DeepDarkSee

“If you think you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re the fool.” 
“Sell to one customer.  Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.”
“Fail fast.  Fire, aim, repeat.”
and many more great axioms for Web next.0 - at UnstructuredVentures

and the best article I’ve read in a long time on “what’s next on the web” is a review of answers to that question when posted to ReadWriteWeb users.  Well worth a read.

So what if you extend AJAX running with a keepalive connection to allow the server to send updates/events to the browser code based on server side events?  Good in concept, and maybe it’s called Comet.  OK fine, you could do some fun and useful stuff with this, but don’t say it scales.  I’m tired of hearing great ideas that aren’t practical on a large scale (and keeping a connection open to EVERY user isn’t, no matter how you pitch it).  Great for creating some wonderful dittys, and some limited deployment apps, but not for scaleable web apps.  So many people don’t get this, it’s amazing!  I think these ideas have their place, and the creativity is great, but the naivete doesn’t help anyone.

Wow, so much has been going on.  The big news… we publicly launched Bones in Motion and our first product, BiM Active, at Demo 2006 yesterday.  We’ve all been working non-stop to pull this off.  You can check out the 6 minute video of the presentation.  We also announced availability on Sprint and Nextel phones (and another big carrier will be announced very soon).

The bigger news is that we’ve had a fantastic response from the launch at Demo.  An AP story highlighted us in an article that was picked up by over 50 papers, including USA Today.  The San Jose Mercury News featured us (1 of only 6 companies mentioned and first in the story) in their article.  Editors from several major publications are requesting phones to take back from Demo 2006 to use for testing and in-depth articles.  We’re hearing from Sprint that no application launch has ever generated this level of inquiry and activity to their PR group (a reflection on ‘Demo’ as a great launch vehicle).

Oh, and I spoke at Mobile Monday the night before the launch (and I’m told that despite sleep deprivation, I was even coherent)!

I don’t think I like the label anymore. What makes “2.0?” Here is someone’s list of “all” of them. Cleary incomplete, but where do you draw the line? Are Blogger and Wordpress “2.0″ apps? I’d say so. What about others that provide web APIs to their content and capabilities.?Time to do away with the label, and focus on doing useful things in web-wide collaborative fashon.

If Social Networking 1.0 is eGroups, Evite, Yahoo Groups and such, and Social Network 2.0 is Friendster, Linked In and such, then what is Social Networking 3.0? David Hornik defines it in a post as enablers of other compelling consumer experiences. He writes that “dozens of new social networks are emerging to enable specific, valuable consumer experiences that are enhanced by the underpinnings of the network.”

We’ve been thinking of the social networking integration into the BiM Active web service since the earliest days of development. We started with the assumption that communicating and sharing is an integral part of the use of the web service. It’s not an add-on, but is part of the normal use. Ironically, doing this well - so that it is just ‘there’ - is not a simple task, and we’ve left parts of that implementation incomplete. It’s our next big functional push. It’s become obvoius that we really have designed it in as an integral part, because the absence of more than the hooks is so obvious in our current state of implementation.

So it’s great to see some more validation for this model. We considered tie-ins to Tribe and the like, but couldn’t figire out to how to really integrate them into the fabric of what we’re doing. OK, so now all we have to do is do it well (yikes!).

PS: BiM Active will be publicly available (out of restricted beta) in January! February!

Read at TechCrunch … this is great! In a move similar to the release of the GMaps API, Google is now messing with the VoIP world. Think how easy this is going to make it to integrate chat with all kinds of web and non-web apps (text and voice calls). Think of the hybrids - click on the icon on the map to call the marked location is obvious, then think social networking sites, then games and community. We’re going to see tons of creative applications of this API.

Important to note is that this release includes a peer-to-peer technology layer as well. Another big door opener. That, and the fact that the API is under a Berkeley style license - it can be used for commercial as well as free apps - and woo hoo!

Google has also just changed the rules for Skype and other VoIP providers, much like they did in the mapping world not so long ago.

OK, based on inspiration from Mike Rowehl (now customize it, Mike!) and so many others, I’ve finally made the move to WordPress from Blogger. I’ve imported my blog entries from Blogger using the utility Wordpress provides. The only glitch was my confusion…none of the image references are present in the archives. Found the answer here. A simple change, but I’m amazed that showing ‘excerpts’ rather than ‘content’ is the default for archives!

I think this blog post by Marc Canter is worth looking at…. not so much for the comments on Dodgeball, as how it illustrates the “if you build it and get buzz, they will buy you” mentality that is spreading in the valley lately. Marc points out some successes, but I think it’s dangerous criteria for spending time and money. It’s going to overheat, and a lot of resources will be wasted. Look for the companies that show a sound model to make money (even if they aren’t at that level yet). Flickr never showed one. Buzznet doesn’t even seem to be trying to (looking pretty, waiting to be bought). Reminds me of a bubble I vaguely remember from a few years ago.

Mobile phones open many doors in the medical space. I expect that we will see heart monitoring harnesses, home diabetic test equipment, and many other home health monitoring and treatment systems enabled with communications in the future. It’s getting really inexpensive to build in a data connection based on mobile phone technology. Textuallly.org has some good links up today for applications in this area.

There are some good web sites and newsletters out there that have been reluctant to produce RSS feeds because of their dependence on advertising revenue (like Fierce Wireless, one of my favorites). Google has now stepped in with a solution that could be a win-win. We’ll have to see if it turns out to have been done well, but that’s a fairly safe assumption when Google is involved. This is huge (we’ve seen Feedster Media Network and Blogads, but now things are popping).

I’ve become addicted to RSS as a way of gathering and reading the sources I care about…it’s so much more effecient. My reader of choice these days is Shrook on Mac OS X, and I’ve been playing around with Ecto for blog posting.