Google is continuing their quest to become center of the online universe.  They just released their Account Authentication API, which allows other sites to integrate their login process with Google and lets users use their Google ID to authenticate to any site that uses it.  While I admire their amibition, it's essentially a rehash of Microsoft's Passport idea.

There's nothing new under the sun, is there?  When Microsoft had 99% of the software market they tried this and failed, and now Google is trying.  They apparently think that they have more trust and mindshare than Microsoft had at that point.  However, I think they're going to run into the same problem:  people don't want to tie their identity to a company.  They want to tie it to themselves.

I really wish companies would stop trying to own people and the content they create.  This comes down to a fundamental mis-understanding of what makes the Internet great:  it's a decentralized, democratic place where nobody really owns anything besides what they create.  Google wants to be the beginning, middle, and end of our online experience, but I for one am not willing to hand my identity to Google, Microsoft, or anyone else.  I want my identity to revolve around something that *I* own, such as my domain name.  (I wrote an entire post on this a while back.)  There are plenty of identity initiatives such as OpenID that don't hand ownership of my identity to any one company.  Of course, Google's stock is soaring, they're the latest, greatest media darling, and they want a piece of everything anyone does on the Net.  But pride comes before a fall.

This is not progress, this is a new body on an a car that's been totaled a few times before.

First Kai-Fu Lee, then Marc Lucovesky, then Robert Scoble, then Martin Taylor, and now Vic Gundotra have announced that they're leaving Microsoft.  All except for Scoble (and Taylor, yet?) are going to Google.  This exodus has set the blogosphere abuzz about the reasons why this might be happening.  My guess is, it's one of the following reasons:

1. It's a coincidence.  It's only five people, a very small percentage of the over 70,000 people who work for Microsoft.  My money's on this horse.
2. Microsoft's vision has stopped resonating with it's employees, and the ones who have the ability to jump to another high-profile company are doing so.
3. Microsoft has become too beaurocratic with too many layers of management for visionary employees to make a difference.  This seems to be a common complaint from Microsoft employees.  Hopefully new execs such as Ray Ozzie will be able to fix this.
4. Microsoft isn't paying well enough to keep top talent.  I doubt it.  With billions in the bank, Microsoft can afford to give important employees rides to work in personal jets while getting full body massages and washing down caviar with Dom Perignon.
5. High-profile employees have more fulfilling opportunities available.  I'm pretty sure this is why Scoble left, as he's basically starting his own company now.  There's no better feeling than working for yourself.  I'm not sure what, if anything, Microsoft can do to prevent this.

Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

One of my biggest gripes with the Internet in general is what I'm calling "content leeches".  These are companies that people use to create and publish content (TypePad for publishing my blog, for example), but that hook themselves into the content in such a way that extracting it from that company becomes a nightmare.  Some call this "job security", I call it extortion.  TypePad and MySpace are the two biggest offenders that I've noticed.

Let me share an example.  When I set up my blog, I told TypePad that I wanted my blog to be hosted at www.jasonkolb.com, a domain that I personally own.  One of the main reasons I signed up for TypePad is because they offer this capability, and it's very important to me to centralize my online identity around the jasonkolb.com domain.  (I believe that a person's online identity will eventually revolve around a URL, read this post to find out why).  However, when I publish a post, all the links that TypePad generates (permalinks, trackbacks, etc) don't stem from jasonkolb.com, they stem from jasonkolb.typepad.com, undoing that centralization that I'm shooting for.  For example, a recent post of SHOULD be located at http://www.jasonkolb.com/weblog/2006/06/this_is_not_an__1.html, but TypePad conventiently ignores my domain name and publishes the post as http://jasonkolb.typepad.com/weblog/2006/06/this_is_not_an__1.html.  They both go to the same post, but one uses *MY* domain, the other uses *TypePad's* domain.  I can find no way to force TypePad to use jasonkolb.com instead of TypePad.com.

To me, this is a bigger problem then the built-for-AdSense RSS aggregation pages.  This concerns where my content is found on the Web, and where people will be pointed to by search engines.  When I change to a different blog engine down the road, it's going to be like wading thru mud to try to update my links.

