vSocial Post, re: oEmbed

Did a post on oEmbed over at the vSocial Blog titled “oEmbed: oVerkill?” Check it out.

I know, 2 posts in one day, crazy.

What’s the biggest lesson the iPhone 2.0 release teaches us?

So, I’m a massive Apple fanboy. Waited in line for the first iPhone, planning on doing the same for the 3G. However, I think after having been a user for a year now, and watched the comings-and-goings of the device (it’s not just a phone!) I’ve learned one major, important lesson from it:

The browser is not the end-all-be-all anymore, and has a finite shelf-life as the central point of the internet experience.

I’m not just talking about the iPhone, either. I mean everywhere. The browser-as-only-path-to-heaven days are short, in my opinion, because it’s just running out of room to grow.

Whoa, whoa, Brad, that’s crazy talk. The browser is going to free us from the constraints of Microsoft and the desktop! Hell, it already has!

Actually, I think the constraints the browser has, and continues, to put upon development of network applications is stifling at best, and going to grind things to a halt at worst, over the next year or two. The fact is, the browser (as a sandbox) is EXTREMELY difficult to get to bend to your will. The security protections which, rightfully, are in place, really limit the potential of things. Flash gets around this, somewhat, but even then, I still can’t save a file, or access a device, or do any number of things — in the browser.

The solution isn’t an easy one — Microsoft got around this by signing and verifying developers, which was a disgustingly long and annoying process that developers got really pissed off at, and eventually revolted against.

Ultimately, I see a future of multiple human interfaces, and each of those is going to have unique requirements, constraints and abilities. Having one application run on all of them is just a bunk idea, I think, and opens the playing field for some really interesting innovation possibilities.

OpenSocial Take Two — I was incorrect

Google delivered something elegant, simple and amazingly powerful. Amazingly overwhelmed by both the potential and the way they executed on the concept. Definitely looking to wrap both the app aspect and the container aspect into V:social.

Google’s pushing OpenSocial — So… So what?

Howard blogged about the NYTimes article discussing Google’s entry into the Social Platform (really just an API set to allow widgets inside of social networks; let’s not all get term-changey on each other) world, to compete against Facebook directly. Well, sort of.

See the issue that has both made Facebook succeed and makes me scratch my head with this announcement is that Facebook is a mostly walled garden. Actually, scratch that, Facebook is a parking garage. Easy to get in, has those stupid tire-poppers if you want to get out. But because they’re a controlled interface/experience, it’s relatively easy to develop an application for it, somewhat akin to using the standard libraries for Windows or a Mac. You build to their spec and it just fits in. How will this work for a network of partners that includes Orkut, LinkedIn and Ning? Are they simply developing data delivery and ingress standards? If that’s the case — and it’s the only one that makes sense to me — Yawn! Otherwise we’re going to have grey boxes in multiple places. I just don’t see how this will work, nicely, inside of the targets and partners on this list. It’s kind of like how Java was hailed as this AMAZING way to have applets that ran EVERYWHERE in EVERY BROWSER in EVERY ENVIRONMENT! And it sucked. Doing too much is worse, most times, than doing too little. I prefer that they do the “too little” path — but we’ll see when we have details.

Platforms, Top-down design and Tumblr

So, let’s start off with the cool, fun stuff: I love Tumblr. Aside from being slow to aggregate my data (their TTL might be a bit long?), it’s a neat way for me to have all of my “Web Twoooooo” activities aggregated into one place that looks neat and is easy to swallow. I love it, and am going to be giving it it’s own domain and a design at some point (until then, check out http://webba.tumblr.com/)

However, this brought up some discussion when Mike Luby was over at my place this past weekend working on some super-cool stuff with me. What happens if, say, Twitter just dies? I mean, besides how many people would get pissed off. There’d be literally dozens if not hundreds of services that would either be severely crippled (did you set CURLOPT_CONNECT_TIMEOUT right?) or just plain not work. It’s quite literally the house of cards. Which makes it important for me to get back up on my soapbox really quickly about 2 things:

1) Build your application as a platform! Don’t retrofit some crappy website 2 years later after people have been using your site as a service. Design it as a service, or use a framework that’s been built to handle being a service, from the beginning. It’s huge.

