Yahoo Mail, the beta Web-based email program, is better than Gmail - so says the WSJ's Walt Mossberg. He notes:
"The new Yahoo Mail is far superior to Gmail. Yahoo more closely matches the desktop experience most serious email users have come to expect. Gmail, by contrast, is quirky and limited."
He goes on to say:
"On several key issues, Google's engineers have decreed that familiar email practices are no longer useful, and have substituted approaches they prefer, arrogantly denying users any choice."
He cites the lack of choice around the 'conversation' mode that Gmail uses to display emails. Personally I really like that mode, because it produces a less cluttered interface and I can keep track of conversations far easier. Also I think Gmail's search functionality is a brilliant implementation of Google's famous Web search user experience, only with email data.
Paul Kedrosky agreed with Mossberg - he thinks there's an "arrogant software design ethos underlying Gmail".
But I think Mossberg takes his premise that web email must "look and work like regular desktop programs" a bit too far. Gmail was responsible for some fantastic innovation in how email can be experienced on the Web, so I don't think we should knock Google for that. Is it arrogant to experiment with new forms of Web functionality in an email application, rather than try and replicate desktop app functionality? I prefer to think it's innovative. I'm not one to defend Google that often, but I really can't see much evidence of a lack of user choice in Gmail.
Having said that, I haven't yet tried the new Yahoo Mail. So perhaps it is better than Gmail. Anyone from Yahoo care to send me a beta invite? ;-)
Bud Gibson has a nice profile of FeedDigest, an RSS remix service created by Peter Cooper that I've had my eye on for a while. FeedDigest lets users "mix, filter and republish or syndicate feeds to HTML, JavaScript, WAP or PHP, or to a new feed." Personally all I've used it for so far is to publish my linkblog feed to Read/WriteWeb. I think there's a lot of unrealised potential in the RSS remixing/mash-up area - and maybe FeedDigest will be the one to lead that market. Time will tell. In the meantime, Bud wrote about FeedDigest:
"Though nothing has been announced publicly, certain of the blog posts suggest that outside investment was secured in the second-half of August. Ten thousand users is a benchmark that Silicon Valley VCs often cite for seed investment."
The first post that Bud linked to was on the FeedDigest blog and says "a major announcement" is imminent. In a follow-up post, Peter says there will be "a new architecture in the next week or two." On the FeedDigest homepage it says new stats features are on the way, plus podcasting and email services.
Sounds great, can't wait to see the new version.
Tim O'Reilly has posted a meme map of Web 2.0, from the "What is Web 2.0?" brainstorming session at FOO Camp 2005. Hat-tip Josh for the link. It's kind of a business model map:
The orange box in the middle and brown ovals at the bottom cover some the themes I'll be writing about in the next chapter of Josh's and my book. The chapter is tentatively titled 'Building a Web 2.0 Business' and will explore the principles of Web 2.0 business. e.g. "Services, not packaged app".
I've just finished my first chapter, which was a general introduction to the 'Web as Platform' concept. So this will be an interesting follow-on from that.
Alex Barnett has done a nice "Microsoft mash-up", inserting links.
Feedburner's released more stats to celebrate reaching 100,000 managed feeds. They highlight some impressive growth in the number of subscribers to Feedburner feeds - over 4.2 million subscribers per day by end of August. Paul Kedrosky noted that the number of subscribers has doubled every 2 months during 2005. Dick Costolo also pointed out the global nature of this growth, saying that they "now count almost 2000 different aggregators and bots polling feeds on behalf of subscribers and other feed services coming from over 190 different country level domains."
Like Dick, I think these stats tell "the story of a changing media landscape in which more subscribers are consuming more content wherever and whenever they please." It also tells the story of a publishing company, Feedburner, that is rapidly becoming a 'big publisher'. Maybe they are already. And not just in terms of the number of feeds they manage - 100,000 - but also in the number of subscribers to those feeds (users in traditional Web parlance).
This is what's known as network effects at work. When a product or service has a network effect, it becomes more valuable or useful as it gains more users. It was a common strategy in the dot com days - to gain as many users and as much market share as possible and then eventually profit or be bought. Well, it only worked for a small percentage of dot com companies.
Amazon went for years without making a profit, but its long-term strategy of gaining as many users as possible eventually paid off when the e-commerce market matured. In Amazon's case, network effects were gained mostly from its customer reviews and user metadata - the more people that contributed data, the more useful and valuable Amazon.com became. But many other dot com companies crashed and burned without ever getting to profitability.
