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New iPhone Features Won’t Slow Android —

Silicon Valley blogger Louis Gray posted a great entry to his blog last night in regards to the new features that the iPhone has. Here are a few of his key points:

• Apple made some good moves with the high quality cameras
• And they made some bad ones by charging for iMovie
• Despite Apple showing stats of marketshare, the onslaught of capable Android devices won't be slowed, and thats something that fancy iAds won't fix

And here's a direct quote of his last three paragraphs, as everything he says is right on the money:

"What I was looking for today was not a device that offered feature parity or similarity to what I have now somewhere else - on a platform that isn't limiting me to the manufacturer or to the carrier. I wanted more flexibility and more functionality. An iPhone 4-only parlor trick of video calling much like that on AIM or Skype or Yahoo! Messenger from the last decade isn't what is going to make my phone buying decisions made up, but instead, a promise to create a high quality experience for all aspects of my using the device.

AT&T has failed that litmus test of quality and has done so consistently for years. Today, Apple had the opportunity to look customers in the eye, and either apologize for the poor service we have come to accept from AT&T and Apple, and the missed promises, or better yet, offer an alternative. They didn't. That tells me either they do not fully understand the magnitude of the problem, or they think they can get away with continuing to ignore it.

Apple, I didn't want a thinner iPhone that's slightly faster and better looking. I wanted a promise that the new one would make phone calls, act as a fantastic Web device, and provide 3G access to other devices. Today, you didn't do that, and it's disappointing. A smartphone can't be smart if it's married to a company as dumb as AT&T."

[via blog.louisgray]

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

New iPhone Features Won’t Slow Android

The iPhone 4 is here now and it's all that we had hoped for and...well, that's about it. Apple's now predictable keynote began with stats, ended with "one more thing" and detailed a few highlights throughout regarding the company's latest creation, the iPhone 4.

But one thing didn't happen today: we weren't blown away. We weren't surprised. We didn't jump up and down, screaming. We don't even know if we'll rush right out and get one.

In fact, we might just skip the iPhone altogether and get an Android phone instead.

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Blame Gizmodo if you will, for spoiling all our fun with their spy shots of the iPhone prototype "found" in a bar. But we don't think that was the problem. No, the problem is that iPhone has lost its edge. Meanwhile, Android is killing it.

iPhone 4 or Android?

Case in point, here's the conversation this blogger had with the spouse:

Me: It's only $199 to upgrade my iPhone!

Him: Is it 4G?

Me: No.

Him: What's cool about it?

Me: Um, it's got a better camera. And it's faster. And it's has a 3-axis gyro thingy.

Him: What's that?

Me: This thing for games, it helps when you rotate the phone, the game rotates.

Him: That's cool, but you don't really play games, do you?

Me: Not really. But it has HD video recording!

Him: So does your camera.

Me: And threaded email...And video chat!

Him: Over 3G?

Me: Well, no. Over Wi-Fi. And only with other iPhones. But EVO has Qik, and that works over 4G, actually. Hmm, maybe I should just get an EVO.

In fact, maybe I just will.

While I'm at it, here are a few more things that Apple didn't announce today:

1. 4G

No, it was not the "iPhone 4G," it was the iPhone 4. Why? Because AT&T isn't set to roll out its 4G network until next year. And Apple didn't surprise us by finally confirming the mythical Verizon iPhone, not that we expected it at this point. But still. Where's my iPhone 4G already?

2. Cloud iTunes/OTA Sync

Sure, Apple just bought Lala.com, but couldn't they have at least teased us about the forthcoming "cloud iTunes?" After all, that's what Google did. At its recent I/O conference, Google announced that an upcoming version of the Android Market would allow music and app downloads and automatic over-the-air sync. Is Apple even thinking about doing this? We have no idea.

3. 3G Video Chat

FaceTime, Apple's new mobile iChat-like application, will probably be fun, but it's not game-changing. It only works over Wi-Fi for one thing (thanks, AT&T), not 3G. Meanwhile, Qik and Fring already have video chat apps for Android and Skype is hinting at an Android app arriving this year. Oh, and Qik on EVO offers 4G video chat, too.

4. Mobile Hotspot

In the current version of the Android operating system (the operating system!), there's a feature that lets an Android phone function as a mobile hotspot. Carriers can choose to implement this feature or not. The iPhone, meanwhile, can be tethered for $20 extra per month via USB or Bluetooth on AT&T.

5. Free MobileMe

Apple wants to compete with Google, but still charges $99/year for MobileMe (for the smallest package) while Google gives away its low-end services for free. That's not working for us either.

6. Voice Input

Trying to stop your dangerous texting while driving habit? Better get an Android phone. Although universal voice input is probably coming to the iPhone thanks to Apple's acquisition of Siri, a cutting edge, voice-based digital assistant, it's not here yet. When it is arriving, though? Apple's reluctance to disclose future plans has us again, looking to Android, which does this right now.

7. Free navigation

Navigation on the iPhone? There's an app for that! *Yep, but it's not free. Google, meanwhile, offers Google Maps Navigation for free on all Android phones. Apple, either provide your own app or make nice with Google and use theirs, for goodness' sake.

8. Dashboard

We were halfway hoping that the recent news about Apple killing off all the "dashboard" apps on the iPhone and iPad meant the company was going to launch its own dashboard-like app similar to Android's widgets. Guess we were wrong here, too.

Conclusion?

All this being said, the iPhone 4 is still a great smartphone thanks to other hardware-based innovations like its "retina display" (326 pixels per inch!), its integrated antennas, and its glass and stainless steel casing housing the thinnest iPhone to date: 9.3 mm thick. But maybe now that the hardware has been modernized, maybe Apple can focus on the software?

Discuss

Rachel Sterne, our third Sources Go Direct panelist —

We've already announced the first two Sources Go Direct panelsts, Nick Denton and Fred Wilson.

Nick is our contrarian -- I'm expecting him to say that while distribution is now electronic, news flows much as it did when distribution was on paper. Or something like that. ";->"

Nick is also a focal point for a wide-ranging and often emotional debate about how sources are used to get information that companies are reluctant to share. Many of us, myself included, have a strong interest in knowing about Apple's products in development, as much as Apple has an interest in controlling how much we know and when we know it. I think it's good that people like Nick are trying to get the information we want, when we want it. I can empathize with Apple's perspective, having spent many years as a commercial software developer. But I've often been frustrated at how much the tech press seems to serve the interests of industry at the expense of users. It's good, imho, that Nick is pushing the envelope here, and helping strike a different, healthier balance. I expect some of the people in the room to disagree, respectfully of course.

Fred was the first VC to use the web in a personal way to create new relationships with entrepreneurs and other investors, to learn about new tools, and to share what he has learned. All this has allowed him to do venture capital in completely new ways.

Rachel Sterne, CEO of "citizen journalism" site GroundReport provides a platform for 5000 independent writers and editors who contribute their work to produce something analogous to a newspaper as Wikipedia relates to a pre-Internet encyclopedia.

In the early days of news on the web, Salon boasted that they were sending a reporter to Yugoslavia, a sign of their maturing to become a more substantial news organization. I was skeptical, thinking that we, the world wide web, were already there. Our network wasn't that well organized in 1999, but thanks to the work of Rachel and others, we are there today, and the dream of 1999 is being realized in 2010. Scott Rosenberg, one of the founders of Salon has already registered for the event. It'll be interesting to hear his perspective. Jay Rosen, who Rachel says has inspired her work at GroundReport will be there too, of course. ";->"

As mainstream journalism pulls back, as international bureaus close around the world, it seems Rachel and Co may be building the distribution system that gets us the news we need.

