THINK / Musings

In this picture you can see his blog about firefly with firefly active on the page.  Everyone present on the page is represented by a mouse icon and some of those people are chatting within firefly.    I wrote a piece about overlays and layers of the web a few weeks ago and firefly is a great example of this layering idea.   Its also a return to the early days of the internet –  when would crawl into some corner of the net and just start talking with someone — community and people were far more present than they are today.    Firefly offers up a layer of interaction where conversations can take place while people are still remain in context on the page — no download, no extension, no registration, just people on a page.    I had a crazed week but wanted to put up this screen shot before the weekend hits.  

Couple of related links:  

Summize search on firefly, a good way to find whats going on

Blog post on Firefly, and another

“… there is no potential for any malicious activity” is what the TLC told NBC after Billy managed to browse around the file system of the PC’s onboard NYC taxi cabs. When will organizations learn that computers attached to the public network are vulnerable.

Billy’s post and the interview with Billy on NBC.

Billy created a wonderful little ruler for the iphone. Its interesting, its dislocating and its beautiful done, lovely to see wood grain on a device.

Just passed 10M member accounts on Fotolog.  What a year it has been, some community metrics / data points.   

• We have almost doubled our membership so far this year
• We hit Alexa #17 in the world yesterday (ahead of ebay!), average over the past week is #18, yesterday we were tracking reach of over 2%.
• Comscore recently logged us as having 4.5M daily unique visitors on a base of 10M member, and 15M monthly uniques
• Over 20% of our pageviews last month were from Europe.

And the adoption of new products has been very strong.   When we launched Fotolog Messenger three weeks ago we had 1.5M people try it out in the first 15 hrs.  As of Friday we had 3,193,618 members who had enabled the messenger feature, almost a third of everyone, who ever, over the past 5 years opened and used an account with us? ! That's, one engaged membership.  

Thank you to our members, thank you to our team in NY and thank you to everyone who helped make this happen — its a privilege to be part of this great social media network.   We are figuring out who is member #10M is and do something special.  We will also be launching more new features on Fotolog this week than ever before in our history — 10M or not, this was always going to be a big week!

Big changes at Fotolog last week — we shipped the new Fotolog memberpage.  It is written in Java, an update from the old PHP code that goes back to the founding of the site.   Results are coming in and it looks like significant performance gains across the board.  

First the member experience has improved — the new page is cleaner and has a faster response time.   But in addition, we are now serving the site on less than half the boxes that we were using.  

Registrations are up — over the weekend we are seeing our daily registrations up over 35% given the improved performance and a requirement to register to post a guest book message.  Revenue lift from Google is trending up approximately 15% given additional contextual data from the guestbooks. 

This new code base will allow us to innovate much more on the member experience — that is why we made this change — we did expect to realize some other benefits.  But these across the board immediate gains are far broader than I expected.  

A few people have asked me what applications I am using on my Mac, in particular all the little sidecar applications I use. When I start using a new application I typically add it to the "app's I use" section of findin.gs. But here is a snapshot of some of the more interesting applications I am currently using.

Omnifocus : Omnifocus is a Getting Things Done (aka, GTD) application that grew out of the work of Ethan Schoonover and the set of scripts that he wrote called Kinkless GTD. I tried Kinkless, moved over to Actiontastic and now I am trialling Ominfocus and loving it. The degree of granularity it offers in terms of project/context control is great - as you flip from project to context, zoom in and out of focus, see Ethan screencast of the product. In Betaworks I have a diverse set of projects that I want to track and manage — Omnifocus is still underdevelopment but the omingroup have the beginnings of a great application here.

Neoffice : Open Office for the Mac, works great, unlike MSFT Office it runs native, and becasue it opens files all inside of one application its far faster than office. I dont generate many office docs, I use Neo essentially as a viewer — works very well. The best of lotus Symphony final comes to life as an open source project.

Spirited away: I like to work with a clean desktop — Spirited Away does just that,it cleans up applications that are not in focus after X minutes, very useful.

Backdrop : Nice little application that drops a curtain between the application in focus and others - for someone who likes working with a clean space, this is a great little app. Spirited away and backdrop work very nicely together.

