Work(ing Title)

Looks like PDC will be coming back with a vengeance in 2008. The City of Angels will never be the same:

2008 will be a PDC ( Professional Developers Conference ) year. This means that it is going to be pretty exciting time if you are an evangelist at Microsoft, as there are a number of really new things that we are starting to work on that we want to share.

Like with every other PDC ( I feel I have ever known ) this is going to be at the Los Angeles Convention Center again.

So, what are you going to do? Mark your calendars and save the date.

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October 27–30, 2008
Pre-conference October 26, 2008
Los Angeles, California

(Neil Hutson)

When it came time to ask someone to refine the idea behind the Defrag conference, Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo) was tapped to provide an explanation. The first ideas Jeremy felt were the reasons for Defrag to exist were Open Source, Social Everywhere, Web Services, and Web platforms. Open Source got left out of the discussion a bit, but the remaining three were very interesting.

The point was made the MySpace and Facebook typify sites that are built as destination sites without much real function. In contrast, MyBlogLog attempts to incorporate social software around online activities people already participate in.

This argument makes plenty of sense up front. Providing rich socialization ability in the online locales where users already spend a lot of time is both obvious and logical. Personally I get all dizzy at the thought of a Facebook-esque news feed built into my Flickr homepage. However the question of a tipping point is worth exploring; If enough users all show up, does a site need a real purpose? There are plenty of popular bars that have lines out the door and tonnes of people inside, while the only function of the place is to buy overpriced drinks.

Yahoo’s investment in Hadoop, in conjunction with the in-house growth of Yahoo Research’s Pig, represent a shift in development priorities towards something Jeremy calls, “infrastructure software.” The social networks, even in their first-generation ‘outpost’ modes, are showing us that software needs to leverage grid/infrastructure computing, as distribution is handled by the users.

The movement towards developing software to run in the cloud is clearly a mandate for anyone who wants to have an audience moving forward. When you combine the idea of relocating social software and building the tools for developing infrastructure software, the end result is an extremely democratized method of software deployment. The human experience of finding software through your social grid is more capable than traditional marketing and distribution. This is incredibly similar to the painful evolution of the music industry, and I think what application developers need is something like a Radiohead vanguard to follow.

This morning’s Defrag keynote opened with a panel discussion on where the business of search and discovery has come from, and where it needs to go.

Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley) made a strong opening analogy by explaining that search is currently an, “experience in orienteering;” the journey to your information begins with a few words, followed by a long period of sniffing out clues. This process repeats until hopefully you find what you were looking for.

Obviously this creates a demand for a major upgrade to the human experience of search. One of the natural solutions is natural language processing, where Microsoft is doing a lot of great work (TellMe, Windows Speech Recognition, and Ford Sync).

Another of the interesting factors in the evolution of search is a pitch for building more topic-specific indexes. Steve Larsen (Krugle) argued a compelling case for vertical search indexes, “In a code-writing search index, Python is never a reptile and always a language.”

This feels like a workaround for the lack of NLP implementation/effectiveness, but as opposed to most instances, that sort of design sounds extremely valuable. I think I might rather have a half-dozen different search engines that I use across a day, assuming they are each much more targeted toward the information I’m looking for. I think this type of strategy could allow for a lot of smaller-scale growth in the search market.

Bradley Horowitz (Yahoo) gave an explanation of Flickr’s Interestingness system which brought up the powerful difference between explicit and implicit discovery systems. Explicit systems (voting, rating) are ripe for gaming and rigging, which obviously prevents an honest view of the landscape from emerging. The Interestingness recipe watches views, comments, and favourites across all the system’s photos. In addition though, it weights the value of those actions based on the relationship the author has with the viewer (your brother marking your photo as a favourite is different than a stranger doing the same). Intricacies like that help develop a more honest result set.

The beauty I see in these implicit designs is their invisibility to a user’s actions. Rather than putting the request on the user to think consciously about the value they place on something, the software simply listens and reacts. As Bradley put it so eloquently, “The system changes in the user’s wake.”

When the discussion got to addressing the uncrawlable information trapped behind paywalls and corporate firewalls. Jeremie Miller (Search Wikia) made the comment that as people define knowledge by what is discovered through search, knowledge that doesn’t make it into the index may cease to exist (so far as many people are concerned).

Honestly I’m terrified by the social implications of such a reality; the rift between those with access to the indexes and those without can have dire effects, not to mention the concerns around who controls those indexes.

Danah Boyd and Henry Jenkins launched the YPulse Mashup this morning at the Nikko with a discussion centered very much around everyone’s favourite teenage wizard. Mr. Jenkins, who directs the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, pointed out that it’s unlikely we will see another phenomenon on the scale of Harry Potter. The petrol of the Internet has fuelled the fire of niche markets to a point where individual interests are now rarely singular.

Ms. Boyd noted that Usenets developed the model of groupings of users based on interests rather than traditional demographics, and that 20 year old model has grown into World of Warcraft guilds where users of all ages contribute to common goals and therefore socialize. This notion of dissolving international borders was crystalized by Chinese Harry Potter fans translating the sixth book in 48 hours via a wiki, rather than wait for the official release, which was ultimately shown to be edited for the Chinese market.

The Chinese Harry Potter story illuminates one of the concerning elements of adult control over the youth Internet experience. Students are being warned off of the Wikipedia for fear of it’s inaccuracy, and this will prevent participation in these egalatarian communities. Second Life is a powerful example of this participatory culture, and as it evolves a resident v. tourist dynamic may develop. This can be seen today with the individual v. corporate use of Second Life currently.

All in all, the keynote was a good primer for the remainder of the day. Together Danah and Henry highlighted the contrasts between offline and online social models as they relate to age, class, and nationality.

The smoldering embers of the Flickr/Zooomr API fire almost got a another burst of fuel this weekend when Thomas Hawk showed up at Bloggercon. Niall just about kept him from opening his mouth at all, though that didn’t stop Marc Canter from taking the ball and running–something that I simply can’t do justice to in text (mp3 44:08-44:48). The thing about it is what Marc and I briefly traded on across the aisles; a problem I’ve decided to call kickball and lemonade.

The fantastic thing about the Web is the collaboration it fosters, and all the ideas born on the Web have the sense of sharing in their DNA. Companies are formed out of a common desire for a particular tool or service, which has a similar set of motivations as playing kickball.

The other side of the coin is that these ideas, in this most popular case Flickr and Zooomr, are ultimately businesses created for aquiring wealth either for profit or to cover the cost of existence. These motivators are just like those behind running a lemonade stand.

While it’s well and good to get together and just play, most people will get thirsty and start looking around for something cool to drink. The problem reaches a breaking point when more and more people move into the neighborhood and start doing the same thing. It’s kosher as Christmas so long as it’s all about having fun, but sooner or later the two cats who were playing kickball together are selling lemonade across the street from each other.

If electricity and bandwidth were free then ‘fair APIs’ would just happen and I wouldn’t be writing this. So far however there are still bills to pay and spending money to help your competitors is pretty low on the list of places to invest that preverbial phat cash.