Jiri Donat's weblog

Google has one last chance to buy Facebook

2010-11-29T13:29:00.000-08:00

The Internet went already through several battles on its platform. The first one was a battle for the browser, which was also completed with a dramatic judicial final. Browsers in the meantime became nearly uninteresting commodity, on which now (almost) nobody earns money. The second battle focused on the search engine. Search engines are now at the peak of their career. They earn money so well that the winner of this battle Google has become a powerful global corporation. On the Internet, however, nobody does have anything certain forever. We are now ready for the next, already the third major battle: this time to fight for the platform on which it will be possible to build personalized search and personalized mass advertising. The winner of this "internet personalization layer" will be granted huge income from the modern advertising industry. Today there are only two serious rivals: Google and Facebook. If Google doesn’t buy Facebook now, it may eventually regret its decision.

The magic of advertising market

Advertising market was, is and always will be very lucrative. The need to sell is the basic need of all commercial firms from the dawn of business. Internet brings to this area a breakthrough innovation: for the first time in history it offers mass advertising aimed at individual needs and preferences of specific customers. Yes, especially the apparent contradictions in the words "mass" and "personal" is the key to huge earnings mass personalized advertisement will bring.

Two types of advertising

Personalized advertising was always available: but it required a personal work of people. The more customers we wanted to reach, the more people we had to involve in the sale: we had to hire more dealers, more salesmen, more call center operators. Advertising could therefore always be personalized, targeted to the specific needs of buyers, but couldn’t be in the same time a mass.

Also, mass advertising is available here for some time, specifically, since the invention of mass communication media - print, radio and television. It is able to reach millions to tens of millions of people in a single moment, but all of them with the exact same message. Men are then offered hairspray, ladies are offered sports car or a razor blade to shave beards. Mass advertising is relatively inexpensive, which unfortunately leads almost to its "abuse", which results in its overabundance. People are today approached by advertising from all sides. And since most of the advertisements are not relevant to them (they are not targeted), people take advertising as something annoying, something that is just a waste of their time and thus should be ignored ("ad blindness"). But this forces advertisers to try even harder – to try everything to win customer’s attention. Advertising thus became increasingly obtrusive and annoying. This is however, paradoxically, against the two "golden rules of successful sales. Perhaps these rules would not hurt to recall:

1. Try to solve customer problems;

2. Contact the customer when it is convenient for him.

In other words, the seller should always try to respect the needs of customers and context of their situation. If the customer looks at a football match right now, let’s assume he cares about the match, not about buying a new car. Conversely, if the customer is walking down the supermarket, now is the right time for commercial information. Advertising in such a situation will be perceived by the customer as a useful information and he will be keen to listen.

Era of mass personalization

Personalized online advertising is the right tool to solve this dilemma. The Internet is a two-way mass-media. It can deliver a personal message to the billions of people, but in the same time it can do it individually, with knowledge of the situation and context. And it can do so automatically, because the internet is basically an interconnection of computers on which programs communicate with target users according to pre-written rules. The role of precious personal sellers, dealers or call center operators can be taken over by these cheap computers and their programs. Internet thus offers the same level of economic efficiency as public broadcasting, but unlike public broadcasting it is able to customize the messages and provide an optimal time of delivery. For the first time in history, advertisement can be mass, inexpensive and yet individually addressed to specific potential customers. But this is exactly the combination every commercial company called for for years! In addition, personalized Internet advertising does not reach customers only on the Internet - thanks to consumer electronics devices it extends its reach to our daily life. Advertising (and not just the Internet one) will thus change from today's untargeted, flat and annoying form to a useful information respecting the person addressed and the context of his situation.

More effective sales

This offers truly exciting possibilities for both sides of the sales relationship. Seller will be offered personal contact right to those potential customers who might be interested in their product: we can then address just those car owners who are just now considering a replacement of their vehicle, only those tourists who now go around my restaurant and love the type of food I cook, just those travelers who are just looking for bed this evening near my hotel and could thus fill my unsold capacity. This new way of advertising is also advantageous for buyers. Buyer will be interested in receiving commercial information of the areas that interest them, and when it is useful to them. If I am walking down a mall, I would be happy to learn that the shop left to me offers the gaming console I have already asked for, and that if I buy it right now, I get a personal discount of 30%. Finally, people will not be bothered by advertising; on the contrary, they will look forward to it.

The need for a single platform

To build such an advertising system, we certainly need to know users; that means we have to know about them as much information as possible and we need to watch their behavior for as long as possible – and all that of course regardless of the device that the users are using. The same user should therefore register with the same username and password on his computer, on his cell phone, video console, television or an electronic book - personalization must be at the user level, not at the device. The platform must be capable of processing data from a large number of users and automatically monitor their activities (shopping behavior, topics read on the Internet, books read, movies watched, even their movement in the real world as tracked by GPS). All this information should then be automatically added to their profile and then groups of “similar" people should be calculated. The platform should also be massively used in order to compare the behavior patterns of as many people as possible. The more users the platform will have, the better it will be suited for targeted advertising.

It is therefore necessary to create a platform that will meet the following two criteria:

1. It is mass-popular

2. People spend as much time as possible using it.

Let's see, who is now closer to this “golden platform”. Facebook or Google?

The Facebook approach

Social network Facebook was founded in 2004 as a small student platform. By today it has more than 500 million active users, far beyond the academic realm. Gradually, Facebook is offering more and more services that compete with the general Internet services. The last of its major innovations is email called Facebook Messages, which the company launched on 15th November 2010. With this email, users get address @facebook.com and can send mails with attachments to anyone on the Internet. This email platform competes head-on-head with Google’s Gmail. But Facebook has also other services in competition with established Internet applications: for example, a photo album with no limit on the number of uploaded images and with the possibility to tag other users on photos (competes with Flicker and PicasaWeb) blogging tool Facebook Notes (Blogger.com competition), discussions organized by businesses, schools or other criteria (competition of Google Groups), not to mention the personal websites of users, which competes to Google Sites. Plus a large number of third party applications, the possibility to update user status, shared "wall" where users can write messages and post attachments, the "news feed" informing users about changes in profiles and activities of their friends. Facebook is just a small "Internet-in-one”. Everything is extremely well integrated, the user gets all the features easily, the system constantly advises them, which other functions they could still try. Whether you want to find friends, classmates, or attend one of the many forums, you are still in one application enjoying the same interface. Besides, nearly all of your friends are already there - Facebook is now by far the most popular social networking platform. Thanks to it all these services like search and discussions gain even greater meaning and usefulness.

This leaves Facebook with a real wealth of personal information. Facebook is well aware of the value it has in their users and tries to use the data collected from users in contextual advertising. Let us mention the Facebook Beacon project in 1997 (ended in 2009), which sent data from external websites to Facebook, ostensibly for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements. This project is proof that Facebook knows which direction it should take.

In summary, Facebook gradually grew into a natural platform for the Internet - it's kind of a small Internet of its own, which integrates all useful functions, but which does not suffer from the complexity of the "big" internet. With some exaggeration we can even say that Facebook is the "Internet for ordinary consumers." But that is the majority of the Internet users.

How can Google compete?

But what is a competitive platform Google could stand against Facebook? Google has its applications in most areas of Facebook functionality. These applications usually existed long before Facebook and offer more functionality than Facebook. But does Google have a single product that could stand Facebook as its direct rival? I am afraid that here the answer is negative.

Google applications grew up as completely separate platforms, created by different teams, or even purchased as finished products. As a result, these applications are not integrated together - except the login where the same Google Account is used. An additional problem is that the functionality of many of these applications overlaps considerably. For example, several Google products have characteristics of social network, namely Gmail with Google Buzz, PicasaWeb, Blogger, YouTube, Google Maps with Latitude and Orkut. In all these applications you can add "friends" and see what these friends do. Unfortunately, by adding friends in these separate applications you end up with a number of different, separate sets of "friends." To tell the truth it results in a chaos, with whom we actually take up with.

Chaos in friends :-)

In fact, Google applications are very good individually. In particular, Google has an excellent e-mail system Gmail, which is combined with chat, video chat and calendar. In February 2010, a feature called Buzz was added to Gmail allowing short messages to be shared with "friends." This step actually moves Gmail into a sort of a social network. To share photos, however, you have to use other application, PicasaWeb, which, unlike Facebook limits the number of photos uploaded to 1GB of storage space, the additional space must be paid for. Here, users can also comment on their photos and send messages, but those comments are separate from Gmail or Gmail Chat. If the user wants to blog, it can do it of course as well. But then he must turn to another distinct system: blogger.com. There, your blogs can be followed by other people via RSS feed and similarly you can follow other blogs (again, the analogy of "friendship"). For the blogs of your friends (the analog of Facebook News Feed) you can use an excellent RSS reader Google Reader (another separate product), which works regardless of platform where your friends are blogging.. Unfortunately, this creates yet another separate group of your "friends". Google has also excellent maps, enhanced with an interesting community feature Google Latitude. With this feature, you may disclose the location of yourselves to your friends and vice versa. Adding "friends" into Google Latitude creates unfortunately again a separated “set of friends”. The popular video server YouTube is also a sort of a social network. Its users can rate videos, can comment on videos and recommend videos to others. However, this interaction is again separated from the interaction on Gmail, Google Buzz, Blogger, and PicasaWeb. YouTube users can also watch other people’s “channels” - again, an analogy of friendship, but separated again from all other sets of “friends” in Google's portfolio. And to make matters even worse, Google also owns a "full-fledged" social networking site Orkut. This network has 100 million active users, especially in India and Brazil - and certainly cannot be considered a failure. Unfortunately, friends in this network are yet another separate set of friends you have in Google.

Can this all be ever integrated?