So we have three very different perspectives on our panel on Wednesday, but in no way do they cover the entire spectrum. That's why our session will add some of the elements of a BloggerCon-style unconference. We will have a "monitor" with a wireless mike available to help you add your point of view to the discussion (which will also be webcast, the backchannel will be on IRC and Twitter). You can ask questions, but you can also simply comment. We don't draw a very bold line between the stage and the room, we understand that there will be 125 incredibly smart, experienced and knowledgeable people in the room, and we want to tap into as much of that as we possibly can.

The session will last one hour and fifteen minutes. After that we will switch format to an "open newsroom," an idea I've wanted to try for quite some time. Bring your laptop, netbook or iPad, we'll provide wifi and refreshments. The discussion will continue and we can all write our blog posts and do it in any collaborative fashion that makes sense to you. If it goes as I think it will, the newsroom will be every bit as valuble as the panel discussion. It's an experiment, so it'll be new, that's for sure. ";->"

We've set up a website with links to all the resources for the event at go.hypercamp.org.

Tickets are free at Eventbrite and we'll webcast via Ustream.

I love it when I write about something I need and some developer out there builds it. It happens all the time and it never ceases to amaze me.

This week it happened as a result of my email bankruptcy post. I wrote this in that post:

I have a list of about thirty people who I email with regularly and who are my most important email relationships. I use two web services, Gist and Etacts, to tell me who these people are. Both are useful. I then do gmail searches on their names and make sure that I have no unread and unarchived emails from them. It would be great if one or both of these services could auto-generate a gmail search on all thirty addresses for me. It would be even better if gmail had this feature built into the service.

The team at Etacts read the post and added the exact feature I wanted. I've got the Etacts browser plugin in Chrome and this is what my gmail sidebar looks like now.

Two of those links were inserted by Etacts, the "awaiting reply" link and the "unread from top contacts" link. I don't use the "awaiting reply" functionality in Etacts but the "unread from top contacts" is going to be so huge for me. A couple times a day, I have time for five or ten minutes of email and what I want to see is any incoming email from my top contacts. This Etacts link does exactly that for me. 

What is even more awesome is that the definition of top contacts is not hard wired. It will change over time as my email behavior changes. Maybe we sell one of our portfolio companies. That team may fall off of my top thirty list. Maybe we make a new investment. That team may rise onto my top thirty list. So cool.

Thanks Etacts for doing this. You made my week.

Fred Wilson is a partner at Union Square Ventures. He writes the influential A VC, where this post was originally published.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: Yahoo Still The King Of Email, But Losing Ground To Gmail
• Gmail Lets You Drag And Drop Pictures From Your Desktop Into Emails
• Google Makes Gmail Easier

XAuth is a lot like democracy:  The worst form of user identity prefs, except for all those others that have been tried (apologies to Churchill).  I've just read Eran's rather overblown "XAuth - a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea", and I see that the same objections are being tossed around; I'm going to rebut them here to save time in the future.

Let's take this from the top.  XAuth is a proposal to let browsers remember that sites have registered themselves as a user's identity provider and let other sites know if the user has a session at that site.  In other words, it has the same information as proprietary solutions that already exist, except that it works across multiple identity providers.  It means that when you go to a new website, it doesn't have to ask you what your preferred services are, it can just look them up.  Note that this only tells the site that you have an account with Google or Yahoo or Facebook or Twitter, not what the account is or any private information.

Some objections to all of this are natural; I had them too.  Below are my answers (note: I'm not speaking for Google here, just myself, but I believe these answers are consistent with what people like Chris Messina and Joseph Smarr are thinking).

1. Objection:  The implementation relies on a single domain.  Answer:  The current implementation does this due to restrictions in browser security models.  There is no essential reason for that single domain to exist, there is no data stored on the domain's servers and no web services accessed from it.  It just stores the JS used to implement the API today.  In theory one could write a browser extension that maps "xauth.org" to "127.0.0.1", make sure to serve up the JS from a local web server, and XAuth would work fine.  A better use of time is to convince the browser vendors to support XAuth natively.  Which leads to objection #2...
2. Objection:  This should be done by the browsers, not by a back door via a JS API.  Answer:  Yes, it absolutely should, and the best and fastest way to make that happen is to get a deployed solution and user experience supported by many sites as quickly as possible, then swap out the implementation.  It is trivial to replace the XAuth JS core with calls to a browser solution.  In fact it'd be great to figure out a good way to make this happen automatically with feature sniffing, though for that we'd need a very stable JS interface.  And for that we need... field deployment experience!  XAuth is a great bootstrap to a browser centric future solution.
3. Objection: But the central domain name should not be managed by a single party, even in the interim:  Answer: Yes, that's true, and the parties involved are working to get it managed by a neutral third party who can be trusted not to do something bad.  Note that we can know fairly easily if some domain owner starts to do bad things as they'd have to mess around with the publicly visible JS to get information to go anywhere but the users' local computer.
4. Objection: It should be opt-in per browser, not opt-out.  Answer:  Note that XAuth doesn't prevent opt-in semantics on the part of identity providers, it just doesn't enforce it.  All other things being equal, yes, it would be better to force the default to "off" and ensure users understand what they're doing when they turn it "on".  The last bit is hard; a choice that users don't understand is even worse; it doesn't really solve anything but hurts adoption -- and gives proprietary alternatives, which don't require opt-in, a big advantage.   Again, a browser-native alternative may be able to solve this.  An XAuth ecosystem, already in place, ready for browsers to use, is a powerful incentive for them to do this.

At Microsoft, there's a thin line between a tablet and a slate — Microsoft released this week a Community Technology Preview test build of its Windows Embedded Compact 7 product -- and introduced yet more murkiness into the "which operating system is best for which form factor" debate. I have a (tiny) bit more clarity about the company's latest guidance now (I think)....

This week at the 2nd annual Internet of Things 2010 conference in Brussels, British service Pachube announced a partnership with Current Cost - a producer of real-time energy monitors. Current Cost is using Pachube's Internet of Things platform for the Bridge, an ethernet device which connects Current Cost electricity monitors to the Internet.

Pachube Founder & CEO Usman Haque called this "a major step in making the 'internet of things for consumers' a reality."

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We've long been a fan of Pachube (pronounced Patch-Bay) and named it one of our Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009. Pachube is an open platform for sensor data. We first reviewed it in May last year and since our last update in October, Pachube has followed through on Haque's promise to develop a viable business model. The Current Cost partnership is a part of that evolution.

The Move From Experimental to Commercial

One of the most exciting things about covering the Internet of Things, is watching the slow but gradual move from experimental apps to commercial ones. I watched - and blogged - this same evolution in the years before Web 2.0 existed (2002-2004) and it's happening again in 2010 with the Internet of Things. Startups like Pachube are literally inventing the business models as they go.

As we've noted in previous posts, up till now Pachube has been mostly used for experimental applications. However, Current Cost may be its first important commercial case study. The Current Cost 'Bridge' enables users to analyze their energy use via a website dashboard, on iPhones and other smart phones, and via Google's energy service, Google PowerMeter.

Pachube is being used for data management on the Bridge, enabling the device to deliver tracking, notifications, comparison tools, and more. The Bridge also has "enterprise level features" such as privacy groups, statistics API, user management and a device provisioning server.

