Joshua

Announcing the 2008 Phizzpop Design Challenge!

allenjs — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:20:00 GMT

The Phizzpop Design Challenge last year produced some of the coolest concepts and applications I've ever seen. It's back again this year, and bigger than ever.

Once again, web designers from the U.S. and around the world are having their design skills put to the test as they compete in four successive challenges of increasing complexity over the next eight months. Faced with a problem statement, participants will combine their creative genius with the provided challenge-specific Expression Studio training to create a solution that solves the posed issue.

All submissions will appear in the PhizzPop Gallery where viewers can rate their favorite design solutions. Participants have the opportunity to win valuable prizes and receive bragging rights by winning either the judged or people’s choice categories – or both!

Don’t delay! Get in on the action by visiting PhizzPop.com for creative inspiration, challenge specific Expression Studio training, and instant exposure of your solution through the PhizzPop Gallery. Let loose your creativity and show the world your design know-how!

Your Personal Medical History on HealthVault

allenjs — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:54:00 GMT

Why are Google and Microsoft creating large centralized databases of people's medical histories? Why are two Internet giants getting involved in medicine? And what is Microsoft doing to protect patients' privacy?

Watch this intriguing interview with George Scriban, Product Manager for HealthVault, Microsoft's online service for personal health. George explains why HealthVault is an natural extension of Microsoft's historical vision of empowering personal computing, and why Microsoft is in a unique position to protect and steward information like this.

Awesome Visual Search in IE8

allenjs — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:51:00 GMT

The search features of IE8 have really changed the way I work. One of the coolest new features is Visual Search, which is kind of like search suggestions, but more awesome.

Check out this quick screen capture to see Visual Search in action. A bunch of sites already support Visual Search, including New York Times, Wikipedia, Amazon, Me.dium, Taobao, and more.

Download IE8 B2 and try some Visual Search Providers for yourself!

Privacy Features in IE8

allenjs — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:13:00 GMT

Did you know that the new Beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 8 includes some new features to help protect your privacy? There are some similarities to the privacy features of Safari, but some interesting new ideas implemented.

Check out this blog post from the IE8 team describing the new privacy enhancements. The blog post includes screen shots and detailed description of the features. In addition, Charles Torre sat down with Dean and Andy of the IE team to get more information about the features.

You can download Beta 2 of IE8 now, and try it out!

Party Over for Web Spies

allenjs — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:16:00 GMT

Companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft, and (especially) Google depend on being able to track your browsing habits to better target you with advertisements. In the past 2 years, the proportion of ads being served through ad tracking networks has climbed from 5% to more than 30%, so these tracking networks like Doubleclick (Google), BlueLithium (Yahoo!) and aQuantive (Microsoft) are the lifeblood of the top web properties. DoubleClick touches more than 80% of the addressable Internet population.

Tracking people's behavior on the web is incredibly lucrative, so everyone wants a piece of the action:

FireFox, the popular web browser, has announced plans to track your browsing habits directly from the browser, without needing to use tracking cookies.
AT&T has announced that they can track your browsing behavior directly off of the wire, without needing to extend the browser or use tracking cookies. They will sell this information to ad networks, or use it to target their own ads.
Several other ISPs have already embarked on projects to track people's behavior for ad tracking, supported by startups like NebuAd and Phorm.

With all of these companies fighting over you like a piece of meat, you'd think someone would ask you what you think. Historically, the companies profiting from tracking your behavior have pointed out that people often say that they want privacy, but then give it up easily. Google has gone so far as to say that there is "no such thing as complete privacy" and they don't get a lot of credit from the critics for sincerity.

So, must we resign ourselves to this trend? Five years from now, will your web browser, ISP, and everyone else spy on you with impunity?

The answer seems to be "no". The first volley was the class-action suit last week against Facebook for the abortive "Beacon" feature. Facebook's "Beacon" feature wasn't actually intended to invade privacy, and didn't go nearly as far as the examples cited above -- but this case demonstrates that people actually *do* care about privacy, and are willing to take action to protect it. Likewise, people almost immediately raised the privacy red flag when Yahoo! announced Fire Eagle location tracking service.

Far more interesting to me is the news yesterday that Congress will be taking up legislation to protect privacy online. This legislation is aimed directly at web tracking networks and software or network operators who track your behavior.

This is huge. The legislation would require companies to get your permission before spying on you. A stronger proposal would require that those spying on your behavior allow you to opt-out at any time, and establish the equivalent of a "do not call" list. There are many details to be worked out, and some well-funded parties with strong incentive to weaken the legislation, so I'm tempering my optimism. But this is a huge step in the right direction.

What do you think? Do we need legislation, or will the industry self-regulate? And do you think that this proposed legislation stands a prayer of making it through the process with teeth intact?

Ribbit: Global Platform War

allenjs — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:42:00 GMT

Reader JenST responds to my recent analysis of "smartphone carnage", saying:

"See BT purchased Ribbit. This could be the first move of the carriers to take control from Google, Microsoft, Apple."

