graphicallyspeaking

#ihatewhengirlssay "that didn't take long"

2009-09-12T17:28:00.005-04:00

Interesting to watch "tweetalanches" happen... and where/when they get started. For example, today at 10am, "#ihatewhengirlssay" was not a hashtag with any tweets. At the moment .... a few hundred. It should be interesting to see how much "damage" it causes before the dust settles. The whole things reminds of Scott Adams' "Avatar" concept/character in his most excellent books: God's Debris and Religion War (no relation to James Cameron's upcoming movie).

Also of recent note: Twitter's going to start making money.

#ihatewhengirlsay "Twitter's going to make tons of money."

It will... for the founders.

No one else will make anything....

Comcast, Time Warner, and TVEverywhere

2009-06-25T17:34:00.003-04:00

Comcast and Time Warner jointly announced the "TV Everywhere" initiative - much to the very vocal derision of blogs, pundits, and digital heads everywhere :)

The root of the announcement is, of course, that premium programming content will be available online, at no incremental cost to consumers (what marketers like to call "free" :)).

Hard to see why this is a bad thing - but there are lots of big words, like "anti-competitive" and "anti-consumer", being bandied about, so let's try to deconstruct the questions being asked a bit. Note that opinions expressed here, as always, are strictly my own.

1) Should content producers allowed to charge for access to their content?

I think the answer to that is "yes". There are some fair questions about who they charge, and how, and is there pricing collusion, etc. - but I don't think anyone means to imply that advertising is the ONLY model that content producers should be able to use?

2) Doesn't "TV Everywhere" depart from the Hulu model?

So... broadcasters (NBC, ABC, Fox, et al) ALREADY make the content available for free (over-the-air) - and they monetize with advertising. The "Hulu model" was to take the same business model, and make it available online. I don't mean to parse semantics here, but... kinda sounds like the same idea here: make content available wherever consumers are, using a model that is already working for consumers. Like Hulu, this isn't a new business - its a new distribution channel.

3) Doesn't this "violate the open nature of the Internet"?

Hmm - not sure I follow this one. "TV Everywhere" is not exclusive in any way - its simply a way for premium TV producers to get their content to consumers online, and helps identify those who are already paying for the content offline. If the content producers want to make their stuff free - well, it is their content; they're welcome to do so - not sure how this initiative impedes that idea. Yes, NBC, Fox, et al, already make their content available free to consumers (for a limited time window) - but also did so before Hulu.

The Internet is an "all bits are equal" data pipe into the home - and nothing about offering subscription video over the Internet with "TV Everywhere" changes that?

The irony, to me, of posts like Om Malik's (about the "inefficent business model" being propagated here, etc.) is that it sits on the site the same day as a post that reads "Is there a future for original web video shows?"....

There is a fair question here - will the price to consumers of content trend towards zero? And if it does, how will that impact quality (i.e. who's going to want to pay to make the good stuff)?

This program doesn't purport to answer that - mostly its just trying to get more people more convenient access to something they're already paying for.

How horrible! :)

MS Bing: The more things change...

2009-06-01T16:32:00.004-04:00

Microsoft launched their new search engine (Bing) today. Its nice, though, as a friend on Twitter pointed out, it does have that "Microsoft smell".

For instance, Googlewhack has always been a fun past time (find a search term of two words or less, that resolves to one and only one result) - and its fairly tricky to do (check out the site for details) - on Google.

But with Bing.... not so hard! Turns out that searching for a competitve search engine (Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc). is a googlewhack, um, bingwhack.

I'm (pretty) sure that the algorithm is NOT based on that fact - but that it appears so is, well, so Microsoft smelling... try it yourself.

Bing!

Cue John Hodgman Apple commercial....

Browser benchmarks: When did they get so stupid?

2009-05-20T12:53:00.004-04:00

So, the claim that IE is faster than Firefox, Safari, or Chrome, is ridiculous at many levels (MS claims IE faster than other browsers), and Microsoft was appropriately ridiculed for it.

But so is the idea that you have a test that demonstrates that the new Safari builds are "above 15 times better performance than Internet Explorer 7 in the same system".

Seriously, that's just stupid., and renders the index meaningless.

Why not just multiple the index scores by 10? Then you can claim Safari is 150X faster than IE7.

Without scaling the index into a range that meaningfully communicates (or at least correlates) to user experience (which things like FPS and even 3DMark did for video cards), it renders the testing both invalid and irrelevant.

Comscore v. Hulu: garbage in---garbage out?

2009-05-15T22:03:00.006-04:00

Interesting. The New York Times is reporting that Hulu is disputing audience count with Nielsen, stating "While Nielsen reported 8.9 million visitors to Hulu in March, another measurement firm,comScore, counted 42 million. "

Wow.

