Web 2.0 Watch

Times Reader 2.0 - the Newspaper Reloaded

On May 12th The New York Times launched Times Reader 2.0 ("TR2"), a cross-OS-platform newspaper reader powered by something called Adobe AIR, a still relatively new product on the Web 2.0 scene. Over Memorial Day weekend I grabbed a cup of coffee, kicked up my heels, downloaded the 2.5MB file and signed up. My skepticism quickly melted away.

Don’t be fooled by the understated UI when TR2 first launches.  You’ll see a listing of newspaper sections on the left and content for the first page on the right. It’s cleaner than a Web page (no animated banners or ad overlays to close) but you would be excused if at this point you yawned.  Things will start to come into focus once you start browsing.

Speed is the first thing that made me sit upright as I flipped through the articles.  There’s no waiting for pages to load. That’s because all the content loads when you first launch TR2. I powered up and went for a refill.  And that means you can read the entire paper offline. Pretty cool for commuters or those running from place to place who can’t find a wireless network signal or live port (never mind that business of bringing your own cable). By the way, cutting the tether to the Internet yet creating a rich offline experience is made possible by Adobe Air (curious given its name).

I rediscovered browsing with a feature that goes by the same name. TR2 lays out each newspaper page as a readable tile (not just a thumbnail) allowing you to browse up/down through sections or left/right within the section.It’s similar to the new Palm Pre “activity cards” analogy that allows you to flip through applications quickly.  With the Times Reader, scanning through an entire paper is faster than flipping through the broadsheets.

There’s peace of mind that comes with the Reader in knowing where you are. It’s smart enough to let you read through a 4 page article and then with 1 click take you back to the listing of articles that you started from. You don’t have to click back 4 times to ensure you’ll get back to where you started.  Flipping through images is in-context, you won’t leave the article.

Your eyes will thank you. This is thanks to something called Text Layout Framework that gives you print quality rendering and resizing which not only addresses the past limitations of text in Flash but goes well beyond CSS and HTML. You don’t have to fiddle around with browser text zooming anymore which in any case was hardly used because of the layout distortion it caused on a Web page.

Your forefinger will thank you too.  You can forget about the mouse, at least while browsing the TR2.  I use a ThinkPad which conveniently locates up/down and left/right keys on the bottom right – and it’s even easier with a tablet PC as my wife reminded me. That’s all you’ll need to see those pages whosh by. Go ahead, give the pinkie some exercise at the keyboard.

But what about the latest news? The Times Reader has thought of that too. When you’re connected to the Internet, the reader automatically fetches new content – including videos.  In fact you can set the frequency at which you want to fetch updates.

The blazing fast performance, easy-on-eyes fonts and layout, seamless video playback, regular updates and 7-day archive make the Times Reader a fantastic way to read The New York Times on your computer. TR2 is a significant improvement over reading the paper on the Web which is important given that it’s a subscription product. And while it’s not for those that only care about headlines, The New York Times has never really been for the short attention span crowd.

All this and your carbon footprint is zero. With Times Reader 2.0, say sayonara to taking your beloved print edition to the recycling curb.

 

Adobe Cloud Acrobat-ics

Adobe’s offering to the SaaS (Software As A Service) world is Acrobat.com, not to be confused with the famous document software that has been around for years. Acrobat.com is a suite of products offered that include Buzzword for word processing, and Connect Now for collaboration work.

The first thing I noticed was a very clean UI reminiscent of the iPod/iPhone juggernaut, which admittedly goes a long way with me. There are four buttons to get where you are going. To launch a document, click on Buzzword. Buzzword has full word processing capabilities; you can create and edit a document, then share with others. Microsoft Word docs can be opened from Buzzword, and saved as such. However that part isn’t very intuitive. You have to use Export a file to save to your hard drive, rather than Save As… which merely allows a user to change the name of their file.

Performance on the Beta site was snappy. Uploads of existing Word files (such as my weekly column) were great. However I was less than thrilled by the fact that my Word doc saved in the commonplace Arial font, did not open in Arial. In fact, that font was nowhere to be found, only seven fonts are available. But my file did look good in Acrobat. When saving my file back to the hard drive, I lost some of my fancy formatting. If you're like me, you won't appreciate losing your handiwork, not to mention the time it took to make your docs snazzy.

Perhaps the final version will contain some of the more common fonts, but it's good practice to notify the user that their document will open in a slightly different format.

