Finally, The Internet As Intended.

Ray Ozzie presented Microsoft’s Web2.0 vision to financial analysts last thursday (webcast, transcript, ppt). It paints Windows Live as the web architecture platform that will support Microsoft’s future - across all lines of business. It’s a grown up vision for putting web2.0 to work at a massive scale. For me, it’s yet another example of this blog’s title. We are starting to to put the real potential of the internet to use - and it all seems very new, but how long ago was it that  Scott McNealy told us the Network is the Computer? Finally :-)

If you don’t want to watch or read the entire presentation, Richard McManus has a good overview here on Read/WriteWeb. 

Yahoo! Messenger 8 is now out of beta. It’s interoperability with MSN Messenger is huge, but the most exciting new feature is its support for web standards based plug-ins.  Now anyone can build tools for the 100 million + messenger users.  Plugins for file sharing and ecards are already popular. Those and about 120 others are available on the plug-in gallery.

This is yet another opportunity for Online Community purveyors to extend their community beyond the borders of their destination web site. As I said before your community members are out there communicating and collaborating away in places that are *not* your site. You can now give them the tools to take their community with them by developing useful widgets, plug-ins, and bookmarklets that operate all the places they do -which isn’t just your destination website.

Knowledge workers unite! My colleague Dave Witzel has an editorial in CXO saying the wave of online supported collaboration we’re experiencing is no less important to today’s global economy than the industrial revolution was to yesterday’s. It’s definitely worth the read, and I even get some ink:

More accessible and useful information. Not only are we rapidly creating and distributing knowledge, it is becoming more embedded in context and connected to other information. This context and connectedness is called “the semantic web” by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTML and much of what we now know as the “world wide web”. As our knowledge becomes more connected with better context more people will be able to find it, understand it and use it. Google already uses the connections between websites to drive their powerful search engine. My colleague Kurt Voelker has invoked a “Moore’s Law” for knowledge where every six months we can expect connectedness, and the value, of knowledge to double.

A week ago when ActiveCollab got dugg, I posted that Jason Freid and the 37Signals boys should release an open version BaseCamp to keep hosted ActiveCollabs out of their market. They didn’t. But today Ross Mayfield and SocialText have done just that - released an Open Source version of their popular wiki collaboration software.  As I’ve said before, this is a smart move for any any SaaS company whose product is built on tools that small development teams or enthusiastic do-gooding programmers can effectively mimic. Here’s two reasons why:

1. It creates a pipeline of open-to-paid converts that would otherwise just walk away. What do you think big company developers do all day? They download trial and open source versions of things they feel may have value. SugarCRM knows this well. When they need real support and SLA’s, and are ready to give up the headaches of managing their own install -they become paying customers.


2. It protects their SaaS market. If someone were to release an open source mimic of SocialText (which isn’t that unlikely, look what ActiveCollab just did to basecamp), the window would be open for others to compete directly with SocialText at reduced cost by providing the OS clone as a hosted service. By releasing as OS version, the effectively close that door - who would take and use a mimic OS version when you can download the real deal?

This morning I ran across JP Rangaswami’s post about email’s declining usefulness for the M generation.

3 reasons why email is past its useful life:

1. E-mail is now snail-mail, with all its consequences. A chore to do; formal and structured with letterheads and signatures and logos and all that jazz; a few important letters hidden in the midst of a pile of junk; usually filled with secondary spam as well, attachments and advertisements and whatever else people want to put into your e-mail envelope; hard to file, hard to find, rarely providing the context necessary to comprehend it and act on it; yet still part of our communications process, but far less so for Generation M. And people read e-mail like they read snail-mail. If you haven’t got their attention in the first few sentences, then it doesn’t get read. No longer fit for purpose, although it served many glorious purposes for many years.


2. Attempts to extend the breadth of e-mail by connecting everything else to a mail mindset will fail. Calendars and schedules; to-do-lists; reminders; alerts and subscriptions. RSS readers. Whatever. Over the last ten years we have seen the mailbox morph into something that has become a catchall for all this, and this was natural. For us. Not for Generation M. We are used to getting reminder letters from dentists and doctors and what-have you in snail mail, and we have faithfully reproduced all this in e-mail. Wrong. Paving cowpaths.


3. Like snail-mail, e-mail will not die. It will just gently become the electronic equivalent of snail-mail. Just look at what’s happening: 


• (a) your e-mail address just became your phone number anyway, as telephony became software


• (b) there are better tools for point-to-point communications, especially with time-sensitive information; so people will use IM and texting for these


• (c) where a richer dialogue (multilogue?) is called for, blogs and wikis and IM, social software in general, allow you to connect the conversation with the context. Like putting notes and comments on a flickr photo, or participating in a multipartite IM “channel”. As a result of this connect between conversation and context, it is easier to multitask, context-switching is cheaper and more reliable

Ultimately, we are talking about a person’s preferred method of contact - how do I like others to get my attention? Information exchanges are moving to diverse new mediums, and these new methods of exchange offer more context than email does. But we’re definitely still in beta. Where is the ulitmate context? When can I get all my attention information from one stream and in context - who will unify my messaging across SMS, social networks, my comment stream, my bookmarks inbox, IM, email, my VOIP phone, and maybe even my digitized snail mail? I don’t know. But I think that even generation M will tire of bouncing from social network to social network to check their inbox :-).

