The iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0 are causing quite a resurgence towards the iPhone platform — new users and previous iPhone users alike are both feeling like they have a brand new device in front of them. The App Store allows people to download desktop-class applications directly to their phone and it’s amazing.

However what gets me more excited is the splattering of advanced web technologies that are now in millions of people’s hands courtesy of the Apple and the iPhone. Technologies like CSS3 and sqlite that have only been implemented in the tiniest slice of browsers are now able to be taken advantage of on the iPhone.

Safari performance in iPhone OS 2.0 has been dramatically improved, and this is important because it will continue to allow developers to create great web applications instead of simply going the native Cocoa route. One of the beautiful things about creating applications for the iPhone is that you get to pick which technologies you want to use and implement them where they make the most sense. With the advanced layout rendering capabilities present in Safari, you can create some seriously powerful design logic just by using CSS3 selectors to manipulate your content.

Safari and Firefox have implemented many parts of the CSS3 specification, but the problem is if you’re releasing an application to the masses, you have to support the big ugly dog in the corner, Internet Explorer. All the cool things you can do with CSS3 don’t matter if you’re still supporting older browsers, but on the iPhone you’re only supporting one browser and it happens to have fantastic standards support.

So go ahead and bust out your shadows, rounded corners, and background images, Safari on the iPhone can take it.

Powerset has launched (Powerset.com) and it unveils natural language search capabilities to find answers on Wikipedia, the first dataset that they’ve indexed. Instead of typing things like “Google acquisitions” into, well, Google, you’d type in “who did Google acquire” into Powerset and get back your results.

Wait, what? How is that useful?

Before people get up in arms about my example, it’s on their homepage under the Unlock Meaning section for search queries to try on Powerset. Here’s a list of some other queries they’re hyping as good examples of the technology:

• actors in Pulp Fiction
• what causes diabetes
• who signed the Kyoto Protocol

Perhaps it’s just me and my above-average keyword searching capabilities, but finding these facts on Google would be trivial. When on Google and searching for “pulp fiction actors” the very first result is the IMDB listing with full information and the full answer to my query. When looking on Powerset it gives me a scrollable view of the actors. When I click on an actor, it brings me to another page which is a copy-and-paste job from Wikipedia, but on a Powerset page. The future is here!

If the benefit touted by Powerset is that you don’t have to click to the first result in the list to find your answers — instead, presenting them on the page — and that’s all they’ve got, then they’ve got nothing. The iPhone is killing the cellphone industry not because it’s “everything else that’s out there plus some other features” but because it’s a quantum leap ahead of what’s out there. When Steve Jobs announced it he talked heavily about the “high technology” features and how the technology in the iPhone is at least 5 years ahead of anything else out there. And he was right. Powerset isn’t 5 years ahead of anything, it’s just giving you what Google might have given you if you slightly alter your query.

Danny Sullivan from SearchEngineLand.com had a fantastic quote in the NYTimes article linked previously from which I pulled the title of this blog entry:

“They have a new and interesting technology that most people don’t really need right now,” said Danny Sullivan, a search expert and editor of SearchEngineLand.com. Mr. Sullivan also said that analyzing the meaning of pages, as Powerset does, demands so much computing power that the company is unlikely to be able to index the entire Web any time soon.

Danny his the nail on the head and drives it right into the wood. People are used to keyword searching and they’ve been perfecting their searching skills for years. Powerset gives you the same results in a different format, but it requires a different search syntax. This is like giving professional baseball players a new and improved baseball, but you have to throw it with two hands on the ball at all times. If you throw it with two hands, and do it perfectly, it will go the same speed as you used to be able to throw a normal baseball. What a feature!

