This post on the BW blog echoes some feelings that I had when the web2.0 “revolution” took off and everybody with an internet connection put a blog. I was wondering how long it will last because it was seemed similar to a trend in fashion, a trend that you don’t expect to outlast the season in which it was launched.

One pretty good example of such an application is Technorati, an application feeding off the blog frenzy that characterized the mid 2000’s. For a few years it was the go-to site for everything blog-related, today it is a has-been as interest in blogs was replaced by interest in social networks and Twitter.
I see one small problem with applications which follow and try to satisfy consumer trends: the fact that they require large investments in infrastructure (demanded by the large loads they have to satisfy) as well as the fact that they need to re-coup this investment in a relative short period of time before they become fads. 

I am wondering how volatility in user tastes will affect the funding and the revenue models for applications which are trying to satisfy consumer trends, because the gap between the investments necessary for putting up such applications and returns on these investments grows larger as the volatility increases. VCs will not be able to hedge away risks by investing in multiple applications at the same time (effectively spreading risk across different applications in the same class of applications), because all these applications could suffer large swings in their userbase. VCs will probably have to hedge away the risks of investing in these applications by investing in areas outside social-networks (green technologies, etc…).

User volatility is a pretty new phenomenon for which there is no history from which to infer much. It will be interesting to see how this will un-fold: will this type of application simply disappear because it is economically irrational to invest in them or will the costs of running such an application become so low that the investment required for it can be amortized in a short period of time? Or something else…

I still cannot fully absorb the news that Oracle is buying Sun. First, I don’t understand the rationale for it (since when Oracle wanted to become a hardware vendor???). Second, because I see the development environment I grew used to (an environment which gives the developer a lot of freedom in choosing how to work, what components to use, how to integrate them, etc…) threatened with change. 

Reading the press release I came across this worrisome snippet: “Sun is a pioneer in enterprise computing, and this combination recognizes the innovation and customer success the company has achieved. Our largest customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly optimized stack based on standards,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips.
I had the opportunity to deal with a highly optimized stack from Oracle - JDev integrated with Oracle DB - and I know that I don’t want to deal with anything similar to it again, from what I remember developing on JDev means basically being taken hostage to a set of capabilities.

I think that this deal is best defined as the acquisition of the largest open source company in the world, Sun managing these OS assets: MySQL, Java, Open-Solaris, Open-Office,  Open-Sparc. Oracle should treat these projects and the communities built around them with care and not antagonize them because quite a few competitors would love to be put in a position to efficiently fork Sun’s OS assets in order to acquire a new community and a new customer base.

Another point I would like to make is that Oracle is buying Sun when Sun’s grip over the Java community is waning away. As outlined in a post by Rod Johnson development in Java is moving away from EJB containers to specialized solutions which means that the EJB assets bought by Oracle are diminishing their worth.

I think that this transaction will define Java for the near future. Sun did an outstanding job of building a community around Java, a community which delivered an impressive stack of libraries, an open community which could work together in order to avoid duplication, a community which turned R&D projects into viable commercial projects. It would be a shame if this changes in the future.

Later Edit: mySQL just got forked, I thought I may add a “Fork Watch” for the Sun OS products which Oracle has just acquired. It would be interesting to watch how this will unfold…

• First fork of mySQL by the Open Database Alliance.

I was watching this interview with Tim Bray in which Tim downplayed Rich Internet Applications in favor of ordinary web-apps and I find myself agreeing with Tim, I think that web-applications have the means to become the applications with the largest marketshare and this is due to the low costs of composing applications on the web vs the (current) high cost of composing application in RIAs.

Let me explain: with the introduction of ubiquitous connectivity partnerships between various organisations became feasible to the point where applications are becoming applications composed of components, components which are not all originating from the same organization. Organizations are finding it wasy to exchange data and functionality (think about the widgets on Facebook: Facebook could import Digg-like functionality and data straight from Digg). The result is that web applications are becoming places where organizations meet, agree on the interactions between them and then implement these interactions. Once a web-app manages to get a certain number of users it has the opportunity to become a portal by swapping data with other web-apps and integrating with these web-apps.

