Webware

SAN FRANCISCO--"I don't know how many of you actually got sacrificed out there, but condolences to you," said Matt Walsh, head of the Interaction Design department at ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, as he surveyed the audience at his Friday morning talk at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Burger King)

CP&B, after all, was the creator of the "Whopper Sacrifice" phenomenon, a Burger King ad campaign on Facebook that promised a coupon for a free hamburger if participants deleted 10 people from their friends lists on the social network. It was a wild success: the Facebook application was installed nearly 60,000 times in a matter of days, nearly 20,000 Whopper coupons were sent out, and well over 200,000 Facebook friends were deleted. Facebook members even created unofficial groups, offering to let other members add them as friends and then delete them for Whopper Sacrifice purposes.

But Facebook disabled the campaign after ten days, claiming that it was a violation of user privacy because Whopper Sacrifice notified friends if they had been deleted. "(It) challenged the very concept of Facebook," Walsh said. "Whopper Sacrifice had been sacrificed." In an ironic twist, that just led to even more buzz for the campaign.

Walsh took the stage at the Web 2.0 Expo to talk about what he saw as the secret sauce (ha, ha!) behind Whopper Sacrifice's success: what he calls "deceptive simplicity."

"It's a very, very simple idea," Walsh said. "And it's something that to a user is a very easy message to communicate. Sacrifice ten of your friends, get a free Whopper. It's got kind of the ultimate elevator pitch."

But the decision-making process behind the campaign was more theoretical, almost anthropological. Walsh said that another core element of Whopper Sacrifice's popularity was the fact that it tapped into a real "tension" in digital culture--how social networking has changed our ideas of what friendship means.

"For so long, friendship in the social space has kind of been a form of social currency," Walsh explained. Social networks' "entire system is kind of dependent on you aggregating as many of your friends as possible in the network, ballooning as quickly as possible, but at the end of the day that's all fine and good in the ramp-up when everything is novel...quite a few years into the social-networking arena now, there's really a question of what is friendship in the 2.0 world?"

Combining that provocativeness with a simple, no-brainer campaign is what Walsh said made it work.

"You're going to be faced with a lot of questions, and you're going to be faced with a lot of what-ifs, and you're going to be faced with a lot of bells and whistles added on," he suggested to marketers in the audience. "Whopper Sacrifice was one that went viral with pretty much zero media budget. We had a few small media banners on Facebook itself, but outside of that...we had a press release and that was it. It blew up because it was something that really resonated with people."

He also acknowledged that not all the feedback was glowing.

"Some people thought it was a little brutal because we did send notifications," Walsh admitted. "If I defriended you, you would get a message saying that you were worth less than one-tenth of a Whopper."

Google's HTML 5-based Web version of Gmail shown on an Android phone

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--What Google did with Gmail in conventional browsers five years ago it is expecting to do again with a new mobile version of its Web-based e-mail service.

Vic Gundotra, who leads Google's mobile software and developer relations efforts, showed off the Web application "technical prototype" Friday in an onstage interview here at the Web 2.0 Expo. Google offers Gmail applications that run natively on BlackBerry and Android mobile phones, but the company clearly has high hopes for a Web-based version as well.

Building a Web interface means Google can reach more phones more easily, Gundotra said, as phone browsers get more sophisticated and their Internet connectivity gets better. "Imagine if you could build apps that ran across all these phones," Gundotra said.

As he did in a similar demonstration in February, Gundotra showed a version running on an iPhone and on a phone using Google's Android operating system--apparently the HTC Magic.

The software relied on features in HTML 5, the still-under-development version of the technology that underpins Web site design. Specifically, it used offline data access so the application could read e-mail even while there was no Internet connection.

"When we make it broadly available, people are going to see this as the first HTML 5 mobile application," Gundotra said, declining to say when it would become available. "It'll be like Gmail in 2004. It was a great watershed moment for Ajax apps," which employ JavaScript for relatively sophisticated browser-based interfaces.