Microsoft is rumored to be looking at Powerset as an acquisition target and I truly hope they buy it. If Ballmer thinks that Powerset is the key to taking down Google, then I’d love to see them try and fail over the next 2 years while they ramp up and give it a shot.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the U.S. economy is headed for a recession. The Federal Reserve just cut rates — again — down to 3.50%. This, coupled with oil’s rising prices, the fall of the value of the dollar, the rise in inflation, and the credit lending problems are all pointing to a dramatic downturn in the stock market. Heck, U.S. markets opened today down 5% but managed to come back a few points through solid intraday trading. This isn’t just a random blip on the radar, it’s a signal.

The genius behind the Drama 2.0 blog posted his thoughts on the recession’s effect on the tech industry so I’m going to jump in and post two impacts of the recession right here.

What Will Get Cut First?
When budgets get tight and revenues aren’t as high as they were in the glory days, what will go first is marketing. You can’t dip on your core competencies and get rid of a dozen highly-skilled engineers because then you’re cutting your own throats. Getting rid of your top people and replacing them with low-level morons was the reason that CompUSA went out of business, and cutting the head off your engineering department is a similar mistake.

When advertising gets cut, the ones with the lowest ROI will be the first to get the slash, and that’s going to mean CPM advertising. With CPC, a company is putting all their effort into converting the click on their own website so they control the conversion rates. CPM ads put all the pressure on the publisher to get good click-through rates, and if they’re paying top dollar for CPM rates on popular sites and aren’t getting a good CTR, then it’s a waste of money. AdWords and AdSense aren’t going to drop much, but CPM rates will.

Investors Change Their Tune
VCs have been pouring dollars into companies like paper money is going out of style (*cough*) and 2008 will be the year they take a more careful look at their investments and investment strategy. Investing in pre-revenue companies with no revenue strategy is a lot different than pre-revenue companies that have a solid revenue strategy, and you can guess which type of company won’t be raising as much money this time around. The theory of “past success indicates future success” when it comes to startup founders is going to be flipped around and although an entrepreneur may have had a big name a few years ago, investors will realize it’s a totally new game in 2008. If you’re giving away the cow (the service) and the milk (unique value proposition) for free then you don’t have much of a leg to stand on when it comes time to introduce a revenue model for your “at scale” company. You may be big, but you’re not sustainable. And money doesn’t grow on trees anymore.

It’s astounding to me to think about Google and then picture them buying Sprint, a “real company” in my eyes. Google’s a search company and Sprint makes things and builds things and has advertising and all the things “real companies” seem to have. But to put things in perspective, Google has a market cap of over $200 billion which is more than 4x the market cap of Sprint Nextel, so Google is certainly a larger company.

Google’s Open Handset Alliance announced last week had a lot of hand-waiving and fun illustrations, but was short on actual product. Phones running Google’s Android platform are nearly a year away from being in consumer’s hands, so there are a lot of questions still up in the air. If Google were to acquire Sprint Nextel, it would certainly give more credibility to their hand in the poker game of their cellphone “alliance” and might open up some additional avenues in regards to generating revenue.

So many people hate the telecom industry and cable companies that if Google were to purchase Sprint and use their infrastructure to build out a high-speed, long-distance wireless network, I can see many people ditching Comcast or TimeWarner and jumping on the Google bandwagon. Broadband pipes are so locally saturated in the major metropolitan areas that wireless alternatives might be a good fit for people fed up with lobbyists having a larger impact on their cable companies then their own petitions. Personally I’d love to see Google sell a WiMAX set-top widget that would coordinate with a cellphone widget to push WiMAX speeds to me wherever I am. Unfortunately with Google pursuing the handset alliance it seems if these pipe dreams (no pun intended) come true, iPhone users will be left out in the cold. At least until a 3G iPhone appears and by then anything is possible.

Apple aficionado, speaker, and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki has a new startup coming out called Truemors. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal (person starting mobile-ready web application, how unique) but because it’s Guy Kawasaki’s pet project it gets press. Unfortunately for Guy, his aura has been fading in recent months, so simply having his name attached to a company isn’t enough anymore.