Mindmanager: Just starting to work with version 7. Its good client based mindmapping software, I am still trying to figure out how to integrate this into my workflow (aka "why do I need this, how does it help")

Groupcal : To synch between exchange and ical, snerdware has a piece of software that runs pretty well. Warning, dont disrupt a synch — recovery is not fun.

Quicksilver : Amazingly versatile finder application

Glance : Remote desktop, demo's and presentations, glance is something the Flog team introduced me to and its way simpler than the alternatives (webex etc).

Disk Warrior : I was doing some preventive maintence to the other week and tried to install Tech Tools Pro. In the process my hard drive melted down — half way through the installation I was stuck and off to the Genius bar.   Disk Warrior fixed the problem, Tech Tools didnt.   For hard disk errors Disk Warrior.

Thats it for now 

The launch last week of Facebook's platform initiative, F8, has generated a lot of talk, much of it in the mainstream press.  Its a compelling story, Facebook is becoming a platform, out maneuvering Myspace, doing to the web what Microsoft did to the PC.   Its a story we have heard before, it seems to recur periodically.  However, the announcement last week was mostly about distribution -  it didn't involve either deep or open access to Facebook data nor open access to its infrastructure.   F8 as it stands today is a partnering platform.  This one more small step in a long negotiation that is taking place between web sites on how data is owned, on how its shared between sites and how people navigate through services on one site to another.   This conversation is still in its infancy.  

XML really began the process of lateral data flows between sites and the vision of the semantic web offers a rich set possibilities — yet it's early days — most sites still operate in vaccum's and most user data is still stuck in proprietary silos.   And while the technology certainly needs to evolve so do the scope and kind of business arrangements.   The web of contracts, contracts between vertical sites, contacts between sites and users - needs to evolve in order for the vision of the semantic web to reach some of its compelling end points.   Weaving, back to the Facebook announcement.  What happens next is more interesting than what happened last week.    Facebook has taken a different approach to Myspace - who has opt'd to control much of its third party innovation through fairly simplistic interfaces and binary business driven rules, more like a traditional media company, vs. letting the community really build on top of the service in a meaningful manner.     As the Facebook platform evolves there are a handful of things I will be watching:

1. How deep are are the API's that Facebook is going to present to the community.    Facebook markup language is a proprietary API, the "platform" maybe wide in terms of distribution but its not deep, there is little to no access for third parties to the social data or infrastructure that makes Facebook such an interesting service, and its not open for developers to just build on, everyone accepted into the platform has to be sanctioned by Facebook, the degree of openness, real openness (vs. marketing gibberish) will dictate the depth and the value of the platform.   Amazon has done a great job at developing a set of platform services — starting with the affiliate model, extending it into community and then the Mechanical Turk and the elastic computing cloud services.  These web services were built step by step along with trust and a degree of openness that surprised many.    Pretty much every startup I work with today is using EC2/S3 — if Facebook going to have the same influence over the web application space, if so they need to open up more than a distribution funnel. iLike's weekend server hunt demonstrates a need on the infrastructure side, but the is also a real need re: social data.    Offering Facebook users the ability to port social data, their social network across applications and letting applications developers innovate on top of that data set would be really interesting.

2. How will the application metaphor evolve?   I see the metaphor Facebook has applied as the most interesting thing in the announcement last week.  The web has spawned many interesting platforms for micro application development.    Applets, plugin's -  from Wordpress to Firefox to Myspace there is a an active ecosystem of development around many web sites.    But the term application suggests user control beyond a widget or plug-in, applications are often monolithic, the management of applications by the underlying OS is usually benign and in service to the application (get me that device driver)  — the term application presents a high bar for Facebook to jump over.    To me the use of the term suggests a rich set of API's and a clearly defined layer - a layering of both technical and business terms.   Its an exciting challenge to see if they can make this truly an application environments.   And if they do, what is Facebook's relationship to these applications?   The identity issue below is only scratching the surface of this question.   It was fascinating to me that in the announcement last week most of the mainstream press look in the rear view mirror for metaphors — this was going to be like windows was to the PC.   I hope not — we don't need another OS, what we need are open development platforms — and open access to data.    I did a lot of work on platforms a long time back — back in 1998, I invested in a company called WebOS that tried to go down the path of applying the desktop metaphor to the web, of duplicating the inadequacies of the desktop on the web.    There were few people comparing last week's announcement to Adobe's Apollo — Apollo is setup to be a more traditional, extensible platform.  One of the companies I am working with — im in like with you — is developing much of its service in Apollo.   Apollo is truly a web application environment — offering state management outside of the browser, for example Apollo will let me do my web mail while I am unconnected.  But Adobe is building this as a platform service, like Flash the intent is to proliferate the tool set across the web, developers will adopt it as will end users and like Flash it will provide revenue from scaled developers paying Adobe a license fee.   This is a platform business model that the market understands.   A cross platform run time isnt as sexy sounding at F8, but it might be more meaningful.  And then there is Firefox 3 — another valid comparison that didnt seem to come up in many discussions.   