Now, since the place where applications are getting composed is typically the place where applications are deployed, it follows that the place where applications are deployed defines the costs of application composition. If the applications are deployed remotely then the task of composing these applications is shifted onto the teams which are managing this remote application. If the application is deployed locally (on the desktop for example) the task of application composition is shifted onto the user that manages it on its desktop. If the costs of application compositions are low then the task of application composition can be shifted onto the user, if they are high then the same task will be shifted onto the teams that are managing the application remotely.
I would say that application composition costs are application discovery, integration between applications and integration between applications and the host environment and currently these costs are higher for RIAs than for typical web-apps.

Given that the costs of application compositions on the desktop are currently high, predominantly because of lack of standards, it follows that most of the application that get composed will be deployed remotely. Flash/Java FX/Silverlight will probably run stand alone applications which have a low degree of interaction with other applications. Facebook will probably be the place where a lot of the application composition will occur.

The near future is on the web and on web-applications. RIAs will probably satisfy some niche, but will not become the dominant architectural style in the near future, unless the makers of the RIA runtimes (Flash/Java FX/Silverlight) will find a way to address the costs of application composition. Some sort of a container which allows components originating from multiple sources to integrate among each other easily could lower these costs, taking the appeal of RIAs beyond its immediate differentiators (greater interaction with the user, low response times, etc…). Honestly, I am skeptical that the costs of composing application in RIA environments will become low enough to the point where RIAs will become more like portals where interactions between multiple organizations are carried out and less like applications.

Open source started with the desire to create applications whose code could not be closed away from the general public and for a few decades followed this course. Operating systems, databases, application servers, frameworks, applications were written, had an OS license pasted on it and then released into the public. The only one exception to break away from this pattern is Spring Source, the company behind the Spring portfolio of products.

Spring source is an a-typical open-source company in the sense that they broke away from creating open source software and moving into creating open source domains. Initially they became known for their IoC container and a few libraries which solved various code issues (their JDBC libraries being one such example). Next, they added various features to the Spring container (proxy-based AOP, etc…) and added some more frameworks to their portfolio, such as Spring MVC, following the typical road of an OS company that senses industry-wide needs and addresses them by creating frameworks implementing those needs.
Lately, however, Spring Source has been diversifying into business domains: right now its product portfolio encompasses Spring Security (actually an old framework known as Acegi Security), Spring Batch, Spring Integration, etc… It is a pretty interesting development and, as far as I know, it is singular in the OS space: we have an OS company that senses domains that are needed across the IT industry, pools together domain experts and goes on to deliver a framework that covers the main concepts of the domain and is sufficiently flexible to allow for covering corner-cases easily.

One interesting point about OS domains is that the company that provides a framework which implements such a domain pretty much needs to acquire a significant marketshare and be guaranteed not to lose that marketshare and actually move to a monopolistic position as long as it delivers a good implementation of the domain. The reason for that is a domain is pretty much a form of knowledge and implementing a domain is essentially translating this knowledge into a particular programming language. If the knowledge has been translated into a programming language successfully (i.e. when the domain has been implemented robustly) there is no need for a competing implementation, because this competing implementation would simply re-translate what was previously translated, which is pointless (the end result is the same - a new translation of the same concepts).
Another interesting point is that the company servicing the OS domain will probably derive revenues from domain knowledge rather than from the framework/application implementing that domain, the support for the framework implementing a domain is actually a proxy for domain knowledge (people buying support for the framework will buy it for understanding the domain better and for using the framework better within the domain). 

If I were to say what qualities are necessary for a domain to become an OS domain I woud point out that such a domain needs to be quite static, it has to be mature enough and it needs to be in great demand, it has to cut across the whole IT industry.
If I were to point a domain which is ripe for becoming an OS domain I would say that partitioning an application to run across a large number of nodes will probably become a good candidate for an OS domain as the number of applications which need to scale out massively will increase.

I maintain a different “blog” (*) hosted with Wordpress, a “blog” that I use for storing various information and that I visit rarely. In fact, I visit it so rarely that almost every time that I log on I see that a new version of Wordpress has been released and has been forced onto my blog. 
Which is very confusing because every new Wordpress version has so little in common with the preceding one that it takes me a while to get used to it. This leaves me wondering what has happened during each Wordpress release to require so many changes… 

From what I see Wordpress has a bit of a problem maintaining some coherence between its releases, when I first saw WP 2.7 I first thought that it is a completely new product with a completely new functionality and user base. Time to focus on continuity when designing user experiences at WP…

* I don’t realy use this blog as a blog, but mostly for storing some information that I find interesting. It contains links to my del.icio.us account, etc… I keep it with Wordpress in blog format because it is the most convenient.

