Oren’s Weblog

They’re announcing three things today:

Live.com new version
new version of Windows Live Search
Windows Live toolbar.

Live.com – launched in November. Wanted to give people rich control over information they view – what modules get shown on the page. Ajax based (of course).

The ability to add and name tabs (looks the new Catalyst web tools interface).

Does RSS aggregation – can hover over feed and see content from the feed.

Made performance improvements to live.com.

Search – can tab between vertical searches (images, news, etc) keeping the search term intact – like Google.

You can pop open a box to search within individual sites.

There’s a smart scroll control that does dynamic fetching so you don’t have to do individual page loads.

New Image search with some UI improvements.

Feed Search – can preview entire feed in search results before subscribing.

Search macros – ability to describe, save, and share a saved search with parameters. Can’t yet create new macros, but will be able to in a few weeks.

Windows Live Toolbar – includes antiphishing filter, synced up favorites for IE, MS has acquired OnFolio – a browser add-in to help people organize info, including RSS aggregation and collections (gee, like Plum). Free with the toolbar.

Windows Live Local – being able to search for local info. Birdseye photo images – hired planes to take pictures. streetside – sent cars out with 10 cameras each to digitize images of downtown – Seattle and San Francisco so far.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

The concept of Blue Chip product vs. the Off Bran product – Julia Roberts vs. Sandra Bullock, iPod vs. Creative Zen, etc.

How you could make blue chip products – the formula:

- Make people happy (by giving them control)
- Think about emotions
- Obsess over the aesthetics

Ajax’s instant feedback makes people feel like they have control and makes them happy.

The iPod has obsession in making the entire experience seamless.

Some apps and how they live up to the formula or don’t:

reddit.com – people share links and other people can vote on it. The reddit mascot alien is adorable – why is he cute? He has large eyes and he’s bald, so he looks like a human baby, which we think is cute. The alien changes with little stories from day to day, which creates an emotional bond. Happy: A, Emotions: A, Aesthetics: B Final score: A

motorola Razr – best selling phone of all time. A lot of obsession over aesthetics. There’s also the PEBL – people love to feel smooth ocean beach stones, so they made a phone that people like to fondle. Motorola gets an A for emotions and an A for aesthetics, but they get a D for happy for not giving user good feeling of control. Final grade: B

Web-based calendars – Basic requirement was being able to enter a flight which starts and ends in different time zones. Tried Airset – not beautiful, but very functional – even has a java application for cell phone which works well. The first actual usable java application for cell phones. A for control, B for emotions, C for aesthetics.

There are three web design trends that have become popular in the last year – ugly, ugly, and ugly. Enough with the pastel arial, already! This is copying from Google – which is cargo cultism. Google design only makes aesthetic sense compared to the old cramped up portals.

Look at architecture 9 the Seagram building or LEver house of minimalist design – revolts against Beaux Art wedding cake monstrosities.

When Google came out with the stripped down design, it was making an interesting statement. WHen you copy their fonts you’re not making a statement.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

The place I direct my attention when I have a question is to the search engine. There is intelligence on the web…and it’s you. Great ideas, but can we rely on imperfect humans? What’s the mechanism for doing that?

What if there was a way to collect almost anything from anywhere, and then share it in a way that matters to me, can I connect and discover things from other people?

so they created plum.

Lets you click on a page and plum collects it and caches it. You can collect anything – including people (within plum). You can collect live feeds. Other people can contribute to your collections.

You can collect email from your desktop or gmail or yahoo.

There’s a little floating dock of icons called the plumber that has the controls for the desktop.

Today they’re announcing (of course) an open source API. developer.plum.com

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

The place I direct my attention when I have a question is to the search engine. There is intelligence on the web…and it’s you. Great ideas, but can we rely on imperfect humans? What’s the mechanism for doing that?

What if there was a way to collect almost anything from anywhere, and then share it in a way that matters to me, can I connect and discover things from other people?

so they created plum.

