My previous post was a response to Gartner’s prediction last month that social networking would replace email as the “primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.” In it, I named some properties that would need to be held by any social networking system that would successfully replace email.

• Ease of use
• Ubiquity across devices
• Platform, service and infrastructure independence

My argument boiled down to the following statement:

Email has succeeded because it’s open, standard and decentralized; for social networks to replace it, they must also be open, standard and decentralized.

Email is useful because just about everybody has an email address. I can get in touch with my clients in London, my friends here in Oxford or my grandfather in Austin, Texas, with equal ease, even though all of them are using different infrastructure and software provided by different companies. I use Gmail, but there doesn’t need to be any kind of formal agreement between Google and whoever’s providing my grandfather’s email, say. It just works; nobody owns email as a communications method, and anyone can set up an email server. The same is true with websites: anyone can set one up, and nobody owns the web.

For social communications to be as popular and ubiquitous as email, there must be one social web, and it must be owned by nobody. That means that each socially-aware site or application must implement the same social communication standards.

The best standards aren’t dictated: they evolve through common usage. If you look at HTTP (the protocol that the web relies on), SMTP (one of the protocols behind email) and file formats like RSS and HTML, the common thread behind them is that they’re simple. It turns out that through excellent work at companies like Google, Plaxo, SixApart, Twitter, JanRain and – perhaps incredibly – JPMorgan Chase & co, we already have a number of technologies that collectively embody the properties I listed above.

Notes and server architecture for one possible social web

These are my ideas about how these standards might be used. These aren’t intended as replacements for existing social networking platforms or services; rather, they could easily be added as additional features both to those and to many other types of application. The ability to share isn’t a uniquely required feature of social networking software – think about its usefulness in applications like Word or Google Docs, for example.

With email, you use a software client (Outlook, say, or the Gmail web interface) that speaks to an email server which does the hard business of sending and receiving messages to and from the wider Internet. Here, I will be describing a system where everyone has their own node on the social web, which effectively acts as a client and server. Mine might be here at benwerd.com, for example. It’s my website – my profile on the social web – and it’s where I both send social communications. That’s the server side. However, it also acts as the client when I’m accessing resources stored on other peoples’ servers.

Establishing connections and granting permissions

Let’s say I want to make a resource available to my clients. With email, I’d send them each a separate copy. This is both insecure and inefficient: I have no control over what happens to that copy, and each time I send it I create a new version. With some back-and-forth, there could easily be ten or twenty individual copies of a document floating around. (I often bounce software specifications – typically Word documents – around with my clients, and this is something that happens to me regularly. Google Docs is probably a better solution, but not everybody has a Google account.)

With the social web, only one version needs to exist, which I own. If my clients have established a connection with me, I can restrict that resource so that only they may see it. The tricky bit is that in order to know if it’s really them, they must be authenticated in some way.

In monolithic systems like Facebook, where everyone uses the same website, that’s easy: my client must be logged in, and we must have established a friend connection. In a decentralized system, that’s a much harder problem, but not insurmountable. Two technologies will help us:

• OpenID: the open, decentralized authentication standard, which currently uses a website address as a kind of universal username
• OAuth: an open protocol that “allows users to share their private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their username and password.” OAuth provides a secret token to applications that they can use to access authenticated services and resources behind the scenes

Specifically, we’ll need OpenID Connect (or, until that’s up and running, the OpenID / OAuth hybrid protocol), because we’ll be using OpenID to authenticate, OAuth to power our decentralized access permissions, and a number of other protocols and endpoints along the way. It’s much neater if these are all established at once.

Making friends and getting updates

The process would work in the following way. Let’s say I want to make a connection with my friend Marcus Povey.

1. I visit his site, and see that he is displaying a “connect to me” icon, indicating that it is a node on the social web. Later on, perhaps my browser would detect that this was a social web node in the same way that most browsers detect RSS feeds today, and light up an icon. Chris Messina has started a five part series on the browser as a social agent, which is worth a read.
2. Either way, I click on “connect to me”. Marcus’s site prompts me for the address of my profile, which I enter. (Later on, my browser does this bit for me.)
3. My profile address is an OpenID, and through the authentication process my social web node receives an OAuth token from him. No further authentication is required.
4. On his social web node dashboard, Marcus sees that I’ve established a connection with him. He can ignore it, in which case nothing happens, or he can mark me as a friend (or any other arbitrary designation, which could be unique to the software he’s using).
5. My social web node periodically checks for activity updates from Marcus’s, signing each request with that OAuth token so it knows who I am. This may be at my direct request; through repeated polling, RSS-style; or the update may be pushed to me through a PubSubHubbub ping.
6. Depending on the assignation he’s given me, Marcus’s node either responds with just a feed of public activity (if he’s ignored the request), or with additional activity he’s allowed me to see, in Activity Streams format.
7. Marcus can change my assignation or withdraw my OAuth token at any time from his dashboard.

Embedded content and interacting directly on other social web nodes

Activity Streams is based on Atom, so content for items like blog posts (and resources like photos, using Atom Media) can be embedded directly in the activity feed. (Rob Dolin from Windows Live has some great examples.)

However, not all content is standard enough to be embeddable. In those cases, I can simply click through from Marcus’s activity update to his site, possibly log in again using OpenID, and interact with the content there. Additionally, by allowing users to log directly into his site via OpenID, Marcus can show selected people restricted content even if they don’t have the full range of social web software.

Friends lists and commenting

Further standards help us add extra functionality. If Marcus gives me permission, I might be able to download his contacts via Portable Contacts. Salmon is a protocol for commenting on distributed resources and allowing those comments to find their way upstream to the original, which is compatible with Activity Streams. Using this, I might be able to comment on Marcus’s activity items from within my dashboard and have them show up in his. Through this mechanism, all his friends could have a conversation on his activity stream items.

Reliability

So far, so good: we have a simple technological basis for permissive social communications. But if the social web is really going to replace email, we have to address one of the most important features for enterprise users: reliability. Businesses will not accept their critical communications being subject to fail whales.

In my next post, then, I’ll discuss person-to-person messaging and the thorny issue of guaranteed delivery.

