Web 2.0 Watch

Web 2.0 Expo Buzz – Part 3, Companies to Watch

After leaving a conference my adrenalin is always very high. I’ve taken in so many new ideas in a short period of time that I feel like I’m suffering from information sickness (coined by Don DeLillo in “White Noise”). And yet I am not anxious to see it soon part. I’m eager to incorporate all the data and make sense of it as fast as I can. 

So was the case this past week in San Francisco as a fairly broad community gathered for Web 2.0 Expo. Here’s how I’m making sense of it all in 3 parts.

Part 3 – Companies that are doing interesting things. 

In keeping with the purpose for starting this blog, here are some Web 2.0 companies to watch (I have no affiliation with any of these companies). 

• Sprout (www.sproutbuilder.com) does for Flash what Front Page did for HTML, only better. It brings Flash development to the masses. 

• Beeweeb (http://www.beeweeb.com/mwt/) is a Rome-based engineering and design company that builds mobile applications for large mobile carriers. I’d say they are akin to Ideo but with a very heavy coding pedigree. I shared a lunch table with their president and was amazed with the kinds of things they have already built for mobile phones: mapping, video and music players. 

• Blist (www.blist.com) promised to bring databases to the masses. Their UI is very slick. 

• LiveMesh (www.mesh.com/web20) from Microsoft connects all of your devices (not mobile yet) together so you can easily get at our files. Many people have tried to solve this problem such as WebOS and Groove which is now part of Microsoft. LiveMesh is clearly leveraging features from it. They have not yet made it possible to run applications from any of the devices – that would be a killer feature. 

• BigString (www.bigstring.com) offers self-destructing email, instant messaging and chat rooms. From what I can tell, they do this by converting text to an image which can then be deleted off the server. 

• SpringNote (http://springnote.com/en) comes from Korea. If it was my call I’d position this product to go after the technical documentation market. Take a look and you’ll see why.

Web 2.0 Expo Buzz – Part 2, Ideas

After leaving a conference my adrenalin is always very high. I’ve taken in so many new ideas in a short period of time that I feel like I’m suffering from information sickness (coined by Don DeLillo in “White Noise”). And yet I am not anxious to see it soon part. I’m eager to incorporate all the data and make sense of it as fast as I can.

So was the case this past week in San Francisco as a fairly broad community gathered for Web 2.0 Expo. Here’s how I’m making sense of it all in 3 parts.

Part 2 – Ideas: here are some memes that were spreading around the conference. 

• OpenID protocol eliminates the need to create a new account on every new site or service you signup for. There are many companies subscribing to this idea including AOL, Yahoo, WordPress, Technocrati, Verisign, France Telecom and the pioneer MyOpenId. Every time you use your OpenId to access a site accepting this protocol, the accepting site redirects you to a verification page. For example if I try to login using “openid.aol.com/Anshu”to Springnote.com, Springnote.com will send a verification request to AOL to confirm that I am really the one accessing the site. Read more at: http://janrain.com/openid/ .

•  Open Social API from Google promises to allow any Web site using it to let apps work on their Web site. In other words the benefit for developers is create your app/widget once and run it across all participating social network platforms. It’s very early (released late last year with fanfare and much commentary) but spreading so rapidly that it’s worth keeping up wiht. See this presentation on implementation by Hi5: http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/asset/attachment/2291

•  Twitter is being used in some very interesting ways. One moderator asked the audience to twitter (or is it “tweet”?) him questions for the panel or comments and many did which he then put up on the giant presentation screens. Two other presenters spoke about how Twitter is helping consumers (Comcast, T-mobile) organize and get better customer service. Read more: http://getsatisfaction.com/tmobile/topics/t_mobile_shuts_down_twitter_service_for_good

Web 2.0 Expo Buzz – Part 1, Presentations

After leaving a conference my adrenalin is always very high. I’ve taken in so many new ideas in a short period of time that I feel like I’m suffering from information sickness (coined by Don DeLillo in “White Noise”). And yet I am not anxious to see it soon part. I’m eager to incorporate all the data and make sense of it as fast as I can.

So was the case this past week in San Francisco as a fairly broad community gathered for Web 2.0 Expo.
Here’s how I’m making sense of it all in 3 parts.

 

Part 1 – Presentations worth sitting through.