Slightly embarassing, but I think that the Times is confusing "Unique Visitors" (how many unique cookies are counted by a site - a reasonable proxy for people visiting the site) with "Unique Viewers" (a syndicated video player concept - how many unique cookies were counted by the syndicated player; a reasonable proxy for the number of viewers who were served video by the site).

In layman's terms, the first number would represent, in our example, the number of people who visited Hulu.com (unique visitors), while the second (unique viewers) would represent how many people watched a Hulu sourced video, whether on Hulu, a third party site (like Fancast), or embedded elsewhere (like on somebody's blog).

A visit to alexa or compete shows the number of "unique visitors" to be comparable to what Nielsen reported (a fact others have noted). And guess what? Even Comscore doesn't put Hulu in the top 50 for April 2009 - which means even Comscore suggests that the number of unique visistors to Hulu is less than 19M (if someone has the actual number, I'd appreciate it).

So... move along... nothing to see here...

Wow - what am I missing?Pirate bay craziness...

2009-04-26T23:07:00.001-04:00

http://www.nme.com/news/various-artists/44103

The pirate bay is (was?) a site that holds *links* to torrents. I'm NOT in anyway in favor of copyright violation or intellectual property theft - but how is this (a) wrong or (b) worthy of the punishment? ($M in fines, and time in *prison*)??

Its a search engine? It doesn't hold the content.... perhaps I'm missing something (have to admit I never used it).

Update: hiliarious (and accurate) thepirategoogle (pirate bay using google... duh, its a search engine, just like thepiratebay was)

Update 2: hmm - broken (blocked by google?)

Update 3: An update (tried to find the site owner, but couldn't)... so try this: thepiratebaygoogle on sree

Boxee v. Hulu: Endgame

2009-03-24T21:57:00.004-04:00

For those of you who haven't been following - In this corner: Boxee's a very nice media center type "10 foot" UI for watching video content (local and internet) using your PC/Mac. In the red trunks: Hulu's a "free" browser based video service backed by NBC/Universal and Fox.

Round 1: Boxee's supports Hulu in Boxee and goes from "nice" to "useful/interesting"
Round 2: Hulu asks Boxee to drop Hulu support. Boxee complies.
Round 3: Sort of. Its not supported out of the box(ee :)), but Boxee lets users manually add Hulu support.

Round 4: Hulu blocks Boxee.

Round 5: Boxee adds a browser. (Mozilla/Firefox - read through the post)

Now it gets interesting...

So... much like the machinations of ESPN, the real question is why?

It's not entirely clear to me - and Boxee's end run should bring it to a head; If I connect a browser to my TV, why shouldn't I be able to play content that works on my PC? As a practical matter, there's no good way to differentiate (in the medium term - short term hacks might work)

I kind of get the point for the content guys - they want to decide how and where their content gets consumed. Here's the thing - they may not get that choice: free is free.

(Incidentally this is less of an issue for folks like us than you may think: either way its over our connectivity, and content aqcuisition is a big part of our costs - think it through. For example, note that Netflix likes streaming - because they charge you a subscription.)

It seems like the issue is that, ultimately, the Internet will erase a huge amount of value (valuation? perhaps not quite the same thing) from the world. I'm not arguing about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing - arguably, this was artificial value. Just saying its so... question is how you adjust.

ESPN makes an... interesting play

2009-02-12T21:02:00.004-05:00

I'm surprised there's not been more coverage of ESPN's ISP extortion scheme.

ESPN's Play To Make ISPs Pay

(from slashdot)

Its kind of interesting - on the one hand, its their site, their content, they should be able to do what they want... on the other hand, well, it seems like deals like this seem like a bad idea on many levels. I guess the markets will speak on whether this makes sense.

But amusingly, this was also covered on BroadbandReports (see here) - the amusing part is that the article ran with an advertisement (contextually served by our overlords at Google) from, you guessed it, ESPN.

Karma's a fickle beast.

Twitter, really? You're surprised?

2009-02-02T11:52:00.006-05:00

I'm always a bit surprised at the media's surprise of media darlings (to wit: "Twitter's Risk of Ubiquity"). First, we're all lemmings - where "all" especially includes anybody who thinks they are a subject matter expert, analyst, or pundit.

Secondly (specific to this instance), Twitter is Second Life for the "cool" geeks (what's the emoticon for sarcasm?). Which is to say, though not as nerdy as 3D, it is an interesting indicator of future interaction patterns ("follow the alpha geek"). But, its never going to be a interesting business, and the early pioneers will likely not stand the test of time.

