It appears that Microsoft is getting into the unified communications game under the guise of a project called "Echoes".  And by unified I mean truly unified, where all a user's devices and message channels are aggregated and used to contact the user in the way he wants to be contacted at any given time.  It seems to be a multi-pronged approach, with some software for telcos to install and other software for end-users.  The end result sounds somewhat interesting:

Messenger contacts will automatically appear in users’ phone address book, so that even if they  don’t know one of their Live Messenger contact’s phone number, they still will be able to call it. Numbers will be able to ring simultaneously on multiple devices/systems. On the flip side, Echoes will help insure instant-messaging-to-SMS continuity. A user can send an IM to any mobile contact, and the contact can respond via a text message.

But the implementation looks clunky as hell to me.  Every contact has to be a Windows Live user in order for this to work, and I just don't see them as having the traction nor the momentum to make this happen.   They also have close to zero geek cred at this time, so getting the early adopters to pick this up will prove somewhat difficult.

While this is an interesting concept, and I like the overall idea, the implementation (if correct, it's all rumors at the moment) sucks.  Once again, Microsoft is heading down the path of blazing its own trail instead of playing nicely with everyone else.  Instead of using open standards like FOAF, which the rest of the world can play with as well, they insist on re-inventing the wheel--badly.

Is Microsoft still big enough to push through a proprietary standard?  It's an open world now, and the "magic" to make this happen is already all out there for the world to to pick up and use--the only problem is that there's nobody out there pushing it right now, so Microsoft may have a first-mover advantage.

Other Blog Coverage:

• Ray Ozzie Hints At Mesh—Web Apps Across All Your Devices
• What About Those Microsoft Echoes

The Financial Times has an interesting article about how Web 2.0 startups have so far managed to generate a lot of buzz and behavior changes, but thus far very little in the way of actual cash.  This has been a constant wonderment to me for a long time, as it seems that people are looking for cool things and assuming it'll make money somehow down the road.  Like Twitter.

The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.

Don't get me wrong, I love many of the sites, and several of them I would actually pay money for if they asked.  But others I suspect will either be abandoned completely or scaled way the hell down.  Twitter is cool and all, but it really should be either open source or it should be somebody taking donations to do it.  Eh, I know I'm probably the only who thinks this, but it just doesn't add much value to me--it's more a diversion than anything.  (I'd be interested to hear if anyone out there would actually be willing to pay for Twitter?)  Maybe they could actually charge people to use it now that it has this many users, but I'd bet half their users would leave instantly. 

Advertising is getting to be pointless, it's so in your face on every Web site that people are numb to it.  It's also the lazy way out, where you add so little value to your users that the only way you can conceive to get money out of the interaction is to take advantage of the fact that they won't walk away from you.  It's like a street performer who juggles advertisements or something.

“If you look at some of the valuations, you wonder what fantasy of revenues they’re based on,” said Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Hummer Winblad.

Agreed.  With the economy screeching to a halt, these companies will need to start making real money, real fast.  The VC money will dry up.  They must either produce real value and get paid for it or take their ball and go home.  It will be interesting to see if the last few years are later seen as one big industry-wide "try before you buy" period.

(Sorry, I found that hilarious.  I don't mean to demean your favorite buzzword ;)  Found via Giles Bowkett, so go yell at him if you're offended :)

I've been playing with Twitter for the past few days on Trent Adams' recommendation.  Here's my profile.  I never really saw the difference between Twitter and a blog plus RSS, but he said there are some good conversations that happen there which you'll miss if you're not a part of it.  And, after a few days of play time I'm actually starting to enjoy it.

What it ends up being is a personal online chat room where you pick the participants.  You need a fat client, similar to a modified instant messaging client, or it's basically useless because you don't get the realtime updates, which kills the deal.  I use Twhirl.  There's a lot of noise (for example, I tweeted (twitted?) about how much the hotel coffee sucks this morning), but it's actually pretty cool when it works as an online conversation.  I see a lot of potential in this communication model for enterprise teams.

However, Twitter was not built as a chat platform using XMPP or any of the other actual chat protocols that are available.  It was built as a micro-blogging platform using a RESTful interface, and it does not lend itself well to scaling to a vast number of users bombarding it with requests for updates.  It goes down, a lot.  Just goes to show you that buzzword technology still needs to be applied judiciously.

Twitter is a perfect candidate to switch to an RDF back-end for publishing twits.  They could make this change in a week and while the clients wouldn't automatically switch over to SPARQL querying they'd at least have a scalable back-end going forward.

Oh, and I have no idea how they could possibly monetize this thing.  This type of service can not live forever as a private service, it can only work long-term in a distributed, decentralized model.  I have a feeling it's just a glimpse into the future of messaging.

Robert Scoble is a melodramatic guy.  He thinks that because the current crop of social networks might stay closed that the Net itself is in danger.  That's only true if you think the Net as it stands today is broken, which I don't.  It's going through puberty.

