This week's Friday Gillmor Gang podcast featured Mark Lucovsky, currently head of Google's search APIs and formerly a top technologist at Microsoft (reportedly Steve Ballmer threw a chair across the room upon being informed that Lucovsky was getting hitched to Google).
Mark Lucovsky
Lucovsky talked about making Google's APIs available to developers. The APIs include high-speed access to Google search via Javascript and RESTful protocols, peer APIs about accessing APIs, language APIs for detecting languages and translations, and hosting of third-party open Javascript libraries, such as Mootools.
"We are opening up all of Google bit-by-bit programmatically," Lucovsky said, referring to search APIs as well as the GData read/write API and Web analytics and site monitor APIs. About the only areas not yet publicly accessible are the massive compute cluster for processing data out of band, with MapReduce and the Google File System, he said.
"We are taking things we are best at and opening them up to the public," he stated.
He maintained that Google is doing the right thing for customers by providing access to its APIs and hosting tools. "We get nothing out of this. We have gone through a lot of latency work in the last quarter, and a lot of sites don't know how to do things right in terms of caching," Lucovsky said.
Of course, Google benefits when more applications and users interact on the Web by using its APIs. It's a means to selling more ads.
He was asked about Google having access to all the user data via its search APIs and hosting services. "We have access and can see what is going on, but we only look at stuff in aggregate," Lucovsky said. If an API is launched, Google can see how well it is working, such as if the cache semantics are tuned properly or which configuration is more popular, to help optimize performance, he explained.
He was also asked about cloud computing services, and working with multiple providers, such as Amazon.com's EC2 and Google's App Engine. "You can pick and choose providers with best of breed services," Lucovsky said. For example, a developer could build a hybrid application using a Google front end and some bulk storage from Amazon's S3 service. He is also betting that large-scale providers such as Google and Amazon will be the most dependable infrastructure providers because they have the depth of experience and APIs that scale.
He is optimistic that Web service interoperability and a hybrid application architecture is feasible. "I love the fact of Amazon, Google, and Yahoo with their APIs, and Microsoft out with a good trajectory and track record...it's absolutely the right way to go," he said.
Lucovsky also admitted his fondness for Microsoft Outlook e-mail over Gmail.
"The strength of client in a lot of ways is about presentation and interaction with the data or in original content creation. E-mail is the canonical client application that works great as a Web app and aweseome as a client app. I love Outlook and don't share the love for Gmail, but I like that I can go into an Apple store and check my e-mail," he said, noting that Web-based apps are pervasive and client apps are difficult to set up.
He would like it if Outlook were on every machine and you could just type in a URL. He might want to try Yahoo's open-source Zimbra e-mail, which is what Web Outlook should be, and it also has offline support.
Lucovsky was asked about Microsoft's Hailstorm project, which he worked on during his tenure in Redmond. Hailstorm was a precursor to what is going on now on the social Web, with OpenID, OpenSocial, OAuth, and other technologies. "If you squint at Hailstorm, it assumed every identity was a very rich and extensible profile," he said. It could include friends, photos, calendars, message streams, and other content. "Opening up API access to enhanced profiles is a replay of what we were talking about back in the day," Lucovsky added.
Lucovsky also had some comments about Microsoft's Live Mesh synchronization initiative. He said that the lack of compelling applications for Live Mesh makes it difficult to understand its potential. "There are a million different ways people are doing synchronization in XML, and most cases are tied to real application problems," he said.
He gave Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, some major kudos, however. He said that Ozzie and his team would be the one group he would trust to solve the distributed synchronization problem. "Mesh represents the best effort from working on problems for 20 to 25 years," Lucovsky said. He added that Ozzie has had more experience in this area than anyone. "I don't think a kid from Stanford with a B.S. in computer science has made enough mistakes (to solve the problem)," he said.
Participating in the Lucovsky interrogation were myself, Steve Gillmor, Jason Calacanis, Doc Searls, Robert W. Anderson, and Mike Vizard.
The Friday Gillmor Gang podcast featured special guests Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor, the creators of FriendFeed. Along with Twitter, FriendFeed has become a poster child for the next wave of communications tools favored by the cybernauts.