A recent Web 2.0 company demonstrated that network effects can pay off big time, despite (or because of) the risks. Bloglines you will remember was the first to market with a decent web-based Aggregator. While the bigco's twiddled their thumbs and other potential competitors watched from the sidelines, Bloglines proceeded to build up a large user base and came to dominate the RSS Aggregator market. They were almost certainly nowhere near profitablity, but that didn't matter. Eventually Mark Fletcher sold Bloglines to Ask Jeeves, just before The Big 3 swooped in and commoditized RSS Aggregators (well actually the commodization isn't yet complete - but the writing is on the wall). Fletcher's strategy was to build up the Bloglines user base - and by extension the amount of data Bloglines had about users and their subscription patterns - and then get acquired. He's done that twice now (first with ONElist sold to Yahoo!) and he's a millionaire many times over because of it.
I'm not suggesting Feedburner's strategy is to get acquired. It's one possibility, but equally they could go the Amazon track and wait until the RSS Publishing industry matures and revenues roll in (like the e-commerce industry did for Amazon).
Either way, network effects are certainly happening for Feedburner. The more feeds they manage, the better quality statistics they can produce and the more users and subscribers they can attract. The stats they released today indicate they're well on their way to a huge user base, although it's fair to say they're probably not very profitable at this point. TechCrunch estimated that only about 5% of Feedburner managed feeds are the Pro version. Peter Cooper in the comments reckons it's even lower than that - 2.5% is his guess.
But really Feedburner won't be the least concerned by that. They've got tons of users and they're growing at a very fast rate. They're already the dominant RSS Publishing company in their market (there are other niches though). For an Internet company, that's all good news. So long as there's $$$ light at the end of the tunnel. That's the risk, of course. But if it pays off, it will pay well.
Update: added more detail to explain Network Effects better.
I love reading old books about the Web and Internet. I'm in the middle of Stewart Brand's classic book from the 80's, The Media Lab, right now. Anyway I came across this 2001 web article from devx called The Future of Web Apps and Services, on the subject of Futurist Paul Saffo's predictions for the Web. There's no exact date on it, but I believe it's from Dec 2001. OK, nearly 4 years ago doesn't count as that historical. But given that this was before RSS was popularised and before Web 2.0 was coined, plus it was right in the middle of the dot com burnout, it's an interesting read.
Saffo said this:
"Saffo sees the information evolution of the last 50 years as follows: In the 1950s, the emerging technology was television; the medium was broadcast. In the 1980s, the technology was time-sharing; the medium was e-mail. In the '90s, the technology was (and is) client-server; the medium was (and is) the Web. At the dawn of the 21st century, Saffo sees the emerging technology as peer-to-peer, with the medium in the form of applications such as Napster, Morpheus, and Grokster.
"It won't be long at all until Web services are simply automatic, done by machines - very little actually programmed by humans," he said. "You set your Napster-like app, and it will find all the music and books you like. You'll be able to let applications do your research for you. Just put your preferences in, and away you go."
Two things struck me about those predictions:
1) his usage of the term 'peer-to-peer' and talking about the hip products of that time (Napster, Morpheus, and Grokster). This is very much like us in 2005 talking about Web 2.0 and Google, Flickr, delicious.
2) the automatic web services bit - automation of course has long been a dream/goal for computing and the Internet. But what Saffo described is happening right now with RSS feeds (for books and other retail data) and tools like PubSub (future search). His "Napster-like app" is our RSS Aggregator.
Another Saffo observation:
"In the future, we won't be purchasing automobiles, we'll be subscribing to them. Because cars are becoming more software-dependent each year, with pay-by-the-month geo-positioning systems, in-dash e-mail, "smart" information systems, and such, we won't be buying a car so much as subscribing to services that will run the car for us. It's like Microsoft; you don't buy their software as much as you're subscribing to all its successive versions."
Ha, I'd never really thought as far ahead as subscribing to a car - but if you think about it, that's the evolutionary path we're on.
Sometimes it pays to look to the past to see how some things stay the same (peer-to-peer then, web 2.0 now), enlighten us about what we've achieved so far (automation with RSS) and remind us where we're headed (subscribing to cars).
This week: eBay-Skype: Web 2.0 Ramifications, The Real World - Katrina response, Microsoft PDC - Start.com extended, Yahoo Shopping API and Shopify, New apps on the block.