An ex-VP of Business Development of one of my endeavors once said "Our goal is to have a business model that you can't disprove in a finite amount of time." (I probably should have listened to him - but that's a story for another day)

So here's my new axiom for the new economy (I'll warn you in advance that its not as pithy as my former colleague's):

If you have a Chief Revenue Officer, you might be a jack-ass.

The business of EVERY business is to make money. Seriously. Its right there in the definition and everything.

Redux: Touch UI and the Art of Intent

2008-12-19T23:24:00.004-05:00

Some very interesting research into touch UI from Microsoft Research, University of Toronto, and the good folks at Mitsubishi (MERL's been doing some great work) illustrates how to improve the precision and efficacy of touch screen computing. This isn't strictly a technology problem (touch screens are pretty accurate) - its a human factors problem (an affordance issue).

I wrote on this a while ago - the mouse is pretty accurate, but one of the significant reasons I think it succeeded as an "intuitive" input device was that it created an interface paradigm that allowed "intent".

Touch screens allow us to create programmable input devices (the hardwares becomes "soft" - the rest is just wiring) - I don't think its tactility that's makes it intriguing.

While the article posits that they solve the "fat fingering" problem by allowing the interactive to happen "above" your fingers - that is, you can touch the front *and* back of the screen, I'll posit that its actually the recapturing of *intent* in the interaction flow that makes the difference here.

Judge for yourself:

In any case, pretty cool.

I've seen the future!

2008-12-10T14:37:00.004-05:00

Not so much.

Microsoft Plans VR Simulation of Everything? (from slashdot)

"Microsoft's research chief has been promoting the idea of commerce applications and other tools built on top of what he calls the 'Spatial Web', a blend of 3D, video, and location-aware technologies. He gave an example of a shopkeeper creating 3D models of his store's interior and goods with Photosynth and then uploading the results into a large 3D model of local shopping district. Customers could 'visit' the area, browse products, and order them for real-world delivery"

As a colleague of mine once said, quite some time ago:
"Sounds like Doom, without the fun"

(Or... was that me? Can't remember....)

Review: Best Javascript book EVER.

2008-12-09T16:00:00.005-05:00

Douglas Crockford's "Javascript: the Good Parts" - go get it. Its concise, and takes you through the semantics of Javascript from first principles. Unlike most such books, which try to make learning JS easier by over-analogizing to other languages, Doug's book also highlights the differences from the very beginning - building a much better foundation for understanding the language, pros and cons.

Heartilty recommended regardless of your level of sophistication or intimacy with Javascript. At a minimum, you'll come away with a better framework for approaching your web applications. And if you're language geek, you'll just like it.

Plus, its concise.

Probably my favorite programming book since the red book (level 1, natch).

Practical Joke?

2008-11-10T15:46:00.004-05:00

I read this headline on Slashdot:
Halliburton Applies For Patent-Trolling Patent

It's GOT to be joke... see the original article: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081107/0118162765.shtml

Is it April 1 somewhere in the world? *Somebody's* got to be kidding... please?

Election '08 (that's a wrap)

2008-11-05T12:39:00.003-05:00

"There's no question about it - In the next 40 years a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother had." - Robert F. Kennedy, 1968.

Google Chrome Review in 25 words

2008-09-19T10:45:00.001-04:00

Pros: Great UI (not break-through, but very nice), Fast

Cons: Memory hog, Crashes a lot, not quite as compatible

Summary: Its my default browser - go figure!

Google Chrome: Quick Browser Benchmark

2008-09-02T15:18:00.009-04:00

Update: IE 7 was not included because it took too damn long to finish and I got bored.

Using Dromaeo.

Firefox 3_____2042 ms
Safari 3.1.2__2561 ms
Chrome 0.2:____540 ms

Actual product thoughts forthcoming after a few days of usage... but my "first 10 minutes" review is: nice, but nothing that would make me switch (from Firefox).

New Browser: Google Chrome -Launching Tomorrow! (maybe?)

2008-09-01T21:10:00.009-04:00

Update: Official statement.

Lots of information available at blogoscoped. Of particular interest is how it looks like its going to be introduced: using an online graphic novel by Scout McCloud.

The new JavaScript VM should be interesting - I've certainly felt you could achieve 5-10X current JavaScript without resorting to a JIT for dynamic languages. Too much is made of the process isolation (IMHO) - though there is something nice in the idea that each tab is a "reboot" of your browser.

They also outline some UI design choices which I think are appropriate - we did them quite intentionally on AOL Explorer, and (forgive the sense of vindication but) two items I feel particularly that I pushed (larger back button and tabs above the address bar) look like they're mainstreaming... pity we blinked so often back then.

