Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

Google has released an early version of “Google Gears”, a browser extension that lets you store state and work with web applications even when you are offline. With Internet access becoming more and more ubiquitous, even on the go, offline access and desktop applications will become less and less important. However I doubt that they will ever become completely irrelevant: for the overseable future even with 3G there will always be times when you are out of coverage.
So there is something to be said for something that enables you to have a seamless user experience whether you are offline or online: if this works well it could easily be the thing that brings on the next wave of innovation. That is of course depending on the level of “seamlessness”, any clunkiness will probably be a deterrent rather than an attraction point for users, personally I’d rather use something where I know the parameters of its functionality: when it works and when it doesn’t. If there is any level of uncertainty when or how an application will function dependably, I will probably not even start to use it.

Google Maps have released a 360 degree “Streetside View”, so you can see what a street looks like in a panoramic view. Obviously it is only static photos put together, but I get chills down my spine when I think about how it could be applied to London and its millions of Closed circuit TV-cameras:
real-time internet video feeds of any street corner, 24h “citizen surveillance” available to any government-agency, insurance company or deranged stalker at the touch of their fingertips. That would really give some flashbacks to the DDR or “1984″, you’ll never know who is watching, if anyone, or who is an informant for something.. Everyone has something they don’t necessarily want to share, whether they know it or not.

No thanks.

Valleywag notes how Tagged, a social networking site is basically an elaborate phishing site: by asking for your webmail provider (such as Hotmail or Gmail) username and password, it will harvest all the contact details of anyone you have ever corresponded with, and send out Tagged-invites to them, whether you want it or not.

I’ve received invites for Tagged from a few people so far, at first, I looked at it out of curiousity, but once it asked me for my Gmail login details, I smelt a rotten phish (dry pun intended) and abandoned the registration process.

The bottom line is that Tagged’s approach is pretty darn unethical, it inflates their registered user base while at the same time using your personal data and address book without giving you control or asking for your consent in how it is used. Why Tagged would want to inflate their user database is pretty obvious: in the short term it will make them look bigger than they really are, thus making it easier for them to con money from VC’s who don’t do their due diligence properly.

What Tagged is doing could be good from a usability perspective, but now it is just downright unethical and wrong. Used right, Tagged could present the user with a list of people in their address book, and let the user choose who, if any they want to send out invites to, but that is not how it works at the moment. Furthermore, Tagged should allow people to easily skip giving up their logon details, but the only way of doing so when I checked was abandoning the whole registration process.

I think the moral of the story is, from a user point of view, be careful in giving out personal information and logon details unless you know exactly how it is going to be used.

From a service provider stand-point it is simple: the only ethical way of using someone elses personal data is by giving them full control and transparency in how that information is going to be used.

If people leave me a voicemail, I will almost without fault call them back, even if I know it is of no benefit to me. However there is one way that will guarantee me not calling back when leaving me voicemail, especially if I don’t personally know someone: mumbling your name in an unintelligible way and saying your phone number so quickly it seems like you’re in a hurry for me not to be able to write it down.

I just got a voicemail that went something like this:
“Hi, this is *mumblemumble* from [agency], I’d like to discuss a contract role with you, could you call me back at [12 digits said so quickly I had to listen 4 times to get it down]“.
I’m just sorry, I don’t have dog-hearing so I’m able to hear on other frequencies than ordinary men, nor am I a Hollywood action-hero who is able to get down any number or location however quickly mentioned on the first try (I’m also unable to tell what “12 degrees south southwest” is without a compass, but that goes without saying..).

This time, I actually did bother to take down the number and check the agency’s site, it is their main line. Sorry, not going to call an office with 50 people in it and ask “Do you have a guy there whose name is ‘mumblemumble’, I think it might start with an A?”.

As a person, I am mostly solution-driven/motivated (I mean that in the least clichéd way possible): what gets me ticking both professionally and personally is solving interesting problems in novel ways. This can be either technical problems, entrepreneurial problems or both, money is kind of a secondary concern: it is the fascination level that counts (that being said: I’d prefer travelling in an Aston Martin to public transport, and currently public transport is what I can afford out of the two..).
This is why I am constantly looking for something new and challenging to solve, it gives me a sense of purpose. But lately, probably in the last year or so, I haven’t really had any interesting challenges and as a consequence I have felt I lacked a bit of personal purpose (I’ve been comfortable, that’s all).

So I was quite happy yesterday when I was reading “Founders at Work” (which I mentioned earler), and the piece about Ray Ozzie (of Lotus Development, Groovy and currently Microsofts Chief Software Architect): his start-up Groovy network was based on the premise of being able to collaborate in a peer-to-peer environment and synchronize data and workspaces seamlessly.

That got me thinking: masterless, peer-to-peer data synchronization, that is an interesting problem!
Apart from certain collaborative applications, various integrations for desktop-to-mobile synchronization etc, I am not aware of any generic, multi-purpose solution in this space, a framework that would seamlessly synchronize data of various types and sources based on implementations plugged into it. Sounds like a pretty interesting area for something, perhaps an open source project?

Now, I’ve only thought about it since yesterday, and only then for a few hours, so I might not be aware of the whole landscape in this area (if anyone is, give me a shout, either in the comments or by e-mail). But I’ll at least do some research on it, and if it looks favourable, I might start doing something, if nothing else for the fun of it.

Yes, I know it borders on “technological self-gratification” to use a less vulgar term, and that most of the tangible business applications to the concept may already be covered by pre-existing products, but hey, a mans got to have his fun, don’t you think?