Pachube's New Revenue Models

Pachube now has what it terms a "corporate" service - essentially a third party service for companies that want to connect devices to the Internet. For example Pachube provides bulk accounts to "web-enable thousands or millions of devices," such as electricity meters. Other services include delivering 'out-of-the-box' tools for consumer-facing companies, building communities around products, and developing branded web portals for manufacturers.

In addition, Pachube has added premium accounts to its consumer service offering. These include "value-added features" such as privacy options, statistics/aggregation, greater bandwidth, history and search.

It's great to see Pachube develop its business and we'll continue to track its efforts!

Discuss

Enterprise 2.0 : Harmonising formal processes and ad-hoc work —

In the previous post I reviewed a video interview with the talented Jordan Frank from Traction Software, which was on social tools and ad-hoc processes. This video got me inquiring further into what others have said about this over the past couple of years. So I headed to my bookmark collection, and this post is what resulted.

But first I’ll repeat a few highlights from Jordan’s interview:

Workflow systems are great until they fail…a need to have a collaboration safety net.

Collaboration is not necessarily about making the things that are planned go right, it’s about dealing with the things that are unplanned that go wrong

It’s hard to troubleshoot when what happened till now is not easily accessible or not recorded in a raw fashion

You can’t anticipate a workflow for fixing a problem (with social tools like Teampage) you can model informal processes on the fly

Make sure when business conditions change your business processes don’t get left behind

I also linked to one of Traction whitepaper’s that demonstrates the bottom-up enabling tools we now have to better cope with getting things done, and by default achieving the original aims of KM and being an agile organisation.

Emergence by default

Social computing is about many things: discovery, connection, conversation, emergence, crowdsourcing, transparency, engagement, innovation, collaboration, findability, diversity, sharing, learning, helping, sense-making…

Helping and sense-making have an immediate impact eg. stuck on an issue, asking a question, getting an answer and moving on…whilst this happened others got to learn for free.

In a way emergence happens anyway as a result of sense-making ie. emergence that surfaces from "In-the-flow" working, which is in contrast to "Above-the-flow" emergence (crowdsourcing, sharing your experience, etc). Either way we have emergence because people are visible and their interactions are documented, all made possible via bottom-up enabling tools.

Another immediate sense-making aspect is dealing with exceptions to processes. Email is our survival tool to not only improvise, but to plain and simply do work. Same goes with MS Word and Excel…then put them together as email and attachments.

James Dellow pins this down:

"Like cockroaches, spreadsheets have continued to thrive despite the growing (perceived) sophistication of modern enterprise information system. They record data, drive barely repeatable processes, they are spread around by email systems and people use them to address problems that other systems fail to solve."

Process vs Practice

I will refer later to "barely repeatable processes", but for now let’s looks at processes and how we need flexibility.

Jack Vinson quotes Mike Gotta on Process vs Practice:

"Process is "how work should be done." And Practice is "how work is actually done." When process fails (exceptions), people use practice to fix things. When process doesn’t exist, practice fills the void. While people don’t realize it when they engage in practice, they actually are tapping into community — an informal social network within or beyond the enterprise to discover expertise and get things done. The problem is that we haven’t had the tools to support good practice."

An interesting comment on Jacks post by Marnix:

"Process is the way work is being done, combining technology and practices. Culture is when this happens unconsciously; ’it is just the way we do things around here’"

Move from pre-defined structure to DIY

Bil Ives says the difference with new social tools is that the people (users) decide on the structure of the process:

"ERP provides infrastructure that often requires work processes to confound to the software structure. Enterprise 2.0 is often attempting to provide tools that will conform to your work practices. With ERP adoption is not the issue, except in the 9% of cases where parallel adoption is used, With ERP the issue is implementation, as people are generally required to use the system. The study stated than 83% of the ERP implementations studied were considered successful."

Bill also says:

"The irony of enterprise 2.0 is that you actually get more control because the free form nature of the tools allow the business people to decide on where structure occurs, not the people who make the software.”

Joe McKendrick gives BPM a new name:

"No matter how automated a workflow may get, there are always stages in which things need to stop for an exception, an approval or a quality check. The role of human interactions has always been a complicating factor in business processes. Introducing Enterprise 2.0 approaches may help shift the emphasis from business process re-engineering to business process re-energizing."

Jim McGee combines the concept of rigid processes and how it relates to emergence:

"In an accounting or ERP system, the system’s designers specify all aspects of workflow, database design, and information structure in advance. Users are expected to select from among pre-defined choices and enter only such data as the designers have provided for. In designing a system for emergence, the designers leave a number of these decisions open; waiting for users to fill in the blanks"

Paula Thornton comments on a past post of mine on this meme:

"Real knowledge work is about handling the exceptions. Everything else can be automated. Thinking about the frustrations you’ve had with anything you’ve tried to accomplish in getting work done (save your own shortcomings or those of others). A good majority of them are either due to over-automation (not allowing for exceptions) or underautomation (leaving you to manage mundane tasks). What IT methodology focuses on assessing for such balances? NONE!"

These are our tools to execute work. They are also the tools that come in especially handy when the process system we should be using is too rigid.

I know when I was doing document management support work the support database was merely used as managing the call, but the conversations happened in email. That is, email is our coping mechanism. I’ve posted on this before, and Larry Hawes has a post on the hybrid use of both process-centric and people-centric tools. The BPM type tool to locate issues, status, who’s on it, blended together with conversational tools where the troubleshooting actually happens. There is a place for both where they complement each other…the road ahead is integration 2.0.

This is when we say social computing isn’t really anything new, it’s just the next survival tool or coping mechanism which is more effective than email. Especially in circumstances where we need help, and ad-hoc collaboration to get through a process. We have phone, then email / IM and MS Office, now we have microblogging, blogs, forums…and wikis to stitch the process together.

Even a janitor is not absent from these non-routine and improvisational working conditions.

Unstructured and Barely Repeatable Processes

Sandy Kemsley notes that Gartner calls this unstructured processes:

“…work activities that are complex, nonroutine processes, predominantly executed by an individual or group highly dependent on the interpretation and judgment of the humans doing the work for their successful completion”and notes that most business processes are made up of both structured and unstructured processes. Unstructured processes are costing organizations a lot of money in lost productivity, lack of compliance and other factors, and you can’t afford to ignore them. Although most processes aimed to meet regulatory requirements are structured, unstructured processes provide a company’s unique identity and often its competitive differentiation, as well as supporting operational activities."

Sandy moves the conversation to Integration 2.0, where social tools are features of existing business process tools

"…the BPMS vendors are looking for ways to incorporate “barely repeatable processes” into their systems, allowing users to create their own ad hoc processes on the fly but still capturing the audit trail so that it’s not just happening over email or the phone in an unaudited fashion. The idea is not to pre-define all of these processes, but to provide tools that allow process participants to have a sufficiently unstructured environment to do what they need to do, and augment that process with their own call-out at that point."

I have posted before on Barely Repeatable Processes, and Exception Handling and am going to re-quote here from some of the pioneers in this movement.