Steve Gillmor seems to think that Twitter will become the predominant messaging backbone for the social Web. If the company behind Twitter can't make it happen, Gillmor suggested that FriendFeed should do it.
Buchheit, who was employee No. 23 at Google and suggested the now famous "Don't be evil" motto, said that FriendFeed wasn't designed to kill Twitter. "It's about making services you already use more useful," he said. "We think of FriendFeed not so much about displacing services, but about making them more useful."
He characterized FriendFeed as a content discovery tool, allowing users to view content through the eyes of the people they know. FriendFeed also allows for comments and has "Rooms" for groups of people to gather, as well as application programming interfaces that expose all the data in the system. Twitter is more of a messaging service.
Taylor said he created FriendFeed because what he defined as the nucleus of his online activity was different from that of other friends. "Over the past five years with the proliferation of syndication and APIs, the data isn't necessarily siloed."
Gillmor tried to make the case that most people don't use a lot of services. Buchheit agreed that most people use one service, but added that not everyone uses the same service. "Part of what makes FriendFeed so powerful is that we all use different services, such as Google Picassa, Flickr or SmugMug (for photos). You can see them all even though users are using separate services," he said.
Gillmor and Robert Scoble recommended that FriendFeed support XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol--an XML technology for real-time communication), which would give it Twitter-like capabilities. "We want to pull in data and make it available anywhere, such as in iGoogle gadget, Facebook, and RSS feeds. Adding XMPP would fit in logically," Buchheit said.
The FriendFeeders said they plan to add a blocking feature. "We are adding features as users request them," Buchheit said. "We have been thinking about the right way to implement blocking for FriendFeed and it's a bit more complex (than Twitter blocking)." Nor does FriendFeed have the track feature of Twitter (which has been disabled of late), but it has search, which Buchheit said provides equivalent functionality.
FriendFeed's developers are also working on improving the user interface, which suffers from information overload. Buchheit said they are testing summarization of the best content from a period of time, so users don't have to sift through to find the best stuff, and combining items that are duplicated or related.
They also maintain that the fragmentation of conversation by having separate comments for each entry is one of the best features. Users don't necessarily want to participate in aggregated public forums, preferring to converse within the social groups they care about. For example, you might not want to combine co-workers comments with your mother's comments, Buchheit said.
David Glazer: Friend Connect is in line with Google's goal of enabling a more open Web.
(Credit: CNET News.com)On Friday's Gillmor Gang podcast, Google's point person on Friend Connect, David Glazer, took questions from the gang, which included Steve, Marc Canter, Robert Anderson, Mike Arrington, Dana Gardner, and myself.
Much of the conversation centered on Facebook's suspended participation in Google Friend Connect. Glazer said he expects Facebook and Google to make peace but didn't want to give a time frame for a resolution.
Regarding efforts by Google, Facebook, and MySpace to provide some element of data portability, Glazer said they are complementary, based on what is known about the APIs so far, which isn't much.
Glazer maintained that Friend Connect is in line with Google's goal of enabling a more open Web, which also has the potential to improve Google's bottom line. Sites and applications that use Friend Connect could also serve Google ads. "It's just an example of how when more people have more reasons to do things online, it can be good for Google," he said.
In a special edition of the Gillmor Gang, Steve Gillmor, Mike Arrington, Doc Searls, Dana Gardner, Robert Anderson, Robert Scoble and I discuss Microsoft's decision to walk away from its bid to acquire Yahoo.
The consensus: Google is a big winner, Microsoft is not dead, and lives to bid another day, and Yahoo better be able to execute with precision on its strategy or it faces difficult times and a less lucrative result for shareholders.
David Treadwell is the special guest on the Gillmor Gang this week (check out the podcast of the show here). He is the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Live Platform Services, which includes the recently introduced Live Mesh. Treadwell works directly for Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who has been working to put the Web, rather than the PC, at the center of Microsoft's computing universe.
Live Mesh is trying to solve a key user problem--how to mesh the desktop, mobile, and the Web for consumers and developers. For example, Live Mesh can provide core underlying infrastructure for synchronization, collaboration, and other services.