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The analysis firm Gartner just released five key predictions for social software:

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
2. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.
3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.
4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.
5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

Social networks replacing email. Really?

I broadly agree with all of these, but that first prediction needs a little more analysis. Let’s think about why email has succeeded:

• Ease of use
• Ubiquity across devices
• Platform, service and infrastructure independence

I access email from my Dell PC, my iPhone, and have in the past used Blackberry phones, Macs, Linux boxes, etc, all the way down to Windows 3.1, using a combination of software that’s included Eudora, Thunderbird, Phoenix, Turnpike, and many more. Right now I use a combination of GMail, Google Apps and self-hosted email addresses; in the past I’ve used Microsoft Exchange in various guises, Yahoo Mail, and so on. No matter which provider or hardware I used, I could email anyone else with an email address, no matter which provider or hardware they used. Email is a completely open, interoperable standard.

Social networking is anything but an open, interoperable standard. If you use Facebook, you can communicate with other people on Facebook, full stop. Even networks based on open source solutions like Elgg are essentially social islands.

What needs to be done?

I strongly believe that social messaging can be significantly more useful to both enterprises and individuals than standard email. Proof-of-concept applications like Google Wave are beginning to show the way: you can make resources available to whoever needs to see them, rather than the current, inherently insecure practice of making copies and sending them out. Whereas email takes inspiration from letters and faxes, the social messaging paradigm is based more closely around conference calls and conversations.

Nonetheless, in a business situation, you need to be reasonably certain your message is going to reach the recipient, and the current platform constraints – only being able to message someone using the same site as you – are untenable. Let’s look again at those email success factors:

• Ease of use
• Ubiquity across devices
• Platform, service and infrastructure independence

Social networks do currently have ease of use. They may approach near-ubiquity across devices only if they create a developer ecosystem around their proprietary APIs, as Twitter has done, but this requires a lot of faith in a single third-party service.

No, I think it comes down to one principle:

Email has succeeded because it’s open, standard and decentralized; for social networks to replace it, they must also be open, standard and decentralized.

Next: real world, technical approaches to this that can be implemented today.

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My sister is a singer-songwriter. Her songs are great, and you can find them in the usual locations: MySpace Music, Last.fm and Facebook. Interestingly, though, she’s decided there are different purposes to each:

• Her Last.fm page contains more polished recordings.
• Facebook has those too, but also contains more rough-and-ready demos, ideas and experiments; it’s also updated the most, probably because she spends more time on it than on any other site.
• The MySpace page seems to exist because you’re expected to have one.

I wonder how common this is? Any other musicians care to comment? Is there one best place to promote yourself as an independent musician?

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This is inspired by the iBooks launch, but it’s applicable to any ereader that uses the ePub format. (Or, indeed, it could use any ebook format – MobiPocket, Kindle, DAISY, etc.)

A podcast is just an RSS feed with a file enclosure – part of the RSS standard – that points to an MP3 file. Similarly, video podcasts point to video files. An obvious evolution, then, is the pubcast: periodical publications delivered through RSS feeds.

Free publication subscriptions

In the free case, a user would simply subscribe to a public pubcast feed with a compatible reader. The reader software would check regularly for updates, and new publications would be downloaded and fed into the user’s ereader software on release. Easy.

Paid publication subscriptions

In the case of paid publications, there are two options:

An authenticated pubcast feed. When you subscribe to a publication, you get an address to an RSS feed that requires a username and password to download content. (Gmail is an example of an application which already does this.) This authentication ensures that only paid subscribers can access the file, but you could go a step further and watermark the publications themselves.

Activation within the ebook file. The RSS feed itself is public, but each downloaded publication could require an access code to read. This would open the door for public feeds of paid journals, where users could buy each issue individually to read.

Making subscriptions an open standard

Either way, this approach would allow any ereader using any compatible software solution to subscribe to periodicals. It could be used for newspapers, magazines, journals, zines, or new kinds of periodical; they could be hosted anywhere and, in the case of paid content, use any payment provider. I love reading, but dislike monopolies, so this is something I’d like to see.

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If you pay any attention at all to the tech press, you’re probably sick to death of the iPad, Apple’s announced tablet device. I’m posting about it anyway, because there are two things that haven’t been discussed enough, which I think deserve a mention.

One: this isn’t a device for the tech community. I think Rafe Colburn hits it on the head:

It’s just an iPod Touch with a big screen, but that’s all that many people need from a computer. You can use it to surf the Web, read email, listen to music, watch video, or compose documents. That’s the personal computer use case for many people. And I think a lot of people are going to buy them.

He goes on to discuss the locked-down nature of the device, which I agree is a setback that may have a profound impact on the consumer computing industry. (On the other hand, as Yehuda Katz argues, this is a major win for standards-based web applications.)

Two: for me, the big news wasn’t the iPad at all. It was iBooks: Apple’s new iTunes-like store for ebooks. You may remember that iTunes pretty much revolutionized how we buy music, and this is the same; the books are stored in the open ePub standard, so they’ll play with other ereaders, and the experience is seamless. (You almost certainly won’t need an iPad to buy from iBooks.)

Mashable notes that some big players are on board:

iBooks is backed by big-time launch partners Penguin, Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Hachette, all publishing powerhouses in their own rights.

You can think about the iPad as a kind of $499 catwalk model, that other devices will slowly emulate over the next couple of years. But iBooks? That’s a store that anyone will be able to use right away, which just might change the publishing industry forever.

Photo by kennymatic, released under a Creative Commons license.

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Going out and checking in

I’ve been using Foursquare quite a bit lately (here’s my profile). There’s a lot to be impressed by: not least the level of mobile integration. Foursquare doesn’t make much sense if you’re sitting at your desk, so it’s far easier to see where your friends are and check into a new location from the mobile app.

The way it promotes participation is even more interesting. The designers decided that just seeing where your friends were, and getting personalized travel tips, weren’t enough. You gain points – the same kind you get in Sonic the Hedgehog, say – for checking in at a location, exploring new places and telling the app about venues it’s never seen before. In turn, the points lead to badges, and there’s a weekly leaderboard for the top scorers among your friends. There’s no real tangible value to any of this, but you feel good about joining in. As a result, Foursquare is hugely addictive.

