The combination of Ning and WidgetLaboratory (WL) was a story that had wikinomics written all over it. The former is a platform that enables anyone to create their own social networks focused on anything they want, and they actively encouraged individuals and companies to innovate on top of the platform and make it even better. WL did just that, and in a big way - they sold a number of widgets (for around $30 / month) tied to the Ning platform, supporting somewhere in the range of 2,000 networks and 1,000,000 individuals. WL was the most popular widget creator on the platform.
If I was writing this post a week ago, it probably would have been a feel good story about wikinomics, but the wheels have recently fallen off the proverbial bus. This is a development equally worthy of exploring in relation to the challenges that come with embracing wikinomics principles - and particularly those that emerge when you only embrace a few of them. Of greatest interest to me - if more stories keep popping up like this, it could be a dramatic blow to more open, collaborative innovation processes. That would be a shame.
TechCrunch picked up the story on August 22nd, when Ning suddenly removed all of the WL widgets, without warning to anyone, from their network. This decision which clearly angered the company, as well as the thousands of customers who had spent time and money with WL in order to optimize their offerings. Based on the emails that WL has published on the web, this is the gist of Ning’s complaint:
Over the past few months, WidgetLaboratory’s applications have caused multiple and significant technical degradations to the Ning Platform. In point of fact, your code has broken numerous times and has negatively affected a large number of Networks in addition to the Ning Platform.
I’ve been looking into new ways that people can use mobile devices. Both Google and Apple have offered big prizes for people who develop applications for their Android and iPhone platforms. There are lots of location-aware applications that offer immediate access to information that’s relevant to wherever you happen to be, but they’re all pretty drab in their execution. Except for Enkin.
Enkin is a mapping system that bridges the digital and real worlds. Typical mapping applications show a bird’s eye view whatever location is being investigated. What Enkin does is something called “Live Mode”, which provides an overlay of rich digital information that you use when you look at anything. That probably isn’t very clear, so check out the movie. Skip to about 2:40 for the really cool stuff:
When I was doing follow-up research on the topic of prosumerism (chapter 5) last year, the XNA platform (which enabled people to create games for the XBox) was one of the examples I was most interested in. It has continued to evolve, and if you want to see it in action you can check out the creators club online, “a community all about games - created by you, played by everyone.” There are lots of fun little games available, and the next round of the Dream-Build-Play challenge has been launched, offering $75,000 in prizes for the best games - and bragging rights of course.
The problem, however, is that most people will respond to that by saying “I have no idea how to make a game” - and if you go to the game creation details page, most people will be long gone right after they read “Visual C# 2005″ and see what they have to download. It all seems quite confusing if you’re not, you know, a game designer. However, if you want to make a far easier foray into game making, you can now go to Sims Carnival - where users can create their own games on the platform EA provides, with the site providing all kinds of helpful tools along the way.
I’ve just started the process of making my own game (Hancock’s shoot em up), and it is remarkably easy - you simply register and answer a series of questions that are provided, and next thing you know you have a game. Admittedly, the product that emerges at the end of this isn’t particularly good - my game right now has a bunch of boxes floating around, and evidently I have to shoot the black ones before they hit the green ones, I think - but I’ve been presented with a series of tools that can make it better. The first that I’ll likely try is the Swapper, which allows me to swap in any images I want to replace those pesky boxes. If I want to do more than that, I can download the game (or anyone else’s for that matter) and customize it as I see fit… and if I really get going I can download the Game Creator and do even more.
David Meyer has posted an interesting story on ZDNet, where Dr. Ari Jaaksi (Nokia’s VP of software) argues that open source developers targeting the mobile space need to learn business rules - including DRM. Here are a few of his relevant quotes:
“There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models.”
“Why do we need closed vehicles? We do. Some of these things harm the industry but they’re here [as things stand]. These are touchy, emotional issues, but this dialogue is very much needed. As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies, but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too.”