Google thus has all the functionality which Facebook offers, and usually at a higher level, but unfortunately, these functions are spread among a number of very different applications. Google’s applications are excellent and in many cases even the best on the market. Thanks to them, Google owns also a large amount of data about their users. But these data are again held in separate applications, without the possibility to access them uniformly. Our conclusion? Google lack an uniform platform that could compete with Facebook.

In contrast, Facebook went through a very different process. First, it created its own platform, only then it built all of its functionality on top of it. Thanks to this approach Facebook created its own “small Internet,” which is well integrated on a single platform. As a result, there is only one “set of friends” on Facebook and there is just one platform all the applications run on. Facebook can thus be much more efficient in collecting information about its users. And last, but not least: it is also much easier to use.

This is a big threat to Google. Google is aware that it has no other option than to win users for its own plaftorm, Google Account .

How to get users to Google Account?

The easiest way is to gain market share by "brute force"; in other words, Google must engage in this combat all of its popular services. A similar strategy has been already used by many companies in the past: for example, Microsoft has built the success of its Office suite on the success of its Windows operating system. Google has already made the first step: unified login of all applications in its portfolio via a single Google Account.

But Google has two other irons in the fire. They are the popular Android operating system and the forthcoming Google Chrome OS. For manufacturers of mobile phones and PCs both platforms are very appealing for their zero price and high quality. And they are very attractive for users, too - along with a mobile phone or PC users get some very useful applications (such as maps, navigation, and online Google Docs office suite). But to make this system work, users must have a user name and password on the Google platform, otherwise its operating system will not even start.

The Android platform is expected to increase the number of its users by 500% in the next 3 years. Already, there is no doubt that Android aspires to the position of the main platform of mobile devices. But even if this actually happens, Google will still be far from victory. It can easily occur that although most of the devices will be using the Android operating system and Google Chrome, all of them will also carry an Facebook icon on their desktop. And this icon will be in addition present also on all other platforms that are out of Google’s control. Android's success will be then possible to compare with the success of the Internet Explorer browser. The battle was won, but unfortunately on the wrong battlefield.

Should then Google buy Facebook?

Would it be therefore a solution for Google to buy Facebook?

According to SecondMarket Inc., as of November 2010 the market value of Facebook is U.S. $ 41 billion and Facebook is the third largest web company in the United States after Google and Amazon (just before eBay). Google's market capitalization is around U.S. $ 190 billion. Acquisition would be possible, but it would not be in any way cheap for Google.

Another problem would be that Facebook functionality massively overlaps with Google’s. In the case of purchase, therefore, Google has either to abandon some of its own applications or integrate them into Facebook. If it decides to integrate it would be a very complex task – both in terms of technology and marketing.

Yet it is perhaps still a better option for Google than the prospect that in a few years, Google will compete with Facebook in a match of equals. Although Google will have better and more sophisticated applications, Facebook will be easier to use and better integrated. And the majority of users will be on its platform.

PC Sales Cycle Has Stopped. Is the Windows era over?

2009-07-28T06:15:00.000-07:00

Windows is the crown jewel of Microsoft. It was Windows which made Microsoft one of the richest businesses in the world; thanks to Windows Microsoft was able to penetrate the market with its other desktop and server products. But Windows was even more powerful than that. Up until recently this system was able to dictate the development of the entire “PC ecosystem”. It was the Windows, which helped Microsoft to create so called “PC sales cycle”, which forced users to buy a new computer every 3 to 5 years and which forced any other player on the PC market (both from hardware and software side) to support sales of Microsoft software. This cycle worked reliably since 80’s, has been already repeated six times and up until now has been appreciated by the majority of PC makers and software producers, because it has been bringing new repeated business to all of them. But today, to the surprise of everyone - and mainly Microsoft - the PC cycle has stopped. Vista failed to push enough users to buy the new, stronger hardware. Quite to the contrary, new hardware commodity appeared on the market that ignored increased Vista requirements and – what is even worse – it gained massive success. Whom to blame? The netbooks. And of course the new emerging web applications which ignored the rules that governed the PC world up till now. No doubt about what does this all mean. Microsoft lost its market dominance. Other players don’t need him anymore. It is now only a matter of time when the Windows era is over. The new ruler will not be the operating system – the new computing landscape will be ruled by web based services, and financed by targeted advertisement. Operating system will become again a free companion of hardware, as it was before the Microsoft created its incredible marketing tool called Windows.

How to sell the same thing again

Before we explain the PC Sales Cycle, let us first look at one important business tactics: the so-called phenomenon of moral obsolescence. This is the tactics helping companies to get repeating business from existing customers even on markets, on which this would be otherwise very difficult or nearly impossible.

Every company needs to earn revenues on an ongoing basis. It seeks to have recurring revenue, because it needs to gradually finance its operations and growth. For companies selling services this requirement is met automatically. The more successful is my service, the bigger is my users’ base and the more money flows into my business. For companies which operate in the commercial software market it's however more complicated. Let us illustrate the problem by the following example.

Existing legislation gives all buyers of commercial software the right to use such software for a life-time. This represents a significant problem for software manufacturers. If I have a car, it will rod over time, the engine will stop working, so sooner or later I will have to buy a new one. The same holds in principle for any tangible goods - washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, etc.

In contrast, for example a word processor is "eternal". It cannot rod; it has nothing what could break. It will always work as well as (or as poorly as) in the beginning. In the worst case, its users can really use it for their life-time. In that case they will unfortunately never buy any other word processor. And if all customers behave this way, the market of word processors will disappear.

This is obviously unacceptable for the software manufacturers. If they are unable to sell to existing customers, they cannot get the “low hanging fruit”, the easy revenues. This is even worse for the manufacturers that control significant market share of their particular market, because they have even smaller “free” market where they can grow. There must be a way to sell the same user the word processor again!

And indeed there is such a way – it is called moral obsolescence. The manufacturer comes up with a better product than the existing one, puts the new product on the market and offers it to its existing users. If customers consider that this new product (in our case a word processor) is really better, they will purchase it and pay for it to the manufacturer again. Up to this point this strategy is reasonable and fair to all participants.

The Problems Begin

Problems occur when the product has already undergone several such improvements, and therefore there are no features that this product would significantly lack. Users of the product are essentially satisfied. It sounds very good, but such a situation is in fact very threatening for the software manufacturer. In the worst case scenario these satisfied users will use their products (in accordance with the license) until the end of their lives, because the manufacturer is unable to offer them anything better. This would mean that these users will never pay the manufacturer again. The software manufacturer however desperately needs revenue from his existing users! He needs this revenue the more, the bigger market share he owns. The bigger market share he has, the smaller space for growth is available to him.

The solution is to create a new product even when the original product is good enough.

The manufacturer must therefore find new features at any price, because without them he cannot introduce a new version to the market. This principle can however lead only to two results.

Result 1: Growth of complexity of user interface

In the best case scenario the manufacturer adds features that are not important for most users, but still are somewhat useful. Apparently, this should cause no problem at all - why couldn’t my word processor have some built in features that I might make use sometimes in the future?

The reality is different. In fact, any new unnecessary feature (slightly) complicates control, and thus the usefulness of the whole product (again slightly) deteriorates. The more functions are added over the time, the more complex and confusing the work with the product becomes. Even the most advanced modern aircraft doesn’t have several hundred buttons and displays in its cockpit. A "modern" word processor, unfortunately, does have such a complexity. As a result, effectiveness of usage of such a word processor gets worse and worse.

Result 2: Re-making features and UI

In the worst case scenario the manufacturer is unable to find any reasonable function that is missing, and so it starts to re-invent the existing functions. This, however, has even worse implications to the users, because things suddenly work differently than the users were used to. The worst idea the manufacturer can have is to remake the user interface.
What can be a “modernization” of UI compared to? Imagine you bought a new car. With high expectations, you sit down to your new car, but at the same time you have to start looking for where the manufacturer put this time the steering wheel, or where the manufacturer has newly decided to hide brake and gas. Later, when driving the car, you are many times stuck because you suddenly could not cope with situations that were easy for you even one day ago, in your old car. And on top of that you are forced to constantly read and swallow the new marketing handbook in which "expert" explains to you that this change is actually the best for your efficiency.

In fact, users do well know how quickly and effectively they work in a familiar environment, where they do not have to think about how to find things and how to do tasks. Worst on the contrary is a work in an environment where every three years someone completely reorganizes things on our table. This means a real harm to any effectiveness, regardless of what the marketing experts claim.

Moral obsolescence

The conclusion is very simple. When a product develops to a certain stage, any further modification of it only reduces its practical usability and the efficiency of its users. Software companies are forced to do these “surplus” modifications, because they are vitally dependent on revenue from repeat sales and they have no other option how to sell the same product again. This dilemma results in a situation that can be called as "swelling of commercial software."

Two development stages of mass market products

To sum up, every commercial software (but this holds for basically every product on the mass market) develops through two stages:

Development phase – in this phase, innovation is natural and valuable.
Destruction phase – in this phase, innovation is artificial. The product is already beyond the stage when innovation makes sense. The innovation is now motivated only with the need to sell new product to the same customers. In this phase, we are facing the phenomenon of “artificial moral obsolescence”.

The specific of commercial software is that software producers are forced to develop their products beyond reasonable innovation for as long time as possible. The longer they are able to stay in the “destruction phase”, the bigger revenue they get. Every additional sales cycle counts in the company revenue. Companies in, say, consumer electronics market can do “destructive” innovation, too (see e.g., some models of Nokia phones), but they are not so desperate because they have also other options – to create a really brand new innovative product and thus return into the “development” stage (this is not possible in the, say, word processor market). In addition, everyone in the consumer electronics market knows that new innovative products (e.g., iPhone) can earn the company much more money than even the smartest and longest “destructive” innovation.