Open source participation

Over on Twitter, I asked:

Could the game dynamics used by apps like Foursquare be harnessed to make a more participative open source community?

Open source projects depend on contributions from their communities. Getting people to participate can be difficult; although many people will join in because it scratches some kind of itch, moral incentives like a place in the credits help. However, adding these kinds of game dynamics over the top could provide an extra push. Currently, the only quantifiable open source contributions are source code patches, and any software project has a lot more going on; this would provide an opportunity to quantify other, equally useful forms of participation.

Game dynamics in the enterprise

Graeme Hunter pointed out to me that this model wouldn’t solely be useful for open source. An internal project communications framework that also incorporated game dynamics could be a very interesting platform for ideas, solutions and internal innovation. He’s right; I think it’s an idea to keep in mind if you’re looking for software to use internally for your project.

There are also implications for online communities, where game dynamics are often already used (to rate individual contributions, for example). What if we used similar ideas for education? Or a community centering around journalism?

Photo by dpstyles, released under a Creative Commons license. It’s of a Target store in Milford, Massachusetts, where they use game dynamics to encourage faster checkout times.

Update: Graeme comments below with an exploration of what a participation framework using game dynamics might involve.

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The British equivalent to Obama’s data.gov opened today. Over at ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick points out the scale of the ambition involved:

At launch, Data.gov.uk has nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. The U.S. site, Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets today.

[…][Unlike the US equivalent, the site] includes 22 military data sets at launch, including one called Suicide and Open Verdict Deaths in the U.K. Regular Armed Forces.

However, these are raw datasets. As Paul Clarke points out, the site only pays lip service to openness until someone comes along and turns these sets into useful reports and applications:

The only test of real success is: use. Not usefulness. Not theoretical use. Real use. Getting beyond the novelty application, the demonstrator, and the hobby lies at the heart of really untapping the potential of data.gov.uk.

Indeed, the figures that Techcrunch Europe report suggest that turning this data into something useful may be harder than it sounds:

So far over 2,400 developers have registered to test the site and provide feedback, [while] 10 applications have been created.

I left a comment on Paul Clarke’s post pointing out some potential pitfalls that may inhibit innovation, including the government’s insistence on licensing the data under Crown Copyright and their impartiality regarding Twitter. There’s also been some criticism around the lack of a common data format for each feed (although the RDF triple proudly displayed on the front page suggests this is likely to change).

Nonetheless, I believe this represents a huge step forward. Turning raw materials into useful, compelling applications that improve the users’ quality of life requires a huge amount of creativity and talent, and providing the data feeds in the first place is a crucial first step.

You can list all the available datasets here.

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The Internet has, undeniably, changed our culture.

For most of the 20th century, we paid for our news, entertainment, art and literature. We allowed businesses to act as gatekeepers for this content, and accepted that the media landscape would be dictated by decisions made in the boardroom. Publishers, movie studio bosses, broadcasters and record company executives dictated what we read, saw and heard, based on financial projections. Their opinions about what was commercially viable regulated supply. Content had a price.

This situation was dictated by economic scarcity. That is to say, not only did an original work, such as a novel or a movie, cost money to produce, but each item used to distribute it, such as a book or a DVD, had its own individual cost of production. To make money, a publishing house or a movie studio needed to recoup its initial production costs for the original work, as well as the per-item cost for each book or DVD. The exception to this in the media landscape was broadcast media – television and radio – which anyone could watch for free, in exchange for a regular advertising break. However, in both distributed and broadcast media, the content needed to be commercial enough to either attract buyers or advertisers. In order to recoup the production cost. the companies involved controlled what was released according to what they thought would sell. As a result the market for content was led by supply – what the content companies deemed worthy of release – rather than consumer demand.

The first continuously-published American newspapers launched in April, 1704. Since then, their philosophy of objective journalism has played an important part in American culture. For democracy to function, a citizen must understand the facts surrounding an issue, so they can vote on it in an informed way: access to impartial information is key. One New York resident remarked in the 1840s that “one thing is certain – nowhere will you find better informed people – that is, those who better understand all the principal movements of the day, whether political, moral or religious, than the readers of a country newspaper”. As the primary method for disseminating facts and information to the public, newspapers have been fundamental to democracy.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the model for distributing newspaper content changed. In 2008, newspaper circulation in the US dropped by 4.6% on weekdays and 4.8% on Sundays. Meanwhile, visits to the top fifty news-related websites, which all are free to access, increased by 27%. Correspondingly, the first quarter of 2009 was the worst ever for newspapers, with sales plunging by $2.9 billion.

The seeds of the Internet were sewn in 1969. However, it wasn’t until Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 that its effects on the media began to be felt. While content had been made available on the network for twenty years, it had been purely text-based, required a level of technological knowhow to operate, and needed to be accessed through specialist communications software. The Web was based on hypertext, a more accessible way of joining documents and articles together through linked topics and phrases. Most importantly, though, it brought with it the Web browser, a single portal for accessing all content, and allowed the use of embedded images, movies and sound.

In 1992, the Internet was opened for commercial access, and online services like AOL, Prodigy and Delphi began offering connectivity. Anyone could run a site on the Web, which was now accessible to millions of people worldwide. In 1993, Global Network Navigator became the first online publication to support itself with interactive advertising banners, and the path forward was clear: newspapers could make their content available for free to anyone in the world with Internet access, and pay for it with advertising. Due to the nature of the network, once a piece of content had been produced, the cost of disseminating it indefinitely was negligible. The barrier to entry had also been dramatically lowered: anyone could publish news without having to establish a distribution network. Other advertising-supported sites like the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post and opinion-orientated “Web logs” like DailyKos began to spring up. The former media gatekeepers were no longer an effective part of the news ecosystem.

These events moved newspaper content beyond the scarcity model. Wikipedia says this about scarcity: “Goods that are scarce are called economic goods. […] Other goods are called free goods if they are desired but in such abundance that they are not scarce, such as air and seawater”. Thanks to the Internet, content became like air and seawater: almost infinitely abundant, and free. The possibilities provided by Internet advertising seemed to have heralded a new era.