Lately I have found myself doing something that I have not done for a pretty long time: reading newspapers and I mean real newspapers, made of paper (*). The main reason for this is that I find reading news from a laptop is pretty inconvenient when you have kids (**) and that nothing beats reading a newspaper next to cup of coffee.

At the same time I have found myself growing dissatisfied with the RSS feeds that I use for getting news and articles online and I think that the main reason for this dissatisfaction is the specialization of the content sources behind these RSS feeds. I am subscribed to a variety of content: from articles on software architecture, to financial news, to articles on design, economic development, economics in general, etc… These content sources are targetting a domain and are producing content according to that domain’s needs. One side effect is that by consuming the content provided by these sources you are getting a certain degree of specialization in the domain covered by them (which is very beneficial if you want to acquire a certain amount of specialization in a particular domain). One other side effect is that the specialization of these content sources prevents different content from getting to you and you are becoming hostage to some predefined content.

I find that by getting articles only thru my RSS feeds I am getting isolated from other parts of the world. In part for addressing this I have started reading newspapers again, because newspapers provide that general view on the world due to their format: the content of a newspaper had to be delivered as a whole rather than to be split into multiple slices which could be delivered to the reader independently. This format pretty much meant that if you needed to address new interests for your readership you needed to add new sections to it and as a result to expose your readership to new fields. The old newspaper is a home to multiple fields (for example your typical NYT covers everything from world news, to metropolitan news, to arts, business while also providing some comentary) with a news reader that is exposed to a variety of fields and an editorial team that understands the typical news reader and can provide the appropriate content for it.

This, however, changes a lot in the new media: the newspaper in the new media is getting decomposed into finer and finer slices which are being marketed to the newsreader thru various channels. At the same time the task of choosing what to read is being shifted from the editorial team to the reader which results in the abandoning of large, uniform reader bases and the creation of specialized niches.

If I were to set some resolutions for 2009 I would take a look at the fields into which I want to get some degree of specialization, keep the appropriate RSS feeds and remove the rest. While continuing to read newspapers, of course.

Happy New Year to everyone!!!!

* I recycle pretty much all that can be recycled in a home.

** I get too absorbed when reading news or articles on a computer so that when my kids want to play I cannot let go of the laptop easily, this is the main reason for which I pretty much stopped using a computer at home. When I am reading a paper I just put it down and go to play and I pick up the paper later.

I am following with a great deal of interest Amazon’s offerings to the point where I think that they are the company that understands the web the most, more than any Web2.0 company including Google. Amazon brought to the world the cloud, the MTurk, fulfillment and now they are bringing public data sets. 

Really funny that an online bookstore defines the web and not the Yahoo-Microsoft-Google group. I think that Amazon is ahead of the pack because being an online retailer its competitive advantage doesn’t lie with hoarding data or its super-efficient data-centers and as a result it can make them available to the outside world without damaging its competitive advantage. One interesting difference between Amazon and the YMG pack is the rate of success of each group’s offerings: Amazon Cloud has been a tremendous success, the MTurk seems pretty busy while Google has been releasing one service without customers after another (anyone remembers Google Health?), Microsoft is paying people to use live.com and Yahoo is struggling to figure out what it needs to do next.

This retailer gets the online world and will probably define important parts of its future. The fact that its revenues are indirectly derived from the web will probably make it avoid various conflicts of interests (hoarding users’ data rather than giving users control over it being one such conflict) with which the YMG group is struggling.

I was reading this post on BW’s Blogspotting and I think that link-less is not going to work because the content producers will be pushed out of the equation like it is explained below:
But what Raghavan is describing sounds very much like an effort to push relevant Web pages down, or even out of the equation. “We’re not giving you pages, we’re giving you information synthesized from other pages,” he says.
In this scheme, Web pages cease to be destinations. They simply fork over information, gratis.  

Yeah, like I would ever want to fork-over my content to Yahoo so that they can put an ad next to it. There is a sense of ownership to the content that you are creating (not necessarily monetizable) that would enrage many content producers if Yahoo would neglect it.

If search engines master this transition, how will the Search Engine Optimization crowd tweak their Web pages?