Not only that, but I've heard from multiple companies such as Sphere and Technorati that they're having trouble stitching together multiple URL's that point to the same blogs.  I can't even imagine a way to do this efficiently, because URL stands for Uniform (thanks Jim ;) Resource Locator, and when two of them point to the same thing they don't end up being very Uniform.  Because of this, links pointing to jasonkolb.com and links pointing to jasonkolb.typepad.com are considered to point to two different places in the eyes of search engines.  This ends up reducing the effectiveness of the search engines themselves.

I really can't tell if this is a concious decision on TypePad's part or if it's some type of technical issue, but if it's a technical issue they need to hire some more competent programmers.  I'm paying for the service and they need to honor what they say they offer.  I'm really not happy about this situation.

There are so many more examples of this that I can't even list them all, but in keeping with my recent habit of badmouthing MySpace, I will say that they are the worst offender.  I don't personally use MySpace to publish content, my MySpace profile is just a collection of links to my blogs, LinkedIn profile, etc.  (See this post for more details on that.)  But I find it extremely offensive to users that not only does MySpace make you log into their site to read blogs, messages, updates, etc, but they won't even let third parties use the content to make the service more useful.  Because, of course, if you don't have to log into MySpace, they'll lose 50 cents in ad revenue.

These companies are tying their customers to metaphorical chairs.  They're taking the torch from AOL and carrying on that company's not-so-proud tradition of customer service--they make me emberrassed to say that I'm a customer.  I truly hope that companies with products that can stand up on their own merits (a la PeopleAggregator) will trounce these content leeches in the end.

I just found out about a site called PeopleAggregator (Via TechCrunch) which aggregates your online identity from various social networking sites into one place.  Not only is it a social network itself (that part I'm not all that excited about as they're a dime a dozen these days), but you'll be able to view, update, and maintain all of your existing social networks from this one central location.  It works with all the social networks that actually support open API's and expose their data to the outside world (meaning, pretty much all of them except for MySpace).

This is great for a few reasons.  First, I don't have enough time to update all the social networks I use regularly, and this will help with that.  Second, if you decide to stop using a particular network or add a new one, no biggie, you just tell PeopleAggregator about it.  Third, if all of the social networks besides MySpace can come together and form a unified front of some type, it just might create enough of a snowball effect to put a dent in the MySpace armor.  That will be a happy day indeed (if you're wondering why I'm so down on MySpace, check out this post and this post).  Fourth, they're supporting pretty much all of the integrated online identity standards out there (such as OpenID), so you can use whichever one puts a smile on your face.

The coolest thing about PeopleAggregator is their open API's.  They're opening up their system to anyone on the Web, and encouraging developers to use them to create applications and create new API's.  What's just awesome, though, is that the PeopleAggregator API's are essentially aggregated API's into all of the social networks that PeopleAggregator works with.  So somebody who wants to write something like SingleStat.us, which MySpace recently litigated out of existence, is not only free to write it, but they're also empowered to write the software in such a way that it'll work with any of the social networks supported by PeopleAggregator.  That's cool.

Another reason I have high hopes for PeopleAggregator is that they don't put themselves in the center of the solution and say that you HAVE to use their service.  Instead, they act as sort of a decentralized gateway to other social networking sites, which means that if another service that does the same thing pops up, you can easily switch and start using it instead of PeopleAggregator.  This is a great example of a free market in action, which has been sorely missing from Web startups recently.  I love the idea of using the BEST site for the job, not the FIRST site.  It takes confidence in your product to create it in this way, and I applaud PeopleAggregator for that.

Hopefully PeopleAggregator and services like it will make the other social networks so much more useful and functional than MySpace that MySpace's huge userbase becomes less and less of an advantage.  The entire Internet will be developing applications for the other networks, and is basically prohibited from writing applications for MySpace.  Long-term, I'd place my bets on the Internet horse rather than MySpace's internal developers, which I have very little respect for to begin with.

