February 2006 Archives

Thanks to Guillaume du Gardier from Edelman, I had the chance to meet with David Weinberger twice on Sunday for diner and on Monday for a workshop on corporate blogging. We had interesting conversations about writing, the killing of the internet by a few big corporations (most notably the music and movie majors and their dying business model) and governments, and the right for forgiveness in the everything-goes-digital-and-online-and-searchable era. I'm glad to hear David answering the usual "what will be blogs in five years time?" question with "I don't know", because that's my answer too (though I predict that cats blogs will be written by cats, or at least with their active participation thanks to Woz and their GPS tracking devices).

Here are my rough notes from David's presentation on "what blogs are not":

• he gave a great example of lame marketing with the so-called Juicy Fruit Blog (which is no more to illustrate what NOT to do)
• the size of a topic matters. The Encyclopedia Britannica has 32 volumes and 65,000 topics and because of the constraints of paper, the size of a topic tells about its importance (in the eyes of the editor). Wikipedia has no space constraints and its English version has around one million topics. Wikipedia is a much better indicator of what people care about today than the E.B. (like it or not)
• Blogs aren't about cats (that's a prejudice in the US press, in France the equivalent would be: blogs aren't about Skyblog)
• Blogs aren't journalism. Blogosphere against journosphere. The editorial job of journals has been taken over by the blogosphere ("I read the papers through the blogosphere.")
• Blogs aren't mass media. You'd think personalization, but 1:1 isn't one to one because one of them isn't a person (big corp -> individual)
• The long tail is twisted (lots of related, social individuals)
• Our blog is ourself in the public space (our body in the new public space)
• We write badly and it's ok, it exposes more of us, you're allowed to make mistakes (it's human, adds intimacy with readers)
• The "good enough" concept on the internet should apply to knowledge more (no need to always seek for perfection)
• Journalists think that bloggers are narcissists, but they never make any links to other sites except for ads! On the contrary bloggers are very generous in giving lots of links-love (the net is about hyperlinks)
• Brand < Reputation < Relationship
• Blogs are here to stay, they're co-creation, 2-way conversations
• "Blogging medicine: best or at least very good if taken internally". Open up some internal blogs to selected customers and partners
• The blogosphere is a huge focus group ("a defocus group")
• PR should be Public Relationships
• What to do? Listen, Audit, Engage, Give up control(*) (*)Blogging policy: 1. sound like a human being 2. be a human 3. engage, don't defend 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. be transparent 10. link, link, link...
• Make your own mistakes: your customers know more than you do! Take risks, don't be boring.
• Do you want people to talk about you?

Greg Linden wonders if there's a tendency to lower uptime expectations among web companies, and document recent examples :

Google's Blogger has been taking many planned and unplanned outages over the last few weeks. Yahoo My Web just announced they're going down "for a few hours." Salesforce.com just had multiple outages, including one that lasted almost a day. Gap decided to close Gap.com, OldNavy.com, and BananaRepublic.com for over two weeks. Bloglines took an outage instead of trying to switch to a new data center without any interruption of service. Technorati did something similar a year ago, but took a longer weekend outage for the move. And there are many, many other examples.

He's also fingered David Heinemeier Hansson's opinion piece, Don't Scale, with The folly of ignoring scaling, and points to other interesting opinions: Om Malik's post, "The Web 2.0 hit by outages" and Nicholas Carr's post, "Salesforce.com's hiccups".

Lowering uptime expectations is to me akin to Microsoft getting the whole world think that it's normal for an application to crash several times a day and your computer to show a blue screen of death once in a while ("What, you didn't save your work? Your bad, dear!")

Trouble is, when your software set is what it is because of tradition, pressure, inertia, *cough* monopoly *cough*, and it costs thousands to change it, you think twice before dumping it. But in the Software as a Service (SaaS) world, where the "no strings attached" label is touted along a low monthly price in a much more competitive space, this is a very different story.

Still, I believe it's far more difficult to switch SaaS suppliers than, say, more commoditized ones such as ISPs. Internet connectivity comes in the same flavor everywhere, but when you've got sites and mailboxes, it starts to become a little more complicated. And when you've built critical business functions around a platform such as salesforce.com, where do you turn to and how long/difficult/costly is it if you want to drop them?

I've now spent an equal part of my professional life on both sides of the client/supplier frontier, and I've learned how crucial — and mutually beneficial — it is to build trust. Nicholas Carr is spot on, citing David Berlind on Saas reputation about overpromising reliability and underdelivering, in that SaaS providers need to be totally transparent and realistic in order for this model to fly:

No system is 100% reliable, and I believe the SaaS model will ultimately prove to be considerably more reliable than the on-premise model, but obfuscation about an outage may end up doing more harm to a SaaS provider than the outage itself.

