News Armada Post Mortem · 10/28/2008
We’ve stopped construction of News Armada.
One of the things you read, repeatedly, about founding a startup is that the idea will change. Ours was no different. And when the big change came, it felt like an exciting moment, like we’d reached a milestone. It wasn’t just a change, it was an improvement. Better features, better plans, better products.
The downside? With changed idea came a changed target market. And it went from one we were comfortable with, one we knew, to one full of strangers. Let me tell you, the last type of customer you want is a stranger. If you don’t know your customer, you don’t know your business. Before we knew it, we were solving a problem we weren’t completely sure existed for customers we didn’t even know.
How did this change happen? We were looking for the money.
Our core idea was simple, if ambitious: take social news out of its infancy, and create the most valuable community of content creators on the web. But big ideas take big bucks, and we needed a business model that would make it financially worthwhile. Our first idea for how to do that wasn’t going to work well enough. As soon as we realized that, we started thinking about other ways our idea could make money.
That was a mistake.
What we should have been doing was focusing on developing the features for a first version of our site as quickly as possible, so we could start building our community. Instead, we were chasing dollars and doing more research. It slowed us down, way down. Losing momentum on a startup is bad in more ways than one. It’s demoralizing, it’s a ton of effort to regain it, and worst of all, it acts as an anchor. It’s permanently attached to your company, and that’s a serious hindrance when you’re trying to reach goals like getting funding. Investors will look at the time you’ve spent on your company, look at what you’ve accomplished, and say, “This long, and that’s all?”
If you know you can create a company that can create value, and all you lack is a way to extract it, create the value first and worry about getting it later. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done. There are real pressures on entrepreneurs to prioritize revenue before value. For first time entrepreneurs, like us, it’s worse. Without resources to bootstrap for very long, there’s a practical need for a clear plan for a payoff, for investor approval.
News Armada had changed, both too much and too little.
What’s Next
And now we’re moving on. Our next project, code-named RealtorForge, solves a clear problem for customers we know well. I hope to tell you more about that in the months to come. In the meantime, there’s still more benefits for you to enjoy from our attempt at News Armada, other than a lengthy post-mortem. There’s no reason the market should (or would) wait until I have enough money and motivation to improve social news. There are many players in this space, with more on the way as news is clearly an industry in need of innovation. I’d like to offer my ideas, and let others make use of them as they like. More posts on this subject soon.
The Web Desktop - What It Is & What It Needs · 09/20/2008
The Google OS has been a popular rumor for years, and resurges every time they launch a product that mimics some formerly desktop-only functionality, like Google Docs. But is Google the only service that can offer an online operating system? What would one look like, anyways? Why would we want one (isn’t a PC with internet access enough?)? And assuming we do, how far do we have to go from here to having one?
What’s a Web Desktop?
What makes a computer your computer? I’d argue that it’s three things:
- personalized preferences,
- navigation arrangement,
- and access to files.
The
web desktop is when every computer is your computer. Instead of using cloud computing as storage for your data, it becomes a home for your data, putting it into the context of your own navigation arrangement, and storing your preferences for the applications/services you use, so that the experience is the same from any place you access them.
Universal access to your data, while a benefit itself, leads to further advantages. It allows unprecedented ease of file sharing and collaboration. You can access your PowerPoint presentation from any computer in the workplace and grant editing access to your team members, who can also edit it from any computer in the workplace. Two workers discussing the file in front of one computer could even switch seamlessly between editing it using Worker 1’s program of choice, PowerPoint, and Worker 2’s program of choice, Keynote.
This would be like walking to your neighbor’s house, having access to your own kitchen and food, your grandmother adding the secret sauce while she’s still on the plane, and serving it simultaneously to both your family in Massachusetts & your in-laws in Florida.
All without the hassle of e-mail attachments, or using different delivery methods for different people.
Why Not Just Web Services?