Guy put up the “help wanted” sign over at his blog, saying that Truemors was looking for a few good people, and was trounced in the comments. Here are some choice quotes:

“I hope this is a joke?”

“I agree with most of the comments. It just seems sad. The world doesn’t need another gossip monger.”

“Did you hear that Guy has sunk to a new low? Come on Guy… gossip is one step away from pornography.”

According to TechCrunch, the service will be a “rumor reporting bulletin board with twitter-like capabilities”, or if you switch it around a bit, “Twitter but for rumors.” Unfortunately, that description falls dangerously close to the “it’s like X but for Y” where X is a popular (and normally revenue-free) Web 2.0 startup, and Y is the uninteresting market that X purposely didn’t go for. Truemors gets pwn3d over at that TechCrunch thread as well:

“Cash from rumors. True or not. Potential to ruin lives and reputations all on one board! Great idea, Guy.”

“Wow, how boring and what a bad name. I don’t think Guy has ever founded a real company and his investment record is poor as well – and tumor or whatever is sure to maintain this record. Reminds me of Seth Godin and squidpoo or whatever it was called.”

The comments at TC bring up a good point. If Truemors is essentially “post whatever you want, is it true or not? VOTE!” then I could theoretically post something like “My next-door neighbor John Smith is a Nazi and likes to burn down churches in his spare time” which is obviously libelous. The problem is, the entire Truemors concept is based on posting things that may or may not be true, so how do you avoid defamatory comments in any sort of programmatic fashion? I want to see how they sort that stuff out.

Those crazy cats at TechCrunch have done some more sleuthing, and have somehow gained access to the Truemors beta and produced a screenshot:

The screenshot validates the rumors (ha) about Guy’s new service, and indicates it’s also adopting a Reddit/Digg-type voting style to move individually posted rumors up and down. The site was developed by electric pulp, a design/development agency out in South Dakota that does some really great work. They even have a quote from Guy on their homepage:

“Most tech teams are good, fast, cheap — pick any two. Electric Pulp is all three.” -Guy Kawasaki

Um, not to burst anybody’s bubble, but that’s hardly a compliment. Being good and fast is good, being called or thought of as cheap is not. I’d never want a quote like that on my website, but hey, Guy Kawasaki wrote it so it must be gold, right? Right?

CNET just ran an article today about the future of the Web-based operating system, one that would operate independently of your actual operating system and utilize fat pipe bandwidth to get the job done. I don’t know how many people are actively putting thought into this subject or its monstrous hurdles, but I wanted to get some of my opinions down on “paper”.

Web Apps Are For Casual Creation

One thing that always bothers me about the Web OS argument is that the proponents continue to skip over my segment of the tech population — people who use desktop-class applications to get hardcore work done. I’m in Photoshop all day long with 15 windows open. I’ve got an Illustrator document to my right with over 40 layers. I have TextMate open with multiple projects, dozens of tabs, syntax-highlighted documents across 4 computer languages, you get the picture. I’m not jotting down little notes or cropping/resizing images (casual), I’m creating applications and creating images (professional, not casual) and that’s the difference. The power and multi-threading of desktop applications is needed when you do anything besides casual computer usage (upload photos, chat on IM, jot down notes, etc.) Unfortunately for Web OS proponents, the vast majority of my day is dedicated to non-casual usage because I use my computer for work. Adobe is taking Photoshop to the Web but will be positioned as the lowest-class Adobe photo app out there, lower than Elements. Hmm, I wonder why? Maybe because…

