Facebook today announced some potentially ‘net-changing features they are releasing under the moniker Open Graph. Open Graph replaces Facebook connect, or perhaps deprecates it if you like, making it easier for people to utilize their Facebook data within the context of other websites. Sounds fancy, eh? Let’s break it down into understandable examples:
Most prominently, websites can embed “Like” buttons on their pages, just as Facebook has on its activity feed items and various other pages around their site. Website creators will embed these Like buttons because it lets their users publish links they like back to their Facebook feed with a single click – they don’t even need to sign in to the creator’s site, as long as they are already signed in on Facebook - free marketing for the website.
In addition to the Like tool, Facebook offers a variety of other “social plugins” to help site creators make their sites more social and more integrated with Facebook. The Activity Feed lets users see what their friends are doing on the creator’s site. Login with Faces shows a user which of their friends are already members of a site and prompts them to sign up with that site to connect with them. Comments lets users comment on individual items on the creator’s site, and gives them a seamless option to post that comment back to Facebook as well. All this without having to create an account on the creator’s site. You get the picture.
Facebook = identity
The most significant immediate implication of Facebooks Open Graph is that site creators may no longer bother having their own registration systems at all, as FriendFeed founder Bret Taylor (now with Facebook) explained. My interpretation is that Facebook wants to own identity on the web, and site creators are likely to step in line because Facebook has made it in their best interest. If creators adopt the tools, they get free marketing tools and a seamless experience for their users. All they sacrifice is having to share their user data with Facebook.
Open Graph is easier to implement than Facebook Connect, and people can start interacting with sites immediately, no login required, which is great. It appears that Facebook will share users’ “basic” information once they connect on a site, so creators get names, email addresses, genders, etc. – all the basic things they would ask for anyway. Easy for the user, easy for me, everyone wins.
Especially Facebook. Once Open Graph plugins become widespread, Facebook will know exactly what users are doing…all the time. They’ll know what sites you visit, and they’ll know what things you Like on those sites. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Big Brother Zuckerberg knows.
Spam bait
Interesting note for you privacy fans: it appears that any data you make public on your profile (which is most of it by default), including things and sites you like, will now be available to other sites so they can tailor their content to your tastes. Cool? Yes. Spooky? Yes. Ripe for abuse? Most definitely. While I don’t have a problem with this personally because I am pretty careful and sparing about what I share on Facebook, a lot of people are going to get stung, and spammers and direct marketers will try to abuse the system to deliver unsolicited ads. I wish Facebook well, but this is going to be a hornet’s nest.
The data
Now for what I think is the real meat of all this: the data. When site creators implement these Like buttons and other plugins, Facebook is encouraging them to tag their pages with specific types of common metadata that may be relevant: image, name, location, email address, phone number, and “type” (e.g. sport, activity, restaurant, athlete, city, product, book, blog, website, etc.) If creators take the time to tag their pages like this, then when their users “like” something, Facebook will know exactly what it is and can present it nicely within the Facebook context.
Think about this for a minute. Suddenly, one organization on the web has the ability to know what pages are about without having to crawl every page (and its backlinks) to figure it out. Site creators are telling Facebook exactly what their pages are about using structured data. Here is the quote from their Open Graph page that jumped right out at me:
Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed.
Search results, eh? Any page on my site that I tag with structured data can show up in Facebook search. Facebook could presumably let their users filter the search so it’s for “actors” or “politicians” or “athletes” or whatever type of object. They can search for activities, landmarks, restaurants near their current location… This sounds an awful lot like Google, but with 1/100th of the effort that Google goes to when compiling their monstrous index of every page on the Internet.
Even better, all these links are ranked by humans. Every “Like” button that we press makes this massive index of webpages and real-life offline things smarter. This is getting impressively close to the holy grail of search: social search. Not only is it vetted by humans, but it’s real-time – no need to wait for a crawler to poke around every corner of the web. The best of Google search with the Best of Twitter search in one package.
Google is surely watching these development keenly, and probably wishing they had acquired Facebook back when they had the chance. Microsoft is surely dancing a jig. (Hey Stumbleupon: love you guys, but it’s time to pack up your bags and go home.)
If I was Google, I’d give an arm and a leg for all this data. With Microsoft being a major investor in Facebook, don’t be surprised to see this data integrated into Bing in the not-too-distant future.
Good article on Apple’s opposition to Flash
Ravi Nagarajan has a good writeup on The Real Reason Behind Apple’s Decision on iPad Flash Support (applied to iPhone/iPod, too.) From the article:
Technologies like Flash and Silverlight allow developers to create rich content that can be delivered via a web browser. There is no gatekeeper regarding who may run such content as long as the user has a web browser that supports the plug-in technology. This open access model directly threatens Apple’s obsession with retaining tight control over what applications are allowed to run on the iPad.
