Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled

There's A Pony In There Somewhere

A random sampling of notes I jotted on a napkin during a midafternoon conversation between John Battelle and Joyce Park at Thirsty Bear...

• "You are part of a conversation. Not how but who. Models won't work. Quality matters."


• "A dashboard for advertisers that really works -- so they can know everything."


• "Leverage existing ecosystems, don't try to make new ones."


• "Advertisers want audience, plus content, plus community -- the conversations. Audience, content creators, and community owners, on the other hand, only want advertisers we think is cool. And cool is totally subjective."


• "Intermediation between personal and commercial depends on trust, not necessarily on market relationships."


• "Marissa Mayer said the prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the Founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. So until recently Google really didn't understand or appreciate webdev. And even now, one wonders if Google corporate understands and appreciates the Web -- or if, more likely, that task is relegated to a few very talented individuals within the organization..."

By the way, don't read too much into these notes because they're really incomplete because I cannot read my own damned handwriting. Sometimes I scribble addresses too sloppy when I jot 'em. I gotta stop those three martini lunches... and those moron bowls... ;)

The Web Way

The W3C celebrated its tenth anniversary today, and my employer CommerceNet turned ten this year as well.

As the year draws to a close, I'm filled with the feeling that 2004 was the year that Silicon Valley technical folks and entrepreneurs who appreciate The Web Way started to gather with more regularity than any year since I arrived. (That would be December 2000, when KnowNow moved from Seattle to Silicon Valley.)

The Web Way is a philosophy toward Web-based services:

1. They should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
2. They should have clean designs for user interfaces and clean designs for programming interfaces.
3. Where it's useful, they should embrace REST.
4. Where it's useful, they should embrace loose coupling.
5. Where it's useful, they should embrace glorious, nonblocking, asynchronous pubsub. ;)
6. Where it's useful, they should embrace microformats, a/k/a lowercase semantic web.
7. Where it's needed, they should embrace the time-tested principles of Scalable Internet Architectures (three simple rules: optimize where it counts, complexity has its costs, and use the right tool).

It is no wonder that 2004 -- being the year of The Web Way -- was a breakout year for blogs, wikis, RSS, and REST. (For far-out thinkers, the principles of application-layer internetworking and ARRESTED may also prove useful in the 2009 to 2014 time frame.)

Looking back on the year of The Web Way, I see that my lives intertwingle category offers a delicious sampling of the kinds of gatherings that have taken place in 2004. The year started with a wonderful geek dinner organized by Jeremy Zawodny (thanks!). Or in spring, when some great folks did some web services networking. Or in summer, when we did the empire tap. Or in fall, at Web 2.0.

I was reminded of that dinner this evening when I was invited to dinner at King of Krung Siam with some of the Twelve Olympians of Mount Olympus of PHP: Rasmus Lerdorf (and child), George Schlossnagle (who flew out from OmniTI in Maryland), Tim Converse (fresh from interview fame), Jeremy Zawodny (fresh from grokking Bloomba, and still psychic), Kevin Murphy, Sterling Hughes, Joyce Park, and Raj Vaswani. Actually, Tim and Joyce are more like Moses bringing the tablets down from Mount Olympus, as represented by their PHP Bible. Bad metaphor, but you get the point. Anyway, Joyce told us that a loofah is the fibrous endoskeleton of a gourd -- and that was the least interesting thing I learned at the dinner table.

But  I'm off-topic. My point is that when people who are well-versed in The Web Way meet over a meal (or better: booze), interesting ideas are exchanged and it's as if you can see the wheels of innovation gaining momentum. It is truly an awesome phenomenon, not to mention a delectable culinary experience.

Many times I just plain forget to blog about such gatherings. For example, last Tuesday November 23, Tantek arranged for a bunch of people well-versed in The Web Way to dine at Ti Couz Creperie. There I had the opportunity to talk with Tantek Çelik talking about microformats, Amber Nixon (the DJ who made the Fast 50 -- I voted), Jason DeFillippo (of metroblogging (I voted, blogrolling, and now technorati -- where does he find the time?), Aaron Boodman (who escaped billg to embrace the GOOG, but still had time for crepes with us), Niall Kennedy (technorati is two years old?!), Dinah Sanders (who's right that it's too cold in the Bay Area lately), Kragen Sitaker, Alex Russell (Dojo! Dojo! Dojo!), and troutgirl (who may never reveal her true identity again). It was a great time, and I learned a lot, and I wish it could have gone on longer...

But I know there will be more such get-togethers. There is reason to be optimistic. We have survived the Silicon Valley downturn, and we look ahead. There are a lot of innovations yet to be created, and the technologies of The Web Way are mature enough and inexpensive enough that entrepreneurs can gain momentum for their ideas; I look forward to more such interesting gatherings in 2005. 106 Miles does not exist yet except as the twinkle in Joyce's eye; but one day soon it will be so much more. And, before that, there should be some fun as well: on December 14 there's a pretty interesting zLab gathering that should be a blast. The future is wide open, and we're leaving the spammers behind...

P.S. -- When did Bugzilla get a new mascot?  Buggie is so cute!

Rob Rodin

Rob Rodin is visiting today. Whenever he visits, he usually leaves me with one major point to think about -- sort of like leadership-by-koan.

For example, once he handed me and Rohit a sheet of paper with the lyrics to Paul Simon's "The Sounds of Silence" on it, and the following lines in bold:

People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening.

On Friday he met with Joyce and made a dozen decisions; I was disappointed with some of the decisions but I understand that part of my growth as an individual and as part of a team is internalizing the Rolling Stones' line,

You can't always get what you want,
But if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.

