Building Feedly

Alex Iskold has an interesting post on the new iPhone SDK. I think that I disagree with Alex’s conclusion:

In a lot of ways, web applications have been playing catch up with Desktop apps. Now, a handheld device has lept forward, years ahead of what is available inside any modern browser. The sheer power of Apple’s graphics, motion and sound APIs just opened the door for things that have not been possible before on the web.

I am not sure I buy that. I think that Mike McCue/Tellme’s vision of ask with voice and receive a simple response will be much more ubiquitous than fancy navigation, sound and graphics. Look at all the applications you are using every day - except for games - very few of them are fancy, mainly because users prefer simplicity.

That said, I think that Apple is wedging their bets: iPhone SDK for games and Webkit Safari for the rest.

I was watching the MIX Keynote online today and it was very interesting:

Part of Microsoft is trying to do the right thing with IE8 and making sure that the web remains open and standard.

Part of them is locked in their past mistakes (WPF and silverlight) and they do not seem to find the courage to do the right thing and cut their losses and focus 100% of their energy on doing the right thing.

I wish they had done that mistake back in 1995 and try to push both IE and black bird.

The next couple of years are going to be interesting: I really look forward to Firefox and Webkit (HTML5, native video, gears) doing to Silverlight (and AIR) what Mosaic and Netscape did to black bird.

Here is the audio capture of Matt Mullenweg, founder or WordPress, presenting at Northern Voice 2008. Matt is definitely a super smart person. Very interesting keynote.

(via Robert)

Iinnovate has a great podcast of Hasso Plattner, founder of SAP and chairman of the Stanford (D)esign School. I really like the focused, no-b*s, realist style coming from 35 years of hands-on experience and the ability to step back and take a much broader perspective on enterprise software and its intrinsic complexity (very similar to what Larry Ellison looks like behind the scene).

What a day! BEA finally surrenders to Oracle and Sun acquires MySQL!

Four quick notes:

1) Sun is executing on his very last chance: create a world class infrastructure stack for companies focusing on delivering applications as services. Pros: leveraging open source for innovation and betting on a massive number of new applications being delivered through software as a service over the next few years. Cons: where is the money? where is the sales force? No real track record of being able to successfully integrate the pieces they acquire. Conclusion: I am not sure that the market will give Sun the time it will need to create a real competitive offering and create the sales force necessary to show the benefits of this acquisition.

2) It is an exciting moment for Oracle. The integration is going to be hard (integrations are always hard) but they now have all the pieces and talent to have a great fight with IBM and MSFT and win like they did with the database. This is also the time to open up their strategy to be more inclusive of open source.

3) This is a sad moment for BEA: The weblogic acquisition gave them a great product from which they built a great and loyal customer base but sadly, they were not able to leverage it and expand their footprint. They tried a lot of different things, a lot of different acquisitions but none of them had the technical excellence of weblogic and they lacked focus and cohesion needed for a smaller company to win. A great case study.

4) Where is SAP? Are they officially throwing the towel on Netweaver?

About 6 months ago, I was complaining that there was something fundamentally broken about Apple TV. Today Steve Jobs announced Apple TV Take 2: no more itunes interference, move rentals, hd support, flickr support.

Very nice. Let’s to the same thing with .mac!

Very cool hack!

(Thank you Oliv)

Here is a very interesting post from Facebook’s Jason Sobel on how Facebook is keeping up with their massive growth (more than 2 million new members each week. wow!) using a combination of MySQL, Memcached and a custom replication module they have created. Very nice.

Whenever that person goes to change some data—uploading a photo album, or changing profile info for example—we send them off to California so that all our modifying operations happen in the same location. This decision was made to prevent two or more modifications from conflicting with each other and messing up our data. It might sound like we’re forcing our users to go to California a lot but only about 10% of our traffic causes a modifying operation. MySQL has a great replication feature that allows us to, in real time, stream all the modifications happening on a California MySQL server to another one in Virginia. Replication happens so fast, even across the country, that the Virginia servers are almost never more than one or two seconds behind the California servers.

We have been using the same MySQL+memcached combination for the back end feeddo services and have been happy with the results. Sometimes Open Source feels like magic!

Here are 5 things I would love to see happen in 2008:

openid becomes mainstream. I am tired of creating new accounts and having to remember passwords. I am hoping that Oracle buys LinkedIn and use it as a tool to become an OpenID leader.

<video> and gears. I have blogged about this in the past. I would love to see <video> become available in browsers. I would also love to see something like gears become widely available (more for the async processing and the encapsulation than the off-line and db support).

webkit extensibility. With Android, iPhone and great technical execution, Webkit has found a way to get back into the browser war. There is only one thing missing: a clean extensibility framework. It will be interesting to see Firefox and WebKit battling and pushing the limits of the Open Web.

bye bye wsdl and soap. It is time to depricate wsdl and soap and have everyone focus on restful json services as the foundation for publishing and integrating data on and across the web. This will be the opportunity to re-invent SOA - into something significantly simpler and more ubiquitous. This is a huge opportunity for Salesforce.com whose next challenge is to become a hosted integration platform.

apple ultra-portable. ok…that one is selfish. But I am just so ready to run feeddo on a apple 13″ laptop with multi-touch support. Pleeeeaaaaase.