On a side note, and reading Greg's post on Blogger and database inconsistency, I'm afraid that there's already a two-class model, where the B2C SaaS providers may show far less consideration for their customers data than the B2B ones. As our life goes more and more digital and online, that's not good. As a matter of fact, the dreadful shrink-wrap license of software that would exonerate the software vendor from all responsibilities, has turned into a simple "accept it or go away" checkbox on all those SaaS sites, and you'd better read the fine prints very, very carefully before subscribing. More transparency would be appreciated here too, for example on the fact that if your supplier boasts its duty to keep your data safe as a key advantage of SaaS vs. on-premises backups, what use is it if the contract explicitly stipulates that you cannot claim any damages from data loss? Clearly, when Six Apart's Typepad service went South, their customers' reactions did show a high level of reliance on the platform (a number of them being businesses!) but also a glaring misconception about the legal responsibilities of such a supplier for this kind of service, and what they could really claim in case of an outage (answer: nothing). I wonder if the insurance world has started to integrate SaaS in their coverage of business continuity. This would be another strong positive signal for this business model.

Exactly as the Google Web Accelerator in its time, Fasterfox is the latest net SUV. I'm not going to link to this extension for Firefox, because it's harmful in its present state, I'll rather tell you how to block Fasterfox requests and prevent it to abuse your bandwidth. Just add these two lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Fasterfox
Disallow: /

Warning, serious parody ahead...

I should really buckle down and try writing a Java app because, at the moment, I have an attitude problem. I know that IBM now officially loves it, and Tim Bray's been charting the upcurve in Java book sales, and everyone's saying that Oracle's going to adopt NetBeans. If you want your ears bent back, have a listen to Sun President Jonathan Schwartz; he'll tell you that half the websites in the world are powered by Java and that there are 2½ million developers and that the war is over and Java won. So here's my problem, based on my limited experience with Java (deploying a couple of Content Management Systems for a big IT company): all the Java code I've seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti JSP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places. Everyone agrees on Java's downsides: it's not written for the web, it's difficult to deploy and get running, and it's pretty slow and a resource hog. Those are important disadvantages. And I'm sure that it's possible to write clean, comprehensible, maintainable, Java; only apparently it's real easy not to. But Java has competition, most obviously PHP; and don't write the Rails crowd off, they're not stupid at all and they're trying to learn the lessons that Java tried to teach. So Java hasn't earned everyone's respect in getting where it is, and Sun should understand it more than it has. But in the big picture, it feels vulnerable to me.

Sorry Tim, but when I read your post on PHP, I just couldn't help but swap PHP with Java in there, because that's pretty much my attitude problem with Java! Of course it's a parody of your post, but an alarming amount of the above is actually true in my book!

In the past height years, while running my company web platform, I've eliminated two major things: Microsoft and Java, the two over which I've lost sleep. The big winner is LAMP with P as in PHP, Python and Perl. The new kid on the block is Ruby on Rails, though I'm watching its hosting aspects like milk on the fire, for some of them remind me too much of Java in terms of bad code, memory leaks and resources consumption. I'm not enamored with Linux (especially not the Red Hat distro), and I'm eager to test this T2000 and Solaris 10 to see if they're up to some promises, so Sun's not completely out of the picture (my last Sun server, running Solaris 8, died last year). But in the near future, I'll have no Java on my web servers as long as I have better choices. Better meaning: more reliable, faster and less expensive to write, maintain, deploy and run.

P.S. Tim Bray has picked up a lot of good feedback and reflected it on his post. He labelled mine "satirical, funny", which is cool. I think I need to make clear that the above was written in the same spirit (or so I think) that Tim's piece, i.e. an admitted prejudice, certainly not an absolute truth, that's biased by one's experience. I'm very focused on hosting, i.e. running, dynamic sites in a shared environment where 1) I don't control what my "clients" upload and run on servers, 2) I must ensure everything runs smoothly 365/24/7 style, 3) costs must stay as low as possible (read: pack servers and make them sweat). I know how to do that with PHP, but not with Java. I don't pretend to know it all, but look around at the shared hosting world: how many do offer PHP vs Java at competitive prices? QED. One dirty truth is that one can write good or bad code in just any language, PHP is just more forgiving (or, er, "adapted") to that than Java in a shared hosting configuration with, say, average code from multiple developers that are, say, disparate in quality...

Roland Piquepaille has just published an interesting point of view on the economic weight of blogs. He pinged me among others writing that this will probably not bring him lots of friends, but he might be a little bit too cautious (what should I say about my predictions for blogs 2006, then). I mostly agree with him (some ideas need to be developed), though there is one sentence where I don't really see the point (or what it brings to the debate):

If we add similar programs — and the money made by Google and others — the global ad money generated by the blogosphere almost certainly doesn't exceed one billion dollars in one year.

If it's close to one billion dollars, I'd say "not too bad" (for Google that is ;-)).