1. Idea
2. Implementation: Hotties for Obama.com
3. Launch

For bonus points, link to your new website, using link text with sensible keywords, from a domain that already has high PageRank. You know, like I'm doing right now.

Do you remember when iTunes was actually a descriptive name for that program? Introduced to the world on January 9th, 2001, it was a Mac-only media playing application that did MP3s and a few other formats that nobody cared about, including Apple's soon to be obsolete DRM format. It had a cute, elegant interface and some nice features like smart playlists and some relatively clever algorithms which would organize the files in your music collection for you. It also managed syncing these files to your iPod.

Now here's iTunes' current primary feature set:

• iPod sync manager
• MP3 player
• Video player
• AirTunes broadcaster
• MP3 store
• Video rental store
• Podcast tracker
• Mobile phone activation and backup repository
• Contacts manager
• Photo sync manager
• Ringtone store
• Application store
• Application backup repository

Most of these "features" could be -- and most are -- the sole focus of other standalone applications. Apple's ability to combine all of them into a single application is either a triumph or a tragedy, and I'm beginning to lean towards the latter.

Firstly, these functions have increasingly less to do with each other. Yes, I know the iPhone is also an iPod, but that's really a sub-feature of what is primarily a portable web device, PDA and phone, in that order. I would love to see an iPhone application, freed of the jail of having to pretend to be a music player: it could properly expose my contacts list, and concentrate properly on application search and discovery. The current situation where the application store is a subsection of the iTunes Music Store is patently insane: when do you ever, ever search for a single search term that would be equally valid as an application name or a song, or vice versa? Why are the photo syncing features of the iPhone -- which is also a camera, remember -- so rudimentary? Yes, I know on OS X it syncs with iPhoto: more than 75% of iTunes users are Windows users, so that's not an acceptable answer.

Secondly, the self-evident bloat of this feature set aside, Apple is beginning to use the ubiquity -- nay, the tyranny -- of iTunes to bundle in other software. It can reasonably explain the presence of Quicktime with every iTunes install, Quicktime being the engine that plays music and videos for iTunes. But why is Safari in there? I guess you had to include the KHTML engine to render the music store, but suddenly installing a completely unrelated application on users' machines under the pretext of a software update sounds like another company we know, one that got into a certain amount of trouble for doing so.

Bundling ever-more functionality into iTunes was initially a clever shortcut that has now become a major design mistake that Apple, gods of UI, have been getting a free pass on for too long. It's time to refactor, and end the tyranny of iTunes.

On the ongoing Russia-Georgia conflict (don't call it a war!):

Ed: i mean, I hate russia too
and I think that this is a very bad development
but I am not at all convinced that we should be getting into a shooting war with the Russians.
war with russians never turns out well for anyone
laurie: Yes, that went badly last time.
Ed: surely we've learned that much
laurie: Also, it went on forever
Who has two decades to waste on a national pissing match now?
We all need to unite, and gang up on china.

It struck me the other day as strange that even today, the vast majority of web startups come out of the Bay Area. Cities like London and New York, which have no shortage of similarly smart, young, ambitious, tech-oriented people, produce orders of magnitude fewer startups. Why, in a world of instant, easy telecommunication, is your physical presence in the bay apparently stil essential?

My theory is that it's because you don't come up with ideas on your own. In fact, you don't come up with ideas at all. Ideas are accidents. Creativity is the process of creating new connections between disparate inputs. Working on your own, your inputs come from what you read. That can produce some creativity, but what you read is largely self-selected or at least filtered by your choice of blogs and news outlets.

Conversations produce accidental ideas. It's one of the most striking things about a conversation between two clever people: they nearly always end up creating new information -- even if it's just a joke -- rather than merely exchanging it. And in the bay, sheer density of geeks means there are more conversations between geeks, which means more happy accidents.

In other words, the bay area isn't necessary to run your startup -- all of that can, indeed, be successfully done remotely these days. The bay is necessary to get your idea in the first place. It's not because the people who live in the bay are unusually creative, it's because there are unusually large numbers of creative people in the bay. No matter how clever and plugged-in you are, you can't duplicate on your own the effect of constantly talking to hundreds of other smart, technical people, which is the social life (of geeks, at least) in the bay.

Which is sort of why I'm here.

I've been whining to quite a lot of people about my vision over the last year. If you've been wondering what's up with that, read on. Most other people should stop now.

Over the last 18-24 months my vision has massively deteriorated. A slight extra glow to streetlights at the end of a long night was my first indicator -- rather like the glow you get when it's a bit foggy. This slowly became a glowing halo around all lights at night, then lights during the day, and now anything light-coloured. Light text on a dark background -- the default terminal screen in a UNIX environment -- is completely unreadable to me; I have to change to a lower-contrast colour scheme. Credit sequences in movies are similarly unreadable, and dark scenes in general are becoming harder and harder. At night, my vision has become an increasingly indistinguishable mess of overlapping, glowing blobs which has significantly decreased my enthusiasm for going out at night.