Vic Gundotra, head of Google's mobile sofware and developer work, speaking at Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The mobile Gmail application also featured a floating toolbar that stayed perched at the top of the inbox, offering constant access to delete and archive buttons and a menu of further options.

Mobile is central to Google's work. The company already offers a search application for the iPhone and some other models that lets people issue queries by speaking rather than just typing. The accuracy of the speech recognition has improved 15 percent in the last quarter, Gundotra said, and usage of the service is growing fast.

Gundotra previously worked at Microsoft, but it was a few words from his then 4-year-old daughter that led him to Google. He'd told a friend he didn't know the answer to a question, and his daughter, overhearing, asked him, "Daddy, where's your phone?"

"In her brief four years of life, she assumed any time you didn't know the answer to a question, you brought out your phone. For her the phone was the ultimate answering machine," something that answered questions. That helped him realize that Google's mission of organizing the world's information and presenting it to people would happen in mobile phones, too.

Google likes HTML 5, but it'll take time for it to become adopted broadly. In the meantime, other alternatives exist for richer Internet applications, notably Adobe Systems' Flash. Also up and coming are a browserless relative of Flash from Adobe called AIR and a Flash rival from Microsoft called Silverlight.

Google showed off a better browser version of Gmail on the iPhone.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Asked about AIR, Gundotra said, "I think Adobe has got some great products," mentioning Google's use of Flash to power video streaming at YouTube. "There's also Silverlight from Microsoft. I am biased toward open Web standards," Gundotra said.

And he touted another HTML 5 feature: "I predict we will see video tag become broadly adopted," a technology that could enable video streaming without a Flash player, similar to the way Web browsers can show graphics without requiring separate plug-ins.

Gundotra also had words of praise for Google App Engine, a year-old service that can be used to run Web-based applications. One such application hosted on Google App Engine is Google Moderator, which lets people submit questions and rank which ones they want to hear answered. Moderator originated as a way for Google employees to ask questions of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin during weekly employee meetings, Gundotra said.

Google was excited but scared when the White House said it planned to use Google Moderator for an online town hall meeting with President Barack Obama, Gundotra said.

But it held up under the load, and "the 45,000 other apps (on Google App Engine) were totally unaffected by this much scale," Gundotra said.

The town hall moderator system handled nearly 700 queries per second at its peak, with 3.6 million people voting on the questions they wanted to hear answered, he said.

Traffic spiked at Google Moderator when the White House used it to handle questions.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Nitobi present their app-building tool, PhoneGap, during Web 2.0 Expo Thursday.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

The mini-Demo conference at the Web 2.0 Expo is the Launch Pad, where five start-up companies pitched to a small panel of experts (Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, Matt Marshall of VentureBeat, and Anand Iyer of Microsoft) and a moderate audience spread out across a very large hall. Of the five pitches, I found four very smart (read the summaries to figure out which one didn't get my nod) and of those, one appeared to be a genuinely new idea. That would be the first company in this run-down. (The audience, though, liked Nitobi the best.)

80legs is building a platform for "Web-scale" applications, which it defines as apps that deal with the ocean of data and transactions, just like a search engine (like Google) does. The service crawls up to two billion pages a day, the pitchman said. 80legs lets you run scripts against that corpus of knowledge, and for a reasonable fee: $2 per million pages looked at plus 3 cents per CPU hour. The service could be used to analyze Web-wide trends, scan for content that pops up on it, and, of course, for new search engines. It's a really interesting subset of cloud computing: a crawler for rent in the sky, as it were. I am very curious to see what people do (if anything) with this platform. 80legs "data center" is made up of a mesh of computers enabled by Plura Processing technology.

Bantam Networks is an online workspace for businesses that's entering private beta today. It's a combination of a nanoblog "activity stream," a task list, a file store, and so on. There are, of course, dozens if not hundreds of workflow apps out there, and more and more are taking on Web 2.0 aesthetics and getting Web 2.0 features, like this one. Bantam also pulls in personal data and updates from other Web 2.0 sources, like Twitter and LinkedIn, which is smart. The on-stage demo was strong, and in a vacuum, this would be a strong service for work groups. However, as I said, this is a crowded space and it's evolving very fast.

