If you’re a webgeek like me, you have probably figured out that we are living in some very interesting times right now. Microsoft and Sun made significant announcements and improvements to their new RIA platforms this month, and Sun has released their new JavaFX Script (ok, now really, who came up with that name?)
So Silverlight wasn’t open source. Or at least, not in any significant fashion. The big reason #10 that Tim mentioned was in fact the inclusion of a cutdown CLR in Silverlight so that developers have access to a subset of .NET without needing the users to have installed the whole runtime environment on their machines - which is a big win for Silverlight given that the CLR does not have 100% penetration even on windows, let alone on the Mac.
But if it’s not open source, the Silverlight team must have another reason for thinking they have something that will compete with Flash/Flex/Apollo, Ajax, and XUL.
I think what it boils down to is that Silverlight is a way to give their existing developer base a way to migrate their .NET skillset, components, and tools onto the web. So it’s all very exciting if you’re a .NET developer, but less so for everyone else. I can see how it has a chance, because there will be a lot of windows developers feeling that windows applications just aren’t where it’s at these days, and Sliverlight gives them a migration path.
One wonders if this is what Sun has in mind with JavaFX. There isn’t any talk of a cut down JRE to be deployed where the full version isn’t installed, but they have said that there is “more to come” for JavaFX, so I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this came about. And JavaFX is open source. GPL in fact, like almost everything Sun is doing these days. Which is pretty amazing when you think about it.
Arguably, it will work for Microsoft and Sun in the other direction as well - if web developers start using Silverlight / JavaFX and gaining an understanding of XAML or Swing, that will mean they’re more likely to use them for desktop or mobile versions of the same.
Despite the hype, neither Silverlight nor JavaFX will eclipse development with Flash, XUL, or the various Ajax libraries anytime soon, because ubiquity trumps functionality in an awful lot of cases. But there are certainly tasks for which they will be well suited, and with the massive developer and developer support teams of Microsoft and Sun involved, it seems likely that both these new platforms will grow a significant presence given time.
All this activity by major players has caused a bit of a ruckus in the Mozilla Community, with Chris Messina arguing that Mozilla should focus more on platform (ie XULRunner) development to counter these moves by other players, while Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO) among others, argued that the best course of action was to focus on the users rather than the developers, and keep pushing Firefox while it’s on a roll. I tend to agree with her, even though I have this really cool app idea I’d love us to build with XULRunner once our addons are launched and we get some funding (and more staff) for Interclue….
Guy Kawasaki, who is a blogger/author that every startup CEO needs to read, seems to have fallen in love with The Turk. Maybe one of the companies he backs will actually find a good use for it.
Have you done a search and seen the jobs being offered? Most of them are simple SEO work - writing filler to wrap adsense around and confuse the search engines, or “voting up” something or other. And the payrates offered are atrocious.
Update: After marking up this screenshot. I figured out how to get a list without doing a search, just clicking on HITs, you can go here. There are only 193 “HITs” posted right now. None of them pay more than $5. That’s not even worth the time I took to make the screenshot, let alone the time I took to write this post. But, I guess I’m a startup CEO, not a starving third worlder! But frankly, anyone with a clue and with an internet connection knows that their time is worth more than this. BTW (obligatory plug) if you’ve got a clue and an internet connection (and Firefox), you really ought to try the Interclue Beta.
Essentially, it was an idea that sounded great and original and interesting and got Amazon a lot of attention when they released it, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten used in the way they might have hoped. I guess there are a lot of ideas like that. Maybe things will change, but I imagine that they’re looking at the lack of uptake and pondering that to make it worthwhile they would have to be doing 100x more business, so why bother when they’ve got so much else on. (note to self: finish post about Google Answers…)
But as for Amazon trying stuff non “book” related, I’m vastly more impressed with S3, EC2, SQS, etc than I am with Mturk. We are planning to migrate Interclue onto S3 and EC2, once we have launched (Soon! I promise!) and got some more investment underneath us. Amazon is a great company, doing great things.