Swelling of operating system

This problem of “software swelling” is built-in into any commercial software. Operating system is no exception here. Also operating system must bring repeated revenue to its manufacturer; also this product is after some period of innovation in fact good enough and reasonably usable. So which are the specific consequences of “software swelling” for the operating system?

The operating system originally served as a simple tool to enable comfortable control of the hardware. Openly speaking, it should have stayed in this area. In particular, its role should be to provide a relatively stable platform for other applications and abstract the application software from the diversity of hardware (through the HAL - Hardware Abstraction Layer). Everything else should be left for the application software. (Naturally, Google Chrome goes right into this area of a simple lightweight OS – it doesn’t reinvent the wheel.)

Well, this is not how Windows looks like these days. As a result of the need to sell Windows to existing customers again and again, Windows gradually developed into a complex bulky system that includes more and more applications and services on top of a relatively complex user interface. Vista includes a browser, media player, DRM system, indexing system, etc. It is of course only the decision of operating system manufacturer what he would like to add to its operating system. Microsoft in particular, quite logically, adds components that support its other applications and services.

Emergence of the PC sales cycle

To be fair to Microsoft, we have to say that the "swelling" is an essential feature that is built into any commercial software, Microsoft cannot do anything too much about this. Microsoft depends on the sale of the operating system with a large part of its income. It does not have really any other option than to publish every three (if possible, preferred) to five years a new, "improved" system, to milk the market for some additional money. In the recent years, however, it became very difficult to find "improvements" that were still not built-in in the OS functionality (and which would not break the backwards compatibility). This problem became particularly strong during Vista development. Many bloggers and authors commented that existing users are already satisfied with Windows XP and don’t see any innovation opportunity here (and thus any compelling reason to migrate to the new system). Hesitant adoption of Vista by the market confirms reasonability of these opinions.

The influencer

The operating system has a unique position in the entire ecosystem of commercial software: every commercial application depends on it, and if the position of operating system is strong, even PC manufacturers have to closely watch its development and adjust their hardware. Any change in the operating system has therefore implications for the entire computer market.

Microsoft was able to use this dependence of the market with a real mastership – it created in fact a strong dependency of all application software manufacturers and PC makers on the success of its operating systems, and hence on its own success. It was a sophisticated mechanism, called "PC sales cycle."

PC Sales cycle

PC sales cycle is 3 to 5 year long cycle during which the PC users are forced again and again to buy new hardware, new operating system and new application software. The cycle begins with the creation of a new operating system, which has higher hardware requirements than the previous one, and therefore it is not running (or it is running only under very limiting restrictions) on the existing hardware. Hardware manufacturers are however already prepared to resolve this “problem of the users” and are coming with their offer of readily prepared new hardware that is certified right for this new system. Also manufacturers of application software do not hesitate to use this opportunity and bring promptly new versions of their products, which are able to make better use of the new hardware and new features of the operating system.

The main role in the sales cycle is played by two companies - Microsoft and Intel. For this reason, people sometimes speak about the Wintel (Windows + Intel) alliance. Of course, no formal alliance ever existed, however the better this system worked! Every new version of Windows operating system forced users to buy a new, more powerful hardware, and then the new software which made a better use of this hardware.

Even until today companies calculate the "moral" life of corporate notebooks and PCs as 3 to 4 years. They take it as a fact and incorporate it into their IT budgets. No one asks questions like, for example, why the computer must be disposed of after only 3-4 years of usage, while a TV set (a similarly complex product) would keep operating without major problems for 15 to 20 years.

Corporations also automatically allocate in their budgets money to purchase new versions of the operating system. Again, no question asked. On the monopoly market, you don’t have many choices, do you?

Microsoft however helps its customers to make such migration decisions much easier. Promptly, without unnecessary delays it notifies its customers that it is going to cease support for previous versions of its operating system, so everyone who decides not to migrate should understand he will not be supported.

End of the PC sales cycle

Vista was no exception to this proven strategy and shortly after Windows Vista launched, Microsoft announced that it would "not support Windows XP too much beyond 2008." This plan however never materialized. Around the time when Microsoft wanted to stop selling Windows XP, something unexpected occurred, that prevented Microsoft to make this step.

Lightweight devices called “netbooks” entered the market and started to gain popularity. The problem was that netbooks were unable to run Vista. In full compliance with the PC sales cycle Vista had to be more hardware hungry than XP. Unfortunately, netbooks are lightweight devices and their priority is portability, not performance. This is also what makes them appealing to more and more people.

Netbooks – the breach of the plan

Netbooks are a clear violation of the original plan: first time in the PC history, Microsoft was dislocated from the hands-on control of the sales cycle. Vista has inevitably higher hardware requirements than XP, to allow manufacturers to make money on their new hardware. Netbooks are outside of the will of Microsoft. This means very likely the end of the Wintel alliance. Its end will be as informal as was its beginning.

From our point of view it is rather surprising how long the PC sales cycle was running. It has repeated in total six times. The explanation is however easy: all participants on the PC market were happy, because the cycle yielded to the PC industry much more money than if the industry was left to the free market competition. In the situation when one major player was "conducting" the PC market, everyone was able to sell every 3 to 4 years to the same customers again, and therefore everyone benefited from new versions of Windows (Microsoft made the other PC players dependant on its own success - see this IDC analysis [PDF, 147 KB] of December 2006 - for every dollar earned by Microsoft from the sale of Vista the other companies in the PC ecosystem will make $ 18).

Maneuvering space of Microsoft

Microsoft had to respond to the success of netbooks. The company decided to keep selling Windows XP and accelerated to the maximum extent its work on Windows 7, which will again run on netbooks.

Here we should stop for a minute. This is a real landmark moment. For the first time since its dominance on the PC market, Microsoft has again to adapt to the market developments. This is the first version of Windows ever that is less hardware hungry than the previous one. After a long time it is not Microsoft who determines the evolution of the market. This puts Microsoft into a new, unfamiliar position.

In addition, his maneuvering options are very limited.

Microsoft Limitations

Microsoft, for example, cannot afford itself to develop a lightweight system with limited functionality. Microsoft must convince users that the OEM price of about $ 10 to $ 50 for one netbook brings visible functionality. If the operating system was light, almost invisible (however effective), it could hardly be distinguished from other systems, which are also almost invisible and also work, but are free.

Especially in the netbook market Microsoft will have a very difficult situation. When the price of these devices come down to $ 100 to $ 200, every dollar spent for operating system starts to be really visible on this very competitive market.

Microsoft, in addition, can not waive its backward compatibility. The main competitive advantage of Windows is that users can continue to use all their software, which they are used to and which they previously purchased. This is the main reason that keeps the users loyal to Windows. But it is also a brake on further development. Microsoft cannot thus go to a fundamentally different concept that would address issues such as viruses.

When will Windows die?

In summary, the position of Windows 7 will be very difficult, specifically in the netbooks segment. Unlike Google’s Chrome or Intel’s Moblin, Windows will start more slowly, due to backward compatibility they will allow to run not only all current programs, but also all existing "malware" and viruses. They will also mean a significant price increase on otherwise cheap netbooks. Any growth of netbooks popularity further undermines Microsoft's position in its key operating systems business.

And what will be the position of Microsoft in the traditional desktop? I have no doubt that it will remain very good. The question however is, how long will this market survive. Example of netbooks teaches us that users are already aware that there are alternative approaches how to do things. The fact that the sales cycle ended is very significant warning that things are not going to be as they were only few years ago.

The question therefore is as follows: how long it will take before the mainstream functionality moves from the desktop to the web. Once users start to look for functionality on the Internet, they will have no more the reason to look for it, and therefore to pay for it, on the desktop. The battle for the customer will then finally move from the desktop to the Internet.

At the same time this will end the era of commercial software, as well as the business tactics of artificial moral obsolescence. I am sure nobody will miss this particular feature of software.

Life in a glassy fishbowl

2008-02-20T04:52:00.000-08:00

One interesting comment appeared today on my previous post:

Anonymous said...

Well described. However there is missing area. Security. People usually not expose contacts which could be pretty close and they feel that another their contact dislike/ hate the person. Second, not all communication whatever intensive mean we are friend or colleagues. Imagine yourself complaining to any bigger company. Many times long story and no relationship will happen. Third, Unified ID. Thanks God there is no way how to enforce it (now). ID itself is great idea, however real people abuse anything they can. Now you loose at maximum limit on your credit card. However with digital identity you could loose more. In worst case you could be completely impersonated with all consequences. In digital world (now I exclude mixing of real and digital world) your reputation could be easily harmed and your chance to prove your innocence is limited

2:23 AM

Good points! However, the future world will not care about which developments we would prefer to happen. There is one general observation we can make even now: the level of transparency our our future world will change. My hypothesis is that whether we like it or not, this "transparency level" will increase significantly. It however doesn't mean our world will necessarily become a worse place for life. It may work just the opposite way: if all information is transparent we can live a more peaceful life than today - no more will anybody be a subject of gouging, no more will anybody be nervous that something secret will be found out. All information will be public. Everybody will have to live his life with a full knowledge of this fact to avoid negative surprises.

The other side of this new set-up however is that we all will have to accommodate our life to this new situation. We will have to live our life as if we stood at every moment on a public stage. It is not inappropriate to compare this situation to a new kind of religion - from the time when the God saw everything (so people had to behave gently and appropriately), we are now approaching a situation when we can be sure that whatever we do can be observed, archived and found by anybody, even by our worst enemy. (And to be frank, to a great extent we already live in this situation today - or do you really think our emails and calls are safe these days?)

