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May 30, 2005  An Open Letter to Adobe Systems Inc.

Good Training and Support is Critical

I know from experience how beneficial it is to work alongside the people who engineer, design and market the products that I use daily to perform my job. What's the best way to convert a color image to a sepia duotone? Should I use FrameMaker to write my thesis or InDesign? How do I draw Scotch tape in Photoshop? If you don't have access to these people, life is not easy. How can that be? There is a world of information available to someone interested in learning how to use Adobe software: a manual which you receive if you buy the product, user to user forums, conferences, magazines, trade organizations, books, videos, and millions of websites.

Well, the reason it is difficult to find answers to questions despite all the support out there is that without having someone you can ask who will immediately answer your question, you need to search. Google is great at searching the Internet, but it is not optimized for helping people get information about Adobe software. For example, the results are, for the most part, pure text. When you need to learn more about use Photoshop to make something look like a piece of Scotch tape, having some pictures along with the search results is more than just a convenience (note that I didn't say a snapshot of the website as some tools provide; I'm specifically talking about an image that illustrates the tutorial).

Improving the Existing Help and Support Systems

If Adobe were to build infrastructure to allow people to search for, annotate, and document tips and tricks, it would create a space that would far exceed the value derived from a printed manual.

This online infrastructure would allow for the following:

1. A Wikipedia-like model for collaborative content and content moderation

Taking Wikipedia as an example, we can see that a community edited and moderated forum for information is sustainable. In fact, there are many benefits to a model like this when applied to the problem of support and training for Adobe software. The first, is that it is completely unpredictable how people will use this software. Although certain features are designed with specific uses in mind, the combination of the features applied across a diverse set of tasks creates instances where people are doing things with the software that the original creators never envisioned. Thus having a collaborative system for documenting and extending this information becomes invaluable.

One of the fears about the Wikipedia model is that a group can be its own worst enemy, but the challenges there have been addressed by Wikipedia and other companies like Six Apart. It is difficult to disregard their success despite this challenge. In fact, it may be easier to focus on the upside: the Wikipediholics who can't stop adding information.

2. Profile pages for authors

One of the differences between support and tips for Adobe software versus an online encyclopedia is that with Adobe software who you are and what you do for a living has a significant impact on how you use and approach the products. Someone in forensics is going to use Photoshop differently than a web designer. For this reason having people as an organizational structure within the system becomes increasing valuable.

Now, as with any system that allows for people to become an organizational system it opens up the possibility for a type of network to be created, and from that a sense of popularity and credibility naturally grows out of the system, much like what EBay and Google use to make sense of their customers or the world wide web respectively.

An additional benefit is that existing experts in the domain of software instruction, like Lynda Weinman, have a forum to promote themselves and their services along side free content. The advantage they have to working within a system such as this is that it gives them more exposure, particularly since they have the ability to deliver richer content and the network of people who would rely on them is greater.

3. Search optimized for the task at hand

When searching the contents of this online space, people will need to see previews of images, video, audio and PDF files. A text-only result set won't work. People should be able to tag the pages, and the tags should act as a way to search, sort and filter through the content. People should be able to rate content and authors, and that data should also be incorporated in to the search criteria.

Adobe Studio's Exchange is already setting a good precedent for this and the design of that site can and should be leveraged.

In addition to search, an RSS-based system for syndicating updates will help people stay informed when new content that is potentially relevant to them is posted.

Costs and Revenue

This proposal to move Adobe help from static documents that are printed and bound to digital media, moderated by the Instructional Communications employees at Adobe and volunteers outside of Adobe will be a difficult transition. It will be expensive to develop and deploy. Since I am a shareholder of the company and want to make sure that while the company develops new areas it does not lose sight of costs and revenue, I would like to briefly touch on the financial advantages of using this system.

First and foremost, it should be understood that a system such as this will reflect a typical long tail curve. That is, there will be highly popular information that is more useful and more frequently accessed by orders of magnitude versus other information. Particularly if published authors and professional instructors begin to use the site as a forum to gain exposure and document their work, the success of their content will far exceed that of an individual in a remote area who uses only one of the products for an obscure task.

As such the financial model should be fairly easy to predict. There will be premium, copyrighted content that costs the consumer a fee to access. Adobe and the writer of the content will split the revenue. This will be the head of the long tail. And then there will be content that is free and protected under the Creative Commons License. There will be significantly more content of this nature than of the premium kind as this will cover obscure areas by people who may only write updates from time to time as a hobby. Revenue generation in this area can take the form of donations and opt-in advertisements that will be presented to the reader. Again, Adobe, the writer, and the consumer of the information can split the revenues generated.