Internet advertising has a major benefit over its printed cousin: it can be targeted towards its audience, and statistics about advertisement effectiveness and reader engagement can be captured in real time. Advertisers know exactly how many people have responded with an advertisement, and can tailor it to a particular viewing demographic. Contrast that with the print medium, where by necessity everyone must see the same advertisements, and advertisers must make inferences from the newspaper’s readership statistics and their own sales to determine an advertisement’s effectiveness. It should be no surprise that in addition to its $2.9 billion in lost sales, print advertising sales in American newspapers declined by $7.5 billion in 2008.

Given its theoretical superiority, the loss of newspaper advertising revenue in print should have been made up for online. However, this is not the case. Scarcity provided a captive market: often there were only one or two newspapers available in any particular location. Suddenly, with the advent of the Web, there were tens of thousands of titles available everywhere. As a result, what had previously been a supply-constrained readership that read a relatively small number of sources fragmented into a demand-driven one that read articles in the most convenient way to them, from whichever source was most conveniently available. Competition for readers had become fierce, and the abundance of publications willing to host advertising meant that prices were much lower.

Furthermore, a lot of advertising that had traditionally been placed in newspapers was now being cannibalized by new, specialized websites like Craigslist and Monster.com. As New York University’s Clay Shirky notes, these new companies “all have the logic that if you want to list a job or sell a bike, you don’t go to the place that’s printing news from Antananarivo and the crossword puzzle. You go to the place that’s good for listing jobs and selling bikes.” Newspapers, or even their associated websites, were no longer hubs for local information. People were visiting specialized sources for each kind of information they needed.

Shirky also points out that the alignment of advertising and journalism was always going to be short-lived: “the commercial success of newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn’t a deep truth about reality. Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.” In other words, the advertising attention they received was because they were the only, rather than best, option. As soon as the Internet opened up more efficient avenues, the money flowed away.

To replace this vacuum, some newspapermen are attempting to rebuild a captive audience through other means. Rupert Murdoch, the head of News International (the multinational news corporation that owns the Fox News Channel, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, among others), announced in the summer of 2009 that he would begin charging for access to all of his newspaper’s online content, from the Wall Street Journal right down to the Sun. With it, they will also ban readers from electronically sharing content with their friends, which is a kind of social word-of-mouth marketing that has driven readership levels in recent years. As Chase Carey, News International’s Chief Operating Officer, puts it: “we believe customers value quality journalism. We need to get paid for our product as it shifts to the digital world.”

Murdoch’s announcement sent a strong signal to the rest of the newspaper industry, and split commentators down the middle. Consumers, after all, were now used to getting their content for free. Both the music and movie industries had been having a very difficult time convincing their customers to purchase rather than pirate their wares. On the other hand, it was clear that making content free and advertising-supported was not delivering the revenue that publishers had been expecting. Variety, the entertainment trade newspaper, had experimentally made all its content available for free online in 2006. Although their website’s readership flourished, advertising dollars did not appreciably increase. On December 17, 2009, the “pay wall,” as website pages demanding payment for content are known, was re-established.

Indeed, a recent decision by the Dallas Morning News to bring its editorial department under the control of its advertising sales division (brought to my attention by Paul Adrian of Press for the People) would seem to support the idea that news content should be directly paid for. The old supply-driven model allowed editorial departments to maintain journalistic integrity: companies might have been ticked off by a newspaper article, but where else could they place their advertising? However, in today’s multi-source media, the loss of a valuable advertising contract is a very real possibility. The situation at the Dallas Morning News may help ensure the newspaper’s longevity, but it results in subjective journalism that is at the whim of overriding commercial concerns. Arguably, the only way forward for objective journalism is to charge the people who value it.

However, serious questions are being asked about the viability of this route. In particular, how willing will people be to pay for content, even from a trusted newspaper, now that there are thousands of competitors giving it away for free online? “When we look at why people quit buying the newspaper, it’s overwhelmingly because ‘I can get it for free online,’” notes William Dean Singleton, the CEO of the fourth-largest American newspaper company, MediaNews. It may not be possible to force an artificial scarcity in news reporting without all newspapers charging for it at the same time – something that would require widespread collusion in the industry. With the exception of reporting niches like finance, where, according to Shirky, “data is valuable in inverse proportion to its availability (unlike editorials, say, or political reporting),” most consumers prefer to receive their content for free. In the mainstream, Shirky suggests, “the key questions for the average publisher contemplating pay walls are: How serious will that competition be? How many users will you lose? Will banning sharing create a defensible advantage? And the answers are: crushing, most, and no.”

How, then, will objective journalism survive? One emerging suggestion is that we must de-couple journalism from newspapers. We may have to accept that the latter may become extinct in order to save the former. After all, it’s the factual reporting and analysis that are valuable to our society, rather than the bundles of low-grade paper they are printed on. I would argue that those things, when provided in a thoughtful way that makes full use of current technology, are worth paying for.

As O’Reilly Publishing’s online editor Kurt Cagle puts it: “When a previously thriving industry seems to be dying, it is most likely because the services that it initially provided are becoming obsolete. It is better in this situation to rethink what such services should provide, then build a niche for it. Otherwise, you’re just wasting money.”

It’s an open question, and one I intend to help address in 2010.

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The Christmas period is traditionally when I take a step back and consider what I’m going to do over the next year. For me, it’s a time for family, for quiet reflection and for evaluation. What have I done well? What will I do better next year?

During 2009, I left Elgg, the project I’d been developing for five years, and concentrated on real-world contracts and projects. I spoke at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and met some very interesting people who are going to provide a new model for news reporting in America. I’ve been working with them for the rest of the year, and look forward to writing some more about that project soon.

I’ve also been working with a local publisher in Oxford, creating GeoRSS feeds for their content and paving the way for a mashup with the official University of Oxford mobile site. Imagine walking around your hometown, seeing rooms and apartments for rent displayed on an augmented reality browser, superimposed on the streets themselves. It’s just one way that the web is meeting simple, real-world needs with innovative approaches that are quickly beginning to resemble science fiction. Data is being mashed up and made available in increasingly sophisticated ways.