He bases his assumption that the sky is falling on the fact that FaceBook is closed to Google, and he thinks Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) bid for Yahoo's (NASDAQ:YHOO) search engine is an attempt to keep FaceBook's data hidden from the Web and accessible only to Microsoft customers.  Somehow this translates to:

"Google is locked out of the Web that soon will be owned by Microsoft. We will never get an open Web back if these two deals happen."

Come on.

This is only true if you think all of the entrepreneurs out there have stopped hacking away at night at something much better than FaceBook or any of today's social networks.  Do you really think innovation will stop because FaceBook remains closed?  Did that help CompuServe or AOL?

"Don’t think this matters? It sure does. Relevancy on Yahoo search will go through the roof when it has access to Facebook data and Google doesn’t. People will see that Yahoo has people search (something I’ve asked Google for for years) and Google doesn’t. That’ll turn the tide in advertising, and all that."

Good, at least somebody will have it until we get to the next-generation Web.  It's not worth hyperventilating about.

And yes, as long as HTTP keeps working the Web will be alive and well.  As long as the roads are fine other people can show up to the party at any time.

As I often do, I was googling an idea I had today to see if anyone had had it before me and posted something on the Net about it.  However, I just completely forgot what I was originally surfing for because I stumbled on a site called HalfBakery.com. It appears to be a site where people post ideas for products and businesses, and then other people can comment on them.  There appear to be some serious ones on the site, but what really hooked me was the just plain crazy ideas people post. 

Some of the funnier ones:

• Carrymehome.com:  You don't want to drive and you don't want to wait for a bus because then you'd have to pay attention. Even walking to a taxi is too much effort. Remember when you used to pretend you were asleep so your parents would lift you from the car to your bed? In this most modern of all possible worlds, why should any adult have to forego that childish pleasure? ... With the premium service, you are wafted along on the hands of a half-dozen basketball players (of either sex) dressed in flowing gowns. A bargain version might involve being simply dragged by a large dock worker.
• Hullaballoon: A personal airship both lofted and propelled, at a leisurely pace, by a series of balloons tethered to a conveyor belt which moves along the vertically-oriented perimeter of the longitudinal axis of the craft. Each balloon inflates as it moves from the underside of the ship, up around the prow, reaching peak inflation above the center of the ship. The balloons then deflate as they move around and down the backside.
• Evil Laugh Activated Hand Dryer:  Instead of a button or infrared sensor, people sometimes rub their hands together in the airstream, activate this hand dryer by laughing evilly

Some of the better (seemingly real) ones:

• Panic PIN:  In addition to the regular PIN number, each bank card would have a second PIN number that would indicate the user was in some sort of distress (such as being forced to withdraw money at gunpoint). Use of this alternate PIN would summon the police and perhaps put the ATM's camera in a higher resolution and/or frame rate mode.
• Cream Cheese Rings:  Pre-packaged, preformed, cream cheese rings separated by thin plastic sheets. Just peel and toss on the bagel.
• Receipt Scanner:  The Receipt Scanner is a small upward standing USB device that would receive receipts like a paper shredder, scan the receipt, and use integrated OCR software that would read the receipt and enter the appropriate information, including place of purchase, date, and total, into the user's primary finance program (such as Quicken or MS Money).

If you're the entrepreneurial type like me and you appreciate original ideas it's worth taking a few minutes to check out this site, if only for a chuckle.  The site reminds me of the Hamper and Trivet Catalog... I think it's out of print now but it's worth picking up if you see it.

If you haven't seen this before, check it out.  Johnny Lee has come up with some incredibly creative ways to use the Nintendo Wii hardware:

I can't help but think the 3D head tracking will play a prominent role in the future of human/computer interaction, all it needs is a killer application.  3D modeling and gaming comes to mind.

I try a ton of different services aka Web 2.0 applications, most of them get used for a day or two and then dropped.  However, every once in a while I come across one that actually makes it into my regular rotation and I start recommending it to people.  One of my favorite applications that I use all the time is Jott.  If you've never heard of it, you need to get acquainted.  It enables consumers with cell phones to leverage voice recognition at a personal level, and it's very cool.

At its core, Jott is a voice recognition and message-sending system.  You dial the Jott 800 number and it recognizes you from your caller ID.  You then tell it who you want to send a message to ("Myself") and then speak whatever message you want sent to that person "Don't forget to wake up early tomorrow, some *#@!*$&^ scheduled a meeting for 8 am tomorrow."  Jott will then automatically transcribe that text for you and send it to the person you wanted to send it to.  And the voice recognition is very good.  This is very powerful enterprise-grade technology that they've made accessible to the average person, which is way cool.