While Adobe should not look to this system as a way to generate significant cash flow, having a strong case for a profitable revenue model is not something to overlook.

Adobe Systems was started in 1982 and has done a miraculous job of redefining itself over the years so that it is consistently relevant and inspiring. I believe a change to the help and support system such as what I've described can be a part of redefining the company yet again for an age in which we are increasingly connected and interconnected.

Posted by johnnie at 11:30 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 15, 2005  Subscriptions: The Third Wave

Original Post: 15 May 2005
Updated: 17 May 2005

What Jim Allchin wants you to know

Subscriptions. When most people hear the word, they think about paid subscriptions for mobile phone service, cable, magazines, newspapers and so on. There are also a host of annoying subscriptions, such as those spam-like newsletters that get mailed to me from Classmates.com, which I assume are a result of me not checking or unchecking something years ago when I first visited the site. But for many people today who are at the front of the web technology adoption curve, the word subscription has come to mean something more. It also includes the idea of subscribing to feeds that are published by blogs, news sites, photo sites and other websites that have content that changes regularly.

In an earlier post I wrote that: "in his recent interview, Jim Allchin, head of the Windows project at Microsoft, said that syndication and subscriptions represent the third big movement for getting information on the web (the first was hyperlinking and the second was search)."

I'd like to revisit this and write about it in more detail. If the person responsible for Windows says that something is important, it seems like it would be wise to pay attention. The last time they had a focus such as this seems to be when it was around the web browser.

I believe that this isn't just Allichin's personal opinion, but is actually more fundamental and is shaping the direction of Longhorn, the next release of the Windows operating system. Two facts make me believe that Allchin has something up his sleeve. The first is that the Wallop team, responsible for social computing research at Microsoft, was moved off of the Wallop project and on to Longhorn. The second is that in the WinHEC 2005 demo, they mentioned a feature called, simply, Lists that would allow you to syndicate using RSS a feed of files on your drive (the idea being that co-workers could subscribe to this feed). Clearly with months to go before Beta, and a launch date that is more than a year away, we should expect to see more in this area.

If subscriptions are this "third wave", we should not only expect Microsoft to go after it aggressively, but for the competition to get ready for a battle. The first wave was defined by Netspace. Back in 1995, the company had a blockbuster IPO and went head to head with Microsoft for many years to see who would dominate the way people access hyperlinked web content. The second wave was defined by Google. In 2004 Google had a similarly spectacular IPO, and has, in many ways, challenged Microsoft more aggressively than Netscape had in the late 1990's. Who is the Netscape and Google of the third wave? Only time will tell. Subscriptions today are where web search was in 1998. Remember AltaVista? Excite? Google was good back in 1998, but it wasn't something you would point at and say "This should be a $100B company in ten years."

There is one company that stands apart from the rest... that seems to have learned the lessons from the previous generations. That company is FeedBurner.

FeedBurner

FeedBurner describes their service as: "an RSS/Atom post-processing service that allows publishers to enhance their feeds in a variety of interesting and powerful ways. By republishing their feeds through FeedBurner, publishers gain detailed feed statistics, maximum feed format compatibility, 'shockproofing' to absorb bandwidth spikes, and more."

Basically, that means that if you publish a feed, as almost every website will in the upcoming years, you can have FeedBurner do all the grunt work for you: compatibility, statistics, and other services. FeedBurner currently does this for free for lightweight websites. Bloggers have already started to use it, and recommend it.

As such, FeedBurner has positioned itself squarely in the same space that Google and Netscape had: the moderator between the publisher and the consumer.

In an interview with FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo, he noted that: "If RSS popularity continues to increase, and it becomes less and less a vehicle for driving site traffic but more and more its own content-viewing medium, that presents an interesting situation to publishers."

FeedBurner is positioning itself strategically to do all the things that were great about Netspace and Google: making it the way you want to access web content. We'll see what happens.

Update

After I wrote this post, Om Malik broke news that Newsgator is buying Bradbury Software, the makers of Feed Demon.

Nick Bradbury explained why he wanted to join Newsgator: "the biggest request - by far - that FeedDemon customers have had is the ability to synchronize their subscriptions between multiple computers." And Newsgator now gets a Windows RSS reader client application.

What does this have to do with FeedBurner? Well, as I originally stated, the subscription market is heating up, and I believe FeedBurner is well positioned to capitalize on it. The consolidation is only beginning.

