Hi everyone, just to let you know we are in the process of switching over to the new site + blog. There will be a number of changes including the feed, so there may be a little disruption over the next 24 hours. Don't forget to email me al at folknology if issue persists.

This page and the old permalinks are being frozen in time (hopefully) as we speak. The new home page is simply http://www.folknology.com/ . The feed is being cached via feedburner so you should not need to 'adjust your set' although the feed contents itself may change (we are trying an atom feed).

Hopefully the next thing you will hear from Folknology will be the new Blog/Feed posts..

regards
Al

When you add 'Security' to RSS it isn't really simple syndication anymore. This is one of the issues that we are dealing with here at Folknology. In order to deliver what our customer desire we need to be able to provide RSS's functionality and simplicity with clients desire for security, particularly around financial information.

We have been working on this for some time and still do not have satisfactory solutions, thus we have recently started to reach out to other developers in this area to ask what they are doing.

In simple english RSS appears to have been developed without consideration for security, not that this happened on purpose of course rather it was designed from a public content perspective. The trouble is we and others n are now wishing to use it in a way in which it was never intended and are hitting speed bumps and even roadblocks.

Here are the main issues that trip us up:

1) Securing transmission of the transfered information
2) Authentication and identity
3) Caching of feeds both locally and via aggregators/routers
4) Traces and shadows of information left by caching and viewing

All of these are tricky because there are few standards implemented around RSS that cover them.

Niall has recently brought attention to this and other threads have been following on from it :

• Authenticated and private feeds
• Carnage4Life
• Computer Zen

I think Dave Winer has also picked up on this, as will others I hope, as this is a problem that needs co-operation to solve. We may have to consider encrypting items within the XML to completely resolve this. Either way let me know by email if you are experiencing or anticipate issues around secure feeds. (use - al at folknology.com).

Something we have been working on here at Folknology is how to improve small business's integration with the web. We will shortly be presenting a new version of this blog and web site that helps explain our take and services in this area. As you will also be aware (If you have checked in here before) we are also involved in building a new small business tool 'Live Tally' which will be released as a separate entity in the next few months.

In this regard our radar picked up the Intuit/Google announcements, unfortunately the biggest buz around this seems to center on the TechCrunch coverage. Unfortunately the TC coverage focuses in on the bundling of Google Desktop and the paranoia surrounding that. Fortunately some bloggers (like Dennis and Rex) do get the significance of this move investigate it for what it could be. I think it's a good move by Intuit and some thing we have been working on for a while. Intuit also have an advantage having snapped up setup recently to help the product/service integration. I am left wondering if any other services have stepped up to the mark to do anything similar to 'Setup' but in a more general and open API fashion, if you hear anything let me know (by email for now, al at folknology).

Update
What is not clear in the announcement or anywhere else I can find is what they mean by inventory integration. I understand that to mean more than just listing products but also dealing with stock and availability etc.. The information I have seen seems to indicate only 'product listings' although they seem to be construing this as an inventory function, I think Dennis is also querying this ambiguity.

This is just a quick catch up post as I know I haven't been posting a lot recently.

First I (and the family) had a great vacation down in French Catalan, superb I recommend the region you have it all : sunshine, wind, beaches, mountains and great places of interest like Barcelona only a short car ride away.

Having been thoroughly rested, fed and watered I am now back up to speed, heres whats happening in my life at the mo:

1) Decided to be more Nomadic, check out some good advice from Om on his new Web Worker Daily blog.
Anyone in the Guilford or Reading (UK) areas that would like to SWAT, let me know (via email please, as comments are currently off)!

2) I had to turn of comments due to unprecedented spamming by bots, I tried to fix it but decided to just turn them off for now see post below.

3) This blog runs of an early experimental piece of blogging software we produced here at Folknology, We are just polishing our second generation version of this project and will be moving Folknology over onto shortly. Thus we may have a few teething issue over the next few weeks, so please bear with us.

4) We are moving our infrastructure from self managed to using web services. The first part of this is move is to Google Apps which has been completed except for this site. We are using GMail (god I have waited for that) and Gcal so far and it is all working rather well. It has also saved a great deal of time on email SPAM.

5) We are still testing LiveTally and hope to roll out a beta later this month. We are also looking for developers in the Guildford/Reading area.

Thats it for now more soon I promise ..

Steve Gillmor has been alluding to the death of the link for months now, despite the resistance he has met in the infosphere he continues to predict it's demise. Today he elaborates on the idea at the end of he's post "A Hamburger Today", prior to his planned deliveries at Gnomdex later this week. His brief but revealing view of the future without links instead provides gesture based dynamic or intelligent linking inserted by the service you consume. In my post here that would mean your RSS reader would automatically provide dynamic links to Steve's info router when you hover over "A Hamburger Today". Don't worry if this doesn't work yet you are just looking at it to early and the reader just hasn't realised that links are dead yet.

This of course solves a great deal of the link spam issues, as the link itself is only visible to the participant and only has relevance to that participant. In this future PageRank is of course meaningless (we always new it was going this way anyhow, due to gaming). I guess then that we will all end up with personal gesture/attention based search services probably based around GestureRank?

I for one welcome the our new relevance overlord (GestureRank) A.K.A me.. The Link is dead long live the Link.

Technorati Tags: GestureRank, SteveGillmor, LinkIsDead

Checkout the amazing BumpTop it will blow your mind, I want my Mac to support this!!

Technorati Tags: BumpTop

Anyone know what Jorssis is? found incoming bookmark links from there ?

I know I promised some teasers for LiveTally and I have been so busy that I forgot, so here is a couple to get on with :

P.S. We are still looking for more general small/micro businesses to join our private beta, email me :
al at folknology dot com if you are interested.

P.P.S. Sorry about the tease images, we seem to have had a couple of issues on the blog server with uploaded images recently. I really need to move this stuff over onto Wordpress when I get time. Hopefully the images should be visible and available now. Once again apologies.

With a follow up to my Ultra Deep Linking article back in March I can kill a few birds with one stone. The first stone is the recent web based spreadsheet activity, I have failed to write about more recently discovered offerings. In particular I have been very impressed with EditGrid I think these guys are leading the pack feature wise, I was very impressed with their product. I have also conversed with David Lee at the EditGrids's developers blog, he linked me to an article (rethink online spreadsheets) that inspires the EditGrid team and really lines up nicely with Folknology's thinking, it looks like they will move towards that deep linking utopia, dang thats cool!. Also I notice that the light has gone on upstairs at Scripting news where Dave starts thinking about ULE by perhaps using his XML-RPC - Bing! it all seems to be happening I just can't wait for these features to be available as we will be leveraging these in LiveTally to allow users to mashup and remix our stuff. I do have Google Spreadsheet access and will be checking out their offerings also, I don't however expect to be able to have a conversation with them unlike the EditGrid, NumSum, Irow,Numble, JotSpot guys.. ;)

PS I'm hoping Mike does a Round up of the spreadsheet offerings soon.

