Holy cow!

Steve Jobs has left the stage at WWDC ‘08, and the new Apple homepage is up. The Aussie Apple Store now has the 3G iPhone promoted but only for sale at Vodafone and Optus. So where’s Telstra and Three??

This is a great idea! I don’t want to get into all the technical reasons for it, but for a host of reasons, I think it’s a great idea for Google to host the most popular script libraries like script.aculo.us, Prototype, jQuery and Dojo. The only other one I really want to see there is Appcelerator. Hmm… I wonder if Jeff Haynie agrees?

Well, I’m not sure if it’s going to kill it completely, but think about this…

Ingredients

• 3G/HSDPA mobile phone broadband
• A mobile/cell phone with a 2+ megapixel camera
• Installed software and an account with qik.com or similar
• An eye for something interesting to shoot

Recipe

• Bring ingredients together in a large mixing bowl.
• Mix and set aside for just a few years (to let every the technology and adoption rates reach, say, every second person with a mobile phone).
• Take small fistfuls of mixture at a time, shaping each into a mobile phone
• Distribute around the Western world, India, China, etc

Serving Suggestion

• Serve most liberally in cities (like LA) where the traditional media is most concentrated… watch them weep as they’re always beaten to the “scene” by citizens with cell phones, uploading live to ustream, qik, and soon youtube (of course!).

Seriously now…

Imagine the earthquake in China this week. Imagine the same event in just a few years time, when cell phone usage is so ubiquitous, along with 3G/HSDPA and live streaming video functionality…

Imagine emergency workers digging like crazy trying to find survivors. Now, assuming the cell network is not destroyed, what if trapped survivors have videos and can broadcast their location and surrounds. One of the big issues with digging people out is not just finding them but assessing their conditions properly, and not risking the lives of the emergency crews too.

Or imagine that police bashing that was caught on camera by a helicopter TV crew earlier in the week (or was it last week?). Imagine the same event, but the footage is picked up by half-a-dozen onlookers, livecasting from their mobile phones.

This is not a fantasy! This is real and it’s happening right now among (very) early adopters. Take, for example this guy using qik to livecast this conference.

Now, there’s no way qik won’t get bought out soon enough by (probably) Google, or possibly Facebook. Certainly Scoble is talking it up, Arrington uses it, and lots of people are having fun with it. It would make a powerful addition to the YouTube “arsenal”.

(Meanwhile, I’m sooking coz qik is only a Nokia S60 think at the moment, and I’m WM6. Sob.)

Prognosticating…

I have no idea where this livecasting thing is going to take us, but it’s very exciting. I am especially excited because I have always felt that, as passionate as I am about writing, the QWERTY keyboard has had a lot to answer for in terms of the way it has made blogging hard(er) for many people - myself included.

But now, if communicating by video becomes as simple and as seamless as making a phone call or sending an SMS, then we’re going to see a revolution. And not just communicating by video, but publishing by video… the livecasting way.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s why I’d love to see Facebook buy and “integrate” qik, or a similar service.

Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president of product marketing, described Facebook as “the next-generation platform of the Internet that can turn any ambitious entrepreneur (with the right application) into an overnight success.” He was of course talking about application developers building Facebook apps.

Now, if you do the research and read the stats, you’ll see that the most successful apps on Facebook are those which provide functionality and features which are the most natural “fit” for the Facebook “DNA”, which is all about social activity. That’s because Facebook is a social platform: it’s the platform and the plumbing to allow people to socialize, commune, share, interact, befriend and otherwise participate together online.

However, to my mind, so much of what happens on Facebook right now is, as I’ve already said, limited by the QWERTY keyboard. We send messages, write on walls, poke and pinch and punch and throw sheep, we mark up photos, we play Scrabble, we comment on things, and we add things (lots of things!). All very text-heavy and keyboard-heavy.

When vision catches up to text…

So imagine for a moment what the next few years are going to bring, if livestreaming is in the middle of it. Imagine a Facebook “social world” where vision is at least as easy to communicate via, as text.

Imagine Facebook where 50% of all user activity is via vision, not text. Or at the least, where both work hand-in-hand. Imagine a “default” setup for things on Facebook where it is assumed you’re on camera, as are the other participants.

Imagine if the messaging section of Facebook defaulted to video, because people find it easier to talk than type?! Of course, I can think of a lot of women (especially) who need two minutes of make-up time for every minute on camera, if they can bear to be in front of it at all… but we won’t go there!

Eyewitness News?!

