The Pebble and the Avalanche

The Great Yahoo! Beer Money Caper

Microsoft's quest to purchase Yahoo! continues to puzzle me. First, there's Yahoo! itself as a company; I can't quite figure Yahoo's business model and why the company might be worth $45 billion — I can't help but thing of advertising revenue as just beer money. And Yahoo! itself evolved from a simple list of Internet resources into a huge aggregation of barely related resources. (I stopped reading Yahoo's new pages when Google News provided a more interesting new feed.)

The other question is about Microsoft itself. As others have pointed out, a hostile takeover rarely works in the Internet world. As far as I'm concerned, however, I can't imagine that Yahoo! would survive a Microsoft takeover even if it were friendly. Despite Microsoft's deep pockets and rigid control over the desktop, Microsoft's internal efforts to create a popular web site relevant to Microsoft's business model failed utterly. Microsoft clearly intends to modify Yahoo!'s operation to support Microsoft's goals (so I expect that Yahoo! will one day suddenly stop working with non-Microsoft browsers, for example).

This entire operation reminds me of AT&T's purchase of NCR. AT&T failed to create its own computer business; they purchased NCR instead, installed the managers who had failed at running AT&T's internal attempts, and promptly ran NCR into the ground. In the end, the mistake destroyed AT&T: AT&T's "trivestiture" allowed them to dispose of NCR while distracting investors by with the creation of Lucent.

Pointless aggregations are not a sign of strength. Disaggregation fosters innovation; random aggregations and forced integration generally fail miserably. Microsoft is about to make a company-killing mistake.

Topics:  · business · internet · microsoft

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Twitter as a Technical Resource

If you haven't used it, Twitter is one of those "I don't think I get it" technologies. Leaving aside the cute terminology, Twitter provides microblogging. Ordinary blogs are short essays, such as this one; when I write a blog post it usually takes considerable time and effort. Twitter accepts only very short blog entries, 140 characters or less. These updates are sent to anyone who subscribes to them and can also be tossed into a large public pool for anyone to read. While this might sound sort of useless and derivative, it's anything but; I ask you to recall that blogging is really just a quick-and-dirty way to update web pages, and look what it has become now. Twitter lowers the barrier even further.

Is Twitter popular? Yes, extremely so; new media technologist Dan York has a Twitter account followed by over one thousand people. His "tweets" cover everything from his his latest technology thoughts to the local weather. (My account is the much same way.)

I've recently discovered that Twitter can provide an amazing technical resource: instant expert help from people who you didn't know even existed. Some individuals monitor the entire Twitter stream for certain keywords — and they might respond to your comments with extremely welcome help. Earlier today I noted in passing that I couldn't find a particular software function in the Ruby programming language; a few moments later Ivor Paul responded with a few well-chosen links to Ruby documentation that will cut hours off of my learning curve. And earlier this week Neil Edwards, twittering from London, gave me a leg up on finding the right software to make Ruby on Rails more useful.

I'm fascinated by the capabilities of Twitter. Twitter is disaggregated: Twitter allows access to Twitter as a a building block for other services. Now I've begun to wonder just where all this will lead.

Topics:  · internet · technology

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Video Blog

Dan York interviewed me to discuss my Phone 2 Directions idea; here's the video.

Topics:  · business · innovation · internet · telephony

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Turning Phone Numbers into Directions

As much as I'd like to attend the eComm conference, I can't be there in person because of a schedule conflict; if you can, try to make it to the conference, which promises to be very interesting. To help you find the way... here's something new. Call +1 312 252 1758 to get directions to the conference location. And you don't have to enter an starting address — instead, you enter a phone number.

If you've been wondering why the blog hasn't been updated lately, I've been quite busy working on this little invention. I call it "Phone 2 Directions," and it's based on a very simple principle: if I know a phone number, there's a good possibility I know the location of that phone number.

Here's a simple example. I'm driving along in an unfamiliar city on my way from the airport to a meeting. I get a bit lost. I don't really know what street I'm on, and often I might not even be certain what town I'm actually in. As a result, most conventional map services won't help me — I need to enter an address for them to work. Besides, map services require keyboards and that's not useful (or safe) when I am trying to drive.