Apple is so reluctant to allow users to control the software that runs on the iPad that the device even lacks such basic interfaces as a USB port. Failing to support Flash and other plug-in technologies is presented to the public as an attempt to shield users from buggy software that could cause the iPad to crash. Yet Apple seems content with supporting Flash technology for Macintosh computer systems. If Flash is so buggy, perhaps Apple should eliminate support on the Macintosh computer lines as well?
Google Buzz: Cool, but not a game-changer
For several years now I’ve been lamenting the fact that social networks have been divorced from web mail. Seems like a natural fit, right? If you’re already logging into a site that knows who your friends are, why not help me keep in touch with those friends beyond the simple “send an email” option?
Some of you may remember that Yahoo has been taking steps to integrate their web mail with social networking (and other daily tasks) for a while now. Facebook wants to add mail to their social network. Google decided to play catch up today and released Google Buzz, as covered really, really, really extensively by TechCrunch and others.
What is Google Buzz? Imagine your Facebook feed interspersed with your email, and that’s pretty much it. When one of your contacts updates her Google status, you’ll see it in your Gmail inbox, and you can comment on it, making it show up in her Gmail inbox again. Adding a little jab at Foursquare, Google will also allow you to geo-tag these status updates, which makes perfect sense if you’re updating from a mobile device.
So it’s fun, it’s cool, but…it’s a couple years too late. Most of us just finished building out our Facebook friends lists, and we have co-workers, classmates, and our parents on it now, so I don’t really need another way to announce my status updates to my contacts. Will I use it? Yeah, occasionally, but I have far more friends on Facebook than I have contacts on Gmail. Not everyone uses Gmail, y’know?
This is not a new concept or a new feature, it’s just a more convenient tool for current Gmail users to keep their friends and family up-to-date. Hopefully TechCrunch will stop flogging this as soon as the “buzz” dies down.
iPad: For the early adopter’s mom
So after the iPad announcement on Wednesday, it seems like much of the tech world has been panning the iPad for not having the features they were hoping for, like a camera, multitasking, more storage, etc.
So today we’re starting to hear more voices defending the iPad, saying that it does have a reason for being, that it does have a customer, and that customer is…moms. I first heard this from two friends of mine, then saw it on Greg Meyer’s blog, and then on Cnet and TechCrunch. The argument goes that moms don’t like laptops because they’re too bulky to carry around, but they still want to read, do light emailing, and web browse, but a smartphone is too small for these tasks, so the iPad fills the bill. The iPad is like the Nintendo Wii of tablets – it’s targeted at a mass market, not the hardcore like the PS3 and Xbox, so stop complaining that it doesn’t have every feature under the sun.
While this argument is tempting, it fails in a couple key places. First, no device that fails to win the early adopters will capture mass market support. The Wii was a hit among early adopters – primarily the under 30 set. They put it on their wishlists, got their moms to buy it for them, and then when they realized it was so easy, they showed their moms how to use it. It succeeded because of its simplicity, and with a lot of help from a $250 price point.
The iPad, on the other hand, looks simple, but really isn’t. Consider a couple of every day use cases in the form of this imaginary conversation with my mom:
“Joel, I want to watch this DVD on the plane. Can I do that on my iPad.”
“Sure, just rip the DVD on your laptop then import it into iTunes, and download it to your iPad.”
“Um…how do I do that?”
“Nevermind. I’ll do it for you.”
“Joel, I want to store a bunch of word documents on my iPad so I can have them handy when I do my volunteer work, how do I do that?”
“Um…there’s an app for that. I’ll do it for you.”
“Joel, I want to send the photos on my digital camera to your aunt. Do I do that on my iPad?”
“Do you have a 30-pin to mini USB adapter or a 30-pin to SD card adapter?”
“A what?”
“Just use your laptop.”
“Joel, I want to buy an ebook and read it while I travel.”
“Well, now you’re in business.”
Ultimately, it’s a device that has a form factor and UI that may be attractive to moms, but it requires tech savvy to actually use it for anything more than what mom already does on her smartphone or laptop. So good thing mom has you, the early adopter around to help her use it. And you’ll probably have to buy it for her, too – how many moms are going to shell out $500 on this kind of gadgetry?
So there you have it: the iPad will sell like hotcakes. To the moms of early adopters, early adopters who are nice enough to buy it for them. I’m sure Apple’s shareholders are pleased to hear that.
iPad fails to live up to the iPod/iPhone legacy
Stevie Jobs yesterday announced the much-anticipated iPad, a tablet device that he says fills the gap between smartphones and laptops. There have been a flurry of articles since then for and against the iPad, mainly focusing on what features it has or is missing, but I’d like to look at it from a higher level, looking at the product positioning and the problems it is trying to solve.
