Ironick

Out of the Ruins

We do not so much "stand on the shoulders of giants" as we build out of the ruins of fallen giants.

The Web is Agreement

Paul Downey of BT, who I recently had coffee with just outside St. Paul's Cathedral in London, has produced this absolutely brilliant poster about all things Web. Click on the image to go to Flickr to check out the labels for all the areas on the poster. It reminds me of xkcd's equally brilliant Map of Online Communities.

  The Web is Agreement 
  Originally uploaded by psd.

I am so much BIGGER than the life I am leading

   

Another postsecret favorite. My feelings exactly -- especially now that my 50th birthday is just four months ahead.

The Importance of Play in Web 2.0

I LOVED the New York Times OpEd piece " The Fakebook Generation "! Why? Not because it signaled a "backlash", but because it highlighted an essential element driving the popularity of the most successful Web 2.0 sites: entertainment! Here's what Alice Mathias nailed about Facebook:

Facebook did not become popular because it was a functional tool — after all, most college students live in close quarters with the majority of their Facebook friends and have no need for social networking. Instead, we log into the Web site because it’s entertaining to watch a constantly evolving narrative starring the other people in the library. [emphasis added]

All the most successful Web 2.0 sites are fun! Whether its Wikipedia having entries about your favorite hobbies and TV shows or its Facebook feeding you trivia about your friends' activities, there is a healthy entertainment factor in what can also be used for a specific productive purpose.

So the root challenge is not how to keep social networks separate so the oldsters don't harsh the mellow of the youngsters (although that may be a derivative challenge), it's how to make sure that both new and experienced users of Facebook of any age (or any social networking site or any Web 2.0 site for that matter) continue to find Facebook entertaining as well as useful . When a Web 2.0 site feels like "work" to someone, she will at worst stop using it entirely, or at best will minimize her use of it -- to just do the work she needs it to do. Either way, this will kill or at least dramatically limit the "network effect" of the site.

Most people, especially those trying to harness Web 2.0 for enterprise use, forget that "play" was highlighted by Tim O'Reilly as one of the essential elements of Web 2.0:




So just as the web itself is based of the strength of weak ties , social networking sites specifically and Web 2.0 generally are based on the productivity of fun ties . Lose too much of the fun or entertainment value of these sites by trying to make them too productive, and you'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

I don't have time to go into it here and now, but I think all our talk about "consumerization of IT", "mass amateurization", and "democratizing innovation", we miss the unifying theme of all these trends: the advantages of blurring of the line between play (entertainment) and work.

wikis.sun.com

Coolest thing to come out of Sun in a long time. In the style of Web is us using us, shows the history of publishing at Sun -- from roff (?) to wikis. The only significant flaw is that the old markup-based publishing is described as having "started with text formatting accessible to a few highly technical people." But the wiki markup at the end looks pretty much the same. <grin>

Here's to the misfits -- except those crazy enough to write 3rd party apps for the iPhone

Great video scrolling through all the 3rd party apps that Apple has bricked with its iPhone "upgrade" while playing the Apple "Think Different" marketing campaign voiceover. Perhaps we should start calling the iPhone the iPown .

My first post from my mobile phone

This is my first mobile phone blog entry. I'm using the Jott.com service to speak this blog entry and have it transcribed and sent to TypePad. Hope it works. Click here to listen Powered by Jott

Three Kinds of Web Platforms

Marc Andreessen has a good post on three "levels" of web platform (The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet):

• A Level 1 platform's apps run elsewhere, and call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services -- this is how Flickr does it.
• A Level 2 platform's apps run elsewhere, but inject functionality into the platform via a plug-in API -- this is how Facebook does it.  Most likely, a Level 2 platform's apps also call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services.
• A Level 3 platform's apps run inside the platform itself -- the platform provides the "runtime environment" within which the app's code runs.

I'd call the three kinds of web platform

1. Client/Server
2. Externally Extensible
3. Internally Extensible

Gorilla Rock

Via AccMan Pro. Hilarious. And it rocks.

Here's the original.

SOA: Sometimes it IS about the technology

Hallelujah! Somebody else finally said it. Andrew McAfee, of Enterprise 2.0 fame, has a great post about the two senses of the phrase: "It's not about the technology." INATT v1 is shorthand for "It's not about the technology alone", which is a reasonably benign observation.

INATT v2 is shorthand for "The details of this technology can be ignored for the purposes of this discussion." Andrew rightly points out that this is a dangerous assumption: "If true, this is great news for every generalist, because it means that they don't need to take time to familiarize themselves with any aspect of the technology in question. They can just treat it as a black box that will convert specified inputs into specified outputs if installed correctly."

Like Andrew, I cringe when I hear this argument -- most especially in SOA discussions and most especially in SOA discussions in the Service-Orientated-Architecture Yahoo Group (British spelling). In such discussions, technology alternatives for implementing SOA are dismissed as irrelevant and the discussion floats away on its own hot air.

I call such architectural discussions "aspirational" -- the entire focus is on architectural goals without the slightest consideration of whether such goals are realistically achievable given current technology trends. However, if you try to shift the conversation from aspirations to how to achieve them, then you will inevitably hear the mantra "SOA is not about technology". I did a search of the SOA group messages and turned up 53 matches for "not about technology"!

So thanks Andrew for reminding all of us that even lofty concepts like SOA are to some degree about the technology!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that I saw Andrew's post via this post by Stu. Also mentioned by Assaf at Labnotes.