Commitment anxiety

I’m sure a lot of Squash readers are like myself and basically try out every new service that comes along. Most you never use again, a few you experiment with for a while jumping between competitors and then there are those few sites that you really commit to.

Committing to a web app is a big thing. It’s generally not easy to pull information in and out of most Web 2.0 sites, not to mention the time in training and becoming familiar with an application. What’s more, due to the social nature of most web apps, it’s quite likely you’ve convinced friends, co-workers and family to follow your lead.

Which is all very well and good, except most web apps are still pretty immature. They all have long product roadmaps, promise they’re working on new features and often can be quite buggy. So if you do decide to commit to a web app, you put a lot of faith that the company you’re going with is going to deliver on its promises.

I’ve switched photo libraries six times. I went from flickr to smugmug to photobucket back to flickr, onto picasa and finally thought I’d settled on smugug. In the end, I like how much you can customise your galleries with smugmug and the customer service is better than the larger players.

However, being smaller they don’t have the third-party support. For example, the new online Photoshop Express doesn’t pull in photos from Smugmug but it does the other services I tried and then left behind. On a number of occasions, I’ve almost switched back to flickr. It’s cheaper (I don’t mind paying for a good photo library and I’m a smugmug pro user) and seems to have almost become de facto standard in terms of having the support of third parties which has become increasingly important. But I’ve uploaded a lot of photos to smugmug and really don’t want to lose that time and bandwidth investment. Plus, I still do really like the service.

However, recently videos have been a sticking point for me. I want to use one service for videos and photos and have been hanging out for this feature in smugmug. Thankfully, they added that support but they’ve been lagging in providing a nice Flash player, which is obviously critical for embedding and making reasonable use of your videos.

It’s been promised as coming for a long time and it’s something that’s now holding up a couple of work projects as we’re hoping to use the smugmug video engine on MediaConnect websites. So when Flickr unveiled they’re really neat video service in the last 24 hours, I must admit to having pangs of jealousy.

I know the Smugmug crew will do a great job when the flash player comes but I’m afraid I’m not a very patient user. Oh commitment is tough, even in the web world.

Buzzword is brilliant

OK, you’re probably sick of me bleating about the shithouse print formatting of Google Docs. Well, I thought I’d tell the world I’ve given up. If I have to create a document for printing I will never use Google Docs again until they get it right.

If you think this means I’m back to Word or OpenOffice, then think again. I’ve been using the Adobe online word processor Buzzword and it rocks! Prints out exactly as it shows on the screen, has a nice intuitive interface and is just a joy to use. In fact I haven’t really found anything to complain about.

Well, they do really need an online view. At the moment, you’re forced to view the document in a traditional page format but if you’re creating documents for online, you just want your words to fill up the screen. Buzzword needs to enable you to toggle between a page view and a web view just as the desktop wordprocessors do. Google Docs needs a page view. But at least now, I’ve got a solution for documents I intend to print (Buzzword) and a solution for my web docs (Google Docs).

That said, I’m finding I’m using Google Docs less and less. We’ve now got Google Sites up and running (the subject of another blog to come) and it just makes far more sense if you’re creating any documents for sharing among a team to create them in a wiki or publishing environment.

I do admit, its far from ideal having my documents in two separate places and it would be even worse if I created more documents that I do for printing. I hope to riff in a future blog more about this, but the online app vendors need to get together and come up with a common file format that will enable me to move my docs around the various services. More than that, I’d like to be able to decide where I host these docs  (say Omnibox or SugarSync) and then just right click and say ‘Open in Buzzword’ or ‘Open in Google Docs’.

The other thing I’ll note in this blog is I think Adobe can represent a real challenge in the online app space. I’m not a big fan of flash for your average website but when it comes to online apps, the technology really comes into its own especially when combined with Air. If Adobe were to pick up a word processing and presentation start-up and quickly tie them together it could feasibly jump ahead of both Google and Zoho in functionality and ease-of-use.