I have obviously been trying very hard to work out what is going wrong. A succession of opticians have examined my eyes and found them completely healthy in every way they can measure -- my prescription remains the same: in bright light, everything is perfectly clear. The pressure inside the eyes, the pattern of tear distribution, the surfaces of my corneas and my retinas are all healthy and unchanged. Listening to my symptoms they pronounced "dry eyes", and so a succession of eye drops, gels, heat packs and oil pills have been tried, all to no apparent effect.

As the deterioration continued unchecked, I began to press my opticians to try harder. This led to further tests, all still good, and questions, aimed -- subtly -- at determining whether there might be a neurological cause, i.e. something like a brain tumor. Finally, yesterday, I got an answer: "spherical aberration". A very precise map of the surfaces of my eyes show that they are microscopically flattened at the front. This type of flattening used to be a common side effect of lasik surgery, and in fact it was a lasik clinic where I got the tests done.

This answer, while heartening -- the lack of any other probable cause had me really quite worried about the tumor option -- is also very dissatisfactory. There is no treatment for having flat eyes. You apparently just "get used to it". The other odd factor is the sudden onset -- your eyes are either flat or they aren't; they aren't supposed to suddenly get flat, or at least not this quickly. The lasik doctor said, however, that eyes do change shape in your mid-twenties, so it was not entirely unheard of.

While unsatisfactory, I guess this explanation will have to do. At least there is something they can point at, and I will keep -- ha -- an eye on the situation.

Origin of title

The problem: I like to Twitter shortened URLs quickly, but I prefer RURL to TinyURL (because it's shorter!).

The solution: this bookmarklet! Drag this "RURL" link to your browser's bookmarks bar. Clicking it will take you to the RURL site, giving you the tiny version of your current page.

So last week Google launched Google Knol, which TechCrunch described as a monetizable Wikipedia. That's a pretty good description. Unlike Wikipedia, each page has exactly one author, and multiple authors can create competing Knols on the same topic -- so Knols are based on competition, rather than cooperation, as Wikipedia is.

But Knol is really something more profound and a lot more worrying. It became clear quite quickly that Knol has ridiculous levels of PageRank, the Google juice that gets you listed first in searches. Within a few days of launch, a page created on Knol took just hours to out-rank a long-standing page that Google itself declared to be identical, from a highly-ranked, long-existing domain. PageRank isn't supposed to work that way, and it doesn't work that way for anybody else.

Jason Calcanis (of Wikipedia/Knol competitor Mahalo) put it excellently today when he said that Google is becoming a content company:

I've always seen Google as the modern day operating system, and our job to work within their framework. ... Their operating system is search results, and About.com, HowThingsWork.com, digg.com, NYTimes.com, Engadget.com, etc. are all applications in that operating system. Our job is to create the best possible products that operate -- aka rank -- as well as possible with Google's OS.

That's an excellent analogy, and a telling one. Knol is a content application in the Internet operating system created and owned by Google. When the company that controls the operating system creates an application, and favours its own application over identical applications by other companies... well, it sounds a lot like abuse of power. More dangerously, when the maker of that operating system has massive 68% market share and growing, it becomes abuse of monopoly. It also sounds pretty startlingly similar to another antitrust case I remember.

The rapidly growing consensus amongst content creators is that Knol is a step too far. The company whose mission is to "organize the world's information" is straying into "monetizing the world's information", and in the process they are damaging competitors who were doing it better (Wikipedia) or at least just as well (Mahalo).

A little over a year ago, when Google bought DoubleClick, I said:

...now the corner has been turned, and a move that makes more money despite annoying and hassling end-users has been deemed Googly. Any number of dirty tricks -- and with market power like Google's, there are a lot of dirty tricks it can pull -- are now fair game. This will, inevitably, lead to them doing something to improve Google's bottom line at the expense of your Internet experience. Goodbye, non-evil Google. It was nice knowing you.

And now you have it: Google is stealing traffic from other websites with identical or better information, and making money from the theft. There's no way to wriggle out of it: Google, this is evil. Stop.

This is all Hulu's fault. Daily episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are entertaining but you, dear readers, are the ones who suffer.

Console yourselves with the tales of John McCain's worst week ever. Having goaded Obama into making a global tour in the hopes of his "foreign policy inexperience" leading to a major gaffe, it turns out that everybody in the world loves Obama. Especially the Iraqi prime minister, who endorsed Obama's plans to withdraw from Iraq. And you know who really loves Obama? The disproportionately black US military, that's who. Especially when he tries out their basketball court and sinks a 3-pointer on the first try. Talk about unnecessarily good.

McCain, meanwhile, stayed at home and did all the foreign-policy flubbing instead. He referred to Russia's relationship with Czechoslovakia, a country that ceased to exist back in 1992, a mistake he's been making since the 2000 campaign. He also referred to the Iraq/Pakistan border. It may be that he's being incredibly clever here, and he was subtly referring to Iran, which is what actually lies between Iraq and Pakistan, but it's a lot more likely that he's just old.

