Month: May 2008

There have been lots of “whither Google?” stories in dozens of publications, and no doubt there will be dozens more to come. Some talk about competition from Microsoft on the advertising side, and some talk about how Google hasn’t really had any big hits apart from its ability to coin money on keyword-related search. But Adam Lashinsky’s latest piece for Fortune magazine puts its finger on what I think is one of the biggest issues facing the company: namely, the simple fact that it has become a gigantic entity (and one that is getting more gigantic every day), and it’s hard to be as creative or move as swiftly.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, but a couple of things jumped out at me: one was the fact that Google is hiring on the order of 100 people every week. When Google went public in 2004, it had about 2,000 employees — now it has almost 10 times that many. And with all of those employees, and the billions of dollars that the company brings in every quarter, Google has no doubt developed a bureaucracy of sorts, even if it is a bureaucracy composed of kids in Threadless T-shirts riding scooters on their way to the free massage area.

This growth has also led to departures, like the ones that Lashinsky describes — including that of Paul Buchheit, one of the developers of Gmail and the co-founder of FriendFeed.com, who is quoted in the article. As he puts it at the end of the piece:

“I was always so excited at Google, because I didn’t know what would happen next … then I knew what would happen next.”

That may not mean the imminent death of Google — far from it. But it is still a fact that companies cannot grow at the kind of rate that Google has been growing for very long; and when they do grow at those kinds of rates, they almost inevitably become less fun, less creative, less flexible. It’s almost a law of nature. Microsoft still has Nerf toys and free movie nights and that kind of thing too, but does anyone think it is as creative or flexible as it was a decade ago? I doubt it. Not even Bill Gates would make that claim with a straight face. Google’s biggest enemy now is itself, and its own slowing metabolism.

It’s hard to believe, but mesh 2008 — our third year — is just around the corner, and (I just can’t resist a plug) we are really close to selling out, so you’d better get in there and get a ticket if you’ve been procrastinating for some reason (meshU tickets are here). We’re pretty pumped about the content we have, which you can see by checking out the schedule of speakers and panels and workshops. But I wanted to update everyone on a couple of things:

— CBC Radio live taping: Up until a week or so ago, we had a spot in the schedule with CBC Radio host Nora Young’s name on it, because we knew that we wanted the former Definitely Not The Opera host to do a panel discussion about something for the society stream and tape it live for her new show Spark, but we weren’t quite sure what it would be. As you can see from the updated schedule, Nora’s going to be talking to Bill Buxton — the legendary user-interface expert and visionary from Microsoft — about whether physical location matters any more in these social-networking, virtual world, Twitter-type days we’re living in. Nora is also hoping to bring a second guest for the debate, which in the sports world would be referred to as “a player to be named later.”

— Social events: As my fellow organizer Mark Evans has noted on the mesh blog, we have a couple of great events planned this year: the first is a party after meshU finishes up, which will be taking place May 20th at The Drake, one of Toronto’s favourite funky watering holes. Everyone with a meshU ticket will get a complimentary drink, but others are also welcome to come and mesh. And the following night, after the first day of mesh 2008, we have a party at the Rockwood CLub on Mercer Street, just south of King and east of Wayne Gretzky’s. That one is sponsored by our friends at Social Media Group and all are welcome. We’re also having a kind of mesh wrap-up party after the second day, which our friends at Edelman are putting on at the Bar Mercurio.

That’s it for now, although there could be more updates to come. Stay tuned to the mesh blog or @meshconference on Twitter, or follow me (@mathewi) or Rob Hyndman (@rhh) for updates. Mesh on!

I wasn’t going to jump into this one, mostly because it seemed kind of “inside baseball” (i.e., not that interesting to lots of people), but as we all know one of the main things the blogosphere likes to do is blog about blogging, so I thought I would take a crack at the Ars Technica brouhaha. Exhibit A is MG Siegler’s post at ParisLemon about what he calls “another classic rip off” by Ars Technica. You can read the post if you need to catch up on the details, but basically MG is saying that the site rewrote his post and never gave him credit for the idea.

This isn’t the first time that Ars has had such allegations leveled at it. As Cynthia Brumfield writes at IPDemocracy, an incident involving a link to one of her posts occurred back in 2006 and has even made it into the Wikipedia entry on Ars. In the comments on her latest post, Ars writer Nate Anderson takes issue with Cynthia’s characterization of events, however, saying it was a mistake that was corrected quickly and that she should have tried to contact someone at Ars before she flamed them in a post. In a response, Cynthia said that she had heard from many others who had had similar experiences.

In the interest of balance, I emailed Ars founder Ken Fisher to ask him for a comment on the allegations, and he said that in the case of IPDemocracy, it was a simple mistake in which “the link got removed accidentally in the editing phase,” that it was fixed as quickly as possible and that there was “no intent to deceive.” As for MG Siegler’s post, he said that Siegler wasn’t the only blog to make the comparison between the iPhone and the game of Risk (this blog also did) and that therefore he didn’t deserve a link. In any case, he said, Ars didn’t see Siegler’s post and wrote its own version at about the same time (the site said it was published later because editors were busy).