The motto of Boy Scouts America is elegant in its simplicity: “Be Prepared“. As reported on ComputerWorld (which i found via Slashdot), the 98 year old organization has decided that “Open Source Software, built for the community, by the community” will help them better live up to this motto. This is no small endeavor - the software will aim to support the almost three million Scouts in America, in addition to the 1.1 million adults in the group. Interestingly, it appears that their decision was made based on the advice of a group of corporate CIOs (remember the days when corporate CIOs were the ones against open source?), and the open source site went live a month ago to help centralize and streamline application development. To quote Gregory Edwards (a contractor who helped create the site):
“It’s a true golden opportunity for the open-source community, too… by connecting it with a large group of interested adults and tech-hungry children who can be inspired to use and learn about open source. The open-source community and the Boy Scouts can spread the word on it.”
Nate Anderson published a very interesting article on Sunday where he quotes Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu calling Apple’s iPhone the device “at the center of the battle for the future of the Internet.” Why? Well…
It’s not that he doesn’t like the iPhone; he does, he owns one, and he’s jailbroken it. The problem is control, or, more accurately, the lack of control that device users have over their own devices.
The argument builds on Jonathon Zittrain’s new book “The Future of the Internet (and how to stop it)“, where it is argued that “generative” technologies (think: open) are being marginalized by closed technologies like the iPhone and other proprietary platforms. As Wu went on to argue, open devices are important (and even the iPhone is making tentative steps in this direction), but without open access to networks they aren’t much good. There is also an interesting perspective on Wu’s history provided, notably including how he determined that some work in his former life (working with a device maker to help ISPs control content people can access) was “probably not very good for the health of the Internet or the future of free speech.”
Ryan Schultz sent me a great wikinomics in action story last week, highlighting the fact that Studio Wikitecture won the “Founder’s Award” for their open source entry to a competition hosted by Architecture for Humanity on the Open Architecture Network. Their entry, for a tele-medicine facility in Western Nepal, was selected for a reason that is truly music to our ears: “for embracing a truly collaborative way of working using online crowdsourcing and Second Life as a way to create a highly participatory design approach.”
The details of their entry can be found here. To quote the project description:
In keeping with the collaborative spirit of the Open Architecture Network, this entry was created by an open and public community of over 40 contributors from around the world representing a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds. To facilitate this effort in design collaboration, we developed a grassroots ‘3D-Wiki’ technology that is built on the virtual reality platform: Second Life. With this technology, we were able to focus a very diverse range of ideas into a naturally evolving process ranging from comprehensive text-based research to 2D plan diagrams and on into immersive 3D virtual models designed and built on a replica of the project site.
Note: Actually I just realized that the company which produces phidgets is at phidgets.com. Apparently they’re located in Calgary, Alberta, so much closer to home for Canadian readers of the blog.
All of it works via USB connections and they offer things like servo controllers:
A little over a week ago I published a post called Is that gemeinschaft uncomfortable in your geshellschaft?, which was about an unfortunate Schnitzel incident that I had at Octoberfest once. Er, I mean it was about the two sociological categories that were introduced by German sociologist Fredinand Tonnies in 1887 (You can think of Gemeinschaft as community interest, and Geshellschaft as self-interest), and how they applying to strategic choices for business in the age of wikinomics.
The insightful comments from Venkat added a lot of value to the post, and he dropped me a note to say that our brief exchange helped him frame the Outsider Innovation 101 post he put up yesterday. I think wikinomics readers will find it interesting. The start of the post lays the foundation for the concept of outsider innovation he hopes to explore, and this touches on many of the themes of the book. The middle of the post then focuses on what we would probably call Education 2.0 (and what he refers to as the missing Education Revolution), which is a particular interest of mine. Having recently went back to school to complete a master’s degree, I’m wholly convinced we’re closer to Education 0.1 than 2.0 right now - but that’s a topic I’ll have to come back to later.
The Arduino is an open source hardware platform that’s used for electronics projects. It has a growing base of fans among DIY hobbyists and artists alike. Arduino.cc describes it:
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
Because it’s open you can either buy the Arduino from a variety of people who manufacture it (for example robotshop.ca in Canada) starting at about $35 each, or you can simply build one yourself out of parts.