Hopefully there will be more in "Google Chrome" - a rethought browser is looooong over due. Definitely read Scott's comic commentary as to why.

Probably unfair to juedge without a test drive, but what I see in screenshots is still pretty incremental (as was AOL Explorer) - it would be a continued sign of corporate hubris to imagine success by tweaking a successful formula and sticking their brand on it.

(Note that I'm not saying it won't work.... :P)

I'll post some thoughts when I try it out.

Open Source Legal Ruling Sets Precedent

2008-08-19T17:29:00.005-04:00

The ruling is from last week, but still worth mentioning as there seems to be some confusion and swirl about the scope and impact of the ruling. As always, I'm happy to provide my opinion on the subject :)

The short version is this: someone incorporated some very liberally licensed source code into a commercial product, and did not abide by the terms under which the original source code was released - namely that if you use the code, you must provide attribution and a link/pointer back to the original. So the owner of the original source code sued.

The questions that got answered by the courts were:
- Is an extremely liberal license the equivalent of depositing your work in the public domain? (no)
- Is an open source license a valid copyright, or does it fall into the jurisdiction of contract law? (copyright)

Basically, it means that the copyright holder has the right to impose restrictions on the use of licensed products.

Although some folks have noted that this could fuel further RIAA/content license nonsense, it should be noted that this ruling did NOT touch on fair use (the right of the individual to manage his/her "copy"), but on the rights of re-use and re-distribution.

And although it was a "win" for open source advocates - especially because copyright law provides the opporunity injunctive relief ("the right to withold") - it didn't address the so-called viral nature of GPL-like licenses, either.

Still, all-in-all, seems like a win for rationality - read it for yourself (its not long).

True Story

2008-07-17T01:22:00.002-04:00

Until Facebook, I never realized how annoying something as mundane as my birthday could be. Thank you social networking overlords.

R.I.P: Finder/Explorer AKA "the Desktop", 1984-2007

2008-06-15T22:11:00.010-04:00

I'm calling it - time of death: June 2007. Its been a long time coming, but it seems clear that the Blackberry, the iPhone, Outlook, Picasa, and iTunes all herald the end of document-centric computing.

The iPhone really didn't create this trend, but I'll say that its certainly a very visible final nail, just as the Macintosh Finder was the "visible" start back in 1984. Today, you don't keep piles of stuff on your "desktop" and activate applications (or applets) against relevant document parts: the vast majority your content is organized against your applications, not the other way around - the iPhone is a computer that doesn't even have a desktop, in any traditional sense.

There was a brief resurgence of the idea that the document was the gateway to your applications in the early 90's with OpenDoc and OLE (Object Linking and Embedding).

Hah.

We're at the starting tip of an orgasmic diarrhea of content creation in the form of e-mail, blog posts, music, photos and videos. And every single one of those is organized against single media form computing - barely a compound document in sight... you go to custom applications to create, edit, organize, and consume all the vast amount of gigabytes and terabytes of data we all share.

Vista Search and Spotlight in OS X only demonstrate even further how increasingly irrelevant the Finder and Windows Explorer are for everyday users.

In a slightly related tangent: What's most shocking to me today is how right Unix got it in the 1970's. URL's and hierarchical file paths seemed like dinosaur concepts in the early 90's before roaring back.

Either that, or we just haven't had the imagination to organize our way out of a paper bag since 1977... there's a parallel here.

Another way of saying "cool idea - wrong problem".

1 year at Comcast

2008-05-28T14:42:00.009-04:00

I just completed my first year at Comcast. Its been a gratifying experience thus far, both personally and professionally. I've been having a blast living in downtown Philly - the lifestyle has been wonderful, and the 10 minute walk to work everyday has completely spoiled me for commuting in the future. And Comcast has been a great place to work: an interesting and challenging set of problems, and a good group of people to work with (and for). I'd be lying if I said it was moving as quickly as I'd like - although I think I've made some meaningful contributions throughout my time thus far, the bigger consumer impacting things I've been working on (tru2way and Project Infinity and the like) will only begin showing up in the back half of '08 and only really at significant scale and volume (from a consumption perspective) well into 2009.

That's a long time.

Still, its a complicated technology environment - its a heady mix of legacy technology infrastructures, permutations of configurations and network designs, and a significant scale of problem set and quality-of-service requirements - and just to help, we enjoy a... challenging regulatory environment. (Boy, Those sound like excuses, even as I type them)

In celebration of my year (sort of) I spent last week at NCTA's (National Cable and Telecommunications Association) "The Cable Show". I spoke on a number of panels at the show, which is always fun. The Q&A's are always a bit frustrating, as people come to the shows to get answers, which I have .... but usually can't give. We have enough problems internally distinguishing between *goals* ("we're committed to getting there") and *plans* ("we actually have a path to get there") - no good way to make that distinction clear externally - especially for a public company.