Meet my mistress, darling!
Specifically to your first point: I fully agree with your comment that not all our contacts would appreciate to know all other contacts we do have or we communicate frequently with; for example, our wife will not appreciate our mails, calls and meetings with our mistress(es), your boss will not value our job application to the competing companies, etc., etc. However, as I said above, this will be not our choice to decide which information we will share with whom (I do exaggerate here, but only slightly). It will result in a new, "transparent" world and this world can basically have two consequences:

People will start to behave "more appropriately" (knowing the consequences of each steps they are doing), or
People will become more liberal and will accept certain situations as "normal".

I frequently think about how this new level of transparency will influence peoples' relationships. My tip is that the final result will be between these two extremes and will be different for different areas (work code of conduct will probably be more liberal than the personal code of conduct). It will be certainly very interesting to see how this develops.

Business of personal?
Your second comment falls into a more general category of how to split "business" communication from the personal one. The question is, do we need to split them at all? I agree with you that although even in business we can (and do) make friends, we all have personal experience with annoying communication with institutions which lead nowhere (only to personal frustration). But my experience tells me that in these situations we tend to limit the communication to an absolute minimum.
In addition, there are other tricks that can be used, which will help to separate the"real" relationship with the fake one. If somebody is, say, a speaker of a large corporation, he automatically gets lots of messages every day and he also replies to lots of messages, because it is the nature of his work. In this amount of communication, his personal share of communication with any particular client gets naturally pretty low. And this can be one of the clues to our problem. Weights of the friendship can be taken relatively in respect to the overall amount of communication of every person of the communication.
Interestingly enough, such an algorithm would work also well with celebrities, actors, politicians, sport stars, and all people who receive lot of attention and thus lot of communication (even with our boss). It would automatically take into account the "weight of the communication" on every side of the communication. The more asymmetrical the communication is, the less important the relationship probably is. There is certainly need to work out such ideas to a much more detail and to come up with better and better algorithms.

Let's live in a glassy fishbowl
To your third point: yes indeed, everything in our world can be and will be misused. I don't however think an instant "loss of identity" can occur; on the other hand, somebody can pretend he is you. But to make this really work he would have to do it continuously for a long time and invest quite a lot of energy into it. Frankly, most of the people have other things to do. In other words, most of the people are normal: tell their real names when we meet them on the street, do wear their own faces, not masks, and tell their real names to the phone when they call us. So I tend not to be too pessimistic here. But indeed this will be a problem. Certainly some mechanisms will appear to fight these frauds and certainly there will be even smarter frauds invented that circumvent these mechanisms. But as I said, most people behave normally and this is, frankly, why our world works, and why the future world will work, too.
Much bigger problem would thus will be how people will cope with the new transparent world where there will be an absolute minimum of personal secrets. It will depend only on us how we tackle this new situation.

So I would correct your saying slightly:

In a digital world you will have to build your reputation every moment of your life.

Wrong concept called “digital” friendship

2007-05-20T23:52:00.000-07:00

Let us discuss the concept of “digital” (=Yes/No) friendship that governs today’s social networks. I am afraid this concept is outdated as it doesn’t reflect reality of peoples’ relationships. It should be replaced by a more natural concept of, say, “communication proximity”, which would be dynamically built on frequency of communication between any two people.

The long-term solution would be to incorporate a standard to the internet that would unambiguously identify people along all ways of their communication. Even if I read an article of certain author, this should be calculated as his one-way communication with me. If I post comment under that article and the author reads it, it will be already a two-way communication. After collecting all these data, everybody would have a personal map available to him that would automatically map people in his neighborhood – from his closest friends to some remote potential contacts; in addition there should be possibility to map people not just by frequency of communication, but also by common professions, interests, hobbies. In other words, even results from this mapping exercise would be highly personalized and would offer variety of outputs. This model would correspond much closer with reality than today’s digital Yes/No schemes.

Ideally, contact management systems should be developed that would automatically watch all means of my communication: email systems, IM systems, (VoIP) phone applications, and that would also integrate with my calendar, as personal meetings are also a way of communication. To allow these applications being established, a clear method to uniquely identify people in their different ways of communication should exist. Yes, we are again returning to the concept of “Unique Personal Identificator” described earlier in this blog. Unfortunately, nobody has the authority to define such a thing, even if it is very useful. Several interesting attempts exist (e.g., FOAF), but the way to go is probably through creating a de-facto standard.

And now we are coming to our question. How can, to your opinion, such a standard develop? Which is the most likely scenario that would force people to use certain identification method in all their communication?

I have some ideas and I am ready to share them with you, but would love to hear your opinions first.

My third book: Effective business on Web 2.0

2007-05-18T02:04:00.001-07:00

My new book arrived on the market these days. For those of you who can read in Czech language it brings some practical tips of how to use internet applications dubbed “Web 2.0” in everyday business. We are not in a fully automated world yet, but we are getting closer and closer to this vision literally every day. Enjoy!

Opportunity to be filled: personal notes in contacts

2007-05-14T23:47:00.000-07:00

The history taught us one lesson very clearly: the best chance for adoption have those products that solve particular customer problem. So let us have a look at one particular customer problem now; problem which is well known, but yet unsolved today. It is a problem of managing personal notes in our contacts.

Most contact organizers, both in paper and electronic form, allow users to add personal comments to any contact in the database. This in fact splits the information in organizers in two groups:

Contact information with up-to-date phone number, email address and job title – this part would be preferably updated by the contact himself;
Strictly personal judgments and notes that are unambiguously linked to the contact information, but still remains the sole property of the user who wrote it. This part cannot be updated automatically and may be shared if and only if it is explicitly required.

To my knowledge, solution that would separate these two categories and would allow synchronizing the public part while still keeping the private part untouched doesn’t exist on the market. “Personal tags” in Xing are not satisfactory for this purpose indeed. In a long-term, "Unique Personal Identificator" defined earlier in this blog, would solve this problem – it would unambiguously link all information about particular person both on the web, and in personal notes of whichever form. But before these general solution emerge, there is a gap on the market. Any interest to fill it?

Three quick tips for Gmail team

2007-05-14T00:07:00.000-07:00

This will be a short one. I have the following recommendations for the Gmail team:

When searching in Gmail, display not only emails that contain searched words, but also contacts containing these words. Alternatively, add “search contacts” next to “search mail” button.
After opening an email, make the email addresses “live” – allow opening particular contacts by right-clicking to any email address, which is displayed in the header or in the body of email, including addresses in “From”, “cc:” or “To” fields (should work similarly like the "Linkedin companion" plugin for Firefox)
Allow opening mail messages in new windows, for example by right-clicking to emails in inbox

I am sure these changes would be quite helpful and still very easy to implement.

The Implications of the Cracked Zune (and iPod)

2006-11-27T08:40:00.001-08:00

It was clear that the protective DRM software of MS Zune player will be broken one day. Few people however predicted that it will happen so soon. Just one week (!) passed after the official launch of Zune and somebody already found out How To Use The Zune as a Hard Drive. In fact, using media player as a hard drive is a functionality that is normal to most of the competing players, however, for the MS-Zune users, this was excellent news. Going from there, other things became suddenly possible, including the very useful tip How To Bypass The Zune's WiFi Sharing DRM.

Both these methods force users to a cumbersome procedure (the second one is even more cumbersome than the first one), but, and this is strange, even then they are more attractive than the implicit, built-in way. But it is only logical, because users of the built-in solution are offered:

to transfer files to their device only via a software that controls what can be transferred and what not
to artificially limit abilities of their wi-fi-enabled gadget to very limited sharing of music and video

Good news for Zune?

It is a paradox, but both these news can be in fact considered good news for Zune. By removing artificial limitations of its functionality, the device becomes more appealing to its users and can be more successful on the market. (The problem however is, that Microsoft wanted to own a platform where users are locked-in. Opening the device to competitors will not make the trick.)

Wider Implications

Zune is not alone with this kind of problems. New software promises to unlock iPod, iTunes, the most popular player and music download service on the music market. In such a case, a broader question should be answered:

Does it ever make sense to create protecting mechanisms in today’s time, when such mechanisms can be broken in matter of days?

Long-term solution

As regards music, from a longer-term point of view no technology can avoid its copying. Instead of fighting against the inevitable, another approach should be chosen. We should invent such a business model of the music industry, which will be in compliance with the fact that music can – and will – be copied. Selling individual copies of music and trying to protect them through cumbersome (and sometimes even buggy) DRM systems is not the way forward. Instead, the music industry should learn from the software world. Similarly to the shift of software towards the “Software as a service” model, the future of selling music will be ensured by selling tracks to providers of interactive services. While music for personal usage will be for free, authors will get paid in the case of any commercial usage of their work.

Music will become the essence of new interactive services. These services will be so attractive that majority of users will prefer to consume music through these services than to download the free “pure” music. Thanks to this, future users will “pay” for most of the music they will listen to (the word “pay” is in quotations because typically even these services will be for free for the end user, as they will be sponsored by targeted advertisements). By the way, even today the majority of users listens to music through paid services (TV and radio channels). So this service-oriented model of music sales will be very natural as it will be built on existing behavior of users. It will also not require any new pattern of consumer behavior to be learned by users.

Why these services will be attractive?

Let us name just few examples of possible services of the future:

an interactive radio where virtual clubs of fans of certain genre or a particular music group are formed and served
educational service teaching its participants the basics of music
“smart” libraries allowing search for music “similar to” other music, or browsing through music that “people similar to me” like
automatic recommendations systems of various kinds
radio that “understands” my mood (thanks to seamless collaboration with other web apps, including my calendar) and automatically offers me what I want to listen to (of course, feedback is implemented, so e.g. a particular track can be skipped and system learns from this)

Why services?

Services have two nice properties:

They cannot be copied.
They are more attractive for customers than just the music alone. This will assure that future users will “pay” for most of the music they will listen to.