I expect mobile to come into its own in 2010, particularly now that the mobile Internet market is projected to be twice the size of its desktop cousin. Augmented reality and applications like RedLaser are the more obvious manifestations of this, but I expect the nature of web publishing as a whole to subtly morph. Platforms like WordPress are beginning to recognize this in small ways, such as adding native support for the Twitter API, but expectations are being set far higher than this.

Hardware like the iPhone, the assorted Android handsets and smartphones like the Palm Pre are very affordable multimedia all-rounders which have turned ubiquitous connectivity into a mass-market feature. People are going to expect to be able to save any digital content from anywhere, and share it with anyone. In 2010, I intend to help them.

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As research for a new project I intend to launch, I’ve been using a variety of sharing and bookmarking services to keep track of web resources I’ve found interesting. I think the parallel processes of bookmarking, sharing and publishing can all be improved upon, and the new tool has a simple elevator pitch: share anything, from anywhere.

In the meantime, I’ve started a Tumblr to collect all these links in one place. You can find it at http://benwerd.tumblr.com/, and while most of the content is web-related, I make no apologies for including articles on other subjects that I find fascinating. Of course, a next generation sharing tool would understand how to break my resources up into categories based on their content, perhaps using simple rules I’d set out, and would be highly customizable, extensible, decentralized and secure. It would also be agnostic to my choice of identity provider.

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Why does it cost $235 million to integrate a few IT systems?

Johannes Ernst contrasts the Yahoo/Facebook deep integration announcement with the US government’s announcement that they will spend $235 million on integrating incompatible healthcare IT systems, and asks some pertinent questions:

I assume we all agree that an environment in which leading-edge companies innovate on their own to the benefit of their customers is better than one in which the government has to spend large amounts of money to drag along kicking and screaming “participants” — as it is so common in health IT. How do we turn US healthcare IT from the latter to the former?

One might equally substitute education, or local councils, or law enforcement. It’s a widely-accepted truth that public IT endeavors suck, and that enforcing data standards across disparate public bodies is like herding confused, angry cats into a very wet bag. It’s also true that commercial web services have been very good at integrating for the good of their customers, often without any money (let alone $235 million) changing hands.

I do think there’s a false distinction that’s been made here: public bodies and government departments tend to be swamped in a sea of bureaucracy that prevents them from moving or changing as nimbly as many commercial companies. (Of course, as companies begin to become institutionalized through age and size, they also become less nimble: take Microsoft and IBM.) Many of these restrictions are necessary for the simple reason that they’re using our money, and some regulation is required to ensure tax funds are being spent wisely and benefit the wider public good. We don’t want people to just walk off with it.

Our tax dollars at play

It’s also widely-accepted that our tax dollars are not spent wisely, and often don’t benefit the wider public good. Public bodies are full of inefficiencies, in part because of the bureaucracy involved. I’ve certainly worked within university environments where entire departments of people could reasonably be described as incompetent, but had integrated themselves so well into the system that they had become a required port of call in the bureaucratic workflow. I’ve also seen fully private companies formed using university money and resources earmarked for public research, and government grants essentially spent on beer and travel. These are the kinds of inefficiencies and sanctioned fraud that must be stamped out.

Public bodies and private companies are different in one major respect: their stakeholders. It is a legal requirement for shareholders in a company to have access to the company returns, board minutes and so on (although a wider cloak of privacy is often necessary). In a public body, the stakeholders are the public, yet we often don’t have access to details like financial statements, minutes and decision-making rationale. In Britain, an attempt to get government departments to work like commercial companies has resulted in a ridiculous system where departments must pay each other and the British taxpayer often doesn’t have a legal right to the information they produce.

The public is the board

Ultimately, in a democracy, the public should be the board of directors. Genuine public oversight hasn’t been possible before, but transparency and accountability are now possible via the Internet. We don’t need political parties and administrations to be our eyes and ears any more; we need them to be our hands, and act on our behalf. We need to be able to see the inner workings of public bodies: not just the numbers, but the actual internals and decisions. With genuine public oversight in a way that ensures the bodies know they’re being watched, and governments obligated to maintain these bodies for direct public benefit in a way that’s responsive to the public, costs should go down. It’s not perfect – and Switzerland has recently shown us the dangers of having frequent public referendums – but given the spending, inefficiency and fraud inherent in the system, we can no longer trust the government to do this on our behalf.

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Yesterday, I posted some commentary on Tim O’Reilly’s take on the web as an application platform, and agreed that Microsoft championing the open web would be a very smart strategy for them.

Previously, I’d talked about the issues with cloud computing at the moment, and how an iPhone App Store approach to web applications would dramatically increase security and ease-of-use, and therefore the whole experience:

What if we could fix all of these things at once? Enterprises, organizations and individuals could have their own, more secure environment that would allow them to use the cloud applications they needed with fewer security risks, while enjoying the ease-of-use and immediacy that the cloud provides.

[…] Imagine if you could get your own server environment that was as easy to use as the iPhone.

Windows Azure is that product, built on their web platform infrastructure. Jorge Escobar took a look:

It picked my interest. A Web Platform Installer? Microsoft doing PHP?

I went to the URL provided and I was blown away with the concept behind this application. Basically Windows has introduced point-and-click cloud computing for the masses and it’s doing it in a way that resembles the iPhone application directory but for web applications.

The app gallery is available to browse today, and includes well known applications like WordPress, Moodle and SugarCRM. They also have a product, the Web Platform Installer, available right now, which allows you to use these apps and easily set up a web environment on your own computer or server. Windows Azure will use the same model, but without the need for your own server: the applications will install seamlessly into the cloud. Personal users get their own cloud application space; enterprise users get to use their own infrastructure for extra security. This is where Microsoft’s going, and it’s very clever indeed.

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Tim O’Reilly has a great piece up on Radar:

If you’ve followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I believe we are engaged in a long term project to build an internet operating system. (Check out the program for the first O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in 2002 (pdf).) In my talks over the years, I’ve argued that there are two models of operating system, which I have characterized as "One Ring to Rule Them All" and "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," with the latter represented by a routing map of the Internet.