3. How will application providers be promoted in Facebook?   This is critical to understanding the underlying business terms between the distributor and the application creator.   Last weeks announcement was about distribution, and it formalized an approach for Facebook partners, business development in a box, a highly scalable approach to partnering.     But what are the underlying economic drivers?     At AOL promotion and positioning was usually governed by dollars spent.    At Google it now seems to be about long term strategic value: years ago the Google services that were tiled above search results - were best in class - for finance related searches (search for a stock ticker), Yahoo finance was promoted, Mapquest was the default when you searched for a location.   Then slowly over time Google services received prominence equal or better to others.   Today its pretty much all Google services upfront, in default positions — nice to leave some pointers for competitors but as Google knows well defaults drive traffic and traffic drives revenue.  

Last week the COO at Facebook, Owen Van Natta, said:  "How are we promising not to trump your application? We're going to level the playing field, developers won't be second-class citizens–we're going to compete directly with them."   Accordingly, the Facebook application directory is organized today mostly by popularity — but mostly is different to always. 

See the ringed sections of the screenshot — unlike third parties Facebook applications don't list the number of users of its applications (Marketplace is a Facebook application).    And note the that Application directory (boxed) starts with Facebook's top Applications.    Finally, as the users expands and contracts the application list (the more carat, where the arrow is pointing) Facebook's one advertisement on the page moves down, partially below the fold.  Tell me this execution isn't setup to collide with business priorities.

In Japan, on the cell phone, Do Co Mo understood that with a limited UI placement of third party services needed to be ranked by usage.   Is Facebook headed down the same path — and what does the COO really mean?? — Facebook owns this garden, competing directly with application providers is going to be, interesting.

4. How will Facebook manage identity and data across third party applications?   Some sites promoted in F8 seem to be managing identity independent from Facebook, others are doing a one click install and sign in (but even in the case of Mosoto, you are signed in for chat but to file share you need to sign in again?).    Does Facebook become a alternative identity broker on the web and if so they are going to have to a lot more open in their approach to data — open ID is a pretty high standard.      Facebook has traditionally had a fairly rough privacy policy — they gather a lot of data about their users and there has been a fair amount of controversy about it.    As they manage data across applications this is only going to get more challenging. 

5. Lastly, how does Zuckerberg social graph extend beyond the core college audience / behavior?   The feed feature added a whole new dimension to Facebook and extended the time people were spending on the site significantly, Comscore data suggests it went up by over 5 mins per day.   Fotolog has a similar, feature that alerts users to new uploads by friends — its a significant driver of our navigational based traffic.   But how does the audience and the use cases evolve beyond the core?   Will people outside of college enter in real names into profiles and will the social dynamics of the broader audience fit with the services that were built for the student based audience?   Over the past year I have started to use LinkedIn more — its starting to become useful, the network is large enough, the alerts I get from LinkedIn are useful — not spam.  I signed up for Facebook shortly after they opened up — but I didn't go back, till friends started inviting me.   Over the past 6 months I have visited the sites to confirm friends but there is nothing useful about Facebook as yet, and useful aside it better be either personal or entertaining — but like so many other social networks its about collecting connections, but whats are the services that are going to drive usage for me — I don't see it yet.   

This is a quote from Giga Om's review post the launch event, its worth a slow read.   "Zuckerberg says you can serve ads on your app pages and keep all the revenue, sell them yourselves or use a network, and process transactions within the site, keeping all the revenue without diverting users off Facebook. This was the opposite to what was stated in the WSJ article earlier this week, and gets by far the biggest reaction from the crowd."  