•  10 years ago page load time was all important. Smart marketers, page designers and HTML coders were obsessed with finding ways to reduce bloat on pages. Well, a decade later the focus is back. Steve Souders (http://www.stevesouders.com) gave a very clear presentation on ways to reduce page load time. You’ll be surprised, as I was, to learn that most of the wait (avg. 70%+ on top 10 sites) happens on the front-end, i.e., during the browser loading elements, not on the backend. He suggested many techniques to have JS loading not prevent other objects from loading in parallel (a big culprit). He has made available 2 tools on his site: YSlow and Cuzillion.

•  After a several years of the paid search alphabet soup (PPC, PPA, SEM) taking top spot in headlines thanks to Google’s intoxicating effects on the media, the ugly cousin, natural or organic search is back. Why ugly? Here’s 4 reasons: 1) it involves more moving parts than just bidding to have your ads listed; 2) it’s a process that never ends; 3) it takes smart marketer who understand their market working with smart Webmasters who understand how search indexing agents read pages; and 4) you can’t outsource it to an agency (to understand why see 1-3). There were multiple presenters talking about search engine optimizing; of particular note is the presentation given by Stephan Spencer (http://www.stephanspencer.com).

 
BTW, I believe most presentations will be made available as a public service at: http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/schedule/proceedings . If you don’t find it there, try emailing the presenters directly.

 

Forrester Predicts Web 2.0 Trends

Forrester's report "Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions for 2008" has been getting some pick up in media outlets. I think the reason is because until now industry analysts have seen Web 2.0 has being primarily the domain of social networks and anyone wanting to jump on the popularity curve for everything the Web 2.0 space implies.  I wouldn't be among those considering it a fad but apparently it hasn't been seen as enterpise-grade by industry pundits (this means many things, among them the popularity of a technology with IT consultancies and CTO magazine).

So it's right on schedule for 2008, 4 years after the term was coined, 1/4 of all enterprises (not sure how that was calculated) will now be implementing Web 2.0 technologies. Such as what? Well the Forrester list includes social networks, RSS and mashups.   The thing that I would change is rather than this being a prediction, it is probably more of a reality - in some sectors. Certainly there are no shortage of corporate blogs, community forums, and RSS feeds at technology companies, from mammoth IBM to Keynote Systems. No comment on other sectors, a quick gander at Web sites will provide the obvious answer.

Any way, these customer facing technologies are here to stay - no news there. On the other hand how enterprises deal with usability, performance, and privacy issues . . .  well, that story is still to be written. 

As is almost always the case, the real money is spent and made after the hype. So if you are trying to make heads or tails of what this could mean for your corporate Web performance, check out this Keynote Webcast; it will give you a framework to start understanding the impact of Web 2.0.

Software As A Service - Riding on AIR?

Online software (a.k.a. Software as a Service or SaaS) sales has increased 21% from 2006 to 2007. Yet it is still a good distance away from being a dominant segment of the market. According to the Gartner Group analyst Ben Pring, SaaS still accounts for only 6% of business software sales, roughly $5.1 billion.

However, the Wall St. Journal recently pointed to trends that show SaaS will be growing significantly over the next year. The successful IPO of NetSuite has escaped the notice of absolutely no one (it helps when Larry Ellison is involved). Toss in companies such as Siebel and SAP who are taking aspects of their traditional software offerings online, and the snowball that is SaaS is picking up some downhill velocity.

According to Pring, It is expected that SaaS will grow rapidly by 2011. The perceived advantages of lower cost and lower equipment costs have him projecting online software sales increasing to 15-18% of all business software sales by 2013.

You might have noticed I said "perceived" advantages, due to the fact that while online software might cost less in the short term (due to lower hardware costs), it may cost more than desktop software over a period of time. Another point of concern is according to a December survey by Forrester Research, only 6% of IT leaders prefer to buy online software. As a side effect, SaaS companies try to sell more to the business-side leaders rather than to IT departments.

At this time, online software is better suited for tasks that are not too complex or require high levels of configurablity, hence businesses looking for supply chain software or complex financials (NetSuite notwithstanding, Wall St. demands might be a bit much for online software) are probably not looking for online software solutions - right now. But desktop alternatives are rapidly becoming, if not a viable option, at least worthy of being in the discussion.

Small and medium businesses, such as city governments wincing at the costs of upgrading or replacing MS-Office, are starting to look for alternatives. At present, these apps are not pushing Microsoft - yet. As Burton Group analyst Guy Creese stated, "At this point, I still think it's a bit early to move to SaaS-based content creation and management. However, I don't think the wait will be long -- by the middle of next year, I think, there will be some viable solutions." Some of those viable solutions could be applications produced by Google (Google Apps), Citrix, and ThinkFree.