While the Arduino is an amazing product of mass collaboration itself, it has also spawned an interesting community of innovators who use it. Searching youtube for “arduino project” reveals dozens of results - from funky lights and robots to a visualization of voice patterns. Other companies have even integrated the arduino with mobile networks and GPS for example (there’s a contest to win one if you develop an interesting project with the arduino), the robotshop.ca site even has one with built-in Zigbee wireless capability. It will be interesting to see what new innovations come out of this little $35 hardware platform.
The Economist has two very interesting articles out on social networking - Break down these walls, and Everywhere and Nowhere. The first focuses on the notion that social networking should follow the now well-trodden path on the Internet, where open standards trump “walled gardens.” They make a good point that companies like Facebook and Second Life look a lot like AOL in 1994, in terms of being closed worlds based on proprietary standards. The hope would be that, with history as a guide, the new upstarts might avoid being marginalized by the seemingly upstoppable momentum behind open standards.
But what makes this issue interesting is the second article, where the subtitle says it all- Social Networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life. That does not mean it’s a business. Interesting comparisons are made to the evolution of email, a now fairly ubiquitous and critical technology that’s not making any real money. Read More »
When YouTube launched in 2005, success on the Web was measured largely by the number of users who visited a site. Now YouTube is trying a different strategy: letting users avoid visiting its site altogether.
This is the neat little intro that Alan Greenberg provides (as seen in Forbes) , leading into an article about how YouTube is releasing a set of free software tools that allow developers to create fully functional YouTube players on their own site. Pretty cool idea, and a particularly intriguing business strategy to watch - again. Google seems pretty good at this stuff, and the context provider position they are targeting makes such open strategies remarkably effective. Read More »
Just a quick heads up that John Hagel and John Seely Brown have a great little article in BusinessWeek, which talks about lessons Western executives can learn from Tata’s $2,500 Nano. All I’m going to give you from the article are the four subtitles, which should pique the interest of wikinomics readers:
1. Think outside the patent box
2. A modular design revolution
3. “Open Distribution” Innovation
4. Welcoming users back into the design loop
As always, John and John are well worth reading… are there any other lessons from the Nano that jump off the page?
Last week, Derek posted an interesting piece on some major players joining the Data Portability Working Group. Today, ReadWriteWeb has linked to an excellent video on the basics of data portability by Michael Pick of Smashcut Media. Watch it here at its original location.
Dan Farber at ZDNET has commented on the announcement by Yahoo!, at the 2008 Consumer Electronic Show, that they were jumping into the competition to become your integrated web services provider in response to the efforts of Google, among others, to become customizable one stop shopping source for all of their users’ internet needs.
The aim of the project is to integrate Yahoo!’s existing services into a broader Web 2.0 offering with Yahoo! Mail acting as a hub while allowing for the integration of a wide variety of internal and third party applications in what Jerry Yang (co-founder and CEO of Yahoo!) calls, “life with an explanation point.”
Over on Wired.com’s blog, they’ve noted that Yahoo! seems poised to integrate OpenID as a means of integrating their applications using a single internet ID.Code was discovered on Yahoo!’s Flickr site that indicates that there’s already action behind the scenes towards making this a reality.
This leads me to a couple of questions. Does the emergence and growth of these integrated online services make it less likely that I’ll spend time wandering the halls of internet miscellany stopping on anything that catches my eye? My second question is how Yahoo!, Google or anyone else for that matter, know what I want from the internet if I don’t know myself? Is my integrated online service portal only as smart as I am?
Here’s an interesting thought: Could Silicon Valley be the catalyst for the development of the electric car?
Matt Neumann of the San Jose Mercury thinks so. In his article on the subject he highlights several efforts underway in the area, notably those of Shai Agassi, former exec at SAP. The latter has raised over $200mn in VC funding in an effort to get electric cars on city streets, noting that “Detroit is a car manufacturing center. I think what we’re looking at is not something that can be done in a normal way. . . . It needs an Internet approach, a Google approach.”