Most of the time I use it to send emails to myself, but there are a ton of other potential uses for it as well.  Some of the fun things I do with it:

• Send Twitter messages from my phone
• Hook it up to my Sandy account so I can feed Sandy from my phone (Sandy is a virtual secretary service that reminds me of todos and appointments)  (Mmm... lots of Web 2.0 goodness there, no?)
• Spew ideas into it while I'm driving which I then archive in Gmail for further reference.  This thing is worth its weight in gold to me just for this purpose, I used to lose a lot of good idea because I didn't have a pen and paper handy.

One of the very cool technical things they've done with it is set up a way to connect the output of a Jott message to another system using an HTTP post.  So what they've essentially done is provide a voice recognition system that you can use to feed other applications.  That's a huge barrier to entry that they just took down in one fell swoop.  It's really fun to use in development because all of a sudden you have a totally new way to interact with the user.  I've already cooked up some really cool little apps using it, maybe some day I'll put them up publicly.

I love Jott and I use it all the time, but I don't think I've ever mentioned them before.  Just wanted to send some props to them.

Imagine you're sitting in an interview and your phone suddenly tells you that your friend John went to college with the person you are interviewing with.  Pretty cool huh?

I was just complaining the other day that radical innovation seems to be in short supply these days.  Then today I stumbled across this really cool idea called Mobile FOAF (they're calling it FoafMobile, but that sounds too much like a funny little car to me--maybe because it rhymes with PopeMobile?--so I'm calling it Mobile FOAF instead).  The basic idea is that friends and people you know, who are in close physical proximity to you, can be discovered using Bluetooth-compatible mobile devices.  It's a small world, after all...

The gist of it is that each Bluetooth device has a unique identifying address (like a MAC address), and if you put that address in somebody's FOAF graph you can trace a Bluetooth device back to its owner.  You could query your FOAF graph for anyone you know who has that particular Bluetooth device, and even ask your phone to show you if anyone in the restaurant knows any of your friends.  If so you could pull up their name and picture and go find them to have a cup of coffee.  A magician could have a field day with this stuff.

The writeup I found on Mobile FOAF is actually pretty old (2003), but I'm not sure how something like this would have been useful before SPARQL was ratified this year anyway.  <hint>Hopefully this will get picked up by some enterprising company and taken to market,</hint> because this would certainly be some radical innovation.  If a Bluetooth "beacon" could be baked into wireless routers you wouldn't even need GPS to locate somebody...

Umair Haque recently wrote one of the best posts I've read in a while.  He expresses some of the same thoughts I've been having recently:

I haven't been posting a lot lately. Why not? I've been talking to lots of people - about a topic that is perhaps worth discussing here.  There's growing awareness of a disturbing incrementalism gripping Silicon Valley...  What's really going on here? I think the malaise is deep and systemic. Many of you may disagree - but I'm vastly disappointed in the moral and strategic bankruptcy of today's crop of venture investors and so-called revolutionaries.

"Incrementalism."  That's the word I've been searching for.  Don't know if Umair just made that up, but I like it.  And "underwhelmed" pretty much sums up how I feel about the state of technological innovation right now, actually for the past several years.  Sputtering along on fumes.

Not that there's anything wrong with that of course.  When times are good, anyway.

But Umair then goes on to make an astute observation about the ability of these startups light on innovation to survive the economic tsunami we are currently facing:

Today's crop of investors and startups are perhaps even more economically autistic than megacorporations. Too many are willfully blind to today's deepest and most essential strategic truth: that the path to radical value creation isn't cutting more deals (dude, high-five!!) - but in rebuilding a flawed, false global economy: one which actively transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, from the sick to the healthy, from productivity to cronyism.

I would rephrase the second half of that statement to read that the path to radical value creation isn't cutting more deals but in increasing productivity and human capacity.  That's been the role of computing for years now and it's one of the primary reasons developed nations have such a high standard of living.  Projects which don't actually add any value but merely exist because someone thinks they might be able to get acquired or because they think they might be able to sell ads end up as footnotes.

I have a feeling that the current state of anemic innovation is only sustainable because money has been ridiculously available at all levels of the economy for several years.  There was enough money floating around to keep even the most money-losing businesses afloat based purely on hope.  In our current environment that hope and smile might buy you a Coke.  As I predicted earlier this year in my post about IT spending in a recession, I think that "easy money" has pretty much dried up at this point.  Startups must now innovate--TRULY innovate--or die.  Twitters, social networks, and things created just because they can be need not apply.

I haven't seen much true innovation in the past several years.  Most of what is celebrated in the blogosphere is, frankly, fluff.  Mediocre fluff with rounded edges and odd names.  Where are the radical innovators?  I haven't been posting much lately either because frankly there is very little in the way of exciting ideas out there.  They are few and far between--computing seems to be in a state of suspended animation.  And I have a feeling there is going to be a massacre in this space in the next few years as a result.  If you don't innovate and provide value you die.

There are bright spots, of course--it's not all gloom and doom.  But that list sounds like it would actually make a pretty decent post of its own, and I'll take the opportunity :)