This got the biggest reaction from the crowd??  Maybe a crowd packed with Web 2.0 service and feature developers who are in need of an audience found it it interesting.    If a user today opt's in to use your site on Firefox — or your application on windows — or even within the grandfather of walled garden's AOL — you still get to keep the ad-revenue.  So why is this a big surprise?  Maybe the attention the announcement garnered is also about the proliferation of web based features searching for a destination to marry themselves to.

Intent and that Telegraph Road

I do think its worth do ask whats the intent behind the Facebook announcement, who is meant to serve and whats the need behind the F8 initiative?    The Facebook was launched as a service for US college students.   It was full of social tools, it let you build out your own network, post events, notes, photos and most importantly its all private, so that students can develop a profile that is real vs. many of the fantasy based profiling you see on Myspace and other sites.   Facebook achieved a lot of its early traction for the same reason as Cyworld did– you could enter your College, your year and actually find friends, colleagues, friends to be, cruches etc.  Because people used real names on the service — emails were verified by domain and you could find anyone in your university.   This was and is a big idea — few sites have a relationship based with their users that maps to real identities.     Anyone who has attended a US university or college knows exactly what this is about. Then came the monetization.  

Facebook started with advertising, they achieved some remarkable successes by mid 2005 they became profitable, they had 2,000+ colleges and 20,000+ high schools on the service.   And the audience was rabidly engaged — 2/3rd's of the active membership came to the site everyday.     But look at Facebook's reach through 2006 — it is flat, because by 2006 they had tapped into an audience and grown the business about as far as it could go given its natural limitations: students.    They were now faced with the question of how to scale your business beyond its base.   They could go global — there are services like FriendsReunited in the UK and Australia who are demonstrating, albeit with differences , that the market exists outside of the US for a Facebook like service.    And /or they could opt to extend the scope of the Facebook offering and try to reach a broader audience in the US beyond students.   They decided to push on both fronts but most significantly in September last year Facebook opened up to users irrespective of whether they were in school or not.   In 2007 Facebook's reach more than tripled.  Before they opened up the doors to the broader audience they were adding 15,000 members a day, today they are adding 100,000 a day (NYT stat, note Fortune says 150,000 a day).  They now have 24M active users, posting mostly Photos, notes and events.

But now reach has extended they need to find ways to get people to spend more time on the site.  Here comes the platform initiative.  The platform that was released last week is about extending Facebook in a different manner to the other social networking sites.  Its about continuing to extend Facebook features by offering distribution of third party applications on Facebook.  Yet the features been added are contained within the Facebook experience.   Out the gate its a great opportunity for fledgling sites, particularly sites that are more of a feature than a destination — Facebook is offering one click installs for applications within Facebook. Its about distribution and its about continuing to drive the amount of time people are spending on the site, which in turns drives advertising.  Facebook is playing the same game as media aggregators have played since the dawn of time.    Whether its Disney, Yahoo or AOL — its all about getting in front of the distribution firehose — they are selling their audience.   Day 1 its not setup as a sale.   Remember that AOL used to pay service providers to offer content and services within the walled garden — then in 1996 when AOL hit a scale it stopped paying providers and started charging — bit by bit AOL flipped the model.  This all seems far less interesting and ambitious than the headlines suggest.   Zuckerberg told Kirkpatrick that what Facebook is unveiling would be "the most powerful distribution mechanism that's been created in a generation."  I hope its is more than that.     If Facebook's F8 is about trying to extend the size and scale of innovation and services in what amounts to another a walled garden experience it will another building block in the long history of web hype.  The Facebook has a great social platform to build off, I hope they are brave enough to let their users take their data and extend services beyond their control, beyond the walled garden.  