JP Rangaswami, the guy at BT responsible for this acquisition, is one of my favorite bloggers, so I have followed this story with interest. Although he doesn't talk about work on his blog, he is an extremely lucid and enjoyable thinker who understands this new world deeply. And the news stories provide enough additional details to start forming opinions.

In short, I think JenST is right. While it's too early to paint this as a direct assault on Google (or other carriers, for that matter), this is a really strategic acquisition.

The key thing to realize here is that BT is trying to do for carriers (and particularly, voice) what Facebook did for social networks, and what Amazon did for hosting. This was BT's strategy prior to the Ribbit acquisition, and Ribbit was pursuing this strategy independently. The essence of this strategy is to open up your platform, and let your developers evolve the difficult parts and edge cases organically. Rather than trying to design a complex and monolithic platform speculatively before signing up a single developer, you define just the core pieces, and let the platform grow and adapt to real-world needs.

I respectfully disagree with Om, when he speculates that it will be *harder* for Ribbit to attract developers under the BT mantle. When pursuing a Facebook/Amazon strategy, Ribbit had to convince developers that their network had critical mass -- a key value proposition of Facebook development is the millions of people already on the network. With the BT partnership, Ribbit is instantly associated with a massive global network. Now that the backing network is more than a toy (and a carrier with a real business model), Ribbit is a lot more interesting to serious developers.

Sam Dean expresses a slightly different concern, worrying that BT will squash the "openness" of Ribbit. To be honest, I can't make heads or tails of this. What exactly was so "open" about Ribbit in the first place? It certainly wasn't "open source", and if all of the IP were entirely unencumbered, it's hard to imagine what the $105 million acquired. Furthermore, the SDK currently supports only Flash, which is rather proprietary last I checked. I am reminded of the recent controversy on FriendFeed over the promiscuous use of the word "open". Let's just agree that Ribbit has some characteristics of "openness", just like the Facebook API and Amazon EC2/S3; and that this quasi-openness can add a lot of value to BT's walled garden just as Facebook's social graph and Amazon's physical infrastructure derive value from their controlled openness.

So ... will this move be the gasoline that lights a fire in the heretofore controlled world of telco platforms? I don't know. BT is clearly hoping to force the hand of other telcos and VOIP providers, just as Facebook and Amazon forced their larger competitors to follow suit. So long as they nurture their developer community and show some measurable gains, other telcos will certainly need to pay attention.

But it seems that BT wish more to pre-empt a Google, Microsoft, or Apple move as much as disrupt their carrier competitors. The money quote is JP saying:

"What we expect the competition to do – and we think it will much more likely be the Apples and Googles of the world – is to start positioning around a device [such as the iPhone] or an approach to connectivity [such as Google’s ad-based Web model"

Now, that is strategic thinking. I am pleased (or am I?) that JP cannot imagine Microsoft being a player in this space.

Smartphone Carnage Far From Over

allenjs — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:56:00 GMT

I can still remember meeting with people from RIMM 10 years ago, as they were a relative upstart compared to Palm, and were feeling out Microsoft’s intentions in the smart phone space. Since then, a lot has happened. Lots of new players and threats have emerged, and many have fizzled out after great hype.

All of the recent hype about iPhone 3G would make you think that the Smartphone market is Apple’s to win (from RIMM). Heck, much of the coverage makes it sound as if the iPhone is the first phone to have a popular developer ecosystem. CNET even went so far as to predict that the iPhone would replace Facebook and MySpace as the preferred social network targeted by widget vendors and advertisers! As in the past, the popular consensus is bound to look myopic in hindsight.

In this industry, there are 4 types of players who compete and cooperate:

· Carriers – companies like AT&T or Orange who sell you communications bandwidth for your phone. They own spectrum, and lease that spectrum to you. They want you to A) pay as much as possible for as long as possible, B) not cost them a lot in customer support. Carriers have the control, since spectrum is a scarce physical resource. This is why everyone else is interested in “network neutrality” legislation.

· Handset makers – these are companies like Nokia who make phones and want to get a profit on the hardware sale.

· Phone OS providers – companies like Microsoft who try to license their software to handset makers.

· Service providers – companies like Google who make profit when people use their service from a mobile phone.

I won’t take the risk of making predictions that could come back to bite me, but it’s safe to predict that the carnage is far from over. For the next 5 years at least, the following 5 companies will all be very relevant with significant share. For each one, I talk a bit about the business model and strategy to help understand how things might play out:

Google

Google Android aims to be an open-source operating system for Smartphones; free to all handset makers. Google like to say that they “do everything out in the open”, so it was fun to see them get caught being secretive. But it’s all a bit unfair, since Google is more open than Apple, Microsoft, or RIMM – and in fact that openness may be their downfall.

You see, Android is basically a strategic hedge by Google, to ensure that nobody can tie up the mobile platform with a closed, proprietary system. Google benefits when everyone develops using web standards and targeting Google services. Google’s business model is to profit on the services (like search) and use that profit to subsidize the phone user experience. This is a really strong strategy; and Google’s absolutely dominant ability to monetize their services will make them relevant on all mobile phones, regardless of how many Android units have shipped in 5 years.