It is not a coincidence that the solution for the music industry copies developments of the software world. Software as a service made already its entry in Wikipedia. Why the “Music as a service” entry is still missing there?

The breaking news that didn’t make it to the headlines – End of the PC era

2006-11-14T23:50:00.000-08:00

Last day of October, one small article appeared on the cNet News: Office Live almost out of the gate. I am afraid that mainstream media didn’t quite realize its real significance and implications.

A Forced Move

Anticipating Google's moves in the area of web based applications (Google Apps for Your Domain, but also and mainly Google Docs & Spreadsheets), Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker, has responded by introducing Microsoft Office Live -Web-based software for “small business and consumers”. By this move, Microsoft is starting to fight against its own core cash-cow products. And this is really unique in its history.

Cannibalizing its own cash-cow

At first, Office Live is cannibalizing its Exchange Server right now. At second, the longer-term consequences of this step will make the entire MS Office, which is the most important cash generating product for Microsoft, obsolete. Although Microsoft is trying to underplay its move and underlines that Microsoft Office Live is not intended as replacement of MS Office, but as an additional tool for “small business and consumers”, the reality will soon show up.

The Purpose of Documents

Let us forget marketing for now and be blindly honest in describing why documents exist: every document is created to be processed (read, edited, reviewed, approved...) by other people. That’s it. There is no one simple document which was created just with the purpose to be stored somewhere on the PC.

But only now the second part of our observation comes: there is currently no better platform to accomplish this purpose than the web. Web based applications are inherently better suited for information exchange than any PC-based, or PC-centric solution. Web based applications are not better for formatting documents or printing them, but they don’t need to be. They don’t need to compete with desktop apps in the same arena. Instead, they can use their real competitive advantage and realize the real purpose, why documents were created. They can help people to increase their productivity and effectiveness by allowing them an easier and more straightforward communication.

The Funny World of Today

It will not take long and today’s world and our present-day document practices will sound very funny. Imagine that we need to tell somebody important information today. At first, we write it on our computer, then we print it, then we insert it into an envelope and send it by mail, fax, or messenger, then the recipient reads it and takes notes to his own computer. Is this really the best way how computers should be utilized?

The Funny World of Email and Millions of Copies

OK, you say, “go on, we have the email today!” But that is just slightly better. Document must be saved to local disc first, then send as an attachment to the recipient, then saved by the recipient to his local disk, then the recipient makes his comments and remarks and saves the modified document on his computer (if he is smart, he chooses a different name), then he sends the revised file to a third person to his revision or approval, the third person sends it back to all of us... Well, at the end of the day we end up having tens of copies of different versions of the same file across several dozens computers of our firm, including several slightly differing copies on our own PC. Yes, I am aware of the “Version” function of today’s word processors. But for good reasons (we all are aware of) it is not a good practice to delete the original file when we receive a newer version...

End of the PC era

The conclusion is simple and straightforward. The PC paradigm is not a suitable platform for collaboration of people. At the onset of the mainstream mass internet, the document storage and processing paradigm should be revised from the ground up.

Don’t be confused by the fact that Office Live is marketed only to small and medium companies. The truth is that even big corporations do need to work with documents effectively.

The Blue Chip Expert service - is this the future of networking?

2006-10-09T02:55:00.000-07:00

I have recently received multiple invitations to join a startup internet network called the Blue Chip Expert service. Eventually I was unable to resist and joined, too, to learn more about it. My first feelings are however mixed.
On one hand, it is true that internet networks like this one will significantly change Executive Search and recruitment industry one day. On the other hand, all these networks must go through one very delicate phase: they have to be very innovative in the way how they catch attraction, but in the same time they should retain their credibility.
The dilemma is simple: all of these networks strive to become the next "de-facto" standard in their particular market niche and, in addition, they have to do it faster than any competitor. But it is too easy to become too "innovative"!
I cannot help myself, but the Blue Chip Expert service looks like a pyramid-game and has a strong flavor of multi-level marketing. Myself I have received 10 invitations in just three days, but I am a happy guy, because some friends of mine receive 20 invitations every day, which is very annoying. This email storm certainly helped the service to build awareness of professionals without extensive marketing money, but even through it didn’t cost the company a penny, I am pretty sure that the price was already too high. It is not a good thing for any service to become labeled "spam marketing", and even more it is true for a service that should be based on trust.
I already formed my opinion. I actually thought a lot about future of recruiting, including how to optimally use (virtual) communities in this process. I am pretty sure that motivation of the virtual community should be more complex than just a simple MLM-like scheme, which the Blue Chip Expert system offers.

The problem of SPAM

2006-07-18T12:47:00.000-07:00

I am a strong believer that most of the problems we are facing can be simplified to just several model situations. The reason for that may well be that we are just simple human beings who are unable to recognize too many different situations . Being it this or that way, I can simply not buy into the idea that new technologies bring brand new situations to us.
Let us illustrate it on a problem of spam. Time to time we can read various ideas of how to get rid of this “new” problem. One of the really strange suggestions is to make the entire email communication a paid service. The reason given to us is that this would make spamming too expensive, so the entire problem will naturally disappear. This is very naïve reasoning, indeed.
Let us understand the root of the problem. As an individual I am not offended by reading the same news which millions other people read, too (e.g. BBC technology news). I am however offended if somebody starts communicating with me and doesn’t want to spend even a minute to find out whether his message is of any relevance to me. Instead, he decides to hand over this task (to find out the relevance) to me. In such a case I feel humiliated.
From this perspective SPAM is however nothing unique in our life. It is very similar to today’s advertisement. And although advertisement is paid, it doesn’t stop it from spreading. Corporations have enough money not only to write me, but also to have somebody to call me, and even to break into a movie I am just watching, or even make a pause in a hockey match. After such a dramatic entrance they broadcast very shallow and mostly absolutely irrelevant messages.
Paid emails would not solve the SPAM problem. They wouldn’t however solve even the real problem that stands behind these initiatives, too: the problem of decreasing income of telecommunication companies. Roots of spam are deeper: people are too lazy today to invest time in building relationships.
Unfortunately, our world is sort of strange. It will be technology that will try to help people improve in these soft skills. Future development of CRM and marketing systems target definitely this direction.
Sophisticated systems will enable us to establish targeted, personalized communication again. But will be such a communication anymore personal?

Clear Message of Globalization

2006-04-19T10:58:00.000-07:00

We are living in an exciting time. Fast changes are occurring everywhere in our global world. I am an especially lucky person, because I have the opportunity to have a first hand personal experience of these changes.

Last December I went to China to teach MBA in Peking University. Can you imagine any better place to discuss the phenomenon of globalization with managers than Beijing? These days I enjoy being in Moscow. So my life has been arranged in a really special way! I am able to see the disruptive development of our civilization called globalization from different angles and on my own eyes. And I am also able to think about it.

I remember Moscow from my young days 20 years ago, when I was on a student exchange in the time of Gorbatchew. Now, the city is very different, although interestingly enough, the speed of changes is substantially slower than in China.

Our world is changing itself in a rapid pace. It is a direct consequence of information technologies that help people to reorganize the way they interact. Formerly, communication between nations was limited to contacts between emperors or politicians only. Today, this has been replaced by direct contact between anybody who has the need to communicate. From a slow and centralistic method of communication (or, should we rather say, “isolative method of communication”?) we are moving to a free flow of news, ideas, and cooperation. We are living in a world where communication is more and more limited only by the will of the participants.

This development has a direct consequence: the role of states decreases and with it, state regulations goes off, too. In some parts of the world this process is faster, in other parts it is slower. But the message is here and is very clear. The process is global and the changes are inevitable.

Well, we all are lucky to live in an exciting, opening world. In the world where barriers are being removed for the benefits of most of us.

The Power of LinkedIn

2006-04-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve just joined the fast growing Central European team of Capgemini. In my new role of Managing Consultant it will be my pleasure to develop offerings of this global IT services and business consultancy around the lines of Service Oriented Architecture.

In another place of this blog I am discussing the business model of social networks. Indeed, the model is flawed, as today’s applications motivate participants to grow their “trusted” networks indefinitely (last time today I’ve got an invitation saying “it is always beneficial to increase the size and scope of ones network…”). So, this conclusion is very true.

But of course, even if the business model is not right, it does not imply anything about practical usability of these applications. Actually, I can serve as a good example myself. After being a member of the LinkedIn network for just two months, I was approached by headhunters working for Cap. They found my profile at LinkedIn around the same time when another big IT company found me on this network, too. Then both these companies approached me directly and gave me the luxury of deciding between two good opportunities.

The lesson learned? Applications like social networks really work. Even before visionary projects like UPI happen (sorry, this is my child :-)), social networks are already turning the internet into a more structured place. By improving search in more and more special areas, the internet is gradually becoming a medium where you can find what you need.

So there is one symbolism for me. Since now, I have a new job. But in the same time, I have been shown that the world has changed.

Welcome to a networked world! It will be my pleasure to continue meeting you there.

UPI Defined

2006-04-02T05:38:00.000-07:00

UPI – Unique Personal Identificator – is a new and open syntactic layer of internet that uniquely identifies both authors and users of the internet content. It can be applied to various forms of electronic communication (web pages, discussion forums, mails and even IMs and VoIP calls). As a result, the traditional PageRank method will be superseded by a truly personalized approach. We will not only see search results sorted by our personal preferences, but in addition will be even able to limit web search to “people similar to us”.