In introducing the iPad, Steve asserts that it is “better (than smartphones and laptops) at these tasks”: browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, eBooks. But the product he then demonstrated didn’t seem to be better at any of those tasks.
- Browsing and email: these will always be easier on a laptop that has a physical, full-size (or close to full-size) keyboard with a mouse/touchpad/pointing device. The iPad’s touchscreen does not make web-browsing or email easier, nor does its small size. The iPad will be adequate for short email or browsing sessions, but for many of us our smartphone is already good enough for that.
- Photos, video and music: it’s a nice photo browser, but to watch movies you’ll need some sort of stand. The hard drive (64GB max) is too small to be good at storing any of these – it would fill up with 10 DVDs, and I know many people whose music collections alone are larger than 64GB. To upload pictures from your camera to the iPad, you’ll need to stock up on dongles because it only has one 30-pin port for connectors (no USB). This device (being based on iPod/iPhone software) is clearly intended to complement a laptop or PC with larger storage capacity, not replace it.
- eBooks: this is the one application in which the iPad outshines smartphones and laptops. And it could be argued that the addition of color (neato!) makes it better than the Kindle, but for people who read for long stretches the Kindle’s e-ink screen will still make it the better option, assuming they aren’t reading magazines or textbooks that rely on color.
Apple lost sight of the fact that tech devices must simplify our lives. The iPod made it easy to listen to music (and later, watch movies) on the go. The iPhone gave us a world of applications with a slick interface in our pockets. It let us take pictures without a camera and navigate without a dedicated GPS, and it let us do a myriad of light computing tasks without a laptop. The iPod and iPhone both revolutionized their markets and changed the way we live, but the iPad fails in this regard.
The iPad is too big to be truly mobile, and it’s too small and limited to replace a laptop. Rather than simplifying my life, the iPad is making it more complicated – it’s a third device I have to maintain, load media onto, and buy dongles for. And all this starts at $499? No thank you, Apple.
Even Hitler doesn’t want one.
For more details, here’s a sampling of the extensive coverage out there:
Three cheers for Valleywag
Three cheers for Valleywag, for calling it like it is. Comscore has been a scam for years, and now it’s downright committing blackmail. Read the Valleywag piece for all the color, but the gist is that websites must pay Comscore $10k/mo in order to get accurately measured, and this is huge because ad buyers at all the big advertisers and agencies rely on Comscore stats (which I can vouch for from personal experience.) Yay Valleywag, boo Comscore.
Amazon: Stop it, now
Amazon today announced that they are making an app store available for the Kindle. What they need to do is go back to the engineers and have them crank out a color Kindle, so developers can make halfway interesting apps for it. Mashable opines that this is “a huge development that completely changes the dynamics of the impending Tablet wars,” but when you consider that the imminent Apple tablet is sure to have an app store, a color screen, and will likely sell more units in their first year than the Kindle has sold cumulatively, this announcement amounts to squat. There’s a reason Amazon doesn’t talk about how many Kindles they’ve sold.
Amazon knows they’re losing all their momentum to Apple, and they’re grasping at straws. They conned EA into giving them a quote for their press release, ““Working with Amazon, we look forward to bringing some of the world’s most popular and fun games to Kindle and their users,” but what’s missing here is any mention of a specific game. EA probably hasn’t started work on any Kindle games and may very well just wait and see if the platform is going to shape up. They certainly won’t release any of their premier game licenses on a black and white screen.
Please move along, nothing to see here.
Looks like I’m not the only one on this bandwagon…
Tablets and E-readers will be killed off by Notebooks
You heard it here first: despite the fact that they were all the buzz at CES this year, tablets and e-readers are destined for obsolescence. Sadly, the fax machine may outlive them.
Here’s why:
E-readers:
The only reason e-readers exist is because it’s hard on the eyes to read text on a computer screen for long periods of time. You could argue that e-readers were invented to save paper or reduce printing and distribution costs, but if that were the main reason, then people would have been reading their books, magazines, and newspapers on their computer a long time ago. You could go read War and Peace right now, but you won’t because it would make you feel like someone is hammering rusty nails into your eyes after the first hour.
So e-readers exist because they have cool e-ink screens that are easy on your e-eyes. Great. But what is an e-reader really, besides a tablet PC with a nice e-ink screen and no web-browsing? In time, tablets will be developed with screens that are similar to e-ink, or perhaps with an “e-ink mode” that can be turned on if you want to read for a while. And then after you’re done with War and Peace you can go back to watching the latest Lady Gaga video. Cool. If I had a tablet like this, I wouldn’t have a need for an e-reader.