DubMeNow is trying to solve the business card problem: the fact that most cards get lost or forgotten, or at the best, put into a database where their information slowly becomes out of date. DubMeNow is a mobile app, runs on several types of phones, and lets you send and receive electronic cards, which then feed into your contact list. Remember the Palm Pilot's infrared card beaming? This is the same thing, except the data goes over the Internet and is stored on a server as well as on your devices. I don't want to be too harsh, because I, for one, desperately need a better solution for business cards, but this one rings flat to me. As inefficient as business cards are, they are part of an important social ritual that everyone understands. I don't know how DubMeNow gets a step in this dance. See also: Plaxo.

Nitobi is launching PhoneGap, a tool for building apps for smart phones. Developers write their apps in HTML and Javascript, and PhoneGap will make the app run on multiple devices--eventually (just iPhone and Android so far). It's an open-source project, and so far there are more than 50 apps in the iPhone app store that have been built with it. Eventually the company will also offer app store integration to push apps out to the various and different stores. Success here is measured in apps built on it, and it looks like the platform is getting traction.

ZeaLog is a Web app to help you meet your goals--to collect data, log it, and share it. The presenter, Aaron Hurley, used it to track his weight when he wanted to lose it. I'm of a mind to reduce my daily lunch expenses, so I might give it a try for that. Hurley points out that although there are dozens of personal tracking sites for weight loss, quitting smoking, and so on, each of those personal improvement tasks is an industry, most of which have giant global advertising spends. This is not a ground-breaking new idea, but it does look like a very smart business built on top of a useful service. My advice, though, is not to go to this service looking for a personal improvement task, but rather remember it for the future when you finally realize you want to get serious and lose weight, drink more water, drive more slowly, or what have you.

Will Wright, creator of the Sim City and Sims franchises, is interviewed by John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Are video games really all about feeding your ego? Maybe, suggested legendary game designer Will Wright in a keynote interview at the Web 2.0 Expo on Thursday morning.

"Most people are very narcissistic," said Electronic Arts' Wright, creator of the Sim City and Sims franchises and now last year's avant-garde Spore, onstage with Federated Media's John Battelle. "The more you can make the game about that person, the more interested, the more emotionally involved they will get."

Advancements in technology have made it possible for the customization craze of the social-networking world to permeate the console and PC gaming sectors, and that has begun to open up the industry to new users who didn't see the appeal in hardcore gaming or immersive role-playing virtual universes.

He suggested that virtual world Second Life was on the right track by making it possible for members to create elaborate in-game items, but they were too difficult for most members to partake in. "The sophistication...was pretty high," Wright said. "For a lot of people, programming does not sound like entertainment."

Even though games--especially role-playing games--have a reputation for being a lonely form of escapism, Wright suggested that mainstream appeal can be found in, well, getting to be yourself. And that's where it gets back to the narcissism.

"The more this game can be about me, and my real life, and my real experiences and where I live, and my real friends (can mean more than) 'I'm going to go to the game and become an orc and get a real sword'," he suggested. Granted, Spore is all about building and growing strange creatures in a bizarre, science fiction universe. But there's a lot more out there, he said, as we're seeing a "Cambrian explosion" of ways to play and interact.

"The Wii, to me, represents the idea of non-immersive gaming," he said. "When you think about the Wii...most of the entertainment is not happening on the screen, it's about watching your friend act like a doofus swinging the thing around and maybe throw it into the TV set."

So maybe gaming can temper that ego, too.

Douglas Rushkoff at Web 2.0 Expo 2009

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--A conference about Silicon Valley innovation invariably will feature at least one talk about how the old order of American business is hopelessly broken and needs a tech-savvy recharge. At this year's Web 2.0 Expo here, it was author Douglas Rushkoff's "How the Web Ate The Economy, And Why This Is Good For Everyone."