Last minute thought: I wonder if there’ll be an upsurge in mturk uptake on the supply side after they start rolling out millions of OLPCs…
Nope, some of them are at least half serious. Most people I know still haven’t figured out what Web 2.0 is all about, but for a lot of the peopleIread, it’s getting pretty old hat, and a few of them are trying to define the next revolution already.
ReadWriteWeb asked people to come up with their own definition of what Web 3.0 means, with tickets to the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo on the line. My contribution was:
Web 3.0, highly abstract noun:
1. Term used by Web 2.0 startups to differentiate themselves from other Web 2.0 startups. 2. Term used by Web 2.0 pundits temporarily bored of writing about Web 2.0 startups.
I didn’t win. I probably should have made it even more snarky.
Of the winners, I really liked Robert O’Brien’s definition. I think he’s right about the way things are heading in terms of personalised and integrated information flows. Interclue is definitely headed in that direction. Stowe Boyd and Fred Wilson have been talking about this sort of thing for ages.
Realistically, there will be no “Web 3.0″ until O’Reilly change the name of their conference. They are the thought leaders, and despite one or two recent missteps by Tim, I can’t see them losing thought leadership anytime soon. So the question is, what would inspire them to make that change? See my list of potential factors after the cut.
Ok, so I started this post 3 weeks ago, and have only just got around to finishing it. Bad Seth, slap hand. But there’s been so much going on, and I’d sorta been waiting until Interclue was definitely nearing launch before poking my head up in the blogosphere again.
A month ago was what we in NZ call “Waitangi Weekend” or roughly “the weekend closest to Waitangi Day”. For the last decade or so I’ve celebrated this particular weekend by going back into the past, doing Medieval re-enactment with my friends in the SCA.
This year I instead paid a trip to the future, having scored a late invite to Kiwi Foo Camp (aka “Baa Camp” (an in joke too long to explain), organised by Russell Brown and Nat Torkington, who are both awesome overachievers in their own different ways.
In fact, most of the people I talked to during the weekend were awesome in some fashion. As an invite only event, with the karma of O’Reilly and the two organisers behind it, sponsored by Google and Rod Drury’s Xero, they really were able to pick and choose, and although there were plenty of people they realised ought have been invited, the ones they did choose were pretty damned interesting. I think I may have been one of the last ones to sneak onto the invite list, apparently later on it was more a matter of “Ok, if it’s Jesus Christ come to announce the second coming, then *maybe* we’ll let him in…
So Jayne and Glynn, thanks for prodding me to ping Nat about it when you did! Was good travelling with you (and Damien and Phil).
The event started with everyone introducing themselves with 3 relevant words (eg I was “attention deficit infojunkie”, and Rod Drury was “Stock Options. Hiring”), and filling out forms with among other things, the top 3 things they would bring back from the future if they had the chance (I chose Immortality Pills, a Pocket Quantum Computer, and an iCar, but later I decided I should have gone with a USB2 compatible storage device containing a copy of the future’s version of Wikipedia - or, if their drive was big enough, a copy of the future’s Internet Archive Project…now that would be a big drive.)
Then everyone wrote down on big sheets of paper what they were going to talk about. Goodness, but there were a lot of interesting sessions. The problem was that there were 5 different sessions per slot, and I usually wanted to see at least two of them! Later on I discovered it was even worse, because there was usually someone hanging around the common area who I really wanted to talk to *as well*. So I usually wanted to be in 3 places at once.
Highlights
Our Minister for Communications was great value. I think everyone was impressed by the depth of his understanding of the issues surrounding telco reform. He also was able to get a sense of the consensus in the room regarding the need for peering policy, which is something that has driven everyone a bit batty since the major Telco’s stopped doing it - for a while now traffic that used to travel from one box to another inside the WIX or AIX has had to go via Australia, because our local BigCos are hoping the SmallCo’s will pay them interconnect fees. Judith Tizard was also there, and definitely seemed to be enjoying herself.