Joshua Porter asks:

"The most difficult part of the MySpace problem is that, despite what designers might think about it, and how they might have made it look, MySpace is actually a well-designed website. Who could argue with this? MySpace has grown faster than any site in the history of the Web, and in two short years garners nearly as much traffic as Yahoo! If that growth and popularity isn’t a metric of good design, then what is? "

Um, I will argue with that.  My metric of good design is my pissed-off-O-meter when I visit a page and try to do something.  If it stays at zero then  it's good design.  When I tried to use MySpace for the first time it shot to eleven.  Have you ever tried to use the thing?  I like to consider myself halfway intelligent, but I was dumbfounded when I tried to set up my profile and change my privacy preferences (shouldn't this be in big glowing red letters by now to keep lawsuits at bay?)

He goes on to write:

"Instead of wondering what MySpace could be, let’s learn from what it is."

This is like studying Shaq's free-throwing capabilities or his sneakers to try to copy his success.  Shaq is successful because he's big, and so is MySpace.  But they both have some pretty major flaws.  God help us all if this becomes the reference design that all Web sites aspire to, I might just stop using the Web to pursue simpler endeavors like figuring out a unified theory of physics.

It's the kind of thing you don't really think about when you're knee-deep in code, but Live Clipboard is really a new paradigm for the Web and it takes a  while for people to adjust and digest everything, let alone use it effeciently.  After I posted my embedded microcontent/viewer post, I started realizing from the feedback that people didn't really know what to do with it.  This is an attempt to explain, in end-user terms, how to use Live Clipboard.

To use Live Clipboard you need two things:  content to copy (the source), and somewhere to paste it (the destination).  For this example I'm going to use the viewer I wrote layered on top of an HTML file with embedded microcontent as the source, and Ray Ozzie's Live Clipboard demo site as the destination.  You can follow along in your own browser if you'd like.

Step 1:  Copying Content

I'll be using http://www.xformats.org/MicroViewer/microContent.htm as the source.  It's an HTML file that contains embedded microcontent, and links out to the viewer I wrote, which means it ends up looking like this:

The blue box on the right contains the content that was extracted from the embedded microformats.  You can do other things with it such as map an address or make a call using Skype, but we're going to focus on the Live Clipboard button in the lower-left, which looks like a pair of scissors on an orange background: 

Copy Method 1:  Selecting and using Ctrl+C or the Edit Menu

There are two ways to copy the content using Live Clipboard.  The first, and what I assume most people will end up doing at first, is to click the icon, which selects the microcontent, and then either press Ctrl+C or go to the Edit menu in the browser and click Copy.  This basically acts just like Windows.  When you click the icon, the viewer will change the look of the box containing the microcontent to let you know that you can go ahead and copy the content using Ctrl+C or the Edit menu:

Once you use Ctrl+C or the Edit menu to copy the content, the microcontent gets stuffed into your operating system clipboard.  You can even look at it by pasting it into Notepad or something, but it won't make a whole lot of sense--it's meant to be used by a Live Clipboard destination.

What's interesting is that although I think this behavior is the most intuitive, most new users don't seem to realize that you can do it.  They all seem to end up using....

Copy Method 2:  The Right-Click Context Menu

With this method, you use the same icon as before, but you right-click it, bringing up the browser context menu:

Clicking "Copy" on this menu will also copy the microcontent to the clipboard.

Step 2: The content's copied, now what?

Now that the microcontent is on the clipboard, we need to paste it somewhere.  I'm going to use Microsoft's Live Clipboard demo site:

The list of boxes on the left are basically receptacles for storing microcontent.  Scroll down until you find an empty one:

You have two options now for getting the microcontent you copied to the clipboard into this receptacle (by the way, we really need a name for these endpoints).  The first option is to click the Live Clipboard icon to hightlight and then press Ctrl+V or use the Edit Menu to paste the content in.  This is what the receptacle looks like when it's selected:

Or, you can right-click the Live Clipboard icon and click the Paste menu item, like this:

After you do either of those things, the microcontent that you copied out of the other site will show up in the receptacle and look like this:

That's it, you're done!  You're now officially on the cutting edge of Web technology.  Now go demand Live Clipboard integration from your vendors ;)

P.S.  This is all developer technology preview-stage stuff, so you will probably notice some rough edges.  For example, sometimes I have to close my browser and re-open Microsoft's Live Clipboard demo site before I can successfully paste in content.  I'm sure this will be smoothed out in time, just giving you a heads-up.

P.P.S.  There has been some discussion lately on the Live Clip mailing list about the best way to visually indicate to users what they can do with Live Clipboard.  If anyone has any feedback in that area please share!