This is exactly it (although for technical accuracy, I prefer the term “application platform” to “operating system”). The “one ring to rule them all” approach is the game being played by companies like Facebook and Google. “Small pieces loosely joined” is the open approach, which seeks to create an Internet application platform that isn’t reliant on any one service provider – much like most of the rest of the Internet works today. (Anyone can run an email server, for example, without having to hook up to a central email provider.) I strongly believe that this second approach is the only one that can ensure a secure future for the web.

The full article is worth a read. Most intriguing, for me, is Tim’s postscript:

P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

I had a conversation yesterday with someone related to Microsoft which suggests that this isn’t the case. Nonetheless, it’s a genius strategy, and I hope someone up there in MicrosoftLand is listening. (And hey, Microsoft, if that’s what you’re up to – I want in.)

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Google was an advertising company.

Back in 2005, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber described Google’s business as follows:

Judged by their profits, Google is an advertising company. They don’t profit from search, they don’t profit from software. They profit by selling ads. This isn’t to belittle them — I think Google is a terrific company, and they are profiting handsomely from ad revenue ($369 million last quarter). […] If Google has a platform, it’s an advertising platform, not a developer platform. I’m not even saying Google should have a developer platform — I’m just saying they don’t.

Fast forward to 2009, and Internet advertising is beginning to fail, declining slightly during the first half of the year. Sites like TechCrunch were quick to herald its demise with articles like Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet, which declared:

My basic premise is that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it, and all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, and all the creative talent of Madison Avenue cannot put it together again.

It’s become clear that for a lot of purposes, advertising is not a viable or useful business model. Although it may still be suitable for very high-volume, mass-market sites and applications, it’s almost impossible to make money through advertising with niche or specialized content in most areas. (Some areas, like real estate, remain relatively lucrative.) Additionally, targeted ads require the advertising software to track your activity and store data about you, which more consumers are becoming concerned about. And perhaps most importantly of all, nobody actually wants to see ads – and advertisers are having to become more creative and invasive in order to compensate.

Similarly, if you want to make headway in the enterprise or educational spaces, targeted ads are inappropriate or impossible, for legal and policy reasons. For publicly-funded organizations like educational institutions, allowing commercial companies to track users is an ethical nightmare. For private enterprise, the data collection required for ad targeting is unacceptable, and the visual presence of advertising threatens their brands.

However, they are willing to pay for software, to the tune of $222.6 billion worldwide.

Boldly going to the enterprise & paid software.

The web is fast becoming a viable platform for applications: rather than visiting websites, we are increasingly using applications that happen to use the web as an interface. Google is at the forefront of this change.

On November 11, Google announced SPDY, an “embrace and extend” version of the HTTP protocol that underpins the web (it’s how browsers and web servers talk to each other). This new version has numerous tweaks that result in pages that load up to 55% faster – important if you’re trying to build responsive applications with web interfaces. Google have also been betting big on HTML 5, which extends the web’s UI infrastructure to provide support for a much richer experience without falling back on plugins like Flash. Two of the most important requirements for enterprise applications that use a web-based interface are offline capability (the ability to use the application with no Internet connection) and support for concurrent processes (allowing your web interface to perform more than one task at once). HTML 5 has both.

Google has evolved from a consumer search and advertising company, into one that provides enterprise infrastructure applications. Its plan is clearly to dominate Microsoft’s leadership and become a bona-fide software power. Recently, Microsoft has been playing catch-up, by including web-based versions of its applications in its enterprise Sharepoint intranet offering. It has also be moving against the tide by planning on offering advertising-supported versions.

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, told the Garner Symposium last month why it was charging for their enterprise applications:

"Enterprise is a huge priority for the management team and me personally […] It’s the next big billion-dollar opportunity after our display (ad) business. […] We looked at ad-supported enterprise applications and decided most corporations would not be comfortable with random ads showing up on somebody’s desktop."

The web is moving away from advertising.

It’s not just Google that is moving away from a purely ad-supported, consumer strategy. Markus Witte, co-founder of the language learning portal Babbel, wrote on their blog about adjusting their business model:

Our plan, in fact, was to partially finance Babbel with advertising. We intended to provide a “freemium” product that would have a basic version that was public, while providing additional premium content for those who might want to dig deeper. But now we see this just doesn’t work. It simply is not possible to build a high-quality online learning environment while simultaneously selling ad space effectively. We tried to bring these two objectives together. But ultimately we had to accept that a business model appropriate for social networks and news services is plain wrong when applied to online education.

The numbers speak for themselves. The US paid e-learning market has been estimated to be worth $16.7 billion in 2009 and has a relatively small number of players; the US advertising revenues for the Internet as a whole were estimated to be $10.9 billion for the first half of 2009. (That’s $10.9 billion to the advertising companies, rather than the amount content and site owners see, which will be a subset of that amount.) When you run a startup company, you can either put your trust in display advertising and number of eyeballs looking at your site, or you can employ a sales team and ask for cash. Entranced by the model that Google originally promoted, Babbel tried the former, and discovered that it didn’t work; recognizing that they were a software company rather than a mass-media outlet, they then reverted to traditional business methods.

Using a centralized software service for non-core activities like language learning is probably fine. However, enterprise organizations can be uneasy about trusting software hosted by third parties (in what’s almost ubiquitously called “the Cloud”). Blog posts and photos are one thing, but it’s quite another to place your internal strategy documents, confidential discussions and financial data on servers owned by another firm with no real guarantee that they’ll remain unseen by prying eyes. It’s also insecure on a technical level: by using the Cloud, you’re outsourcing the fidelity and availability of your data. A much more preferential option would be to gain the ease of use of web applications, but store them securely on local infrastructure.

Open source software is commercial.

Later in Markus Witte’s post, he discusses some of the things that are successfully given away for free on the Internet; among them is open source.

In contrast to Open Source software and Creative Commons, where developers and authors often work for free, ad-sponsored services are designed to make money – and they do. […] But there is another, more insidious, drawback of ad-sponsoring that is less visible to the naked eye: the true customers of these ad-sponsored services are not the users but rather the advertisers. And as everywhere else, the Customer is King.