Dave Winer wrote: "the motivation was to allow FeedDemon to tie into the subscription-sharing network Newsgator is building. It seems inevitable that they'll buy a Mac news reader product, they would probably like to buy NetNewsWire, and it would be hard to imagine Brent wouldn't take a reasonable offer (I have no inside knowledge). This is venture capital at work, not sales revenue. I imagine that Newsgator will roll up with Feedburner (they share an investor), and Technorati may become part of this deal too. The goal? Get large enough to go public or merge with something going public (SixApart) or get bought by Microsoft."

Dave Winer, as usual, is circling around the right ideas, but I don't entirely agree with him. In fact, I think Fred Wilson and Brad Feld have a better perspective:

Fred Wilson of Union Square Venture Partners noted, "It appears that Brad's (referring to Brad Feld) convinced the team at Newsgator to do a venture rollup. Its a smart play because the big guys have figured out how important RSS is and are coming after the early entrants."

Brad Feld of Mobius Ventures responded by saying: "I’ve seen a couple of posts speculating that Feedburner and Technorati are next in line to be acquired by NewsGator since they share an investor (me). While Feedburner, Technorati, and NewsGator are all complimentary and are discussing a variety of ways to work together, I think it would be a dumb idea to combine these companies. As an investor, I’ve placed my bets on three companies that are the current leader in each of their segments (Aggregator: NewsGator; Feed Management: Feedburner; Search: Technorati). You can argue about how you define the specific segments, but these are mine (the one I missed that I wish I had an investment in is the CMS segment.) I’d much rather try to create three separate platform companies that are complimentary then jam them together into one big mess and fight the battle on three fronts."

This is a critical component that Dave Winer missed. Yes, consolidating anything and everything that has to do with subscriptions in to one company may sound reasonable, but as an investor it is wiser to allow elements to grow organically. There are also too many conflicts of interest and organizational problems with mega-mergers that are easily avoided by having separate, but collaborative, entities.

Jeff Clavier, another venture capitalist, agrees with me: "Anybody checking (FeedBurner) RSS referrer logs sees that there is a page long list of aggregators out there, in a very fragmented market... Dave [Winer] predicts the acquisition of a Mac aggregator, like NetNewsWire - which would make sense, especially given the popularity of the product (based on my stats). However, like Tony, I am not really following on FeedBurner or even Technorati. Both for cap table/deal/integration/execution issues (even if these companies have both DFJ and Mobius as investors), as for 'impedance mismatch' from a product/commercial standpoint. Brad Feld actually dismissed the concept of piling up these three cos as 'a dumb idea' in his post regarding the acquisition."

The references to Dave Winer and Brad Feld are those I've already included above. As for Jeff's reference to Tony, here is what Tony Gentile had to say: "FeedBurner could certainly join the growing Newsgator empire, but that would be tying up with the wrong end of the micro-content stack. A more logical move would be backward integration with a publishing platform, or forward integration with a marketplace owner; of course Dave doesn't care for ads in Feeds, so if you're a fan of his, chalk his comment up to a clever, low-key dig. ;-) Regardless, unlike other components, FeedBurner is best served by achieving escape velocity as a standalone player providing a network service ala the collapsing Overture model of old."

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is Microsoft's own plans to build syndication and subscription tools. Would they need to buy Newsgator? I doubt it. My bet is that Microsoft will roll their own solution as part of Longhorn and the version of Office that follows. This is why I still have my money (figuratively) on FeedBurner. They can be, potentially, much harder to shake.

Posted by johnnie at 11:57 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 11, 2005  Ajax: 99% Bad

What is Ajax?

Ajax was coined by Mr Garrett of Adaptive Path in his essay Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. This was on February 18, 2005, and even though it's only been under three months, the term has spread quickly.

Before defining Ajax in detail, Mr Garret described two examples: "Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web."

So as not to be left without specifics, Mr Garrett goes on to describe the components of Ajax in detail: "standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS; dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model; data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT; asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest; and JavaScript binding everything together." It's certainly a mouthful, which is why having a nice, friendly name like Ajax is so helpful. So what's the problem?

99% Bad?

In part, I'm being facetious. The title of this post is an allusion to Jakob Nielsen's famous post from October 29, 2000 called Flash: 99% Bad. In the article, Mr Nielsen says: "Although multimedia has its role on the Web, current Flash technology tends to discourage usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks with the Web's fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site's core value."

