Entries Tagged 'Webgeeking' ↓

I think this might herald the beginning of the end. The CEO of Mozilla corporation declared that it was time for Thunderbird, their free desktop mail client, and one of the best out there, to find its own way, so that Mozilla could increase its focus on Firefox and “the open web”.

The venerable communications tool known as “e-mail”, the Internet’s original “Killer App”, is broken, and probably needs to die. At the very least, it needs to evolve, and it might be *too hard* to evolve it, we might be better off coming up with a replacement and a migration strategy. Actually, I think I might even have the beginnings of such in my head from a brainstorm the other night, but it’s competing with a few other things to get out of there right now. Oh and by “evolve” I certainly do not mean this.

Hence, a prediction: Within 5-10 years what you and I know today as “e-mail” will be where usenet is today - a communications platform still loved by a few aficionados, still distributed by many ISPs, but mostly supplanted by web based systems with richer interactive possibilities and fewer opportunities for spammers to gum up the works.

I met a few Mozilla Folk while at Kiwi Foo camp. It struck me that they were all very much Alphageeks, wicked smart, and on top of their game. The Kiwis were Roc, giving talks on the future of the Firefox layout manager and reinventing the debugger as a side project, and Ben, who has mostly moved onto new projects with his new employer, and I particularly liked Asa, who thinks and talks about Mozilla and the Open Web at a meta-level far above the average technical evangelist.

On the other hand, I might just be flattering myself by saying that the MozCorp people are brilliant, because they usually seem to think the same way I do about stuff, most notably about the increasing importance of the web as a platform and the role of Firefox in evolving that ecosystem and keeping it open.

More thoughts on this later…but here are a few links:

From Web Worker daily, who disagrees with me.

From a Seamonkey developer, pondering that this is the second time Mozilla Corporation has attempted to reduce the importance of email.

And thoughts from one of the two key developers of Thunderbird.

And finally a quote from Tim O’Rielly: “Are we moving into a world where Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are just device drivers for Firefox?”

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?)

Given that we’re also about to take the covers off Interclue May 2007 is likely to go down as a month of intriguing events for the future of the web. (BTW feel free to ping me if you want the password to the site, otherwise, add me to your feed reader and stay tuned for Wednesday)

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….

Pssst: Apparently the Mono project will attempt to port Silverlight to Linux.

Something that flitted across my google reader lately was the top 10 reasons to consider using Silverlight, the new cross-platform Flash competitor from Microsoft. Reason number 10 was a mystery:  

“Ah… #10. I can’t reveal this yet - there’s a big surprise up our collective corporate sleeve that will be announced at MIX. I hate to hold back on you, but anticipation is part of the pleasure, as my mother used to tell me as a child when I was waiting impatiently for Christmas to come!”

Source: Tim Sneath : Introducing Microsoft Silverlight

Presumably, this can only mean Microsoft is open-sourcing large chunks of this new platform of theirs. No, seriously. It makes sense, they’re going up against Flash, and one of the only ways to compete against something that’s got wide market adoption and is ”free as in beer” is to release a competitor that’s ”free as in speech”. Having better features just won’t do it, when the opposition already owns the market. Microsoft has been trying to paint themselves as the less evil empire for a while now, so it just makes sense to build something major and open source it. Evolve or die, as they say, and they’ve well and truly given up claiming that Open Source is just another word for communism.  They’ve even got a lab dedicated to interop with open source technologies,  blogging at Port 25.  

Anyway, the real question is: which bits will be open sourced, and what licence are they going to choose? If they want to have any credibility at all they’d better pick something OSI-approved. For style points, they should pick the MPL. I wonder what Mozcorp would make of that one…anyway, I expect my friends Mary and Simon will tell me I’m completely off base with this, but I thought I’d hang it out there just in case I’m right :-)  

 BTW The answer to the question in the title, I suspect, is no. It’s probably not going to gain significant adoption vs Flash, even if it’s open source. But it will be interesting to watch.

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 people I read, 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.

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