents a gating factor in what most users can do. As a result, most people are now looking at how they can access the Internet faster, moving the discussion away from the desktop and onto that bit of the network that has traditionally been the realm of telephone companies.

With the rise of cable companies as access providers to the Internet, Microsoft now needs to find partners in two access camps: on the one hand, it needs to partner up with cable companies, and on the other, it needs to partner up with phone companies. For the first time in its life, Microsoft is actually forced to play in an arena where the monopoly players are somewhere else than in its own company.

With the AOL partnership, Microsoft is closing one part of the equation, by getting access to the pipes offered by Road Runner, the high speed access company offered by AOL/Time Warner. Coupled with relationship established with Verizon and Qwest, Microsoft has gained a foothold in the access space. However, this is potentially short-lived, as Microsoft could easily be replaced if any of those companies decided that they wanted to partner themselves with someone else.

So securing access to the pipe is one way to ensure continued relevance but it does not ensure the level of control that the desktop monopoly once allowed. In order to get that level of control, one must find a way to leverage the existing platform (windows) and create a lock-in with it. This is where partnerships on content can become useful.

In order to create a long term strategic control, Microsoft must ensure that it will be difficult to move away from its offering. This is where the Windows media strategy comes in. If Microsoft manages to get control of content created on the Internet, it will be much more difficult to unseat it in the future. With last week’s announcement that AOL would collaborate with Microsoft on digital media, the companies have started to establish something that may give Microsoft much more control in the future. Once content is encoded using the Microsoft Windows Media solution, it will be difficult to move away from it. A partnership on Digital Rights Management also ensures that Microsoft will hold the keys for content encoded using its solution, hence ensuring its tight control of a very lucrative market.

The ace card Microsoft holds in this is its installed base. By moving the dialogue from web servers (a battle it lost long ago) to video and audio servers (a battle that has yet to be fought), Microsoft is positioning itself for the future of the Internet. This early position will ensure that it will be able to offer Windows Servers that power the next generation of Internet content. The key in making its case is that, because it has control of the desktop, Microsoft can offer millions of users with a media player already running on their machines. This is an attractive public, and allows the company to make a strong case for an integrated suite of products and services (“here’s the player, here’s the server.. oh and while you’re using our streaming media server, how about using our rights management system… and you know all that stuff actually runs better on our windows platform…”)

So this is the worst case scenario. But, one can easily say, there are competitors and there’s no guarantee that this will work. Furthermore, the open standards are always creating a limit on the company’s power, right?

Well, that’s not even a guarantee. As we know, Microsoft came from behind in the browser wars. First, there was Netscape, and it was controlling 80% of the market. Then Microsoft launched IE but things didn’t really change much in the beginning. As Microsoft improved its browser (and Netscape, drunk on its own hype, believed it couldn’t be defeated), the percentage of control shifted.

AOL, with its established customer base of 30 million, and its ownership of the Netscape browser (bought as the company was already losing marketshares), was the only company that could have change the balance back. By bundling Mozilla first in Compuserve and then in the mac client for AOL, it indicated to Microsoft that this was something they might be willing to do, if Microsoft didn’t work with them. It quickly became obvious to Microsoft that they could be locked out of the browser market if they didn’t play nice with AOL. So they cut a deal and gave AOL a royalty free license to use the browser for the next seven years. That seemed to pretty much lock everything in place to keep tight control.

But the story doesn’t end here…

Apparently, Microsoft does not intend to build a standalone version of IE anymore. The relevant lines in that discussions are as follows:

Q: when / will there be the next version of IE?A: As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.

Zeldman points out that IE will be built into future version of MSN for the mac but that otherwise, it will be part of the OS. This is an interesting development.

Let’s extend this concept out to beyond seven years: Microsoft and AOL are at the end of the current agreement. AOL did indeed use the Windows Media suite and is using the OS-embedded IE. Microsoft decides to renegotiate terms. AOL balks. Microsoft says that it will change its browser so that AOL doesn’t work on it. What happens then? What is AOL’s fallback position? On one hand, it’s got 7 years worth of media now encoded in Windows Media format (and would need to reformat all that in order to move off the Microsoft platform, a huge undertaking unto itself), and is locked into the Microsoft OS.

It seems that, unless AOL is keeping Mozilla alive, it is about to sign a deal that could eventually put it in a tough position on the browser end. It also seems that unless it hedges its best and encodes content in windows media and another format, it risks lock-in.

On the web development end, this also has huge repercussions. If we all develop solely to Microsoft, and agree to extensions they might make to HTML once its in the OS, we run the risk of all becoming windows developers, beholden to Microsoft.

This is a really all about a fight for the soul of the Internet. In the 90s, Microsoft announced a strategy of “embrace and extend”, which was often derided as “engulf and devour”. We’re now starting to see the extension happening, and it seems to point back to windows. Do we want to be locked in?

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 Lock-in?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

As readers of the weblog may have noticed, I’ve been getting into an increasingly obscure area of the Internet by trying to meld two different web formats (RSS and XHTML) and come up with documents that could be understood by multiple devices (web browsers, RSS readers).

The exercise was largely an academic one to study the validity of statements made about the semantic web. Much has been made about the subject and I figured that I would test the validity of the statements being made. The idea behind the semantic web is that the web could become embedded with some basic intelligence, allowing computers to understand extra tagging in a document and allowing for those tags to provide more information.