Of course, the biggest concern with any SaaS application is that it is only good as long as you are online. Offline...well there's always Solitaire or Minesweeper to kill the frustration.

Enter Adobe and their latest offering, Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a new development environment that allows for data stored on the net to be interchangeable with data on a person's hard drive. An AIR application can mimic the functionality of a web browser without needing a browser. One early adopter is the eBay Desktop, which allows users to use eBay functionality without the browser or checking email constantly. Users will be able to get alerts and run searches. AIR is also expected to add functionality to web applications that we normally expect on the desktop such as drag and drop, system notifications, and file system access.   

On Monday, Adobe will formally introduce some of new hybrid desktop-online applications that are already using AIR, among them the Nasdaq and AOL. The implications are immense. If AIR is fused into a Google Apps for example, then one would think that Microsoft and their online offering Silverline will have to up the ante.

All of this means potentially good things for small and medium sized businesses. Consider the IT manager of the city of Stratford, CT David Wright. Like many a city, Stratford needs a software upgrade, but the town isn't exactly flush with cash. But the advances in SaaS, may provide an alternative. "The longer I can put off upgrading to Office 2007, the more options I'll have... [if Google Apps or its competitors become a decent option soon], that could work out well for us."

Next week, I'll be back with more on SaaS.

S3: Amazon at a Crossroad?

We started the week with a Blackberry Blackout.

We're ending it with a S3 Suspension (ok, I might have overreached in the name of alliteration).

Amazon's touted Web 2.0 application known as Simple Storage Service (S3), is a web services interface which allows for the easy storage and retrieval of any amount of data from the web at anytime. Until this week, it had proved to be a godsend for small businesses, using cloud computing to allow them the ability to utilize the same data storage method that Amazon itself used. Even sweeter for developers, S3 had a unblemished reputation for reliability.

Until today. S3 has been down since approximately 7:30 this morning, Eastern time. The outage hit several startup companies that handle their data storage and messaging through S3, among these companies, Twitter (which only uses S3 to store data), SmugMug, Adaptive Blue caught it on the jaw.

Amazon claims they fixed the problem within two hours, but there still seemed to be some issues this afternoon. I could comment further, but consider this comment on the S3 site:

"I have to add a major ME TOO here. My business is effectively closed right now because Amazon did something wrong. I'll have to reconsider using the service now."

It is worth noting that some people feel that Amazon should be cut some slack as this is the first major glitch in S3 since it came on line a year ago. Perhaps. But when small/startup businesses are relying on you for all of their data, fairly or not, the margin of error is small. Cloud computing is on trial, and Amazon will be graded not only on their response time in fixing the problem but also:

1. How forthright they are in the highlighting the causes of the outage.
2. What they will do in terms of redundancy to allow for seamless disaster recovery the next time a glitch occurs. And you know it will.

Bill Gates checks out of The Hotel Facebook...

Here I was ready to write a column on another topic that has been burning a hole in me, and Facebook just has to screw it up.

By now, you probably heard that Bill Gates is taking a hiatus from his Facebook page. Understandable. The poor guy set up a page and now has 8,000 people - yes, eight thousand - who have sent him requests for friendship on Facebook. Who says a man can't have too many friends? At least we have a good idea that the website is performing well. That type of love can crash a server, and there were no significant hiccups.

Ah, but here comes the fun part - Bill can't exactly delete his account. In fact, the New York Times showed that deleting an account on Facebook is, as one frustrated customer said, "[Facebook] is like the Hotel California, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

More than a few users have found that in order to truly delete your account, all data must be removed manually, and then pestering Facebook customer service may not be a bad idea. You see, Facebook says the following in its Terms Of Use:

''You may remove your user content from the site at any time" but also that ''...the company may retain archived copies of your user content", which means that you may unknowingly leave an electronic footprint when leaving Facebook "for good".

Since the Ultimate Worm programs that will remove all records of you on The Web (written about in many a sci-fi book) doesn't exist yet (to the best of my knowledge), users wishing to completely delete their Facebook presence should check out this site.

Facebook has responded, but you have to dig into their Help section under "Privacy", where they say, "If you would like your account deleted, please contact us using the form at the bottom of the page and confirm your request in the text box."

Forgive me for asking a dumb question, but why not simply give the user a button saying "Delete My Account", with a couple of "Are you really sure?" decision boxes? Is that too darn practical?