Google’s weakness is that their strategy is fundamentally opposed to the strategy of the carriers. Phone Carriers want you to keep paying your bill, and to use data plans that are more profitable. They don’t want you calling them with an expensive support call about some 3^rd party application that they didn’t even write. Carriers may not mind open source, but they want a controlled developer ecosystem.

Symbian (Nokia)

Symbian is the dominant smartphone platform outside of the USA. The big news recently was that Nokia has purchased Symbian and will open-source the platform.

Unlike Google, who makes money from the services, the handset makers get their profit from selling the hardware. An open-source Symbian means that they don’t see a sustainable business model in licensing the handset OS. While open-source Symbian and Android are a blow to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile strategy (at a minimum, creating some pricing pressure), open-source Symbian is also blow to Google’s Android plans. The handset makers are wary of Google and want to keep their options open.

RIMM

RIMM owns a proprietary handset, operating system, and services. Because they control everything except the carrier, they can offer seamless end-to-end experience. This is why BlackBerries are so strong in the USA. RIMM knows how to work with carriers, too.

Apple

Apple is essentially copying RIMM’s strategy, controlling a proprietary handset, operating system, and services. Just like RIMM, they provide a seamless end-to-end experience. Just like RIMM, they make carriers happy by providing a sexy device that makes it easier for the carrier to sell expensive contracts.

Much has been made about how “innovative” the iPhone SDK and store is, but people apparently forget that Windows Mobile, Palm, and even RIMM have had additional applications available for a long time. The sort of applications, and the download trends, look a lot like other platforms. When people mention that Facebook is the #3 download from the App Store, they forget that Facebook released an app (web-based) for iPhone long before the SDK was released, and it was immensely popular. Windows Mobile recently got two Facebook apps, and installs of the Facebook app for BlackBerry still outnumber iPhone.

What Apple is doing differently is important, though. By centrally controlling the application store, they give an improved user experience. And more importantly, they provide a visible brand where people wanting support can call *instead* of calling the carrier. Apple’s app store will certainly increase expense for the carriers, but less so than the more open strategies of Google or Microsoft.

Apple business model is to profit up-front on the hardware, and break even on the services. They take a 30% cut of app store revenues and charge a subscription for mobile me, but their primary strategy is to profit on hardware. This gives them the free cash flow up front.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s business model historically has been to make money licensing our proprietary operating system. As a platform, we offer C++, .NET, or Silverlight, as well as AJAX.

As the entire company moves toward a software plus services strategy, our mobile strategy combines operating system with services. This is what the Danger acquisition was about, and it is no mistake that the Live Search app is one of the most popular applications for Windows Mobile.

Search is the Lever

Common wisdom says that this is about Apple and RIMM, but I think this is actually about Google and Microsoft. It’s true that Google hasn’t shipped a single unit yet, and Microsoft’s primary revenue stream (licensing the OS) seems threatened by open-source Symbian and Android. And neither company sells a sexy handset to drive cash flow-positive revenue.

But both companies control search engines, and search service is far more monetizable than any of the other services. The end-to-end experience using the WLS app on Windows Mobile is the sort of experience Google would love to have on all mobile handsets, and you can bet that they will. Apple getting $0.30 every time someone installs the “Flash Light” application is cool, but the revenues and margins of app store and iTunes store won’t be able to compete with search. Like iTunes and app store, the Mobile Me service is an attempt by Apple to protect their high hardware margins.

Search will be a critical component of RIMM or Apple experience anyway. Search is a really hard market to enter, and none of the other contenders will be able to afford the infrastructure necessary.

Of course, when anyone makes money, the carriers want to take a cut. So the carriers are the wildcard here. This is a fact that Google and Microsoft have known for a long time, and both companies will need to get better at making carriers’ lives easier to make inroads against Apple and RIMM.

BOSS Ain't Bad

allenjs — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:02:00 GMT

Yahoo! just announced that they are opening up their search engine for people to re-rank and augment search results to create custom search engines. I saw an early version of this feature (named Yahoo! BOSS), and have been anticipating the release. Unsuprisingly, I think that some of the popular blogs are wrong about BOSS.

Contrary to what the popular blogs are saying, I don't think this move is as radical or revolutionary as Search Monkey. It's definitely cool, but Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have all had search APIs for a long time. The news here is not about a search API, but about the terms of use. The terms of use for BOSS are admittedly more generous than Google's, but not radically so. I previously explained why I think Search Monkey (a product which the popular blogs largely dismissed) is truly innovative. BOSS is a good addition, but the really creative parts are still just vapor.

The most perplexing coverage is both CNET and ZDNet somehow confusing BOSS with open source. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only do you not get the source code to Yahoo!'s search algorithm, you are forbidden from trying to reverse-engineer it. It is true that Yahoo! contributes various technology to the open-source community, and a Yahoo! engineer recently won the TeraSort benchmark using the open-source platform upon which Yahoo! search runs. But the actual ranking and indexing algorithms are Yahoo! search's crown jewels, and they would be crazy to give those away. Perhaps people are just confused because "BOSS" ends in "OSS"?