2) Top-down design. What’s that mean? It means presume and plan for the biggest, best, scaliest(?!?) outcome and work towards that end. Don’t build around pretty and slow for 2 users and wonder why when you become popular that you’re rewriting and retrofitting like crazy. Plan and design properly! It’s not hard to both make a platform usable/pretty as well as scalable/well-written.

So, cool apps are good, bad design is bad. Pretty simple, eh?

Google Launches TubeSense — When’s the real release of AdSense for video coming?

So google released their AdSense for video — which I’m going to dub “TubeSense” (more on why, later) — yesterday. This is obviously a big deal, I think most of the advertising industry was hoping that YouTube/Google would be the leader insofar as advertising goes, because the market has been so nascent and needed someone with some clout to determine what a/the “right” answer was/is. So that’s great. However… what’s with tying this ad unit to YouTube videos? This is very similar to how they required that user-generated AdSense units were Blogger-only, back in the day. At some point, they’ll feel they have enough of a lead (like they don’t now??) that they’ll open it up to all content distributors, and make their “real business” — same way they did with in-page. When this becomes a non-walled garden, I’ll consider it a successful release. Screenshot:

Bubbles go in the tub

So there’s been this groundswell of calling the whole reinvestment in internet technology a “bubble” recently. It’s kinda silly — the last bubble was marked with “I have randomthing.com and I just went IPO and made a shitload of fake money” — that will be the sign of concern for me, imo. Anyways, Marc Andressen — smart guy (fairly successful, too, turns out) — has a great post about these shenanigans. My highlight? This:

Venture capitalists? All stupid, and unnecessary to boot. Everyone knows that you shouldn’t need to raise more than $5.37 in loose change to start a new web business. I mean, c’mon.

I love that certain “unbiased” bloggers still seem to think that there’s no capital cost to create, run and innovate web startups anymore. Clearly their time isn’t worth anything — so I’m not going to waste my time reading them anymore. Great post, Marc.

Working with Twitter and extending

So Dave Winer made a post on using Payloads within Twitter. Great post, great idea (ala RSS 2.0) — the question, though, is would this work in Twitter’s architecture? Depends, really, if they built things top-down or bottom-up. If they built from the lowest common denominator (i.e. sms) they could pretty elegantly extend their API to ignore the superfluous bits of data for SMS. If they built a pretty web interface and hacked SMS in, then they may have an issue. However, I still think that working within the 160 characters is a solution for now, even if it ends up being a hack for future devices. It’s definitely something to keep in mind, and a good problem to have (i.e. how do I extend this into a habit-changing service) — but I think, at this point, there’s a workable solution. I think to Dave’s point, though, the ability to degrade gracefully is important, and we’re working on filling in the gaps as we find them for Twiddeo — so if I view on a phone, instead of a page with flash, I get the 3GP, 3G2 or iPhone-MP4. It’s a problem, but quickly solved, and easy to test.

Twiddeo? It’s Twitter, with Video, and it’s pretty neat.

So… we just launched Twiddeo and folks are starting to poke around. It’s been something I’ve wanted to push us to do for awhile, so I pulled Jonathan Apostoles away from the grindstone for a week, and he banged things out. Aside from having a very spartan look (which I’ll take the blame for), it works great — both elegant and simple, but powerful and useful all at once. Great job by Jonathan, the V:social API, and the new version of our Flash player application (written by Mike Luby!)

Mashable did a quick pre-launch writeup (and hopefully will do a post-launch writeup!) here.

P.S. My twitter user ID is dskwared — wordpress.com doesn’t let me post the widget on here. We need to get that fixed, imo!

Eras recycle themselves, and it’s “totally” the 80s.

Businessweek is running a piece about aSmallWorld — what they call an “online country club” — and it continues something I’ve been more cognizant of lately. We’re absolutely reliving the 80s. The excess, 4-5 figure designer bags, celebrity-as-royalty mindset, moral babysitting and stock market volatility spells out the fact that we’re reliving (as always happens) a bygone era.

Now, you may think that this is a doom and gloom post. Couldn’t be farther from the truth. I love wealth, greed and excess. I couldn’t be happier that I get to relive one of the most ridiculously excessive time periods that I wasn’t truly a part of (being that I was 2-12 during the 80s) — but can be now!

Just don’t bring back the goddamn shoulder pads. I wanna Delorean!