The Motivation

Let us start with several concrete examples. Should UPI be massively adopted, the following internet search queries will become possible:

Find for me new ideas on certain subject that were written or read by people similar to myself.
Feed me with any new ideas from people whose reasoning and thinking I like
Find a fishery expert (or any other expert I need right now) that has similar interests and way of thinking like me.
Find a business partner that shares my business specialization and that will be an easy communication partner for me
Find a customer for my product or service I can easily target personally

The Method

There are lots of systems today that attempt to solve similar tasks. Generally speaking, we can divide these systems to the following two categories:

Systems that are trying to dig out more from context around certain keywords (e.g., Zoominfo, that searches names in context of automatically selected adjectives), and
Systems that are trying to add some additional explicit information from the user to the existing web content.

The second group can be further divided to

a) systems that collect user’s behavior – or directly, or through their work with links (e.g. Google Reader, Google Personalized Search, Flork, del.icio.us, or Stumbleupon)

b) systems that try to add an additional piece of syntax to the internet (e.g. the Friend of a Friend FOAF project)

The UPI system falls into the 2b) category.

Acknowledgements

The UPI system was invented in a discussion (here is its full content in Czech language) that was moderated by myself on the discussion server Lupa.cz this February. Several members of the community added significant pieces to the system design, so the idea I am now describing is by no means my sole work. My special thanks go to Jan Bilek, who created several important elements of the system.

How it works

First of all, the user chooses his or her unique UPI. Although the easiest technical solution to implement this function would be to go through one centralized registration service, this centralistic approach would very likely harm the system’s adoption. We are thus envisioning multiple competing services – so called identity servers – to do the registration process. The only thing that must be defined centrally is the UPI syntax. We propose the following one:

chosen_name#identity_server_URL

This syntax corresponds with the popular email syntax
chosen_name@e-mail_server_URL.
Our approach makes it easy to select UPIs really uniquely and yet in a decentralized way; the UPI identificator is easily differentiable from the rest of web content, so, in other words, it creates a new piece of the web syntax, which is easily understandable both to human readers and machines. It also directly points to the home identity server of the user, which helps to resolve potential conflicts if more than one UPI identity server page (so called reading profile – see below) is found for a particular user.

The Role of Identity Servers

The purpose of UPI is to uniquely identify a particular user in all his communication activities. To collect the maximum information possible, we must cover (that means uniquely identify) both reading and writing activities of the user. To allow for maximum adoption, the system itself should not demand too much activity on the user side. We thus propose to include all functions of the system in a simple browser plug-in which will do almost all activities for the user automatically. The user will be only required to sign-in to this service on the device he is going to use. The plug-in will be provided or by any third party (in most cases by a search engine) – this area is fully open to competition, too. In addition, the plug-in can automatically identify existing UPIs on the web pages as we see them and turn them automatically into miniature clickable icons or even pictures of users; clicking on such a picture will show a context menu that is related to search services of a particular search engine. It can for example automatically show us the pages we read jointly, discussions where we both participated or even the entire history of our communication.

Tracing Authors

The easy part of unique identification is the “active”, or authoring part. The browser plug-in will sign everything we publish on the web. This is technically very easy: the browser contains a button that inserts our UPI to any our post, article, and even email we write. However, the syntax of UPI is so easy that users can sign any document even manually, in a similar way to adding email address to their posts.

Tracing Readers

A much more difficult part of the system is to trace reading behavior of a particular user. In an ideal world, every page would be signed by UPI of its author and will in the same time contain UPIs of all its readers – this highly formalized content would be then publicly available for all competing search engines. This would be an ideal form of the web!

This will of course not happen (most of the web pages are “read-only”), but we can do virtually the same by placing our reading history to any publicly visible page of the internet. Our plug-in will automatically add URL of every page we visit to our “reading profile” – a web page with specific syntax which can be located on any server we have writing access to. The server that hosts this page will be then called identity server. Over the time, special identity servers will certainly appear on the internet, but to use UPI system we don’t need anything else than just one web page we have write access to.

The Role of Web Search Engines

As soon as we have the web content signed by UPIs of authors and related via reading profiles to its readers, the main part can come. All this information is publicly available, so a competition between different search engines in processing this valuable information may start. The main outcome of this competition will be implementation of “people similar to me” search function. Let us underline that the UPI concept will not become a competitive advantage of any particular web search service; it will serve to all of them, both general and specialized, in creating better personalized search.

How Will Search Engines Process UPI?

The “search people similar to me” function implementation will revolve around the family of statistical cluster analysis methods. The algorithm may look this way:

For each user the search engine searches the web for the person’s UPI and for his reading profile. If multiple reading profiles are found, it resolves this conflict. The information found is then transformed into multidimensional user information that will serve as an input for cluster analysis. This multidimensional representation of user information is to a certain extent similar to the FOAF project, but it is much more information rich and, in addition, it dynamically evolves during the time and so it respects changes of user’s behavior. The actual realization of this transformation will become a competitive advantage between different web search services.
After creating the representation for all UPI users, the cluster analysis starts. For each user the search engine calculates his “distance” to all other users. The detailed realization of the cluster analysis will become a competitive field, too. As a result, we get a two-dimensional matrix of mutual users’ relations. This matrix will then become a direct, personalized successor to PageRank; it will serve for any search query the particular user will carry on from now on, until the next analysis is performed.

Advantages of Openness

Because the UPI concept itself will not serve as a competitive advantage to any particular search service, all search services will be encouraged to optimize its implementation.

The search engines competition will evolve around refining the following areas:

processing the raw content of web pages (web crawlers may be for example able to identify UPIs not only on the same page, but in addition within the same discussion threat, or analyze the frequency of communication between particular UPIs in participating e-mail or IM systems);
further processing of UPI-based information (for example, “aging” of my reading or publishing history could be optimized for particular search scenarios – how should the weight of pages visited or created decrease over the time?);
representation of user information to the form which will provide the best cluster analysis results;
the cluster analysis itself – it can be modified to best serve specific search queries.

Transferability of UPIs

There are of course many remaining things to be resolved. What happens if I am not satisfied with my identity server? Or, if the server stops its service entirely? There should be an easy procedure which allows me to move to another identity server and still maintains my existing UPI (as UPI should be persistent over the time). So I should be able to transfer my UPI to any other identity server; the original server will then be responsible for displaying my new ID server.

What happens if the original server stops working entirely? Even this situation can be resolved. My new identity server will always display my UPI on my publicly visible reading profile. This page will be searchable by search engines, so they can find my UPI page wherever it is located (because UPI is unique and reading profile has a given syntax – so we know the list of reading profiles for each UPI). It is user’s responsibility (and also his own interest) to ensure there is just one UPI profile page with his profile on the internet. If there is more that one page, the user is informed about this problem by his search engine and is then asked to resolve this ubiquity. He can for example blacklist a fake “reading page” provided by a malicious server. Such a black list can be in addition shared by multiple search servers.

Motivation of Users

A nice feature of the system is that it motivates its users for a fair and consistent usage. Soon after we start to use this system, we start to benefit from an improved web search. If an user for example decides to stop using his UPI and replace it by another one, he instantly looses all the information that he already built during the usage of his former identity. In other words, the longer and the more consistently I use my UPI, the more I benefit from it.

OK, there can be one special question: how about if the user wants to visit some xxx pages? He is certainly not willing to have this part of his history publicly available in his profile. But that is fine, too. The user is free to have more than one UPI, if he wants to. His second, “xxx-UPI” will help him to find the xxx-content even better than before, while his “normal” UPI will help him in his normal work. By choosing the right UPI he actually submits an additional information to the system. The user is of course also free to sign off from his UPI-toolbar entirely when he wants to visit pages he doesn’t want to share with anybody else. In that case, he can browse the content entirely anonymously.

So it is the user’s own motivation to use the system as frequently as possible and in a very consistent way. Only this usage pattern will give him the best search benefits.

Conclusion

The main properties of the UPI system are openness and simplicity. It extends the current internet infrastructure and its proven algorithms, so it builds upon existing and verified systems. These properties maximize chances of the system for its mass adoption.
The system is not implemented yet, but I will be happy to assist with its implementation to anybody who is interested.

My FOAF Comments

2006-04-02T05:26:00.000-07:00

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is certainly worth a look. It attempts to provide some basic machinery to help us “tell the Web about the connections between the things that matter to us”. People are one special case of these “things”, so from this perspective, FOAF has similar motivation to UPI (Unique Personal Identificator).

I have however one issue with this system. To my opinion, it is not feasible to try to put condensed personal information (relations to other people or activities) into one short static descriptor. It will never be exact; it stays static over the time and still requires quite a lot of work from participating users. To my opinion, another approach makes better sense: to uniquely identify the user and let him freely work and use the internet. As a result, enough information will be created during a time. This information will then allow any (competing) web engine to create on the fly “FOAF-like” identificators that are however dynamically evolving over the time. In addition, these “dynamic FOAFs” can be then focused and optimized to a particular purpose.

I am sure that the UPI approach, which we are going to describe in the next post, can eventually fulfill the FOAF Goals, but can even strive for something more...

Funny Profiles on Zoominfo

2006-03-24T01:28:00.000-08:00

These days a lot of people try hard to work on improving search on the internet. Today’s wealth of internet content is so vast that any method that would help people to differentiate quality content from the ballast (that is overall flooding the net) would be extremely beneficial. Well, we already have one such a method – it is called PageRank. This method is based on the “universal popularity” of a particular site expressed by links that are pointing to it. In other words, PageRank grubs out the semantic information on popularity from the only available syntactic tool: web links. The PageRank algorithm is well proven and fine-tuned to the best possible extent. It is very hard to find any further improvement of it.

Context digging

OK, so where can we move from this point? There are just two ways forward:

to add some additional syntax piece to the internet (that would help make the content better searchable), or
try to work better with the existing unstructured content.

Zoominfo can serve as a typical application of the second approach. It tries to dig out the semantics information from the context of keywords and automatically builds user profiles from publicly available news resources. To do this, it attempts to uniquely identify a particular person by searching its name in the context of other keywords that are automatically identified as being relevant to this person. This is a very non-trivial thing to do, indeed!