SugarSync moves us closer to cloud nirvana

I’ve written a lot about online/offline access and a couple of things have happened of late that has really pushed that concept forward quite a bit. There was the obvious move from Google to announce offline access for Docs and I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on that.

However, in the meantime I’ve fallen in love with a product called SugarSync. Quite simply, Microsoft needs to buy this company and built it into the OS and they need to do it yesterday.

For those who have not seen SugarSync, it does what I’ve been pleading for, for years. It sits in the background and automatically synchs your folder on your PC with a virtual drive in the cloud. Not only that it can sync that virtual drive with multiple PCs. I now have my work PC, home PC and laptop PC with near identical folders, plus an online drive just in case I’m at any other PC. I can now get any file that I’ve been working on - no matter where I am and if I’m using one of my personal computers I get the speed and performance of desktop access.

If I had of had this product 2 years ago before I started migrating all my apps to SaaS services I may not have gone down the Google Apps path. Access of files from multiple PCs was my biggest pain-point. Now, I’m hooked on the collaboration aspect as well but if I was Microsoft I’d be buying SugarSync and I’d have bought them yesterday. This kind of functionality should have been at the core of Vista. Not only would it represent a major leap forward in Web-enabling the Windows operating system but, as mentioned, it makes all of Microsoft’s desktop apps work in the cloud.

All Microsoft would then need to do is build collaboration-features directly into its productivity suite and you really would combine the benefits of offline and online.  Office with SugarSync and P2P live collaboration functionality would be a major step forward and would be infinitely more compelling than a revamp of the user-interface like we got in the last version. (Sugarsync also works with mobile devices and Macs btw)

Anyway, back to SugarSync. These guys have just cut their pricing plans in half and now you can get a 10Gb annual subscription for $US25. It’s just a no-brainer if you use multiple computers. My only feedback for Gibu and and the team is you really need to introduce a business plan. I need a ten-user license to roll this out across my team and then I don’t need to worry about backup issues anymore.

And of course the killer feature for small  businesses would be the ability to share folders between team members. I’m a bit surprised this wasn’t a part of the service from launch as it wouldn’t seem that difficult to implement given the syncing nature of the product so I hope its on the roadmap!

C’mon Google fix Docs formatting

As anyone who has read this blog before would know, I’m a big Google Apps user. So I’ve been following the latest thread emenating out of Read/Writer Web regarding Gapps vs MSOffice.

For me, the two killer features for Gapps are:

• Accessibility
• Collaboration

I’ve been using three to four computers for a number of years now and I simply have to have my documents stored in the cloud. Robert Scoble notes this as his reason for moving more of his apps online. However, as Lunn identifies once you get hooked up on the collaborative abilities of online apps you simply can’t go back to shared drives or emailing files about.

However, Google REALLY needs to fix Docs. Docs is fine is you don’t want to print what you’re writing and considering most of what I write appears online, that’s ok. But as soon as you are writing for print, Docs is awful. If you’re copying and pasting text from different sources and using tables and so forth, you end up with a document that looks nothing like you might imagine. Any if you’re formatting goes awry, the only way to generally fix it, is to copy it all into notepad take out all the formatting and start again. Indeed, most occasions I find myself starting with a fresh document, copying all the text from notepad and then formatting again.

Ryan Stewart in another post says that the answer is Adobe Air. The problem for me and this is something I’ve riffed about before is that once you commit to a suite, it’s really hard to move away. So even if Buzzword or Zoho have a better word processor, I’m unlikely to give up Docs or any particular piece of the Gapps suite because that’s where all my files live now.

Interestingly, Bernard Lunn describes Docs as being mature while Spreadsheets is in development. As far as I’m concerned Spreadsheets is far more developed than Docs. We’ve managed to build remarkably complex applications in Spreadsheets and especially with recent developments like Forms and the improved charting, I have no reason to ever use Excel again. Yet I still find myself booting up Word for most print jobs.

I saw a comment in a Google Docs forum, which said that until Docs had true WYSIWYG it would always falls short. I tend to agree. I’d like to think the lack of development on the Docs front is because Google is working on a significant improvement to ironing out these formatting problems.