A last point worth making is the absence of Microsoft, Yahoo, Ebay and AOL in the platform / social networking space.     Live.com was meant to be a web development platform — but things hewed back to Windows with the launch of Vista.  Microsoft developed much of the thinking behind the web as a platform — with hailstorm and then live.com — but IE7 and Live haven't taken the lead.   Yahoo made all these great acquisitions, many of which they they have left in silos and failed to build upon.    Ebay has this amazing social / trust network that links merchants and end users.    We think of profiles as been specific to social net, but Ebays profiles as they relate to trust and commerce and communications (skype) are a trove of data that could be opened up to users, applications and the web as a whole.  And the merchant relationships, what about extending them into advertising.     Like wise with AOL — there was a recent comment about the importance of opening up AIM, again…     Its amazing to see the leaders of earlier generations of the web MIA — gone from this social networking race.

The semantic web needs to be distributed at its core, another walled garden is too low a bar for a really powerful and interesting social network to aim for.  I hope Facebook actually step beyond the marketing hype and deliver a social platform for the web.

I am trying out the Canon TX1 hybrid cam. I am a big fan of hybrids — for the past couple of years I have used the Sony DSC M1 hybrid. This Canon promises a lot and thus far seems to deliver fairly well. The Camera is very stripped down and easy to use — but the ergonomics aren’t as good as the Sony, harder to hold and shoot with one hand. Stills are 7.1 pixels and other than the flash (which is weak) the stills are good. The face identification software does a really good job of finding faces — less clear whether the adjustments it does once it has found faces is worth much, but that strange allure of technology recognizing a human feature is enough to make one think it must be have some value.

Video is just weird. Canon promote this as an HD hybrid and sure enough the video is 720p, 16:9, 30fps. But it records in M-JPEG (Motion JPEG - basically a string of jpeg images?!). Hugely inefficient at encoding, gives you approx. 13mins of video on a 4 gig card? There is the advantage that you can pull a still from the video stream, which is kinda interesting if you want to wade through a gazzillon frames for the 1/30th of a precious second. But why M-JPEG, Divx or MPEG4? I suspect they wanted to (a) save on licensing fee’s — and (b) make sure the camera wasnt too good at doing video. The tension that hybrids have for Camera manufactures persist — if its too good then people wont need to buy two devices. But the choice is an interesting testament to how the plunging cost of storage continues to radically effect technology standards.

A lot of chatter about the iphone — just read Dave Winer's piece — lots of conspiracy theories about how real the Job's demo was and people are starting to focus on the question of how closed the platform is.  Jobs has said that the platform will allow third party development but it will be "restricted" and managed — like ipod games.  Apple believes that in order to get a product into market — out of the box — end to end control of the hardware and software experience is the easiest and fastest way to deliver something that works to users.   This worked in the case of the ipod — it wasnt the first MP3 player to hit the market, it was just the first to work as seamlessly as it did, from the device to the pc.   There are smart phones of many flavors out there today — but they all require a lot of setup, maintenance etc.  The iphone is clearly going to be different — take a look at the Pogue's list of what is does and doesnt do.    

Last year I lived in Italy for six months and I made some notes about what an insanely mobile the country was — 57M people with 70M cell phones.   There are more mobile phones here than fixed lines, estimates are that 18% of the population have cut the cord (chk). Kids and couples walk around listening to cell phones playing music, like 30 years ago people would walk around listening to a radio.    Someone we know was chatted up by a waiter at a restaurant — for follow up, he offered her a SIM chip instead of offering his phone number.   SMS is everywhere and its far more conversational than in the US. The rates and pricing plans push people to SMS.    Wifi is fairly available and the cell co's are clearly nervous about voip / skype - 3 (Hutchison Whampoa) has an offer in market for $15 a month unlimited voip calling to over 25 countries from your handset.    And in Italy Apple has next to no presence (as of 06 they had no stores and next to no market share).  In Italy Apple has next to no presence (as of 06 they had no stores and next to no market share).

Over time the iPod functionality needs to merge into the phone.     Yet Apple has created a business model that is based on tethering hardware to software and reaping all of the margins on the hardware.    The result is that music that I have "bought" on iTunes isn't transportable to other non apple devices.   I really haven't bought it, its a rental agreement - with the a right to listen to that music on 5 apple pc's / devices.  Jobs knows that the ipod is close to its peak and its time to move the ball — the question in my mind is whether open and unlocked alternatives — palm, symbian, rim and even linux phones can out run Apple. 

