The Mobile Discussion Originally uploaded by R.J. Friedlander. While I’m posting images from San Francisco week, here’s me at the Web 2.0 panel (“The Mobile Discussion”) with Om Malik and Ansi Vanjoki from Nokia. I’m saying “this is the future calling” right after Anssi talked about running Bittorrent on his N93. Om’s thinking “Why do I always get stuck with the weird ones?”
Don’t worry, I am not trying to define another “2.0ism.” However, I attended an event earlier in the week at which the term Enterprise 2.0 was defined by a speaker, but the definition he gave stuck me as more like “Intranets 1.0” — that is, knowledge management tools applied to the enterprise space. Yes — corporates have been trying to get better about knowledge management for years — why is Enterprise 2.0 any different? It strikes me that Enterprise 2.0 will actually be tools and applications that run on the Web and are made available to knowledge workers through the browser. These applications will enable all kinds of knowledge sharing and office automation but totally free to the corporate and funded by ads. This model totally undercuts the traditional IT software / services providers and empowers the workforce to self-organize and use the tools that best fit their unit / group / activity. Of course, savvy knowledge workers are already doing this — using IM to conduct business against corporate IT policies, or using Google docs & spreadsheets to collaborate between different office locations. When these applications really do become as powerful as their desktop and enterprise-network-bound equivalents and when CIOs and CFOs wake up to this fact that and realize the whole corporate IT and enterprise applications ecosystem has suddenly become irrelevant, that will be Enterprise 2.0. Just my €.02.
Google Docs (née “Writely”) and Spreadsheets have graduated. Two weeks ago, Google quietly moved Google Spreadsheets and the newly christened Google Docs over from one side of the Google Labs page to the other (the “graduated” products). No big announcement , and the products remain tagged as Beta (but what isn’t these days?). I’ve been using Google Spreadsheets for a few months now, as a simple issue/action-tracking tool for one project and as a means to track sponsorships for the mobile2.0 event I’ve been organizing. When I first heard about Google Spreadsheets, I remember shrugging my shoulders. Sure, it was a cool idea to run a spreadsheet inside the browser and it showed off Google’s Ajax mojo, but what, really, was the point? Excepting the cool factor, why would I ever use this instead of good old trusty Excel? My “ah ha” moment came when I discovered the powerful collaboration features. The ability for multiple contributors to collaborate on the same spreadsheet a the same time and view each others’ work in near-real-time, using nothing but an off-the-shelf browser is a quantum leap. In the case of mobile2.0, it’s enabled me to quickly collaborate with partners distributed in different time zones and to be sure that we’re all looking at the same information at the same time. This is the kind of collaboration the Internet was built to support, but somehow the big IT vendors have not been able to bring it to us. But what does any of this have to do with widgets? At …
You know — I used to be the kind of guy who sneered at people who said things like “Web 2.0” or “whatever 2.0.” I still am. I am not by nature a joiner. For the longest time in the mid-nineties I resisted using the indefinite article in front of the word email (as in “I’ll send you an email.”) I still believe the word email is not a singular noun. “I’ll send you email” is correct. “I’ll send you an email” is incorrect. I always have to apologize in advance if I use the word “leverage” or “synergy” in a meeting. I have always found jargon fascinating, in that using jargon tends to shut people out – to create exclusive clubs. I prefer inclusive modes of working and I believe that in general it’s worth the time to explain yourself in plain language rather than using jargon. So anyway, when I first heard this term “Web 2.0” I thought “what a load of crap.” But then when I read the article and heard a few presentations and started to talk to people about it, the term clicked. And it has clicked with enough people that it’s become a useful way to talk about a set of topics in one breath. I still think it’s a bit silly and when I use it, I do so with a dash of irony, but I do use it. Aside from “Web 2.0” people have not started adding 2.0 to anything to make a point that that thing has …
Wow! So now in addition to the mobile2.0 I’ve been organizing on the 6th of November, it looks like I’ll also be on a panel entitled “The Mobile Discussion” at the Web 2.0 conference on the 7th. Looks like it’s going to be quite an exciting week. I’m not quite sure what brought about this change of heart on behalf of the O’Reilly folks, but I’m really glad to see them bringing some mobile focus and interest into the event. Of course, to get the full scoop on the future of the mobile platform, you really need to come to mobile2.0 the day before. Luckily, the cost of mobile2.0 is only $45 so if you’ve already splashed out for Web 2.0 you won’t need to spend much more to attend mobile 2.0 as well.
Here’s an interesting article on the unintended consequences of social networking. Basically, it is reported that the NSA is snooping social networking sites (with the juicy twist that it plans to do so using Semantic Web technology – more on that later). This seems to fit into the category of “examples of why it’s important to have some kind of user-controlled trust / privacy layer in the fabric of the Web.” Who should be able to see information you put online (including your links to others and the nature of these links) and who shouldn’t? P3P addressed some of these issues but it was never widely adopted. Liberty Alliance has built some interesting technology standards around federated identity, but they are not user-centric, they are provider-centric and they do not really cover privacy. An interesting effort called Dix seems to blend the two approaches, but after a quick read of some of their use cases, it doesn’t seem that they cover “prevent the government from snooping my network.” Or is laying ourselves open to government surveillance the price we pay for living more of our lives in the digital realm? Discuss! By the way, on the whole Semantic Web issue, I think the link they are drawing in this article is tenuous at best, but it is true that the Semantic Web architecture is likewise lacking a coherent identity and trust mechanism.
The experience my kids (2 and 4) have of media is radically different from my experience when I was growing up. Of course, they clamor to watch certain programs and it’s always a challenge to balance the “right” amount of television with their wants, what’s good for them, and the temptation that television can have for exhausted parents who just need some down time. But what’s different is what these kids expect from media. Of course, they want to watch what they want when they want — which is enabled by video-on-demand from Homechoice for us, but they’re also just as likely to want to play (Web-based) computer games associated with the characters they like (like Dora games on NickJr., Sesame Street or Teletubbies) as to want to passively sit there and watch things. In the case of Sesame street, this is rarely seen on UK TV so most of their knowledge of these characters is actually through the Sesame street Web site. Many of these sites also let them stream video clips. So they are beginning to “curate” their own experience of media in much the same way that adults are. They are demanding more from their media. And why not? Why sit there and passively watch Teletubbies when you can go play an interactive Teletubby game with lots of direct feedback?
So if you look at the New York skyline on Google Maps or Google Earth, it becomes aparant how some of these images are stitched together from different satellites. In particular, bits of Manhattan seem to have been taken at different angles. So if you zoom down on 50th street and 5th avenue, for instance, part of the map seems to bend upwards in an Escher-like fashion so that it looks like a huge office tower is looming alarmingly over St. Paul’s cathedral. Now I haven’t lived in New York for a while, but I’m fairly sure the buildings are mostly parallel to each other – unless there’s been a wave of postmodern architecture. The effect is actually very disturbing.
So I wrote a Wikipedia entry on – what else – the Mobile Web using – what else – the Mobile Web! Check it out and contribute to fleshing it out. The original entry was composed on a Nokia N70 using the Opera browser. The amazing thing was that it was possible – just. The text field on Opera was really buggy and couldn’t hold much text and the whole process of logging in was really cumbersome. Still, it’s a step. The entry itself was written partially out of a need to put a stake in the ground around the term “mobile Web.” Some have taken this to mean “a separate web for mobile devices” but the meaning taken in the majority of use (including the definition we are using in the W3C Mobile Web Initiative) is the use of the Web (cap W) on mobile devices.
This is cool — a blogger widget. How “Web 2.0” is that? Very. If only there were a “mashup” involved in some way…