On the behalf of the entire DevHD team: Happy Holidays and looking forward to seeing you on 2008 for some serious fun!

Updated on January 15th: Apple announced the MacBook Air. The thinnest notebook! The touchpad has some of the multi-touch gestures integrated. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for those events to bubble up in Firefox 3 and webkit! Nice…

Updated on January 17th: Yahoo announces support for OpenID. Kudos and thank you!

Google just announced knol: a tool to allow people to capture knowledge about topics they are passionate about. From the screenshot, it seems very well executed. A brilliant (open and scalable) move by Google to add more human input into the search experience. It will be interesting to see how it will integrate with Wikipedia.

Robert Scoble has a cool video of BugLabs on this website. They offer a kit to build your own network-ware[1] gadget by plugging together modules (LCD, camera, motion detecteur, etc…). It would be interesting to evolve Bug into something that a kid could play with - it could become an interesting device/environment to expose a kid to programming.

[1] exposing RESTful webservices

(Thanks Robert)

Tim Berners Lee talks about the semantic web as the natural evolution of networking: from computer (net) to documents (web) to things (social networks being an example of semantic web where things := friends). Very interesting read.

Business Week reports today that Thomas Kurian is now the new head of the Oracle Fusion Project and that if successful, it would put him one step closer to becoming the next CEO of Oracle. I had the chance to work with Thomas for two years as part of the Collaxa/Oracle acquisition. He is the smartest, most intense and most technically savvy executive/leader I have had the chance to work with. It is great to see him exposed to this new challenge and I am looking forward to see him cross the finish line.

(Thanks to Greg for forwarding the link to the Business Week article)

I think that Ning is going to benefit the most from OpenSocial. Here is a short description of why.

Reason #1: Designed from the ground up around APIs

A lot of the social networks announcing support for OpenSocial are doing it as a desperate measure to try to counter Facebook. Their website was not designed to be extensible. They are just putting some lipstic on the pig and try to win some PR by leveraging Google’s brand and power. On the other side, Ning was all about extensibility and platform. Since day one! To the point that if you wanted to build a social network in Ning 1.0, you had to create the UI yourself. Evangelizing APIs is hard, very hard. Open Social is going to do that for Ning. This is a huge win!

Reason #2: The next generation social networks

As powerful as open standard can be, I think that Facebook has too much momentum for anyone to be able to attack them head to head - even for a Google. The power of facebook is not the applications per se but the community. They are spreading like wild fire. People join facebook because their friends are there - not because of a fancy applications. I have heard people say that we are at the beginning of social network adoption 200 million actual users versus 2-3 billion potential users. But those 200 millions are the early adopters. The others are going to look up to. Who (except Scoble who is pissed off to have reached the limit in terms of number of users) is going to go and replicate his entire network on Orkut? This seems similar to Yahoo trying to go head-to-head against eBay once eBay had already reached critical mass.

Instead of going head to head with facebook, Ning is instead looking at the next generation social networks, smaller, active groups of users who want to own their own place on the net and want to have 100% control over the experience and functionality of the network. The result: great looking websites with a lot of personality. 100,000s of them.

It is going to be interesting to see how all this plays out, once the hype settles and we have clearer visibility into where adoption occurs. My bets are on facebook, Ning and iGoogle!

It seems that Adam is getting ready to jump back in the trenches. I really like the quote about sketching code and re-factor it over and over until it feels right:

“Watching me write code is like watching an indecisive sculptor work with clay. I shape it. I look. I wince. I reshape it. I play with it. I wince some more. I ask my friends, nurse my wounds, and then reshape it yet again. And so on. Constant iterative development. It takes three tries before it is even close to the way it should be, best case. I think it is totally worth it. The arguments and design decisions are just way more concrete and tested.”

Adam has a very sharp mind so I look forward to hearing more on what he is up to.

Great presentation [embedded video] from Yahoo’s Douglas Crockford on the opportunity and challenges associated with the development of mashups.

The solution Douglas is describing has similarities with the streets framework we have built in Feeddo to declare and wire modules together. The first difference is that streets is based on a dependency injection framework (a la Spring). The second difference is that we advocate support for both ATOM+XHTML and JSON.

I had the chance to see Mike Shaver talk this morning at Stanford as part of the Mozilla 24 event. Although I had heard of Mike in the past and we overlapped during our time at Netscape, it was the first time I was seeing him present live. I was really impressed. I published a photo stream of his presentation on my flickr account.