Ross Dawson explains the need to complement an ERP - Easily Repeatable Process, with a BRP - Barely Repeatable Process (via Sigurd Rinde):

“Typically exceptions to the ERPs, anything that involves people in non-rigid flows through education, health, support, government, consulting or the daily unplanned issues that happens in every organisation. The activities that employees spend most of their time on every day. Processes that often starts with an e-mail or a call. A process volume, measured by time and resource spent at organisations, probably larger than for the Easily Repeatable Processes. These are mostly handled and organised - frameworked - by systems like paper based rules and policies, e-mail, meetings, calls and now in more modern organisations by wikis and other collaboration systems and methods. Known by extensive loss of information (e-mails residing on HDDs), little knowledge acquired and reused (typical research says 70% of problems solved before without being known) and most of all, untrustworthy processes (oops, forgot to send that mail). In other words not an iota (well almost) of business process thinking or methodology applied to this huge untapped area of business processes.”

Ross Mayfield on the same meme:

“The way organizations adapt, survive and be productive is through the social interaction that happens outside the lines that we draw by hierarchy, process and organizational structure. The first form of social software to really take off to facilitate these discussions was email. Most employees don’t spend their time executing business process. That’s a myth. They spend most of their time handling exceptions to business process. That’s what they’re doing in their [e-mail] inbox for four hours a day. Email has become the great exception handler.”

Bottom-up structuring of ad-hoc processes

Before I spoke of using social tools to sense-make (get help, get through a process), well the next step are apps created from the bottom-up (by the users), that have noticed how people use social tools in an ad-hoc way, and are offering a way to design or assemble this process into a more visible flow. Basically making your own process, which you can manipulate at any time to suit the situation.

A way to see it is a kind of semi-formal approach where you are agile enough to assemble an app to slightly structure ad-hoc work:

Dennis Howlet talks about Thingamy software:

"…‘barely repeatable processes’ - a good way to look at them - where you need a quickly built app that includes the process loops in order to solve the problem."

And Jacob Ukelson talks about ActionBase:

"One thing to be careful with is that you want to provide enough structure to the process to add value, but not so much as to strangle it. Given that most of these processes are executed today via documents and email, we built our tool as an extension to those standard office tools - allowing the same ad-hoc feel, but adding a layer of management, tracking and reporting. "For many of these processes an initial formal model is overkill (and at odds with the needs of most knowledge workers) - at most you want a guideline or best practice that gets modified as the work gets done. Then these emerging models can later be used to create a more formal model if needed (I’ve blogged on the topic of in-situ process discovery on our blog http://blog.actionbase.com/in-situ-process-discovery)."

When you think of Activities on IBM Lotus Connections they are practicing this in an organic way. Activities (and Google Wave), are a collaboration tool to work on a task, where everything is recorded, and lives on a URL. Common activities can be available as templates eg. if you have to organise an event, there’s no doubt many have done this before using "Activities", so why not start by re-using a template, and re-mix it to your context.

See a video called "The man who should have used Lotus Connections 5 - Innovate or Die"

Human Process Management

ActionBase call this Human Process Management (which is what people may refer to as BPM 2.0).

In the post, The ‘H’ Bomb in Business Process Management, they state how traditional BPM does not reflect the reality of work:

"Human work is: Dynamic Tacit Ad hoc Crossing boundaries and silos Saturated with peer to peer interaction If you want to manage a human workflow like fraud investigation or a product change request or any other, you need to accept the “chaos” and face the facts - structured, rigid process does not fit into this paradigm."

Following on, the post, What is a Human Process?, re-iterates what has already been reviewed in this post, ie. the co-existence of routine and tacit interactions:

"Human processes are business processes that generate a business outcome that is heavily dependent on interactions between people. These are also called “tacit interactions” by economists, which is an attempt to differentiate between routine transactions and interactions that rely heavily on judgment and context. These “tacit interactions” are the most prevalent kind of business processes in which knowledge workers take part. Most of the work of involved in executing these human processes is with the communication, coordination and management aspects of the process. Currently most human processes in business are executed using standard productivity tools (e.g. MS Office), email (e.g. Outlook) and meetings.

I have listed just a few of their characteristics involved in human processes:

"Unstructured - there is a standard framework for the process and how to achieve the intended result, but each case is handled separately and requires human understanding (for both decisions and flow) as part of the process. There isn’t enough standardization between instances of the process that allows for a formal, complete and rigorous description of the process end-to-end. Dynamic - the flow of the process changes on a case by case basis, based on available information and human decisions. A flow can also change while the process is being executed based on new information, or a changing environment."

Then they put it altogether as, What is Human Process Management (HPM)?

Mike Cohn takes this to the human behaviour, and change aspect, where enabling and empowerment from the bottom-up is key to adoption, as workers have a finger in the process pie that they will be using:

"None of the agile processes as described by their originators is perfect for your organization. Any may be a good starting point, but you will need to tailor the process to more precisely fit the unique circumstances of your organization, individuals, and industry. As Alistair Cockburn once told me, “Having a chance to change or personalize a process to fit themselves seems to be a critical success factor for a team to adopt a process. It’s the act of creation that seems to bind teams to ‘their own’ process.”"

Enterprise 2.0 - Complementing and Supplementing existing processes, and assembling new ones

Bertrand Duperrin has an excellent post on the three streams of enterprise 2.0 which puts an understanding out there that enterprise 2.0 is not about some isolated fairy-shary thing that happens on the edges of the organisation…he also posts about it here. Besides serendipity, and formal communications, it’s also about complementing and supplementing existing processes. He says:

"Becoming an enterprise 2.0 is not a goal for any enterprise and should not be. The only one is : improving the way things are done everyday, the way it produces. But what does “production” really mean ?"

1. Formal Production Capability (FPC):

"Being able to produce something defined, following a process in which everyone knows exactly what he has to do, when, and how."

2. Ad-hoc Production Capability (APC):

"Being able to overcome any breakdown or insufficiency […] goods and services have to be more and more customised. As a consequence, production is less and less standardized and the need for readjusting it according to clients who have more and more specific requests is not an accident anymore but a norm […] their unpredictability has to be admitted and a framework has to be defined in order, even if things are not under control in the strict sense of the word, they respect some essential rules. Paying no attention to that and focusing on the traditional FPC causes many dysfunctions and put employees in unbearable situations."

3. Serendipity production Capability (SPC):

"Being able to innovate and produce unexpected things […] has to be facilitated because it’s key in a disruptive economy"

He puts this into perspective using a comparison table, and concludes:

"…businesses have to develop these three points. Not one of them, all of them […] Companies should facilitate the switch between these three systems because it’s what people need to get things done […] There’s no unique satisfactory way of doing things. People have to know how to switch from one to another.

Bertrand has a related post on being adaptive and agile, which I will highlight in a future post.

Co-existence of processes and ad-hoc work

Many I have quoted admit that "process" is a good thing, but extreme standardisation, rules and rigidness can trap people, creating unproductiveness and inefficiencies which is counter to what you are trying to automate in the first place. The key is for some flexibility in the process to cater for change, contexts, and the unpredictable…and to also be able to assemble people and tools to create your own ad-hoc processes.

Ross Mayfield on the folly of process extremism:

"…processes can become calcified and accepted as the rule even when they do not work and make no sense."

I like how Ross sees a process more as a framework, that can be built upon or bendable (similar to Ross Dawson’s view of enterprise 2.0 approaches):

"A process is like a standard. It provides a common definition for others to build upon. This is generally a good thing […] At best, a process should serve as a reference model. Something that others can reference when completing a task. Something that can be leveraged for innovation, a boundary condition for experimentation at the margin."