Finally, a common theme in the blogs is that this is a "Hail Mary" play of desperation brought about in response to the recent drama with Microsoft. But I'm not convinced. BOSS is a lot less crazy than Search Monkey, and is really just an increment on what Google are already doing. The terms of use may be dangerously liberal, but they have plenty of room to learn and change. And it's not the kind of feature that someone can crank out in a few days. They have been working on this for awhile.

Does Privacy Matter?

allenjs — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:19:00 GMT

The New York Times and Times of London this week took two very different views on the issue of online privacy.

The New York Times opines that people (especially people in "terrorist" countries) need to get accustomed to having their activities recorded and judged by concerned fellow citizens. Their thesis is that privacy is dead, and that this is a "good thing" (tm) because we can all spy on each other and stop bad guys. This is the same argument against privacy that is made every time a stunned neighborhood in a privacy-loving culture discovers that a predator has been doing bad things in his house next door.

Conversely, the Times of London argues that too little privacy and too much spying by "fellow citizens" leads to mob justice. They cite the recent example in China of a girl who impulsively recorded herself saying some disrespectful things about the Sichuan quake victims, and was tracked down and harrassed by angry citizens.

As more details of our lives become public and instantly indexed in powerful search engines, such questions are sure to arise again and again. But I think that both the NYT and Times of London are missing the point. They both presume that cultural norms and expectations about privacy can be swayed through a process of discourse and debate, or that negative outcomes can be avoided by prescribing policy correctly.

In reality, different cultures have different attitudes toward privacy, and these professed attitudes remain remarkably constant over time. NYT lecturing Arabs or Austrians to be more like Chinese, or Times of London lecturing Chinese to be more like Austrians, are pointless wastes of ink.

Furthermore, we've learned that a group's cultural attitudes toward privacy are often a poor predictor of how they will behave when presented with specific new technological challenges to privacy. Austrians may love privacy in principle, but they still give Doubleclick massive amounts of data about their personal browsing habits. One could argue that this is because they are unaware of the level of tracking that's done, but I suspect that it's in large part because they don't really care as much as they say they do.

Study after study has shown that the attitudes toward privacy which people adopt and profess, do not necessarily translate to action in given situations. People know how they *should* feel about privacy, and will happily parrot those beliefs -- but they all too often will give up their privacy at a moments whim and ignore warnings when their privacy has been compromised. One partiularly sobering study showed many New Yorkers giving away their social security number and password to a stranger on the street after being told the information was for an "I Love New York" survey. The participants' desire to contribute to the "New York Love" led them to eagerly give away very sensitive information. We find that people readily give away personal information for many similarly impulsive payoffs, such as free access to download some tool or try a hot web site, or to mail a humorous video to a friend.

So, when it comes to privacy, why do so many people profess one thing and do another? And what can be done about it? I would love to hear your thoughts.

SearchMonkey is Disruptive

allenjs — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:07:00 GMT

OK, after being initially skeptical, I’ve become convinced that Yahoo! SearchMonkey has the potential to really change the game in search. The evidence is mounting that they have really thought this through, and that they intend to disrupt the existing order. The plan is somewhat crazy, but this just might work.

When SearchMonkey launched, about 6 weeks ago, it seemed that the news was primarily lauded by proponents of RDF who believed Yahoo!’s endorsement of RDF would resurrect their beloved but anemic Semantic Web (with a big “S”) standard and give it legs to finally dethrone the small-“s” semantic web technologies like tags and microformats. To understand why they were so excited, you need to understand that it is the search engines who strangled RDF in the first place.

7 years ago (when Google was still a serious underdog), I argued that the search engines completely control the fate of “semantic web” standards, and explained that the major search engines have very little business incentive to support such standards. You can read the whole whitepaper, but the summary is simple:

1) Search engines are the dominant way that people query for entities on the web, and it’s nearly impossible to get authors to add the semantics and bootstrap the semantic web if search engines ignore the semantics or promote competing semantics.

2) When it is difficult to extract semantics from documents, it gives advantage to incumbents with massive scale data centers who can extract semantics from natural language. It creates barriers to entry for new competitors.

3) As a top search engine, you want the most useful semantic information stored in a format that your competitors cannot utilize.

For 7 years, my thesis held. At the time, I lobbied both Google and Microsoft to start indexing RDF (and later microformats). My hope was that their desire to disrupt the (then) dominant Yahoo! search position would lead to a more open web. But for 7 years, no search engine was crazy enough to truly adopt open standards for semantics. In fact, Google even dropped support for meta tag’s rudimentary semantics during that time period.

Then came SearchMonkey. For the reasons outlined above, indexing RDF and microformats is a pretty crazy underdog disruptive strategy, so I was skeptical. At first, my skepticism seemed to be justified:

1) At first, they supported only a handful of partners. See point #3 above.

2) The functionality was totally opt-in by consumers, and Yahoo! was doing nothing to evangelize it to average users. It looked like a silly PR stunt to curry favor with the RDF and microformats camps, and clearly Yahoo! was not putting any wood behind it.

3) Semantics can only be added by document owners, on their own subdomain. This immediately favors large incumbents. See the whitepaper for a description of why author-created metadata is a very weak form of semantics.