It occurs to me that Rob, because of the life he leads, has spoken with and listened to tens of thousands of people just this year -- and it is in his life, intertwingling with others, as a highly connected and charismatic person, that he is able to influence a tremendous number of people in the world, sometimes by speaking and sometimes by listening, sometimes by supporting and sometimes by not supporting -- and this in turn influences the future, as Brian researched,

"The future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed."

This type of future-influence I've found common to many superconnectors like Rob, but the thing that strikes me about Rob in particular is that even when I disagree with him, I find myself wanting to follow his lead and to do the best I can.

I've learned from Rob that a big part of leadership is providing constraints to an individual or team, and then letting them figure out what to do given those constraints. Sometimes the constraints are tough -- for example, you cannot have money for this, or you must get this done by this aggressive date -- and I cannot always understand why the constraints are chosen. But I do believe that an individual or team who figures out what to do -- and does it well, given the constraints -- is much stronger and more capable for going through the process.

Web 2.0

I thoroughly enjoyed getting caught up in the whirlwind of Web 2.0.  My summary:

Including the gatecrashers there were probably close to a thousand people in attendance, schmoozing each other up and creating the kind of optimistic, wild enthusiasm that I haven't seen since 1999.  Silicon Valley is buzzing again -- and the powerful, the influential, and the entrepreneurial came together to trade ideas, to make connections, and to get energized to take the industry and the world to the next level.  This was, by far, the best conference I've attended in a long time.

(I judge a conference's quality by the quality of the hallway banter, and I can count the oodles of private bits that I became privy to this week as testament to the excellence of Web 2.0.)

I have neither the time nor ability to make a comprehensive archive of Web 2.0, nor do I want to repeat bits in the wonderful Web 2.0 coverage, so I'll just post my favorite memories.

Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle on the big themes of the conference:

• The web is a development environment.
  
• Websites are now software components that you can call as services.
  
• PC application stack was Intel-Others-Windows, with third party applications to lock in at the top.
  
• Web application stack is NetworkSolutions - OpenSource/Browsers - BigGuysLikeAmazonAndMapquestAndGoogle, with network effects to lock in at the top.
  
• Customers build businesses -- tons of people are putting content on the Internet to help eBay, Google, Blogging, Amazon, Flickr, etc.
  
• Microsoft won the browser war but saw no financial gains from the win.  All the value has migrated to the applications.
  
• We're seeing the end of the software upgrade cycle, because Web applications are always up-to-date.
  
• "The Power of the Tail" means you can have a lot of small players that all survive. Google AdSense takes advantage of the tail.

Cool companies showcasing goodies were debuts like JotSpot, SpikeSource, Sxip, Keyhole, Rojo, as well as Flickr, Laszlo, PubSub, and SocialText.  There's true momentum for lightweight business models.  Oft-mentioned technologies getting significant buzz in the hallway chatter were RSS, Wiki (and especially Wikipedia), Firefox, and Podcasting.  (More interesting, technologies that received no mentions in hallway chatter were SOAP-style Web Services, Longhorn, Bluetooth, and WAP.)

There are 313 billionaires in America right now, and three of them attended this conference: Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang, and Jeff Bezos.  (Out of the three, apparently there were zero billionaires for Bush. :)

Jeff Bezos enthusiastically showcased the Alexa Web Information Service and Amazon Web Services 4.0, which now has 65,000 developers and serves more than a billion web service requests a month:

[Our philosophy is] find the useful guts of Amazon and expose them... offer API's and let an ecosystem develop... It's still day one.

Tim O'Reilly said, "Web Services let us rip/mix/burn websites", recalling Apple's rip/mix/burn ad for iPod.

Bill Gross showcased Snap, a new search engine.  Said Bill, "Search results are where the journey begins." More interesting than Snap is that when Cory blogged about Snap's linking policy on BoingBoing, which was then snapped up as RSS and fed to employees at Snap.com who subscribe to a PubSub.com feed about themselves, which led to them changing the policy.  Actions and cause-and-effect reactions happen in real time in the blogosphere.  After the Snap presentation, John Battelle said, "I really want to be blogging right now."

Gian Fulgoni presented a wealth of statistics about the Internet; here are some bits I scribbled:

In the United States there are now 160 million people who use the Internet. Almost half of them have broadband at home now. The average narrowband household spends $217/quarter online; the average broadband household spends $311/quarter. People who have been using the Intenet for more than 10 years average more than $700 spent online per quarter.

This year Americans will spend $148 billion online. $35 billion of that will be spent on eBay. $1 billion a year is now spent on online content. 20% of Americans pay some of their bills online.

U.S. Internet users conducted 3.9 billion Web searches in August. [The implication is that this will be the first year that U.S. Internet users do 50 billion Web searches.]  The top 20% of searchers do 68% of the searching. The average Web searcher does 34 searches a month. [editor's note: Rifkin does more than that a day, but I'm a search junkie.]

Gian pointed out that "searchers are the online buyers", and that the Internet is now what you use for any major purchase or life decision.  We've come a long way in 10 years.

John Doerr reminded us that 500 million cell phones shipped in 2003 as part of the HereWeb (always with you), as opposed to NearWeb (PC), FarWeb (TV), WeirdWeb (voice), b2bWeb (plumbing), and DeviceWeb (devices). [editor's note: What about PersonalWeb?]

John pointed out that soon there will be 3 billion people worldwide on the Web, and 3 billion events happening in the world at any given time -- and that an interesting research problem is that of how to get relevant information to the right place at the right time.

John also noted that "MoveOn was a social networking phenomenon", and Esther Dyson agreed.

Mark Cuban had lots of interesting things to say, among them:

Wherever there's a deathmatch there's an opportunity...

