Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

I’ve decided very late in the game to update my “Web 2.0″ credentials by giving Facebook a second chance, and start micro-blogging on Twitter (blogging here will continue as usual).

For those not familiar with Twitter, it is simply a service where you regularly have to answer the question “What are you doing right now?” in less than 140 characters. In other words, an effective way for the voyeurs out there to keep track of what I’m doing.

You can follow me here: http://twitter.com/wfaler

I have an iPod Touch, not an iPhone, but I recently updated the software to 2.0, so I could download apps from the app store, and I found the one application to rule them all, the one application that has persuaded me to eventually get an iPhone once they become easier to come by:

NetNewsWire, and RSS reader. Why is it so good? Well, it is available for Mac as well (and there is a compatible, but not as good Windows client), and it does what I have always been looking for: it syncs the read status of my feed across devices over the internet. In other words, if I read a feed on my iPod or Mac (or even their web client), it will turn up as read in the other device.
Seamless syncing of feeds, perfect!

I have already found the app useful on an iPod touch alone (combined with that of my Mac at home), syncing over Wifi.

But for an RSS junkie like me, being able to read my feeds anytime, anywhere is brilliant. Enough for me to get an iPhone very soon.

Interesting piece from Om Malik’s broadband blog:

But when it came to persistent storage, he pointed out, they started talking about it as soon as they had a beta, putting startups and other firms planning such a service on notice that Amazon would enter that market.

“We wanted to make sure people had a look at our roadmap,” Vogels said. “Our goal is to be very respectful and recognize the value of the ecosystem.”

It seems Amazon recognizes the value of the eco-system being built around their web services - they would rather be the keystone in a large, healthy business eco-system, than alone control a small eco-system that is withering away. Good news for startups.

Admittedly, I’m a bit late to the game when it comes to learning hands-on about Amazons Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), but I’m glad I’ve put in the time during the last few evenings.

There are a few niggly bits to get over, but when it all comes down to it, they are actually helpful: there is no persistent storage for your server instances in the cloud, which means you will loose any files or databases not backed up if your instance crashes. But I’ve actually found this useful, it has really made me think about how to best do frequent backups to the S3 storage, how to automate backups and restores if instances go down, and actually test that all this work.
How many people can actually say that they have put their backup- and restore strategies to the test? I think most organizations think about them, pay lipservice to it and have something in place, but it is rarely properly tested, with the consequence that from time to time they fail.

One thing that is easily addressable annoys me though - all Java API’s for Amazons Web Services are extremely poor, there are a few out there, but they are all subpar, including Amazons own. I guess this is down to Amazon preferring that people roll their own and simply use the RESTful http API’s that they provide, which are actually quite good.

These little annoyances got me started in writing my own Java API on top of S3, that will encapsulate the (small) complexity of the REST API’s in something that looks more akin to a regular “File system” interface for Java, but one that still gives you meaningfull Exceptions when things go wrong. I might go on writing some tools for management of EC2 instances too, and roll it up into a bundle and release it as open source, we’ll see about that (I have quite a lot on my plate at the moment, with trying to make an imminent release of Wicket RAD as well).

Overall, I’m starting to really like the concept of not having to pre-emptively know how much storage I need, or how many/how powerful servers I need, I’ll just increase capacity as I go along!

I try to keep this blog somewhat politics free, but this is too big to leave alone: the swedish surveillance law I mentioned yesterday has now been passed in parliament.

It gives the government the right to snoop and listen in on, in real-time, on every e-mail sent, every web page visited, every phone call made and every SMS/text message sent. Always sifted through by new shiny supercomputers, sometimes read and listened by government bureaucrats. The thing is, the next time you make a phone call to Sweden, you won’t know for certain if there is a third person listening in on your conversation.

Privacy, protection of journalistic sources, privacy of any correspondance are now well and truly dead.

And what is more worrying is that the main “client” of this surveillance is not the intelligence community, it’s not the military, but officials of whatever government is currently in power. That means that effectively a sitting government can listen in on their political opponents to find dirt and secrets (they’ll probably get a gentle slap on the fingers if ever publicly caught doing so, but nothing more). That will surely have a positive effect for free and fair elections in the long run, or not.

