UserDriven

The Dilbert Blog!

"The only reason I dare writing this blog is because I have absolutely no sense of embarrassment. Most people would be horrified at the prospect of proving their ignorance to thousands of readers. My attitude is more along the lines of I have thousands of readers? Cool." (The Dilbert Blog)

Long Tail Music Connection

"An average episode of a television show uses 20 to 60 pieces of music, from full songs to two-second snippets, and clearing rights for musicians signed to labels requires time-consuming negotiations and phone calls.

Pump Audio solves that problem by providing networks with a hard drive filled with 11,000 songs categorized and searchable by genre, instrument and lyrical theme. Customers pay a flat fee per episode (or commercial) to Pump Audio, which the company splits evenly with the musicians."

(Wired News: Pumping Indies on MTV)

AttentionTrust.org

"The AttentionTrust is a non-profit organization that is developing and encouraging others to develop open source ‘attention recorders,’ devices that will allow their users to capture what they do and therefore assert some control it. Although later attention recorders will not be so limited, the first is a Firefox extension that saves the user’s clickstream, and gives users the option of forwarding on their clickstreams to services that live up to the AttentionTrust’s high standards – property, mobility, economy, and transparency. In plain English, these principles ensure that you know exactly what’s being recorded about you and how it’s being used, that you own all of that information, and that you have the right to move it around however you like, including the right to delete it completely from each service’s databases. These are not insignificant rights; they’re rarely found online today." (AttentionTrust.org)

Ning-ing It -- HyperCard 2.0?

A trackback from Marc (thanks!), led to some good posts on Ning:

Lucas Gonze: Social software for developing social software

Kevin Burton's Feed Blog: 24 Hour Laundry (Ning) Launches - Expect Scalability Problems

Om Malik’s Broadband Blog - Ning, the real 24 Hour Laundry

Software Only: The 24 Hour Laundry has closed, and is replaced by Ning

Anything Else: ning: My Thoughts

SiliconBeat: Andreessen's Ning unveiled

And, as always, TechDirt nails it: "This raises one big question: the core value of most social application is in whether or not it can build a real community. eBay, Craigslist, Flickr, del.icio.us and others really succeeded because of the communities they built, rather than just the technology. Thus, the idea of having lots of people easily creating new social applications might not seem too appealing. Those apps are pretty much worthless without the community, right? It might be a useful way to rapidly prototype a new app, but can it turn into something more? Actually... it might. If you start to think about it more as social situated software, suddenly the idea becomes a lot more interesting. The idea of situated software is that it serves a specific need for a specific (often very small) group of people. It doesn't need to scale. It just needs to serve that group." -Techdirt:Build Your Own Social Apps?

So is Ning essentially a glorified Web 2.0 HyperCard (the old Apple Macintosh app that "made everyone a programmer")? Even though there were many apps that could be built on top of HyperCard, "serious" programmers did not build "serious" applications with it...

Also, each of the above examples (eBay, Craigslist, Flickr, del.icio.us) have many many subtle but real differences in how their systems, rules, and community were built that enabled and empowered their communities of users to build something unique and valuable.

Having generic tools that can make a generic copy of some Web 2.0 success stories is still very much missing the essence and soul of what makes those examples so remarkable.

And while the generic concept of Ning is very very very cool ("give users the tools and platform to build stuff"), this smells way too much like "let's be the next Microsoft® by trying to lock users into our fabulous new and shiny Stealth 2000 Web 2.0 OS Platform®."

If Ning had "just" been an open source library of tested and interoperable code to make it easier for people to "roll their own" it would have been a very different story, but that, of course, would have none of the "sexy business model lock-in possibilities" - which is also the exact same huge reason why the odds are strongly against a "serious" app ever being built on it - as other options are still relatively cheap, easy, quick, potentially "monetizable" through AdSense and the like, and, most importantly, come with no implicit platform lock-in...

It is surprising that none of the above bloggers address this last point - or is it not an issue for anyone else?

O'Reilly on Web 2.0

Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software

"Overture and Google's success came from an understanding of what Chris Anderson refers to as "the long tail," the collective power of the small sites that make up the bulk of the web's content. DoubleClick's offerings require a formal sales contract, limiting their market to the few thousand largest websites. Overture and Google figured out how to enable ad placement on virtually any web page. What's more, they eschewed publisher/ad-agency friendly advertising formats such as banner ads and popups in favor of minimally intrusive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly text advertising.

The Web 2.0 lesson: leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head...

Like DoubleClick, Akamai is optimized to do business with the head, not the tail, with the center, not the edges. While it serves the benefit of the individuals at the edge of the web by smoothing their access to the high-demand sites at the center, it collects its revenue from those central sites.

BitTorrent, like other pioneers in the P2P movement, takes a radical approach to internet decentralization. Every client is also a server; files are broken up into fragments that can be served from multiple locations, transparently harnessing the network of downloaders to provide both bandwidth and data to other users. The more popular the file, in fact, the faster it can be served, as there are more users providing bandwidth and fragments of the complete file.

BitTorrent thus demonstrates a key Web 2.0 principle: the service automatically gets better the more people use it. While Akamai must add servers to improve service, every BitTorrent consumer brings his own resources to the party. There's an implicit "architecture of participation", a built-in ethic of cooperation, in which the service acts primarily as an intelligent broker, connecting the edges to each other and harnessing the power of the users themselves...

The now hotly contested web mapping arena demonstrates how a failure to understand the importance of owning an application's core data will eventually undercut its competitive position. MapQuest pioneered the web mapping category in 1995, yet when Yahoo!, and then Microsoft, and most recently Google, decided to enter the market, they were easily able to offer a competing application simply by licensing the same data.

Contrast, however, the position of Amazon.com. Like competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, its original database came from ISBN registry provider R.R. Bowker. But unlike MapQuest, Amazon relentlessly enhanced the data, adding publisher-supplied data such as cover images, table of contents, index, and sample material. Even more importantly, they harnessed their users to annotate the data, such that after ten years, Amazon, not Bowker, is the primary source for bibliographic data on books, a reference source for scholars and librarians as well as consumers. Amazon also introduced their own proprietary identifier, the ASIN, which corresponds to the ISBN where one is present, and creates an equivalent namespace for products without one. Effectively, Amazon "embraced and extended" their data suppliers.

Imagine if MapQuest had done the same thing, harnessing their users to annotate maps and directions, adding layers of value. It would have been much more difficult for competitors to enter the market just by licensing the base data...

Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license.) The open source dictum, "release early and release often" in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, "the perpetual beta," in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It's no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a "Beta" logo for years at a time."

(O'Reilly Network: What Is Web 2.0)

Ning!

"Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications. Social apps are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people." (Ning)

Architecture of Participation

"Most recently, O'Reilly's dead-on inner compass led him to anticipate the current stage of the Internet. Powered by the bottom-up nature of sharing and collective action, it's exemplified by such developments as the barn-raising methodology of Wikipedia; group efforts like tagging; open source systems; Wi-Fi; open API's in ecommerce sites like Amazon, eBay, and Google; RSS; the spontaneous connectivity of Apple's Rendezvous; and dozens- of other dots that are being- connected to fulfill the original promise of the Net. He calls it the architecture of participation. In O'Reilly's world, sharing increases value - so much so that it becomes unthinkable to close off information or to adopt nonstandard proprietary systems. The result is a virtuous cycle where openness becomes the norm, encouraging even more participation." (Wired 13.10: The Trend Spotter)