*Update I have uploaded some of the original Websheet files for anyone looking at the deep linking principles, these files are related to the idea of the microformat standard associated with the ULE for spreadsheets. If anybody wishes to use, copy remix this stuff feel free just let me know what you do with it.

And Also see : SocialText/wikiCalc: More Interesting Than Google Spreadsheets

Technorati Tags: EditLive, iRow, JotSpot, mashup, microformats, Numbler, numericalAggregator, NumSum, Spreadsheet, tag, WebaCus, WikiCalc

HI everyone, just popping my head above the parapet with a quick note that Mike of TechCrunch will be in the UK this weekend. He has an open event on Monday at the Pitcher and Piano, Soho so if you have some Web 2.0 startup action or just want to be a friendly UK geek be there. Rest assured I will be trying to get LiveTally in front of Mike at some point in the course of events.

P.S. if anyone else wants a sneak peek of LiveTally (A4) catch me at the event also, see you there.

Technorati Tags: Business2.0, CrunchNotes, LiveTally, London, MicroBusiness, MikeArrington, TechCrunch

Remember my AdBase article last year, well it's all underway, the AdWords/Google Base part of it was just announced on the Google Base blog. Google has so much leavage in their favour for Google Base as well as GData (the ontology). It's all slowly coming together, really exciting.

Technorati Tags: AdBase, AdSense, Google, GoogleBase

Wow check out this really cool card , smarter than a smart card for sure. Add a few more features and this could solve my wallet problem - a single card holding all my accounts and loyalty points etc..

I presume having perused previous posts (as well as my blogosphere cousin's), that the Enterprise 2.0 meme has crossed your attention path. The thinking goes something like - Because the web clicks into V2.0 then surely the Enterprise also does so via some technological magic like SAAS. You will also have seen me skirting around such ideas with a little skepticism, but bags of interest and perhaps points for trying. Only recently have I come to terms with the real business revolution.

Just as the web has empowered the individual and by it's nature the network, it is currently tearing down the media empires and broadcast mentality of the 20th century. With this wind of change I believe the enterprise Goliaths are also beginning to loose their shine in response to the bright sparkles of startups and new business models. These are the signatures of business 2.0 as it emerges from the noise floor of the world economy. This change is not just a revision of the enterprise, but rather whole new models and reversed supply chains, shifting markets entirely. The very fabric of business itself is shifting and undulating with this networked energy and agility.

In this new world we are all businesses, every single one of us is a veritable Microbusiness with our own MicroBrand. We are bloggers selling and indulging ourselves, perhaps picking up a little social revenue en route. We are buyers and sellers through eBay, Craigslist, Gbase or affialiates of the new networked economies. We are developers deploying services funded by advertising and subscription. In short we are the Microbusiness economy, we are Business 2.0. There will be no Enterprise 2.0, the revolution is coming up from the bottom, it's not top down, this is the 21st Century, things work differently on this side of the second milenium, it's as different as mammals and dinosaurs. I would suggest this economy will be larger, more prolific and carry greater influence than anything before it, the monolithic enterprises will recede into it's shade, the new big is small!

Vive la revolution.. and up the mammals... etc....

Tell me it's not so, I dare you

May we all live in exciting times.

P.S. This is my weekly rave, if you're new here ;)

Technorati Tags: Business2.0, microbrand, MicroBusiness

Om has a great post Five things eBay can do, I particularly love his Number 2 suggestion :

"2. Focus on core strengths. Buy Intuit (Quicken) to give eBay buyers and sellers accounting features."

Nice one, but unfortunately moving forward it makes eBay even more of a closed shop. Remember we are now in the Web 2.0 age, it's about open APIs and mashups , remixes etc.. What the customer needs is a product that will work with eBay and google and shopify or even their own web site and has an API to get your data out along with connections to AdSense etc..

Now that would be the kind of product I would like to see.

P.S. Oh and did I mention that we are looking for eBay Power Sellers to join our private beta for our online accounting product (A4), If your interested send me an email : al@folknology.com .

P.P.S. I guess that makes it easier for eBay now they only need to do 4 things ;)

Technorati Tags: accounts, AdBase, AdSense, ajax, API, eBay, financials, Folknology, GoogleBase, mashup, web2.0

John Hagel has an interesting and comprehensive post SOA Vs Web2.0 . He's analysis (on top of his many previous posts) isolates in great detail a number of the architectual/technical reasons why SOA isn't, to date, as successful/prolific as Web2.0 (Implying that SOA is of course the Enterprise's Web2.0).

I think one must look at the motivation to really grok this whole meme, I think that motivation is the key, rather than architecture or technology. John is picking up the signal when he talks about the connection of resources :

"When you talk to SOA proponents today, you will hear a lot about connecting applications and databases, but not a lot about connecting people together and helping to support their interactions with each other. In contrast, Web 2.0 advocates put a lot more emphasis on the opportunity to connect people together and to support their collaborative efforts. Web 2.0 certainly also addresses issues of connecting applications and data, but Web 2.0 is distinctive in the social dimension that it explicitly addresses."

Heres my point :

Web 2.0 creations are often the result of entrepreneurs that believe they can create a web based product that is better for clients than those that currently exist (or not). They are driven by the belief that armed with AJAX a Purple Cow and bags of customer centric participation and passion mixed with a little difference and lots of sweat, that they can change the world (they can)! Trouble is that that kind of high octane mixture responsible for the Web 2.0 motivation is a little harder to find in your average enterprise (about as common as rocking horse sh*t in my experience). So the question that needs answering is how do you engender that sort of motivation within the enterprise in order that the enterprise re-invents itself from the inside out like the net has with Web 2.0.

I do not believe for one minute it wil come from the top down via some grand SOA architecture. The likelyhood is that it will emerge from the bottom up and middle out of the enterprise. It will be more organic and no one will give a flying f*ck whether or not it's 'Light-weight' because it will just make things work better in the enterprise for the participants.