Early this week eBay confirmed its acquisition of Skype for between $2.6 - 4.1 billion. On my ZDNet blog I looked at some of the Web 2.0 implications. Here is a summary of that post:
- One reason eBay bought Skype is to upgrade its communications platform. It will continue to run Skype as a standalone Internet Telephony business, but it will also use Skype's telephony and IM product line as a platform to extend its own e-commerce business.
- eBay is also building up its community platform. With 157 million customers and a thriving buyer and seller community, eBay probably sees IP telephony and IM as the next level of functionality - much like Google recently releasing Google Talk.
- eBay is expanding its global presence, or its "global footprint" as they termed it. Skype is used worldwide, whereas eBay has limited worldwide presence.
- Let's not forget that Skype is a desktop app and so eBay automatically gains a foothold on some 54 million PCs (the number of registered users Skype has).
- Also this brings eBay up to a new level. They're now playing polo with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft - instead of kicking a soccer ball around with Amazon and Ask Jeeves.
- So all up, I think the deal has a fair amount of promise for eBay to extend itself as a Web Platform company.
Interesting to note the dot com-like merger theme continued throughout the week, with rumours of an MSN-AOL deal. Or even more bubbleicious, an outright purchase of AOL by Microsoft, Google or Yahoo. Don't do it! Anyway that should hopefully be settled by the time I get to next week's Wrap-Up ;-)
The response to Hurricane Katrina on the Web has been huge. Doing some research for the book I'm co-writing with Joshua Porter on Web 2.0 this week, I came across many examples of Web technologies used to help respond to the disaster. Wikis and blogs were set up, including the Katrina Help blogspot site and Wiki - created by several founders and members of the SEA EAT (South East Asian Earthquake And Tsunami) blog & wiki.
The Hurricane Katrina relief effort also included:
- mobile weblogs (aka moblogs); eg http://www.missingkatrina.com and http://www.safekatrina.com
- a webcasting portal offering streaming
media
- public galleries and multimedia websites - e.g. http://katrina05.blogspot.com/
- photo-sharing sites
- Donation websites
- News digests using RSS
- Aggregators - e.g. http://homepages.cwi.nl/~cilibrar/projects/a/aggs/
- Volunteer websites - e.g. www.hospitalreliefefforts.org
- Message Forums
- People and Shelter Finders
- And much more no doubt (please add to the comments if you know of other things - I'm
researching for the book)
It's heartening to see the Web used in so many ways to help respond to natural disasters. That's what I call a Real World benefit of Web 2.0.
At their annual developers conference (PDC), Microsoft wowed a lot of developers with details of Office 12, Vista, RSS integration, and web APIs for four MSN sites. The highlight for me was its Start.com developments, as I've been following progress on Microsoft's web-based RSS Aggregator since the beginning. In fact Start.com went live on 1 September and during the PDC they announced extensions to it.
The new Start.com is extensible and offers tools for developing what Microsoft is calling "web gadgets" - DHTML-based components. The idea is that these "gadgets" will be created by external developers and used within Start.com. There are more details at the Start Developer Center website and more thoughts from me here.
This week Yahoo! released a Shopping API. Developers can use this API "to create applications and Web sites that search Yahoo's comparison shopping database, which contains millions of offers from thousands of merchants."
As Tim O'Reilly pointed out: "...the real test of whether this is interesting is going to be whether people start building new services in which Yahoo! shopping is just a component, rather than the main point."
On the topic of shopping and web apps, I discovered a promising new app being built currently - called shopify. It hasn't been released yet, but it aims to be a Web 2.0 e-commerce application. I think that means it'll include community and collaboration features. It's described more here:
"Shopify is a hosted e-commerce solution that removes the traditional barriers that have kept many individuals and small business from selling online. It is a Web 2.0 product that focuses on providing buyers and sellers with the features essential to completing e-commerce transactions."
Bonus link: Charles Coxhead has been thinking about "feed commerce", using Yahoo! stores XML feeds.
Some new web apps that popped up this week:
- Pete Freitag has been busy developing neat stuff - dealazon uses Amazon's API to find deals and has RSS feeds too; dailymashup remixes Flickr, Del.icio.us, furl, and Yahoo; and tagbert is a tag search aggregator.
- Netvibes: a "web 2.0 home page solution" powered by Ajax, with RSS feed reader. Looks like a cooler version of Google's personalized homepage. Not sure what the business plan is with Netvibes, as they're basically competing for non-geek users with Google, Yahoo and MSN! TechCrunch profile here.