I love Flash, so when I originally read his article, I thought he was off-base. That said, I did see where his resentment came from. Flash was a great tool, but in the wrong hands it was making a mess of otherwise reasonable websites. Interestingly, the three complaints Mr Nielsen had about Flash are directly applicable to Ajax. Because the data is delivered without a reloading of the page, the URL is not descriptive of the contents on the page. This was one of the biggest complaints about all-Flash websites.

Popularizing the use of Ajax also has the problems of popularizing Flash. Although Flash is well-suited for behavioral and programmatic animations, many unscrupulous designers would simply use it to present a canned introduction to the site, along with the perennially despised "Skip Intro" link. Likewise, JavaScript presents the unscrupulous designer with a similar metaphorical rope with which to hang himself.

Take, for example, the design of the Designing User Experience (DUX) 2005 website. It's a nice looking site, as one would expect from a conference of user experience design, yet clicking on the links reveals a deeper problem. The content is replaced using JavaScript, and thus the URL of the page remains fixed even as the content changes. This prevents someone from bookmarking or sending a link to a certain piece of content to someone else. The people of Zago Design have ingeniously replicated the same poor design from their own website here for the DUX conference.

All these issues are not inherent to using JavaScript, nor are they inherent to using a full Ajax approach. Indeed, the DUX 2005 website is not written using XMLHttpRequest at all, even though it does rely on XHTML+CSS, DOM, and JavaScript. Why then do I claim the Ajax is 99% bad?

The Rabbit Hole

In addition to the reason that popularizing Ajax is giving unscrupulous designers rope to hang themselves, there is one other fundamental point that erks me.

First, the two examples that Mr Garrett points to do not qualify as Ajax. Google Suggest doesn't use XML/XSLT for data interchange and manipulation. It uses JavaScript arrays. Why did Mr Gibbs choose JavaScript arrays over XML/XSLT? Because it's a better approach. Does Google Suggest use XHTML? No. Why not? None of the Google sites save Blogger rely on XHTML code. So for someone to point to Google Suggest as the canonical example of their newly coined term, when in fact it doesn't match two of the five criteria is not only incorrect, it's a misrepresentation.

Adaptive Path is looking to sell a service. Telling people "this is how we build things, which is almost like how Google does it, but they use a slightly different approach 20% of the time" is much more complex than saying "Google does Ajax, and so do we." Unfortunately, this is, at worst, a lie and, at best a stretch.

1% Good

What's really going on here? Well, despite my complaints, I do want to give Adaptive Path credit. They have started a dialog around these architectural issues, and that is a great thing. It's gotten a lot of people eager to try some of these techniques out.

37 Signals put it best when they said: "As with anything, it’s not the technology that matters, it’s the proper application and the execution of that technology that counts. And most of all it’s how well we hide the technology."

I believe this is part of the reason for Google's success. Instead of writing a paper on the five technologies you need to make a cool website, they hired Chris Wetherell and Aaron Boodman and got to work.

Part of me wishes the Adaptive Path article had simply stated: Google has been writing madd JavaScript, and we think that's cool.

Posted by johnnie at 12:04 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack

May 05, 2005  9rules Network

I'm now a member of the 9rules Network. What is it? It's a group of designers, bloggers and... people with websites... like me. How did I get in? I read 9rules regularly and I noticed a post on Whitespace that said they wanted to grow the network and were accepting submissions for sites for a limited time.

Some people currently in the 9rules Network include:

The man behind this whole operation: Mr Paul Scrivens of CSS Vault and other operations; a wine site Corkforce.com; nerdery sites like Forever Geek, Insert 25 and The UberGeeks; artist/Designer Erik Sagen; designer Mark Boulton; students like Mike Rundle; marketers like James Archer of Forty Media and their site The Return of Design; and of course the design site Whitespace.

What do I hope to get out of this? I don't know. It just felt right to me. I believe the internet is a social platform and this was a good opportunity to be... social.

Posted by johnnie at 01:56 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 02, 2005  The Syndication Mess

In general, I try to keep expletives out of my posts, but this one will be an exception. Tempers have run high. You've been warned.

Recent news about Google's new test feature to place ads in RSS feeds have caused a bit of a backlash.

Dave Winer commented: "... It wasn't just that they had failed to recognize RSS, they also tried to delete it. You know the mutant solidiers [sic] in Lord of the Rings, the ones the Fellowship keeps killing? That's Google. They do everything mean and evil, and in the end we'll kick their asses back to Podunk. Seems Silicon Valley can't resist fucking with a good thing. They won, they had us, and then they insist on taking the low road when taking the high one would cost them nothing. Fuckers."