The Reality Check

Let me share some examples with you. If we search Zoominfo for the most popular Czech singer Karel Gott, we find eight (!) different profiles. The good news is that all are sort of related to the singer; however, the bad news is that no one is really correct and seven of the eight actually don’t mention that this person is a singer! Where is the problem? In the attempt to differentiate possible namesakes the system actually splits information about one person to many different profiles. Of course, the balance is difficult to reach. On one hand, it is wise to suppose that if there is a lot of information about a particular person, part of it should be contributed to namesakes. On the other hand, it doesn’t hold always, particularly if the person is really popular.

From professor to journalist or landlord

However, this problem is even more general and is not limited to top celebrities only. For example prof. Vorisek, who is the Head of Department of Information Technologies at the Prague Economic University, has 4 different profiles. Only the profile No. 2 is sort of correct, but it is vastly incomplete, just quoting his name and school. We don’t even know his function and have no idea about his other activities. In addition, some of the profiles are pretty funny. My favorite one is the one that actually identifies Jiri as a sort of landlord of Zofin Palace. In reality, Zofin Palace is just the venue of a regular annual conference Jiri’s department is organizing.

The conclusion

I don’t think that people at Zoominfo don’t try hard. They certainly do. The problem is a more serious one: the task to process context of keywords exceeds capabilities of today’s technologies, even if we limit this task to search in a particular context only (e.g., search of names and positions, as Zoominfo does). The idea itself is not bad, but it is a too ambitious one. Generally speaking, the complexity of this task is close to the problem of an automatic text comprehension and translation. Zoominfo’s case just illustrates that we are not at this stage yet.

This is a very clear message that shouldn’t be overlooked. It is (yet) very hard and even contra productive to automatically work with unstructured information, even in very special scenarios. On the other hand the syntax approach (PageRank) works well; the problem however is that its mechanism is already “milked to death”.

The solution?

To get better search results, we will have to add some additional syntax to the web. We should do it smartly – we cannot expect too much work from users, but in the same time we should make this web extension a clear advantage for everybody who joins.

There are many applications already that tackle the internet search problem this way – social networks can serve as a good example; thanks to their growing popularity they are in fact turning a significant part of the internet to a structured form! Another interesting example is the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project.

We will however try to formulate a more general approach based on Unique Personal Identificator (UPI). It is actually a nice paradox that Zoominfo (and not only it) would greatly benefit from such a system. On the other hand, if the internet had UPI, applications like Zoominfo would not be necessary at all...

What Will Supersede PageRank?

2006-03-13T23:01:00.000-08:00

Today we live in a world ruled by PageRank. Every web page has its specific rank that says whether it is valuable to the internet community or not. There is however one problem. There is nothing like a “universal” internet community per se. There are just people with different priorities, interests, expectations.

Although PageRank was a big success of its days (being able to distinguish between valuable content and the “mess” of the web), more and more people understands that the “majority” approach, that fits well with broadcasting media, is not suitable for the internet, which is by its nature an interactive medium, able to personally identify its users.

“I don’t want to only see the stories that most people are interested in, I want interesting stories.” (Dave’s Wordpress Blog)

OK, this is a reasonable expectation. But, how to move on? By replacing an “universal” PageRank with an “personalized” one?

A “personalized” PageRank

Page Rank is a brilliant piece of thinking. It was able to make use of the only semantic information that is embedded in the web syntax (the links) to evaluate quality of pages. By processing statistics of links we can understand which pages are most linked to, and this in fact allows us to access the vast amount of work of people who already read and evaluated these pages and created links to those they considered valuable.

But the links are already “milked to death” and there is nothing other in the web syntax that would give us an additional clue to quality of web content. So any attempt to move forward with the quality of web search would require introducing some new piece of syntax to the web, or, put it simply, something that would make the web content more structured. Yes, it is a tremendous task, but not impossible. And in fact, it is already happening.

Towards a more structured web

There are two possible approaches to adding more structure to the web:

Growing popularity and thus mass penetration of structured applications, like social networks.
Introducing a new piece to the web’s syntax, that would be seamlessly integrated to the existing web. My candidate: the Unique Personal Identificator (UPI).

These are quite different approaches; while the first one is based on mass adoption of structured applications, the second one is based on adoption of simple additional syntax by users. Let’s start with the first one for now.

Social network as a search engine

Social network is in fact an application that consists of

a specialized web search engine coupled with
a specialized web hosting service.

This approach has a clear motivation: the specialized search engine greatly benefits from being able to work with upfront defined structured information. So, for example, if we assume that the name is always filled in a field called “name”, company name in the appropriate field “company” (and is in addition related to the unique ticker symbol), education degree and country are selected from a pre-filled list etc., we are able to provide far better and far more relevant search results for our predefined queries than any full-text based approach can. So we are just porting the old good theory from traditional database systems to the internet. Ideally, the entire web should be structured this way!

Growing popularity of social networks

But now the interesting piece comes. The web is in fact becoming more structured, thanks to these applications. Because the search in social networks really works (well, structured search worked in traditional databases since 60’s, so why not here), these applications become useful and thus popular. The biggest social networks today contain tens of million of users and put profiles of these users on the web. Thanks to this development, a significant piece of the internet content is becoming structured in a very formal, traditional “database way”. We can even say that the web is becoming a more organized place.

Wider consequences of social networks

So there are now millions of users on the web, who took the time to create their personalized and structured profiles, and who keep these structured profiles updated. This is an amount of work that cannot be overlooked. In fact, it could already be compared (at least to certain extent) to the effort, which web users invested into linking their pages. This growing piece of structured web content will serve as a special (and welcomed!) input to universal web search engines. It can greatly improve their search capabilities in the areas where applications like social networks force people to use “strict syntax”.

Vision

This in fact doesn’t mean anything else than introduction of new syntax rules to certain application areas of the web. It is fair to expect that there will be more and more applications like social networks over the time. All these applications will have one thing in common: they all will motivate users to use the internet in a predefined, highly structured way. Whether this will result in structured personal profiles, product descriptions, descriptions of calendar events, or others, all this information will turn the internet to a more structured base of data. The amount of structured content on the internet will grow and will become a goldmine for any search engine of the future. As a result, traditional full text based web search will be complemented by more efficient tools in all areas where possible. Thank to this development, search will certainly improve. But for a really significant improvement, we should dethrone PageRank from its role of a sole and universal expert for evaluating information relevance.

PageRank Replacement?

To do this, we should implement a shift from evaluating pages to evaluating users. This would be a true revolution in the web search allowing us to search personally relevant information.

However, as we already said, this would require introducing a new piece to syntax to the entire web. Very difficult concept, indeed! Could we find out a method how to persuade users and developers to adopt this new piece of web syntax? Let us think about it next time.

Live.com - too deep innovation

2006-03-13T00:27:00.000-08:00

There is lot of areas where we should innovate the web search, except of one – user interface. It was Google’s big contribution to the internet community to go the simplest way. No flashing banners, no “sexy” layouts. Just a very intuitive text list. And a page navigation that uses our own browser functions. What could be nicer and more practical?

And now have a look at live.com. Its search results are displayed in a fancy window and end some 5cm above the bottom of page. You intuitively need to scroll – but oops! No scrollbar is there. Just two strange and almost invisible (because made in light grey on white background) arrows. Should we move them? Click on them? Click on the bar?

This is not the way to go. As Microsoft Monitor blog puts it: “I see the new doohickeys--slider and macros--as adding complexity without significantly improving search relevancy.”

Microsoft uses the extra white space under the search results for a message Help us improve. Interesting enough – if they really improve in this matter (and focus their innovation efforts to the right areas) the place for this message disappears automatically...

What is Missing In the Ray Ozzie’s Live Clipboard Concept?

2006-03-12T02:06:00.000-08:00

Let me say a few words to the new initiative of Ray Ozzie, who proposes the universal clipboard for the internet. I would like to show a slightly wider approach that could be better positioned for a mass adoption because - in my opinion - it better corresponds with the nature of today's internet applications and user’s expectations.

Ray Ozzie’s Concept

Ray envisions a standard for interchanging structured information between web applications (e.g. web calendars and address books) and calls it an “extension of the clipboard user model to the web”.

Quote:

And what was the most fundamental technology enabling “mash-ups” of desktop applications?

The clipboard. And a set of common clipboard data formats.

Before the clipboard, individual applications (such as Lotus 1-2-3 with its Copy and Move operations) enabled intra-application data transfer – in a world largely designed around a single running application. But the advent of the multi-application user environment, combined with the simplicity of the Select/Cut/Copy/Paste/Clear model, suddenly empowered the user in ways they hadn’t previously experienced.

Reading these lines, no doubt the concept and its reasoning sounds interesting. But when I had a look at the screencast of a Live Clipboard demo, a big question emerged in my head. Will the Live Clipboard really succeed? Is this the right application for the internet world?

I don’t think so. The user’s perspective changed significantly since late 80’s and 90’. These days, people expect more from internet applications than they expected from PC with Windows. They would like a real automation, not just a tool for manually moving (even complex) data.

And this is why I think developers will not be too excited to implement this concept – it will not bring any real competitive advantage to their products.

Why the Clipboard Was Adopted

Now more from the developers’ view. Back in 1985, when Windows 1.0 first appeared on the market, the battle was not about pushing the clipboard; it was of course about pushing Windows and reach its wide adoption by developers. Clipboard was just one (and certainly not the most important one) "selling point" of Windows (the really important selling points were: GUI, ability to execute multiple graphical applications at the same time, virtual memory, system's own device drivers). But as soon as developers decided to move to Windows platform, implementing all Windows features (including clipboard) made a good sense for them, as it differentiated their product from its DOS competitors. And regarding clipboard itself, they of course had no alternative to it. The platform was owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft also defined all the standards of data interchange.