Nicholas Carr shares his middle ground:

"…meticulously defined and managed processes continue to be a powerful source of competitive advantage for many companies. Look at Toyota, for instance. Its highly engineered manufacturing processes not only give it superior productivity but also provide a platform for constant learning and improvement. The formal structure, which is anything but democratic, spurs both efficiency and innovation - productive innovation - simultaneously"

Nicholas talks about how new tools complement processes:

"The simple group-forming and information-sharing software tools now being introduced and refined will often provide greater flexibility and effectiveness than more complex "knowledge management" systems. But even in these cases, processes aren’t going away; they’re just changing. There can’t be organization without process."

He concludes:

"Bad processes can destroy individual initiative, but well-designed processes, even very formal ones, can encourage individual initiative and, importantly, guide personal and group creativity toward commercially productive ends. I’m not sure you need to balance process and people so much as harmonize them"

Irving Wladawsky-Berger reminds us not all processes deal with unstable environments:

"…we need to standardize those processes where differentiation brings little or no incremental value, so as to avoid the huge inefficiencies involved in re-inventing the same process over and over again."

And also share’s his middle ground:

"An innovative business looks for the proper balance between process - covering those aspects of the business that can be designed, standardized, and increasingly automated - and people - who bring their creativity and adaptability to handle everything else. In a world that keeps getting more and more complicated and is changing faster and faster you need both - but even more, you need the innovation which, when all is said and done, is the truly human element."

Mark Masterson’s insightful take on it is:

“The problem is not business processes. The problem is trying to automate business processes."

Mark’s insight in detail:

"We are more efficient than before, but we’re disappointed nevertheless. Yes, our coordination costs are lower than they were with ad hoc and / or manual processes. But now we want more! We want to keep enjoying these improvements in efficiency and productivity, but we want the creativity and innovativeness back, which we are somehow certain that we’ve lost"

Phil Gilbert reminds us where we started:

“The traditional notion of a business process comes from the manufacturing world where you can standardise the inputs and outputs of a given process,” he explains.“With ‘white collar’ processes, the very reason you have human beings doing them is that you cannot standardise those inputs and outputs.”

Sigurd Rinde reminds us too:

"If work was like a water flow and the given framework was the pipe it flows through, then BPM would be the system whereby pipes were shifted from side to side and valves opened and shut to direct changes to the flows. Good enough if the flow is water. Not so good if the water molecules had a mind of their own and actually were able to make directional decisions underway. Funny thing, people can. And more; it’s wanted because people are smarter than machines and that’s why you hired them. Ever broken business rules or botched the main systems just so you actually can get your job done? But of course you have."

This takes us, as always, to being more effective and agile.

Mike Gotta quotes a HBS article:

"Many organizations struggle to balance the conflicting demands of efficiency and innovation. Organizations can become more efficient in the short run by replacing costly, unpredictable problem solving activity with consistent, streamlined routines. However, this efficiency often comes at the cost of long- run adaptability. The more organizational activity is dominated by stable routines, the less the organization learns, and the more rigid and inflexible it becomes. To escape this fate, the authors of this working paper theorize that highly disciplined organizations must actively engage in strategic and selective perturbation of established routines. A perturbation interrupts an established routine and creates an opportunity to innovate and learn."

Endnote

Often enterprise 2.0 is synonymous with "emergence" and "free-form" which mostly relates to what surfaces from people sharing and conversing about what they know. But "emergence" and "free-form" also relates to "processes"…how do I work around a process by being empowered with new bottom-up enabling tools. And what may emerge from using these free-form tools is things like a wiki page to list what to do in different contexts, troubleshooting tips that complement procedures, etc…see my post, Wikis for exceptions and process failures.

In the future I want to look more deeply into integration 2.0..social computing blended with designed process tools.

This post could keep going but I’ll stop here. Some related areas are; the addiction to Best Practices, stifling innovation, Management 2.0, Plans and Targets, and Complexity (uncertainty, unpredictable)…which I plan to post about.

Related

Socialize your business ? What does it mean ?

The Everything 2.0 discussion - the real issue

Process problems and one answer from thingamy

Process flexibility

People versus Process

On Process, Technology and Work Design

Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity

Microsoft is losing two high-profile executives. Both J. Allard, "Chief Experience Offer" and Entertainment and Device Division's CTO, and Robbie Bach, President of Entertainment and Devices Division, are leaving the company per a Steve Ballmer email from this morning. These are the guys behind the Xbox, Zune, Project Natal, and the dead Courier project -- so basically all of Microsoft's hit entertainment projects from the last decade.

From: Steve Ballmer Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2010 11:01 AM To: Microsoft - All Employees (QBDG) Subject: Executive Leadership Transitions After almost 22 years with the company, Robbie Bach has decided to retire from Microsoft. I have worked with Robbie during his entire tenure at Microsoft, and count him as both a friend and a great business partner and leader. Robbie has always had great timing, and is going out on a high note - this has been a phenomenal year for E&D overall, and with the coming launches of both Windows Phone 7 and "Project Natal," the rest of the year looks stupendous as well. While we are announcing Robbie's retirement today, he will remain here through the fall, ensuring we have a smooth transition.

Google PAC-MAN Cost 4.8M Person-Hours — The folks at Rescue-Time, who make software that helps you (and companies) figure out how you spend your online time, did a modest calculation based on their user base and concluded that Google's playable PAC-MAN doodle cost the world over 4.8 million person-hours of productivity last Friday. "Google PAC-MAN consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6M daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr. (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate). For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time." Also, Google made the doodle permanent.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, we wrote about how Lady Gaga had leveraged free music as a huge part of building up her popularity, and turned that into money via sellout tours and corporate sponsorship. However, most of that article focused on "legal" free music -- such as the songs her label had put up on MySpace and YouTube and elsewhere. But what about the unauthorized kinds? Well, in a wide-ranging (and really quite fascinating) interview that Lady Gaga did with the Times Online in the UK (check it out before they put up the paywall), Lady Gaga admits she's fine with people downloading her music in unauthorized forms because she makes it up in touring revenue:

She explains she doesn't mind about people downloading her music for free, "because you know how much you can earn off touring, right? Big artists can make anywhere from $40 million [£28 million] for one cycle of two years' touring. Giant artists make upwards of $100 million. Make music -- then tour. It's just the way it is today."

Similarly, she knocks bands that don't really try to work hard to please the fans, and who just expect them to automatically buy each album:

"I hate big acts that just throw an album out against the wall, like 'BUY IT! F*** YOU!' It's mean to fans. You should go out and tour it to your fans in India, Japan, the UK. I don't believe in how the music industry is today. I believe in how it was in 1982."

Like Mariah Carey, it looks like Lady Gaga has realized that this concept of Connect with Fans and giving them a Reason to Buy works at the superstar level just as much as it does down at the indie artist level. The specifics of implementing a business model around the concept are very, very different -- but the core concept remains the same. Treat your fans right, learn to leverage what's infinite to make something scare more valuable, and then sell the scarcity.

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MLB Planning A Check-in Application For Baseball Games —

MLBAM, the company behind MLB.TV, plans to launch a new social, mobile application that utilizes Foursquare-like check-in functionality, CEO Bob Bowman announced at SAI's Startup 2010 conference today.

Users who use the app to check-in at baseball stadiums will get access to exclusive content – including a replay of that "bang bang play at second base," said Bowman.

We're excited about this because currently, MLB doesn't allow teams to show controversial replays on their jumbotrons.

The app will also allow users to communicate with other users in the stadium. Imagine a version of Twitter used only by people at the stadium.

The new app is supposed to launch on July 13, during Major League Baseball's all-star break.

