Martin Gordon's Blog

With 100,000 iPhone SDK downloads, the relative simplicity of the platform and the popularity of the iPhone, there's no doubt we'll be seeing tons of iPhone applications being released as soon as the App Store goes live. But will those apps be any good?

Brent Simmons, author of NetNewsWire, thinks we'll see a ton of to-do lists and Twitter clients. He's right: Apple has failed to provide a to-do list app for iPhone OS (or Mac OS X, for that matter) and people have complained about it since June 29, 2007. Twitter is also the love du jour of techies everywhere and an iPhone app would be much better than the web interface (look no further than Iconfactory's Twitterrific on the desktop for proof). I am personally working on an app that combines the two ;-)

Brent also thinks that the money is in the Cloud. He states that standalone iPhone apps are easy and cheap enough to write and too boring to use. The most interesting apps will be those that sync to the cloud. It's the development, maintenance and scaling of the server apps that will be expensive, and that's where he sees much of the iFund money going. Time to become an expert on NSURLConnection!

I can't help but agree. One app I'm working for will tie into a web app we've written internally - the API isn't currently there, but it will be. Blossom (as we call it) won't be the most revolutionary iPhone app out there, but it is a good testing ground for client-server iPhone apps. I've got ideas for other apps too, and the thing they have in common is that they all tie back into the Cloud. The 1st iPhone "SDK" (web apps) was far from perfect, but if it did anything, it helped developers focus their attention on where it should be - the Cloud.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPhone SDK, Apple, iPhone OS, Cloud, cloud computing, Cocoa Touch, development, Brent Simmons, NewsGator, NetNewsWire

Ars Technica has a great article today on Professor Lessig's potential run for Congress that I mentioned yesterday. The article does an excellent job of outlining Lessig's platform in far better detail than the one sentence I gave it. What's particularly interesting about his position is his desire to build a Creative Commons in Congress, where "[i]f politicians begin foreswearing PAC money, the theory runs, voters may come to see the failure to refuse lobbyist dollars as a badge of shame rather than simply the way things are done." This sounds like a very necessary change and requires the proverbial "Washington outsider" to really get going - Lessig is that outsider. Further, the article elaborates on the difference between Lessig and his greatest rival in the race, Jackie Speier. Lessig mentions that there aren't many differences, but that a focus on technology would give him an edge and that even though many prominent California Democrats have thrown their support behind Speier, the rush to consolidate support has frustrated voters who want more options. As I said yesterday, I can't wait to see how this plays out.

Technorati Tags: Larry Lessig, Lessig, Congress, Tom Lantos, Jackie Speier, Creative Commons, Free Culture, Change Congress, Draft Lessig

I wrote about Professor Larry Lessig's shift in focus from Free Culture to corruption in Washington when he gave his last Free Culture talk. Since then, a seat has opened up in Congress as a result of the death of California Congressman Tom Lantos. Lessig posted on his weblog earlier today that a Facebook group and the draftlessig08.org website have caused him to actually consider running.

I think Lessig has a great chance of winning thanks to support from the tech community. Having him in Congress would not only be excellent for his next project, but would also help along causes that current Congress members are either too tech illiterate or too influenced by money to really address the right way (one such cause being Net Neutrality).

There's no word on when he'll make a decision, but along with the rest of the tech community, I wait with bated breath.

Technorati Tags: Larry Lessig, Lessig, Congress, Tom Lantos, Free Culture, Change Congress, Draft Lessig

Yesterday I was meaning to write about Amazon's $300 million acquisition of Audible, a match made in heaven, but today comes news that Microsoft is offering $45 billion for Yahoo, which pretty much eclipses the relatively straightforward Amazon/Audible deal.

There were no shortage of rumors regarding a MSFT/YHOO merger/acquisition in 2007, but no formal proposal was actually ever made public and Yahoo came out and said that a deal didn't make sense on account of the potential upside of the restructuring and strategic initiatives set for 2007. As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer states, a year has passed and the competitive landscape still hasn't changed. Indeed, Project Panama has done little to improve Yahoo's situation in the advertising space and search seems to be in the place that it's been in a while - an ever more distant #2 to Google. Perhaps even more indicative of Yahoo's true status, however, was this week's announcement of plans to layoff 1,000 employees.