A fantastic performance from the Vospertron guys. Conversation overheard in the carpark afterwards was along the lines of: “so, what microprocessor do you use in these light suits?” - “Uh, it’s a PICAXE…” - “Wow, AWESOME, I market those. I’ve got something to write about on our site tonight!”. The other cameraphone in this video belongs to Russell Brown, who I introduced myself to afterwards. He’s a really down to earth and severely clueful media guy, who’s right across technology and politics in this country. I like him.
Showing Interclue to a bunch of people, who were actually pretty impressed on the whole. My actual presentation wasn’t as good as I wanted, I wish I’d spent more time preparing for it, but the week before was just madness. Got some useful feedback on things people wanted to see, none of which we’ve actually managed to implement yet, but it’s all on the drawing board.
Rod Drury’s demonstration of Xero - wow, now that was what I call a presentation. You’d almost think he’d done this sort of thing before…
The Firefox 3 show and tell - some great things coming up there.
Talking with Asa Dotzler, who is a very clever man. In fact, all the Mozilla guys there were wicked smart. But Asa was speaking my language - the big picture stuff, why Google needs Mozilla, how Firefox is assuring the future of the web as a platform, etc. Asa is the head of QA - essentially nothing gets into the final release of Firefox without him signing off on it! He also started the Spread Firefox website, and is a key evangelist for the Mozilla Foundation. [1]
Chatting with Mike from Pitch Black, his friends in the entertainment space, and seeing their awesome multimedia mashup demos. I first saw Pitch Black perform at Roots Festival in Kaikoura - they had the last set of the night and by the end of it I remember thinking “Pitch Blue”. Awesome electronica and great visuals. Kudos to Nat and Russell for inviting some people from the more entertaining side of the geekosphere.
Playing Werewolf for the first time. I didn’t last long. I was a werewolf. I picked the two smartest fast-talking villagers I knew, killed the first one in the first round, but failed to convince the other two werewolves to nab the second one, who fingered me in the next round. Doh! Unfortunately that particular game ended at 4am, I was somewhat drunk, and I forgot to set my alarm. So much for sunday morning :(
Top 3 things I really regret missing out on:
Quinn Norton’s session on Bodyhacking (apparently she was appearing with the aid of Provigil, which is marketed under the brandname “Modavigil” in this country, you can get it for “Shift Worker Sleep Disorder”, and yeah, it’s useful, but it’s not a magic bullet.)
The session from the Public Address bloggers, who are great value.
Chris di Bono’s session on the OLPC project, a project I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while, as it is one of the definitive Philanthrogeek projects of our time…but I was having a good conversation with Asa Dotzler at the time, so I missed it. Bugger.
There are a lot of people I want to get back in touch with and continue conversations started at Kiwifoo, but every time I started an email I got to a certain point and remembered that I didn’t actually have time to talk, and that anyway I should at least get the new website up, which we still haven’t finished. I’ll go back through my drafts soon and ping them.
After it all, I came back, caught up on sleep, progressed an important deal for the company, and then headed out for the final night/day of Canterbury Faire. I was probably the freshest person on the site, apparently everyone had been having a fabulous time, and I’m so sorry I missed all the action, but well, Kiwi Foo was a bit of unique event (well, hopefully not unique, and hopefully not on Waitangi weekend next time). I did make the Steward pretty happy when I fetched cold caffeine for him and his crew during the hot and dusty packdown.