Here are the top 5 things which resonated with me:

1. Constraint-based development. What aren’t people doing on the web? what is the smallest thing that will fix that? This is very much aligned with the organic software development pattern I talked about in the past. This is also why I think that Silverlight is going down the Rip, Replace, Regret path.
2. <video>. Having video as a first class citizen of the browser would be a great step forward and would allow for deeper integration between the pages/experience which embeds the video and the video itself.
3. Type support in Javascript 2. It is going to allow developers to write much more robust code and detect a lot of the issue at development/build time rather than run-time. It is still difficult to have more than 3 or 4 people work on the same Javascript project. Javascript 2 will be a big step forward.
4. Parallelism and Asynchrony. Firefox offers a modular architecture where developers can extend the capabilities of the browser by writing either extensions or XPCOM components. One of the current limitations is that is you write your XPCOM component in Javascript then you run in the UI thread and can affect the responsiveness of the application. Google Gears offers a first solution to this problem through what they call a worker pool. it would be great to see this functionality natively available in the browser.
5. Security and Control. The ability for one application to be able to interact with multiple services across multiple domains is key to building great mash-ups. This is a hard problem with both technical and usability impacts.

Kudos to the entire Mozilla team/extended team for continuously pushing the limits of web technologies and doing it in an open way!

Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect and first employee at Plaxo talks about their experience building the latest version of the Plaxo Online (which is definitely pushing the limits in terms of what is possible to do using AJAX). A lot interesting nuggets of information if you are building an application which has a large amount of Javascript code. Very smart. Very passionate. Here is a link to the video.

Note: Robert Scoble also has an interesting interview of Joseph about opening up social networks using micro-formats.

John Resig, the brain behind jQuery and FUEL, talks about best practives building Javascript Libraries. A great mix of lessons learned and recipes to apply to avoid them. I like particularly the section around “Thank God for closures”/Functional Programming: if you are a Java developer and think that Javascript is a primitive language, watch and have fun. You might change your mind.

(Thanks Michal!)

Eric Schmidt provides a definition of Web 3.0: widget-style applications which can run both on you computer and your mobile devices and will be distributed virally through social networking sites or email. This seems inline with the direction Apple is going with dashboard and widgets. I think that for widgets to become really interesting, someone needs to address the problem of portable identity and widgets have to be able to go beyond fragmented little boxes. It will be interesting to see if OpenID and Microformats can take us there.

No so long ago, software was designed, implemented, tested and delivered on a CD. This cycle could take anywhere between 12 months to 36 months. Some companies like Microsoft make the bulk of their money from Window and Office, products which still follow this model. I think that this cycle is the biggest treat for traditional software companies (bigger than the cost of burning and sending CDs around, bigger than the pain of having to install and maintain the software).

The alternative model, the one used by open source and most software as a service companies, is much more organic, experimental and iterative: you build the minimum functionality to offer some value to the customer (enough for them to exit their existing solution and adopt yours) and then you observe, try to get a better understand of how they use the existing solution (and where the rough edges are) and what additional things they would like to do. This direct link between you and the customer combined with fast iterative cycle is the best weapon to use against more traditional software companies: continuously collect feedback, prioritize it, prototype solutions, do A/B testing, create APIs for others to extend your core offering and watch 100 flowers bloom (some of which will be ugly and die, some of which will be very clever and will add value to you offering). Short iterations not only allow you to be fast but to also be much more darwinian: it is much easier to kill a project/idea/feature when you have only spent 2 developers x 2 months. This more organic behavior results into the addition of 100s of meaningful details and the refactoring of 100s of rough edges and becomes key to the the long term success or the failure of a software development project.

Here is an example: In 2003, we created a blog for Collaxa. I remember that back then, Blogger was hands down the best blogging tool available. A couple of weeks ago when I went through the same decision process for this blog, I tried both Blogger and WordPress. I decided to use WordPress, because of where it is in terms of features (number of themes, number of plugins, add-ons, domain options, etc.) and most importantly, because of how fast it is mutating (something that you can not artificially inject into a product no matter how much money you throw at it).

What are some of the other fast mutating species out there? Here are some of the ones which are close to my heart: Firefox (vs. IE and Safari), Ajax (vs. Silverlight and AIR), Eclipse+Aptana, Facebook and Ning.

There is a lot more that can be said about this topic. I think that the trend around organic software development is here to stay and we will see the tipping point shortly.

Updated on Dec 11th, 2007. Since I initially wrote this article, iphone and android have injected a second life in webkit and it is now evolving at a fast and furious pace. The firefox vs. webkit it going to be fascinating to watch!

I have the chance to spend the afternoon at Barcamp 2007 in Palo Alto. It was my first barcamp and a great experience. Kudos to the team who put the time and emergy to organize this event.

Highlight #1. I was very impressed by the open, organic nature of the event. No big banners with marketing messages. Instead a self organizing wall were people could publish and subscribe to talks.

Highlight #2. Tom Conrad, CTO of Pandora, did a 45 min talk on the lessons they learnt while scaling Pandora fro 8 users to 8 millions users. Both from a technology, marketing and support perspective. Tom is a great presenter with a very conversational/engaging style. They have a very open culture centered around listening to customers and focusing on building a great and differentiated product. They took three very important turns in the history of Pandora: 1) focus on internet radio, 2) differentiate by building the first product to allow users to create their own channels in one click and 3) shift from a subscription-based model to a creating ad-based model.

I had the chance to interact with Tom a couple times while he was at Kenamea and I was at Collaxa. I am glad to see that he/Pandora is doing very well.