The icing on McCain's week was probably his plan to upstage Obama's speech in Berlin by having a press conference about opening up offshore oil drilling in the US with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, on an oil rig near New Orleans. McCain claims offshore drilling will have an immediate impact on gas prices (even though the experts say the impact will not be felt until 2030 and will be "insignificant") and also that it is "safe enough these days". However, the campaign cancelled the conference, blaming it on nearby Hurricane Dolly -- but the more likely reason is that an oil tanker has collided with a barge, causing a massive oil spill just outside New Orleans.

This election is beginning to look like a walkover.

Ten(ish) days in Barbados, baby. See you when I get back!

In part 1 I explained what we have right now: social networks and crowd processors. I then expanded on the future of social networks. Now let's talk about the future of crowd processors, which I called "social software" before. To be more usefully specific, let's give this software its own name:

Social processor

Software the creates value for its users by utilizing their social networks.

Social processors are combinations of the two existing types of social software, social networks and crowd processors. This solves two problems:

1. Social networks don't do anything. They collect data about your social graph and then... nothing.*
2. Crowd processors (see previous post) do a lot of processing, but their recommendations often throw up combinations that are strange or impersonal.

How crowd processors work

Crowd processors do a ton of processing on all their members to calculate recommendations of various types. They take two approaches:

1. calculate global recommendations, e.g. the Amazon Best Sellers list: the first-pass approach, this quickly begins to fall down as membership grows, since you get a "lowest common denominator" effect: your food network begins to recommend McDonald's, your music network recommends you try Justin Timberlake, and Amazon recommends whatever Oprah is reading this week. This is an equivalent to the social paralysis problem in social networks: only the stuff that offends no-one can be recommended to everybody.
2. calculate similarity recommendations, e.g. Amazon's "customers who bought X also bought Y": this is the current standard approach, and involve 4 steps:
   • look at everything you've said you like, A
   • find the people, B, who also like A
   • find all the other things, C, that people in B like
   • from C, subtract the things that everybody likes, to get distinctive results
   The last step can vary a lot in sophistication, and that determines how good the application is at recommending stuff that's really related to you. This is the tricky part, and it's seldom perfect.

What will social processors do?

The problem with both approaches taken by crowd processors is that they are an approximation to the real world. In the real world, you discover things you like from your friends, and the more of your friends who like something, the more likely you are to hear about it. Equally important, the closer you are to somebody -- the stronger your connection -- the more likely you are to be interested in their recommendations.

Therefore, social processors will use the data about your social connections -- gleaned from an existing social network, not a new one -- to calculate recommendations from your social circle, and only your social circle. A partial example of this is GoodRec, who can recommend things based only on your friends' recommendations. Although they currently require you to create a new friend network (or guess one inaccurately from your GMail address book), they could easily get it from, say, MySpace's Data Availability program (assuming your friends are on mySpace).

Why is this so much better?

Think recommendations only from people you already know sounds a little limiting? Far from it. This is how the world already works. Your taste in food is based on what people have fed you, or eaten around you. Your taste in clothes is based, even if only subconsciously, on what the people you interact with daily are wearing. The same is true for books, movies, music, even political ideology. The difference between this way and a crowd processor's way is no false positives. Have eclectic taste in friends? Then you'll get wacky recommendations. Are your friends adventurous musically? Then chances are you are too, and you'll get their new stuff. The fundamental point here is that you are like your friends. That's why they're your friends. And the humans work, the longer you know your friends and the closer you are to them, the more like them you become.

But if this is how the world works now, why bother with software at all? Because in the real world, communication of preferences and interests and consumption is ad-hoc and incomplete. You don't start every conversation with everybody you know by asking them for an exhaustive list of the TV, movies, music and books they're consuming and their opinions of each -- although each of these things are popular topics of conversation. You can get the network to do the work for you, and when that happens, new things that are popular will spread incredibly quickly.

This is why it's important that social processors not attempt to create their own networks to work with. The network it uses has to be complete and detailed, with nuances such as lengths of friendships** and frequency of interaction (do you exchange messages all the time? Then you're probably close). It's not just tiresome to do this over and over, it's a critical stumbling block. Social data is a key part of recommendations, and if you have crappy data you'll get crappy results. It is essential that a social processor use real, accurate, detailed data.

Okay smartypants, so what does it all mean?

So if this is where social software is going to go, how do we jump on the bandwagon and make money? If I knew, I'd be doing it already, I guess, but some general tactics that I think seem promising are:

• Build a social network: by far the riskiest approach, as this space is approaching saturation. Unless you've got a really, really good user interface and a much more detailed social graph that would make you simultaneously more attractive to users and developers, this is probably unlikely to work.
• Build on top of a social network: this is the next-best thing. For the love of god, if you've got social software that you're building right now, please do not demand that I "create my profile" and "invite my friends". I've done that a thousand times. Let me enter my Facebook or MySpace credentials and get that information from them.
• Again with the interoperability: even better, build on top of every social network. And since that involves a lot of implementation, I repeat my conclusion from the first half: the people who crack making social networks interoperable will make money hand over fist.

* MySpace attempts to solve this by being about music. Facebook attempts to solve it by introducing Facebook Apps, but it turns out they're mainly about wasting time, because nobody wants to run a business inside of Facebook.

** Ever wonder why Facebook asks you when you met somebody?