A 1.5 Terabyte hard drive is $1200. And those prices will drop. [It might be easier to ship a drive with every song ever recorded and manage rights locally, rather than download a la carte.]

A Gigabyte secure digital card is $59. Consider it as an alternative delivery mechanism: shipping a Terabyte hard drive overnight is equivalent to downloading at 7 Megabits a second... File obesity is file security... It's not on the horizon to get 50 Mb pipes into the home.

If you're at this conference, your livelihood is at risk if the Induce Act passes... Orrin Hatch wouldn't know a computer if it hit him.

[On IceRocket.com:] I don't search for relevance; I wanna see what's new and what's been added and exclude external sites. [editor's note: At this point, Rohit applauded and Mark said, "Why thank you." Classic.]

I'm a natural born short seller... CNBC is like a QVC for stocks.

Had there not been a DMCA, there probably would have been alot more bandwidth coming into the home.

[On Mark Cuban's blog:] Sports writers are so driven about the scoop that they miss the in depth story, and that's what blogs provide.

Watching news in high-definition is eery. We just tell the reporter to set it up and get out of the way.

Denise Howell noted in Cubisms, "Mark was saying that if he learned one thing in the NBA, it's that a general manager's job is to keep his job. It's a good life, who would want to give it up? So if something goes awry, there's always Shaq to blame. Piracy is Hollywood's Shaq."

See also: Joyce Park's interview of Mark Cuban in Red Herring, "Cuban Lets Loose":

Red Herring: Are you a geek?
Mr. Cuban: Yes!
Red Herring: Are you sure?
Mr. Cuban: I have pictures!
Red Herring: Do you feel like you’re out of the fray since you don’t live in Silicon Valley?
Mr. Cuban: Not at all. Living in Dallas and being away from the Valley, you have to have a high bullshit meter when you come back here.

Joyce Park said about the interview: "The thing that impressed me about him is that he doesn't seem to worry about seeming stupid, and therefore he is able to allow himself to do simple but crucial things -- like focus on his own business instead of worrying about what all his competitors are doing. It's incredibly hard in Silicon Valley to stick to your own knitting instead of being distracted by the next shiny sexy thing."

Cory Doctorow had a great quip during Q & A with Mark Cuban: "TVs are just like dumb laptops that are hard to carry around."

The Google party offered a thousand points of light.

Joe Kraus debuted JotSpot, a platform for developing semi-structured content and custom lightweight applications that combines the best of wikis, databases, and the web.  Said Joe, the world needs a platform for people who are collaborating that reflects the fact that "half the time you don't know what you want when you start".  The spiffy integration with email, Yahoo RSS feeds, Google searches, and Salesforce.com made the JotSpot demo very slick.

Brewster Kahle reminded us that

Universal Access to All Knowledge is Within Our Grasp... it shouldn't be a crime in this country to give away information for free...

and provided lots of juicy bits:

There are 26 million books in the Library of Congress. Over half are out of copy, and many are out of print. Since a book is roughly a Megabyte of storage, 26 million books can be stored in 26 Terabytes, which costs $60k and could fit in a very small room.

It costs $10 to digitize a book and get it online, so the Library of Congress could be completely digitized for $260 million.

There are 8 million books that are out of print but under copyright. We call these orphans, and they should be freed. See: Kahle v. Ashcroft.

It costs $1 to print and bind a book (vs. costing $2 to borrow a book from a library).  The entire Library of Congress could be printed for $26 million.

Between 2 million and 3 million LPs and CDs have ever been published.  Archive.org offers unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free archives of any music published under the Creative Commons license.

Between 100,000 and 200,000 movie releases have ever been published.  Half of them are Indian.  600 films in the United States are not copyrighted, and 300 of them are on Archive.org where people can use them to rip/mix/burn to make new films.

Archive.org is recording 20 televison channels 24 hours a day; already 1 Petabyte has been stored.

Usage of Archive.org has been growing; it just passed 1 Gigabit per second. It's also noteworthy that Archive.org has already spun out 4 companies.

Andrew Conru pointed out that $445 million was spent by Americans in 2003 for adult content online. (Remember, the total Americans pay for content online in a year is $1 billion.)  Margins are getting tighter in the adult business, because there exists lots of content that's hard to differentiate from freely available content.

Bill Janeway on a panel discussing the financing environment:

How many companies were started so that at the dawn of Web 2.0 we already have eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Google? ... Billions were spent to get here.

One thing we like about this environment is the number of scarred veterans who want to build [lasting] businesses... It takes 5-7 years [citing Bill Cole of BEA].

Web 1.0 was about experimentation; Web 2.0 is about building lasting value.

Rael Dornfest: "People spend more on a ringtone than they do on a full song."

Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati, was one of the most thrilling speakers at the conference. Technorati now tracks 4.1 million blogs, and the median time it takes from when someone does a blog post to that content being indexed at Technorati is 7 minutes.  Dave says,

Weblogs are the exhaust of personal attention streams.

If Yahoo is a card catalog and Google is a citation index, then Technorati tells you what's happening on the web, right now. Some blog stats:

• A new blog is created somewhere in the world every 7.4 seconds, so there are 12,000 new blogs created every day.
• Over 400,000 blog posts are created every day -- meaning there are over 4 blog posts per second in the world.
• Corporate blogs are proliferating but the absolute number (5000) is still tiny. Robert Scoble has humanized Microsoft.
• English is less than half the Blogosphere.
• About 45% of blogs are abandoned.
• RSS adoption is still low -- only 31.2% of all blogs have RSS feeds, and only 28.3% of RSS feeds are full text.  However, the most influential blogs all produce RSS.

The new attention.xml work at Technorati is very exciting.