In order to tie everything together, the W3C came up with RDF. The framework uses a concept called namespaces. The idea of a name space is that you can create shortcut in a document and refer to multiple types of XML and “embed” them all together. This is very good in theory because it frees the framework from actually being smart, leaving those kinds of details to the people that write XML standard. Based on this, you have a set of modules (think of each XML standard as a Lego block) that you can tie together using RDF. Or so the theory goes.…

RSS as an RDF module

While there has not been many example of the semantic web, one area where there has been some development is the syndication space. A few years ago, a new format called RSS (for Really Simple Syndication) was created to syndicate stories on the web. The basic structure was simple: every file was a channel, and every channel had item. An item was a link, a title for that link, and a short description of what it was about. It was nice, it was simple, it was the perfect thing to put together a proof of concept about the semantic web. After many fights within the RSS community, a new RDF-specific version of RSS came up. Now, remember that RDF is supposed to tie all that stuff together so technically an RDF-based RSS feed should be modular. RSS 1.0 (as this new formulation of RSS came to be known) has its own definition that can be referenced in a namespace.

XHTML modularization

In an effort to allow to existing HTML document to bravely move into that new world, the world wide web consortium came up with XHTML, a reformulation of HTML that follows an XML structure that is modular and can be used in the semantic web. XHTML also has its own namespace reference.

Assumptions

One would then think that with two different document types, with two different namespaces could be put together using RDF and work properly. Let’s just review our assumptions so far and look at their logical extension:

IF
— the semantic web is a representation of data on the world wide web,
— and if RSS is data
— and if the world wide web is composed of documents that are XHTML
— and if XHTML is a representation of HTML as XML
— and if XML is modular
— and if the modularity is handled through namespaces

THEN
— purely theoretically, it should be possible to have a document that is composed of 2 modules
— then those two modules would be referenced through namespaces
— then a tool that reads XHTML would use the XHTML tags.
— then a tool that reads RSS would read the RSS tags.
— then a tool that can read both would look at the structure of the document and, based on that, represent the data appropriately.

Cognitive Dissonance

Of course, the theory looks correct but it is when trying to implement this that I started to run into problems. For starters, there is no way to used XHTML as your base document. The W3C in all its wisdom essentially said that you can’t do this. Not ideal but I figured that we could go the other way, embedding an XHTML document within an RDF module. But there comes the next problem. In order for a document to conform to the XHTML standard,

the root element of the document must be

and

there must be a DOCTYPE declaration in the document prior to the root element.

So basically, there is no way to embed it in another document.

Conclusion

Now this sounds like I have reached an impasse. An XHTML document cannot be embedded into an RDF one and an RDF document cannot be embedded within an XHTML one. This means that XHTML cannot be treated as a module (since the root element must always be . If we are to embed documents with any kind of semantic markup, this does not seem to make much sense to me.

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

The problem arises out of the need for a DTD to be specified as part of the XHTML core structure. The same problem exists in XHTML 2 which could be a problem moving forward. What is needed is for XHTML to chuck this dependency and rely solely on namespaces for the purpose of establishing conventions. After all, if an XHTML 2 document is reformulation of HTML in XML, why would it need a DOCTYPE ? If it continues doing so, it could jeopardize its modularity and will not allow for HTML to converge with other XML formats. Since the goal of the XHTML 2 workgroup has been to reinvent HTML, why did they make that decision? This is a problem that needs to be addressed before the full specification actually comes out.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title No convergence. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

While XHTML 2 is indeed a departure from the existing standards instead of being an evolution, it is important to realize that some of the things the workgroup is trying to do is fix old issues and help improve the overall development of the web. While I agree with Zeldman’s assertion that IMG should be deprecated in this version instead of being completely tossed out, I believe that the tag should never have been in HTML in the first place. The argument for an OBJECT tag date back to the early days of the web (circa 1993) when things broke down into two camps: one that wanted a quick and dirty way to show images on the web (the IMG crowd) and the other that looked forward and wanted any type of media to be embedded in a page (the OBJECT crowd). We are now paying for the decisions that were made back then and, much like tables are still in use for layout on most sites instead of being replaced by CSS, we will continue to see IMG tags in code for a very long time.

The next assumption by the anti-XHTML 2 crowd is that XHTML 2 won’t be supported by browsers for a long time to come. However, because browsers have now evolved to the point where properly formatted text can be presented, most modern browsers can already display XHTML 2 without any problems (for an example, just check Sjoerd Visscher’s weblog), as long as a proper DTD is pointed to. This means that once XHTML 2 makes it to recommendation level, then all modern browsers will be able to exploit it. However, I suspect there will be a slow uptake (as there has already been a slow one on the existing XHTML implementation) largely because a lot of developers do not want to have to deal with the rigorousness of XHTML (making sure all tags are closed, making sure not improper characters are inputted, etc…)

The first step in making sure that XHTML 2 will move forward is in ensuring that the browser vendors fix their implementations to conform to the standard. Microsoft’s implementation of the OBJECT is broken and needs to be fixed. It does not meet the standard so it is their responsibility to fix it. The same is true of other browsers that do not render it properly. In the long run, the success or failure of XHTML 2.0 will be based more on whether those things are fixed than on what people feel is right and, much like the fights over improper CSS nowadays, this kind of thing will only happen once the development community pressures browser vendors into fixing their code.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Much Ado About XHTML 2. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.