If any Enterprises are reading this here is my recipe :

"Stop listening to those big old school I.T. dinosaurs and starting innovating from the inside out with passion, you can do it better than they ever can. Listen to your participants (web 2.0 word for clients, employees and suppliers), find out what they want and how better to deliver things and work it out. And maybe if you can't find enough heroes inside the business employ some new ones, they are easy to spot, they have skills, opinions and passion in bags, just check out the open source communities if you want examples..."

Oh and please stop using that word 'intranet', there is no intranet any more there is only 'internet' or 'the net'. Intranets are the problem not the solution, the solution is the 'net'.

Sorry daily rant over

Technorati Tags: ajax, emulsifier, enterprise, participation, passionate, PurpleCow, service, web2.0

I had to write a small response to Robert's post How Microsoft can shut down Mini-Microsoft , despite it's deceiving title it's an interesting question posed on how to make it better for the shareholders and employees of Microsoft. Obviously Microsoft's share price has not moved in the upward direction much and internally the troops appear somewhat unhappy. Unfortunately in some ways Robert can't see the forrest for the trees and instantly dismisses the common consensus that dictates Microsoft should be broken into hungry lean and mean baby Bills.

My naive impression is that in the long term 10 Googles would provide a great deal more return for those shareholders than 1 Microsoft, I also think the employees would benefit greater from being within those 10 googles. By googles I mean smaller smarter mean leaner innovative and world changing businesses. If thats not good enough for you what about tens of thousands of 37 Signals, that could result in some amazing innovation and huge shifts forward.

My point here is simple would the world benefit from Microsoft becoming bigger and making more money! would the economy benefit, would workers and investors do better, or could more smaller competitive players provide a better capitalist model with greater benefits to the whole? Thats an argument I would like to see voiced, thats the kinda of question I would ask...

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, MiniMicrosoft, Scobleizer

At least the appearance on the Gillmor Gang doesn't appear to have gone to Hugh's head , Mike Arrington of TechCrunch had some great advice to syndicate Hugh's sketches. I look forward to being able to syndicate hugh's sketches and maybe some of he's StormHoek wine, maybe we should think launch event..!

Anyhow to the point, internally we have a development motto :

"We always choose mind-floss over eye-candy"

This helps us decide over pretty vs functional arguments.. It is for this reason I was struck by (probably for completely different reasons than Hugh's original inspiration of course) the Corrosive Braincandy business card sketch, and particularly in dealing with the complexities of an internet wed life to the detriment of real life sometimes.

First of all an update on the A4 project, we embarked on a minor GUI redesign to improve usability over the last week or two. We are pretty happy with both the new look and feel of the web app now, much more so than before (One intrinsically feels when a GUI is right). We also have completed manual entry parts of the GUI and hence have a completely operational service available now for those testers. We decided to fast track this side of the project in order to satisfy existing testers and functional testing goals. From next week we will be able to roll out product to those in 'manual accounting' situations. From next week (apart from bug fixing etc...) we will be focused solely on the auto-magical importing and integrating with third party web 2.0 apps from Google, Amazon, Ebay, Shopify, BlinkSale to name just a few. Apologies to those Google AdSense participants out there, still waiting for the test logins it's coming honest, just a few more tweeks.

PS We also have an official name and domain for the project we will be announcing that shortly along with a public beta home page. I also aim on putting a few screen snips up shortly given the recent GUI stabilisation.

Technorati Tags: accounts, ajax, alpha, financials, service, useability, web2.0

Nat has an interesting article up on the O'Reilly radar about ALE. What is ALE you ask, well it appears to be the javascript/web equivalent of Windows OLE. I'm not a huge fan of OLE personally but I kinda like the idea of ALE. The other reason for mentioning it here is that he points to a demo on Zimbra showing an ALE spreadsheet component being used to insert a spreadsheet object. Although Zimbra is pretty slow (at least for me) the spreadsheet functionality is one of the best I've seen (they are still missing control/command -c support) and my favorite web addressable cells feature but I am sure that will come. Anyhow check it out, it's very interesting and zimbra seem to be going places with their development.

PS Sorry about the Three Letter Acronyms

Update Whoops in my haste I forgot to explain the ALE TLA it's 'AJAX Linking and Embedding', apologies .

Technorati Tags: ALE, Spreadsheet, web2.0, WebaCus, Zimbra

Well I know we have been a little quite over the last few weeks, but we are still here. More importantly we have our heads down with the A4 project, we have a deadline to go Alpha by the end of this week. Thus there won't be a great deal of blogging this weeks as we are pulling 16 hour days to meet our dealine.. As you can see from the previous post, we will also be expanding the range of participants for the alpha switch on this month, if you are interested in joining the tests let me know, if you are interested in what were doing just leave a comment and I will endeavor to respond (Where I can).

Thanks for staying with us, their be lots of interesting announcements soon, and the first fruits of our work ...

We already have a bunch of alpha testers lined up but are looking for more, particularly stateside. We will expand the range of testers over the next few weeks to include the following participants:

1. Ebay/GoogleBase businesses selling through these and other market places
2. E-shop businesses selling purely online
3. Online businesses interested in third party billing
4. Web based projects needing financial transaction management
5. Small businesses looking to move their financials online

Contact al(at)folknology if your interested in participating on this exciting project, testers will be considered on a first come first served basis, until our beta begins.

Technorati Tags: accounts, alpha, financials, listing, billing, testers, wanted

Michael Mahenoff's - Software as she's developed blog is well worth submitting to if your building people interfaces of any kind (especially web based). I particularly liked his More is sometimes less post about buttons. He reminded me of my past indulgences with products from the institute of sh*t design. In particular the difficulty caused by alarm clocks having so very few buttons that it takes morse code operating skill in order to set the alarm! In fact it became such a problem that I purchased an automatic digital clock that can set itself from radio beacons some time ago. Come to think about it my wife has an identical clock on her side of the room, how did we get to need 2 dam alarm clocks in one room!! I think a sensible family relative must have seen our alarm clock pain and donated the same excellent solution to us, it's all in the misty past now I, can't quite recall how it happened. Anyhow Michael has another great post about daft dialogue boxes that made me chuckle so I thought i'd share it.

PS. Sorry for the slow post recently we shall be emerging with alpha product shortly.