Okay, so the ubiquitous kitchen is pretty cool, but can’t most of the sharing / collaboration be done with things like Google Docs? Why not just use that for documents, Facebook / LinkedIn for my contact management, Yahoo! for my e-mail, Dropbox for my file storage, MP3tunes for my music, Photoshop Express for my photos…
Well, the huge list you have to make just to keep track of it all, for one thing. The value of a unified navigation interface to access all the different services we use is huge; in fact, it’s the driving force behind several startups that are acting as personalized aggregators / home pages for various independent services, and even major companies (iGoogle, MyYahoo!).
More importantly, for every service we use as our primary service for dealing with a certain type of data (documents, contacts, images, etc.), there are usually several services we use less often, for specific purposes, to have a presence on them, or to try them out. Most of those services could benefit from easy access to the same data and preferences we have stored on our primary services. Unfortunately, we have to ask each service individually to grant access to some of that data, at best, or manually re-enter it ourselves, at worse. Why should we have to deal with 20 different gate-keepers to be able to share all the different types of data we have? Why not just one?
Once we’ve broken the access barrier, the next big benefit is interaction. With a presentation on my computer, I can open it in PowerPoint, add images that I can continue to edit in Photoshop, add speaking notes in Keynote, check how it will look when viewed through a Firefox extension, and send it to coworkers during our Skype conference call. Because web services are self-contained data silos, the only way to achieve interaction between web services is through specially built tunnels (APIs) they connect to each other one at a time, or a lot of importing and exporting.
Even better, when your data has one home that can be accessed (with permission) from anywhere, all uses of that data can be dynamic! So if I realize too late that the vacation photos I just shared with everyone show me on a nude beach… those sea-shell-searchers in the background are a quick Photoshop edit away from being removed, not only from the image I’m viewing, but from the image everyone else will soon be viewing as well. It’s the same piece of data, just replicated across multiple servers for quicker access.
What’s Needed, and Who Can Do It?
There
are many problems to be solved before web desktops can happen. If it were easy, it’d be done already. They have many security needs; their rise will be the tipping point for USB thumb drives as authentication devices. If you carry a key to get into your physical home, why not to get into your digital home? It can store and launch an application that gives you access to your web desktop, which requires a password as well (yay, two-factor authentication! Something you have, and something you know). The thumb drive is also an encryption key, allowing secure communication between the computer you’re on, and your web desktop provider’s servers. Because thumb drive storage is so massive now, temporary data storage can all be on your own thumb drive, and the terminal’s RAM is flushed when you logoff.
More content delivery networks are going to be needed, and we still need higher bandwidth with more ubiquitous internet access. New data transfer protocols will be needed, and new data types for things like preferences and contact / network lists. Your digital address, the only piece of info needed for people to share data with you, is your e-mail address. YourName@YourProvider.com. If for any reason your web desktop provider is different from your e-mail provider, they simply forward any actual e-mails sent to the wrong place right along.
There are several companies in a great position to become web desktop providers once the conditions are right. Google, and Yahoo!, obviously, since many of their actions and stated goals already lie in that direction. Amazon already provides the backbone services needed for a web desktop. Mozilla is at the forefront of looking at the future of (and beyond) the browser. Companies are needed to provide these as hosted services for the web desktop to go mainstream, but the technical among us will be able to host their web desktop on their own servers as well. It will be as easy to deploy your own as it is today to host your own WordPress blog. The main challenge (and the businesses arising from it) will be cheap content delivery networks individuals can take advantage of.
Many of today’s trends point toward web desktops. They’re an important step in computing’s evolution. “Being on the computer” already almost always means “being online”. This is a push further toward making it true, and unlocking the potential from it. When every computer is “our computer”, we’re more free, more productive, and more efficient.
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The Future of Social Objects - SNSs of 2010 - Part III · 06/18/2008
Social objects are the vital concept for online communities. They are the focal point of the interaction, discussion, and sometimes even connection between users. I touched on their role in Social Network Strategy for Web Services. Now I want to briefly highlight a few trends involving social objects and the evolution of social network platforms.