James Currier pointed out that Tickle offers 300 self-assessment tests. 14 million active users have taken 200 million tests, which offer five insights into consumer psychology:

1. It's all about me. Tell me about me. Know me. Appreciate me.
   
2. Freud said that for humans there really only two things: sex and work, work and sex.
   
3. Your mind is different than your consumers' minds. (You: power, technology, knowledge, code, gadgets, work, dollars, sex. Them: puppies, babies, God, Nascar, celebrities, coins, sex.)
   
4. Psychology changes over time. Consumer psychology shifted circa 2001 to the point where more people were willing to use credit cards online, post photos online, and provide more personal information online.
   
5. Understand consumer motivation. At 25, it's competition. At 35, it's understanding who we are and where we fit in. At 51, it's affirmation of the choices we have made.

Expect to change your job 11 times in your lifetime. The majority of workers currently want to find new jobs.

Mary Meeker talked about China. Some bits:

China has 1.3 billion people, or 21% of the world. In 1850, China was 33% of global GDP; in 1991, less than 2%; in 2003, 4% (and 13% using purchasing power popularity).

There are 87 million users of the Internet in China, making them #2 in the world.  Within 5 years, they will be #1. 70% of Internet users in China are under 30. (30% of Internet users in the United States are under 30.)  China is #1 in the world for cell phones, cable, and phone lines.

GDP per capita in China is $619; in the United States, it's $37,000.  Opex per employee is $6500 in China's Hang Seng index, representing tremendous employee surplus; in the S & P 500 it's $73,000, and in Microsoft it's an amazing $333,000.

Andy Xie: "In the middle of every small town in Europe or the US stands a church.  In China, it is usually a Kentucky Fried Chicken or a McDonald’s or both."

Mary made the statement, "China is like the United States in the mid 1990s." What's next? Messaging, gaming, ad networks, ecommerce, and massive amounts of cross-border trade.

Marc Andreessen: "The new lock-in is clearly the data. The Internet has eBay envy."  Then he chatted about Firefox and Safari.

DJ Danger Mouse: "[Remix culture] is about the instant gratification people get from mixing music and pop culture... if I had thought about [The Grey Album] too much, it never would have happens."

Hank Barry: "Napster was the first program Shawn Fanning ever wrote. He went out, bought a Visual Basic book, and just went for it."

Udi Manber: "Google succeeded in reducing the cacophony to a single clear note. It might now be time for chamber music, and eventually perhaps a symphony."

Marc Benioff told us that Salesforce.com has 185,000 subscribers spanning 12,000 customers. Citing customers as small as Zagat (with 20 sales folks) to medium sized customers like Polycom to big companies like ADP (with 3000 sales folks), Marc proclaimed, "You've never been able to deliver the same application to 20 people and to 3000 people."

In chatting with Marc, John Battelle revealed that The Industry Standard had spent $6 million on a Siebel installation.  Apparently John was "trying to build AdSense with Siebel" -- something that demonstrates how ahead of his time John was.  Marc Benioff, with panache, declared that "the Siebel thing probably brought down the whole company."

John Battelle smiled, and added, "BoingBoing has twice the readership The Industry Standard had, with just four guys.  Now that's a lightweight business model."

Derrick Story: "As each session unfolds, so does a clearer image of where we are today and the directions we should explore. Web 2.0 is making our tech world just a little easier to understand -- and a whole lot more exciting."

Cory Doctorow gave a fantastic speech (available as mp3) about copyright and "how the forces of darkness are conspiring in smoke-filled rooms to criminalize the Internet and you're not invited."  Said Cory, "Copying is a feature, not a bug."

Mitch Kapor noted that until this conference, he had never met John Battelle.

Technology can fix a broken political system... to make the system work for everyone.  Of, by, and for the people. Is self government a meaningful concept in 2004?

There are 13 registered lobbyists for every elected official. Political investing inside the Beltway has great returns, VC-level returns...  (For example, 200-to-1 return for big agriculture subsidies.)

We were never meant to have a highly centralized government... They can stifle innovation where they can. (For example, the Intellectual Property cartel.) Overall voter turnout has been going down steadily since 1955. People feel alienated -- manipulated, not engaged.  Is our politics broken?  Yes, without a doubt.

The Dean campaign raised over $50 million -- mostly small contributions over the Internet.  This points to an embrionic mass movement for change.

If Thomas Paine were writing Common Sense today, he'd be doing it on a Linux laptop.

Wikipedia is useful and stable despite the fact that every page is fully world editable... thanks to the principles it is governed by, such as neutral point of view.

The final version of the Patriot Act was introduced simultaneously with the vote -- meaning no one who voted on it actually read it.

Now is a good time to consider an Internet-based reform movement.

Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison were entrepreneurs, not just founding fathers.

Dale Dougherty: "[O'Reilly's first magazine, Make, is for] do it yourself technology projects... Martha Stewart for geeks."  I like the forthcoming article by Charles Benton on kite aerial photography using a "silly putty viscous timer" with a ping pong ball as a tell tale.  Said Benton, "I own 250 feet."

Mike McCue: "There are 2.5 billion people with a telephone... I am interested in the opening of the telephone as a platform."  411 and 800 numbers are killerapps.

Hossein Eslambolchi: "At AT&T we say if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features."

Peter Norvig: "For us at Google, we don't have beautiful buildings.  Labs are a state of mind more than a state of real estate." Actually, Denise Howell had a nice writeup of Peter's demo:

Peter Norvig demo'd an upcoming feature from Google at Web 2.0 that will allow you to see clusters of search results related to specific search terms. The concept is you put in, for example, someone's name, and you get a list of related links that help you focus the search based on the fact the terms you searched for are frequently associated with other terms. So when you try "George Bush", you get search clusters including "dubya," "jenna," "gaffe," and "idiot" (among others). "John Kerry" produces his own long list — but no "idiot."