Forget Internet Bandwidth, Think Browser Execution Bandwidth

The tongue-cheeked answer to “why have a Web OS” is normally “because users’ Internet pipes are getting fatter and fatter and we need to utilize that bandwidth.” It sounds good in theory, but that’s not all there is to it. When you run a desktop application it blazes along as fast as clock cycles and RAM allow, but when you run an application based inside of a browser you have more constricting doors to lock and unlock. First off, you might just be a tab on a window with 50 other fully-loaded tabs, which kills your processor power right there (Camino and FF die slow deaths with dozens of tabs open.) Also, if you’re relying on hundreds or thousands of lines of JavaScript to run your application, it’s only going to run as fast as the JavaScript interpreter is allowed to run, and that depends on the browser and how much RAM is allocated to the browser at that particular point in time. When I used the door analogy earlier of locking and unlocking, I meant that a web application has to unlock the door to the JS engine, which needs to talk to the browser, which then talks to the operating system. At any step along that path, one of the doors might just snap shut or be less than fully open (memory problems, reallocated processor power, etc.) and the web app can’t do anything about it because it is at the mercy of the rest of the food chain.

I Don’t Know About You, But I Like Things Snappy

There’s a reason people buy fast computers and lots of memory and that is so their desktop applications zip around and operate at fast speeds. I have yet to use a web application that was as zippy as a desktop application, and that’s annoying. Why would I replace a perfectly good full-powered application with a crippled and slow web application? How is that alluring?

Over the past few days I’ve noticed some large companies hopping into the space that was previously the domain of some much smaller startups. To start, Mozilla Labs is working on a social networking add-on to Firefox which may put the kibosh on Flock (more on that later), and then today, Google launched MyMaps which has many similarities to Wayfaring. This reminds me a bit of Kiko’s predicament but will it turn out the same?

Former Flockstar Chris Messina is playing an interesting role in the new Mozilla Coop concept, primarily because he came up with it first back when he was working with Flock (and his mockups are a lot nicer). Mozilla gives him a quick shout-out here saying that “our design was influenced” by his original mockups. Instead of Mozilla flipping the friends bar vertically and calling it original, they should just pay Chris a boatload of money and use the infinitely higher-fidelity mockups he already designed over a year ago. As a designer this is pretty upsetting, so hopefully the folks at Mozilla do the right thing or at least give him better credit than a footnote link.

Will this be the end for Flock? I don’t think so, I think it’s a wake-up call. Flock still has incredible potential but the landscape of “social” has changed dramatically since they first began building the application. Now, MySpace is the social king but the royalty doesn’t like to play nice with outside developers. If Flock could manage a business relationship with MySpace (or another large social network) and become the de facto browser for those looking to maximize their MySpace experience, they’d take off. Of course this is a 180° turn from their current target which seems to be tech-savvy people who have del.icio.us and Flickr accounts, but hey, changing in midstream isn’t such a bad idea sometimes.

Google’s MyMaps just launched (accessible via a tab on the normal Google Maps site) and it has some interesting features. For example, here’s a map for the 2004 Presidential Election with state colors corresponding to vote counts. Wayfaring has been offering something similar for awhile now, the ability to create social maps that you can share and annotate. However Wayfaring is somewhat limited by the Google Maps API, whereas Google can do whatever they want because they own the data. The Wayfaring UI is very, very nice, however they don’t have the map drawing functionality that the new MyMaps has. However just like with Flock’s situation, I think that the quality design and architecture of Wayfaring’s application could easily hold its own if it had some unique features that MyMaps doesn’t have, especially better integration with blogs or perhaps an audio/video component that links to your map.

Spivot is yet another content aggregation site in a long line of content aggregation sites like 9rules, Newsvine, Topix, Daylife, etc., only Spivot might be a few months late to the party.

From the email I received, Spivot is an “all-purpose media reader… [that] brings together the functionality of news aggregation (Google News), with social news (Digg), with the capabilities of a feed aggregation tool (Bloglines).” A better description would be, “combines feed aggregation (like Bloglines, but less intuitive) with social news features (that Newsvine and a million other sites already have) with blog suggestion/aggregation (like 9rules, but Spivot doesn’t ask before they take your content) and mashes it together.