So, looking into my crystal ball, I see a tablet with e-ink mode killing off e-readers…so how does the tablet get killed off?
Well, let’s look at the problem that tablets solve – tablets exist because people want something small, portable, and comfortable for casual use while sitting on the couch. Yes, that’s pretty much it. The PC industry has been trying to make tablets for years, but they’ve always failed for two main reasons:
- The reason everyone acknowledges is that fully-functional PCs have always been too heavy. Only recently have we started seeing small PCs with enough horsepower to run regular old Windows, Office, Outlook, and have a few web browsers open at the same time
- The reason everyone has been ignoring (particularly on the CES show floor) is that the tablet form factor just isn’t all that functional. If you’re sitting on your couch, it’s okay to use your touchscreen tablet to web browse a little, play MP3s, watch your videos, or use Facebook. But if you’re doing any serious work on your PC like writing a letter, manipulating files, configuring complex software, using Photoshop…you will want a keyboard and mouse. The tablet form factor is great for fun stuff, not for serious stuff.
And yes, the device that solves both of these problems is the notebook. Notebooks have keyboards, pointing devices, and are getting lighter, smaller, cheaper, and more powerful by the minute.
We are already seeing people merge notebooks with tablets – HP has a pretty cool notebook called the TouchSmart tm2 (that’s right, I said “HP has a cool notebook”), which features a foldaway screen. (Not a new idea, but theirs is very slick.) Lenovo (formerly IBM) unveiled at CES a notebook with a detachable touchscreen (shown above.) The writing is on the wall, guys – notebook/tablet combos will make pure-play tablets pointless. And notebook-tablets with e-ink screens will make e-readers pointless.
The only question is how long this will take. I give it 3 years. I think the fax machine will still be around by then.
And the Oscar for Worst Tagcloud goes to…The Grammys
If you’re a regular reader here, you know how much I love (read: hate) tagclouds. In the vast majority of implementations, they only serve SEO benefits and are almost impossible for users to read aside from the 2-3 largest links. Most are an utter waste of space.
So when I was sent this example which demonstrates everything that is unholy about tagclouds, I had to share.
Wherever should I click...
See it in all of its glory here.
Proprietary e-readers are doomed
Image: Engadget.com
Few tech gadgets these days inspire more wonder and press buzz than e-readers. While Amazon didn’t pioneer the e-reader space, they did popularize it with their bookworm-friendly Kindle. The Kindle, while rather feature-poor as a device, is great for pure book reading, and the passion shown by its users has apparently inspired many other companies to follow suit by developing their own e-readers.
Building an e-reader makes sense for a lot of companies, e.g. Amazon, HP, Dell or Amazon, companies that focus on hardware and developing platforms for which others can develop software or content.
However, we’re now seeing other companies jump into the game who have no business making their own e-readers, specifically content publishers. Time recently gave a preview of their e-reader, showing off its capabilities with content from Sports Illustrated. It looks pretty cool honestly, but what if I want to to read Road and Track on it? No such luck. It’s built for Time Inc. magazines – People, SI, Fortune, TIME, etc.
So no Road and Track, but what if I want to read PC World or Popular Science? There’s an e-reader for that. Bonnier, IDG, and MIT have teamed up with Plastic Logic to create an e-reader for their lineup of technology-oriented magazines.
So now, when I’m sitting on my throne and want something to read, I don’t flip through my magazine rack, I flip through my e-reader rack until I find the e-reader with the magazine I want to read. Awesome.
This must stop. Now. We, the users, are trying to simplify our lives with e-readers, not complicate them. I should be able to have a single reader with all my magazines on it, not a half-dozen different e-readers with different interfaces and control schemes. Any publisher making their own e-reader for their own content is doomed, and needs to be stopped before they hurt themselves.
What would happen if NBC, CBS, and ABC broadcast their shows so they could only be seen on proprietary devices? ”Let me turn on my other TV so I can watch NBC.” Yeah, that’d fly. These guys rely on the TV and HDTV standards that make their entire business models possible.
We have seen format battles in the past like VHS vs. Betamax or Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD, but ultimately those are open formats – available for all content producers to use. This is analogous to the battle between the Kindle, the Sony e-reader, and the rumored Apple iTablet or whatever it ends up being called. But for a content producer to make hardware that solely services their content is just insane. Stop now, guys, and leave hardware to the professionals (as Condé Nast is doing) before you bankrupt yourselves trying to swim in the deep end of the pool.