In the past 2 weeks, however, the first two reasons for my initial skepticism have been obliterated. The SearchMonkey gallery has expanded, and there are a number of interesting services already available. It appears that Yahoo! is promoting services which are not necessarily created by the site authors, which is huge. Check out the Wikipedia Topics entry, for example. And the PHP API entry is a perfect example of why opt-in by default was a good choice – I may want my search results to show PHP API entries, but most people do not. In addition, Yahoo! has started to promote the gallery from the home page of search.yahoo.com, under the customize button.

This isn’t a PR stunt. These guys are serious. Yahoo! took the single thing that drives publisher behavior (search engine exposure) and tied it squarely to open semantic standards.

Now, let’s contrast this with the Google approach. Google were the very first to offer “blended” search results, and much was made of the fact that Google Maps returns microformats on search results page. But spitting up microformats from your proprietary index is the opposite of consuming microformats to enrich your index. And the mechanism by which Google attaches semantics to the “plus box” is notoriously opaque. Watching people beg Matt Cutts for information, insinuate that blended results on SERP amounts to paid placement, or speculate about the algorithm as it changes under their feet (did Google “plus box” really just start scraping hCard?) makes you appreciate the way that Yahoo! does it out in the open.

Google did pay lip service to “out in the open”, when they launched Google Base to much fanfare and started integrating Google Base results into the main search results page. But Google Base still required publishers to store their content in Google’s servers, and the prominent listing on the search results page quickly became a distant memory and Google Base a black hole with little influence on the main search page.

I think people were a bit confused when Yahoo! claimed that SearchMonkey is a “long tail” strategy. But the discussion of Google’s contrasts should have made it clear by now that they are right. Yahoo!’s model of user opt-in makes room for both the default mass-appeal plugins (like Flickr) and the more niche plugins like PHP APIs.

Overall, this is very strong progress in just 6 weeks. To keep up the momentum, Yahoo! needs to continue promoting to end-users, and should be more aggressive about influencing search results ordering when SearchMonkey plugins are installed. For example, I have opted-in to the Yelp plugin, but perfectly good Yelp tresults often get pushed off of the page by CitySearch and others. Random samplings of users who haven’t tried any customizations should be shown enhanced search results pages and offered the chance to customize.

In addition, Yahoo! should allow SearchMonkey plugins to customize results for other pages. For example, I should be able to see the IMDB information next to a search result for a blog page that reviews a movie. This would truly bootstrap the use of microformats, since adding a microformat to your page would automatically make it more useful to anyone using Yahoo!’s search engine. Google tried something similar, with less than stellar results, when they started using scraped addresses from around the web to enhance their map “plus box”. When Google scraped restaurant addresses from old and outdated sites, the search results page “plus box” started directing diners to the wrong location, leaving restaurant owners bewildered as they tried to figure out where the wrong data was coming from. Yahoo!’s approach mitigates against this, since people opt-in to the provider, and they know where the data is coming from. In Google’s approach, you get whatever plugins Google gives you, and you have no idea where they are getting the data.

If Yahoo! share stabilizes or increases, I would expect Google to respond by being more aggressive with their “plus box”, and perhaps embracing and extending, with an eye to extinguishing SearchMonkey. SearchMonkey will encourage the greatest proliferation of microformats yet seen on the Internet, and as more microformats are available, Google will certainly start to leverage this information more in building their index.

Gears a Profit-Killer?

allenjs — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:59:00 GMT

Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch just posted a review of Google Gears, predicting Armageddon with the alarming headline, “Get Ready For A New Platform War. Google Gears Drives Straight At Microsoft’s Profits.” He probably first read Dare Obasanjo’s post, “Google Gears as the Next Flash”, and then let his imagination run wild on scenarios. Before this hype train goes completely out of control, it’s a good idea to lay out the timeline and facts and let people make more sober judgments about Gears going forward.

Both were reacting to the demo of a gears-enabled MySpace mail client prototype, shown at Google I/O. The mail client wasn’t substantially different from the blazing fast Silverlight mail client AOL showed at MIX08, but it made news because it was the first time that a large web property has talked about possibly distributing Gears to millions of users.

Google I/O is where two former Microsoft executives keynoted in Googleskin clothing, saying “We grew up on the web, it’s in our DNA”. One was the guy who battled for SOAP vs. REST at MSFT, and the other the former architect of Win32 and the “ahead-of-its-time” patent the web project. On the flip side, the former architect of Gears at Google (Danny Thorpe) last week joined MSFT for the second time since shedding his Googleskin and leaving Gears. All I can say about the DNA in this industry is, “it’s complicated”.

Anyway, these are some smart and visionary guys, so I will admit that I was inspired when they preached that Gears was the best way to move the web forward and fight proprietary runtimes. Rather than sticking to simple offline storage, they were going to throw in the kitchen sink and any quasi-standards-inspired utility that might be useful to web site authors. This isn’t a new vision for gears, in fact; nor was Google I/O the first that the strategy leaked into public.

Alex Russell, creator of the Dojo Toolkit, presented at MIX08 and had a lot to say about moving the web forward. In this Channel 9 interview taken at MIX, Alex lays out the case for Gears as the basis of new bleeding edge browser innovations. A few weeks later, he elaborated on his thoughts in his “Progress is N+1” post, neatly teeing up the next 3 months of Gears evangelism from people repeating his points.