"This does represent a pretty significant advance for Microsoft, bringing the Web to Windows and Windows to the Web and connecting them super-well," Treadwell said.
I asked Treadwell if Live Mesh is designed as a core and pervasive layer for the Web, as Windows is for the desktop. "I don't think Live Mesh should be a required piece of technology, but we do view it as something that would enhance the user experience, with protocols that make it easy to connect with other services, such as Twitter." He went on to say that Live Mesh will enable a broad variety of usage scenarios, taking advantage of the standard Internet protocols.
David Treadwell, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Live Platform Services
(Credit: Dan Farber)During the Gang, Treadwell said he was worried during the roll out of Live Mesh that the message of an underlying platform would not resonate with users and the press. It's not easy to make plumbing exciting, but people seem to be getting the idea. "Live Mesh itself has a runtime for devices for synchronization, communications and the like," Treadwell said. It is written in Microsoft's .NET, C# and with some native code, and utilizes several public protocols. The key piece is FeedSynch, Treadwell said, surrounded by other standard protocols such as TCP/IP, HTTP, XML, RSS, ATOM, etc.
Treadwell was asked about the Live Mesh-Silverlight connection. "We make use of the Silverlight runtime for the media viewer on Live Desktop, but it doesn't require Silverlight," Treadwell said. "I view Live Mesh and Silverlight as orthogonal and complementary. Silverlight is the runtime for the presentation engine, and it has nothing for synchronization and low level communications like Live Mesh."
Regarding support for non-Windows platforms (Live Mesh currently requires Windows), Treadwell said, "Live Mesh synchronization capabilities require infrastructure running on specific devices, such as the Mac or Nokia phones. We will be pragmatic about getting to as many devices as we can. As long as people are willing to open up their devices and put code on there we will pursue it very aggressively. He also noted that a Linux Mono implementation of a Mesh client could be developed.
The Live Mesh stack
(Credit: Microsoft)Yesterday Amit Mital, Microsoft's general manager of Live Mesh, said Mac support would come in the next two months, and a prototype was demoed at the Web 2.0 Expo.
Host Steve Gillmor asked what he termed the "real" question: Is Live Mesh a transport to take Twitter messages into the Mesh and assign it to multiple affinity groups and express it on Silverlight clients that communicate with each other?
Treadwell responded, "Yes."
He was asked about synchronizing user and social-graph accounts by Marc Canter. "It's an interesting challenge around the class of data portability problems. We have to be concerned about user privacy and we are carefully exploring scenarios. The Mesh could be used but we have to make sure we are not putting user identities at risk," Treadwell said. "The Mesh doesn't have a contact store, friend relationships or other high-level features of Facebook or MySpace, but it can be used as low-level software to enable scenarios, such as synchronizing user and social graph accounts."
Dana Gardner asked Treadwell about supporting real-time applications, such as VoIP. Live Mesh uses "network transparent communications infrastructure," which connects devices regardless of network topology. "Any two devices with an Internet connection can communicate, but it doesn't have real-time communications capabilities. However, as we open up the SDK, it could be user for real-time applications.
I asked about the SharePoint-Live Mesh connection. "We are looking at ways for SharePoint to sit on top of Live Mesh. A scenario is to have Sharepoint documents synchronized across multiple devices. It's not available today but it's not hard to see some scenarios like that," Treadwell said.
He talked about a new feature coming for Live Mesh, the ability to do different version of media files on a per device basis. For example, you could have a 10MB photo on your desktop but a much smaller version on your phone, so you get the most appropriate experience on a device, Treadwell said. "We will need intelligent mechanisms to cache transcoded versions of files so we don't have to do it on the fly," he said.
Of course, there is the business model question related to Live Mesh. Treadwell said Live Mesh makes it easier for people to own and manage multiple devices, keeping the data and applications in sync. The financial benefit accrues to Microsoft in the case that people acquire more devices that include pieces of monetizable software and services from Microsoft. In other words, billions of devices have Microsoft operating systems, middleware, applications, and ad services.
See also: Live Mesh: Just one piece of the Microsoft's platform plan- prev
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