I recently had the opportunity to hear the result of a focus group that an unnamed company held to gauge the market for Web 2.0 technology in the enterprise.  (I say opportunity, because I didn't have to actually attend the focus group, which is ideal for me because I generally don't like attending those things :)

What I found interesting was that the participant I talked to said that the general receptivity to Web 2.0 ideas such as tagging, voting, and rating, was very "blah".  People had the impression that they've seen it all before (which they have), and there didn't seem to be much excitement around it.  They've seen corporate taxonomies promise and under-deliver too many times before, and the consensus is that this is just a re-packaging of those same products and ideas.

Another interesting opinion that was taken away, which I hadn't spent much time thinking of before, was that corporate environments require stricter organization than consumer sites.  They need more centralized control and tighter reins on what users are allowed to tag, what tags they use, what they can vote on, etc, etc.  It sounds like Web 2.0 ideas need to mature a bit before they're ready for the enterprise.

This post is a proof of concept--I've embedded microformatted content into the text of this post.  If you run this page thru a microcontent viewer you should be able to see and use the microcontent.  There aren't, to my knowledge, any viewers out there yet, so I ( this is my vcardJason Kolb jason.kolb@gmail.com 800 555 1212

) wrote a simple one that supports events and contacts (hcards and hevents).  Try viewing this post using the microcontent viewer I wrote using this URL:

• http://www.xformats.org/MicroViewer/default.htm?url=http://www.jasonkolb.c om/weblog/2006/06/this_is_not_an__1.html

Go ahead and play with the viewer a little.  Click the links, map an address, make a call with Skype, copy and paste contacts using Live Clipboard.  (Anyone who's never used Live Clipboard before should read this other post for a step-by-step.)  It's purely Javascript and CSS-based, which makes it very simple to plop on top of any AJAX application out there (including RSS readers).  It's also a small piece of a larger project I'm working on, but I wanted to throw it out there because I see a lot of misunderstanding right now about the potential of microformats.  Although I think it's very cool that search engines like Technorati are beginning to understand and aggregate microformatted content, that's only half the equation.  The other half is that we need to allow PEOPLE to use microcontent as well.  This post is an example of that capability.   Viewing this post with a compatible viewer gives the reader the ability to not only read the text, but to do things with the content as well.   (To my knowledge this is the only public text in existance right now with embedded microcontent, although I'd love to learn about some more examples!)

Using Microcontent

Admittedly, there aren't many fun things to do with microcontent yet. However, it's very enlightening the first time you move data around between applications using Live Clipboard.   Try copying a contact out of this post and pasting it into Ray Ozzie's Live Clipboard demo site.  Another site that supports Live Clipboard is M. David Peterson M. David Peterson m.david@xmlhacker.com 800 555 1212

's Global Clip demo (which is super cool because what you paste in gets stored in Amazon's S3 online storage service).  The sites that support Live Clipboard are a little rough around the edges at the moment, but I would assume that things will start coming together nicely over the next six months.

Here's an example embedded event just for kicks: Web 2.0 Conference

. Just to give you an event to copy & paste using Live Clipboard.

To me, this is what microformats promise.  They enable us to turn regular old content into rich media, with little to no effort on the part of content creators.

More Examples from Around the Web

Now, let's have a little more fun ;)  You can actually use the viewer I wrote to look at things other than this blog post.  You can either hit the viewer directly using http://www.xformats.org/MicroViewer or you can append the URL to the query string to automatically load up a page like I did with the link to this post earlier.  Go find some microformatted content and plug it in, here are some links to content that I found from poking around on http://www.microformats.org:

• http:/ /www.crowley.nl/hcard.html - An example vCard

• http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/events/ - This one gets really crazy.  It has events with embedded vcards for speakers.  Looks like rainbow sherbert in the viewer.  Oooooh, pretty colors!  (Live Clipboard-compatible.)

• http://www.iowamilitaryveteransband.com/members/ - This one takes a while to parse, it's got quite a few contacts.

• htt p://www.jasonkolb.com/about.html - My vCard.

• You can also use http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator to create your own vCard that can be embedded into text like I've done here.