A GPS system would work, but I'd still have to enter my destination, which isn't fun while driving. The same for cell phones that locate (approximately) where you are based on proximity to cell phone towers. Even worse, that requires that I download the cell-phone-tower-finding software to my cell phone in advance. And what if I'm using a plain old telephone inside a gas station to get the directions?

The easiest way to find a location is to do something the telphone is designed to do: enter a telephone number. Telephone numbers are everywhere: on doors of businesses, on signs, in people's homes, at the desks of hotel lobbies. If you're driving along and you see a telephone number, you can use the "Phone 2 Directions" service to get directions.

The basic idea is quite simple. By performing reverse directory lookup, Phone 2 Directions finds the starting location and the destination; it gets the route from a driving-directions service; it reads the results back. It's a great solution for this problem> I call this idea "Telephone Accessible Geotags," using telephone numbers as a way to find and mark physical locations, and there are many more services that quickly come to mind.

A few words about Ifbyphone. The demonstration is hosted at Ifbyphone, which provides the telephony, speech recognition, and text-to-speech services. The interface to Ifbyphone uses the familiar web services pattern, and Phone 2 Directions is one of the first "phone mashups" available. Ifbyphone gives away one million minutes (yes — that's 1,000,000 minutes) of phone connection time to developers each month. If you want an account with them to try your own phone mashup, just sign up.

The source code for a demonstration version of this software is available in open-source.

Or, of course, you can just contact me if you'd like to use a hosted version of this software.

Topics:  · innovation · internet · telephony

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Prediction Come True: Facebook Contact Data — Who Owns It?

An interesting clash over who owns data developed between Plaxo, a company that manages business contacts, and Facebook, a social networking company. Facebook doesn't allow its members to automatically gather the contact information of a member's "friends"; their business model relies on social interactions that take place through Facebook. Plaxo manages contact information, and Plaxo would benefit if a Facebook member could move contact information from Facebook to Plaxo.

Plaxo created software to move contact information from Facebook to Plaxo. Plaxo even created image-recognition software to read the email addresses that were stored on Facebook in image format (which Facebook used for the precise purpose of avoiding automatic scanning).

Facebook detected the scans and shut down accounts of people who attempted to use Plaxo software. At present, it's not clear how this will work itself out.

I discussed the looming battle over contact information in my book. This is one of the opening skirmishes, and we can expect this to continue to play out over the next decade at least, and expand to other forms of data.

There is a way to defuse the battle, however. An initiative to disaggregate social-networking data from social-networking sites sent an invitation to Facebook to join; so far Facebook has refused. While I wonder at the motives of some who have joined the initiative, I look forward with interest as to how well it succeeds.

Topics:  · internet · privacy

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Another Google Gaffe?

Hot the heels of a rather serious Google gaffe, there's speculation from informed sources that Google is about to integrate a social-networking service into their Gmail account. If someone — a business associate, a friend, or just some oddball who sent you email and was therefore automatically added to your contact list — updates one of their Google-related services, this information will show up on a continuously scrolling list ("feed") on your Google page.

This is speculative, in the meantime; no official Google announcement. There's no indication of what information is automatically shared by Google. That is, if you upload your family vacation photos to your online account, do all of your business associates receive notification automatically? Yes, that sounds silly, but as I noted in the link above, Google already did something just like that.

Google might want to organize my life, but they need to realize that my life has nuances. I wonder if the social atmosphere of Silicon Valley, where work integrates heavily with non-work activities, is affecting Google's judgment about what services people want and don't want. Google blew up out of nowhere to own the Internet search-engine mindshare; but if they can't learn how to disaggregate friends, acquaintances, cliques, colleagues, collaborators, and the like from each other, they're going to blow back to nowhere.