See What's Happening At Startup 2010: PHOTOS >>

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• New Proof That Expensive iPhone Apps Can Sell Like Crazy
• Major League Baseball Just Solved Pandora's iPhone Background Streaming Problem*
• Facebook's New Mobile Boss Has Been Power-Testing Foursquare

About a year ago, Facebook suffered a tremendous consumer backlash over its changes to the Terms of Service. To quell the uproar, Facebook introduced a set of Principles. Through a "Facebook site governance" vote, users voted on whether these Principles should serve as the foundation for governing the site." At the time, the company trumpeted the success of the vote, by which about 75% of voters selected the new Facebook Principles: "We strongly believe that our proposed documents satisfied the concerns raised in February." As Facebook explains, the Principles are "the foundation of the rights and responsibilities of those within the Facebook Service." A year later, the foundation is cracking.

Now Facebook flatly contradicts its own stated Principles. The contradictions are clearly shown in Facebook's widely panned ([1][2][3][4][5]) response to New York Times readers' questions on the social network's brave new privacy practices. A reader asked Elliot Schrage, Facebook's vice president for public policy, the key question: "Why can’t I control my own information anymore?"

The answer should have been easy. Facebook's Principles declare:

People should have the freedom to decide with whom they will share their information, and to set privacy controls to protect those choices.

Instead of saying "Sorry, we'll fix it," Facebook's response was dismissive. The company said that "Joining Facebook is a conscious choice" and more bluntly, "If you’re not comfortable sharing, don’t." It's Facebook's way or the highway. Schrage lists the information that Facebook requires to be public information, focusing on how people choose to submit this information and make connections instead of Facebook's choice to remove privacy controls.

Another reader asked "Why not simply set everything up for opt-in rather than opt-out?" Facebook's answer was a strange exercise in Newspeak - "Everything is opt-in on Facebook. Participating in the service is a choice." In Facebook's view, simply by signing up for the Facebook service, one has opted in to whatever sharing it later desires — even if you are one of the over 300 million users who joined before the switch to "public information" without privacy controls. Facebook is going to share the information it deems public, and you're supposed to Like it.

This is not the freedom of choice that Facebook's previously vaunted Principles declare. The "foundation for governing" Facebook does not speak of control as the choice whether to share information, but with whom. Facebook's promises speak of protecting users with privacy controls, not withholding the information.

Facebook's Principles also declare that "Every Person should be able to use the Facebook Service regardless of his or her level of participation or contribution." Now Facebook suggests that the users who aren't willing to play ball must leave.

Of course, as Facebook explains in response to another question, if you decide to leave by deactivating your account, information is saved in case you decide to reactivate later. Even if you delete your Facebook account, you have to wait 14 days and even then Messages and Wall posts remain. The Facebook Principles are much clearer: Users have the right to "take [their data] with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service." Again Facebook is not living up to its promises.

These promises are important. These are the reassurances that helped people decide whether to trust Facebook with their information. They should not be discarded lightly, with glib quips like "Please don’t share if you’re not comfortable." If Facebook truly believes that its users "should have the freedom to share whatever information they want," it must enable that sharing by making people comfortable.

Facebook wrote these Principles and designed them to not only reassure its users, but to give itself wiggle room for the future. It is a carefully drafted document, and Facebook has no excuse not to live up to the minimum standards it set out for itself. If Facebook wants to regain the trust of its users, following its own principles would be a good place to start.

Show and Tell : Proof of Concept or Suggestion! —

Previously I posted on the ability for the bottom-up use of free-hosted tools as a way to bypass the usual channels to try something out…basically you don’t need permissions…this may sound anarchistic, but it’s simply true…people may not pay attention to their rogue behaviour for long, all they see is that they are able to work more productively. All companies can do is monitor and observe, and then shut-down or harness.

When you think of it this is a basic principle of emergent systems. The top are open to allow a pot to boil to see what percolates, emergence arises (not all ideas and strategies have to come from the top), and they can then make decisions based on the outcome.

Anyway, in the next post I talked about this type of experimentation and compared it to pilots, in the realm of enterprise 2.0 implementations.

NOTE: I used the term "enterprise 2.0" because more people will pick up that post and read it, but more accurately I mean introducing social platforms and the adoptions of these into the enterprise. Enterprise 2.0 is a state we one day may reach that will transform the structure (hierarchy blended with networks), operations (from competition to cooperation/collaboration), and the way organisations are managed, as described above (complexity eg.the Cynefin framework).

In this post I want to talk about the benefits of experimentation or "Proof of Concept", over a suggestion.

I facilitate many Communities of Practice (CoPs), and I do this by facilitating the facilitators.

Another thing I do is react to things I see around me, and imagine how they can be re-purposed using community tools. I contact the person to make the suggestion, but I’m finding the "suggestion" is not enough…Proof of Concept" speaks louder than words.

Eg. IT send out an email newsletter on Tips and Tricks

• some sections are excerpts and link to a PDF to read more.
• I suggested that each section in the newsletter could be a blog post (more timely, feedback)
• this way the newsletter becomes a digest of the blog posts over the last month, that is presented in newsletter style

In another example I put together a presentation on some recommendations on how social tools can continue the conversation after an event, and how the presenters could have blogged their monthly happenings and roadmaps in a blog as a pre-cursor to the presentation…but it’s still not enough.

Even if they agree, they might not be savvy enough, allow time, or find it hard passing it by their boss.

The new approach is, "Proof of Concept". Just seed it, get it started and then let them take over…you get the ball rolling, rather than talking about a ball rolling. Momentum is king here.

Feeling it, rather than hearing it, has more impact…people just need a little push or offering to get started.

BUT, when you oversee lots and lots of CoPs it’s hard to find time to go further than a suggestion. You need to be able to build a network of volunteer activists to help you out. Sometimes this happens in a self-organised way…some of our CoPs have success in using social tools for a particular use or process, and when these facilitators are in conversation with others they naturally share the success in the way they have done things…this in essence is the viral effect.

Show and Tell

I have lots on my plate at the moment, but my priority is going to become CoPs-in-Action.

What is this?

I have been collecting lots of use cases that have emerged by various CoPs…people are using blogs, forums and wikis in ways I didn’t think would happen. Lots of these are both Above-the-Flow and In-the-Flow, but what I really want to hone in on are the In-the-Flow cases. People are also using CoPs in the way you would imagine like troubleshooting, calls for help, announcements, looking for stuff, sharing stuff, etc…

I’ve already posted about the emergence of different types of CoPs, in this post I’m now talking about the types of activities that have emerged in these CoPs.

At work I’m going to run workshops demonstrating the business value of social tools that goes beyond sharing and learning…these type of use cases are more tangible as they demonstrate what’s already being done only doing it a better way eg. broadcast team announcements, creating lists, discussing and coordinating a task. And showing examples of what people are doing. eg. A project control team using a wiki for answers to common questions, BU’s using wikis as an onboarding tool, the L&D team using blogs, forums and wikis to do a task like a global e-learning initiative (and the actual end product is a wiki), the L&D team using a forum as a place to ask questions after the presentation is over, etc.

…these initiatives didn’t come from top-down, they were grassroots things started by passionate people in those teams…now we have the ideas and have the enabling tools do the execution…no more waiting, as you are empowered.

You may be happy with how social tools spread your idea, or how the tools themselves built the idea…if not at least you built a Proof of Concept, which is more tangible than hearing a pitch…management may like it and throw some resources at it.

These workshops that will demonstrate what others in the company are doing are a Show and Tell exercise..and the intention is a viral effect.

