For all the billions enterprises spend on IT each year, they arguably get far inferior software than Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other consumer Web companies make available for free. In part, the consumer Web can deliver exceptional value for so little because it piggybacks on the expensive infrastructure built by others.
Is it time for enterprise software to "pull a Google" and build solutions on the consumer Web?
Your new Enterprise Content Management/Collaboration system?
For those who think there must be some trade-off in software quality when brown-bagging with the consumer Web instead of using white-glove dining with expensive SAP or Oracle, they're right. There is.
But the trade-off favors consumer-facing applications, as Alfresco CTO and co-founder (and my colleague) John Newton highlights:
The whole idea of enterprise software in the 21st century seems anachronistic. The term enterprise really only took hold in the 90s in order to describe systems that were able to scale beyond the department. It meant big, powerful, flexible, but it also meant big, clunky, and expensive.
As Web 2.0 sites with their cheap (read free), simple, but scalable platforms scaled to millions of users in a matter of months, the whole idea of only being able to support thousands of users and take years to implement became ludicrous. Being enterprise--meaning you can support your heavyweight infrastructure of other enterprise parts--also seems less interesting when you consider that the largest databases on the planet run on MySQL using a concept called "Sharding."
Sure, there are problems with the consumer Web. ZDNet, for example, points out that Twitter's security model isn't fully formed yet, and could introduce security breaches into enterprise software that leverages it.
But let's not kid ourselves that enterprises aren't already at risk--and, perhaps, equally at risk--from the "secure, enterprise-grade" software they shell out thousands or millions of dollars for every year.
And let's also not pretend that enterprise workers are going to ignore the sleek, highly usable consumer Web in favor of the clunky systems IT foists upon them. They're not.
Nor should they. I already find myself communicating with colleagues, customers, and partners over Facebook and Twitter, and I imagine you are, too. It's simply more efficient that way.
Rather than fight this, IBM et al. should build applications on top of the consumer Web. Or maybe a security overlay is all that's needed. Something that secures the communication endpoints while leaving employees free to interact with their peers at other companies using the consumer Web.
Novell is doing this with its Pulse service for Google Wave, a testament to just how innovative software can be when it isn't locked behind a firewall by IT. Others should follow suit, and not create clones of the consumer Web as Tibco has with its Twitter clone, Tibbr.
Web 2.0 Journal notes six megatrends affecting enterprise IT, including now-familiar themes like open-source development and cloud computing. The consumer Web should be there, too. It may well be the future of enterprise software. And perhaps it should be.
Want to know what prominent Apache Software Foundation and former Google developer Greg Stein thinks about MySQL, the GPL, and the European Commission's antitrust stance on Oracle/Sun? You've got two options.
You can read his original post here, of course. But if you want better commentary, you'll need to read this same post on Facebook.
You can check out any time you like...
Open Web, meet your closed cousin, Facebook.
People rightly fret about Facebook's twisting, turning approach to privacy, but perhaps a far greater concern is that so much great content is locked up at all.
Let's be honest: as much as we may pretend we're concerned about our privacy, the reality is that most of us most of the time appear to be hell-bent on revealing details about our innermost thoughts on a scale only the Internet can provide. As ZDNet's Larry Dignan opines, "We're all Google-tethered zombies who go about life without a hoot for privacy."
That's why, as TechCrunch reports, we're even happily sharing the details of our credit card transactions online.
Really.
The real concern is that we share so much behind the closed doors of Compuserve-esque Web "sites" that serve as Hotel Californias for our content. Yes, I want to keep some conversations private, but as more of my ramblings move to Facebook and other closed corners of the Web, I want to broaden the conversation beyond the borders of my "friends" list.
I can't. I'm stuck. What happens on Facebook, stays on Facebook. Even content that is cross-posted elsewhere: the ensuing commentary (often of equal or greater value to the original post) is trapped.
Professor Jonathan Zittrain raises a warning voice about this in his "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It", but I can't help but think that the convenience of Facebook will trump the social benefits of broadening conversations beyond the borders of such services.
Of course, it's very possible that openness trumps all, and that, like Compuserve before it, Facebook's walled-garden approach to the Web will go out with a whimper.
Unlike Compuserve, however, Facebook is helping people to tame the disorder of the Web. There really wasn't much content to tame prior to AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc. These companies corralled and created the content that populated their services. Facebook doesn't.
Do you share my concern? Or do you think it's just a moment in time that will resolve itself quickly? Please comment here...and not on my Facebook page. :-)
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Twitter and Facebook are duking it out to own the future of the social Web, though users won't have noticed. Indeed, for those who use both, this may come as a surprise, since the two, while both social media platforms, seem to serve very different purposes.
Tell that to Twitter and Facebook, which increasingly have painted big bull's-eyes on each other.
Facebook groks this more than Twitter, which is why your mom/dad, teenage neighbors, and friends all use Facebook, and probably don't use Twitter.
Both companies have open APIs that encourage third-party developers to build out their respective platforms. Facebook has the Open Stream API; Twitter, the ">Open API Service.