And in light of my previous post, will Facebook ever "get it"?

LinkedIn vs Facebook: Score two for LinkedIn

Whom to choose?

LinkedIn?

Or Facebook?

If you believe in the zero sum game, then we may want to score a pair for LinkedIn in the battle royal between the two social networking sites.

With more users and momentum, Facebook looked like the odds-on favorite for adults, with a more mature sensibility than MySpace. Facebook holds 85% of the college market, and nearly 80% of their audience of almost 40 million users are under the age of 35. That is serious leverage of course. Then there are the business professionals who are willing to leave LinkedIn and to use Facebook for their professional networking. Anecdotal evidence at this time, but consider the case of Jeff Pulver, founder and chairperson of Von, who says "Why use a static site where the fun stops at the profile?" Why indeed?

Seems that LinkedIn was listening. More on that later...

LinkedIn has 17 million members, a 189% increase in users from October 2006 thru October 2007, and allegedly adding 1.1 million users a month. I say allegedly only because on my LinkedIn page. However my personal LinkedIn page listed 25,000 people joining each week, which works out to 100,000 new users a month. However, I noticed that I can not find that link anymore, and my personal network has grown by nearly 8,000 people since January 20, which is still impressive.

And then in the last month, two things have happened. First, Facebook gave LinkedIn some help.

The first problem came with Facebook's News Feeds and mini-Feeds, embedded into user's pages, which would give a user the ability to look at what the user's friends are doing, without actually having to click on the friend's web page. Some Facebook users called this "creepy", he backlash among the students was so pronounced a one day Facebook boycott was called for.

What is interesting, and should have been instructive about the News Feed crisis, is that the information that it was pulling can be gotten by a user with a small amount of work. No truly personal information seemed to be getting transmitted. There does seem to be limits on what users want transmitted.

All of which makes the Beacon crisis truly inexplicable.

Given the problem they had the with NewsFeeds/miniFeeds issue, one would think that in 2008, in the shadow of the Patriot Act, constant threats to personal privacy, identity theft, et al, one would think that security of information would be foremost in the mind of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Even on a social networking site, the most narcissistic user will not blindly give up all access of their personal information.

Alas, Facebook dropped the ball - badly. The Facebook Beacon feature did not initially allow for user control, a problem that created a PR nightmare. Faced with allegations ranging from deceptiveness to out and out invasion of privacy, Zuckerberg announced that he would make Beacon an "opt-in" option rather than "opt-out".

Facebook is clearly taking a beating – hyperbole aside, relinquishment of personal privacy has to remain the option of the user, not the company. The Beacon backlash has already caused Coke-Cola to pull back.

“We have adopted a bit of a ‘wait and see’ as far as what we are going to do with Beacon because we are not sure how consumers are going to respond,” said Carol Kruse, Coke’s vice president of global interactive marketing...“I, like you, certainly understood that it would be opt-in...

Meanwhile, LinkedIn was clearly listening to users.

LinkedIn annouced an API answer to Facebook's Platform with InApps (short for Intelligent Applications). InApps will allow for 1) a group of productivity applications to be developed for LinkedIn, and 2) Allow for the porting of LinkedIn to other applications. Already in place is the alliance between LinkedIn and Business Week. The idea being that a user can read a Business Week article on Keynote Systems, and (assuming that the LinkedIn application is activated) the Keynote contacts that you have in LinkedIn will appear.

Add in a few new features such as the following:

1. The ability to post your picture on LinkedIn means a more personal touch for LinkedIn users.
2. The new JobsInsider toolbar that allows IE or Firefox users to search LinkedIn jobs from the browser at anytime.
3. The new Outlook toolbar that allows a user to update a contact list from Outlook, and seamlessly port in Outlook contacts.
4. Users can now pull in industry-relevant news reports.

I believe LinkedIn has made serious strides in answering the concerns of current and potential users, combined with the missteps by Facebook, I have to believe that LinkedIn has closed the gap with Facebook.

Having said all of the above, I do not believe that the Facebook/LinkedIn clash has to be a zero-sum endeavor. I'm not the type of guy who wants his social life that close to his business life. I can just see a business contact reading my Facebook page and noting a not-so-businesslike picture from college the day before we conduct business.

I know I am far from alone in saying the following: Instead of choosing between the two, it can be Facebook AND LinkedIn for some people.

But for others, at this time, LinkedIn is looking better.

When was the last time you PAID for a browser?