Another option is Save PDF, which allows users to save their docs in the ubiquitous PDF format. You can pull a file from the hard drive or from the cloud and convert to PDF. Editing a PDF file is another matter, and you must use the conventional Acrobat software to do so. 

One icon that is always available is the Meet icon, which sends a Connect Now request, the other Twin Peak of Acrobat.com. Connect Now allows the you to setup meetings, mail URLs to additional participants and allows a certain amount of screen control. The views differ depending on your classification; there are 3 to choose from: "host", "participant" or "audience", all of which can be controlled by the host. All docs can be shared at any time, complete with annotations. Other nifty features are Whiteboard and Webcam, which allows for full videoconferencing.

Performance was acceptable when I added a couple of friends and webcams, but could be quicker. Latency was acceptable. However, loading a PowerPoint (25 slides) file for sharing with others took nearly 5 minutes.

I find it very bothersome that the main menu is not accessible once you leave it. In other words, I cannot go from Buzzword to Share PDF unless I open the root webpage. Once I’m in Meeting mode, I cannot open Buzzword to edit in one or two clicks. Resizing the Meet window is impossible, it is either all the way open or minimized.

Overall, I like the look and feel of Acrobat a good deal - never underestimate the power of a clean interface to get users hooked. Buzzword should match up well against Google Apps, and the web conferencing option has the potential to be a staple of cloud conferencing.  But the inability to jump between segments of Acrobat is glaring, and the performance in uploading large files is a source of concern that needs to be addressed in the beta product.  With competing products already out there, end-to-end performance will be a key factor in deciding whether Acrobat.com can attract a new generation to its way of collaboration. 

Gentlemen and Ladies! Start Your Engines! It's FastWebRace.com

Some of my colleagues at Keynote have come up with a pretty cool contest - called the Fast Web Race, at http://www.fastwebrace.com. The idea is that you should submit web sites that are way slow, and the top 5 sites that show the greatest potential in speeding up will win. Our panel will select 5 entries that they think are compelling examples of Web performance bottlenecks. If you are one of the winners, you will get a free conference pass to the O'Reilly Velocity conference, and a free appraisal by our Web Performance gurus. I would submit my personal web site, but they already quoted me the "no friends and family" rule. See http://www.fastwebrace.com.

Get ready for your stress test

New York Times' Bits column reported something remarkable that might eclipse all previously documented records for online business growth. David has overtaken Goliath - in record time.

David is Bit.ly and Goliath? TinyURL. If you use Twitter you know that both of these services offer a way to shorten URL length, critical when you're trying to maximize 140 characters on Twitter.

On Twitter TinyURL apparently made up 75 percent of shared links and Bit.ly, 13 percent in late March. One month later the new %'s are 46 for Bit.ly and 44 for TinyURL. 

One big cause for this turn of fate is apparently the switch Twitter made in its default link shortener from TinyURL to Bit.ly.  The speculation is that this happened because of outages at TinyURL.

With so many competing services, the new battleground for Web 2.0 isn't eyeballs, it's performance. More than one company has come to understand this fact - some the hard way. If you fail the stress test, it might be the end of your business (unless you're a bank, but that's another story).

Twitter, in what has become Web convention, relies on a Web ecosystem to deliver its popular micro-blogging service.  So it can't improve its own performance unless it does a full house cleaning. (BTW, to see how your favorite social networking site compares, you can track weekly performance via the Social Networking Performance Index from Keynote Competitive Research; 1 week sample shown here.)

After more than a decade of the existence of the commercial Web, performance can't be taken for granted.  We've come a long way from the sputtering and wheezing days of dial-up, but today's Web complexity is not an issue that can be solved with faster last mile access.  For user-generated content sites like Twitter or MySpace,  content is constantly changing, site load is unpredictable and there's no guarantee on partner performance.

Web 2.0 has meant more Web site programming complexity, more interlinking parts and partners, and richer content. It is our faster broadband surfing speed that has given license to build more robust Web sites.  And our favorite Web sites have already sopped up the speed we got from our DSL and cable lines. Now what? Just moving to a cloud computing vendor is not enough, see for yourself next time you're on Twitter.

Realizing the problem, the industry is not standing still. This summer there are 2 events focused on improving Web performance. Keynote Live! is a free event we're putting on, it starts on June 22nd. Immediately after that is the 2nd annual O'Reilly Velocity conference. Both are located at the San Jose Fairmont.  And your Keynote Live! registration qualifies you for a nice discount to Velocity.