The Lock-In

When you bring in content from independent, outside sources (like bloggers) then you better be giving them something in return. After all, they’re doing the hard work of researching and writing articles on interesting topics, so if you have their content syndicated on your site, there has to be some benefit to the blogger or else you’re in the same bucket as those damn splogs we all hate so much.

If you visit the Art & Design blog section on Spivot, here’s what you’ll see:

• A list of blogs in the sidebar that produce the content that section is displaying. Click on one of those links on the left and guess what? It doesn’t go to the actual site.
• A list of articles in the center column from their sources in this category. Click on one of the article titles and you head to a page straight out of 1998 with a frameset and a “spivot toolbar” on the bottom so the actual article URL is hijacked. Most blogs have a “email this article” feature built into the site, but just in case that was too complicated, Spivot provides an email service, except the emails it sends out do not include 1) the author’s name or 2) the actual story URL. In fact, no links in the email land you at the real article at all, they all stick you back at the Spivot site. Oh, and if you don’t have JavaScript turned on, there’s no way to kill the annoying bottom frame nor use 90% of the website.
• The only direct link to a source blog on the entire Spivot.com website can be found by clicking on the favicon next to a story. Think it’s going to take you to the blog? Think again, the link takes you to the RSS feed of the blog so you’re staring at code.

It seems like Spivot takes your content without asking, republishes it on their site, and then doesn’t mention your name as the author, doesn’t link to your site, and doesn’t link to your article anywhere. The only thing that could make this worse is if they shoved AdSense blocks next to blog author’s content.

They Could Definitely Have Done Better

Spivot is brought to you by the folks at Involution Studios, a digital product firm founded by two guys (Dirk Knemeyer & Andrei Herasimchuk) for whom I have great respect. Andrei was the first user interface designer hired by Adobe and designed most of the Photoshop interface we’re all used to today, and Dirk is an internationally-known champion of usability and product design with presentations all around the world. Too bad they took all that experience and knowledge and left it behind while they developed Spivot or else maybe it could have done well.

Oh, and before I forget. This whole concept was cooler when it was called Kinja, that site from another era that Gawker let slip into oblivion. Some of the design reminds me of Kinja too, weird.

Much has been made recently about MyBlogLog’s problems, but they have an even larger problem looming on the horizon that is 10x larger than anything else they’ve seen.

The Pro stat tracking features of MyBlogLog are similar to other packages — obviously they track clicks on your site. One of the things that MBL has been tracking (that I have only seen on a small handful of other stat packages) is what they call “iFrame ad tracking”, which is essentially tracking clicks that come from inside iFrames on your site. For people who aren’t super geeks, this is a slightly more difficult thing to track because you have to use the DOM to target the iFrame first, then you have to work the magic. With MBL’s case however, they don’t track generic iFrames and the links on them, they specifically target Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network ads, and nothing else.

What’s also interesting is that they didn’t write this code themselves, but rather “borrowed” it from a third-party developer who put it together for Mint users wishing to track AdSense stats. Here’s part of the code:


//start IFrame ad tracking
//from http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/1715/adsense-click-pepper
var m_px=0,m_py=0,m_as_frms=new Array(),is_ie=document.all?true:false;
function m_as_init() {
var ad=document.getElementsByTagName('iframe');
for(var i=0;i if(ad[i].src.indexOf('googlesyndication.com')>-1){
m_as_frms[m_as_frms.length]=new Array(ad[i], 'http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com', 'Google AdSense');
if(is_ie){ad[i].onfocus=m_trk_as;}
} else if(ad[i].src.indexOf('ypn-js.overture.com') > -1) {
m_as_frms[m_as_frms.length]=new Array(ad[i], 'http://ypn-js.overture.com', 'Yahoo! Publisher Network');
if(is_ie){ad[i].onfocus=m_trk_as;}
} else {}
}


As you can see they only target links in iFrames which have the signature Google AdSense or YPN domain inside, aka, your AdSense or YPN textual ad links. When someone clicks on one of your site’s text ads, that click gets registered on MyBlogLog’s servers and stored.