Continue reading “Blogs and the attribution dilemma”

Like many others, I woke up this morning to Twitter messages about a disaster in China: a magnitude 7.8 (at last report) earthquake in the southwest, with thousands of people either dead or injured. Much like the forest fires in California last fall and other recent news events, Twitter became one of the main sources of on-the-ground reporting — even before CNN started picking up what was happening, and with more personal detail. During such times, Twitter seems like a crowd-sourced reporting tool, much like what NowPublic.com has created but with cellphones and 140 character messages as the medium.

In any disaster, one of the first things that people look for — not just journalists, but readers too — is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?

Twitter is able to supply all of those things — and it’s also self-directed. People can post messages about whatever they wish, rather than answering only the questions that a producer asks them. In the study I wrote about recently that looked at Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia as disaster reporting tools, one of the comments about the California fires was that the media focused on celebrities and how they were affected, but Twitter and other sources gave a more complete version of events and how they were affecting everyone. Paul Kedrosky calls it the democratization of headline news.

Obviously, 140-character messages don’t take the place of reported stories that check facts and determine what exactly happened, or pull together various reports into a coherent whole. But they are a compelling part of that story — and journalists who know how to take advantage can produce something much more complete with the help of all those Twitter reporters in the field. Journalism has been called “the first draft of history,” — and now the people putting together that draft have even more help in getting it right the first time. For more sources and info, check out the post at Global Voices Online.

The debate over whether Twitter has become so important a form of communication that it should be standardized — and thereby removed in some sense from the company that created it — has been going on for awhile now, and recently reared its head again on the Gillmor Gang, the podcast run by tech guru Steve Gillmor. As described by blogger Chris Gerrish, the discussion focused on how a more decentralized Twitter-style “micro-blogging” standard could effectively take over from the service, something Gerrish calls “A Venezuelan moment,” in what I assume is a reference to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and his various nationalization schemes.

I wrote about this awhile back, and many people scoffed at the idea that Twitter was important enough to be having these kinds of conversations, although Marc Canter has compared it to the domain name system that powers the Internet, and Dave Winer has said he’s afraid that losing Twitter could be like losing Web pages from the early days of the Internet (although he has praised Gerrish’s post).

A couple of fascinating side-points to this debate: The first is Steve Gillmor’s long and (in classic Gillmor style) rambling and fundamentally disjointed guest post on TechCrunch about this debate, in which he compares Twitter and “the cloud” to the blood-brain barrier (incorrectly, according to one commenter) and compares Yahoo to Hillary Clinton, then closes with a quote from a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song. One commenter calls it “lazy, badly-written, undergraduate nonsense,” while another refers to it as “possibly the worst TechCrunch post ever.” As Joel Spolsky has written in the past, Steve Gillmor is not an easy guy to understand even at the best of times.

The other interesting thing is a comment made on Gerrish’s post by none other than Blaine Cook, the former chief technology architect at Twitter, who recently departed the company in what became a controversial exit. In addition to saying that he built the service’s “track” feature in just 12 hours, Cook suggests that allowing other services to “federate” or integrate with Twitter’s features wouldn’t be difficult at all. Could Twitter become a kind of micro-blogging standard?

There seems to be a mini-bitchmeme brewing, sparked by VC blogger Fred Wilson’s recent post about Disqus, which is the commenting system that I use on this blog and many others use as well. Why Fred decided to write about Disqus at this point I don’t know — maybe to give the company some free publicity, who knows. In any case, he listed three reasons why he thinks every blogger should use it, including:

• threaded discussions
• email replies
• shared profiles

That was followed relatively quickly by a post from David Risley, in which he said that Disqus seemed “stupid”, primarily because the comments are hosted somewhere else, and therefore they don’t integrate with a blog’s existing comments and if Disqus disappears then those comments are gone for good. Others have noted that Disqus doesn’t support trackbacks either — which I have also mentioned in the past as a drawback of the system, and something I would like to see.

For the record, Daniel Ha of Disqus has promised that both trackbacks and data exportability are coming to Disqus, which would remove a couple of the major complaints about the service. But even with those flaws — or missing features — I am happy to use it, and Fred puts his finger on one big reason why: the ability to respond to comments instantly via email (and also to approve or delete spam via email). As Fred notes, this is huge. And it is handled seamlessly.

Spam — which Don Dodge mentions as an issue in his post — has also been virtually eradicated. I think in the months I’ve had it integrated with my blog, I’ve had Disqus email me twice or maybe three times with a possible spam comment, and in each case I simply replied with “delete” or “approve” and it was handled. Like Fred and Howard, I would encourage anyone looking for a better comment system to give it a try. The benefits far outweigh the drawbacks, as far as I’m concerned. Carlos says he thinks that Google should buy Disqus.

