evan zimmerman

There’s a conversation floating around at the moment surrounding the rise of web platform’ applications in contrast to client applications such as those that Apple and Microsoft have been focused on. Gmail likely prompted this, along with the flurry of upgrades to Yahoo, Hotmail and even Ask Jeeves that have followed in the wake of the Gmail Beta. It’s a very interesting discussion, and one that a non-developer can sink their teeth into as it focuses primarily on usage, rather than technology or protocols.

It’s becoming apparent (to me anyway) that even with a monopoly, MS may have a shaky future with it’s current business model. Why? Well, because it’s being contemplated. That may sound too simple, but for a very long time there was not a thought (outside of the big picture believing OSS community) given to the widely held assumption that it would be a Microsoft world for some time to come.

I’ve been noticing these things in part because, in configuring Gmail and my online data ‘world’, I’ve had opportunity to examine the services that are out there in direct contrast with what has come before: First, there was Yahoo!, the only company that offered a (nearly) complete online package of any reliability. Address book, calendar, mail. Even a bit of storage. It was, to my mind anyway, clunky—but it worked. Then a bit later came .Mac, the Apple service that began as iTools. All the same features, but for pay and tied to the Mac. Elegant, but pricey—it’s the Apple way.

Now, We’ve got Gmail. Address book, Mail and… what. Something. It’s obvious that all this isn’t for the IPO—Google is building an OS out of online, interconnected services. Next up, tools for Gmail (import utility perhaps, more robust address book, integration with Orkut) and then of course, the apps. IM almost certainly. An office suite? No one ever thought a web app could be as fast as Gmail is, and that’s the major point of online office skeptics.

And this leads to me (or the user, if you prefer). I mean, come on, it’s a weblog.So I’ve been aggregating email and contacts, shifting from service to service, long enough to know what apps export what (if anything—I’m looking at you Microsoft) and which import from where. What I’ve discovered is that safest place to keep that data, and the easiest to extract it from, is online services. Redundant backups. Access anywhere. Easy to move to a new computer, no matter what OS you choose. Yahoo has kindly kept my contacts, calendars and mail intact for more than 6 years now—for nothing.I don’t go to Yahoo more than a few times a year, but When Outlook and Windows collapsed repeatedly over the years, sacrificing much of my data to MS’s hubris, Yahoo was there. More recently, .Mac has been there (along with Mac stability, but that’s neither here nor there). Soon, Google will be there too. This is good, but what’s better is that the future looks bright for ease of use in the web app world. Gmail is fantastic (if you can get over the ads. It’s not hard.), but it’s power comes from the integration of what were once desktop features—things like autocompletion of email addresses, integrated search, and smoother (if not as deep) filtering than what is built into Mail.app or Outlook.It’s enough—it doesn’t have to be perfect because it has the added benefits of being a) free, and b) online, with all the things that come with that, mentioned above.

So now, for the first time, I have all of my email (from 3 websites and a number of personal accounts going back for years) passing through one location and as such being archived there. Even though I continue to use Mail.app on my powerbook, my archive is online because everything forwards (but is not removed from the server) to Gmail. Combine this with .Mac and iSync, and you have almost completely automated synchronized storage of contacts, documents, mail and calendars.What’s next?Well, if you compare the services that are now available online against those most commonly used by the hoi polloi (ie, non-power users), they match up almost perfectly—except for the office suite. Mail, Addresses, Cards, Games (non-3d, which is enough for most), Storage for mom’s recipes and a place toput photo albums. All that’s missing is a way to write mom’s recipes down.

For businesses, the result is the same so long as you add in spreadsheets and powerpoint. More and more companies are shifting to nodes that are server based—the desktop is essentially nothing but a processor and a network card—and the users don’t really even notice the difference. Is this a good thing? Depends on who you are. It’s great for content management, great for keeping costs down for businesses, bad for privacy, and higher exposure should something go wrong, since everything is online once an anomaly gets in. Physical access isn’t an issue any longer, for better and worse.It’ll be fascinating to see how each company addresses the trend. Microsoft will continue to fight it or redirect it (“the desktop is the future”); Google will quietly continue to seep into every part of online life, and increasingly, as the difference between online and offline blurs, into all computing life;

Yahoo, it appears at the moment anyway, will pursue Google, but my guess is they will begin to partner with someone before long, starting a flurry of partnerships from the other usual suspects.Eventually (in my estimation), we’ll have the online component of each partnered with an offline (read: hardware) component for those companies who can—Yahoo with HP, Google with Dell, MS with… themselves or maybe everyone, for example. We’ll have boxes that are integrated in various ways with other devices (stereo, car, phone) and a halo of online services backing them up, keeping them synched. Apple, I believe, will be the anomaly—and the leader—in this movement (along with Google, but from the opposite direction).