Go into your stress test prepared to pass. You've got 2 great opportunities to prepare, mark your calendars: June 22-24, San Jose, California.

Nation-building via the cloud

By now I'm sure some of you heard about the trip to Iraq taken by several "new media" companies, among them Google, TypePad, AT&T, and Twitter in an attempt to use Web 2.0 (or new media if you prefer) to help rebuild the infrastructure of the war-torn country.

While it is clear that the mission was rewarding for the executives who traveled to Iraq and illuminating for many of the Iraqis, it may not be obvious how the lessons translate for the rest of us. You don't have to be rebuilding your company from scratch to glean some important lessons.

1. Don't be ashamed of using the cloud. In Iraq, Automatic executive Raanan Bar-Cohen noted that Iraqi admins were embarrassed to admit that they were using Yahoo and Gmail instead of an internal server farm, which was the old status quo. The lack of system resources and the expense of setting up enterprise mail servers forced the Iraqi techs to the cloud, and it was working well. The embarrassment faded when the US executives applauded the initiative and the savings.
2. If time is money, cloud services can save you a ton. Eli Lilly is utilizing a cloud services model to get a web server up in three minutes (yes, minutes) instead of the seven and one half weeks it took in the past to deploy a server. Linux cluster deployment time has dropped from three months to a stunning five minutes. Imagine the cost savings in labor time alone. Lilly is using multiple cloud services (among them Amazon) to provide high-performance computing for its scientists, with talk of external collaboration in the future.
3. Scalable computing will benefit small organizations as much as larger ones. Smaller companies and government organizations such as the Library Of Congress are using cloud tools to streamline operations and save money. Many of these companies are using Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service for their scalable computing.

Several of the executives are Twittering their observations of the mission on a regular basis. I found some really interesting commentary from Raanan Bar-Cohen of Automatic (the makers of WordPress) that he posted to his website. Among his observations:

• Can you here me here? - Almost everyone in Iraq has a cell phone.However, since coverage is spotty between the three networks, many people carry two cellphones to ensure that they have coverage wherever they are. Tightening the loopholes in service is a priority, because...
• Heavy SMS service means opportunity. Since Iraq lacks a strong broadband infrastructure (it costs $400/month to use satellite there - I will not complain about my internet service for at least a month), SMS and devices that support SMS can serve as a partial bridge that will offset the fact that only 5% of Iraqis have home access.  In case you missed it, SMS is the fastest growing segment of mobile revenue.

For more impressions about the trip see the interview Twitter co-founder and evangelist (of Twitter that is) Jack Dorsey did with CNN about what the delegation saw.

Iraq strikes me as a unique opportunity - a sort of petri dish for cloud applications if you will. And it's an opportunity for tech to shine when it matters most. 

Putting Flex into SaaS

We have just released our new FlexUse account type for our SaaS Web monitoring products. Now, account management and subscription service enhancements may not seem like the exciting stuff of Silicon Valley legend but think about how many other B2B examples you can come up with that offer software services on-tap. Not many. 

Imagine a service where you can turn up the tap to get more and can mix in more products and servcies as you please. That’s FlexUse.

Since we started in 1995 our business model has always been SaaS (even before that term was coined).  Customers have accessed our services via an online portal to view their Web performance measurements.  Fast forward to the present day and with FlexUse customers can do a whole lot more, still from just one single portal:

• Review current, past and projected spending.  No more rifling through past invoices. No more guessing if this month is on-budget.

• A single pane shows cost across all Keynote Web testing & monitoring services.  How novel, right?  Sad but true.

• We’ve become accustomed to reviewing our own bills online and even searching for specific transactions.  But the B2B world has been slow in catching up. With FlexUse costs are displayed down to basic components including individual measurements. If you want to roll-up costs, that’s available too. The point is you now have a choice and all the information at your fingertips.

• Imagine if you could price out new services before you bought them.  That would certainly help you manage your IT budget.  Well we’re now offering that.  Prior to deploying any new Web monitoring service on our global network, price it out via the FlexUse built-in cost calculator.

• Your Web sites are constantly changing and you’d like to move fast to make sure you can monitor their performance.  Sometimes that means you’d just like to buy what you need and start the service on your own.  With FlexUse you can.provision new monitoring services on-demand, instantly, when you want.

To successfully deliver FlexUse requires bridging multiple products with back-end systems, combined with a company culture of transparency and openness. We at Keynote live and breathe SaaS and have now taken the next step. We hope you appreciate what we’ve done with the release of the new FlexUse account.