The only real drag has been my travel calendar - would like to slow that down a bit. All in all, though, feels like I'm just getting warmed up here, which is both exciting and depressing, on many levels :)

Apple: "Who needs Flash?"

2008-03-06T08:25:00.003-05:00

Ouch - from the grand poobah, Steve Jobs: "version of Flash formatted to personal computers is too slow on the iPhone"

Adobe's response notes the difference between "Flash lite" (for mobile) and "Flash" (the desktop version Jobs alluded to in his comments).

From a technology perspective, this hilights a subtlety Jobs implies that most (including Adobe's Ryan Stewart) either missed or mis-directed in their responses: Jobs doesn't want the half-assed version of the Web that most users experience on their handsets - he wants the real thing.

And that means, for the iPhone, Flash, not Flash Lite. The point being, the iPhone is a general purose computing device, and, though it may require interaction paradigm adjustments (form factor, input schema, etc.), it shouldn't have to compromise richness and robustness.

The current Flash Player really is optimized for the desktop (especially the Intel platform)- but, to be fair, that's an engineering deficiency, not a phyics problem; it is possible for the Flash platform to address...

Adobe: Engage and AIR

2008-02-25T13:27:00.005-05:00

I'm at the Adobe Engage event is SF today, for the launch of Adobe AIR. Its been a while coming (beginning with Adobe Apollo), with much written about it.

Interesting elements: desktop integration (peristent storage, UI touchpoints, etc.), full HTML(via WebKit) support, integrated PDF display, and an application packaging model for easy install and update (distribution).

The two most important pieces (IMHO) are the persistent storage model and application packaging model - these start to bring the benefits of "content" to executable applications... that its "Flash" underneath is interesting but not necessarily the important part. These technologies do provide a differentiated but overlapping feature set that I don't mean to downplay, but HTML, Flash, PDF, etc. are, I think, going to end up being more about onboarding developers.

Hard to appreciate how important distribution is as a part of application lifecycle management.

The natural comparison points are Silverlight and Prism, and as with those two, distribution will be less the issue than finding the compelling applications will be (although you should note that Silverlight, in particular, is more an answer to Flash than AIR).

Adobe is significantly advantaged in this regard because (a) they're cross-platform (by that I mean crossing OS, browser and Web/Desktop boundaries), and (b) they're committed to the platform - the biggest knock with Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation is that its hard to tell how serious they really are. Remember when all of Vista was going to *require* .NET? Or remember ChromeEffects? Or Blackbird?

That said, I think one chink in the AIR platform (IMHO) is that it provides no way for third parties to natively extend the platform - Adobe still thinks about applications as B2C propositions. A second knock is that they still haven't gotten the "just in time" element of application and platform install quite right (I've written on this before) - it will limit (again IMHO) where users prefer websites to applications.

Still - there's a lot to like.

More shortly - Kevin Lynch is talking now...

Fun with Flash

2008-02-03T21:23:00.001-05:00

Amusing video :)

MacWorld 2008: Software Industry R.I.P.

2008-01-16T21:27:00.000-05:00

It's only fair, and certainly poetic, but the circle is now complete. As Apple, with the Apple II (and a little nudge from VisiCalc), heralded the beginning, so too did Steve Jobs (and Apple) herald the end (or at least, the end of the beginning) of the software industry.

No longer is a "what" (as in, "What do you?"), its now officially a "how". I'm calling it: Time of Death - January 15th, 2008, 9:48am PST (or thereabouts :))

What's am I going on and on about?

Steve Jobs made some cool announcements at the annual Apple-o-phile incest/love-fest: iPhone/iTouch upgrades, AppleTV stuff, MacBook Air, Time Capsule/Airport, and no mention of OS X...

(Tiger? Leopard? What's next? I dunno!! - some damn cat??)

Its not THAT wierd he didn't mention it - after all, Leopard just shipped, and I expect the OS enhancements will probably debut at the Apple Worldwide Developer's conference in June.

What was wierd was that nobody noticed... or cared.

It's a trend that's been developing for some time, but, these days, saying you do "software" is now as meaningful as saying you're in the "customer business" (or as insightful as having an "Audience business"? :P)...... just not that descriptive, dipsh!t.

And 2008 just made it official.

If you'll forgive the math mangling: It's only a hyperbole, if you can't see the asymptopes.