Lets you click on a page and plum collects it and caches it. You can collect anything – including people (within plum). You can collect live feeds. Other people can contribute to your collections.

You can collect email from your desktop or gmail or yahoo.

There’s a little floating dock of icons called the plumber that has the controls for the desktop.

Today they’re announcing (of course) an open source API. developer.plum.com

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

EVDB – Founded in 2004 to maximize event discovery.

Building a web services API platform and an event portal built on that platform.

The platform – REST-style API: api.evdb.com. Podbop is a mashup based on this.

The portal – eventful.com – a site to discover, post, and share events. Three dimensions to events -

Known events (search, calendars, tags, rss & ical feeds, groups, friends family contacts, auto-submit, iTunes import > calendar, AIM EventfulBot, Performers) everything tagged with hcal and hcard.

Expected Events – Prospective Search, notifications/alerts

Dream Events – events you wish would happen. tools for demand aggregation – not onlyh for fans, but for performers. Along with noticiations and alerts. ROlling out the first phase of this today – called eventful demand. Not just a “wish list” but the possibility of fulfillment. A marketplace for experiences.

They have some cool tools for creating and nurturing a demand for an event, including emailing people, and stickers you can put on your site.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Client technology for web applications.

We have Ajax, but there are some things we want to do – vector graphics, safe cross-domain scripting, storage better than cookies, etc.

This morning he’s announcing the connection of flash player to ajax. Open sourced in AFLAX (the framework around ajax and flash) and dojo.storage.

These are all enabled by Flash Player. The flex framework is a way of typing in xml and script code to generate these apps. Flex/Ajax bridge. All these components are downloadable free.

He shows a demo of a flickr browser app that uses ajax and flash, with server logic in Rails.

He demos another application that doesn’t use flash but has a data connecter component that updates pages and local desktop data simultaneously in more or less real time.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Client technology for web applications.

We have Ajax, but there are some things we want to do – vector graphics, safe cross-domain scripting, storage better than cookies, etc.

This morning he’s announcing the connection of flash player to ajax. Open sourced in AFLAX (the framework around ajax and flash) and dojo.storage.

These are all enabled by Flash Player. The flex framework is a way of typing in xml and script code to generate these apps. Flex/Ajax bridge. All these components are downloadable free.

He shows a demo of a flickr browser app that uses ajax and flash, with server logic in Rails.

He demos another application that doesn’t use flash but has a data connecter component that updates pages and local desktop data simultaneously in more or less real time.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

A pattern language is a tool adapted from architecture that’s detailed enough to see how to build it, but not so detailed that it’s tied to one domain.

Wants to propose a pattern language for moderation strategies.

Imagine a measurement of communal freedom – how much freedom does the software allow for users to communicate with each other as a group. Notepad is an example is one extreme, usenet is at the other.

Now imagine a y axis that is annyingness – flaming, trolling, unfunny cascades.

The problem – you’d like to launch apps that have a moderate amount of freedom with a moderate amount of problems – the reality is that once you cross the point of letting communication in you very quickly get into mitigating problems.

Slashdot illustration – over ten years has done a remarkably good job of not getting swamped by negative social effects – how do they do it? Members defend readers from writers. Users with high karma form a defensive membrane. But how do you design the system? Every comment is rated on a seven point scale. The members who moderate the system rank the posts. Most readers never see comments rated 1 or less – which is about 20% of the posts. Whether or not you can moderate takes four decisions. That’s way complicated – there’s very little use of the slashdot software by other sites. How can we get at that value derived from the knowledge of slashdot.

Slashdot faces the tragedy of the commons – each poster has an incentive to defect from the commons to get the most attention to their post. What slashdot does:

1 move comments to a separate page (reduces the size of the commons and lets people know that comments are somewhat ancillary)
2. Treat readers and writers differently – is able to defend readers from writers
3. Let users rate posts.
4. defensive defaults

You can imagine taking some of those systems and re-implementing them yourself.