(YouTube video)

..the reaction isn’t wholly unlike that of my father ten years ago, when I told him I wouldn’t be applying to law school..

Over the last month I’ve become a big fan of Wicket, a component-oriented Java web-framework that stands head and shoulders above the rest of the Java frameworks out there like Struts2 and JSF(brrr…).

So, to my great pleasure, I’ve stumbled across a project that works on various extensions and add-on components for Wicket: “Wicket Stuff”. From what I can gather, it is gathering some momentum, and is actively developed by some people that work at Joost, the much talked about Web-TV start-up founded by the guys behind Skype. And yes, that means that Joost is probably a pretty big reference project for Wicket..

There are lots of components available that tie together Wicket with Dojo (Ajax framework), Scriptaculous (another Ajax framework), Tiny MCE (rich browser-based text editor) and Google Maps just to mention a few (I also saw something in there that looked like serverside Ajax “Push”). Some of the Dojo components are available here as a demo.

What really impresses me is how easily this Ajax-stuff seems to fall into Wicket: looking at the drag’n'drop components in the demos, with the demo-code, it looks really simple and clean. Last year I spent about 3 days tying together some Scriptaculous drag’n'drop Ajax-stuff with DWR and what was to become Struts2, it took time, effort and the end-result wasn’t entirely pretty (yeah, there is refactoring, but that is even more additional time on top of the 3 days). With Wicket it is just a couple of rows of code, and a nice clean html-template.

Now that I’ve found Wicket Stuff, the deal is sealed: whenever I have a choice, I’m using Wicket as my preferred web framework.

A final word of caution/advice: the Wicket Stuff that is readily downloadable as binaries are for Wicket 1.0-1.1 by the looks of it. The live development and fresh code you’ll have to get out of subversion for the moment being. The active branch seems to be developing against the upcoming Wicket 1.3 version, that should be released under Apache’s wings, and with Apache packaging (their first beta is out).
Having looked at the progress in Wicket’s JIRA issue tracker, a June release for production quality Wicket 1.3 doesn’t seem to far off (around 20 open issues for the 1.3 branch).

I follow a lot of news sources and blogs about entrepreneurship and start-ups, both European and Silicon Valley based. Perhaps the most notable of all is TechCrunch, which almost without fault reviews a few products from start-ups every day. What is becoming painfully obvious is that the pace of innovation is starting to slow down. Most new start-ups that are mentioned are “me-too’s”, they are at best slight angles on pre-existing ideas and companies, but quite often just plain rip-offs. Not only that, a lot of the so called “businesses” are just plain features, they have no business model, no compelling idea and their technology could easily be copied by a talented engineer in a week or two. Hardly a high barrier of entry. There seems to be around 30 mee-too’s for every new idea that comes out, good or bad.
Even Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, a guy who makes his bread and butter of the start-up scene seems to think that the fun has gone out of Silicon Valley.

It seems that it is back to the old model of looking for “eye-balls”, just as back in 2000. It didn’t work back then, and it probably will work even less so now: there is a lot more competition for eye-balls, just raising above the static is a challenge, and as a consequence there simply won’t be enough eye-balls to go around.

So why isn’t there any new compelling innovation, technology- or business-model wise? Hard to say, but one thing is for sure: I find it very hard to see the next Skype’s, Google’s or even Flickr’s or Blogger’s. Maybe it is the fact that the economy, both in Europe and the US is doing well?

It seems that innovation is often born out of necessity and scarcity, but at the moment we are living in a period of ample abundance and relative stability. Maybe our own financial well-being and level of comfort is actually slowing down the rate of innovation?

I am currently reading “Founders At Work”, a book in the form of a series of interviews with founders from several high tech startups, past and present.

This book is definitely one of the more interesting reads I have had in a while: although it is a bit thin on formal analysis, it still manages to give valuable insights into the process of a business startup from a more practical perspective compared to traditional books. The “author” Jessica Livingston should get high marks for being a talented interviewer: she is really able to find the probing questions that get to the core of what founders went through in different phases, both their mistakes and successes.

Highly recommended!

I’ve tried installing Microsofts Windows SDK today, which is basically documentation and developer tools/add-ons to the .Net framework. Microsoft has managed to create a textbook example of how not to do an installer, with one of their flagship developer downloads, nice going.

First of, the installer will fail each and every time if you don’t have a blazing fast network: on preparation for installation, the setup will download some files remotely, and the timeout of this is not based on download progress, whether or not the setup is actually doing anything or downloading anything. No, the timeout is based on.. a fixed time out value in minutes by the look of it. My network, which downloaded at approximately 50kb/s was too slow for this timeout.
The fix/workaround? Check the installation log (in a temp-directory), see which file causes the timeout and download it manually into the directory structure that the installer wants it in.

Ok, so I got past that, now what? Well, from now on the timeouts seem a bit more sane, but the installers progress indicator doesn’t give you much to go on. I know I’m supposed to download approximately 900mb of files, but I only get a single progress-bar for the whole install, with no indication of how much has been downloaded, or how much is to be downloaded in total. Again, my only recourse for knowing if the installer is working or has frozen is to tail the same setup-log I checked earlier.

The Windows SDK is easily one of the crappier installers I have come across in recent years. As we speak, it is still running, all I have to do now is leave the computer on over the night, and pray that the installer doesn’t freeze or that my network doesn’t go down at any point..