- Meebo: Ajax instant messaging. TechCrunch said it allows users to "log into AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo instant messaging services from their [Meebo's] web page."
- goowy media: "goowy (re) is a set of solutions optimized for broadband users that offer an innovative fresh look at traditional web services including email, contacts, calendar, games, widgets and more".
- Yahoo Instant Search: "gives you answers as you type -- no more waiting!" Neat to play with, but not sure how useful :-)
- Tech Memeorandum: addictive blog news service goes live. My rave review here.
- Google Blog Search (yawn!)
That's a wrap for another week!
Summary: 2006 may well be Microsoft's year, with upgrades to its flagship Vista OS and Office 12 products. But only if Google lets it be their rival's year. We don't yet know what Google has up its sleeve - when will they release their own browser, or their web-based Office suite? We'll find out perhaps in 2006.
Brad Feld thinks 2006 will be "The Year of Microsoft", citing the release of Vista and Office 12 next year. Paul Kedrosky hedges his bets, saying "the current consensus is awfully negative about Microsoft, despite the company heading, in 2006, into its busiest product cycle in recent memory." Fred Wilson thinks Microsoft probably won't succeed this time round. Fred finished a compelling blog post with this point:
"I can see an IBM-like scenario for Microsoft in its fourth and possibly fifth life. But I can't see them at the top of the technology hill planting their flag again for the fourth time next year."
Interestingly, that echoes what Tim O'Reilly said about Microsoft in my interview with him nearly a year ago:
"I just think that [Web-based] software services have a better model. So I think that Microsoft will continue to dominate on the PC, but the PC is going to be a smaller and smaller part of the entire business.
Similarly I think that Microsoft will increasingly feel margin pressure from Linux as well as people saying: well actually the applications that really matter to me are not on my PC. And so they're going to be able to extract less of a monopoly rent, so to speak. This is very similar to what happened to IBM - they had to shed hundreds of thousands of workers, they went from being an industry goliath to simply being an industry giant! I think that's exactly what will happen to Microsoft. They will lose their pre-eminent position, but they will still be an extremely powerful and successful company."
I generally agree with Tim and Fred, but with the proviso that it remains to be seen how Google is going to respond to Microsoft this year and next. If anyone is in a position to implement the web-based software services model on a grand scale, it's Google. Otherwise I think Brad may be right and Microsoft may come away with the glory.
In an interview with CNET at this week's PDC, Bill Gates talked a lot about Microsoft adopting a mix of its traditional software-based approach (Office being the main example) and more web services things - e.g. the APIs it released last week. Gates is also equating the 'software as a service' concept (which is by no means a new concept - think ASPs in the late 90's) with the web-based services that are a feature of Web 2.0 - the 'Web as platform'. He used the term "server-equals-service" to describe this.
The following is my favourite part of Gates' interview with CNET:
"We're getting decent Web search, we're getting RSS. So software as a service has been moving along. We needed the Internet. We needed low-cost connectivity. We needed XML. The scale economics of doing large server farms...you can do those and do those well.
So you will see the services thing increase. We bought a company called FrontBridge that's kind of a software service firm. We have a lot of expansion ourselves in this area. It's not just consumers. A lot of it, actually the majority of this, is focused on businesses. We're giving them a choice of how they do IT, and some of it is through services."
Frontbridge isn't a company I know a lot about. It describes itself as a "managed services" company whose technology forms "a protective bridge between the Internet and our customer's networks." Its products and services are focused on "corporate messaging infrastructure".
I'm still grokking what Microsoft's strategy is in Web 2.0, but with Office 12 and Vista they'll be aiming mostly at the Enterprise market - "focused on businesses" in Bill Gates' words. Frontbridge is definitely a business-focused product/service. And I find it interesting that Microsoft is trying to bring together the worlds of Web and desktop internet-connected software. You'd expect them to do that, of course, seeing as desktop software and the Windows OS is their cash-cow.
I think it's entirely possible Microsoft may lose market share and become a mere industry giant, rather than a goliath, like IBM did. But I also wouldn't write them off in the Web 2.0 world yet. Brad's correct to say 2006 is a crucial year for Microsoft - as it will be for Google.