These are strong words. Who's Dave Winer, what's RSS, what has Google done wrong, and what's the solution to this problem?

Who's Dave Winer? What's RSS?

What is RSS? It's a syndication format. It's a way to get web content. For example, the posts on my website are syndicated using RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom. If you use Bloglines, Firefox, Safari RSS or other software that reads RSS or Atom feeds, you can subscribe to my feed, and when new information is available it will show up automatically.

Syndication is relatively new, so many people haven't taken advantage of it (there's no support for it in Internet Explorer which is what most people use to browse the web) but it's catching on. In fact, in his recent interview, Jim Allchin, head of the Windows project at Microsoft, said that syndication and subscriptions represent the third big movement for getting information on the web (the first was hyperlinking and the second was search).

The thing with RSS, though, is that it's not a single format. It is an umbrella term that describes seven different formats. The original (RSS 0.90) was developed at Netscape. It was dropped in favor of an updated format, 0.91, but that too was sadly dropped by Netscape. Dave Winer (here's where he comes in) picked up 0.91 and built a company called UserLand around the idea of RSS. Although a separate group picked up RSS 0.90 and updated it to RSS 1.0, Dave Winer and company used the 0.91 branch and moved it to RSS 2.0. Whew...

Google has had a rocky history with syndicating web content. Instead of going with RSS, it chose to use Atom for its popular Blogger blogging software. What's Atom? Well, Atom is a parallel format to RSS. Google and IBM weren't satisfied with any of the seven versions of RSS, nor the control Dave Winer and company had over the development and future directions of RSS 2.0. So they made a competing format.

Now you know why Dave Winer is so pissed off.

Yet, he seems to be one of the most sensible people in this entire fiasco. He recently proposed a merger with the newer Atom standard, insisting "it's time to bury the hatchet and move on."

What has Google done wrong?

Fragmenting the syndication space by introducing a new format ruffled some feathers, but people will survive. Photoshop can read and write dozens of competing image formats and, quite frankly, no one's life is ruined because there is no single image format that everyone must agree to use. So Dave Winer needs to just get over it.

Chris Pirillo puts it more bluntly: "Atom. RSS. Implement either one you want, or both. Aggregate either one you want, or both. Just STFU already so we can get on with more important things - like getting people to understand the simple power of desktop syndication. Or, ya know... keep trying to prove to the world which side has the bigger (collective) dick."

The recent issue with Google is that they have started allowing people to stick ads in RSS feeds. Doesn't sound like a big deal, right? As Brad Feld noted, "This has been long anticipated, is a completely logical extension of Google AdSense, and - while some people may fight ads in RSS – it’s an inevitable part of the RSS ecosystem. "

Particularly for Google, a company who bases 96% of revenue off of advertising and generates revenues from advertising that will eventually surpass that of primetime television, choosing to not stick ads in front of people would be newsworthy.

Although it hasn't been stated this way yet, I believe this is more about the way the ads are included than it is about the ads themselves. When Google initially placed ads along side of web searches it did so in a way that at the time was revolutionary: they were simple text-only ads, discretely placed on the other side of the page away from the data you were looking at (the search results). The point was to keep them subtle and separate. It was a homerun. People were tired of "shoot the monkey"-style, ugly, Flash-animation-banner-ad advertising. It was annoying, childish and needed to be eradicated. Thankfully Google was there to save us. Now they've given up, too. Pathetic.

What kind of example is this for the Feedsters and the Feedburners of the world? Are they going to copy Google with fugly banner-ad style RSS ads of their own?

Especially for RSS, which is based on XML and tries to separate the presentation from the data, this is unacceptable. We've even got Dave Winer going off the deep end, looking for hacks to yank the ads out. "Advertising in RSS is just starting now, for all practical purposes. If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could, by asking the people who create the software to add a feature that strips out all ads. Make it default to on. Then, that would force the advertisers, if they want to speak to us, to do so respectfully, by our choice. Create feeds of commercial information that we might be interested in, and if we are, we'll subscribe. If not, we won't."

How do we solve the problem?

Before she and I left her house, a girl I knew in high school told me she needed to put on some makeup. "You wear makeup?" I asked. "The right way to wear makeup is so that people can't tell you wear makeup," she told me.

Google needs to step back and realize that interruption marketing and in-your-face ugly banner-ad style attention-getters are so 1900s. The advertising of the future is so subtle, so elegant, so relevant, so contextual, that it's not advertising at all. It's informative.

Posted by johnnie at 12:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack