Web Scatter
Over time, everything finds its place; and on the Web, this law is no different. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
I made this argument a few years ago regarding organization of offline activity and webservices in a post called "Scatter Mob." This idea actually came out of a comment I wrote on Jeremy Wagstaff's blog where I started to think about a phenomenon I've been calling "Ambiance Scatter."
Ambiance Scatter
Here's what I wrote about Ambiance Scatter in 2007 on Wagstaff's blog:
What I'm seeing with Twitter, IM, email, blogging, etc, etc is something I'm calling "Ambiance Scatter" -- kinda taking Leisa Reichelt's concept of "Ambient Intimacy" and wondering how its different levels intimacy find the most appropriate medium for broadcast.
What I noticed is that with the advent of Twitter, a B-list tech blogger friend of mine -- a great writer -- stopped blogging about personal, uninteresting to the wider-audience stuff on his blog, and instead left the "I love salad at Joe's cafe" stuff for Twitter posts.
While this was written during the very early days of Twitter, I wouldn't change much about this initial observation: with each type of communication, there seems to be an appropriate medium through which to communicate.
Late for a meeting? SMS or DM (direct message). Planning a party? Send an invite through a social network. Announcing something to your company? Email it. Tell someone you miss them? Call them. Need to disperse a rumor? Blog about it. Tell your friends you're at the bar? Foursquare it.
100 years ago all this would have happened via the postal service. Then we got telephones. Fax was the next step, and then we had email. 10 years ago, most everything on my list above would have gone via email. But Moore's Law must be at play here too.
As we find new ways to communicate, more and more appropriate media pop up; conversely, as we create new media, people find more and more ways to communicate (for many, Foursquare has replaced the flashmob communication I identified as popular on Twitter in Scatter Mob).
Again, for every type of communication there is a most appropriate medium.
This so this the Web of communication: a constantly and increasingly fragmenting and coalescing stream of messages, each finding their most appropriate avenue and bringing other like messages along for the ride.
Web Scatter
What brought me back to the idea of Ambiance Scatter after all these years? For one, it's a framework through which I'm writing a more substantial post on Twitter (hopefully to be out next week).
But another reason is because of an important slide I saw in presentation given by Drop.io's Sam Lessin a few weeks ago:
In this slide, Sam articulates a similar "scatter" model I use for communication -- the idea that "over time, everything finds its place" -- but for the entire Web ecosystem of applications and workflows.
In Sam's model, however, applications are different than communication: instead of there being a "constantly and increasingly fragmenting and coalescing stream" of options, there's a natural order, with all applications moving towards their natural, fixed category of distribution, identity, or content/IO.
Now, Sam, of course, is invested in this call, and this slide (which I've posted with his permision) probably articulates more about his company's strategy than one can immediate tell by looking at their homepage, but I'm posting it is because of its value as a framework through which to see the rest of the web.
For instance, if you were to ask me what's going on with Twitter these days, I'd channel Lessin and tell you that Twitter is increasingly finding itself in its natural place as a distribution mechanism. That's it. On Twitter, identity is dead, and content is whatever's on the other end of that link you included, unless you could fit your message in the signal's 140 character limit (which many succeed at, confusing the matrix).
Now take Facebook... is it a content platform? A distribution platform? An identity platform? Like Twitter, there are a lot of smoke and mirrors to be distracted by here, but at the end of the day Facebook at its purest will be an identity platform. Each of these claims may deserve their own blog posts, so I'll just point out the influx of Facebook Connect around the Web and how quickly most content and distribution companies have given up the idea of owning identity and ceeded control of this aspect of the ecosystem to anyone and everyone -- especially Facebook.
This brings me to AnyClip and the content ecosystem.
As we're building out The AnyClip Stack, we must keep in mind what role we serve in the larger Web ecosystem, and embrace -- like Drop.io embraces -- its position squarely in the content ecosystem.
We are not an identity company... and so while we'll let you have an AnyClip account, we'll promote the ability to login using Facebook Connect and, eventually, any OpenID provider.
We're not a distribution company... and so aside from our own flagship applications on the Web, Mobile, and you Livingroom, we'll let 3rd party developers build the majority of applications which distribute our content.
In the end, we're a content company. We're taking valuable video content and giving people access to the very pieces which matter to them, while we also give compensation to the people who made the content. For the movie business, this is important work, and doing anything but acting as the "IO" for movie clips is a distraction.
Web Scatter is an important way I've started to look at the future of the Web. I hope it's useful for you too.
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I was right. Facebook is spun.
I. Told. You. So.
I don't mean this lightly. You just should have listened.
For the past year, I've been consistent on my Facebook call: it's been a short call and a call for change. Everything we've been seeing and will continue to see show that I'm right.
Dating all the way back to October of 2006, I expanded on Evan Barlett's excellent post and declared that Facebook would need to follow four of their own rules to rule the world. They broke all four.
Then, I warned that Facebook's quest for ubiquity would be challenged by a simple rule of the Internet: Things Change. As more and more successful niche social networks pop up, and projects like DiSo emerge, the concept of ubiquity is looking shallower and shallower for Facebook. New and better things will always come. I bookmarked Scott Heiferman's smartly worded post about Facebook's pending platform and his experience working on AOL's platform.
Then the Facebook Platform hit. Everything was supposed to be different now, and indeed it was. For the first time, I, and millions of other users, reported that using Facebook felt like wasting time. Application invite pruning was a pain. Without restrictions on invites for the earliest applications, Facebook was mayhem. This post by Fred Wilson captures precisely how people felt at the time.
As late June of 2007 rolled around, other folks started warning about the Facebook Platform strategy. "Walled Garden" and "AOL 1997" were the most appreciated epithets.
Then I went to a Facebook Platform hackathon and got really freaked out. (You should re-read that article if it's been a while). It was clear that folks weren't thinking about the long term impact of developing on Facebook's platform. They weren't covering their bums in case Facebook would change the way they treated developers (and of course that day did come). Facebook's platform, I'd argue, was a bad deal for most developers.
Anyway, by the end of July, I was also on top of another trend: Facebook apps weren't getting near the attention from users first imagined. While folks were installing apps left and right, I found that they weren't using them. I say "found," by the way, because O'Reilly confirmed this first 3 months later with some data on app usage and then again 7 months later, in its widely publicized white paper on the Facebook Platform).
Given my developing opinion on the Facebook Platform, chose August of last year to suggest a better path for Facebook. "Give us our social graph!" I said, "and you run the ad platform."
Remember that was August, and I said that Facebook trying to run both a social ad platform and a social graph would bring them a "Google-like quagmire, where the balance between being a personal information bank, public information bank, and advertising platform becomes nearly as tough as keeping everyone satisfied in a bona-fide thrupple."
Lo and behold, that happened. Facebook's Beacon program was the young company's biggest disaster yet.
But even before the Beacon disaster, I could tell a change was coming. In my most popular post in this series, I said that Facebook was indeed "a fad." My point was due to looming trends, Facebook's platform would have to make a dramatic shift in strategy in the coming months, the results of which would be a Facebook unlike the one it was and wanted to be. Openness would win, I said, and win it would.
However, in my most favoritest coverage of this whole thing, math dealt a mighty blow to the Facebook Platform. Indeed, I loved Andrew Parker's report that Facebook apps were being sold off at a dollar per user. My own analysis of Web 2.0 Valuations, says a normal web application should get $20 per user! Was it 20X easier to acquire a user on Facebook? Perhaps in one light. But it was also 20X more crowded by then.
And so, by early this year, the Beacon scandal had come and left the company without a coherent social ad strategy, Facebook announced it would start bouncing apps off the front page of profiles, and to finally put a cork in it, Slide, the platform's largest application creator, announced it would stop building new Facebook applications and would instead focus on building value with their existing ones.
Now, over a year after the platform has launched, I just have to sit here and say, "I told you so."
Why did I take all this time to type out this post to taunt you? Because all throughout, my critizism of the platform has been consistent, so I think there are key lessons you can take away. I always screemed about the value of being open and that not being open would catch up with Facebook. What more, I have been consistent about separating the ad platform from the graph. This is so important, and so if Google can learn something from Facebook (and Facebook from itself) it's to find way to separate the two. It will bolster user-trust, not harm it, and in the end you'll get more value.
Finally, it clear that Facebook, as we knew it last summer, was a fad. It's changing shape quickly, and not everyone is happy.
Who knows where Facebook goes from here. All I can say is that they've spun their self into the land of uncertainty. They need to reassure platform developers there's value in the platform and they must make an effort to reassure the users who feel violated each time a new feature is released.
How they do that remains to be seen.
App Engine Follow-up
If you'd like to continue the conversation about App Engine, please check out the re-post of my article on Silicon Alley Insider (Peter edited it down and it's much more readable).
Also, I wanted to point out this article by David Recordon, who pointed out the connection between App Engine and Facebook's Platform via Twitter from the unveiling event, and then posted about it around the same time my article was first posted here yesterday.
I think David is spot on, and I thank him for making me look less crazy.
Supporting both David and me in our assertions is the debacle around Google's Campfire look-alike called HuddleChat.
Clearly, Google will be toe-ing the same line Facebook does when it comes to apps running on its platform. Think about it: if Facebook came out with its own "SuperWall" or "TopFriends" app, the developer community would be equally up in arms about, justly or not.
So, still today, I see App Engine as Facebook Platform 3 or 4.0, and not much to do with EC2.
AppEngine is GOOG’s Web 3.0, Takes Aim at Facebook, not Amazon
"Web 3.0 will ultimately be seen as web applications which are pieced together."
- Eric Schmidt
In the wake of Google's AppEngine announcement, I want to remind you of this video I've posted before: Eric Schmidt talking about Google's vision for the Web 3.0 computing era.
To me, AppEngine seems like the most logical evolution of Google Gadgets! (This is what everyone thought Eric was talking about back in that video.)
The Real Story
However, every story written about Google's newly launched AppEngine has incorrectly correlated this new service to Amazon's EC2 and S3 services.
I think these people are way wrong and that if the Silicon Valley echo chamber wants to make up a competitor for AppEngine, its proper correlate (by a whisker) is Facebook's F8 platform. If you must cram this new service into a pigeon hole, think of AppEngine as the Facebook Platform for the grown-up web.
Why isn't AppEngine like EC2 & S3? Constraints, constraints, constraints.
- Google is going the run-time environment route, not the scalable, "put anything you want in a box and we'll scale it" route that EC2 provides. Case in point: we could run the BricaBox Platform on EC2 by tailoring our own environment (the LAMP stack) and booting it up on Amazon's servers. We could not get BricaBox running on AppEngine without re-writing in Python, ditching functionality which needed outside libraries or languages, or relational databases.
- Google is not trying to provide pure utility here, they are trying to provide utility tethered to their infrastructure. While EC2's initial investor pitch was "we have this scale and want to monetize unused portions of it," many smart people called them out for what they were really doing: creating a new business based on the concept of utility computing, which had nothing at all to do with their core infrastructure at Amazon.com (i.e. they weren't using EC2 or S3 for their needs).
The point about tying it into their infrastructure, however, is an important one. Google is clearly looking to have as much of these apps tie into existing pieces of Google's infrastructure: everything from the authentication systems (Google Accounts only!) to code libraries (most open source or API accessible code from Google is written in Python and ready to run in their environment) is based around this infrastructure and will be based around this going forward
So, why is AppEngine more like the Facebook Platform 3.0?
- AppEngine is designed for lightweight apps
- AppEngine apps are wrapped around Google's existing userbase and communication infrastructure (Gmail), creating a more organic Social Ecosystem for Google
- AppEngine is way more inter-operable with the rest of the web than Facebook apps, though still built around a proprietary stack (Google's runtime env is the equivalent of FBML)
- The first AppEngine apps will be huge! The next ones will have just as much trouble emerging from the murky waters of the web as any other apps
Who is Nate?
You've found Nate Westheimer's blog. Nate wears many hats. He's the EVP Product & Technology and Co-founder of AnyClip, the Organizer of the NY Tech Meetup, and Advisor to Flybridge Capital Partners.
More about Nate can be read on his Bio page and you can follow his thoughts on Twitter
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