It was a tantalizing title. But most of Rushkoff's talk wasn't about the Web or how it can help steer the world out of a global financial crisis. He focused instead on how the idea of "currency" as we know it, not to mention the notion of the "corporation," is profoundly archaic and that with the market meltdown, we have a golden opportunity to get rid of them altogether.

"We can make pretty much everything great," said Rushkoff, whose book "Life Inc." is coming out in early June, "and if we don't, they will recover and make us miserable for another few centuries."

Corporations and monetary systems, he said, are vestiges of the late Middle Ages when kings and aristocrats were struggling to exert some kind of authority over the fast-rising mercantile class and to rein in independent currencies before they became too powerful. "It was against the law to create value through one another. You had to do it through a corporation," Rushkoff explained. "That was what corporations were for. Centralized currency came up because most towns in late Middle Ages Europe had their own currencies...they had so much extra money they built cathedrals."

(Tip: if you want to make something sound really awful and backwards, talk about how it has roots in kings and feudalism.)

Updated at 10:10 p.m. PDT to correct amount spent on R&D. The correct figure is $9 billion. Also, updated at 9:10 a.m. PDT on April 2 to correct the spelling of Stephen Elop's first name.

During an on-stage chat on Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Expo, Stephen Elop, Microsoft's president of the business division, defended himself against conference instigator Tim O'Reilly's challenge that Microsoft's traditional office applications aren't making, and may not be able to make, a successful transition to the Web.

Elop, a slick spokesman for the Microsoft way, shot back that the lessons of Web 2.0 success, from companies like Wikipedia, are making their way into enterprise computing and Microsoft products.

"What's happening behind the firewall (in business settings) is identical to what happened on the Internet," Elop said. "The difference in the enterprise is that you can translate the value into something customers are willing to pay for. While social networks themselves may be challenged financially, in the enterprise, (Web 2.0) is working."

Microsoft's Stephen Elop says his company is successfully adopting Web 2.0 principles in its business products.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Elop pointed to SharePoint as the indicator of this success. It is "the fastest-growing product in the history of Microsoft, and it's because the principles of Web 2.0 are being applied to it," he said. Hammering home the message of SharePoint's value, he said, "for every dollar we earn, our customers get tremendous value, and there are seven or eight dollars for developers."

Microsoft is offering some of its apps as over-the-Web services, Elop continued. Nike, Coca-Cola, and other companies are paying for online access to Microsoft-hosted apps.

In product news, Elop hinted that an iPhone version of Office may be coming. It's "not yet" near, but "keep watching," he said. He also said a cloud-based Office suite will come soon, with limited features.

O'Reilly asked if it would be free. Elop's reply: "Ad-supported. Nothing is ever free." Features in the paid versions of the suite that would not make it to the free yet ad-supported product include integration with SharePoint and "unified communications"--features most consumers likely can live without. And when can we have it? "Beta code in not too long a period of time," he said, but "not this calendar year."

Other Microsoft products we'll have to wait a while for include a Twitter competitor. "We are experimenting," he said, "in a corporate setting." He said it was a big challenge to bring microblogging functionality into the business setting, where younger employees are avid boosters for the concept but older workers (who are sticking around longer due to the recession), "aren't even comfortable with e-mail."

Despite its apparent slow pace at adopting Web concepts in its products, Elop said Microsoft continues to invest in new technologies. "The only way through this economy is improving productivity. During tough times, we have to power through. That's why we have $9 billion in R&D. We have to continue to innovate."

Previously:
Office Web Apps won't work offline
Consumers have to wait for Web-based Office

Tim O'Reilly speaks at Web 2.0 Expo 2009

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--The floor of the exposition hall at this year's Web 2.0 Expo has been a little bit lethargic, to say the least. "It's a lot emptier than last year," said one representative from a social gaming company that had set up a booth. "I think the 'Web 2.0' thing has become a bit of a stigma."