I’ll let you do the reading yourself but what struck my eyes was the following, “(Agassi’s) plan calls for Better Place to partner with carmakers whose products will use the company’s batteries and charging/swap stations. If consumers commit to a long enough contract for power, Agassi argued, they could even get cars for free - just like with mobile phones and service plans.”
Evidently, that may be a lot of wishful thinking but if you’re one of the Big Three or the New Three (Toyota, Honda, Hyundai) you’ve got to be either concerned at the disruptive potential of projects like these, or enamoured with the potential that collaboration with such innovative projects could produce.
Either way, check out the project site at Project Better Place.
Given that about a week ago I talked rather glowingly about Google, OpenSocial, and how social networking could be transformed, it would take something pretty remarkable in order to get to me post about Google again so soon. Google’s foray into the wireless world - announced monday, with this write-up in the NY Times providing a particularly excellent summary (very much worth the read) - is just such an event.
If you read last week’s post, see if you can spot any similarities between the approach Google took to social networking, and the approach they are taking to the mobile phone business (quote from the NY Time article):
But while Google’s much-anticipated plan has encouraged talk of a Google Phone, the company said that for now it had no plans to build phones. Instead, it has signed up powerful partners to develop and market the phones, including handset makers like Motorola and Samsung, carriers like T-Mobile, Sprint and China Mobile and semiconductor companies like Qualcomm and Intel. The group, the Open Handset Alliance, expects to start selling the Google-powered phones in the second half of next year.
It kind of jumps off the page - the partnerships and the openness that Google is using, has used, and will continue to use as a competitive weapon. And by opening up, Google will allow phones to be customized in ways many of us probably can’t imagine right now - which stands in stark contrast to, say, Apple’s strategy with the iPhone.
Will this difference hurt Apple someday? Well, one would think so. After all, as Apple gets ready to release their next firmware update, the big question on many people’s minds is basically will Apple deliberately try to “brick” the phones people purchased from them and then customized in some way? Maybe the Apple and iPhone brands will gain strength into the distant future even while the company intentionally tries to destroy products that customers legally bought and/or simply make their experiences worse. However, maybe not.
It’s a very different strategy and approach to market, because Google is a very different type of company, as they’ve shown time and again. It’s also interesting to note that while the incredibly diverse list of partners around the world is fairly exhaustive in terms of mobile networks, the two notable exceptions that have opted not to join are AT&T and Verizon - two companies that combine to control 52% of the U.S. market.
But surely they have interesting plans for the future too, and good reasons not to join the open alliance, right? Well, let’s quote AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel from the NY Times article again:
“Google’s announcement is about what is going to happen in the future, and our focus is about delivering the goods today”
That might be one annoucement they want to take back some day, as occasionally good strategy and customer focus includes thinking about the future. More to the point, could the U.S., which has lagged behind much of the rest of the world in mobile phone use for so long, fall even further behind because the big guns don’t catch on to what the rest of the world sees?
I’d personally bet yes - but not if Google has anything to do about it.
Last week Microsoft grabbed headlines by buying a small stake in Facebook. Many people viewed this as quite a coup in Microsoft’s struggle to resist Google’s ever-increasing dominance of online advertising. After all, Facebook seems to be rapidly turning into the defacto social utility network, and if Microsoft combines a small ownership stake with some exclusive ad serving deals within the utility, surely it will put a major dent in Google’s armor - right?
Well maybe - but maybe not. This week, in what some could see as the ultimate web 2.0 strategic response, Google announced the launch of OpenSocial - an open API Google is bringing to the social networking world along with partners Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, Ning, and several others.
To outline why this is a big deal in the social networking world, I’m going to call on Marc Andreessen - the cofounder of Ning, who also gained some recognition for the rise of a little company called Netscape. If you go back to June of 2007, he called the open Facebook platform a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry. My favorite quote from his post:
Metaphorically, Facebook is providing the ease and user attraction of MySpace-style embedding, coupled with the kind of integration you see with Firefox extensions, plus the added rocket fuel of automated viral distribution to a huge number of potential users, and the prospect of keeping 100% of any revenue your application can generate.
The leadership that the Facebook team is showing here rivals anything that the large and established software and web companies have done in this decade.