Technorati Tags: design, useability

Ok time for some Web 2.0 fun, it's been kinda quite on the over-marketed Web 2.0 front the last few weeks. It is time to provide some insightful analysis and perhaps a little fun. Ok lets start with what web 2.0 is mathematically, first lets abbreviate it to w2 :

What do we know about w2 ? Well its obvious greater than web 1.0 (w1) thus : w2 > w1
Good start, lets take it further. is w2 twice as good as w1? : or does w2 = w1 + w1 ?
I would say probably not quite, thus we can assume :

w2 = w1 + (xf * w1) = w1 +xf(w1) where xf < 1

Where xf is the X factor, how much better w2 is than w1(as a fraction less than 1), with me so far?
Web 2.0 is all about participants or users and it relies on the network power rules to become successful.

Thus xf is proportional to the number of participants (P) squared (the networking power law that adds the value)
so what is xf made up of? Well lets see the differences between w2 and w1 (advances) :

1. AJAX - meaning more responsive user interfaces, move away from just pages
2. API - as in enabling mashups, remixes and web app linking
3. RSS - enabling subscriptions, aggregation and notification

Ok so thus :

xf related to AJAX,API,RSS which is related to P. lets simplify it, RSS is an API lets group them as API.
AJAX is about customer satisfaction, better experience, the new stickiness.

API is about connections, openness and the power of many to recombine.
These are both vectors that influence participation and thus participants, lets treat them as a imaginary number remember (x+yj) or (x+yi)?

Thus P = Sqrt(AJAX^2 + API^2) or better P^2 = AJAX^2 + API^2 = xf

And therefore :

w2 = w1+w1(AJAX^2 + API ^2)

Thus your successful delivery of a Web 2.0 (as opposed to a Web 1.0) product is likely proportional to the power of your javascript usage and API openness summed.

See I knew I could prove I was right ;)

We are currently working on a new financial product to help online businesses manage their operations. Among our various plugin services we will be offering AdSense linked features. These facilities help manage the financial side of Adsense in your business. We are currently looking for a small number of AdSense users that would be willing to participate in shaping and testing this part of our offering. The users would have the opportunity to join a new and exciting project during the early stages, prior to any public availability. The tools in question are intended to help you manage your business, as such you will be able to gain an early advantage using these tools. We will be operating this offer on a first come first served basis as we only have a few test seats available. If you are interested in participating please contact al@folknology.com.

Technorati Tags: AdSense, listing, testing, wanted

We do really trust you, it's not an option or a choice, no it is the way of things now, we just have to get it...

I remember how I used to 'do security' for web applications and how simple it all used to appear. Unfortunately with time comes hard earned experience, often the result of one's own over confidence and rose tinted glasses. Lets face it folks, security is a royal pain in the arse. Thats why, whenever I draw up a new framework for a project, I always include an interceptor interface (I know I should use trendy cross cutting AOP instead, guess that makes me traditional..). Why do I do that ? Because I know that at some point (a vantage I cannot yet have access to), I will need to be able to fully intercept any incoming request for some 'security' purpose. From experience I have found that this catch all pinch point is kinda useful to have around, It is also particularly important to assume you won't know exactly how your going to use it, which is why it should be something abstract like and interface. Even so, security has a habit of biting your arse when your not looking...

The case in point is something we are working on at the moment, for good or bad we are in a position that means we have to deal with a concept called trust on mass. Trust is a strange kind of quality as it means different things to different people. In our rapidly growing online world, this issue of trust is reaching an almost fever pitch. Rather than the issue becoming more focused and resolute, it is actually diversifying at great velocity (despite some vendors attempts at monopolizing it's ambiguity). In fact trying to have a reasonable conversation with an average participant on the internet ( a mere mortal rather than an uber geek) about perceived trust, often leaves both parties more confused than they started. Why is that ? And why is it that over the years I have often confused not only myself but also peers with much greater intelligence than I poses in conversations about trust.

So in my usual way I figured I should enumerate my feelings here, fearing as such that the problem is growing exponentially. Not that I'm treating you as my agony aunts you understand, no, rather just applying some simple self help principles and getting it out of my system. So I figured I would start by looking up trust.

According to the Oxford English dictionary on my desk here (yes made out of tree, desk and dictionary, I'm a little old fashioned) :

1 Firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something
2 Acceptance of the truth of a statement without proof.

Wow that certainly explains some of the lack of convergence around trust discussions. just take a look at (2) 'Acceptance of the truth of a statement without proof' now if that doesn't say Faith I'll eat my hat. Which takes me back to my original point, if security is a function of trust, then as such, our security is built upon informal contracts with our participants many of which are customers, and if we are to give birth to a purple cow, and while all marketers are liars then in you we must place our trust, whole heartedly, it is the only one secure reality emerging in this mixed-up, mashed-up century. No wonder most enterprises don't get it, try selling that policy to your IT director and the board. Most likely you'll be carried out on a leather strapped stretcher..!

P.S. Sorry for the weak and tenuous thread of this post, It's been a long day, I have no business encouraging such disambiguation ;)

Technorati Tags: emulsifier, enterprise, participation, security, trust

Want a better aggregator experience, read on..

Let me get technical just for a brief moment, hang with me here...
Recently I have been exploring various ajax libraries, in search of the ultimate components to match our emerging design patterns. In particular I have sought libraries that can actually decouple the client and server as well as keep the markup clean. Most don't achieve this, but I did discover one particular effort called Behaviour created by Ben Nolan. This javascript library works on the basis of adding behavior to an identified element in your markup. It does so not within the markup itself (using typical 'on*Events') but externally using CSS selectors, very clever. This creates a very clean separation of form/data and behavior. (it utilises the script.aculo.us library as well).
Now this technique is not the solution to every problem, but for certain classes of problem it is immensely useful.