Now that we’ve traced the influences behind Nik’s post, let’s refute a few of the claims and analyze the situation:

· Targets Microsoft’s Profits: This claim is very puzzling. If anything, Gears would compete with proprietary features of Internet Explorer. However, 100% of IE developer innovations are now squarely web standards (and creative commons where applicable), and we don’t make any revenue from the browser anyway (let alone, profit). Anyone who speculates that IE strategy is to drive proprietary web APIs or to drive revenue, is operating from zero evidence. Google’s goal seems to be to ensure that the browser platform remains commoditized – a strategy we’ve already been betting on for years.

· “Based on a True Standard”: Fans will tell you that Gears will eventually be better than Flash or Silverlight because “Parts of Gears are based on standards and might be standardized in the future”. When asked why they don’t operate strictly through the proven standards processes that created HTML, XML, JavaScript, and the like, they respond with slurs about how W3C is ineffective and standards bodies produced abominations like EJB. The fact is, it is way too early to tell if Gears will help web standards or cause fragmentation of web standards efforts. When someone argues that Gears is completely innocuous to W3C or Mozilla, you need to take that with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Overall, I think Gears is an interesting approach. When developer innovations spread uniformly across all of the web browser clients, everyone benefits. This is why Mozilla would talk about porting a scripting engine to IE, why Microsoft would release Activities spec under creative commons or contribute CardSpace code to other browsers. And there are very few organization who can build cross-platform, cross-browser extensions of this complexity and deploy securely and stably to millions of machines. The Gears engineers are world-class. It’s interesting that this effort is being created separate from Mozilla, since there is nothing technically preventing Mozilla from porting arbitrary functionality to other browsers and devices.

But it’s also an added distraction. Even if (and it’s a big “if”) Gears succeeds in driving forward a few innovations that make it into all browsers and provoke a few choruses of kumbaya, that won’t absolve the browser vendors from the extensive cooperation we are already doing. Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera, Safari etc. will still have to continue working together to determine which innovations we take on behalf of the web developers. W3C and ECMA will still need to decide which things become standards (or “recommendations” in W3C parlance). Things already got pretty confusing with the initial ambiguity between WHAT-WG and W3C HTML5, and again when the political lines between ECMAScript and ActionScript were being tested. As well-meaning as they may be, any new group of people creating new stuff and claiming that they represent the standards, just makes life more complicated for all of the browser vendors and potentially slows innovation as people are forced to sort through the mess. The way this turns out is far from certain, but I’ll keep an open mind.

Future of Visio Wireframing

allenjs — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:59:00 GMT

Visio is a surprisingly flexible tool, and many designers now use it to create wireframes. Po-Yan Tsang is a PM on the Visio team responsible for designer-oriented features. In this interview, she talks about the decision process they use to add new features to Visio, gives some tips on wireframing, and hints at some new functionality in the coming version of Visio. Enjoy!

Web Accessibility with Cynthia Shelly

allenjs — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:07:00 GMT

Cynthia Shelly has worked with web accessibility both inside Microsoft and with our partners. She currently works in the Accessible Business Unit; the team who bring you the accessibility center on MSDN, among other things.

Cynthia recently joined me in the MIX Online studios to discuss her work with web accessibility at Microsoft; from common issues and problems she has seen in Microsoft web sites as well as external sites, to her work as part of the Windows Live Writer team. Live Writer was a fascinating example, since it's a tool which allows people to create accessible web content, which itself is accessible -- attention to both sides of the equation that is often overlooked.

Google Loses, and Net Neutrality Doesn't Win

allenjs — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:35:00 GMT

Now that we know Google was a big loser in the 700MHz spectrum auction, many bloggers are acting like they knew it all along. But the truth is, when we predicted that Google wouldn’t win any spectrum, there were only a small handful of people who agreed with us. When I explained that Google's involvement was a PR stunt, most people were still fantasizing about the possibilities of Google-owned spectrum.

But it appears there is still some education to do. The normally sober Ars Technica is now calling the loss a “coup” and claiming that Google is “ecstatic”. As we explained, the PR stunt had rather limited success. And in fact it appears to be worse than that. We are seeing now that the much-vaunted open access requirements are open to serious interpretation. I’m as much in favor of network neutrality as anyone, and I would love to report that Google’s PR stunt moved the needle significantly, but that simply wouldn’t be true.

Now Ars Technica and others are predicting that the latest effort, which includes Microsoft, Google, Intel and others, will have a serious impact on network neutrality. That would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath. And while Ars Technica can be forgiven for wishful thinking, I can’t say the same about others. Once again, we are seeing reporters speculate that Google wants to get into network access business. I already explained why Google doesn’t want to be in that business.

Greg Linden: Trends in Collective Intelligence and Centralization

allenjs — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:02:00 GMT

Rich user experiences are going mainstream on a wider variety of devices and putting pressure on web standards. This trend is changing the face of the web as we know it, and we've covered this trend extensively here and at the MIX conferences. But there is another trend that is also changing the web forever, and Ray Ozzie's keynote at MIX08 was a shot across the bow regarding Microsoft's response to this seismic shift.