It seems to me every 2nd city in the English speaking world has a TV station which calls it’s 6:00pm newcast “Eyewitness News”. The implication is, they were there and you weren’t. But what if you were?! What if no matter what they’re screening, someone else got there earlier, took better footage, and was on the inside of the story, with access the journalist can’t or won’t get?!

Television newsrooms are already relying more and more on cell phone footage for vision. They’re now advertising email addresses so you and I can send in our “eyewitness” mobile camera footage for their use. They can’t stop us recording the stuff and if it’s good they want it!

But we don’t have to give them the video to get it seen! And that’s the point. If you’ve been watching how people are using Twitter, you’ll see that when a big news story breaks (say the China earthquake), people are talking about it on Twitter (i.e. gathering the pieces of the “news story”) well before a word is mentioned on any “real” news network.

Now, of course the written word will never be replaced by video. You could never “digest” video as quickly as you can get through a page full of “tweets”. But that’s not the point.

Make a start!

The point is… actually I’m not sure what the point is. I just know we’re in a very exciting time! We are living in a time of absolutely amazing change, when the humble IP protocol is changing everything.

The one thing I’m sure of is that video won’t kill the Twitter star, and it probably won’t kill the TV News star either. But it will make stars out of a whole new group of people who could never have been “seen” before. It will make you a “star” with a very specific niche following, at least much more easily and effectively than ever before.

The age of the ultra-powerful TV network is almost over, to be replaced by millions of “channels” broadcasting live to small and dedicated followings within small and dedicated “niches”. So go get that 3G cell phone and start messing around with livestreaming. At least start testing vlogging, as I am about to.

(It’s a pathetic start, but I do have a channel on ustream tv.)

<plug> My buddy Eugene is the brains of online video. Check this out. </plug>

I’m sorry, but as much as I want Disqus (and have installed it for testing) it’s just not ready for Wordpress… not until it can import existing WP comments. I’m rather surprised they don’t have that sussed yet. Disappointed, even.

Neenz and the great team at Alltop have added Yours Truly to the Alltop blogging category. Just in time for my determined return to a more aggressive and consistent blogging schedule. I have more planned than I can begin to tell you right now, but all I can say is, you’re going to want to a) make sure you’re subscribed to my RSS feed, and b) make sure you’ve added me as your friend in Twitter and Facebook!

When I’ve had a really good look at Microsoft’s exciting new Live Mesh I’ll post a proper reply to Aussie Microsofter Frank Arrigo, who wonders if I’m still disappointed with Ray Ozzie… Looks like I have serious reasons to reconsider! It does indeed look like the Groove successor to die for!

“Code is art.” That’s the tagline over at W3 Markup, which is a well-presented coding service of a web design crew called W3 Edge. They must be doing something right, as they got the gig to do “custom markup” on Neil Patel’s blog. But if this Smashing Magazine markup example is anything to go by, they’re not quite there yet… Who can tell me what needs to be improved there? Use line numbers in your answers, please.

My buddy Cyrus plotted a point in the middle of Port Philip Bay, and asked Google Maps to give directions from there to a location in St Kilda… Turns out Google Maps knows about the ferry!

This is Ray Ozzie. He’s Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect. I pictured him kind of younger than that… but Microsoft ages you like nothing else. I mean, just look at Steve Ballmer!

Anyway, see that link on Ray’s page… top right in the sidebar… yeah, that links to his blog. Click it.

You’ve arrived at a page dated November 16th and you’re reading a post where Ray is talking about this, his first post in his third attempt at blogging. He hopes he will do ok this time around:

So … if I couldn’t sustainably blog the last two times I tried, will it work this time? I guess you’ll just have to stay tuned to find out. I certainly have a much more complex life now than I did then, with much less flex time / whitespace within which to blog. Conversely, I’m involved in many interesting and varied issues here that have potentially broad impact, so there’s probably a lot more I’ll want to converse about.

So how’s he going, you might ask? After that somewhat underwhelming reentry to the blogosphere…

Well, how about I told you that the datestamp you see at the top of that post — November 16 — is from over two years ago?! You got that right, folks… Ray’s official bio page links to his blog, and directly to a post he wrote waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in November 2005!

Ok, so maybe it’s a silly oversight to link directly to such an old post. Never mind… so let’s go to his blog’s homepage…

Now we’re looking at a blog post datestamped April 1st, and I’m sorry to say but indeed the joke is on us. That’s a post from April 2006. It’s coming up to two years old! And if you count the posts as you go down that page, you’ll find a grand total of six posts. Period.

But it gets worse…

Because Ray’s blog carries (what I assume is) the default Live Spaces blog template, there is a long list of Month/Year archive links running down the left-hand sidebar. They go on forever. And one after the other — if you can be bothered clicking on them in the vain hope of finding a blog post — they come up blank, except for the sad words:

There are no entries in this archive.