One of the interesting things about Twitter is that an entire ecosystem of tools has emerged that take the data from Twitter and slice or dice it in some way. There’s Tweetscan and Summize and Quotably for search, for example. But some other services aren’t really tools so much as they are toys — but interesting toys. Twitterverse.com is one that shows you a tag cloud of popular keywords, etc. from peoples’ Twitter messages (which I refuse to call “tweets” because it sounds stupid). You can see them for the past hour, the past five hours, or the past 10 hours. Here’s a list of the recent popular keywords from Friday:

most popular: day going one time twitter work

next most popular: home lunch need new really think

Then there’s a tool (or toy) called Twistori.com, which I think is really cool: there’s a list of words on the left-hand side of the page — love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish. When you click one, you get a real-time (or close to it) display of Twitter messages with those keywords in them that scrolls by on the screen. It’s kind of hypnotizing in a way. Here’s some of the ones that scrolled by on Friday afternoon:

love: working with Canadians margaritas for lunch when i know exactly what to do buttered popcorn jelly beans Trent Reznor’s lyrics having lunch with my mom the rain my foster parents Twitter	hate: nitrogen talking to my insurance company airports when i’m all itchy and stuff those robotic voices my work computer deja vu the Red Wings Twitter
feel: so lost like i am cramming for a final like i am being followed bad but not guilty extremely safe old like i’m on drugs, minus the high a little lost sick exhausted	wish: i were going to the ballpark i was still asleep i was outside michigan had more job openings i knew what bit me last night i was never born i could go back and punch myself i was in nashville people would do their jobs

Interestingly enough (if you’re into this kind of thing), there’s a small note at the bottom of Twistori that says it was inspired by WeFeelFine.org — which is a very similar type of tool or toy, that actually turns out to be an artistic creation designed by the very talented Jonathan Harris. His specialty is information design projects that are also art, and others include tenbyten.org and phylotaxis.com.

Some of you may have seen this already, since it has been passed around on Twitter, but I just had to point to Rick Segal’s hilarious blog post about a startup that did everything right in its business plan — right up until it sent the document without clicking the “accept changes” menu item in Word. So when Rick (who is a VC with J.L. Albright in Toronto) looked at the impressive business plan, what he saw in the margins were all the edits and comments made by the team and their advisors, including:

• “Segal used work for Microsoft so skip the name dropping, save it for the afternoon meeting, they are clueless about Redmond.”
• “When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them”
• “I’d delete this section since we don’t have these features on the roadmap and haven’t figured out how to code this unless you believe the investors won’t catch this.”
• “VCs are typically stupid when it comes to this section so be prepared for a dumb question blizzard.”

Hysterical. I’m trying to imagine someone on the executive team at that startup — or on their advisory board — reading the post and gradually realizing with horror that it’s theirs. Priceless. For what it’s worth, Rick says he thought it was funny and wouldn’t hold it against the company. For other examples of the dangers of Word’s “track changes” function, you might want to talk to the British government, or to someone with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, or someone in the Bush administration’s environmental unit, or lawyers for the SCO Group. You can find lots more examples here.

Mark Dykeman, who writes a blog called Broadcasting Brain, did a Q&A interview with me recently as part of a series he has been doing, and you can find it here if you’re interested. Other participants in Mark’s series have included Dave “DigiDave” Cohn of NewAssignment and Tamar Weinberg, who writes for Lifehacker and Mashable.

Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped has the sad story of Hello, which has just been shut down (Josh Catone at Read/Write Web has already beaten me to the inevitable headline). Of course, it’s only a sad story if you have any clue what Hello was, and it seems obvious that not many people do, otherwise (presumably) the company wouldn’t be shutting it down. Certainly most of the people I’ve mentioned it to have no clue what I’m talking about — but I remember it.

The funny thing is that Hello was actually a really cool app, as a couple of people have noted in the comments on Phil’s post. It was acquired along with Picasa in 2005, but I had never heard of it either until a couple of years ago a friend mentioned it, and said that she used it all the time with her parents. This surprised me, since she wasn’t a computer type at all — but she had just had a baby, and somehow came across Hello and set her parents up with it too. She thought it was the best thing ever.

In effect, Hello merged a photo-sharing app and an instant messaging and chat tool into one thing — and the best part was that when you were looking at photos with someone else, it actually showed you which photo they were looking at, so that you could tell them about it in the chat window. When my friend wanted to show her non-techie parents photos of her baby, she just sent a chat request, they opened the window and the photos would show up — and then she could type in messages about them as they looked at them.

Yes, I know that she could have just emailed them, or uploaded them to Picasa.com and then sent her parents the URL — or she could have uploaded them and then called them on the phone to chat about them. But Hello worked really well, and it was nice to see an app designed to do one simple thing and do it well. I still think Google didn’t put enough energy into promoting it the way they could have, just as they haven’t done anything with Dodgeball, or Jaiku, or a half a dozen other apps they’ve acquired. In the case of Hello, I think it’s a real shame.