By the way, I’d like to thank Bernard Lunn for prompting me to check out Remember the Milk again. Bernard’s original post mentioned that RTM now integrated with Gmail and after downloading the Firefox extension, I’m in raptures. It is brilliant and I can’t understand how Google hasn’t already snapped up Bob the Monkey and his co-workers.

Tinfinger now in the wild

My good friend Paul Montgomery yesterday took the wraps off his Web 2.0 shot at greatness, Tinfinger - which is essentially a person search engine, focusing on people-of-note, rather than your everyday Joe Blog.

Tinfinger is aiming to be a big, hairy, audacious user-generated-content site, so a beta launch is never easy because it’s highly unlikely your going to have a great stock of content when you get going. Of course, your never guaranteed to have a great stock of content because 99% of user-generated-content sites never get enough traction and therefore content to make them compelling.

Tinfinger has tried to incent people by giving them a share of the site’s google ad impressions - in effect, he’s funding the site’s content creation on the back of a debt Tinfinger will owe to its contributors. Contributors will have to trust, of course, that Tinfinger can pay that debt by generating enough page impressions.

Again, it comes back to getting some degree of critical mass of content so that contributors are encourage to contribute. Nobody is going to bother contributing to an empty site - Paul may well have to spend a bunch of time generating content for himself as well as maybe using some offshore services to get it ticking over.

What is nice about Tinfinger is its a mix of dynamic and authoratitive content, by mixing Wikipedia style profiles with news feeds. That’s surprisingly unique in the search-style world.

Paul will freely admit the site has a lot to do, but I’m really glad that Paul and his co-founder Tai have finally got Tinfinger out into the wild. I’m looking forward to them integrating the social networking side of the site more tightly into the rest of the content - I can see nice potential for little niche, social networks to spring up around celebrities and other people of note.

Good luck, gents.

Jotspot around the corner

Having sounded out a senior member of Google’s engineering team about Jotspot, it sounds to me like a first quarter launch of the wiki product is likely next year.

While not wanting to put a firm time-frame on the launch, he did seem confident that Jotspot’s re-emergence from its slumber was not far away.

It will be about time, too. I don’t think anyone would have envisioned an 18 month time-frame for Google to move Jotspot onto its software infrastructure and integrate it with the Google Apps products.

However, I remain firm in my belief that Jotspot may be the single most important product for Google in terms of really cracking the small to medium business market, so in that respect I’m not surprised that Google is wanting to make sure it gets it right.

That said, the Google executive I spoke to, did suggest it would still be a work-in-progress - so don’t think the length of time that Google’s been working on this is indicative that its going to be the perfect product at launch.

One question that has come to my mind, is how the Open Social announcement might relate to Jotspot. Part of Jotspot’s beauty before it was acquired was its API and the developer network that it had been developing and it would be nice to see Jotspot leverage whats going on with Open Social. I guess people tend to associate Open Social with social networks but the Wiki is the definitive social business application.

PC World AU shuts but it’s not the end of print

Today, we broke the news on MediaConnect of PC World shutting its print edition to make the transition to online.

Duncan Riley then blogged the news for TechCrunch a couple of hours later. He opined “I’m betting that 2008 may well turn out to be the year of the dying print magazine”.

Riley argues that in the case of a magazine like PC World, “where exactly is the appeal, particularly in tech, of reading a magazine that reports on news that is 6-8 weeks old, or sometimes even older than that?”

With all due respect to Duncan, it’s naive to think that there will suddenly be a mass collapse of print media. The tech print media should be dead already if you subscribe to the kind of argument that Duncan has made, however the reality is that in the personal technology space it has been remarkably resilient. In fact, over the last five years we’ve had just about as many launches as we’ve had closures. Even this year, we’ve had the launch of the Telstra/GadgetGuy magazine Australian Go which will go to over 100,000 readers to counterbalance the closure of PC World.

It’s foolhardy then to use the closure of just one magazine to proclaim the rapid end to print magazines.