No, indeed there are not. None… Not since April 2006. It’s all quiet on the Redmond Front. Verrrrry quiet!

Now here’s the deal. If Ray’s not blogging, I can handle that. If he’s too busy, I’m cool with that. In my consulting I am as much convincing executives not to blog as I am challenging them to consider it.

But hey, if you do have a blog, here are a couple of thoughts:

1. Build it on a real blog platform that doesn’t create empty month archives by default and deceptively hide the year in post datestamps!
2. Don’t for goodness’ sake link to it from your Executive Bio page on your Corporate web site if the most recent post is almost two years old.

Heck. I say kill it! Get it off the web. It’s not doing you any favours.

How Ray Lost His Groove

Here’s the other reason why I am disappointed, and it’s got nothing to do with blogging, but I’m still sad.

Before Ray was with Microsoft he was with IBM and Notes. But in-between he built what I thought was one of the most funky cool amazing things called Groove. You can think of Groove (at least as it was then) as a P2P “team workspace” with really nice encryption, SDK, pricing model, UI, etc. The technology was gorgeous, and the power of it was really impressive. We’re talking shared documents, built-in voice conferencing, whiteboarding, project management, etc. And all that run over a peer-to-peer architecture with high encryption and more cool stuff that I can no longer recall.

Now, maybe I’ve got it all wrong, but I feel like since Groove was taken over by MS and Ray got the CTO gig, Groove has just vaporized. Here’s proof of what I mean… I’d like to show you the promo video on the MS site… but the link is broken That’s the introductory Groove video, no less!

Ray, are you seeing this?!

Here’s a writer for Red Herring, who last week both praised and damned Ozzie and MS in consecutive paragraphs:

One of Microsoft’s most significant acquisitions was Ray Ozzie, now the company’s chief software architect. We won’t hold it against Mr. Ozzie that he created Lotus Notes, a classic example of packaged software bloat that IBM still foists on unsuspecting customers. That wasn’t why Gates and Ballmer pulled him in.

If you want to see the future of Microsoft, look at Groove, the startup Ozzie built after Notes. Groove was an on-line collaboration platform that allowed users to quickly create shifting groups of workers with finely-controlled access. They could share documents, edit them together, hold meetings and discussions while they looked at documents.

This writer is confused enough to suggest that Groove is a vision of Microsoft’s future, yet speaks of it in the past tense, which might suggest that even technology journalists out there are unaware that Groove still exists and is part of the default install of MS Office 2007 Enterprise Edition.

I’m just wondering… why is Groove hidden away in only the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Office 2007?! Why is it locked into Office and not also strongly promoted and sold on its own merits?

What’s that Big ‘G’ in the Rear View Mirror??

Microsoft has pretty must lost me. I bought a Mac last month. I dumped Exchange Server about 18 months ago and everyone here’s on Google Apps now. On the Mac I never even looked at Entourage, opting for Thunderbird and Gmail via IMAP.

So what did I do today (for no particularly strategic reason)?? I emailed Google and told them I thought it was time they implemented a Groove-style P2P VPN client app (perhaps delivered with Google Pack) so that Google Apps users can collaborate in a more elaborate, encrypted and “offline-tolerant” way than is currently possible.

And the thing is, I’d be surprise if Google was not already working hard on something like that.

So here’s the deal, Ray. I do still think (and agree with our journalist friend above) that Groove is a sign of things to come in the future… except that I’m afraid it will be Google’s future, not Microsoft’s. I have not seen Google make the kinds of mistakes you’ve made recently… like burying some of your best technology in the bowels of Office Enterprise (where it’s guaranteed never to be found by the vast majority of your customer-base)… like screwing up an executive blog on a screwed up blogging platform.

So please… bring Groove back from the wilderness! Reposition it for “groups” (not enterprises) and work out how it’s everything Sharepoint will never be (but that’s another sad post for another day). Give Google something to really feel challenged about, for a change.

I am convinced in principle — but not in technical detail — that Groove is just at that cozy point of equilibrium… of client app married to rich online services, which Google Apps right now is not. It solves the online/offline question, it does security wonderfully, it’s lean, it’s extensible and so forth.

If Groove is not the (kind of) platform for online apps that stands a chance of winning folks like me back from Google, what will?! Assuming it’s O/S platform agnostic, of course

I’m sure you get my point.

Oh, and I’m a blog consultant. I can help you sort that blogging thing out too. But just know that I’ll start by trying to convince you to get rid of that horrid V3 thing immediately.

Over and out.