One area where this provides an excellent solution is with Microformats (MF). With MF regular XHTML chunks can take on additional meaning within a page. Common examples of this are the use of the 'class' attribute to donate that a node (often span or div) is the bounding element representing an instance of a particular MF e.g and event in the hCalendar format :

1    <span class="vevent"> 
2     <a class="url" href="http://www.web2con.com/"> 
3      <span class="summary">Web 2.0 Conference</span>: 
4      <abbr class="dtstart" title="2005-10-05">October 5</abbr>- 
5      <abbr class="dtend" title="2005-10-08">7</abbr>, 
6     at the <span class="location">Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA</span> 
7     </a> 
8    </span>     

Because we are using the class attribute we can use Behaviour to attach behaviour to it. So for instance if we hovered over this event it might pop an event icon or one of Ray Ozzie's scissor icons to indicate we can copy this into our local calendar or another web page. Further still if this event happened to be a 'Todo (MF) (A derivative of event that isn't yet documented), when we hover over it a check
box appears, if we check the box it notifies the server that the todo is done, and removes itself from the page. I know none of this is rocket science in this day and age with ajax, but it is the clean way that the complexity of the javascript and backend is separated from the markup itself. Apart from it making the page markup clean and manageable it also helps do something else for us, thus to my entire point for this post, that upgrade we would like :

Many of us now use aggregators and RSS as a means to access information, it's very effecient to do so compared with browsing. Often we don't even visit a page to get its content. In order to make this safe for the aggregators they strip the markup clean. That means removal of javascript, css and many otherwise harmless tags. They don't do this just to get us pissed, they have a good reason, in that they cannot determine what markup will be placed inside a feed. Some feed markup is just plain bad markup, errors, and can even be purposefully subverted creating masked Phishing attacks that would seem to emanate from the aggregators web site. Thus the risk is to high for the aggregators and generally undesirable, which is why they bastardise our beautiful markup. Thus if we wished to take advantages of combining web based copy and paste, active events, todos aswell as all sorts of clever ajax things we haven't even thought of yet, we are (unfortunately) shit out of luck. The aggregators will strip it all out before it gets to the participant. This makes RSS reading a second class citizen. But fear not there is a solution and it's pretty simple :

Use the behaviors library above to produce standard behaviours that go alongside exiting MF and they actions they support, document it on the MF site with the libraries under CC. Then the aggregators can install the standard MF libraries along with the behaviour within their pages/apps. That way when a recognised MF appears within the page/post the behaviour kicks in automatically promoting the RSS participant back into a first class citizen again.

Any aggregators maintainers reading this post ? would you like to respond? I would love your feedback and ideas., and how do you subscribers feel about you aggregators let me know, this could be achieved if we want it we just have to ask for it..

Technorati Tags: aggregators, ajax, behaviour, LiveClipboard, mashup, microformats, RSS, web2.0

One of the areas we have been thinking about for sometime here at Folknology is Ultra Deep Linking (UDL). As you are probably are aware (assuming you subscribe or peruse regularly) we are working on web based products of the numerical kind. A number of posts over recent months have talked about this side of web apps, and they seem to be in short supply. However these apps are on the rise with WikiCalc, NumSum , iRows just to name a few albeit that they exist within a narrow numerical web space we could refer to as Web SpreadSheets (WSS). Most of these lend themselves heavily toward traditional spreadsheets reborn on the web not quite what we were thinking. We envisage something different from that, we don't se a spreadsheet application per se rather we imagine a spreadsheet component embedded within a page. This component would operate within XHTML powered by javascript (This isn't our project by the way just one we would like to see which could significantly enhance our products). The spreadsheet itself in data form would be a Microformat that we refer to internally as a 'websheet'. It looks just like a regular html table with some special class attributes and practices (following the Microformat way). But if it was a recognised Microformat we could add CSS and javascript standard behaviors that make it act like numsum or irow within the page. These spreadsheats could be inserted in one's blog or any web page in either a read or read/write manner. But here's a the clever bit, using a REST pattern we can make the data within the websheet individually addressable. Stay with me for a moment, assume we have a websheet imbedded in a page with an id attribute of 'mysheet' :

1. The address of the page is : http://www.mydomain.com/mypagewithsheet.html
2. The websheet via - http://www.mydomain.com/mypagewithsheet.html#mysheet
3. Any cell via - http://www.mydomain.com/mypagewithsheet.html#mysheet?row=2&col=B
4. A selection of cells - http://www.mydomain.com/mypagewithsheet.html#mysheet?selection=B1:C5

This means also of course any cell within a sheet can address any cell on the internet or selection therein. as well as applying this as parameters to cell functions etc..

This is what we mean by Ultra Deep Linking - burrowing deep not just into the page for
links/anchors but directly inside of a Microformat instance (websheet) within a page/blog/web app etc..

I am hoping Dan at WikiCalc and the others at iRows,NumSum and new players etc.. will be moving towards this concept as we will soon be producing fodder for these new kinds of in page web numerical web apps.. Now just imagine how much easier it all becomes with LiveClipboard support for linking at table, selection and cell levels how easy and powerful is that ? Also imagine not just Follknology's web apps producing this kind of embed-able interactive data but everyone else's web apps following the same pattern. Now I hope your getting a glimpse of what we have been working towards for some time now, we will enumerate more of this soon, stay tuned..

Update : Oops, forgot to include Numbler in that web spreadsheet category .

Technorati Tags: ajax, Folknology, iRow, LiveClipboard, microformats, Numbler, NumSum, REST, Spreadsheet, web2.0, WebaCus, WikiCalc, windowslive

Wow it's really happening, the things that I have been hoping for are really starting to move on the web technology front. I am so glad that Microsoft smelt the coffee and got back into the web to compete again. Sure sometimes they don't get it or don't show it, reverting back to their old ways, but some of that new blood is raising the temperature. Check out Ray Ozzie's Wiring the web if you want to see a feature that will proliferate widely through the web over the next few months. I know this active linking and copy/paste idea isn't new, but they have implemented it in a very simple fashion, using simple standards (like our favourite Microformats) and made it work from the outset with Firefox! If you check out the screencasts they even choose Firefox over IE, absolutely awesome. Rest assured the Folknology projects will be taking advantage of this work and are likely to support it with implementations, thats how impressed we are - Guess you never thought you'd hear that here.. Thanks to dave for the heads up. I think now with this combination, Microformats will begin having a real impact on the net yeehah... Congrats to Ray, his brother and the team at Microsoft excellent work and if anyone can make this stick you guys can...

Update : The idea is going down a storm, lots of folks are getting this :
Ross at Random Bytes wants to implement it for his Skydasher
the LiveSide suggest it's usages as a standard next to the feed icon
Todd at Geek New Central liked the copy/paste/link to RSS example for flickr
Ross at Rosscode like the idea of seemless copy from the web into his desktop apps
Marc loves it and points to the Structured blogging effort as an underlying widget/data set
Alex Barnett provides a great roundup as Ray's idea percolates through the blogosphere.

Technorati Tags: ajax, LiveClipboard, mashup, microformats, Microsoft, RSS, web2.0, windowslive

Carrying on with the emulsifier serious, this post deals with that initial design choice of the 'middle out' architect.