His remark about open source developers is a misconception: most open source development is done for profit. For example, over 70% of Linux kernel development is done by paid professionals, with a commercial goal in mind. This may be the basis of directly commercial activities like support; a market-based goal, for example to diminish Microsoft’s share; or it may be to ensure the longevity of the infrastructure that a company relies on. (More web servers are powered by open source than not; Netcraft reported this month that 55.33% of active websites are running Apache.) Make no mistake: open source is a business model – one that marries the free ethos of the Internet with paid commerce.

The most common open source business strategy is to use your “community edition” – the unadulterated open source software – as a loss leader that brings users to your commercial products and services. Releasing your software under an open source license theoretically means you gain a community of developers; if your software doesn’t work in a particular set of circumstances, they will often contribute back a fix for the problem. They may also contribute plugins and extra code that extends the functionality of your product. They get software that works for them (and the security that they can always use and modify the code to fit their needs); you get a wider market that you can sell commercial services to, using a wider, more solid set of functionality. Whereas, as Markus points out, the advertiser is king in ad-supported software, in open source the user is king.

Here are some examples you’ve probably heard of:

• The database software MySQL is released for free under the GNU Public License. Unusually, you’re allowed to mix and match it with software released under other open source licenses (but not closed-source software): they really want their product to spread. This is because they’ve got commercial options based on training, certification, partner agreements and consultancy services, as well as extra features for power users that aren’t available in the community product. (See the article MySQL’s Quid Pro Quo.)
• Ubuntu is a version of Linux designed with ease of use in mind; it riffs on the interfaces of operating systems like Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Canonical, the company behind it, make money through extensive commercial support and partner services. The partner ecosystem is their main bread and butter; the more companies pay, the better access they get to the core Ubuntu team and project strategy, marketing materials, rights to use Ubuntu branding and so on. In turn, those things help the partner companies earn more through their downstream Ubuntu services.
• Android is an open source operating system sponsored by Google. Although it’s mostly been used on mobile phones so far, it can actually run on a much wider range of devices; Android-powered netbooks are beginning to appear. This has the benefit of holding back Microsoft’s market share – Google is positioning its application suite, which is paid software, against Microsoft Office. (Windows 7 is said to run well on netbooks, and Google will soon have two open source netbook operating systems out: Android and Chrome OS.) There is also a directly commercial component: although Android is open source, it has direct links to Google’s consumer applications like Gmail and Calendar. Those applications, both within Android and on the web, are not open source, and must be licensed.

There are many more. Check out Network World’s list of 10 open source companies to watch, and note that one thing links them: they are all providing services aimed at the business market.

Charging for web-based software.

Google and Microsoft have both demonstrated that the market is ready for web-based business software: products that have the benefits of the web (you can access it from anywhere, on any compatible device) but are designed with the needs of enterprise organizations in mind. It must be secure, have the ability to be installed on an organization’s own infrastructure, and have a solid business model that ensures longevity of the product.

I also strongly believe that an open source development and licensing model, when coupled with a strong commercial strategy from the outset, is a great way to build a product’s feature set, userbase and reputation on the kinds of budgets that web startups are used to. It also makes it easily available to students, as well as a vast talent pool in places where buying software at western license prices is a trickier proposition; two groups that can be invaluable for promotion, feedback and involvement.

Finally, the commercial open source model for web-based applications allows you to easily create an ecosystem: if you create a compelling application that really does have a solid business model, other companies will be very interested in taking a cut. The more people who have an interest in your product succeeding, the better. If you give them a solid commercial reason to invest upstream, and create a great product that makes end-users’ lives easier, everyone wins.

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My flash fiction story Meaningless Battles is up on Every Day Fiction:

Rain skidded across the window, the smaller drops holding still, helpless in the path of their larger cousins, which sped forth and absorbed everything in their path. The carriage was a wasteland of raindrop-on-raindrop destruction. Alex watched for a moment and then adjusted his focus to the industrial buildings speeding past in the background, graffiti crawling up the walls only to be endlessly scrubbed off and re-painted.

Meaningless battles, Alex thought.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, if you’re a writer in Oxford, the third Oxford Writer’s Group meeting will take place at 8pm on November 16th, at the Magdalen Arms on Magdalen Road. Most of us will be reading an excerpt of something we’ve written, to a rough limit of a thousand words. We’d love to see you there.

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Please take five minutes to watch FreeForm’s video about the open Internet, and then share it with as many people as you can:

Then, if you’re a US citizen, head over to the Save the Internet Campaign and sign their petition to congress to preserve net neutrality. Also see FreePress’s links on how some telecoms companies are artificially skewing the debate and presenting the false impression of a grassroots movement against net neutrality.

(Still confused about what net neutrality is? Wikipedia has a great overview.)

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In response to recent events, I’d like to propose a different kind of web service that overcomes the privacy and reliability issues with cloud web applications, while providing a solid business model for both application developers and service providers, as well as a seamless, easy-to-use experience for end users.

The T-Mobile storm

Over the weekend there’s been a storm surrounding the T-Mobile Sidekick, which is produced by Microsoft’s Danger subsidiary. It turns out the device stores the primary copy of data like calendar and address book information in the cloud rather than on each device; perhaps a fair proposition if you knew you could trust Microsoft’s servers. Unfortunately, said servers went down last week, and Microsoft didn’t have a working backup. Sidekick users suddenly found themselves without their personal information.

Is cloud computing safe?

Understandably, this has sparked a wider conversation about computing in the cloud. AppleInsider summed it up:

More immediate types of cloud services take away users’ control in managing their own data.

While Ina Fried over at CNet noted:

The Danger outage comes just a month before Microsoft is expected to launch its operating system in the cloud–Windows Azure. That announcement is expected at November’s Professional Developer Conference. One of the characteristics of Azure is that programs written for it can be run only via Microsoft’s data centers and not on a company’s own servers.