This is a sad day, the country I was born in and grew up in has taken a turn for the worse. It has now chosen its company among the more totalitarian of countries.
George Orwell’s dystopian vision of “1984″ is now well and truly realised, and the capital of “Oceania” is Stockholm.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

It appears Swedish parliament has at least temporarily shelved a planned surveillance law, due to a massive campaign among Swedish bloggers.

The law would have formalized pervasive telephone and electronic surveillance of all telephone- and digital traffic moving across Swedish borders. In practice, broadband and phone providers would have had to install government snooping equipment in their infrastructure (at their cost!), which would then have been used to listen in on every phone call, read every text message and e-mail, and keep track of every website surfed to in Sweden. This traffic would then have been sifted through by super computers and government officials.

In other words, legislation that would have made Orwells “1984″ look like a carefree picnic in the park.

This seems to have been halted by a massive blog campaign, for now. It’s not inconceivable the legislation will come back shortly with some minor amendments, sneaked through parliament while no one is watching - Swedish MP’s have been attentively learning those kind of practices from their EU overlords.

Anyone trying to follow the gyrations of the economy and markets these days would be excused for feeling slightly panicked. But in times like these, trying to react and predict every movement of the markets and its implications is folly - it’s a sure way of growing an ulcer.

What is more interesting and definitely a lot more productive is to try to see what the long term implications of current and recent events might be, what long term effects will they have in 1, 2 or 5 years time? What do those long term trends mean in terms of you protecting your downside and capitalizing on the opportunities?
Forget about whether the stock markets are up or down 5% tomorrow, try to see where the ball will bounce next in the long term, before someone else does it!

The best medicine in these days is to apply a few mindsets, regardless of whether you are an investor, running a startup, or just a regular Joe worried about his livelihood:

• Don’t panic about events on a particular day!
• ..but don’t delude yourself either, or engage in wishful thinking. Just because you don’t want or wish for something to happen doesn’t mean it can’t happen anyway. Self delusion, wishful thinking and denial are strong instincts these days in most people, don’t be one of them.
• Don’t try to “time the market” - unless you are clairvoyant, you’re likely to get it wrong, just try to find what you think is good value based on rigorous analysis and research. But be warned, there may not be much good value out there at the moment.
• Take the long view - try to see where current and recent events are leading in the long term, not what might happen today or tomorrow.

Volatile times carry a lot of noice, the trick is in cutting through the noice and finding the signal.

2007 is officially over, and it’s time to lift your eyes and look towards the horizon. I don’t want to be any worse than anyone else making predictions, so here are my predictions for the moust groundbreaking trends in technology and business to watch in 2008:

IP Telephony goes beyond cheap phone calls
The convergence between telephony and IT has so far been mostly about cheap and free phone calls, the natural evolution of new technology and new possibilities is to mimic the old, so it is to be expected. But just as the Internet has ended up being about more than e-commerce, advertising and e-mails, so will IP telephony: lower entry barriers and commoditized infrastructure means that tomorrows winners will create new services unheard of before and enabled by new technology. Technology and features previously only available to telecoms and large corporations will be simplified and put in the hands of SMB’s and individuals - people will be able to create their own “call plans” and call destinations to suit their lifestyle, and location based services will merge with voice services. Interesting times indeed.

Virtualization takes a step to the next level
The potential of virtualization has thus far only been scratched on the surface, VMWare, Xen, Amazon EC2 et al open up interesting possibilities, but so far it has mostly been limited to manually being able to duplicate pre-existing “virtual machines” dedicated for specific purposes.
I predict that the next step will be the obsolesence of traditional web- and server hosting: utility computing such as Amazon’s EC2 will not only be about only paying for the machine hours you use, but also accurately being able to scale infrastructure up and down transparently and automatically as traffic and load differ. Organizations will be able to pay not only for the resources they use, but also for exactly the computing resources they need and not any more or less, this will enable finance managers to sleep easy over the use of their budgets, and IT managers to sleep easy knowing a sudden spike won’t kill their applications.

Social Networking becomes distributed
Let’s face it, Facebook and all the other social networking sites work in a way that is very “un-internet like”, they are big central repositories - if you are on one network and your friend is on another, there is no way to connect the two of you. For the promise of social networking sites to really be fulfilled, social networking sites need to become interoperable and distributed - your online identity should be transparent and portable in the same way that your e-mail address can be e-mailed from any domain, or your phone number can be called from any telephone network.