Indeed, these days the term goes hand-in-hand with broken business models and overblown expectations, as much as it does with innovation. With the economy in shambles, attendance at the semiannual conference is down. The show floor is sparser and the speaker lineup less impressive than in years past, and attendees have had to hunt a little harder to find parties after hours.

But conference czar Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media (which co-organized the conference along with TechWeb), said that "Web 2.0" is more relevant than ever.

"Web 2.0 was never intended to be a version number," O'Reilly said in his keynote address on Wednesday afternoon. "It was really a reflection of what happened after the dot-com bust."

Now, he said, the Web is maturing and getting smarter. "The baby that we built with technology is growing up and starting to go to work," he said, mentioning examples like energy metering aggregator AMEE, the Google search application that predicted where the flu would hit next, and iPhone apps that derive search results from voice recognition.

At last spring's Web 2.0 Expo, the market crash was still months off, but the early signs were starting to creep in: venture funding was harder to come by, company launches were growing less frequent, and it was starting to become evident that some of the most-buzzed names in Silicon Valley hadn't produced solid business models yet. Then, O'Reilly's address exhorted the audience to push beyond the Web's trendiest hype machines and start thinking about how to change the world. But now that the rest of the world is searching for answers, he explained, it's time to put that thought to work.

"We thought because of the downturn, because all of us are faced with the idea that maybe those ideas of perpetual increase were going to be a problem, that we might have to do more with less," O'Reilly said. "Maybe there's actually power in less, and that's one of the lessons of the Web...In technology we have this wonderful power of less where we get more for the same amount, and I think we need to start thinking about how we apply Moore's Law to the world's problems."

This year, the power of technological innovation to reach far beyond the Web has already been justified in the election of Barack Obama, which used consumer-grade Web technologies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as powerful communication and organization tools: "The way that he used technology to transform politics, the way that he harnessed his audience to do something that was profoundly world-shaping," O'Reilly said on Wednesday. "History's on a different course because of somebody understanding how to apply technology more effectively in a new realm."

The most important part, he concluded, is that it's crucial to keep up that Silicon Valley attitude of positive change for the greater good as it brings its business principles to the rest of the world. Getting too self-serving was what ultimately caused the market collapse this fall, he said. The tech industry has its egos, too, and that's what got us all into trouble the last time around.

"There were a whole lot of people (in the finance industry) who said, 'Wow, I can get a lot for myself here, and the financial system is really a tale of how collective intelligence can go awry. Because, of course, our financial system is also networked collective intelligence and yet it was somehow hijacked by the spammers, the Ponzi schemers, and the people who thought, 'I want to get something for me.'"

"We know what happened," O'Reilly said, showing a slide of the now-famous Twitter outage graphic of a flock of birds attempting to lift a whale above water. "That's the fail whale."

Mozilla Labs' Aza Raskin talks about crowd-sourcing user design.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Aza Raskin, head of user experience for Mozilla Labs, could be considered the Doogie Howser of the Web design world.

At the age of 25, he's heading up Ubiquity--one of Mozilla's most experimental projects, along with collaborating on Weave and the concept series. This was after Raskin--the son of the late Apple Macintosh designer Jef Raskin--discontinued his pursuit of a Ph.D. to found Humanized, the company that brought him to Mozilla.

However, at a talk about design at the Web 2.0 Expo, Raskin played down his work on some of Mozilla's latest projects, instead using it as a platform to showcase why the company needs more design help from those who can spare it. "For every one employee, we have 1.2 million users," he said. Of those, about 1,000 contribute to Firefox's code, with another 100,000 or so who do the heavy testing.

But of those large numbers, few have offered design help. And in Raskin's mind, design is something that will help drive Firefox's user interface, and the UIs of other Mozilla products, into new territories. "Right now, we have two designers, so if people want to get involved, there's an ample opportunity...the work we do here can affect one of every five people on the Web."

Raskin was referring to Firefox's install base, which continues to grow, despite new and aggressive browser releases from Google, Microsoft, and Apple, all within the past year. In fact, as of this week, Firefox 3 became the most popular browser in Europe, beating out the last three releases of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which had previously dominated the region.