Said Peter about understanding the hive mind, it's "all about understanding meaning better."

Rick Rashid when asked about personal search said,

You can store every conversation you've ever had in a terabyte.  You can store every picture you've ever taken in another terabyte.  And the Net Present Value of a terabyte is $200. 

Rick Rashid (pronounced RASH-id, not ruh-SHEED -- trust me, I used to work for him) also showed us Terraserver (which now has such good resolution you can see people!), SkyServer, Virtual Observatory Web Services, SkyQuery, World Wide Media Exchange, and Wallop.

By the way, the pronunication of Rashid's last name reminds me of another oft-mispronounced name: Vannevar Bush.  Vannevar is pronounced Van-NEE-var. as in "receiver".  Trust me, Wikipedia backs me up on this one.

Martin Nisenholtz: "Journalism is about storytelling. If it's gonna touch you, it'll touch your emotion... [The New York Times has] two separate departments: News and Op-Ed. Most blogs are rich with opinion. I read them for perspective, not with the expectation that all facts are fully vetted." (In response, John Battelle said, "Blogs are works of passion... what was the role of editors is now the role of readers. Readers are the most honest.")

Shelby Bonnie: "25% of local ads go unsold." (In response, John Battelle said, "That sounds like a business opportunity to me.")

George Conrades: "More bits.  Good."  (In response, John Battelle said, "You're an arms merchant, aren't you?")

Marc Canter: "I represent everyone else." (In response, John Battelle said, "Can I have a vote here?")

Chris Nolan: "The news decision process has moved out of the newsroom."

Mike Ramsey: "[TiVo's] role in life is to give people a better experience watching television... we're an advocate for the consumer."  Mike sees working with Hollywood and the government as essential to success. (Cory Doctorow responded, "Marconi didn't give em a say.  The VCR didn't give em a say.")

Bill Gurley talked about MMORPG's.  As with Snowcrash, welcome to the Metaverse.  Some bits:

EA's Ultima Online in 1997 was the first U.S. commercial success.

NC Soft out of Korea has a $1.6 billion market cap, with 3.5 million registered users paying $10 per month for games like Lineage and Lineage II.  Their new game, City of Heroes, has 200,000 users paying $15 per month.

Shanda out of China has a $2 billion market cap, and will do $100 million in revenues this year. They licensed a game from Korea, and use Internet cafe penetration -- there are 200,000 Internet cafes in China -- to serve more than 700,000 concurrent users.

Sony's Everquest cost $30 million to build, and should net them $500 million within 8 years.  They already have 500,000 users.

"Passion of the MMORPGs" is evidenced by prosecution of in-world theft, real world retaliation, resale of digital assets/accomplishments, and people "earning a living" playing games.  To that last point, there are now online game sweatshops at the low end, and at the high end people are making $60k a year to play a game.  Not quite the NBA or NFL... yet.

On the other hand, there is now "virtual clothing" (including brands like Nike) that deteriorate after several months so you have to buy more.

TenCent in China has an instant messaging engine called QQ that now serves 90 million users.

NeoPets in Los Angeles has characters, avatars, and persistence -- and is very sticky for the 23 million kids using it.

SecondLife by LindenLab offers development tools -- programming in a virtual world! -- that allow people in the world to create the world.  One guy built an airplane and sold it.

Bill likes MMORPG's because they have recurring revenues, competitive moats, network effects, increasing returns, "real" competition, time engagement, unlimited complexity, and of course high risk / high reward.

Allan Vermeulen: "Amazon is a technology company, and we believe that sets us apart from other retailers... by giving customers the most quality information, we offer the best product."  There are 10 million Amazon reviews, 500,000 Amazon associates, and 65,000 Amazon Web Services developers.

Bob Morgan: "Before the Internet people took 4 rolls of film a year.  Now Ofoto is closing in on 1 billion images stored, and 100 million shared."

Andrew Anker: "Good blog software is like photoshop: a plug-in architecture and an ecology of offerings around it... People optimize for the tools we give them... Companies need to understand that turning comments off doesn't stop the dialogue."

Brian Behlendorf: "To get long-lived community, have a variety of purposes."

Tim O'Reilly paraphrasing Jeff Barr about Amazon Web Services: "SLAs? We don't need 'em. People want stuff and they want it fast."

John McKinley: "Technology is like surfing: miss one wave, another comes along... Your sustaining value is only as good as your metadata."

Adam Bosworth defined platform as something that delivers value and also lets people build on top to add value.  Developers are the heart of building a platform.  He pointed out that as things become mass market, they get simpler.  Database SQL queries gave way to Web Search text queries; Web Services gave way to RSS.  On that last point, Adam said that

Web Services is like the cartoon character that ran off the cliff and is waiting to fall... The future is simplification... Look at blogs, that was the next step... The hallmark will be your 12-year-old kid can use it... There doesn't even need to be one standard.  You have a choice: RSS, RDF, Atom...  Amazon offered SOAP and HTTP, and 90% chose to do the easy thing, what a shock.

Adam also pointed out that a Web Browser is not a reliable piece of infrastructure, and yet $100 billion has been added to the market caps of Amazon, eBay, Salesforce.com, and Google since the dawn of the Browser while Microsoft's stock has dropped $50 billion.

Stewart Butterfield: "Why do the developer tools for Flash suck?  Support for developers is what wins."