In the eyes of most consumers, both Microsoft and Yahoo provide second-rate products. In the operating system space, especially with the lukewarm reception Vista received, Microsoft only has their incumbency to stand on. In the internet space, MSN is to Yahoo what Yahoo is to Google, if that. Yahoo does have some great properties, but they aren't the cash cows that search and advertising are, and receive both media and internal attention according. The growth opportunities of the workhorse properties, however unglamorous, are still growth opportunities and still have yet to be harnessed and perhaps this deal is the only way that these properties will get attention.

The deal makes sense to me from a competitive perspective, but does it make sense internally? Can these two behemoths really merge operations and culture well enough to come out a stronger entity? Or will their internal focus distract them so much that Google will be able to distance itself even more from Microhoo? I don't know enough about the internals of Yahoo or Microsoft, but I know that the success of this merger will depend on a few factors, including the compatibility between the cultures and structures of both companies and the appropriate handling of redundant properties.

In the end, I look forward to this deal going through. I think it will revitalize both companies, which appear to have been operating at less-than-full capacity over the past few years. In this sense, although fewer competitors in a market tend to decrease competition in that market, I think we'll see the opposite here. Though there's a very subtle feeling out there that since both are so behind the competition, both Microsoft and Yahoo are about to, or should, give up. This acquisition will give the resulting entity a much better leg to stand on against the competition.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Microsoft, acquisition, M&A, competition, business, Microhoo

Larry Lessig will be giving his last talk on the topic of "Free Culture" in about an hour. I had the pleasure of seeing Professor Lessig give this talk in September of 2006 as part of the Penn Reading Project and I think the ideas he presents are fascinating and have had a great impact on me. We've come a long way in some areas, such as in the slow death of over-restrictive DRM, but we're still a ways to go in other areas, such as the predatory litigation undertaken by the music and movie industries. As the blog post announcing the talk mentions, Professor Lessig will begin focusing on corruption in Washington, a topic I'm admittedly less interested in.

Technorati Tags: Larry Lessig, copyright, creative commons, DRM, intellectual property, Free Culture

Stumbled across two great videos this morning. What a great way to start off the week!

Gabe and Max's Internet Thing

via Marc Andreessen, who also posted this gem about rogue trader Jerome Kerviel.

Google Maps Street View Extreme™

via Paul Robinson

The blogosphere just hates to love Facebook. It took almost three years after it's launch for people like Mr. 5000 to notice it, (although in all fairness only a year after it became open to the public) and now the second something newer and shinier comes along people to start proclaiming that Facebook is dead.

Guess what? The 99% of Facebook users who don't care that Facebook is closed as long as it's not exclusive won't switch away; I also doubt that the 1% who do care won't switch either. App developers won't suddenly leave Facebook because OpenSocial is more widely supported; at best, an OpenSocial (curiously OS for short) app will supplement an existing Facebook app. Apps follow users and the users are still (and still will be) on Facebook.

Users may be fickle in their taste, but so many of them have invested too much of themselves in Facebook (by way of routine, photos, videos, wall posts and other content) to go running for the doors even if something tremendously better came along. The lag between the introduction of a better alternative and the abandonment of the old is long enough that Facebook will have time to react; just look how long AOL stuck around despite much better alternatives in both content and connectivity. Facebook's lock-in, while fragile, is in no way as big a disadvantage as everyone makes it out to be.

If OpenSocial does take off, Facebook can adopt it without much hassle and we're pretty much back to where we are now. If it doesn't take off, then it's probably because of Facebook and Zuckerberg and the gang have nothing to worry about.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, OpenSocial, Google, blogosphere, Facebook app, social networks

Paul Stamatiou on his thoughts on the state of the blogosphere:

The larger tech sites/blogs have “turned to crap” to quote an older friend in the field. Everyone’s got an agenda and a quota to fulfill; there aren’t too many “free spirits” when it comes to tech writing, which is why sites like John Gruber’s Daring Fireball receive so much acclaim.