These are critical components of a platform strategy, but they're secondary to the lesson that Microsoft and Apple have taught us: if users don't care about the front end of software/services, developers won't care about the back end of the same.
Facebook largely works because people know how and why to use it. Twitter...not so much.
It's telling that Twitter's "big" feature of the last six months is...lists. I use and love Twitter, but after a month I still can't get myself excited about creating or following Twitter lists. I'm not even sure why I'd want to do so.
Is this the best Twitter can do?
This is perhaps why Twitter seems to work for a narrow class of user: Caucasian, middle-aged urbanites with no kids.
In other words, not teens, not your mom/dad, and probably not you.
Facebook's demographics look very different, probably because its current range of uses is very different.
To me, this is a user-interface problem, and not a defect in the DNA of the Twitter platform. It's simply not immediately obvious what one should do with Twitter. That's not the case with Facebook.
We learned this long ago in open source. What separates a good but doomed project from a truly great project is documentation (to help developers know how to use the system) and user interface (to help end users know how to deploy the software). That's why Linux was interesting but not ubiquitous until Red Hat, IBM, and others added the finish that made its power usable by the general business world.
Twitter has a lot of promise, but not yet much polish.
It's nice that New York gangs have found new ways to dis each other using Twitter. It will be better when Twitter makes it easy and obvious for me to talk with my parents using Twitter.
In a new study, Evans Data says that the developer population in established economies is expected to decline by 35 percent this year compared with last year, as InformationWeek reports. Despite this dearth of developers, however, we continue to see an explosion of open-source projects and social-Web applications.
What gives?
It's very possible, of course, that a dwindling number of developers is pushing more of its development work to the public eye of the Web, creating the appearance of more development activity even as the total number of lines of code written declines. Rising unemployment might be contributing to this.
In other words, perhaps that out-of-work Citigroup developer, who used to spend all of her time as one developer among many contributing to a big intranet application, has now launched an open-source project (or two) to ease the burden of unemployment?
(Credit:
O'Reilly Media)
Or perhaps the development tools made available for writing Facebook applications, for example, make it easier to crank out more projects by fewer people. Maybe productivity gains are enabling fewer developers to do more.
I'm not sure. But it does seem that the developer drought, spurred by a sickly economy, isn't having an adverse effect on open-source and social-Web development. If anything, the weak economy may be encouraging more development, not less.
How would you explain the increased number in open-source and social-Web applications, in light of a reported decreasing developer population?
UPDATE @ 11:51 PDT: As noted in the comments below, I inadvertently describe a 35-percent decrease in the developer population, rather than a 35-percent decrease in developer growth. That said, the same quandary/question remains: the pace of new development in open source and the social Web exceeds the growth of the developer population. Your thoughts on why?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Given the ungainly hand that has held the rudder of Facebook's privacy policies--most recently with its alleged landgrab on user data--it's welcome to now see Facebook letting its users have considerable say in how the company handles their privacy.
In a bold move, Facebook has "open sourced" its terms of service to allow users to help define them for the social-networking service.
Facebook has proposed a new set of Facebook Principles, as well as a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, and is inviting users to comment upon them and thereby help to shape them.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the move "fairly unprecedented," and he's right. It's also a welcome departure from the company's ill-fated attempts in the past to foist things like Beacon on the world with little public input.
Given the amount of personal data Facebook holds, it's critical that the processes governing collection and use of that data be somewhat open. A little transparency should go a long way toward making Facebook's privacy policies palatable.
While I don't want to suggest that people can't change (they can), and that mistakes should be forever branded on people like a scarlet "A," I find it disturbing that MySpace, which previously threw 90,000 sex offenders from its site (29,000 in 2007), recently dragged another 6,000 off, according to TechDirt. Facebook, for its part, has dumped 5,500 from its site since May 2008.
Why don't MySpace and Facebook screen for criminal histories before allowing someone on the site, or require some sort of notice of conviction for sex offenses, rather than dusting up after the fact?
Arguably, this would be easier and less painful than state off-line policies related to housing regulations for sex offenders, which The Wall Street Journal chronicled earlier this week. Such policies significantly impact sex offenders' day-to-day lives with tight housing restrictions, among other things.
Tighter controls online would protect children with little increased burden to the sex offender, which strikes me as the ideal balance. Given that most registered sex offenders have little likelihood of recidivism - The Wall Street Journal's report noted that only 90 of the 15,800 registered sex offenders in Georgia are classified as "predators" - I'm all for a low-impact approach that protects children without unduly burdening the lives of the past offenders.
Whatever a state's offline policies on sex offenders may be, pre-filtering applications for accounts with MySpace, Facebook, and other social-networking sites does little to affect the quality of a registered sex offender's life but arguably helps to secure children while using such services. The burden is so low, why haven't we done it yet?
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
In the face of mounting criticism over its change to its terms of service, Facebook has reverted to its original terms of service, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology. It's a nice about-face, but it also misses the point.
The point, as Techdirt intimates, is transparency.
It's hard to think that nobody at Facebook anticipated it and took some proactive steps to address the changes and attempt to allay concerns and preclude the overreaction.