Craig Newmark on a milk carton gave out a hip-hop "fo' shizzle", standing beside Jim Buckmaster: "I'm going to be spokesmodel to exploit my George Costanza-like glamour... The topic of our talk tonight is something about nerd values and speaking of nerds...."

lessons learned (transcribed by Jeff Jarvis)
    - nerd values, the golden rule, a culture of trust
    - a public commons, community of self-moderation, extreme user-centrism
    - the ironies of unbranding, demonetizing & uncompeting
    - social capital - the importance of user success sories
    - appropriate technology and other lesons from open source
    - a litmus test of light-weight business models
    - stepping off the treadmill of internet time

Jim pointed out that "users run the site for us." Later Craig gave a "hip hop shout out to Mozilla".  Fo' shizzle.

Brendan Eich talked about why Longhorn is irrelevant in the Post-Mozilla world. Firefox is compatible with the web, a big messy sprawl, and already we "took back 2% of the Web so far" (according to websidestory.com).  (editor's note: E4X is a beautiful thing too! Also, I'm excited about future plans for an offline mode for Firefox that allows for intermittent connectivity -- can a personal proxy be far?   Sounds like a plan for a personal proxy for Gmail might be in the works at Google as well, but that was hallway chatter...)

Lawrence Lessig (available as mp3) started with a bad Forbes review for Free Culture -- among other things Stephen Manes called him blustering and bloviating. None of the following are direct quotes, but they get across the points Professor Lessig made.

What did he do? What he did was to take my words, my creativity, with his own... [a review is a] right to remix without permission from anyone. The world of text knows this freedom well.

[Remix culture is] no longer just a broadcast democracy but a bottoms up democracy, no longer just a New York Times democracy but a blog democracy... This is the architecture of this form of creativity...

[Consider the potential of the digital remix.  That a $218 movie that won at Cannes would cost $400,000 if music and video clips were paid for. Or consider creative works such as DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, Hey Ya Charlie Brown, and George Bush and Tony Blair sing Endless Love.]

Potential is a function of the technology.  Restrictions are a function of the law.

The laws have massively changed.  Before 1978, copyright was opt-in; now it is opt-out.

[Thinking the INDUCE ACT is dead is an illusion.]

Getting something as simple as a clip of the President is tough due to copyright, and it is made worse by media consolidation.  Lessig has no tolerance for people who file-share illegally, but we go overboard allowing people to remix Shakespeare but not Lucas.

John Battelle: "Only one person can follow that.  Kim, where are you?"

Kim Polese debuted SpikeSource with a presentation filled with wonderfully well-done hugh macleod illustrations that complemented her speaking points. The world is moving from a top-down industrial egosystem to a bottom-up ecosystem where the real hero is the IT guy.  Governments are reconsidering their IT stacks -- Brazil, Spain, Germany, Belgium, and China are all favoring Linux, and even the Department of Defense is considering it. Companies are running their entire operations on open source. Watching the "Switch to Linux" movie of Steve, the Supervillain who switched to Linux, we're presented with the catch phrase "Linux gives us the power to crush those who oppose us....... Switch to... uh... whatever the hell you want.  Linux."

Web 2.0 arrived when demand began to supply itself.

The rules of open source: nobody owns it, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it...

Innovation is moving to a new layer... Innovation moves to process automation to manage abundance. What kind of company assembles software that Ford did for cars or Dell did for hardware... well, we do.

An automated system for assembling software from open components sounds like... magic!  Offering CIOs validation, integration, testing, support, and services can help them manage a mature market ecology filled with commodities.

Jerry Yang: "Yahoo! is a constant work in progress." I thanked Jerry for making the job title Chief Yahoo! fashionable, and I looked forward to having that job title someday.  He told me I could have it now if I wanted, which I appreciate. I asked him if he had any good bubble stories. He deferred to Kara Swisher, who in her charming inimitable way told the story of how Jerry tried to get a free copy of her book. That's easy to understand; we techies love free swag.

Ross Mayfield: "What's really fascinating about this event and participants isn't the money gushing about or the return of the cult of the CEO or VC. Its that we learned some hard lessons, paid greater attention to what worked and tinkered away unselfishly to create new value. New architectures, but for participation as well as systems. The New New Thing is that these architectures have an easier entry point that scales from garage to beyond. But if we forget that the hard part is the business model and delivering customer value, we are going to get called on it."

Abe Fettig: "These are the things that people were talking about the most: RSS, Wikis, and Web APIs." Nicely summarized, Abe.

Jeff Jarvis: "The internet grew up. I mentioned that Jeff Bezos was more serious. Ditto Bill Gross of Idealab. Ditto everybody, really. The giddy, goofy days of tech are over. Likewise, the glum days are over, too (the fact that 600 influential people showed up for a conference on the web is the best demonstration of that). So it's a business and it's acting like one."

Some of the Web 2.0 presentations are now available.

John Battelle: "I've never been as energized by three days of content as I am right now."  I couldn't agree more!  Thank you to everyone who put in the effort to make this conference so spectacular, and the #1 question on my mind is, when's the next one?

Saddlepeak Lodge

Early this afternoon we went to the excellent Saddlepeak Lodge on 419 Cold Canyon Road in Calabasas (phone: 818-222-3888). The owner Ann Graham Ehringer has a Ph.D.! The service was unparalleled thanks to waiter Darron Smith, and the cuisine was heavenly -- from a Happy Sunday libation called a Bellini (1997 S. Anderson Blanc de Noir Champagne and fresh peach puree) to wonderfully fluffy souffle pancakes with warm blackberry compote and creme fraiche, from the ever-popular "goodie basket" of fresh pasteries to the homemade Kennebec potato chips. A culinary delight, in a delightful environment. We also saw Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O'Connell there, and I was struck by how often lives intertwingle every day all around the world.

