Changing Way

Data Portability is the option to use your personal data between trusted applications and vendors. That’s not as clear as it should be, but it does imply that you own the data, the option to use it, and the decisions about trust.

So what options do vendors have? According to Mike Arrington, they can make announcements about Data Portability while fighting for control of your data, so that Data Portability is the new walled garden.

You can get a more concrete and interactive view of vendor options by playing the game hosted at ReadWriteWeb:

you can choose to play the role of any of 5 different players: Google, MySpace, Microsoft, the Data Portability Project, or Facebook. You can then predict what will happen, or voice your opinion about what should happen. Or both.

These players will no doubt make further moves next week. More then.

Do you want to win a HP HDX Dragon Entertainment Notebook? There is, or has been, a chance to do so every day this month, thanks to HP, its 31 Days of the Dragon promotion, and the participating web sites. Each day, a different site hosts a contest.

Today it’s the turn of last100. To enter, leave a comment there (not here, I have no prizes to give out) “listing your top five digital lifestyle products and/or services.”

I found it difficult to pick just five. Then I reflected that there are satisfactory substitutes for many of the products and services I use. For example, I use Google search and Reader a lot, but wouldn’t be too upset if I had to switch to competing products.

In contrast, here are five products to which I’m attached in one way or another.

• WordPress: this blog lives at WordPress.com.
• Rhapsody streaming music.
• Flickr: here’s my photostream (or at least the public part of it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog or its feed, and like looking at photos of kids, please drop me an email).
• Canon PowerShot A540 6MP Digital Camera.
• Sandisk Sansa Clip 1GB MP3 player.

Each of the first three is a software product for which I pay, even in this age of free stuff. For example, I have a Pro account at Flickr. That is of course where the photo lives. It shows the Sansa clip, along with its friends, the ridiculously good value Koss KSC75 headphones.

One of the most interesting aspects of free/open source software is its relationship with end users, which for the purpose of this post I’ll define as users who are not also developers. Paul Young of Product Beautiful presents an thought-provoking case.

Open source developers have created products so good, that they are nearly indistinguishable to an end user from commercial software. This has changed the mindset and expectations of users to think that they are the persona that the developer is writing code for, but are they? Some applications, such as Firefox, have made the leap and are clearly developing for an end user. For an example of a FOSS project that hasn’t, look no further than Pidgin… a free and open source instant messaging (IM) client… Obviously, there is a huge gap between the expectations of the users and the developers. Who normally bridges that gap? Product Management.

As a once (and future?) product manager, I found Paul’s post particularly interesting. The comments are also good, including the ones that pointed out that Vista has a product management and a gap separating it from its users.

Perhaps there could be some sort of certification of free/open source projects. Some could wear the badge: our users are our customers (e.g., Firefox). Others could wear: our users are us, the developers, and others with the same tastes (e.g., Pidgin?).

I saw Paul’s post via Matt Asay’s Open Road blog. I find it strange that a blog about openness has a partial feed, rather than a full feed, and requires registration for comments. In other words, it’s more like Pidgin than Firefox. And so, with some sadness, I’ll unsubscribe from it.

The term vertical platform sounds like an oxymoron, or, at the very least, like a difficult thing to stand on unless you’re a gecko lizard. But I found myself using it when posting about Pikiware yesterday to describe something that’s going on right now.

Let’s briefly revisit the “What is Web 2.0?” discussion and recall two good answers:

• The web as platform, i.e., if you want to build software, build it for the web and the browser, rather than for any specific hardware and operating system.
• User-generated content, or the read/write web, or the web as Sir Tim originally intended it.

One of the features of Web 2.rightnow is the web as a platform for platforms. For example, if you want to build a social network, you should consider as your platform, not the web itself, but a platform built on the web. Here’s how the folks at Ning describe their offering.

Ning offers the latest social networking features, all infinitely customizable to meet your unique needs. The Ning Platform makes this possible… your social network on Ning runs on a programmable platform.

Then there’s Bricabox, has been described as Ning for content, the above-mentioned Pikiware, more that I haven’t mentioned, and, I’m sure, more vertical platforms to come.

Thanks to Masato Ohta for making available the vertical photo of a platform at Koga station.

I didn’t know that May 1 was RSS Awareness Day until I saw the relevant strip of Interduct Duct Tape.

What does RSS stand for? Follow the links above to find the official answer. For me, the best answer is: Relatively Simple Subscription. RSS allows you to subscribe to web content, that is, to receive the content in the comfort of your own browser without having to schlep round each and every site you want to check on.

If you want to print t-shirts using designs provided by others, take a look at Pikiware. Mashable Mark describes it as a company providing a fulfillment system designed to work with digital garment printers.

Let’s broaden the appeal of this post. Following this paragraph, there will be a t-shirt para, then a Web 2.rightnow para! And Pikiware isn’t just for t-shirt printers, it’s also for people who print hoodies! and mugs! etc!

If you’re reading this because you’re interested in t-shirts, then you might be interested to know that April 28 was the (IMHO) best shirt release Monday at Threadless for a while. My favorite of the new crop is “Attack of Literacy!”

If you’re reading this because you follow web stuff, then the point of this post is that Pikiware is the latest example of the platform trend. If Web 2.0 was about user-generated content and the web as platform, then Web 2.rightnow is about vertical platforms: platforms to enable others to build particular things on the web.