The pressure points are in my mind (a) apple's dependency on the ipod and its related business mode — the iphone needs to have everything the high end ipod has (focus will be on music, video and phone — watch how they execute on core ipod features (eg: access to itunes store from the device (which today is not available), music and video sharing (also not available)) and then non ipod functionality.    The phone is a messaging device, music and ipod functionality needs to balanced against great messaging capabilities — voice and text (Phones outside of the US are used more for messaging that voice — calling them phones is a cultural artifact — they are messaging devices with voice as a secondary features)   (b) apple's tie to cingular (2 years), and the associated restrictions this brings with it (re: no voip, open wifi roaming, no HSDPA/3g, requirement for a 2 year contract, no unlocked alternative etc.)  (c) the tension between a closed end to end platform with controlled innovation vs. an open platform with distributed innovation and lastly (d) the execution of the hardware / device and the lack of a keyboard.  If this is mostly a media device Apple will miss the broader market. 

I have no doubt people will buy this product — it seems like a beautiful piece of hardware and simply postioned as the highest end ipod it will find a market –  just like the nano or video ipod.  But neither the nano or the video ipod defined a new category — they were devices in a long stream of innovation that started with the orginal ipod.   The iphone needs to define a whole new stream of innovation independent from the ipod.  And the business model will likely also have to evolve — in more developed markets (south korea the flip has occurred to a subsription model, $5 a month for all the music you want / can eat).     I am going to be watching the pressure points listed above to see whether similar to the ps3 vs. Wii the lowend offer some real alternatives, without all the restrictions that Apple's business model now imposes on it as the category leader - the mobile world needs to see some real innovation and what I saw last week suggests that not going to come from Apple. 

7 4 07
(things to watch in 07)

1. Google will feel the tension between search and browse and their associated business models. Google quick check-out will emerge as the companies key innovation beyond search and paid listings. Yahoo and Ebay will follow AOL and be rolled into the operating theatre — the problem isnt technology (panama etc.) its the business model tradeoff’s they have both made re: the tail.

2. Sector wise e-commerce will rise in importance as alternative currencies emerge as legitimate ways to transact. Its a different take on the subscription model but using ingame currencies to transact for other products (see qq coin). On the subject of virtual worlds, growth will continue at a pace, but second life will emerge as the one everyone could understand but few actually wanted to visit more than once.

3. Geographically, the rest of the world will come into focus as internet and media companies search for customers and growth and innovation. ROW will start to be a legitimate force of innovation rather than just a platform to duplicate US business models.

4. Connectivity wise, wireless broadband will finally become a force to be contend with

5. Policy wise: the Net Neutrality debate will recede as it becomes evident that while network providers need to have the ability to ability to manage bits, those who think they can manage or shape the transport layer to the bias one application or service over another will be proven wrong. The influence and relative progress of the ROW will help here. And while the focus is on policy — the internet policy debate will switch to US broadband adoption and relative speed/price of offerings in US vs. ROW.

6. In terms of protocols and the evolution of the web — web 2.0 given that it has moved from a useful definition to a undefined meme will recede in importance and the semantic web will begin to take shape, standards, api’s will be extended to form the basis for the next iteration of the internet

7. Hardware and device wise, Vista’s influence will be mostly in the enterprise, the Ipod starts looking tired, the Itv box becomes a big deal. Leopard will be a bigger deal than most expect. Xbox 360 will get squeezed from the bottom (Wiiiii!), PS3 will make its numbers, the product is pretty good, not as much fun as Wii but nonetheless good. And Linux phones should be on your radar, they are on mine.

"Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Uh Oh, Gmail Just Got Perfect Google quietly added a small feature to Gmail this week called Mail Fetcher. When that feature launched, Gmail became perfect."

gmail perfect? not yet — all too often I find that Google's religion often gets in the way of it becoming a great service.    Google's world view is defined by and through the lens of search.   This drives features that are sometimes bent (no folders, only labels, pray tell whats the difference, metaphors are important, no need to bend them), features that are sorely lacking (eg: IMAP, in search centric world where everything lives in the cloud no one needs to sync with clients or devices, why bother with IMAP?  Or is it because IMAP will break the conversations feature, or because it will give users a path around the ad's?), and features which are good but not great (like the conversations feature, that every so often mis-files a mail and suddenly mail is a mess) and a data / privacy policy that serves search not the users.  Last, in a world where there is a rich set of tools emerging for client based email (eg: here , or here , or there ), wouldnt some API"s make sense in gmail?