The Difference

So, what are the chances of Life Clipboard for its adoption by developers?

Three things have changed since 80’s:

The platform is not owned by any single company
While it would still make sense for the developers to implement a “rich clipboard” type of functions, it would not bring them any competitive advantage (while seamless interoperability with other applications was a reasonable competitive advantage in developer’s decision to port their application to Windows).
The user expectation changed (we will cover later)

Given these facts, the motivation of developers to implement Life Clipboard is very weak and is in fact a “chicken-and-egg” problem. The effort to implement this function pays off only when there are enough applications that support it. On one hand, Microsoft is a strong company, so the standard is certainly not dead. But...

User’s perspective

But on the other hand I always think we should strive for more; for something “more sexy”, which would really make a clear difference for the user.

Well, back in late 1980s, the clipboard was no doubt a big step forward. Instead of having to save file, exit the application, launch a new one and then import the saved file we got a very friendly, fast and useful tool. But even this example clearly shows that we shouldn’t exaggerate the sole role of the clipboard – without an ability to run multiple applications at once, clipboard would be virtually of no value to users.

And the same holds for the Life Clipboard concept. Something is missing to it – yet – to make the concept really appealing.

We should strive for more!

Let us then think about an idea which would be really “sexy” by itself; an idea that would excite developers and would motivate them to further extent it. To me, the manual “Cut & Paste” model doesn’t fall in this category any more. It was OK in the DOS time, but the expectations have changed since then. Today’s users would expect something more automatic and more convenient than just a tool for manual transfer of appointments and business cards from one application to another (and it doesn’t matter that all these items contain rich information).

So, what could make the real difference today?

The Vision

Imagine I find an interesting concert on a web page and want to attend. I would expect to find a simple button on the page which I can press in such a case. In the same time, system identifies me (which is technically possible already today) and asks me to confirm payment for the ticket. It also contacts directly my (web) diary (which is however automatically synchronized with any personal device I use) and writes down the event. In case there is any conflicting appointment, the system lets me know before requesting my payment. Sounds better than a simple cut and paste? Yes, indeed – because this is a real automation. But the story doesn’t finish yet.

Now, the concert is cancelled – you know, musicians are just people, so this may happen even in the future -:). Instead of driving there and finding a closed hall with a crowd of angry people, the appointment will be automatically removed from my diary (again, no technical problem – who records a particular information is also allowed to change it) and I will be informed about the change just as it occurs (which may be just a function of my diary – so nobody needs to know my personal email, IM, or whatever channel I use; nobody also needs to learn in which way and when I would like to be informed about changes). This would be a good, useful application. And still no rocket science!

Why Are Social Networks Dying?

2006-03-11T01:26:00.000-08:00

Dear Blogosphere:
Skip directly to the paragraph labeled “socioware”, if you want to start directly with my recent thinking about social networks. But as this is my first blog here, let me start with a few words about myself. First, to my motivation: There is one problem with today’s internet. We can find quite easily products, texts, even maps there, but it is very difficult to find people with similar interests and similar way of thinking. To do that, we have to do some extra work – like the one I am starting now. In the best case, a fruitful discussion starts and the right people emerge from the discussion.
By the way, I understand that you (the readers/discussion partners I seek to find) will read these lines when and only when I am persistent enough with my publishing efforts and cover enough interesting topics in a way that is close to your own thinking; only then you may return also to the beginning of the blog one day and read these lines. And this is a very interesting thing about the blogosphere itself: right now I am actually “broadcasting against the wall” and writing something for my potential future readers. But it depends only on my effort whether I succeed to remove the wall between me and you one day. There is no shortcut today. But there might be one in the future – and we are already coming to socioware visions :-). But allow me two more paragraphs before we get there...
Second, about myself. At the time of writing, I am an 42 year old mathematician, recently earned Ph.D. in Computer Science, who lives and works his entire life in Prague, Czech Republic. I am new to English blogosphere, but not new to publishing at all. I wrote two books, one called e-Business for managers, one sci-fi novel “Stab in the back on the information superhighway”, one TV serial “Man and computer” (produced and broadcasted by Czech TV in 1992). All my publications cover my hobby and lifetime passion: trends in the IT and the consequence of IT developments to various areas of human life and business. These days I write a regular column for the Czech most popular weekly economics magazine Ekonom and for 15 years I am regularly publishing for Czech edition of Chip, the most popular computer magazine here. There is however one BUT: All my publications (with a few exceptions) are in Czech language.
So I am “Mr. Nobody” in the English speaking blogosphere and starting nearly from scratch here (well, I delivered some English presentations and gave some interviews when I was Senior Manager of “Big 4” consultancy Deloitte; and I also put some articles on calresco.org). But most of my work you will find is in Czech.
These days I am teaching e-business and IT Management courses on University of Northern Virginia in Prague (one interesting implication of September 11th – it is more difficult for students to get their US student visa now; this lead some US private schools to open campuses in other parts of the world); sometimes I teach in Beijing for the same school. In addition, I’ve just found a producer for my new educational TV serial on future technologies “Stepping Forward”. The entire serial is based on a story that is placed in the future. This serial will be in English, too. There are lots of strange things heroes of the serial (in their “innovative professions”) have to go through. And I would love to discuss at least some of them with you, too, in some of my next posts.
Enough about me for now. I hope I’ve just covered what is my life-time interest and hobby: visions of IT applications and visions of the internet applications; in the same time, we are not finished yet, as this will be the subject of this entire blog – as long as time, energy and passion allows me to continue (well, I hope for at least one additional post-:))...

Dying Socioware

Contemporary social networks, like LinkedIn, OpenBC, or Orkut have a flawed business model. They all try to earn money on selling the so called “premium membership”, that means access to those parts of their membership database that is not “linked to” us yet. This concept is in direct contradiction with the original motivation of these applications, which was to establish close networks of trusted friends.
All these applications build a concept of “friendship” that is far too simplistic and does not correspond to any kind of real-life relationship of our real world. “Friendship” in these networks is established when two contacts agree via email to “connect”. By this agreement, they make their own contacts mutually visible; if I connect to somebody, I can see his contacts, and I can search in contacts of his contacts. If I search elsewhere, I just get a result like “partner at Deloitte; if you want to know his name, buy our premium membership”.
What are the consequences of such a business model? To make the application work for me, I am motivated to be as opened to accepting and offering connections as possible. As a result, an average number of connections in these networks constantly grows. “Hubs” and “superhub” users appear that connect thousands or even tens of thousands of people. LinkedIn recently decided not to publish the actual number of connections of particular user any more, but this is of course not the real solution of this problem; it is just its manifestation.
The longer term consequence is pretty clear and sad in the same time: everyone will be a connection (a “friend”) of everyone one day. While this is happening, the value of friendship that was originally meant as the essential information of social networks, degrades and will eventually be lost. We can even say that socioware is dying these days, thanks to its flawed business model.

The Way Out?

So, if the business model is wrong, there should be a way to fix it. It would actually not be that difficult. First of all, let us have a look at what are the main characteristics of today’s concept of “friendship” in social networks.
“Friendship” is:

digital (yes/no – a person is friend or is not)

static (once agreed, we are friends; OK, in theory, we can break, but it would be too painful in current implementation :-))

In addition, friends are our key to make the search functions of the network accessible to us.
I am pretty sure that the key to survival of today’s social networks is to frankly answer the following two questions:

How to re-define friendship (of course, in a “non-digital” and dynamic way)

What should be its purpose (and this implies another question: what should be the business model of social networks?)

Nobody is perfect in his reasoning, so in fact I’ve decided to consult this problem with some really good professionals in the Czech internet community. There is a server called Lupa.cz which is focused on the technology and internet, but, what is more important, which is also home of a very strong community of internet professionals. Actually everyone who means something in the Czech IT business reads articles and participates in discussions on this server.

eWorkshop

Six years ago, in Spring 2000, I tried to launch an experimental format on this server. I called it “eWorkshop” and based it on a simple idea. In the first day of an eWorkshop, an article about an interesting topic is placed to this server. This article formulates a problem (like the one above) and ends with some open questions. People are encouraged to participate in a discussion, which is moderated by the author; in the evening, this discussion is summarized in a new article. These steps are then repeated three or four times, and eventually, at the end of the week, the communityitself comes up with an interesting proposal.
I must say I was not sure whether this will ever work when I was running the first eWorkshop back in 2000. But eventually I was really surprised how fruitful the discussion was and how much appreciation I’ve got from the community. It is true – the more you give, the more you get. So no doubt this discussion lead to really innovative ideas and views I would be myself unable to come up with. In some areas (suggestions how to improve web search) we even came up with a solution that was eventually implemented (independently on us) by a commercial Israeli firm. I’ve run eWorkshop on this server six times since then, but last time in 2003.

The Outcome

This February I revived this format and asked the community about its ideas how to salvage social networks. And I must say, the community doesn’t age :-). Even today it came up with very good answers and suggestions that would really solve some big issues of existing socioware. But the biggest surprise to me came later on in the discussion. From a concept of static network of nodes, which serve as the universal basis of today’s socioware, we moved to a much more general an interesting approach. We proposed a concept based on of UPI (Unique Personal Identificator) that would solve better and more generally the original purpose of socioware: finding people that are similar to us in their way of thinking, work and behaviour. This concept could be implemented as a natural extension of existing search engines and would convert web search from being based on universal evaluation of web content quality (PageRank) to a personalized method.
Being able to do that, we would be able find ideal candidates for our real friends. Such a nice change if we compare it with static applications called “network of friends”, or socioware. Well, the internet is dynamic. And this will be our next topic if you stay tuned.