Instead, Zuckerberg responds only after the fuss has been kicked up, and his explanation comes off as damage control, regardless of the motivations behind it or the TOS change...The point isn't that Facebook or any other company shouldn't change their TOS to better reflect their businesses and technology, but that in this day and age, any "minor" change is going to attract lots of scrutiny, and, in all likelihood, will be misunderstood and misinterpreted. This makes the handling of the change much more important than the change itself.
In the Internet Age, companies need to assume that any changes they make to policies, procedures, etc. will become public, and act accordingly. It's no longer a matter of what is legally required to be divulged, but what is socially responsible to divulge.
Transparency, for example, would have served IBM and Novell well in their recent layoffs. Legally, neither was required to publicly announce the layoffs because the number of employees affected wasn't material to the business. But "material" is in the eye of the beholder, and by not talking openly (inside or outside the companies) about the layoffs, both Novell and IBM ended up fanning the flames of rumor. It's unrealistic to expect such events to happen quietly: the Internet is too noisy.
The point is transparency--doing more than the law requires one to do. The alternative is perpetual damage control, which seems to be Facebook's modus operandi. This reminds me of a comment from The Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's Good Country People who, commenting on a self-righteous but flawed woman, says, "She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
I've read reports that only the media and privacy advocates care; that the terms-of-service change didn't matter to the rank-and-file users of Facebook.
This may be true, but that's equally true for just about any important (and many unimportant) issue. We rely on the media and interest groups to ferret out those things that "don't feel quite right" in politics and business.
Companies need to be more transparent. The Internet will force them to be so, but as with Facebook, transparency looks much better when it's voluntary rather than forced.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
While most of the activities on Facebook count as spam or worse ("super poke," anyone?), it's likely that such friending and poking was intended to be private. Recently, however, Facebook changed its terms of service to ensure it has perpetual rights on personal content, including content deleted by its users, as The Consumerist reports:
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings....
You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.
Facebook has always retained the rights to profit from its users' content, but now it retains the right to use old content that its users may have deleted.
Google has had its own problems with user privacy, but this Facebook move calls into question the wisdom of clouds or, rather, storing one's data in others' Web services like Facebook. We need to come up with new licenses or new mandates for open data in the cloud. Facebook shouldn't own our data.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Facebook on Tuesday announced that it has made the Facebook Markup Language extensible, enabling developers outside of Facebook to create custom tags.
For example, the iLike application developers have provided an iLike tag that shows favorite songs and playlists.
Initially, FBML included only tags that Facebook created. Today, we're excited to announce a new feature called custom tags. With custom tags, any developer can create new FBML tags. Developers can use these tags in their own applications, or they can share their custom tags with the entire Facebook developer community as prebuilt FBML components.
This is a great step forward, but it's also a highly limited one, as ReadWriteWeb points out. To be highly reusable and, hence, more useful, Facebook should consider exposing its markup code to developers so it can be "more easily altered for reuse in different ways by different apps."
Exactly. This is one of the cardinal virtues of open source: code reuse. By allowing development of custom tags, Facebook has taken a step toward openness, but not the one that developers require to be efficient with their code.
Mike Vernal, a member of Facebook's Platform Engineering Team, tells Web 2.0 Journal that "our goal with Platform has been to allow applications anywhere to become more social by leveraging the power of Facebook," but this becomes doubly difficult if the platform is closed.
Sure, some companies can pull off a widely used, mostly closed platform. Microsoft certainly has. But in the age of the Internet, it's much easier to accomplish platform adoption through transparency and open code, making it harder to justify keeping the Facebook platform closed.
Back in 1997 I read Robert Putnam's classic "Bowling Alone" for the first time. In his original thesis, Putnam argues that society has frayed, with people going through the motions of sociability...without actually socializing:
Putnam warns that our stock of social capital - the very fabric of our connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities. [He] draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We're even bowling alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues.
Perhaps the Web can help.
All it takes is one look at the blogging phenomenon to see that something is going on. It's not strange that an (apparently) opinionated loudmouth like myself blogs. It is strange to see normally shy or reserved people blogging, Twittering, Facebooking, etc., and I follow a wide range of people that fit this description.
This is one of the most intriguing things about the Web today. It is enabling speech that would normally be muted at best, nonexistent at worst.
Perhaps it's our way of sending a collective "message in a bottle," reminding the world that we're here and that, despite our individual shyness, we want to be heard and connect with others.
For example, my natural disposition is to expect that people have much better things to do than to hang out and/or talk with me, and hence to spend more time than I'd prefer alone. Through Twitter, however, I've come to know friends like @ZUrlocker, @p1lonn, and even my neighbor @bryce much better, and have grown more confident that they actually want to talk to me offline, because of our conversations online. (Guys, don't burst this bubble! :-)
In this way, Facebook and its ilk may actually help us to "bowl together," rather than alone.
It's not about the sheer number of "friends" that one can accumulate online, but rather the basic communication that increasingly takes place online, rather than offline, that makes the Web a unifying force, helping us to find just a few of the "hundred billion castaways looking for a home."