If search engines get around to this SEO will transform itself into a business that would protect your content from being pulled out of your site and plastered on Yahoo’s link-less search.

Chrome, the browser developed by Google is about to be released. I get a pretty weird feeling from this, because Google was known to support Firefox, because it comes on such a short-notice and because I don’t see any benefits to Google, at least not immediately.

Firefox is a pretty decent browser, or more likely, a pretty decent browsing platform onto which you can install various plugins which will make you browsing experience better. Not too bad, even though I have a lot of problems with their address bar.

I think that what sets Google’s brower apart from the Firefox and IE, the browsers currently with the biggest market share, is the vast mass of data that Google has upon browser users and the way they will leverage this data to gain market share and the number of web-applications that it has in its portfolio. This browser will probably be integrated with Google’s other offerings such as GMail, Google Apps, etc… I think this sets them so far apart that the browser to come out of Google may not look like a browser anymore, but rather as an integration tool between your email (GMail), your RSS reader (Google Reader), your office documents (Google Documents), instant messaging (Google talk), etc… Who knows, maybe it will integrate even with Google Android ;-).

As I have said before, Google has put together a large amount of data that helps it describe the typical user that browses the web, and I think that this data will be leveraged in order to get ahead of Firefox because it Google may develop better ergonomics with of this data. Google will probably battle against Firefox for market share and this battle will be a battle between application designers (Firefox) and statistics on usage (Google). It will be interesting to see how it unfolds.

Later edit: I have been using Chrome for an hour or so and it feels more like a desktop than a browser. It manages to hide away, yet make available when needed, a lot of browser-specific functionalities. It feels like Firefox when run in full-screen mode, it gives you more space and manages to stay in the back-ground. A web-application should take advantage of all this space. The web is the new desktop…

My assumptions about Chrome’s design were largely wrong, from what I see Chrome is pretty much concerned with getting the browser out of the browsing experience by using a minimalist design rather than with implementing some funky ergonomics.
I think that its biggest hit is the extra space given to its user and I get the impression that  this extra space will make more of a difference for people WORKING thru the browser rather than simply consuming some passivly thru it, because this extra space makes you more productive. I don’t even see Chrome, yet with a few keystrokes I get any browser-specific functionality I need. I get the feeling that web-applications will need to be re-designed to work in Chrome and take advantage of Chrome’s extra space, for example Wordpress works atrociously in Chrome. 

Oh yeah, and the address bar is way better than Firefox’s. A few more tests and Firefox is history.

Later Edit: Firefox is history as far as I am concerned, I will be using Chrome.

Last thoughts on Chrome: Chrome is taking the browser out of web- browsing, it is almost invisible, when I am browsing I don’t see it at all, it has no edges and no menus, you only get the page that you are working on and its menus (this is why I said that web-applications may need to be re-designed in order to take advantage of the extra space that Chrome gives you, I am a bit confused when I am using Wordpress because where I now see Wordpress’s menus I was used to see Firefox’s menus). When I am toggling between pages I feel like I am toggling between 2 different applications.

Today when I went to check my RSS feeds on bloglines I was presented with the following:

Quickly I realized that I was cut-off from any source of information that I use because I access sites mostly thru their RSS feeds and my RSS feed reader was down. It was out of the question to go to those sites and read the news from their homepage (*) because those sites (BW, FT, Forbes,, Le Monde, infoq, etc…) have tons of content and I would not be able to navigate it in order to find what I like (this was what my RSS feeds were doing).
It was a pretty weird feeling to see how underlined how dependent I am on my feed reader and that my feed reader has become a single point of failure in my contact with various content providers. Take bloglines out and I am pretty much out of contact with pretty much anything I am following. And I don’t think that I can do much about it (**).
I can only hope that they come back up quickly…

* BTW, for a pretty interesting analysis oh how RSS changes browsing patterns please check out this post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. The concept that “any page is a homepage” due to the various channels which are sending users to that page will change a few things in the content publishing business.

** Actually I could turn to my Google reader account to read the feeds from there, but this would mean that I need to update the OPML of my Google account, determine what stories are new and which ones I have read, etc… I could get past this single point of failure, but there are costs associated with it. Strangely enough, using Google reader as a replacement for Bloglines is similar to some work-arounds used for avoiding single points of failures in enterprise systems (synchronizing redundant machines).