“But wait, Mike, isn’t this a *feature* and not a huge issue?” No sir, it is a huge issue. Stat tracking is a feature in the Pro version of MBL however the code that tracks your ads’ clicks is present on everyone’s widget, regardless of if they’re a Pro account holder or not. Since the vast majority of MBL users do not have a Pro account, the vast majority of MBL users do not consider Yahoo/MBL tracking their ad clicks as a “feature” but rather a “WTF@!!!”.

So why did Yahoo purchase MyBlogLog? Many have said it was purely for the eyeballs and the user account numbers, but now it’s becoming clear that by owning MBL user data they now have unfettered access to every MBL user’s AdSense statistics, which could have been the selling point all along.

If you’re using the MyBlogLog widget and don’t want your AdSense stats poured over by Yahoo, you should take it down right now. MBL has yet to discuss this significant ad-tracking problem so until then, consider your private ad data to be a lot less private.

A few months ago, in October 2006, Wired News ran a story titled “The Crusade Against Religion” where the author investigated the re-emergence (or emergence?) of atheism powered by some very brilliant scientists and writers. Many people around the world have been involved with this New Atheism, but the most well-known and recognizable figure is Richard Dawkins who is a professor at Oxford University.

There is no “type” of person who might be an atheist, but if you look at Web 2.0 community sites like Digg and YouTube, you’ll see a growing number of users there who display anti-religion or pro-Atheism sentiments. I would go so far as to argue that without large tech-oriented sites like Digg and YouTube, the Atheism 2.0 movement would not have taken off as quickly as it has.

Earlier today, a story hit the Digg frontpage with the title “Murdered for being an atheist” and as of 3:15pm eastern it has over 1100 diggs and nearly 300 comments, easily eclipsing other stories that were made popular today. The first comment in the thread was made by the person who submitted the story:

“It seems like people who are deeply religious are prone to having hallucinations and delusions. This guy was completely insane and is probably better off in jail.”

That comment currently has +134 diggs, which for people who aren’t familiar with Digg comment threads, is a very large positive reaction to that comment. The second comment alludes to the killer liking God so much, that he should be executed so that he can meet his maker quicker while saving taxpayer dollars, and that comment has +127 diggs.

A few comments further down, Tekrat writes how any belief system can be dangerous if taken word-for-word by a radical, and how in his Christian beliefs he takes a particular view of the Bible as a whole and doesn’t just pick and choose. Tekrat is not excusing this person’s actions, rather he says “…this guy should never see the light of freedom again…he’s a picture of everything that has gone wrong with Christianity”, but his comment was immediately dugg down to an impressive -51 diggs. Tekrat also linked to a Christian Science Monitor article titled “Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history”, which has a very inflammatory and anti-Atheistic title, probably one of the reasons Tekrat’s comment was dugg down.

In the last 2-3 months, seven different stories have made it to the front page of Digg that had to do with Richard Dawkins, with 10-12 more about atheism or atheist-related stories. Would many of these news articles become popular on their own if it hadn’t been for the Digg community’s promotion? I don’t think they would.

Recently Newsweek published an article about how the New Atheists are taking to YouTube with their message, denying the existence of a deity in front of thousands of viewers. A video search on “Dawkins” or “atheism” reveals hundreds of videos about atheism, many with over 100,000 views and thousands of ratings. Without Atheism-related videos on YouTube making it to the Digg frontpage, I don’t think many people would be as familiar with Richard Dawkins and Atheism as they are now.

This article isn’t analyzing if there is a God or not, or if Richard Dawkins’ theories are correct, but that Digg and YouTube are extremely powerful devices to project a message to the masses. If you combine the two, as many people have in regards to Atheism, it becomes a veritable force that can sway public opinion like few other outlets can.