In his keynote, Ray talked about the "mesh", and the inexorable shift of services into large centralized data centers. We announced some cloud storage services, and discussed our philosophy of keeping control at the edges. This is really just the beginning, and we'll be having a deep conversation with the industry over the next year.

To kick off the conversation here on MIX Online, I asked Greg Linden to share his broad industry perspective about some of these topics. Greg led development of Amazon's ground-breaking recommender systems, created Findory, and recently joined Microsoft to work on some top-secret incubation projects. He continues to run the popular "Geeking with Greg" blog, where he riffs on large-scale centralized computing, data mining, and "collective intelligence".

Just a few of the topics we talked about:

Is MapReduce/Hadoop really as good as SQL?
What are the limits of social search?
What good is collective intelligence, anyway?
Will all of the world get sucked into one or two datacenters?

Design Leaders at Microsoft: Eric Zocher and Steven Guttman

allenjs — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:57:00 GMT

The Seattle Times yesterday wrote about the growing influence of design leaders inside Microsoft. Two of the prime examples of this trend are Eric Zocher, General Manager for Expression Suite, and Steven Guttman, Product Unit Manager for Expression Web.

Eric runs the overall team who ship all of our design tools; a sort of "startup within Microsoft". Steven runs the team who build Expression Web -- a product that wins kudos for web standards support, and spontaneous applause for PHP support :-)

Nishant spoke with them about what it's like to build these products within Microsoft, about the recent launch of the Expression community site, and more. I have a feeling we'll be hearing a lot more from both of these guys in the future!

David Armano

allenjs — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:09:00 GMT

When I first started reading David Armano's blog posts about the "Fuzzy Tail" and the blurring of boundaries between roles in our industry, I knew we had to have him at MIX.

He gave a session entitled "Why Fuzzy is the New Clear" at our first MIX UX track. We interviewed him to find out about his session. Watch all the way to the end to find out details about his new book :-)

Get the Software Tools Featured at MIX08

allenjs — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:20:00 GMT

Attendees at MIX08 were provided with copies of developer tools and a fast download location to grab newest copies of the software. Now most of these tools are available for free download!

Expression Studio Beta (download)
The second release of Expression Studio adds a wealth of new features including support for Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology across all the tools. Enhanced designer developer workflow makes the process of building great user experience even better! If you’d only like to install individual components of Expression Studio (Web, Blend, Design, Media, Encoder), go here.
NOTE: ASP.NET 3.5 is required as a pre-requisite to install Expression.

Expression Media 2 for MAC (download)
Expression Media 2 now allows catalogues to be shared amongst team members with file locking and improved network performance. Improved keywording of assets, new file formats and the ability to share photos as Silverlight galleries once you have sorted them on the new multi-monitor light table!

IE 8 Beta (download)
Over the last ten years the intensity of web usage and reliance on the web have increased dramatically. The evolution of the web has introduced a new set of opportunities, immersive experiences, online services and standards. Daily life without the web is simply hard to imagine. •       Interoperability and Compatibility
•       Browser capabilities that enable new, innovative experiences
•       Built in tools that help both first time and experienced developers and designers get pages built
Internet Explorer 8 will take the web experience beyond the page and introduce a new way to seamlessly experience the best of the web whether you are a web developer writing to standards or an end-user discovering a new online service.

IE 8 Virtual Machines (download)
The IE VPC’s allow designers and developers to test their sites on multiple versions of the browser, without having IE installed side by side. There are workarounds to get IE installed side by side, but they are unsupported and don’t necessarily work the same way as IE6, IE7 or IE8 would work when installed properly. The best way to use multiple versions of IE on one machine is via virtualization. Microsoft has recently made Virtual PC 2007 a free download; we’ve taken advantage of that by releasing a VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, with either IE6, IE7 or IE8 to help facilitate your testing and development.

Expression Blend 2.5 Preview (download)
Use Expression Blend 2.5 to create and modify managed Silverlight 2-based applications. Expression Blend 2.5 for Silverlight 2 includes all of the features in Expression Blend 2 but has not reached the quality level of Expression Blend 2 for WPF or Silverlight 1 development.

Deep Zoom Composer (download)
We are pleased to present a technology preview of Deep Zoom Composer, a tool to allow the preparation of images for use with the Deep Zoom feature currently being previewed in Silverlight 2 Beta 1. The new Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight allows users to see images on the Web like they never have before. The smooth in-place zooming and panning that Deep Zoom allows is a true advancement and raises the bar on what image viewing should be. High resolution images need to be prepared for use with Deep Zoom and this tool allows the user to create Deep Zoom composition files that control the zooming experience and then export all the necessary files for deployment with Silverlight 2.

Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 (download)
This package is an add-on to the RTM release of Visual Studio 2008 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 2 Beta 1. It provides a Silverlight project system for developing Silverlight applications using C# or Visual Basic. The components included are:

Visual Basic and C# Project templates
Intellisense and code generators for XAML
Debugging of Silverlight applications
Web reference support
Integration with Expression Blend

Note: this will also install Silverlight 2 Beta 1, Silverlight 2 SDK Beta 1, KB949325 for Visual Studio 2008.