Hey, that oxymoron, vertical platform, deserves its own post.

Mashable Kristen seems positively giddy over the news.

Even before Google acquired Feedburner last year, integration of Google ads into Feedburner feeds was an exploratory wonderment that many wanted to blossom into fruition.

I see ads as weeds rather than flowers. I won’t be planting any in my feeds. If I were the polling type, I would ask: what’s more annoying, a partial feed, or a feed with ads?

Fred Wilson puts the difference at $14.8B - if we take “the publicly available information about the most recent financings of the two companies ($15bn for Facebook and $200mm for Automattic)” to provide good measures of the respective company’s values. But Fred isn’t any more impressed with that measurement that I am.

I think that some aspects of Fred’s post could use clarification. I’ll continue the job of clarification started in a comment by Jeff Jarvis. I’ll also plug some of my own writing about WordPress.

After quoting the funny money numbers, Fred moves on to a chart of unique visitors to Facebook and to “WordPress.” Jeff’s clarification is that the WordPress line in that chart almost certainly refers to the site WordPress.com, and that many WordPress blogs are hosted elsewhere. Jeff also remarks that WordPress is a platform, not a social network.

We need to be clear about three different but related entities.

• WordPress is free/open source software. It can be downloaded from WordPress.org.
• Automattic is the privately-held firm founded by Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer of WordPress.
• WordPress.com is a host for WordPress blogs. It is owned by Automattic; it is not the firm’s only project.

Comparing unique visitors at Facebook.com and at WordPress.com is comparing an apple with an orange. Automattic has other oranges in its bag, and hence has other revenue streams. If we want to compare the $ values of Facebook and Automattic, we should look at all the oranges in Automattic’s bag, and not just at WordPress.com.

Having noted the clarification in Jeff’s comment, I’d like to follow up on another statement from the same comment: “WordPress is not a network. WordPress is a platform.” That’s mostly true, but it ignores a couple of important points.

First, WordPress has several of the ingredients of a social network. Consider, for example, Diso: “an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of… social networking concepts… first target is WordPress, bootstrapping on existing work and building out from there.” I’ve added emphasis to show that Chris Messina and his buddies consider WordPress a good starting point for an open, standards-based social network.

Second, WordPress.com has several network-like features. Once signed on to WordPress.com, you can leave comments on other blogs hosted there (including this one) without having to provide further identity. There are WordPress.com-wide tag and category pages; as an example, here’s the page for the tag automattic.

One of the things that makes Automattic interesting is that it’s in the business of making money from free software. If you share my interest in this aspect of Automattic, you might want to check out my series of posts on it. It starts with this introduction. The most successful post in the series (indeed, on this blog) is the one on making money from WordPress.com.

I don’t attempt to put a $ value on Automattic. I am convinced that its $ value does not lag that of Facebook by many billions of dollars. I think that Fred Wilson shares my conviction. I wonder if he attempted to get his VC firm, Union Square Ventures, a piece of the Automattic action. Earlier this year, Automattic got a $29.5M round of funding.

Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb provocatively asserts that Real People Don’t Have Time for Social Media. In doing so, she addresses a question posed by Nina Simon of Museum 2.0: 08 How Much Time Does Web 2.0 Take? Each post is thoughtful, and has drawn good comments.

Although both posts are about social media and the time it takes, they address very different aspects. Nina’s post is about depth of involvement, while Sarah’s is about breadth. Nina identifies three levels of involvement: participant (1-5 hours/week), content provider (5-10), community director (10-20).

Sarah starts her post by identifying two broad levels of involvement.

Let’s be honest here: we’re all a bunch of social media addicts. We’re junkies. Whether it’s a new Twitter app, a new Facebook feature, or a new social anything service, we’re all over it. But we may not be the norm. The truth is, being involved in social media takes time, something that most people don’t have a lot of. So how can regular folk get involved with social media? And how much time does it really take?

One of the differences between “us” and regular folk is that, when it comes to social media tools (Twitter and clients for it, the BlogIt Facebook application) we try out new stuff, and are inclined to switch if the new stuff is better. In choosing tools, we maximize: we want the best, and are willing to spend time to become aware of it, to explore it, and to switch to it.

Real people, on the other hand, satisfice. Satisficing is a decision-making strategy which attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than to identify an optimal solution. People, real or otherwise, satisfice most of the time.

In the social media context, real people may well find and stick with a “good enough” service for, say, music discovery. We might use several, not because we need several, but because the discovery tools themselves interest us, and we want to compare them.

Here’s what Salesforce announced today.

With Salesforce for Google Apps, you can now run your favorite desktop applications and your Salesforce applications side by side by accessing Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs all seamlessly from within Salesforce.

Erick at TechCrunch has more details. To quote Erick, “Google is in effect becoming Salesforce’s productivity suite.” To quote him quoting Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff:

Certainly the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which makes Google my best friend. I have spoken with a lot of customers who want to get off of Microsoft Word.

It looks to me as though this alliance makes more sense than would an acquisition. I admit that I’m looking from a literal distance of several thousand miles, and that I don’t have any insider knowledge. But acquisitions can be expensive, in terms of time, attention, and morale as much as money. Just ask Microsoft and Yahoo.