I just did, I spent 500 Wii points for the Opera browser (http://www.opera.com/products/devices/nintendo/), for those of you new to this currency it translates to $5/- USD. Sadly for those folks who ended up buying their Wii after July 2007, the browser is no longer free.

So far my surfing has been primarily to watch ‘Youtube’ (I could not play the streams on Veoh or metacafe) videos from the comfort of my couch with the Wiimote controller, compose an e-mail and other light weight tasks. It did freeze once and had to rebooted to get it up and running again. It could be related to some of the streaming content I was trying to watch. With its small memory (512 MB) and an older flash version (version 7) on Opera, my Web surfing will be limited to smaller flash videos that is until I have enough time to wade through over 840 posts on “How to upgrade the Wii memory” on Yahoo! answers

Clearly most Web Sites aren’t geared for their Wii users and the long delay in getting these consoles suggests that the companies have plenty of time to catch up (Only ~ 20 million Wii sold, of which only ~8 million are in US source http://www.vgchartz.com/). That is assuming there are people who buy Wii and get bored (exhausted ? oh many for sure) of their games to go online.

With Wii’s growing social network and user base, it will not be too long before the user wants to check out the Second life avatar of his buddy’s Mii (the Wii Avatar for the uninitiated)

Are you optimized for different browsers?

Recently when Gigaom published its visitor stats - and Om made the following observation:

You like Firefox to a degree that far exceeds the general Internet population. According to Google Analytics, 47 percent of our visits this year were made through Firefox, while 40.1 percent were made through Internet Explorer. As for the rest, 8.32 percent of our visits came through Safari, 1.69 percent through Opera, and 1.59 percent through Mozilla. Only 3.31 percent of visits were made via dial-up connections. …...

While GigaOm’s pattern as OM points out is not representative of the general internet users, the latter still prefer to use IE over 76% of the time, the rest shared by Firefox, Safari and other browsers-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers, It was interesting to note that Om analyzed which browsers were being used to access the site.

If you wonder why it matters? The short answer lies in the fact that if you are monetizing your site and your site’s performance is tuned only for a specific browser, but the majority of your user base uses a different browser to access your site, you risk losing your customers if the performance is poor. In GigaOm’s case it looks like it should be concerned about users of Firefox, Internet Explore and to some extent even Safari.

To study how major portals treat users of different browsers, I conducted a study with Per-Anders Rangsjö, a colleague of mine based in Keynote’s Stockholm office. Our aim was to find out the end user experience of using different browsers for e-commerce. We selected several popular e-commerce sites and portals and noted the performance of the sites when accessed by Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari and Opera. We used Keynote’s Application Perspective® for its ability to emulate different browser behavior and studied these sites for 2 weeks (November 26 – December 10). We used user-agent strings the popular means to identify browsers visiting a site, more on this article in Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent.

Some of the highlights of this study are captured in the graphs below, one shows the performance of a major online retailer to different browsers and another figure shows the first byte download time (the response time for the first byte of the data to arrive – generally considered a good benchmark for the performance) for same portal. We have also included a site that was optimized for all the browsers (requires further analysis of the individual elements) in the study.

This graph above shows the performance (against time) of a leading online retailer’s website to different browsers over a period of time. As seen from this image it becomes very clear that Web sites have to take into consideration their performances with major browsers. In this particular case the users of Opera & Safari browsers get a much better performance than IE 7 or Firefox. This in spite of the fact that majority of the online consumers use these two browsers predominantly.

The figure below shows the performance as it relates to the first byte download time for each of the browsers.

The figure below shows how a well balanced site (i.e a site that is optimized for all major browsers) behaves. The performance remains constant across different browsers. It could also be argued that this particular site did not do any browser based optimization (i.e it served same content for any browser type) but the strong perfomance (mostly below 0.4 seconds) suggests that site performance was a big consideration in its design.

Our initial observations show that majority of the Web sites in this study are not currently optimized for all browsers and even if they are it seems more based on the functionality rather than on the performance (or a combination of both), but it is important to note that Web sites need to tune their performance only after a careful study of their users. There is no incentive in spending cycles to improve the site for browsers that don’t constitute a substantial user base.

We have masked the names of the portal under study for this blog, we might release more details as we collect more results. We plan to refine our methodology to analyze the individual CSS elements downloaded for each browser and JavaScript elements delivered from the server to each browser version and finally compare the performance to a real browser using our flagship product – Transaction perspective. So keep a track of this blog for some interesting information on this topic.