Silverlight 2 SDK Beta 1 (download)
If you are not installing the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 which includes the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK, you can download this SDK to create Silverlight Web experiences that target Silverlight 2 Beta 1. The SDK contains documentation, samples and other tools for building Silverlight applications.

ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 (download)
ASP.NET MVC provides a framework that enables you to easily implement the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern for Web applications. This pattern lets you separate applications into loosely coupled, pluggable components for application design, processing logic, and display. ASP.NET MVC also greatly facilitates test -driven development (TDD).

ASP.NET server controls for Silverlight (included as part of Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 download)
You can integrate the rich behavior of Microsoft Silverlight into your Web application by using the familiar model of ASP.NET server controls. The MediaPlayer server control lets you integrate media sources such as audio (WMA) and video (WMV) and take advantage of rich built-in media player skins. The Silverlight server control lets you add your own Silverlight XAML content to ASP.NET pages, using a custom JavaScript type or a Silverlight 2 managed-code XAP package.

ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview (December 2007) (download)
The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview is a preview of new functionality being added to ASP.NET 3.5 and ADO.NET. The release includes the ADO.NET Entity Framework runtime, ADO.NET Data Services, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, and new additions to ASP.NET AJAX.

The Back of the Napkin with Dan Roam

allenjs — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:53:00 GMT

Dan Roam, author of the new book, "The Back of the Napkin", was at MIX08 to contribute to our new UX track. The feedback from attendees about his unique presentation was overwhelmingly positive. We caught up with him in the hallway to ask about his book, his session, and some of his philosophy about design

Weather Beyond the Browser with WeatherBug

allenjs — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:37:00 GMT

The Web has created a common vocabulary for publishers to distribute content and applications to billions of browsers around the world. But people sometimes forget that the Web has also created a vocabulary for reaching beyond the browser -- to devices, gadgets, and services.

WeatherBug, who make some of the most popular weather tracking gadgets, are a prime example of this. Rather than seeing Silverlight as a competitor to the web, they realize that Silverlight gives them a way to extend their existing web services beyond the web browser.

Check out this interview and demo of the apps that WeatherBug built using Silverlight -- all re-using and leveraging existing Web Services.

Aston Martin at MIX08

allenjs — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:25:00 GMT

Aston Martin make some of the hottest cars in the world, and they showed off a really hot application during the MIX keynote. Nishant sat down with Marek Reichman from Aston Martin and Paul Bishop of Splendid, to get a demo and have an in-depth conversation about their design process. These guys have intensely demanding standards for design, and it's a fascinating insight into the process behind one of the most prestigious brands in the world. Check it out!

Business Value of UX: Move Networks

allenjs — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:30:00 GMT

One of the surprises in the keynote was the announcement that Move Networks would be using Silverlight. Move powers the streaming media for some of the biggest broadcasters, and tend to be rather pragmatic about technology.

I sat down with Greg and asked him what business drivers led Move Networks to engage with Microsoft, and what potential gains they anticipate from this partnership. You might be surprised at his answers -- user experience, rather than bit-twiddling, is where the business value comes from.

Accessibility in Silverlight 2

allenjs — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:04:00 GMT

From NBC to AOL, Nokia to Move Networks, the broad range of spotlight Silverlight applications attest to how much maturity the platform has gained since being launched last year.

Accessibility has been something of a weak spot in Silverlight 1.0; with only very basic support for alt tags and default actions. It hasn't been all bad, since this led developers to use Silverlight with "Plain Old Semantic HTML" in a progressive enhancement pattern -- which will continue to be useful in some scenarios going forward. But the range of options for accessible development increases substantially with Silverlight 2.

In this interview and demonstration, Mark Rideout explains the new accessibility enhancements in Silverlight 2; from support for controls and tabbing to support for (UI Automation) UIA.

Hard Rock Memorabilia Site with Deep Zoom

allenjs — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:22:00 GMT

Browse through thousands of pieces of Rock-n-Roll memorabilia in the Hard Rock collection! Hard Rock just launched the Hard Rock Memorabilia site using Silverlight 2 "Deep Zoom" technology, allowing you to zoom in seamlessly and see incredible detail like fingerprints and photographer's reflections on the pieces in the collection.

We interviewed the crew that built this experience, including the Duncan of Duncan/Channon, Hard Rock, and Scott Stansfield of Vertigo. Watch the video to hear how Hard Rock approaches branding, and how they designed and built this amazing web site.

To see the complete demo footage from the keynote, click here.

First Look at IE8 Activities and WebSlices

allenjs — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:15:00 GMT

Activities and WebSlices are two of the most exciting new features in IE8. Watch Jane Kim explain how these features bring the power of mashups to the browser, and how you can tie your web site or service into IE8's chrome using only web standards and no custom C++ code.

Download the developer beta today, and get started building Activities and WebSlices! You can find technical details on developing Web Slices and Activities at the MSDN developer center.

For a broad overview of many of the new features in IE8, check out the demo of IE8 and interview with Matt Lapsen over on Channel 10. And Chris Wilson drills into the architecture of IE8 over Channel 9.