Synchronous Socializing
So far, most interaction around social objects has been asynchronous: I post a comment about a video, you see it and respond later. Soon, social network services will offer the ability to simultaneously communicate while viewing pieces of digital content. Creating a conversation is very powerful; it’s the difference between exchanging recipes, and actually cooking together.
Facebook is an SNS that’s already taken the first step, providing a site-wide Facebook chat utility. What’s lacking (for now) in the chat client is an awareness of context. I can already instant message a friend a Facebook photo link through any one of a dozen IM clients; but only Facebook’s client can have an awareness of: a) what content on Facebook I’m viewing, b) my network (as it relates to that content), and c) the network of the content owner.
There are dozens of potential applications for synchronous socializing around social objects. A few:
- TV/Online Video. Hulu + SNS-enabled chat = a winning web TV platform.
- Music. Not listening by itself, but joint music discovery. This would be killer for MySpace, Last.fm, or web radio stations.
- Web browsing. There have been plenty of attempts to do this from scratch, but the social- and interest-based context a SNS can provide makes it much more feasible.
Outside Their Own Backyard
As user adoption rates for SNSs slow, they’ll need to expand their usefulness to attract new users. That doesn’t mean adding new features Swiss army style, but increasing the utility of their platform for their particular social object(s). Recognizing and aggregating objects from outside the site, and connecting to other services related to those objects is a key way of doing so.
Partially, that means the same kind of import options, and B2B partnerships other tech companies/services have done for years, but that SNSs haven’t seen a need for yet. The more innovative part is becoming the kind of semantic creator I talked about in How the Semantic Web Will & Won’t Work, and providing useful tools for working with interacting with external objects.
Costs of Content Create New Clouds
For many SNSs, social objects aren’t a specific type of information or interest, but an actual piece of digital content. In these cases, as SNSs grow, their infrastructure needs will also grow. Digital media is exploding in any case, but the rise of persistent communities around pieces of media create the opportunity for improved storage and distribution networks. I would not be surprised to see SNS platforms also operate as content delivery networks, either as a traditional CDN, or through a peer-to-peer solution that doubles synchronous socializing with distributed content delivery.
The community dynamics around social networks and online interaction are still being studied, even as the technology making them possible evolves. It’s an exciting area to watch, and an even more exciting area to be a pioneer in, with News Armada. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the online communities of the future.
How the Semantic Web Will & Won't Work · 05/28/2008
People, places, events; our browsers (and other machines) should be able to recognize these things as easily as you and I can. That’s the promise of the semantic web. But users are not the ones who will make the semantic web work. Microformats extend existing XHTML tags to put human-readable information into machine-parsable form (<span class="location">Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA</span>). But as simple of a solution as that is, it will never have mainstream appeal.
Unlike text-formatting XHTML tags & classes like <strong> or <blockquote>, data-formatting XHTML tags have no immediate visible effect on their contents. Can you tell the difference between:
and:
Jay Neely
Boston, MA
? Because of this, users have no reason to ever remember to format their information with machine-readable tags. Even a rich-text-editing-like interface isn’t that helpful, because users lack a reason to want to make their data machine-readable. Only techies and smart business people care about that; for everyone else, human-readable is good enough. People write for people, not machines. So services will have to write for services.
Semantic Sources
We already have our information put into semantic form on a regular basis. Every time we type our name into a textfield created for that purpose, the machines of at least one service (Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, Wachovia) store that not just as a bit of text, but text identified specifically as our name. Not just our names, but often our addresses, our interests, our friends, our job titles, and many other kinds of information. Data silos have existed for ages, of course; but giving the semantic web at large access to data silos is a key step forward in making semantic tools useful — just as key, if not more so, than collecting data from the distributed web.
Not only is that data all in a central location for easy access, it’s often the kind of data we don’t explicitly state in our natural usage of the rest of the web. How often do you write on your blog or in an IM, “I live in Boston, MA. My interests are coffee, technology, startups, and communications. My relationship status is single, my height is 5’8”, and my eye color varies between blue and green”? (Which reminds me, I really need to increase the female demographic of my readership.)