Well put - we couldn’t have agreed more around here, and said so in this very blog. Then, in his excellent post on OpenSocial that went up today, Marc called it the next great leap forward. On this point I must also agree.
The key reason is simple - while Facebook opened up it’s platform, any application that was developed could only run within Facebook, meaning you could get in but not necessarily get out (or at least not easily). Now, developers can work with OpenSocial and have their applications function in multiple social networks and other “containers.” In other words, it takes the apps out of Facebook’s walled garden, in addition to a variety of other benefits built into OpenSocial that Marc lays out beautifully.
Now obviously Marc has a vested interest in OpenSocial succeeding, as Ning is one of those “other” social networks (and a very interesting one, with a slogan of create your own social network for anything - you should definitely check it out). In his blog he also talks about how Facebook might just prefer proprietary lock-in to be maintained (which is probably what got my friend Nicholas Carr writing about this announcement). But where this gets really interesting is when you think about one of Marc’s main arguments for why Facebook should welcome the change:
It’s hard to see Facebook losing in a world of a billion or more social network users, and hundreds of thousands or millions of social network apps. And it’s also easy to see how a lot of other people — containers, and app developers — will win, as well.
In fact, if rumors of a Facebook web-wide ad network are true, then this could be great for Facebook in another way — such a Facebook-run ad network could be an outstanding ad network for all of these new Open Social web applications!
A Facebook-run web-wide ad network (in partnership with Microsoft, of course)… what do you imagine Google thinks of that? You know, the company that people are saying did this whole OpenSocial thing to ward off Facebook? Or perhaps a better question is can anyone look at all of this and argue that the rules of competition aren’t changing dramatically in the Web 2.0?
Online rumors, and at least one BusinessWeek article, are indicating that Apple is planning to release a software development kit in early 2008. The kit would allow third party developers to create applications and widgets for the company’s popular iPhone.
This is already happening following the braking of the security on the iPhone by a group of hackers called the iPhone Development Team. Most users, however, are reluctant to fiddle with their phones or use these new apps due to Apple’s threat of further software updates. An official development kit would be a good compromise – Apple would retain some control over who gets the kit and which applications they endorse, while users would get the benefit of the creativity and enormous productive potential of third party developers. Now if Apple would only allow users to cut free of the AT&T cannonball…
So the general story, in many people’s eyes, is supposed to go like this - music companies are bad, and Apple is good, because Apple has not only embraced digital music sales, Steve Jobs has said he’d fully support DRM free music. More specifically, Steve’s Thoughts on Musicweb letter from February 6th 2007 said:
Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.
How nice of Apple to think this way, and support an open, interoperable marketplace. But now let’s look at what Apple’s saying about what’s going to happen to people (or more specifically, to people’s iPhones) that have been unlocked to use a variety of different software programs (can you say interoperable?):
Apple has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs available on the Internet cause irreparable damage to the iPhone’s software, which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed.
Um, right - the unlocking programs cause irreparable damage, which will be revealed at the exact moment when future Apple-supplied software updates are installed. Doesn’t that sound a little like Apple-supplied software will disable the phones of anyone that dared unlock it? Did they get interoperable and inoperable confused, or what’s going on here?
It’s a constant cat and mouse game. We try to stay ahead. People will try to break in, and it’s our job to stop them breaking in.
Huh. Alternatively, of course, Apple’s job could be to make amazing electronics and embrace an open developer community to further enhance their products and experiences. Or maybe turn the iPhone into a platform. There’s lots and lots of alternative “jobs” that Apple can be doing that don’t involve sabotaging products customers bought from them.
I’ve been waiting for a backlash on Apple for some time - they seem to have quite the ability to walk many thin lines at once, and rarely get called on actions that companies like Microsoft would get hung out to dry on. I wonder if intentionally disabling phones of a huge group of fanatical customers might finally do it?
Technology and the US election I've written several times about the impact of social networks on this year's US Presidential election - see here and here. And let's be honest, the use of such networks and new web 2.0 technologies has been dominated by Obama. He’s embraced social networks like no other candidate in an attempt to connect with [...]