Show and Tell is good as it demonstrates business value and use cases for others to learn from each other. To help the viral effect, or parallel push along side it, exercises like Blog and Wiki Raids are a good way to workshop with a team on an actual use case by using the tool in the workshop. Then when they go back to their seats they have first hand experience, and may continue using the tool.

Sometimes it’s hard to explain the benefits and use of a new tool, it’s better if people "feel" it…it speaks for itself, it has more impact. But it’s just hard to make time to sit with each group, so you may need to find a network of volunteer activists. Ultimately we hope for the viral effect to become so embedded that it becomes part of the culture.

Peer influence

Just the way Proof of Concept and pilots are similar, so is peer influence and the viral effect.

I have talked to managers about CoPs and collaboration and they really see the benefits and intend to use them. But they go back to their seats and don’t have time to experiment.

Yet if they see the benefits that a peer is getting out of them, or a peer recommends the tools saying there is some ground work, but then in the end they are better for it…then they more likely will give it a try.

Training, and presentations only go so far. You are more influenced by people in your peer group, people you trust..these are conditions for a viral effect.

Conclusion

Instead of waiting for what you want or instead of making a suggestion, use grassroots tools to DIY, or as a Proof of Concept. Some of these applications can be as innocent as complementing a newsletter with a blog, or using a forum for discussions after the presentation is over. And some, like perhaps using wikis to onboard BU’s, could be seen as a control and authoritative issue from a management point of view. But from an autonomous point of view your concept may have fans, and you can’t fight the crowd, or something that is viable and has increased productivity…this can be seen as disintermediation, rogue behaviour…or it can be seen as engagement, innovation…a change from extreme management to leadership blended with management.

destinyland writes "MIT researchers have developed a method of splitting a water molecule by emulating the way blue-green algae separates oxygen from hydrogen. One chemistry professor called it 'an extremely clever piece of work' that addresses 'the nanoscale organization of the components.' Using sunlight rather than electricity to make hydrogen from water could greatly improve the efficiency of the process. The hydrogen can be stored for generating electricity or burned as fuel for cars. The project is being led by the winner of a 2004 MacArthur Foundation genius grant, who uses genetically engineered viruses as templates for nanoscale electronic components. 'Suddenly, I wondered, what if we could assemble materials like the abalone does — but not be limited to one element?'" Here is the press release from MIT; the research paper is available only to subscribers of Nature Nanotechnology (or those willing to part with $18).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Metalink is an XML format for describing downloads. Publishers pack information about a download into a Metalink XML file, such as mirrors and checksums, to overcome many common download problems like a server going down or file corruption. Other useful information can be included as well.

Metalink/HTTP, or mirrors & hashes in HTTP Headers, is another way currently being developed to improve the download situation. It relies on Web Linking (recently approved for RFC publication as a proposed standard) for mirrors and Instance Digests (RFC 3230) for cryptographic hashes.

The nice thing is that it relies on existing standards (using a newly proposed “duplicate” relation type) with the addition of FTP HASH – a way to request the hash of a file over FTP.

Metalink/HTTP can use Metalink/XML too, for certain features like partial file hashes that would be too verbose over HTTP headers. At this stage, Metalink/HTTP only has a few implementations, but existing Metalink/XML clients can be converted to support it quickly.

Metalink/HTTP clients begin a download with a standard HTTP GET request to the Metalink server. Alternatively, they can use a HEAD request to the Metalink server to discover mirrors via Link headers. After that, the client follows with a GET request to the desired mirrors.

> GET /distribution/example.ext HTTP/1.1
> Host: www.example.com

The Metalink server responds with the data and these headers:

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Accept-Ranges: bytes
< Content-Length: 14867603
< Content-Type: application/x-cd-image
< Etag: "thvDyvhfIqlvFe+A9MYgxAfm1q5="
< Link: <http://www2.example.com/example.ext>; rel="duplicate" pref=1
< Link: <ftp://ftp.example.com/example.ext>; rel="duplicate"
< Link: <http://example.com/example.ext.torrent>; rel="describedby"; type="application/x-bittorrent"
< Link: <http://example.com/example.ext.metalink>; rel="describedby"; type="application/metalink4+xml"
< Link: <http://example.com/example.ext.asc>; rel="describedby"; type="application/pgp-signature"
< Digest: SHA-256=MWVkMWQxYTRiMzk5MDQ0MzI3NGU5NDEyZTk5OWY1ZGFmNzgyZTJlODYzYjRjYzFhOTlmNTQwYzI2M2QwM2U2MQ==

From the Metalink server response the client learns some or all of the following metadata about the requested object, in addition to also starting to receive the object:

• File size.
• ETag.
• Mirror profile link, which may describe the mirror’s priority, whether it shares the ETag policy of the originating Metalink server, geographical location, and mirror depth.
• Peer-to-peer information.
• Metalink/XML, which can include partial file checksums to repair a file.
• Digital signature.
• Instance Digest, which is the whole file checksum.

A client request to a mirror server, using the Range header:

> GET /example.ext HTTP/1.1
> Host: www2.example.com
> Range: bytes=7433802-
> If-Match: "thvDyvhfIqlvFe+A9MYgxAfm1q5="
> Referer: http://www.example.com/distribution/example.ext

The mirror servers respond with a 206 Partial Content HTTP status code and appropriate “Content-Length” and “Content Range” header fields.  The mirror server response, with data, to the above request:

< HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content
< Accept-Ranges: bytes
< Content-Length: 7433801
< Content-Range: bytes 7433802-14867602/14867603
< Etag: "thvDyvhfIqlvFe+A9MYgxAfm1q5="
< Digest: SHA-256=MWVkMWQxYTRiMzk5MDQ0MzI3NGU5NDEyZTk5OWY1ZGFmNzgyZTJlODYzYjRjYzFhOTlmNTQwYzI2M2QwM2U2MQ==

Partial file checksums are especially useful for large files. HTTP mirrors can be coordinated, meaning they share the same ETag policy which allows for early detection of file mismatches.

One of the nice things about Metalink/HTTP is that there is no dependency on XML, unless you want partial file hashes. Drawbacks include requiring changes to server software, where the XML version can even be created by users and requires no server side changes.

Metalink/HTTP is also bound to HTTP, where FTP or P2P clients won’t be using it unless they also support HTTP, unlike Metalink/XML.

We’ve been working on Metalink/HTTP for about 7 months and it’s still experimental, so if you have any ideas or comments then help us make it better.

Google’s Android OS surpassed Apple in US smartphone market share during the first quarter of 2010. According to the NPD Group, Google now enjoys 28 percent of the smartphone market, earning the company the second-place spot behind Research in Motion (36 percent) and pushing Apple to third place (21 percent). 

NPD credits Android’s success to strong carrier promotions, such as Verizon’s buy-one-get-one-free offer on RIM and Android OS devices. Still, the only company to offer Apple’s iPhone (AT&T) remained on top of the smartphone market with 32 percent share. Verizon was close behind with 30 percent, while T-Mobile and Sprint both ended the quarter hovering near the 15 percent mark.

It's possible that Apple will retake second place with the release of the next-generation iPhone this summer, but in the long run, Apple may always trail in terms of market share. Under Steve Jobs, Apple has not been willing to license its OS out to third parties, and that's the exact strategy that Google has used with Android to vault it to the top spot. On top of that, Apple currently limits the iPhone to one carrier while Android devices are carried by several different providers. Both of these elements help Google push a high volume of devices. Even when Apple finally moves to a multiple carrier model, Android will continue to be available on a wide variety of phones at a wide variety of price points, while iPhone OS will only be on a select number. 