Adding moderation system allows another problem – who will guard the guardians?

Another set of patterns:

1. Treat users and members differently
2. measure good behavior
3. enlist committed members
4. judges can’t post

Clay is proposing building these kinds of pattern languages.

Bronze Beta (Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan site) made a set of different decisions, which show other patterns.

1. Don’t Have Features (not an accident, but a strategy to reduce complexity.
2. Make Comments Central (unlike slashdot)
3. Make Login OPtional

Pattern Language Wiki and List – social.itp.nyu.edu/shirky/wiki
moderation_strategies@yahoogroups.com

Hobbes and Rousseau Argue about Dave Winer

in 2003 Dave Winer was running a mail list called blogrollers. One day he turned it into a moderated list, which was not well received by the members. The conversation around the change was about what should have happened – what duty did Dave have to his users? That’s part of why we need a pattern for the long time.

Thomas Hobbes in Leviaathan – a monarch is required to keep society from descending into chaos.

Rosseau took issue with this – Force is no reason. People have a moral right to depose their leaders.

This is the context in which the conversation about social software is taking place. You can imagine that conversation going on, leading to the title of the talk.

Best line of the morning so far:

Social software is the experimental wing of political philosophy, which doesn’t even know it has an experimental wing.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

We are all seekers of attention – we all have ideas we want to promote. To that end we make claims on other people’s attention – how can we reward that attention?

There are sets of patterns here – four patterns:

1 – heads, decks, and leads

The information architecture of newspapers – give people the ability to scan what you’re presenting at multiple levels of detail and work their way into the material.

It’s hard to write titles – or name anything. There’s a cognitive dissonance between our objective sense of what we’re about and what we project – we think people can read our minds, so why should we have to externalize ourselves?

What do you present the world in search results, for example? He shows an example of Google where the search results from a blog only shows the name of the blog instead of the title of the entry. Put richer metadata in titles.

The tragedy of discussion threads – a huge amount of collaboration goes on in mailing lists, and the title gets repeated on every message on a thread – what would it be like if discussion threads had titles that told a story? You could get a sense of the discussion from reading the titles. But it breaks the threading!

2 – active context

A new pattern: What do you know about a topic? The answer is most frequently a set of URLs. An active resource collection. A bunch of effects can happen – what tags are related, who are other people with this interest. Scoping is interesting – right now there’s me and the world, but not yet let me see stuff by my trust circle.

Active collection is futureproofed in an interesting way. Used to put together a set of things in a list, but now send a url, which in some sense is a promise to keep updating. The token you hand someone is actually a query.

We can help people visualize what’s changing in complex information environments – e.g. walking through the history of a wikipedia page.

3 – canonical names

OCLC ISBN relationship mapping as a mapping of relationships.

Soundbites in IT conversations – can create a url that is a specific time snippet from media resources.

4 – multimedia storytelling

Storytelling is what we do as a tribe. The ability to remember information we’ve gotten from listening or viewing by where it happened in time is profound.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Last night I moderated a BOF session on calendaring. We had about a dozen people show up, which isn’t bad for an 8:30 pm session at the end of a very full day (and in competition with a bunch of receptions and parties).

Ted Leung attended from OSAF, which was good because there was lots of interest in Chandler and Cosmo and Scooby – folks seemed particularly interested in reusable AJAX-y sort of widgets to use in managing calendar data on the client side before the actual presentation is done. There was the predictable interest in how to work with Outlook/Exchange. There was also a lot of interest in the hcal microformat, which seems to be gathering momentum.

Lots of interest in caldav, of course. We talked up the standards efforts and the CalConnect calendaring consortium.

After the calendaring BOF I stuck around for the microformat BOF – by that point most everybody was getting punch-drunk, so there was lots of laughing and joking, but I got to chat with Tantek a bit about hcard, and he helped walk me through generating an hcard for myself and putting it up on the web – it’s downloadable here.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06