Topics:  · internet · privacy

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Not Everyone Wants to Network Everything

Recently the social networking site Facebook survived a fiasco with its Beacon project. If you were a member of Facebook and, e.g., rented a movie from Blockbuster online, Beacon broadcast that fact to all your Facebook "friends" (a bit of Facebook jargon meaning "people to whom you have elected to reveal certain limited information") without your consent. This provoked a backlash against Facebook, which dropped the program in response to a revolt by its customers. So far Blockbuster hasn't been sued, even though there's a decent-sounding legal theory that what Blockbuster did was illegal.

Google has a product called Reader, which allows people to share documents online. I've only glanced at it for the first time today, and was quite surprised to see that some of my "friends" (again, "friends" as defined by Google's technical definition, not by my own) had placed documents online for me to read. Not that I was interested in them, mind you. Google recently — and suddenly — changed how the documents are shared. Instead of sharing them with a few select individuals, the documents you placed into Reader are now available to everyone on your Gmail (Google email) contact list.

Well, as can be imagined, this provoked quite a backlash from users. People who rely on Google for their business and personal email now suddenly find that Google is sharing documents inappropriately — with gaffes ranging from sharing personal husband-wife communications with business contacts, or sharing confidential business information with business rivals.

There's a few lessons here. First, that social-networking sites sometimes forget that in the real world, not all network contacts are the same — people disaggregate their contacts into groups and don't treat them all equally. Second, social networking web sites live and die by the number of contacts, and therefore have the incentive to continually push you to share more and more information and increase the number of contacts. Finally, if you want to avoid gaffes such as the one that Google just committed, you must retain control over your own data; if you put your business data into the hands of Google there's no guarantee that Google will always act in ways that conform to your business preferences and personal expectations.

Topics:  · internet · marketing

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Amazon Goes from Desperate to Very Desperate

I wrote earlier that Amazon seemed to be in desperate straits: they suddenly abandoned their Internet-savvy roots and decided to start sending spam. I'll now guess that, with the end of the shopping season approaching rapidly, that they've become very desperate — they've sent their second piece of spam in just two days.

Marketing is one thing. Hounding customers with spam is another. What's next, phone calls?

Topics:  · business · internet · marketing

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Are Poor Sales at Amazon Driving Them to Desperation?

I have my own personal index that tells me if a company is doing well or not: if they suddenly act stupidly, they're likely in trouble. Of all the Internet-savvy companies, Amazon is ordinarily one of the smartest; but today I've received spam from them. Spam? From Amazon? Amazing... and I have to wonder if it's an act of desperation.

I immediately placed Amazon on my "do-not buy" list for twelve months, of course, but when an otherwise smart company does something this stupid I have my suspicions. Sure enough, I see that Amazon's stock price is down. While a tick in the stock price usually isn't enough to unleash the forces of idiocy, drastically falling sales usually are; the two signals (falling stock price and spam) make me suspect that Amazon has very bad news to report in the near future.

Topics:  · business · internet · marketing

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Google's Gold

People continue to speculate on just how Google will provide telecommunications service if they win the auction for a portion of the wireless spectrum. Typically, an analyst will point out that Google has no core expertise in wireless networks and — here's the assumption — therefore Google must have a wireless provider partner. The usual suspect is Sprint.

Expanding into a unrelated area is the typical hubris that infects large corporations. Remember AT&T's disastrous excursions into computers, on the rationale that since AT&T used computers, they must therefore be experts in how to build and sell them? AT&T's purchase of NCR probably helped destroy AT&T.

But so far, Google has been very, very smart; at the same time, Google has pursued old businesses in new ways. If I had to guess, I would say that Google has something entirely different up their sleeves if they win the wireless spectrum. After all, Google has plenty of experience running wireless Internet networks, and as a condition of purchase of the wireless spectrum, access to the spectrum must be relatively open. What if Google purchases the spectrum and creates a wireless, VoIP network instead of a traditional cellular network? What if they simply sell Internet minutes instead of cellular service minutes? What if they simply sell unlimited wireless Internet access and forgoe the pain and suffering (and hideous cost) of billing cellular service on a per-minute basis?

Topics:  · internet · telecommunications

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