There is so much head room for improvement in mail - gmail made some great strides forward, but perfect, not yet, and not for most of the world, at least thats what the data suggest.   Last time I saw usage data for web mail based services, in the US, Yahoo was the leader with 40+% share, gmail had less than 3% share — i often hear that internationally gmail is meant to be way ahead, but I recently saw a piece on market share in India of web mail services and gmail has 5% share, yahoo, reddif and hotmail have most of the rest of the market.  Alpha geeks seem to gloss over this data with the assumption that its only a question of time, and the rest of the world will figure it out.   Two and half years after the launch of gmail the rest of the world still hasnt figured it out — and btw, in the quest to follow google, no one seems to talk much about myspace's  20% domestic share of email, the Newscorp UK / google deal is interesting for that reason and some.   

I have spent a week getting a pots number to call forward to another number. I set it up on verizon.com, took 4 days to complete the order, once it was done the number no longer worked. I called and after 25 mins on hold I got to a very perky tech representative — he checked it out, said it was setup wrong through the system. He went and made some adjustments — I swear I heard wheels turning in the engine room — another 15 mins later we were done. With the caveat that I need to call again nxt week to set it to ring straight through (right now its on 4 rings and then it will forward, and only the business office can change that rule).

Vonage, grandcentral, skype, pick your voip — this take less than 3 mins. to update. Hmmm that sure is one smart network.

Just read Cringley’s piece about Grouper, its surprisingly thin. The purchase is about a research — Lynton made that clear in his statement - but with no brand its going to be hard to extend it beyond r&d, something Cringley seems to think is eary. Also wasnt grouper all about p2p and sharing of personal media? Thats what the client / media player is all about. The media have respun this as another video sharing site — but Felsner’s and Samuels vision started in a very different place. Will be interesting to see what Sony really bought and where they go with this. Sony really needs to drive and open up innovation on the software layer - from walkmans to phones to psp’s to connected cameras and playstations — offering users a means to share and manage personal media is a big opportunity that Sony have thus far failed to deliver on.

Why cant I tag movie clips as I film them on my camera? There should be a simple scroll wheel interface into a user defined set of keywords that I could select and tag as I capture media. The relative cost of capturing, or acquiring media continues to drop at an astounding pace — but this has shifted the cost of media from storage, processing etc. to organization and presentation.  Grouper anyone? Another example — have you tried openlcr? Openlcr is a web based interface to offer software services for cordless phones — ringtones, weather, upload contacts etc.  Its abismal — useless, and expensive to boot.   Why arent CE companies adapting to software based innovation? I think the problem is generally grounded in the history of the consumer electronics business. Most of the traditional businesses grew through innovating of specific hardware based functionality. CE devices were traditionally all about making thousands of minute pieces of hardware work in tandem. Yet CE as an industry is getting pressured from the edge by both the low cost manufacturing base, the realities of solid state and the advent of software based innovation, in essentially dumb devices.

Given that the Grouper purchase was made by Sony Pictures its likely they too bought the video sharing meme and wont capitalize on the rest of the opportunity, but there could be much more here than just another video storage / sharing site.

I was talking last night with a friend who has started up a company to assist photographers make the digital transition. His clients are fashion and art photographers who have shot in analog for years and are now moving to digital. The images he deals with are 16-30+ mega pixels. The raw TIFF’s are 50 meg+ each.

Asked him what kind of processing he normally does to to these images — turns out one of the first things he does is add in a layer of grain into the image — to simulate the way people are accustomed to see photos — with grain. As he put it “you add grain and people see the image as more real”. More real? or a better simulation of another media type that is associated with a copy of reality?!

I ordered a macbook pro from MacMall on friday.    Shortly after placing the order I got a call back from the salesperson saying they had to redo the order and ship windows separately due to an agreement signed the previous night with Microsoft.    Seems Apple is now a full fledged OEM — and has agreed to not sell windows unbundled. Will be interesting to see what happens when 10.5 is shipped and bootcamp is standard with the OS, will Windows also become standard, given the gap between retail and wholesale prices - I suspect it might.