One is faced with an enormous selection of tools, libraries and languages for building internet application these days. For the web 2.0 geeks ROR represents in many ways the antithesis of this choice by embracing constraint on those choices. Similarly J2EE ties you into a strict design pattern within the enterprise in order to make it easier on the developer. Both of these live at either end of the scale with ROR representing the simple, agile and rapid web 2.0 meme, whilst the Enterprise java bean oozes it's tried, tested and stable 3 tiers.

The middle way I wish to embellish here offers a choice betwixt the two extremes, gleaming benefits from both. It isn't the only way but it is something we find ourselves fitting into comfortably here at folknology. With middle out we design we concentrate on an API first encapsulating the essentials . Uh oh you're thinking, not that grand design by contract again, aren't we sliding back in time here. No we are not, for the design is greatly simplified, in fact the simplest we can get to and still have a track to follow. Remember I mentioned I use OPML editing tools to record notes , I also use them in designing my APIs, here is one :

See I have just organised my notes into a simple hierarchy of functions grouped by type, takes a few minutes and once your good at it you build it that way when taking the notes. If you look carefully you will notice I am using a REST based API (I know there is no delete and put, but thats another conversation). You see REST gets it done simply and it also offers a very simple access from practically any language or tool. So why am I starting with an API ? here a few of the advantages:

1. I believe you need an interface to your functionality, given you cannot image all of the apps uses in the future, providing an API lets people mash it ,and remix it in ways that solve problems you haven't even thought of yet. Why punish your design by not letting them do that. In the enterprise this is particularly important and moving away from those insular fixed GUIs is essential to enable agility and problem solution evolution.
2. It provides a simple path for the engineer, a track that can be followed rapidly to get something operational in double quick time, without tying a lead balloons to your legs using something like WS-* nonsense.
3. You can skin the app with different tools, not just java but ruby,python,c# and more importantly javascript and xhtml. Yup the API is AJAX's friendly, particularly within a REST based api design.
4. A nice trick we've devised is to make sure all of your rest calls return XML. (whats different about that?) Well when I say xml I actually mean XHTML (which is an XML dialect), why ? multi usage again. I can display it directly in a browser, I can apply XSL transforms, XPath selections,SAX and DOM manipulations or just plain regex if requied. The key is to use small XHTML sub dialects like microformats etc.. There is so much more to say about this but thats another article.
5. I can unit test this over http straight away, in fact it can be done piecewise, function by function or even by module in an agile manner.
6. REST API are self documenting and simple. You can ever add FORM and Link based xhtml pages as documentation if you like.
7. REST* drills through firewalls like a knife through butter for inter Enterprise apps, well worth thinking about.
8. There are tools, web apps javascript apps that are coming that will be able to take advantage of this design decision in the future, by choosing this route you are leaving the future open for these opportunities.
9. This kind of REST based API is extremely scalable, vertically and horizontally i.e. the big iron or the distributed, load-balanced redundant servers. Not to mention all of the off the shelf tools like http-proxies, Apache, analytics and traffic tools etc./..

In fact one can see this type of design pattern in action at many of the larger web companies such as google take a poke around inside their GMail app etc..

I will touch on come of the smaller print (The bits REST doesn't do and authentication etc..) in the next article before then moving onto user interfaces.

*Note I am excluding the use of HTTP DELETE and PUT methods here, as most of our APIs superimpose these on POST in order to avoid issues around over zealous firewall admins.

Technorati Tags: API, emulsifier, enterprise, Folknology, mashup, remix, REST, web2.0

Any software development no matter how large or small has to decomplexify first. What do I mean by that ? Simplify the features, take the 20% of features (Essentials) that deliver 80% of needs, thats where you should start. I am not advocating that one discards the other features, rather they are often revealed as dependencies are exposed during implementation of the essentials. Basically keep the problem small enough to fit in your mind, the branches of complexity will reveal themselves through your agile (You are using agile are'nt you?) iterative process, these bifurcations are often found spawning from the essential trunks.

I have used 'decomplexify' here (not actually a word, more a geekism) rather than simplify, because often the problems that need to be solved are complex in themselves (particularly within and between enterprises) and thus cannot be simplified. Hence we are cherry picking at the complexity and selecting the richer seams of the solution. We are also trying not to laden our egg basket to heavily at the start as this is the steepest climb of the project.

How one does this is an art in itself, different folks use different strokes. You have to find something that you and your team are comfortable with. Be open minded but when you get something that makes it easier, remember it (Some project managers keep a log, not a bad idea and I may be trying this myself). Here some early practices I have adopted :

Many moons ago I used build complex domain models using UML before writing a single piece of code, often along with use cases etc.. I rarely do this nowadays, I just don't find it productive, primarily because it is very top down and far to presumptuous (One is often trying to solve complex problems before a full understanding of them is realised, it's idealism.. ). It is also a guaranteed way to introduce complexity in a project quickly and can also frighten the hell out of some developers (Like showing them a map of the universe and pointing to the small bit they have to produce).

One still needs to go through the domain of the project in order to gain the basic understanding of the problems you are solving. Thus rather than performing formal use case interviews, try using interactive conversations with the key users (or process managers), using simple diagrams and what ifs. My toolkit includes; NovaMind, OPML editor, a microphone a pencil and paper.

(Novamind also exports to OPML which is really handy when it comes to formalising some of your interactive notes etc.. I use OPML for several reason and it acts as a good conduit for me, I like it's semi formal hierarchy it's the way I think.)

When you get good at this process you can often achieve results over the phone (Using Skype is also useful here for recording, just make sure you disclose it!). Avoid predesigning everything up front, work with the user to get yourself into the 'domain zone' so to speak. Making it informal can really help, but you do need their full attention and vice versa.

What tools are you using and what processes have you found success with ?

After this exercise you are ready for the first formal steps which I will discuss in the next emulsifier post covering some preferred design routes, methods and architectures.

Technorati Tags: emulsifier, NovaMind, OPML

This is one of the best articles on web office I have read in a long time
Checkout Rod Boothby's innovation creators article The Next Wave in Productivity Tools - Web Office Smacks a whole bunch of nails on the head at once. Very good article a must read for anyone developing web based office apps.

Thanks to Richard McManus's Why you need a Web Office article for the heads up.