The upcoming preview of Tiger, the new Mac OS, is rumored to be more fully integrated with online services. The finder is expected to be updated. .Mac is long overdue for a refresh and deepening of services. And, the release of Airport Express is… odd. Synchronicity.All of these things point to a course shift away from broad usage devices (like iMacs) and toward specialization—Powerbooks for powerusers, Powermacs for professionals, eMacs for ‘nodes’ and… what.What’s the hole that these things point to—integration with online services, more metadata (new Finder) with online capability, and a device that pushes the data anywhere in the home? Hmm. I won’tsuggest specifics, but I will say it would need to have storage for photos and mom’s recipes, connection with television (Tivo-ized), and built-in wireless. Maybe a monitor. Maybe input devices —but not necessarily.Guess we’ll know soon enough.

The first ad I’ve yet seen in an syndicated feed, RSS or ATOM, brings up an interesting subject. It appeared just today (though I haven’t read the feed for a few days so who’s to say if it’s that recent) in a MacMerc feed, and was text only with a link. Presumably the site has simply added that info to their feed template, so it’s simple enough, but I imagine this is the start of what will be the norm for commercial sites in very short order.I had a conversation by email recently with the author of User Friendly over an image he’d been syndicating through a service that he didn’t approve of about just such a subject. The image was a bit of a visual F*ck You to readers who, for whatever reason, subscribed to the feed. Turns out, apparently this is an unauthorized version of his strip being scraped or otherwise pulled into feed format and sent out without his permission. His solution? Put up an image that accuses the user of wrongdoing. Now, I being the impulsive soul that I am sent a brief message suggesting that there might be a different way to look at this, and to his great credit, the author was actually open to a discussion.I had pulled the Tapestry feed in through a link from 0xDecaf ages ago, and not being a regular UserFriendly reader hadn’t even noticed for some time that the feed was bogus. When I did, I was startled, then annoyed – I hadn’t known, yet here the author was accusing me, not the feed service, of wrong doing. I don’t know if J.D. and Tapestry had discussed this at all – I’m guessing they did, but for whatever reason the feed is still out there, and still syndicating nothing, despite no benefit to either party. Weird.Regardless, J.D. wrote back with his take, which was what anyone would expect – it’s my work, how dare you question my motives, was the gist. I wrote back with my thoughts, and rather than take it for a troll he actually opened up a discussion. The end result was that we worked our way around to the idea that, were there a revenue stream to be had that could offset the bandwidth hit, he would certainly consider it. I recommended ads in the feed itself, not having actually seen them and of course, not being a developer myself, imagining that it was probably a snap to do Since then (at least, it came to my attention since then), it appears he’s started an ‘authorized’ feed of the strip, which is gratifying – I wouldn’t be reading it if it weren’t syndicated, so he’s gained a reader. But, it still doesn’t pay his bills or keep his publisher happy; ads might do just that however.When asked for details about the suggestion that he syndicate ads, I demurred, not knowing the details of such a project. I recommended he take a look at Atom, and referred him over to local guru and lightning rod extraordinaire Mark Pilgrim for questions. Mark’s pretty open in my limited experience, but who knows if Illiad ever actually did write him.Now that I’ve seen my first ad roll across the feeds, it’ll be interesting to see how quickly it catches on. I’m guessing it’ll be an exponential adoption rate and before long we’ll see Google Ads between entries. That begs the question though – can RSS handle that? It doesn’t appear to carry much more than simple text “ads” with links from where I’m sitting. Can Atom? I don’t know, but we’ll find out I suppose.Update: Now MacMinute is in on it. They’ve probably had theirs on for awhile too… but there seems to be a trend here. Feeds with ads much originate from urls that begin m-a-c…

Hours spent in vehicle driving from place to place: 32.5

Number of days over which travel occured: 4

Average Hours per day: 8.125

Number of deer consumed: .5

Number of pigs: .25

Number of turkeys that normally would have been consumed but lived to fight another day this year: 1

Number of holiday skits watched: 1

Subject of holiday skit: Santa is lazy and Rudolph the long-nosed reindeer must convince him that it’s worth it to get off his ass and bring Christmas.Number of holiday songs sung: ~5

Number of dogs in insta-pack at relative’s home once everyone had brought theirs: 4

Number of cats: 1

Weight of cat: freakin’ huge

Chances cat had: 0 (…but he made it to the cellar and wasn’t seen again)

Number of days without net access: 4

Number of days before becoming anxious about lack of access: .5

Unhealthiness of this fact: currently being avoided

Number of days after holiday travel that move to new home began: .5

Number of days after holiday travel before returning to work: 1.5

Completeness of move to new home: maybe 15%

Number of gifts given: lots

Number of gifts received: plenty

Number of times the word “love” used: many. We like each other.