But what kinds of design is Mozilla looking to improve? Raskin highlighted tabs, which he says are fantastic when only a few are open. But they do a poor job of scaling, he said--especially once you reach the threshold of having close to a dozen tabs open in a single browser window. "I think we're going to see a lot of innovation there."

However, that innovation may not be coming from Mozilla Labs, which shuttered its Chromatabs project, focused on a browser add-on that would give each tab its own color, based on the site's identity.

Instead, the company has largely put the onus on third-party developers (or even competitors) to change the way we use them and build some of the best ideas into new releases.

The new page for frequently visited sites will show you which sites you tend to visit during various times of day. It also gives users the option to search and view content from each of those sites.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Raskin also highlighted advancements in improving the browser's memory of what you've been doing, making it easier to do simple tasks by using that information. To illustrate the point, he showed off Mozilla's latest efforts in enhancing what users see when firing up their browser or opening up a new tab. Users will soon have a page that remembers the last few sites you were using and pulls in the latest items from each RSS feed.

It's no Netvibes, though. Instead, it will remember when you use each site during the day, then custom-tailor that page to show only those sites. As Raskin described it, this will keep you from seeing some of the "late night" sites you visit when firing up your browser to read news stories and check e-mail in the morning.

So what about Firefox's next big redesign? It received a few subtle tweaks in version 3, but nothing groundbreaking outside of making the back button almost twice the size as the forward button.

With Raskin at the helm, many of the biggest UI changes could be simply embedding things that used to be buttons deeper within the application. The latest proof of that is one of Mozilla Labs' recent efforts, Ubiquity, which is effectively a command line interface that can learn new site-specific shortcuts. It can also be called up and dismissed in an instant.

Is this going to be the next way we navigate the Web, though? Probably not, but in Raskin's mind, it's a design trend to build more functionality around the sites we use every day.

Update: This post has been corrected with Raskin's correct age which is 25 (not 24) as well as his role in specific Mozilla projects.

I was not surprised that fully half the walk-up pitches I got at Web 2.0 Expo (as in, people walking up to me and pitching their product before I could barely say hello) were related to Twitter. As we all well know, Twitter as a platform and a network has incredible value, even if Twitter as a company has yet to figure out how to turn it into a cash register. Here are three of the Twitter-related companies you can find at Web 2.0 Expo:

CoTweet is a very clever company that will probably start making a nice living from Twitter long before Twitter does. It's essentially customer relation management software for Twitter (see also Salesforce jumps on Twitter-for-CRM bandwagon). It lets you create group Twitter accounts, so that multiple people can update one Twitter feed. More importantly, it performs triage on replies (@ replies and direct messages) to that account, to make sure that someone in the team who works on that Twitter account gets the reply and handles it. As CoTweet provides real value to people managing consumer brands, it will not be hard for the company to charge for its service.

Tmeet is a little location-reporting system for Twitter and iPhones. Like Foursquare and Brightkight, it makes it simple to send a note out to Twitter--either to all your followers or directly to just one--telling them where you are. While I like Foursquare's clever social system and its game-like nature (you earn badges for reporting in), Tmeet looks more useful for just telling a friend where you are at the moment. Plus, the team behind it is already running ads on the service (they're completely inoffensive), and according to co-creator Sudha Jamthe, those ads will soon be location-aware.

Finally, the online dictation company Quicktate was showing off its phone-call-to-Twitter service Tweetcall. Not entirely a new idea, and it's really a demo for the company's U.S.-based human dictation service that relies to a large extent on an army of "stay-at-home moms." Quicktate CEO Lee Dorfman told me "voicemail-length" snippets generally get returned with text in about two minutes, and that the price for longer dictations is competitive with the services that send your file overseas--when you consider the quality, he adds. At any rate, if you ever find yourself with a crushing desire to send a Twitter and for some reason you just can't get to a keyboard, this little experiment might help you out. Tweetcall is still in private beta, though.