The issues surrounding cloud computing have been discussed for a while, and aren’t limited to these sorts of accidents; here’s a post I wrote in 2007 about the rights we ought to have over our cloud data. Partially because of the risks involved, and the risk of leaky data, some kinds of organizations and enterprises simply can’t use cloud computing services. (In the UK, for example, check out the requirements imposed by the Data Protection Act.) At the same time, the Sidekick debacle shows there are clear risks to end-user consumers too.

Despite this, the benefits of cloud computing are obvious, particularly for the organizations that can’t use them: device-independent applications and data we can access and use from anywhere.

Can we have the best of both worlds?

The personal computing model is relatively secure: you install applications on your computer, and they sit on your local hard drive, along with your data. Assuming there hasn’t been a security breach, or you haven’t explicitly provided access to your data over a network or through a direct action like emailing it, it’s safe.

On the other hand, because your applications and data are locked away on your hard drive, you generally have to have direct access to it in order to use them. There are remote desktop solutions like VNC, but these are clunky and fairly useless over a low bandwidth connection.

Web applications that store their data in the cloud overcome this obstacle, but lose the security of sitting on your own computer.

What if there was a halfway house between these two situations?

The personal web server that works

Theoretically, anyone can run their own web server, right now, that allows them to install web applications in a more secure, controlled environment and access them from anywhere. But there are some very good reasons why they don’t:

• You need system administrator skills, usually on top of Linux skills, to do it.
• Web applications – even relatively easy-to-install ones like WordPress or Elgg – are fiddly. There are configuration files, directory permissions and (potentially) source repositories to contend with.
• The web applications you can install on your own server are often not as good as the ones you can get in the cloud.
• When something breaks, it’s your own responsibility to fix it.
• Servers are expensive.

What if we could fix all of these things at once? Enterprises, organizations and individuals could have their own, more secure environment that would allow them to use the cloud applications they needed with fewer security risks, while enjoying the ease-of-use and immediacy that the cloud provides.

One of the reasons everyone’s leaping to copy the iPhone’s app store business model is that it just works. Sure, you’re forced to delegate root control of the phone to iTunes, and the operating system places some seemingly arbitrary restrictions on what applications can and can’t do. But the handset works, and installing software is easier than on any other platform. The truth is, most ordinary users don’t care about those restrictions. Hell, I’m a computer scientist software developer entrepreneur power user, and I’m just happy the thing works. (Context: my previous phone ran Windows Mobile, which doesn’t.)

Imagine if you could get your own server environment that was as easy to use as the iPhone. It would look something like this:

Front end & business model

• You sign up for the service, possibly for a small monthly fee, possibly for free (depending on the service provider). Alternatively, if you’re more technical / an enterprise / an organization, you install it on your own infrastructure. The platform is available for free and could be open source.
• From a secure web-based admin panel, you can add and remove users (although the platform optionally also supports Active Directory and similar standards, as well as OpenID), and install / uninstall applications from a centralized app store with the usual features: ratings, search, similar apps, etc. Installation is one-click, and upgrades are similarly seamless. (That WordPress “what, I have to upgrade again?” problem: solved.)
• Much like the iTunes app store, applications may be free, or may cost a small amount. Applications may impose licensing restrictions based on number of users: for example, the app costs $4.99 for up to 5 users, $19.99 for up to 25, etc.
• As with the iTunes app store, the application store provider takes a cut – and so does the service provider. This creates a strong incentive for multiple vendors to provide hosted services for little cost. It also effectively creates a discount for enterprise, organizational and technical users, who can bypass a service provider. The payment to the web application developer also, for the first time, creates a solid commercial marketplace for high quality web application products, while the free option allows open source vendors to distribute as normal.

Technology

• Behind the scenes, the server runs existing open source technology: Apache, Tomcat, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Postgres, etc. However, there are restrictions on how applications must be structured, behave and share their data. This allows the one-click install and upgrades to function correctly. Importantly, though, users of the system need never worry about the underlying framework.
• The platform has a central data store that all applications may access via an API. This data store is fully exportable, allowing (for example) a datastore stored with a service provider to be moved to an internal setup as an organization expands. As with the iTunes app store, applications are linked to a store account rather than a physical machine, so the application licenses are portable too.

Of course, this wouldn’t replace standard web servers. What it does provide, however, is a simple cloud operating system that simultaneously works in a more secure, dependable way than existing services, would be more acceptable to many organizational users, and provides a genuine business model for web application developers.

The web is now an end user application platform, but still behaves like a lightweight document store. To obtain the level of software customization we all enjoy on our home PCs, a much higher level of technical competence is required. I strongly believe that this situation must change for the web to be a viable commercial application framework.

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There were some great comments on this weekend’s guest post for Media140 about Lily Allen and sharing, so I’ve written a follow-up, exploring some ideas (and the arguments left in the comments) in a little more detail.

However, after at least a decade without tangible participation from the media industries, illegal file sharing has become mainstream. Companies, rights holders, device manufacturers and digital distributors have been engaged in difficult and important conversations for that time, while file sharers, unencumbered with that responsibility, have gone right ahead and developed easier and easier ways to share content for free. If I want to watch Up, the Disney/Pixar film that’s still awaiting release here in the UK, I can download Vuze and be downloading it inside of five minutes. To beat file sharing, any business model has to beat that experience.

Click here to read the whole article. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Just a quick note: I’m starting an Oxford writers group.

My idea is that participants will be able to upload their work to a closed online space, so that it can be read and commented on in a more natural reading environment. Of course, if people want, they can also read their work aloud at meetings, which will be held regularly. If it works, I’ll expand the infrastructure so it can be used by local writers groups elsewhere.

The preliminary meeting, which will help determine the size and scope of the group, will take place this Wednesday, September 30th, at the Gardener’s Arms pub on Plantation Road in Oxford at 8pm. See you there?

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I’ve written a guest post over at the Media140 blog about Lily Allen’s file sharing stance, and the wider place of traditional record labels in the Internet economy.

If the Internet has brought us anything, it is individuality. We have the ability to publish, share and consume the media of our choice, based upon our own preferences. We are no longer happy to adhere to the conventions of broad demographic groups. This change is not just occurring in the record industry; it is happening in politics, in journalism, and across the media spectrum.

You can read the whole post here.

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