Late this afternoon we went to the Santa Barbara Zoo, where at sunset Melissa Rosenthal wed Michael Patrick on a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I went to high school with Michael in Wilton, Connecticut, in 1986 and 1987, and after undergraduate college he and I moved to Los Angeles in September 1992 -- me to begin graduate studies at Caltech, him to begin working on screenplays for The Industry. To pay bills, Michael works at a sports club with a woman named Jill (who happens to be Melissa's sister) and a woman named Suzanne, who introduced Michael to Melissa. Suzanne knew Melissa because her husband (also named Mike) went to high school with Jill and Melissa. What's interesting about this story is that Michael and Melissa were both at Brown University in the late 1980's and early 1990's but apparently never met there. Melissa is from southern California and Michael moved to southern California to find his destiny. Apparently his destiny was to find a woman a decade after moving to California who happened to have lived in Providence at the same time he did. Sometimes lives intertwingle several times over the years and it can take years before they actually connect... and when they do, it's like... magic.

Songs that will forever remind me of the wedding:

• "Somewhere Over the Rainbow / What a Wonderful World", by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole (interestingly, my father's favorite song of all time)
  
• "At the Zoo", by Simon and Garfunkel (which also reminds me of childhood visits to the Bronx Zoo)
  
• "Your Love Gets Sweeter Everyday", by Finley Quaye (which I think was used by a Kodak commercial as well)

My two favorite quotes of the evening:

• Kevin Patrick: "This set of people will never all be at the same place at the same time again."
• Michelle Rifkin: "Do you sometimes wish we could stop time?"

A few years ago, Michael and Rohit both thought they would never find the right person. Now, within three months of each other, both are wed. Never lose hope. When the time is right, great things can and do happen.

August in September

Just a short list of people I had the opportunity to chat with at the annual gathering of August Capital:

• David Hornik of August Capital
  
• Mark Jacobsen, Exec VP of new ventures and bizdev at O'Reilly & Associates, who's about to go Foo
  
• Ross Mayfield, who has one of the most-read and longest-running typepads, and who got Rohit very enthusiastic about sell-side ads and declassifieds
  
• Joe Kraus, who has a brand new typepad
  
• the dynamic team of Erin Turner and Jordan Maynard from EA
  
• Travis Kalanick, CEO of Red Swoosh
  
• Jason Shellen, Megan J. Smith, and Hunter Walk of Google (by the way, Hunter should start a blog!)
  
• Tim Oren, managing director of Pacifica Fund
  
• Brett Bullington, board member of MusicMatch (now part of Yahoo! -- my how quickly things change!)
  
• Ethan Diamond and Toni Schneider of Oddpost (also part of Yahoo now... hmm...)
  
• Shaukat Shamim of Neocarta
  
• Rajeev Chawla, CEO of Neopath Networks
  
• Jonathan Hare, CEO of Resilient
  
• Adrian Turner, CEO of Mocana
  
• Bill Tobin, director of emerging company services at PricewaterhouseCoopers
  
• Bobby Napiltonia, VP/GM World Wide Channels and Alliances at BEA

And I only talked with less than 3% of the people there. It's a small world after all.

Empire Tap

I really enjoyed the Web Services Networking get-together at Evvia we had several months ago, so it is with delight that I report another "Lives Intertwingle" dinner this evening at the Empire Tap of Palo Alto (epinions say mmmm... 651 Emerson Street...). In attendance, besides yours truly:

• Brian Dear, Founder/CEO of evdb, in town from San Diego
  
• Kevin Hughes, third inductee of the World Wide Web Hall of Fame (after TimBL and MarcA), in town from Hawaii
  
• Sterling Hughes (no relation), who with Thies Arntzen is developing PHP and Parrot (current status is impressive for a two-man part-time project)
  
• Alex Russell, who recently wrote a sober look at Java
  
• Raj Vaswani, formerly of Foundation Capital, who proudly declares he has no blog :)
  
• Tim Converse, a famous blogger at Yahoo! whose name is not Jeremy
  
• Joyce Park, one of my favorite people and saver of Friendster

A good time was had by all. A better time was had by some. ;)

Lives Intertwingle

Websurfing hopscotch: I just went from coolmel to kottke to peterkaminski to Robert Frank on How Not To Buy Happiness, but my favorite snippet is the one kottke quoted:

Considerable evidence suggests that if we use an increase in our incomes, as many of us do, simply to buy bigger houses and more expensive cars, then we do not end up any happier than before. But if we use an increase in our incomes to buy more of certain inconspicuous goods -- such as freedom from a long commute or a stressful job -- then the evidence paints a very different picture. The less we spend on conspicuous consumption goods, the better we can afford to alleviate congestion; and the more time we can devote to family and friends, to exercise, sleep, travel, and other restorative activities. On the best available evidence, reallocating our time and money in these and similar ways would result in healthier, longer -- and happier -- lives.

Lives intertwingle; conspicuous and inconspicuous regularly interact and learn from each other, mixing the happiness and unhappiness as people come together all the time all around the world. This reminded me of some words from Kevin Fox that really resonated with me:

So many other faded friends only entered my mind in the abstract, thinking about how lives are like branches, winding, sheltering, separating and diverging from common origins.

As an aside, thoughts of a Google Browser are making me happy, and John Battelle just reminded me that on the Internet no complaint goes unheard. ;) Which brings me back to...

Websurfing hopscotch, part 2: I just went from bibi's comment to bibi's talking about chatango which she found from Joi Ito who has a post about Craig Newmark from Craigslist which references Cory Doctorow's quote of the Wired interview by Josh McHugh:

Google's touchy-feely corporate mantra is "Don't be evil." What's yours?
Give people a break.