The reality is the Australian PC magazine market was overcrowded and someone had to go. (There are still around 10 PC-style magazines in this country!!) PC World have done the best of the magazines down here in moving to online so it made sense for them to focus on the area of growth for them. However, it’s worth noting that market leader PC User bucked downward trends this year by recording an increase in its most recent audit.

So yes, there has been definite circulation declines and advertising has fallen significantly but publishers continue to adjust and reinvent magazines to make them relevant to the publishing environment they’re in. I don’t expect any of PC World’s competitors to shut down in 2008.

Bloody RSS

The ProBlogger post explaining how you can see how many Google Reader subscribers you have caught my attention because my RSS traffic has always been a bit of a mystery to me, especially since WordPress.com dropped its RSS stats. Web traffic is nice and easy to measure, RSS traffic not so!

I really, really wish I had switched to a Feedburner RSS feed when I first started this blog but doing so down the track doesn’t seem to make sense as any stats I get from Feedburner will only show a portion of the picture. Now I know, there’s a way to divert your WordPress default RSS to Feedburner but when your running off the hosted WordPress.com it isn’t so simple so I’ve never bothered and therefore never really had a good idea of what kind of RSS traffic I was getting.

Apparently, I’ve got 197 Google Reader subscribers which I’m feeling pretty good about considering how little I’ve been blogging recently. If you’ve been reading Squash for a while, you’d know that during the Rugby League season down here in Australia I don’t blog a lot on Squash because I write another blog about the team I follow which pretty much absorbs any spare time I have. But Footy season is over now so I’m hoping to try and blog daily again. It will certainly be nice to have a metric like this Google Reader one - as incomplete as it obviously is - to see if I have any luck at building this sucker up again.

Why Digg-clones don’t work

There is another TechCrunch article today about yet more Digg-clones. After  noting that Digg seems “hard pressed to break out of its geek-infested niche”, TechCrunch goes on to observe that “other sites are using Digg-like voting mechanisms to attack a much larger and much less tech savvy crowd: celebrity gossip aficionados”.

Outside of Digg and Reddit has anyone seen Digg-like voting systems work? Not here.

So why is that? Why does Digg work so spectacularly well while all these clones bomb. Check out all of the sites that TechCrunch mention in the article (Showhype, BallHype, Conde Naste’s Lipstick, Dotspotter, and SugarLoving (which supposedly has ‘massive page views’). On all of these sites the top ranked stories have about a dozen votes and a hand-full of comments. One obvious consequence of this is that with such little critical mass, any of these sites could be gamed but presumably noone really cares enough to bother.

So why aren’t any of these sites working? Well, you have to think about what value Digg really brings. For one, it is focused on the tech sector, which has such a massive and diverse range of content written about it on a daily basis that there is a definite need for filtering. Digg’s audience is one that will respond to the empowerment of a social filter system the same way it embraces anything open source. Power to the people, comrades.

There aren’t many content niches where there is so much content that a really good blog can’t effectively aggregate that content. There aren’t many content niches where big media companies aren’t already doing a pretty effective job of aggregating news.  Celebrity sites won’t work because there are so many really good big media sites already doing a really good job in this space, and your typical celebrity gossip reader doesn’t care who’s filtering that content. Same goes with sport and just about every other niche I can think of.

The only way you can make this kind of voting system work is by building a community that gets off on this type of interaction.  The problem with these Digg clones is they’re trying to build a community via the Digg-style news mechanism but that’s always going to have the chicken and egg problem. You need a community to make the concept work but you can’t build a community until the concept works.

I can see Digg-style voting becoming increasingly omnipresent around the web, but more so as a “feature” rather than a product in their own right. So I’ll get to choose whether I want to view the content as selected by the editor, or based on the number of votes, reads, links or whatever other ranking system you want to implement.

What it all comes down to is the way you filter news depends on your audience. TechMeme works for the Web 2.0 community because their primary method of interaction with news is based on approval by blogging and linking. Digg works for the Digg-crowd because it is an effective way of using the kind of egalitarian social interaction favoured by these users to sort through vast amounts of content. Blogs work great as an aggregator for many niches because there isn’t so much to filter through, and most of it is just rewritten content anyway, so the value-add that the blog adds is hopefully some informed commentary or analysis.