This is a good follow up to the OWL theme I will start using the OWL tag to ease discovery on these posts

Technorati Tags: mashup, officelive, OWL, web2.0

I just came from Tris Hussey's A View from the Isle article on full vs partial feeds, although I am not going to wax about that particular discussion I did discover Qumana which I am currently downloading on my Windows XP system. It reminds me very much of my beloved Ecto blooging tool with all those good features like tagging, WYSIWYG editing, offlining, spell checking etc.. But this has a unique feature that is very interesting, the ability to insert ads directly in a post using adgenta . Although I am not sure if this is the way I would prefer to blog it could be very useful for others (I actually have other ideas for RSS ROI than regular ads, but thats for another post). So I am going to give it a spin shortly. In order to do that I must upgrade the Folknology blogging server to the latest version in order for me to use the tool correctly. Don't be alarmed if an add or two appears in Posts over the weekend as I hope to give Qumana/adgenta a spin. I will let you know how I get on with this new tool and idea.

Technorati Tags: adgenta, blogads, blogging, remix

As you may already have noticed, when I find stuff I like I often talk about here and try to provide some linklove and passion towards such products and services. Often I get similar advice from other bloggers. Occasionally however things can go the other way, And I like to make a point of indicating product or service failures here also.

One of my pet hates is the 'Blinkered American' effect.
What is that ? Well that is when an American company's marketing department/person ignores everything that is not domestic, that is everything not inside the U.S of A (Although sometimes Canada does get included in that grouping, lucky them!1). I see this a lot, and with small outfits it can sometimes be forgiven. But with bigger companies and especially web based companies it is just not acceptable for us Europeans, Asians and Australasians etc..

The latest of these incidents to get my gander up has done a double, two in a row, guess who? It's Microsoft. First with the Office Live beta only being available to US citizens, I have mentioned this in an earlier post and It happened again today with another marketing promotion for .Net and the associated tools. Microsoft are trying to attract more developers over from LAMP and JSP etc.. with their Visual studio and .Net/ASP packages. They are currently running webcasts and educational tracks in conjunction with DR Dobbs and Oreilly.

I received an offer this morning via email (I am subscribed) offering me a Free Visual studio development pack with supporting documentation which will be sent to me after attending 3 of the sessions/casts in the chosen track. I duly began my registration, working through the first page of the form (Non trivial I would say) only to then be pressented with the Company details/address form and shipping form. EEERGH... Sorry you can only select United States or Canada on the Country entry for both parts of the form .. AAAAGH I hate that....

This apart from making me very angry because it's one of my pet hates, does not help Microsoft's cause. If they are trying to attract developers to their platforms and tools, they must recognise that developers don't just exist domestically, infact there are now probably more developers in Asia than anywhere else.. So this is a very bad move as it just pisses them (and particularly me) off. This will actually turn developers against them. The very opposite effect of their intended action. I mean it's not like Microsoft does'nt have international offices is it ?

Come on Microsoft you can do better than this, set an example here please...

Oh the offer was here by the way : Bad Microsoft marketing move at learn2asp
End of rant for today.

Technorati Tags: ASP, blinkeredamamerican, DOTNET, Microsoft, learn2asp, remix

Remember my Officelive wish list (OWL) and it's update well here is just one small addition thats come to my attention (thanks Pete) - Numbler . Numbler improves on some of the other web based spreadsheet I have already mentioned ; wikicalc, numsum, iRow. It has a nice user interface and some extra gui features allthough it obviously still needs a little optimisation (It's beta after all, no really beta!!). But most important it has the beginnings of the killer feature set I hinted at in the last (OfficeliveWishList) update post. see there FAQ item 25 for a clue..

Technorati Tags: ajax, iRow, Numbler, NumSum, Spreadsheet, web2.0, WikiCalc

Just a quick post on Google Page Creator And all of the posts around the google buzz. I won't talk about it in particular, but I think the magic from google will be the juxtaposition between these apparently random new web products. Once they start working together with the magic mashup pixie code we will start to see the sparkle...

Technorati Tags: Google, googlepagecreatGooglePageCreator

I have come to the conclusion that Enterprise geeks (EGeeks) and web2.0 geeks (W2Geeks) need an emulsifier. Why because they seem to be talking at cross purposes. The W2Geeks want it agile and simple, whilst the EGeeks are into stable and scalable.

This of course means that the two groups come at problems from different angles, often not appreciating the complexities of the others environment.

Lets just analyse the situation from an outside standpoint for a second. At first it seems that both groups need's oppose each other, but on more careful inspection these needs often overlap.

Lets take the agile vs stable first :
W2Geeks - love things like Ruby On Rails with it's quick development, built in unit testing automatic scafolding etc..
EGeeks - on the other hand like the tried, tested & supported architectures like J2EE, .NET and MQ type message queues.

But actually both are just trying to get good reliable, manageable code that works! Agility is a quick iterative way to achieve this whilst tried and tested design patterns like enterprise beans are another.

Lets now consider simple vs scalable :
W2Geeks - like simple, it means they can solve problems quickly, iterate development and user feedback and make products that become optimised.
EGeeks - prefer scalable architectures from the likes of IBM, Sun, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft etc.. These are heavy duty systems that can expand to multi processor servers running scalable client server apps.

But actually what both want is to build systems that can cope with un quantifiable future demands, and the ability to for the system to be adapted as the needs inevitably change.

So really both sides want very similar things, the main difference is that the enterprise tends to be top down build and design, whereas web2.0 seems to be bottom up based evolution. Thus I personally must conclude the real differences here are purely people/style/and or management differences and this is why it can get so emotional and passionate sometimes.

Given that we often have to tread the divide between the two we (Folknology) have recently been developing our own emulsifiers to allow the oil and water to mix so that businesses (our clients and ourselves) may benefit. So what is the crux of our emulsifiers ? What are those basic ingredients ?

Basically it's a kind of middle out (as opposed to top down or bottom up). But what does that mean architecturally? Well the next few post we will explore some of what we are evolving (both here at Folknology and in our day jobs). We will tag them with 'emulsifier' so you can isolate them, if your interested.

I (sorry back to me) can't promise you a single answer, but we (I and others) will promise you some interesting conversation if you want to participate in the discussion.

What this space ;)

Some posts that got us here :

Stephen Bryant's Five Reasons Web 2.0 and Enterprises Don't Mix at Ziff Davis

ZDNET's SOA blogs and other articles

Many posts from Jon Udell including : When services go wrong , The wrong end of the telescope? . Don't throw out the SOAP with the bathwater , Superplatform politics .. and many many more

Update checkout Zoli's Articles on this also

Technorati Tags: agile, emulsifier, enterprise, scalable, web2.0

First off it appears that my wish list is very much shared by others, in Web Office Suite: best of breed products by Richard MacManus at ZDNET does a good round up of the candidates to fill the some of the wish-list. In fact he goes as far to indicate that Microsoft will move on this along with Google.