[1] I’m pretty Bullish on Google and Mozilla at the moment, but Microsoft have finally shipped Vista and Office, which means that they have a bundle of manpower that’s suddenly not completely overoccupied, they’ve been hiring some very smart people like Jon Udell, and Google has decided that they want to start charging for their online office apps, so it’s seriously game on at this point. We (Interclue) are intending to stay more or less neutral, and support both IE and Firefox (and Safari, and Opera, and others) as best we can with the resources we have. We wanted to launch with both Firefox and IE supported, but IE just proved to be a bit more difficult to work with than we hoped - we are almost there, but I decided to give priority to giving the best possible UX for one rather than an average UX for both at the beginning. Hopefully I made the right call on that.
There are rather a lot of people and groups I’m intending to talk about on this blog, the problem is that right now I’m insanely busy so it may take me a while to get around to all of them. So I thought I’d give a brief list, and if anyone wants me to write about any particular one, they can let me know in the comments.
So, not in any particular order, here are some incredibly cool people doing great things for the people of this planet:
Steven Clift whose tireless promotion of e-democracy may shortly be rewarded with an Ashoka fellowship. I have been following his do-wire mailing list for at least 5 years now and I think he’s well worthy of that honour. It’s a bit of a fluke, but the company behind the forum software he’s using for his Issue Forums is run by people here in Christchurch.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, who recently suggested that we could be a bit smarter about the way we discuss politics online and may be hoping to kickstart another revolution of sorts. Personally this is an area where the idealist and the pragmatist within me have an argument. On the one hand I’d like to see net culture transcend the pathetic sloganeering of broadcast politics, but on the other hand I’m aware that for the moment a fully integrated strategy that bows to the tyranny of the “swing voter” might be necessary in 2006.
Jeff Skoll, definitely a philanthropist after my own heart says here : “In my case, I like to support causes where “a lot of good comes from a little bit of good,” or, in other words, where the positive social returns vastly exceed the amount of time and money invested.” - or, in other words, he’s a Philanthohacker. One of the very clever things he’s doing is running Participant Productions, who are harnessing the power of the movie theatre for the sake of good with films like An Inconvenient Truth. and Syriana
Benetech, who I first spotted because they employed Brendan Nyhan who was involved with Spinsanity, an amazing blog I was following that covered the unprecedented level of media spin in the post 9/11 era, right up until they re-elected Bush, after which I guess they decided that the American public wasn’t quite ready for this whole “sanity” concept yet.
Dave Pollard who was Chief Knowledge Officer of Ernst & Young before he decided that he could do more to save the world through blogging. A fantastic blog.
The WorldChanging bloggers, who I wish I had more time to read. They are supported by the above mentioned Omidyar Network (it’s funny how often I discover something amazingly cool and then later discover the Omidyars have started funding it)
Richard Stallman, who more than anyone is responsible for the worldwide open source movement. Met him once at a party here in Christchurch. Nice guy.
George Monbiot - who mainly draws attention to big problems, but occasionally comes up with some very interesting solutions, unfortunately they often seem to involve the British and/or American Governments behaving responsibly, so don’t expect to see any of those solutions implemented anytime soon.
Aubrey de Grey, who’s somewhat radical proposal is that we could engineer the end of biological ageing within the next 50 years. He’s causing a bit of a stir in the biogerontology world, many of whom think he’s holding out false hopes and probably resent his grabbing all the headlines, but he’s got enough scientists supporting him that I think he has to be taken seriously. Given the acceleration in scientific and medical research that is being driven by the internet and cheap computing power, I find it all remarkably plausible. It’s certainly an amazing time to be alive - the age of possibility.
…and of course I am still yet to discuss the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation in any detail.
Finally here are a few random links from my philanthrogeek bookmarks:
Please note that this is far from everyone who’s impressed me in a philanthrogeek capacity over the last few years, but it’s enough to talk about for the moment.
One wonders if this is what Sun has in mind with JavaFX. There isn’t any talk of a cut down JRE to be deployed where the full version isn’t installed, but they have said that there is “more to come” for JavaFX, so I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this came about. And JavaFX is open source. GPL in fact, like almost everything Sun is doing these days. Which is pretty amazing when you think about it. 