Credit checks get an overhaul and reputation becomes a factor
The current credit crunch has thrown a light at a few shortcomings of the current credit- and credit checking system, it is simply too easy to manipulate if you know how to do it, and people with perfectly good ability to pay can be penalized for frivolous and nonsensical reasons. Maybe credit checking agencies will start taking a more holistic approach, not only looking into traditional sources of financial information, but also starting to measure more intangible areas that concern a persons overall “reputation”. There are several start-ups trying to deal with online reputation, but I think this area is most valuable to credit checking agencies, and they stand best positioned to make inroads into the area - some leading reputation start-ups may be bought out by credit agencies late into the game, but watch this space for credit agencies starting to care more about your character and slightly less about whom you’ve got loans with.

The man on the street will start watching the watchers
Three out of four trends mentioned above are also potential privacy threats, as we become more and more monitored in all aspects of our professional, private and social lives, there are bound to be some considerable privacy scares - the UK has already seen it’s fair share of Government screw-ups in this area in the last half of 2007. As these screw-ups become more and more common, and larger and larger in scale from both government and private organizations, people will start to care more about their privacy and personal information.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a “terror balance” between people and those who monitor us.
People will be monitored by various organizations, and start-ups will pop up that allow people to monitor in more detail how they in turn are monitored and how their personal information is used - and object in cases where their information is faulty, objectionable or they do not consent to how they are monitored and their information is used.

I have just come back from my yearly Christmas tour of visiting my mother in Sweden and my father in Finland. Doing what I do, I am always asked to look at one or the other computer related problem on my visits.
Suffice to say, it is a thoroughly humbling experience to help my mother or my father - their computer literacy is limited to say the least, but probably indicative of at least 50% of computer users. Sending and receiving e-mails is a big problem (biggest culprit in computing problems: Outlook, I always get Outlook related questions, most of them related to “send and receive”..), any website with more than rudimentary navigation and very simple forms are challenging to the degree that they are close to giving up.
To give a “for instance”: this summer when I was on holiday I received an empty e-mail from my dad, I knew instantly that if he bothered with trying to send me e-mail something important was going on, and just as I assumed, when I called him up it turned out that my 90 year old grandmother had been admitted to the hospital at the time (she is fine now and with as sharp a mind as ever, although of fragile health as you would expect of a 90-year old).

The point of these observations is that the flashy, feature rich “Web 2.0″ sites of the last years are for the most part too complex and too feature rich for a big subset of internet users, no matter what they say or claim about emphasis on “user friendliness”. If sending and receiving simple e-mails in Outlook or Gmail is hard work for a lot of Internet users, you can only begin to imagine what social networking, blogging or any number of other internet activities are to them: overwhelming and overcomplex (example: I’m sure my mother or father would love a service like Flickr - but Flickr in its current incarnation is just too complex for them to even remotely understand how to use).

This brings me to the value proposition of keeping things simple - not only in terms of what you, as a super user perceive as simple, but keeping things super simple. To make an analogy to my toys of choice from my childhood: the average reader of this blog is probably the computer and internet user equivalent of a Technic Lego enthusiast, but the fact remains that a big subset of users, my parents included are barely comfortable with the equivalent of Duplo Lego internet- and computing usage.

If you really want to make your software or website accessible to a large mass of internet users, it is probably worth putting extreme constraints on your product: cut out any feature or “user friendly” bells and whistles that are not absolutely essential for the use of it. Cut down choices and options to a bare minimum, so that most tasks can be executed in a straight linear fashion with a minimum of confusion.
If you don’t, the early adopters may like your product, but your mother and father most likely won’t.

I wrote back in June about “Social Networking” and Facebook, and how I didn’t quite see the point.

In the last few weeks I thought I’d check out Facebook again to see what all the fuss was about.
I still don’t get it. There’s nothing there I can’t get via IM, e-mail, RSS and blogging. Oh yeah, there’s a couple of things: It’s not under my control and I have no idea what sort of information they are selling or spreading without my consent.
I’d rather stick to e-mails, IM and blogging - like someone said in a comment to my original post: “Facebook is like training wheels for RSS and a bunch of other things”. I mean throwing digital sheep at your friends? Amusing and novel maybe, but how long before people start moving to the next shiny new thing?