Disclaimer:  if it doesn't work or your computer bursts into flames or you break out in a rash or something, tell me about it--but I accept no blame in perpetuity for anything :)  This isn't even beta software, this is like... whatever comes before alpha.  Also, people are doing lots of weird stuff with Microformats such as embedding <script> tags in them, so you'll often find that although the cards will render, they will choke Live Clipboard if you attempt to paste them into another site.  If you're technically minded, try pasting the contact into Notepad or something so you can fix it.

These links also aren't really examples of inline microcontent like this post is, unfortunately to my knowledge this is the first example of that on the Web.  If anyone has any other examples I'd love to know about them.

Technicalities

If anyone's interested I'll post some more technical information about all this, but I'm still refactoring it for broader use in actual products.  All of the code for this example is licensed under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license, so you're free to use and/or modify it if you wish.  I'm still adding to it and refactoring it quite a bit; however, I got it to a stable point and I figured I'd see what people thought of as it stands now.

Oh and by the way, listen up Microsoft:  we need an editor for this stuff.  If you really want to leapfrog the competition, do us all a favor and build Live Clipboard and microformat support into the next version of Word and Outlook.

Thoughts?

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More on the continuing saga of Google's problems, which I seem to be posting on a lot lately.  It's kind of like hearing a celebrity is dying, you just kind of have a morbid curiosity about it.

I wasn't aware of this interview, but via Steve Bryant I found a NY Times interview with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google.  It contains this nugget:

Google has an enormous volume of Web site information, video and e-mail on its servers, Mr. Schmidt said. "Those machines are full. We have a huge machine crisis."

I've been watching with interest as Microsoft has spent half a billion dollars trying to catch up with Google's infrastrcture.  Now that Google's infrastructure is starting creak and groan under the load (which is perhaps why they haven't been releasing new products as often), the ball is in Microsoft's court.

I would assume that Microsoft's new architecture will be built on top of Microsoft server solutions such as Windows Server, Exchange, Active Directory, etc.  Google's is built on a modified distribution of Red Hat.  This is the ultimate litmus test of Microsoft vs. Open Source.  If Microsoft can pull off a more robust infrastructure than Google, it'll be a HUGE feather in their cap, and probably keep their server business viable for several more years.  They'd be able to claim the title as the king of servers, which is a pretty nice title to have in the era of Software as a Service.

Or, on the other hand, perhaps Google has reached the upper limits of what is possible with our current computers and architectures, and we'll need some type of breakthrough in scalability and/or storage before software evolution can continue.  That would suck.

This seems to be a new trend:  bad news for Google.  Not only are their newest in-house products receiving very mixed reviews, but they seem to keep having problems with keeping their search results pure and relevant.  (See an earlier post of mine for more examples.)  The latest blow comes some guy who got Google to index 7 BILLION pages using some dirty tricks, polluting Google's index and causing a PR nightmare.

What I find most interesting about this fiasco, however, is that Google apparently found it necessary to LIE about it.  They didn't say "oops, he got us, but we fixed the problem and nobody will be able to do it again."  Instead, they basically said that it was a reporting error, and we didn't REALLY index 7 billion pages, it just looked like it.  Haha, joke's on us, now go away please, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  However, the page's Alexa ratings don't lie:  they shot thru the roof once those pages were indexed, and then once the pages were taken out (manually, apparently, by Google), they plummeted again.  This is a pretty good indication that Google was lying through its collective teeth, because a reporting error doesn't generate massive amounts of traffic like that.

Why did Google feel the need to lie about this incident?  I think it's because, as I postulated earlier, they have so many people gunning to break their algorithms that they just can't keep up.  People are figuring out how to "hack" Google's engine, in a sense, and it's diluting the relevancy of Google's results.  Oh, I'm sure they'll patch the holes, but after a time won't it turn into the little Dutch boy with his finger in a dam?  (Does this remind anyone else of the problems Microsoft had with Viruses a few years ago?)  My guess is that they're having a hard time keeping up with these people.  BUT, they can't tell anybody, because if they did their stock would plummet since, after all, search is still their core business.  Looks like they have themselves in a bit of a bind now.

Oh, by the way, CNN Money is now recommending to avoid Google as a long-term investment.  The beginning of the end?