The day is coming when all mobile phones will be “smart," and the majority of them will be running something besides the iPhone OS. Historically, being number one hasn't been a high priority for Apple (until the success of the iPod, Apple seldom enjoyed that position). The world of high margin, niche products is where Apple likes to live, and the fact that Apple is currently number three probably doesn’t bother Jobs all that much.

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On the day Facebook introduced "instant personalization," I updated my status to this:

Facebook has sneakily rolled out a terrible "feature" to give your data to 3rd party websites, and GUESS WHAT, they opted you in without asking you. Go to Account --> Privacy Settings --> Applications and Websites & disable "Instant Personalization." Tell your friends.

The "tell your friends" part was entirely intentional — I was trying to get it to go viral. I had two goals for doing so: one, I wanted to express my frustration at Facebook's actions by inflicting a non-trivial amount of damage to them (in terms of getting users to opt out), and second, I wanted to see if it was really true that most people just didn't care about privacy any more.

Searching for public statuses a few days later revealed a hundred or so that originated from mine, including the inevitable mutations. Keep in mind that users whose statuses are public are much less likely to pass on a message about privacy, and so the true number of status messages is probably an order of magnitude higher. Assuming that each such user opted out of instant personalization themselves and also got a few of their friends to do so, that would mean that several thousand users opted out. Very gratifying, in terms of either of the abovementioned goals.

The interesting thing about memes is that they almost always either die out quickly, or go viral to reach a significant fraction of the population. Those that reach some intermediate level of success, like mine did, are rare. This means that a tiny difference in the original wording could have caused it to collapse or to explode. (For the mathematically inclined, this is because it changes the "branching factor" of the meme.)

A meme, like a virus, has two components — the payload and the replication mechanism. The payload is the part of the meme that urges you to do something. The replication mechanism is the part that urges you to pass it on. As you can imagine, changes in the wording of the latter have a particularly huge effect on the branching factor.

For example, it is entirely possible that if I'd ended my message with "Tell your friends!" instead of "Tell your friends.", it would have spread to ten times as many users. This mystifying power that tiny strings of text have over masses of intelligent human beings is what makes memes a fascinating object of study for researchers and a salivating prospect for marketers.

Even as I wrote my original message, I knew exactly how to word the replication mechanism to maximize impact, but I didn't because I felt it wouldn't be truthful. But someone else figured it out:

FB Privacy heads up! As of today, there is a new privacy setting called "Instant Personalization," which shares data with non-facebook websites, and is automatically set to "Allow. "Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Applications & Websites->Instant Personalization and UN-CHECK "Allow." Please copy and repost because if you 'un-check' this and your friends don't, your friends are still sharing info about you!

That meme got started the same day (around two weeks ago), and is still going strong, being reposted at the rate of once every minute or so, and that's just the public statuses, on a Saturday night! I'd estimate that tens of millions of users have seen that message.

Note the difference: while my meme appealed to people's altruism to get them to replicate it, this one appeals to their self-interest :-) "Repost this for your own good." It amuses me to think about whether users who copy-paste that are actually hoping to get every single one of their friends to opt out. Needless to say, it doesn't significantly affect you if your friends opt out or not (which I why I didn't feel comfortable using the more powerful wording.)

If there is a lesson in all of this, it is that if privacy advocates seek to have any real effect on user behavior, they need to stop pontificating and learn to craft a successful meme. Or more generally: go where the users are, word your messages in a way that appeals to users' concerns, and make it easy for users to follow them. Because the groups that benefit from users giving up their privacy have long mastered the art of creating killer memes.

Report: Apple 'clicking on all cylinders' —

A Barclays analyst leaves a meeting with top executives more bullish than ever

You wouldn't know it from Apple's (AAPL) share price — which at one point Friday morning was down another $21, having closed Thursday off nearly $10 (see here) — but there's nothing wrong with the company that some well-crafted Wall Street reform couldn't cure.

Analysts who pay attention to Apple's fundamentals have been issuing one positive note after another. On Wednesday we heard from Bernstein's Toni Sacconaghi, not always Apple's greatest fan, who estimates that the company's new iAd advertising platform could generate an additional $800 million in revenue for Apple in fiscal 2010 and another $1.6 billion in fiscal 2011.

And on Thursday Barclays Capital's Ben Reitzes weighed in with a glowing report based on a recent meeting in California with three of Apple's top brass. "In short," he concludes, "Apple seems to be clicking on all cylinders."

He reports that the executives he met with– COO Peter Oppenheimer, Apple Store czar Ron Johnson and Internet services VP Eddy Cue — were "very optimistic" about Apple's prospects. No surprise there.

But to his credit, Reitzes left the meeting with a notebook full of details about the company's operations, some of them fresh. Among his findings:

• More new products to come. We know — or we think we do — about the iPhone with the second camera for video chatting, which Reitzes expects to be unveiled June 7 at Apple annual developers conference. But the impression Reitzes got — without any supportive detail — is that Apple has more surprises coming down the pipeline.
• iPad supply problems. File this under the category of problems other companies wish they had. Demand for the new tablet computer is so strong that many Apple stores are sold out and Reitzes is hearing that recent orders are taking even longer to fulfill than the 5 to 7 days posted online.
• Cheaper iPhones. Sales of Apple's mobile phones could take off this summer if, as Reitzes believes, the company lowers prices for the iPhone 3GS to $99 (for the 8GB model) and $199 (16GB).
• Squeezed by the Euro. One sour note Reitzes strikes is the impact of the fall of the Euro against the dollar. That could hurt Apple's gross margins in fiscal Q3, already guided down to 36% from Q2's 41.7%. But, says Reitzes, "The impact of the Euro may only be worse than forecast by a little given Apple hedges its currency exposure 3-6 months out." In other words, not so bad after all.

See also:

• Apple bungee jumps to pre-iPad levels

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Filed under: Apple 2.0

Tim Bray on Android and Private APIs —

Shared by djacobs
So wrong!

Nice explanation from Tim Bray on Android programming APIs:

The Google-provided SMS app has its own database that it uses to stash away the SMS history, and it sets up its own Content Provider for its own internal use. It turns out that if you read the source code, you can figure out how to reach in and access that Content Provider. Which is probably a bad idea, because it’s part of an application that might not even be there.

I personally think the benefits of an Open Source platform exceed this sort of cost — when someone uses the source to figure out how to do something that really isn’t very smart.

There are several significant differences between Android and iPhone OS application APIs, but the biggest difference is one of policy. Every complex platform has APIs that third-party developers shouldn’t use. Android is like Mac OS X (or Windows, or other non-console-style systems) where developers can choose to use these private APIs, against the vendor’s advice, and take their chances. With the iPhone OS, Apple enforces a ban on their use via the App Store review process. That’s the difference.

previewed @adactio's "HTML5 for Web Designers" and highly recommend it. preorder @abookapart http://books.alistapart.com

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Stocks in the US were down 1,000 points earlier today. Initial reports blamed the plunge on fears over debt in Greece, but CNBC is now reporting that the dramatic drop may have been caused by user error. "According to multiple sources, a trader entered a b for billion instead of an m for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble, a component in the Dow." Hey, at least he didn't type g for gajillion.

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: June Cohen, "Ideas Worth Spreading: TED's Transition..." —