A break from what?
A break from how difficult our lives are. It's like, if you're walking out of your apartment building and somebody is coming the other way with an armful of groceries, you hold the door. It feels good - it's the neighborly thing to do. And our species survives by cooperating.

What poses the major threat to that survival?
Kleptocrats and sociopathic organizations that have the almighty dollar as their only goal.

I like the sound of "lives intertwingle; give people a break."

While I'm on the subject, why is the Google mantra a double negative ("don't be evil") instead of a single positive ("be good")? Is it because they don't want to sound like E.T.?

Ok, enough of that rathole. The important thing to remember when lives intertwingle is Pierre's founding principle for the Omidyar Network: " I've been inspired by people discovering their own power, and believed that every individual can make a difference... We realized that legal structure -- for-profit versus non-profit -- wasn't all that relevant to what we believed in. What was important was our simple core belief: that

every individual has the power to make a difference.

So, we created the Omidyar Network for one single purpose: so that more and more people discover their own power to make good things happen."

Shine on, you wonderful diamond!

Web Services Networking

Columbine happened five years ago today, but I'm not thinking of that. I'm thinking about the now-fully-BSD-licensed mod-pubsub release 0.994 I just did, which in turn reminds me of the casual dinner at Evvia I arranged a month ago, the attendees of whom are a "who's who" of the public web services world in 2004:

• Rohit Khare, fresh from completing his Ph.D. on decentralization, just before he won Distinguished Paper at ICSE 2004 for Extending the REpresentational State Transfer Architectural Style for Decentralized Systems
  
• Jeff Barr, Web Services Evangelist for Amazon and Creator of Syndic8
  
• Doug Cutting, Creator of Nutch and Lucene
  
• Tim Converse, Search Specialist at Yahoo!
  
• Tommy Hui, Web Services Guru for Salesforce.com and Driver of the sforce toolkit
  
• Joyce Park, Web Services Specialist for Friendster and Leader of Mod-PubSub
  
• Jeffrey McManus, Web Services Evangelist for eBay and All-Around Party Animal
  
• Nelson Minar, Web Services Evangelist for Google

For a brief moment in time -- over wine and dinner at a fine Greek restaurant -- there was alignment among some of the brightest people working on some of the most cutting edge projects at some of the biggest organizations in my industry. I wish all evenings could be like that one.

Gump And The Age Of Acceleration

There is a Russian proverb that says, "The nail that sticks up the highest gets hit first."  The defining characteristic of my character is that I'm never the nail that sticks up highest.  That in and of itself is most unextraordinary; what gets interesting is when you pair it with the fact that my job finds me floating like a feather from place to place like Forrest Gump so much that it makes me privy to lots of fantastic people.  (Playing with Orkut this weekend reminded me of this even more, as I realized a bunch of great folks I once TA'd for at Caltech are now making Google an even better place.  And that's coming from me, the World's-Biggest-Google-Fan-Who's-Never-Been-Inside-The Googleplex.)

Caution: name dropping paragraph ahead!

Reflecting over the last few weeks, for example, I went to a geek dinner organized by Jeremy Zawodny (which Joyce immediately noticed, I can't go anywhere without someone noticing! :) where I got to see several people I haven't seen for years (Tim Bray, Paul Hoffman, Dave Orchard), meet someone I previously only knew virtually (Bill Humphries), make some new friends (Johannes Ernst, Bill Lazar, Adam Kalsey, and Jeremy himself), meet some friends from Think.Org (Ben Sittler, Mark Lentczner), and of course see Rohit again (fresh from completing his PhD). A few days later I went out drinking with Jonathan Abrams and Rohit.  Then I missed a housewarming party by Erin Turner and Yael Shacham because I wasn't paying attention and thought it was the following week. Last week Dr. Ernie stayed over and I went to Happy Hour with Jeffrey McManus (now featuring vastly lower standards) where I got to see Joyce Park and Andrew Evans, and meet Patrick Breitenbach.  And then I set up a coffee meeting with Vinod Valloppillil.  And on Friday I made a connection through Friendster with a friend I haven't talked with in 20+ years who is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met.

Makes me think about the bigger picture: the world we grew up in didn't have such effortless facilities for any two people in the world to connect, whereas the world we live in keeps adding the technologies that not just facilitate but vastly accelerate the interconnection of relationships and knowledge.  Fast forward a generation or two, and imagine the possibilities.  Our grandchildren will live in a superconnected world, and that in turn will make such incredible advances for humanity that it's easy to get excited about what the future brings.

Coda: today a friend forwarded to my wife a post about Reality Bites on FoRK because he knew my wife really likes that movie (one of her favorites, along with Singles, The Sure Thing, and When Harry Met Sally).  Well it just so turns out that the author of the post was me, written seven years ago to a friend I haven't seen in probably seven years and Cc'd to FoRK, that I just plain don't remember writing.  And yet, a discussion between today's forwarding friend and my wife can now pick up from where that discussion left off seven years ago.  That hints at the beginning of the superconnected world in which we're going to live -- although presumably the subjects that will benefit most from this are science, technology, philosophy, and the social sciences (and not just Reality Bites discussions, as in this case :).  The future is now, only faster and more so.

Post-coda: today Ross Mayfield sent me an invitation to be his fellow Orkutian.  I feel really honored.  Thanks, Ross.  Also, this week I met and LinkedIn with Charles Caldwell, Silvano Maffeis, Augusto Paes de Barros, and Josia Kersen, all of whom live on other continents (Southeast Asia, Europe, South America, and the Middle East, respectively), and all of whom I have only met virtually.  I probably never would have met them at all had we not been living in the dawn of the Age Of Acceleration.