Microsoft has shown its hand already, with Office 12 and Vista. We don't yet know what Google has up its sleeve though - when will they release their browser, or their web-based Office suite? Those are two examples of rumoured products that everyone talks about Google developing. But they're exactly that for now - rumours. And Google hasn't really made a strong push for business customers yet. Well, they haven't needed to... up till now?
So I'd suggest 2006 may indeed be Microsoft's year, but only if Google lets them. What say you?
Populicio.us was a service that used data from social bookmarking site del.icio.us, to create a site with enhanced statistics and a better variety of 'popular' links. However the Populicio.us service has just been taken off air, because its developer can no longer get the required information from del.icio.us. The developer of Populicio.us wrote:
"Del.icio.us doesn't serve its homepage as it did and I'm not able to get all needed data to continue Populicio.us. Right now Del.icio.us doesn't show all the bookmarked links in the homepage so there is no way I can generate real statistics."
This plainly illustrates the danger for remix or mash-up service providers who rely on third party sites for their data. del.icio.us can not only giveth, it can taketh away. Now, it appears as if del.cio.us celebrated its second birthday by re-designing its homepage. I'm curious if they intended to take away the data that populicio.us needed to operate, or was it an unintended consequence?
As Andy Baio pointed out, "the Delicious New Popular is pretty good". Hmmm.
I'm sure it was unintended, but the fact is del.cio.us effectively hobbled populicio.us with its re-design. Who controls the data is something that is still being explored in the Web 2.0 world - and I bet we see some more high profile examples of this 'giveth, taketh away' in the near future.
UPDATE: Fair points by both Dare Obasanjo and Ian Davis, who say that HTML scraping doesn't have the same level of obligation as an API.
Dare wrote: "An API is a service contract which is unlikely to be broken without warning. A web page can change depending on the whims of the web master or graphic designer behind the site."
Ian wrote: "This shows the distinction between content designed for human consumption and that designed for machine consumption. The human format will change for all kinds of reasons often simply as the site matures and its users become familiar with its workings. Machine interfaces change on a completely different timescale and generally stable over the long term."
Both great points. Populicio.us still lost their service because their reliance on del.icio.us fell away, but the lesson here is that screen scraping HTML comes with those risks by nature. del.icio.us or any other data silo still controls their APIs, but one would think they're more stable. Thanks Dare and Ian.
Part of my duties as the self-proclaimed Father of Web 2.0 is to help spread the word and get people interested in Web 2.0. BlogBridge has just published a list of some of my favourite Web 2.0-focused blogs. Note that it's not a directory of all Web 2.0 related feeds, just a selection of feeds I visit regularly.
I'm in good company in the BlogBridge topic expert lists. Dan Gillmor has one for journalism and Jeff Clavier has a list of VC blogs - and there are others.
BlogBridge is an open source RSS Aggregator that I haven't talked as much about as I should've. It's a downloadable app, so that's probably why. I prefer Web-based systems. Still it's worth checking out if you're looking for a new RSS Aggregator.
A new blog called Web Service Finder has done a Map of the Web 2.0 World and opened it up for editing on a Wiki. This is by the same blog that did a directory of APIs and Web Services - currently featuring 105 APIs and 27 examples. Chris Law, who helped found the social networking site Tribe, is the guy behind it.
It's great to see all these API resources coming out - I pointed to ProgrammableWeb's directory the other day.
I really like the Map of the Web 2.0 World. Chris has categorized it as follows:
Data Silos:
Sites that create or originate content but do not share them openly are what I call data silos. Many of the "Web 1.0" companies fall into this area. Examples include: Match.com, Career Builder,Web Service Providers :
Sites that expose functionality and data openly are what I call web service providers.
Examples: Google Maps, eBay API, FlickrData Silo Aggregator:
Sites that unify data from separate data silos into one common view. Examples: AP News Wire (offline), Indeed.com, OodleWeb Services Aggregators:
Sites that unify separate web services and/or data silos. Examples: Chicago Crime Guy, Weatherbonk, Craigslist/Google maps mashup
There's a more detailed categorization on the Wiki. I think there's some synergy with my categorization and mapping of RSS Vendors - also on a JotSpot wiki. With all this categorization, mapping and directory-building going on, it shows that the Web 2.0 world is maturing and beginning to be fleshed out.
I also enjoyed Chris' earlier post about his goals for the wiki. Although in it he wrote: "I haven't managed to find a blog that focuses the discussion how the world changes once web 2.0 comes into existence." Well this is actually what Read/Write Web has been doing for the past year and it's one of the things I'm focusing hard on right now.