Finally, access to data silos is as important as access to distribute data because data silos are where the majority of people are (and will be for the foreseeable future). There are only 165,700,000 sites in existence, whereas Facebook alone has over 70 million active users (and Facebook gets 1/4th the traffic Yahoo! does). The majority of people’s online presences will be through a centralized service, rather than their own site.
Semantic Creators
But, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any value in all of the data available on the distributed web. After all, even just a few sites can put out a lot of content. But for the reasons outlined above, most of these sites won’t be putting their own content into a semantic format. That’s where semantic creators come in.
Data scraping is as simple as understanding the common format a specific type of data usually is put in (myname@mydomain.com or 555-555-5555), and having a web-crawler find that information, extract it, and put it into the desired markup or database entry fields. As natural language processing advances, we’ll start seeing more services that recognize the kind of information I expressed explicitly above (interests, relationship status, etc.), even when it’s only expressed implicitly.
Those kind of services will operate either constantly, or on-demand. They will be the middlemen between semantic tools and the rest of the web, collecting all of the information we put out, and putting it into a machine-readable format services can use (and changing it from the format one service uses to the format another service prefers, until semantic markup becomes more standardized).
Semantic Tools
So we have all that information in machine-readable format; great! Now what can we do with it? We can:
- Find it. Search, bookmarking, related-items, context, area-specific…
- Combine it. Mashups – filter, visualize, correlate, advertise, etc.
- Integrate it. One-click additions of events, contact info, preferences, licensing information, etc. into the applications you use every day.
- Aggregate it. See all of the events for a certain category happening within your city. Discover the most-talked-about TV show amongst your friends. Find all Creative Commons licensed podcasts available for remixing.
The possibilities for users to enhance their web experience with semantic data are endless. But it’s up to developers to create the services that give them that chance.
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Social Strategist News & Boston Events · 04/24/2008
I’d love for you to be in an exotic location. Some place like Tahiti, Morocco, Zanzibar. Just in case you’re here in Boston (where the weather hasn’t been too shabby lately) with me, I wanted to let you know about a couple of events coming up, and a little about what’s going on with myself.
Boston Tech Events
First, POPSignal is a party “aimed at bringing together the local tech community in a fun and informal environment. There is no format, presentations, or speeches. However, there is always a free open bar, free food, music, fun activities from sponsors, and great conversation.“ It’s happening May 15th, and you should RSVP ASAP or you’ll be SOL.
Then May 17th & 18th is BarCampBoston3, an unconference with just as much networking but some good presentations, demos, and discussions too. What’s an unconference? It means that the basic organization(setting the dates, finding a venue, finding sponsors) have been done by organizers, but the content of the conference is driven by the attendees. There will be a schedule of timeslots and rooms available, to be filled the morning of. Hopefully I’ll see you present! Maybe you’ll see me present?
My Boston Tech Life
I’ve been in Boston for over a year now, and have been writing Social Strategist a bit longer. I’ve completed a re-design of the site to make it cleaner, smoother, and now even have a headshot of myself up top… staring at you while you read. I’d like to update more often, but the best ones come when I’m not forcing myself to write something; and I’d hate to waste your time with anything but the best.
As I’ve mentioned in a couple of entries, I’m also working on a startup, with two co-founders: Chris Mela and Andrew Trese. News Armada is a startup that wants to bring online news out of its infancy, based on the philosophy that there’s too much information with too little meaning. We’re planning to build the single best source of news, commentary, and community online. We hope to have a prototype by early June; if you’d like to hear more before then, hopefully I’ll see you at POPSignal or BostonBarCamp3, or you can get in touch and we’ll grab a coffee.
Until then, I hope you continue to enjoy Social Strategist!
About
Jay Neely is a Boston entrepreneur interested in online strategy, user experience, and emerging technologies.
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E-mail: jay [=dot=] neely [=at=] socialstrategist [=dot=] com
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