Jeff updated his argument with a comment on my last post, Jeff Jarvis Hypes Consumer as the New Producer:

I don’t disagree. I think the fact that we can produce means that our production has a new relationship with the old producers. And production can be defined very, very broadly: empowered customers produce product ideas, customer service, marketing, and so on — because they can. And this, in turn, means that the old producers have a few choices, as you rightly point out: (1) fight, (b) ignore, (c) embrace, (d) update.

By the way, isn’t hate a strong word? ;-)

So. I’m busted. My mom would definetly not approve. There isn’t anything I hate about Jeff Jarvis - sorry Jeff :-)

Back to the consumer producer debate - Your response is the right one. We need to qualify “producer”. Your definition seems closer to ‘participant’ than producer, and not changing your terminology leaves you open to snipes like Nick’s.

So, maybe the right metephor for today’s consumer/producer is BASF: they dont make the products, they make the products better :-)

Both Scott Karp (Publishing2.0) and Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) have interesting posts today on Digg and its clone, the new Netscape.com. They offer two very different takes on Netscape’s market position and Digg’s significance as a new model for serving up online news.

Scott says Netscape could pull of a ‘win’ if they continue to cater to "average people", but we need to stop pretending Digg is some social media revolution. Arrington says the Netscape titatanic is sinking and Jason Calacanis’ offer to buy Digg.com power users is evidence of AOL’s desperation, and that Digg’s model and enthusiastic base are truly innovating.

Karp says Digg.com isn’t a wisdom of crowds social media phenomenon at all: 

Diggs power users are acting like traditional editors — it’s really not a “community” deciding what’s news. It’s just different editorial judgment — and that difference in judgment and its appeal to average people is worth discussing.

But let’s stop pretending this is about a “social media” revolution.

While Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch seems to think it’s more than that:

At the end of the day, the Netscape product is a soulless reproduction of one of the most interesting cultural experiments occuring on the web right now. [emphasis mine]

So what do you think? Which is it? 

Kudos to Dan Thomas, a director in Washingon’s Office of the CTO.  This month the DC City government launched DCStat, a service that offers developers access to operational data from a variety of city agencies in several XML formats, including RSS and Atom.  Several weeks ago I said that governments and nonprofits needed to embrace open API access to their data. Its great to see progress in that direction.

Innovators are indeed already starting to work with the new data. Check out CityStat.org, a map-based visualization of DC City information covering:

Crimes
Overdue Open service requests
Overdue Closed service requests
Service requests assigned to the Department of Public Works
Service requests assigned to the Department of Transportation
Other service requests

 Congratulations to Dan and to the CityStat.org team (who’s blog you can catch up on here)

What I like about Jeff Jarvis is his unbridled enthusiasm of the principles behind Web 2.0 - participation, network effects, and collaborative value. What I hate about Jeff Jarvis is his unbridled enthusiasm - he’s over-the-top most of the time. I love this recent exchange between he and Nicholas Carr:

Jarvis hype for the power of the consumer as producer in today’s markets:

Forget consumerism. We’re not just consumers anymore, as Doc Searls has taught me well. We are customers with our money in our fists, spending it wisely and joining together to spend it more wisely. And we are producers who can compete with the companies that thought of us as mere consumers [emphasis mine].

And Nicholas Carr calling him on it - priceless:

Hey, Mr. Producer, can you build me a computer for $399 and ship it over to my house? Throw in a self-fabricated printer for $49, too. And make it snappy.

As usual, Jarvis speaks in hyberbole - but there is truth there. Benefits are gained from the empowered consumer and the sites and apps making them a reality - think Google and eBay, duh. But as of now consumer-producers live in the long tail - producing amatuer products for niches. In aggregate, we’ve learned that inhabitors of the long tail do indeed compete with the head of the tail - particularly in the media market for content. But do they compete anywhere else? Can they?

Its funny to me that someone as steeped in this stuff as Jarvis would miss the big point - that the story of the future isn’t consumer-producers competing with traditional producers, its traditional producers embracing and enabling the consumer-producer that will make tomorrow’s markets so interesting. What Jarvis is seeing, correctly I think, is not real competition with traditional producers it is simply the threat of this competition that is getting the attention of traditional producers.

On Wednesday I spoke at the American Marketing Association’s Nonprofit Conference. Here’s a pdf of the talk, Online Strategies to Influence the Policy Agenda.

The 2 paragraph overview:

Moving the policy agenda requires the thought attention of policy makers, researchers, the media, hill staff, and others. Gaining that attention online with traditional means is difficult because the information used to influence policy is dense and poorly suited to the short attention spans of these users online. White papers, data analysis, position statements, fact sheets and research projects do not lend themselves well to the web.

Organizations looking to further their thought leadership online are well served by using web2.0 technologies - blogs, rss, open data api’s, and participatory networks - to make their dense content:

• more approachable by giving a human face and tone to their message
• more contextually relevant to the current topics of interest
• more discoverable by those who are actively participating in policy debate