Number of days until next holiday season starts: ~350

Number of days until ready for next holiday season: are we ever really ready?

Everytime I look in on one of these discussions (Update: Scoble changed comment systems and in doing deleted all comments.), I have this imaginary vision of what it would look like, were it in the physical world rather than the digital one:I see a boy, standing in the middle of a large room with a whiffle ball bat. There is an elevated area in the middle of the room, and there are other people standing around the room, some in conversation, some alone. None can be heard really well except when standing on the elevated area, however, where their voices carry to everyone else at once.Occassionally one person will walk up, speak their peace, and walk to the side a bit to listen to what follows. Sometimes the boy with the bat jumps up and down ecstatically at what he hears. Sometimes, when the person whose spoken has said something he doesn’t like, the boy runs over and whacks him repeatedly with the whiffle ball bat. It doesn’t hurt. It’s more of an annoyance. Rarely does he let anyone converse calmly.I can’t be sure, but the sense is that the people along the edge of the room decide it’s not really worth the trouble. They can contentedly speak amongst themselves and get more done without having to be swatted at. So they talk amongst themselves, but then they are quickly accused of keeping secrets and told they must speak to everyone if they speak at all.Sometimes, the elevated area is empty save for the boy with the bat, at which point the boy lays down the bat, begins to sob a bit, and pleads for those around the room to come up and say something, anything, where he can hear it.After awhile, someone looks at the boy, smiles, and begins to walk toward the center to speak. That’s when the boy slowly leans down and picks up the bat again.

The words are everywhere in the towns closest to U.S military bases. M & I drove down to a wedding at Camp Lejeune near Jacksonville, NC, and as we approached we saw a marked increase in the number of yellow ribbons and “Support Our Troops” signs on local businesses. The wedding was at the Officer’s Club on base, not exactly a neutral sort of setting, and as such I was apprehensive about the conversation subjects that might arise. I’m not a supporter of our president’s choices of late, but believe we’ve taken steps that cannot be taken back and must follow through at this point, so I was concerned that the subject would come up and I would feel forced to voice an opinion that would most certainly not be popular.That didn’t happen. What did happen was a realization.We walked into the reception and among the first soldiers I spoke to – there were few there who weren’t either solidiers or their families – had relatively severe damage to his neck and upper chest, presumably from shrapnel. He spoke with the harsh gravelly tone of a healing neck wound. We greeted one another briefly and moved on, but the moment lingered for the remainder of the evening. During the ceremony the Chaplain had inextricably connected the couple with the corps. At the toast the Captain whose wedding it was reminded us of the importance of family, even as he lauded the young men who had served in his tank with him in the recent war. All of this energized my values and reasons for opposing the president, not because I oppose the work that the armed forces are doing now, but because I oppose the reasons given for endangering them in the first place.Though there are numerous attempts to rewrite history and put different words in the president’s mouth of late, the truth is the reasons stated for the country to go to war were not backed up by facts. We’re there for reasons other than those stated originally, and while we might debate one another’s opinions about the real reasons, the reality is we just don’t know. But that doesn’t mitigate the fact that soldiers are dying, and that they don’t deserve to, and aren’t being told why.Here, at home, we hear bluster about “patriotism” and lack of it when dissention is voiced, but that’s what these young men and women are fighting for – our right to speak, our freedom. The young captain with permanent scars and dead friends still fresh in his mind fights and serves so that I might be able to engage in freedom of speech. It’s frightening, really, that so many conservatives attack when they hear dissent, yet turn around and speak of freedom in the next breath. Dissent is freedom. I dissent because I respect and feel proud of those Marines, their choices, and their lives – that’s why I disagree so strongly when they are lied to, sent into danger unjustly, and then used as political pawns. It’s a tragedy that we often lose sight of, safe in our freedom here at home.