It’s easy to get enamoured with the Digg model because its a nice low-cost model that means you don’t have to employ editors or journalists but aren’t people wising up to the fact that there are literally thousands of Digg-clone sites on the web and still only a handful have gained any real traction and there all in tech-related areas.

Windows Social OS could kill Facebook

Everyone talks about the social “efficiency” of Facebook but the reality is Facebook isn’t efficient at all. It’s just more efficient than what we’ve had in the past.

And the reality is if Microsoft was to re-think its operating system strategy and go down the social path it could whack Facebook good and proper.

Every body in the blogosphere is talking about Steve Ballmer’s comments that Facebook might just be a fad. A lot of people are getting up in arms over this saying Microsoft “doesn’t get it” - gosh, where have I heard that before. Although I do lend a certain amount of credence to Robert Scoble’s blog on the topic given that he’s been inside the operation and therefore has a more sophisticated understanding of how Ballmer and co. might be thinking, then I could ever pretend to.

However, since I’ve been covering the tech industry as a reporter and blogger for the last dozen years or so, I’ve heard people say “Microsoft doesn’t get it”, a thousand times before. The fact is Microsoft’s operating system advantage is such a massive factor that Microsoft can come late to the party and then deliver a king-hit that knocks the opposition for six. Netscape anyone?

If Facebook should be scared of anyone, it should be scared of Microsoft because if Microsoft was to build social functionality into its Windows operating systems it could deliver an ecosystem a thousands times more effective than what Facebook is.

Let’s remember that Facebook has been positioned as a platform. And it’s doing alright on that front with 40 odd million users. However, as a platform its a minnow when compared to Windows.

So what happens to Facebook if Windows gets social? Facebook dies. And Mark Zuckerberg starts to think that he probably should have snapped up that $15 billion valuation.

So what do I mean by this? We come back to this concept of “social efficiency”.

Right now, I’m required to go and visit Facebook when I want to keep up with what my friends are doing. Which means that when my friend updates his status to say ‘… is in Sydney for 2 days’ and I don’t log into Facebook during that time, I miss out on catching up.

In fact, most of the methods of interacting with Facebook are a chore. Uploading pictures, updating my status, etc, etc all require me to log back into Facebook whereby I typically spend another 15 minutes catching up with everything that has happened since I was there last. Facebook is still a time sink.

If on the other hand, my computer itself becomes social then the ‘efficiency’ is greatly increased. I upload pictures from my camera directly into my social drive which automatically shares them with my friend. Infact, while I’m working away, it’s making use of my PC’s significant processing power to do facial recognition in the background and automatically tagging all my photos with my friends identities and then IMing them to let them know I’ve posted the pics. I’m getting desktop alerts of all the updates my computers deems important enough and everything else is running through my Vista sidebar. I’m using new desktop apps that suddenly have new P2P collaborative abilities because they’re tapping into the social graph that is now a part of every Windows PC. My Media Player is automatically updating my friends on what I’m listening to and they can use P2P to share that song in a Zune-like fashion. 

You tell me that’s not a Facebook killer?

Now, the first objection will be that if you don’t run Windows you’re locked out but Microsoft can have an online version for the Mac and Linux fans that let’s them participate, just not as efficiently.

That’s Microsoft 101, embrace but then extend via Windows.

Facebook have already shown that they’re not oblivious to this threat. They’re only acquisition has been Parakey - a technology that is about synching your computer and your online experience. Facebook is clearly looking at evolving into a social platform that sits between the operating system and your web applications - but the problem with that is its not efficient as it can be - it can always be done more efficiently in the operating system.

However, while I think Microsoft is the vendor who can overthrow Facebook, the question is will they? I’ve blogged before how Microsoft’s next operating system needs to be web-native. It needs to assume that every PC is connected and leverage the incredible advantages that affords. Vista should be the last desktop operating system - the next Windows to use Microsoft’s own terminology should be live but it should also be social