TeledyN - Living with Webservices - Comments

Gee, I'm only 4 years ahead

mrG — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:30:15 -0500

Gee, I'm only 4 years ahead of my time now:

IN THE beginning computers were human. Then they took the shape of metal boxes, filling entire rooms before becoming ever smaller and more widespread. Now they are evaporating altogether and becoming accessible from anywhere.

That is about as brief a history of computers as anyone can make it. The point is that they are much more than devices in a box or in a data centre. Computing has constantly changed shape and location -- mainly as a result of new technology, but often also because of shifts in demand.

[ IT's global 'cloud' | Let it rise | The Economist ]

Ok, maybe five years. That makes me feel a little better.

Sadly yet more failure to grasp

mrG — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 23:08:44 -0500

Sadly yet more failure to grasp the intrinsic plug-in-ed-ness of this Internet-ing machine, yet another startup I'm predicting bound for the tubes, Frappr has a fundamentally good plan of wanting to be your geographic buddy map display widget but just can't break free of that overwhelming urge to be all the rest of the things you need too.

Why? Why would they shoot themselves in the foot like that? They could become a plugin to any one of a hundred dozen different artificial social networking dating-games, but no, they choose to stay inside the box and roll their own, jacking all the trades so to speak.

There's been a flurry of similars lately, a lot of them blinded by the beauty of their new AJaX weapons and that's all the more ironic because AJaX is all about using the inherent always-on but largely overlooked opportunities for asynchronous networking capabilities, and yet do they make a campfire widget to plug into your Flickr page? No. You get a box, fenced framed and branded, metaphorically modelled after un-networked channels, projections of the single-function home appliance.

This is your browser on Chat (fumble fumble fumble) ok, This is your browser on your email ... see how they work so beautifully together?

but the point is, they could work together. no, let me bold highlight that with more urgency: they will work together ... or perish. Be integratable, or die. No middle grounds. No excuses. Nothing personal, it's just natural selection, people when given sufficient diversity of mutations will spontaneously pick the solution that actually works. You can slow that process with marketing muscle and clever ploys, but you can only slow it. Evolution is not a negotiable thing.

The multi-vendor polyprocessing pluggable net-web experience is coming, it's just a matter of which week. Already the UK has research showing how most regular web users regularly visit only six websites. To stay in the daily vitals game, you'll have to vie for real-estate in one or the other of them.

Six sites per person, and soon, that's going to be just one.

My Image Sugar-Shack

TeledyN (trackback) — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 17:05:44 -0500

Can ImageShack outshine Flickr? Maybe not in the dating-game department or for all those flash and browse features for skimming strangers' photologues, but just maybe yes indeed they

Early implementations of connected

Headshift — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 02:34:05 -0400

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Early implementations of connected social software offer a glimpse into a future of distributed applications and web services that might free us from the limits of desktop operating systems....

It's time to get back to the Scholar's

IU Technology Architecture Lodge — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:06:02 -0400

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It's time to get back to the Scholar's Box ....

Gary Lawrence Murphy has a great

Gideon Rosenblatt's Blog — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 08:10:41 -0400

Trackback from Gideon Rosenblatt's Blog:

Gary Lawrence Murphy has a great post called Living with Webservices that paints a wonderful vision of where web services......

TeledyN, Gary Lawrence Murphy,

Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 07:06:23 -0400

Trackback from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent:

TeledyN, Gary Lawrence Murphy, has a tremendous essay up, 'Living with Webservices'. It has greatly expanded my thinking about the future internet ecosphere. Much good stuff: ...It must be just me because there are so many of these sites, and......

TeledyN, Gary Lawrence Murphy,

Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 07:03:57 -0400

Trackback from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent:

TeledyN, Gary Lawrence Murphy, has a tremendous essay up, 'Living with Webservices'. It has greatly expanded my thinking about the future internet ecosphere. Much good stuff: ...It must be just me because there are so many of these sites, and......

In this thread other people and

Olivier Travers — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 05:11:22 -0400

Trackback from Olivier Travers:

In this thread other people and I ponder the idea of implementing trackbacks back and forth between Flickr and blogs. Post a photo on your blog, ping the relevant Flickr pages. Comment a picture on Flickr, ping the blog pages......

Living with Webservices

mrG — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 14:12:31 -0400

Jon Udell follows Jeremy Zawodny in thinking del.icio.us and flickr might be best examples of Next-generation infoware ... because both of them let you quit:

From the user's perspective, del.icio.us and Flickr support near-optimal entry and exit strategies. You can deeply and automatically mesh your own information with them. And you can undo that meshing. Participation in the services is thus an "at will" arrangement. If you maintain well-structured information, you can as easily mesh it with another comparably-equipped service.

So the switching cost is low and the risk is minimized because you can always take your bat and ball elsewhere. And as Jon points out it is your bat and ball to do with as you please ...

You can't delete reviews you write for Amazon, which is why I've never written one there. (Instead I write about books on my own blog where services such as All Consuming can find them.)

I have written reviews on Amazon, but admittedly not many, only it's not because I can't delete them -- the Internet Archive already assures me the impossibility of any real retractions -- but the reason I don't play on Amazon's site is also related to All Consuming: It is because it's my review and it belongs on my website. If Amazon wants it, I have no qualms with that, they can slurp up my RSS and post my words to my hearts content, but if they want it they'll have to come and get it, which is what All Consuming does. Ditto with my profile, my friends lists, and all my metadata; for larger things like MP3s and photos, there's good practical reason for these files to live on those hosting service sites, but I'd want the content apparent in my pages.

I do praise Flickr for the value add of their photo gallery, for the use of their bandwidth (and being nice enough to allow direct image linking!) and I do appreciate the exit clause, but the best perk I find with both services is how they play a network computing game by providing albeit highly limited but nonetheless functional webservices that let me control my own distribution; anyone trying to make their money off my content by strictly controlling distribution channels should know that we already know may be a profitable, but its a questionable idea, and kudos to both FlickR and del.icio.us for not only providing the backchannel pathways around this problem, but to be thoughtful enough to provide them within a simple, portable and scaleable REST style that doesn't lock anyone into tenuous transport methods.

Jon I think touches this idea, but backs off short of the point:

... I'd love to see competition based on the value that's wrapped around the portable data we choose to mesh with infoware services, rather than on data lock-in.

and an amen to that last one because, for my money, the next generation infoware must converge on a network computer that will be exactly this -- Flickr and whoever else should do what they do best inside the infrastructure, but I want my property on my side of the fence, served to my audience.

And I'll go a little farther: returning the control back to the content creators through network computing is one aspect of a next generation, but the real network computing will

use the network to provide services we can't provide on our own
provide services transparently, behind the scenes and in a commodified way where we can switch or gang service providers
fashion content distribution in a decentralized model where there is only our data and the access we grant to that data, and where the actual locations are irrelevent.