His thoughts pretty much echo mine, and though I've mentioned in passing how much I hate the larger tech sites, this quote does a great job of summing up what I've been meaning to explicitly say for a while. The scale has been tipping to quantity over quality for a while now and shows no signs of stopping.

Some sample stats: Google Reader says that Engadget has averaged 40 posts/day. When I started the media fast experiment, all my feeds were read. It's been a week since that started and that amounts to roughly 280 posts. The current Engadget unread count is 272. That I've found 3% of those posts worthy of my attention is telling. In contrast, Daring Fireball averages 10 posts per day and I've read all of them without hesitation.

The "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" approach was fine when I didn't realize how much time was wasting looking at things I wasn't reading nor cared to read. Now things have changed. The large tech blogs have gone the way of mainstream media in their attempt to increase eyeballs. I am avid fan of a handful of TV shows, but you'll never find me sitting on the couch channel flipping; the chances I'll find something worthy of watching are so slim it's not even worth it. The quantity over quality approach doesn't work on me for mainstream media and I've come to realize it isn't going to work in the blogosphere either.

Technorati Tags: blogosphere, traffic, mainstream media, blogs, Google Reader

Scott Gilbertson of Wired writes on how the iPhone is breeding the next generation of IE4-only web sites in the context of iPhone-optimized sites:

In suggesting that developers use the web to build iPhone applications, what Apple has done (perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not) is force the creation of a subset of the mobile web that only works with the iPhone’s unique features — namely the touch-screen interface.

While Apple is pushing HTML and JavaScript for iPhone app development, they aren't (inadvertently or not) forcing the creation of sites that only work with the touch screen. In fact, I recall reading (correct me if I'm wrong) that the iPhone browser doesn't even support draggin or hovers/mouseovers. There's very little in the way of iPhone-only features (only a few CSS attributes and the tel:/map: protocol for dialing and Google Mapping, as I recall) and so the only way sites are being iPhone-optimized are that they're being dumbed down for the device, thanks to a lack of support for Flash and some JavaScript events (and possibly more). Furthermore, most iPhone-optimized sites are extensions of existing sites. There's no killer app for the internet out there that we're all missing out on because it only runs on the iPhone; hell, there isn't even a web-based killer app out for the iPhone (and I saw this as a launch day iPhone owner).

To be honest, I find all these iPhone-optimized web sites to be completely garbage. This stems largely from one thing: the sites are attempting to mimic Apple's native UI. Of course, the web apps have two huge disadvantage when compared to Apple's apps: they're loading data over a (potentially) slow data connection and JavaScript performance is atrocious on the iPhone.

For something I truly wanted to use heavily, I would go out of my to find a mobile, but not iPhone-optimized, site to use over its iPhone-optimized brethren. The two big winners in the mobile but not iPhone-optimized category are Google Reader and Twitter. I use both daily primarily because they're lightweight (prettier, slower competitors to both are out there). The most recent loser: Facebook – and I'm sure there are many others, but I stopped using them so long ago I can't even remember any of them.

The shoddy state of the mobile web being what it is, I went and jailbroke my iPhone last week, allowing for third-party apps to be installed. It was fairly straightforward, though I had to piece together instructions from a handful of websites to actually get it done. Tonight's release of the Mobile Twitterrific proof-of-concept also spurred me to get the iPhone development toolchain installed. Also, fairly straightforward except for finding out what the hell a "heavenly dmg" was (it's an unencrypted version of the iPhone restore image). There's nothing absolutely must-have out there yet, but it's only a matter of time. You don't really get a sense of how powerful and extensible the iPhone really is (or could be) until you've run a terminal on it or ssh'ed and sftp'ed in.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, SDK, Microsoft, Internet Explorer, standards, Wired, web apps, Web 2.0, Cocoa, hacking, JavaScript

I've been back in Philly since last Wednesday, but Verizon won't activate my DSL until this Wednesday, so I've had very limited internet access. Work starts tomorrow, but once things get settled, I'll be posting more frequently. With WWDC starting tomorrow, I'm sure there will be plenty to talk about too.

Technorati Tags: Philly, Verizon, WWDC, Apple, blogging