He also brought up one product I hadn't seen : iRows which builds and possibly exceeds NumSum, certainly on usability. It is actually a very good product, looks a generation on from NumSum more polished etc.. although it still has a few rough edges. Having spent the last few hours playing with it I am impressed.

This category is definitely heating up. There are a few killer features still missing from iRows (like NumSum) at this point but they are encouraging user requests so I am sure they will get to them eventually. They have already built some of the hardest parts in my opinion and executed them rather well, and I bet they more than just the requested feature list up their sleeves.

Overall I'm pretty impressed and suggest you head over and check it out.

Oh and Andrew Watson definitely gets it in Web Office Bets
And Harry McCracken at PC Worlds Techlog wonders about stuff missing from OL.

Technorati Tags: ajax, live, officelive, OWL, Spreadsheet, web2.0, WebaCus

Tech Memeorandum (TMD) is great, I am really hooked and have been since Scoble pointed it out some time ago.

But I think it is actually changing what I read and what I blog. I suspect I'm not the only one, I would imagine throughout the 'Tech blogospere' this effect may be prevalent.

The trouble is that TMD is ,I believe, actually interfering with the system it is reacting to. In a systems engineering analysis I would surmise that TDM was actually providing positive feedback into the blogoshpere. This could have side effects such as stretching the long tail further and amplifying the A-lister's hump at the other end. Thus TDM is other wise know in systems engineering circles as an amplifier, suffering from clipping side effects (to much gain from the positive feedback on particular posts).

Perhaps some negative feedback and damping needs to be applied in order to return our beloved serendipity (whilst keeping TDM). I am sure Gabe has such plans in the pipeline, does anyone else feel the same way or have any suggestions for a fix ? Any black box system engineers up for a challenge?

Technorati Tags: Memeorandum, positivefeedback, systems

Folknology is always looking for contributors, developers (ajax,groovy,java) and even guest posters interested in the move from broadcast to multicast communications and attention based software. Contact : al@folknology.com.

Technorati Tags: ajax, Folknology, groovy, Jobs, listing, Java

I know this isn't new news it's been out a while, But I didn't have a chance to mention it at the time. Check out Opera Mini It is a java based browser for mobile devices. If you already have Opera's great browser built into your phone then you probably won't need it. On the other hand if you don't and your phone supports java got to : http://mini.opera.com/ and click on the download.

The browser does more than just pixel perfect browsing, it uses Opera caches on the internet/carrier borders and compresses the page into a series of images to make delivery good even over slow GPRS connections. You need to try it out to see how good it really is. I now use it as default on my K750i, it's made a world of difference to my phone based browsing.

Technorati Tags: mobileIP, Operamini

I see the rumoured Sykpe on Nokia (Symbian based) is'nt just a rumour anymore : Skype running on Nokia 6680 S60 Handset:
This move combined with 3G+WiFi generation phones moves the goal post somewhat. I wonder what the carriers will do in response, bound to upset some of them.

I think Nokia and Symbian are doing the right thing here and probably against a great deal channel of resistance. The future however cannot be stopped it will be routed around, this sign is the first appearance of serious cracks in many of those unnatural walled gardens. Mobile is about to get very hot for all on IP from here on in, watch this space...

Update : it may be ideally matched with the Nokia 6136, at least according to TheReg.

Technorati Tags: mobileIP

Ok the last 2 posts have been very negative towards Office Live and Microsoft in general, and I know it's easy to be an outside critic and tempting to just pick out the negatives without putting forward positives, so here goes my wish list for what Office Live (OL) could be:

1) OL should include a text editor or basic word processor that can open native Word files and saves to modern word files (preferably the more open xml variants). It only needs the ~20% of feature in the user interface that I actually use, ie basic editing rather than exotic page layout and pagination. Can't be done through a web browser ? check out Writely . It can be done and it can be even better than Writely with Microsoft's resources to hand.

2) OL should include basic spreadsheet functionality (Or numerical processing). Again this should support exiting Excel Formats for input and save to latest version of Excel formats. Again it only needs to support ~20% of the features currently within Excel (Thats all I use). Can't be done through a web browser ? check out NumSum. It can be done and it can be even better than NumSum with Microsoft's resources to hand.

3) OL should include presentation facilities, preferably that read and write PowerPoint formats. Again we only need basic ~20% of features currently offered. Can't be done through a web browser ? check out S5. It can be done and it can be even better than S5 with Microsoft's resources to hand. Oh and it would be great if it supports OPML also.

4) OL should support online database, preferably supporting access file formats (maybe just import/export). Again we don't need all the bells and whistles, just basic database creation/management. Can't be done through a web browser ? check out
GoogleBase . I'm am also convinced Microsoft could better GoogleBase just by supporting MS Access, That allows businesses to migrate easily, there must be millions of access databases out there that could be migrated online in this fashion.

5) Add a good Blogging tool into to the mix for company communications, I won't link to examples here as there is already many to choose from. but of course support standards like RSS and OPML as well as XMLRPC to give user choice.

A few other things would be useful but not essential :
Open Office file support (ODF)
RSS readers that can priorities different categories of RSS
RSS subscription to any item/document for changes
Some sort of WIKI functionality with a rich text interface.
Open standard VOIP support with logging,voicemail,rss notifications
IMAP and or Push support for the email (Better for loosely connected devices)
Spam/Virus Filtering
An outliner
Ability to reskin/re-purpous/mashup all the tools and services using open standard and REST based APIs

All of this must be multi platform and multi browser supported based on open standards of course. (We use Macs and Linux as well as Windows XP, not unusual now-a-days, different tools for different jobs)

I could probably think of more but that would be more than enough for me to switch our micro business to Office Live.

What do you believe my chances of getting any of this are?

Technorati Tags: AdBase, GoogleBase, live, mashup, Microsoft, officelive, OPML, OWL, RSS, windowslive

Ok I admit to totally misunderstanding what 'Office Live' actually was (Me Thinking it being a cut down version of Office as a web app, silly me). But actually the more I read the clearer what it actually is becomes. It is in fact an add on to Office, that is it compliments an existing Office install (I am convinced we will see it on Office 12 as an install option).

The reason being that it is aimed at office clients (Windows only, no safari support sorry Mac users). To get the most out of this you need a number of Office components installed :
1) Import/export features appear to be outlook specific (Multiple versions of office supported)
2) The datasheet and embedded functions require Office to be installed (latest version only I think).
3) The share point like integration (active doc sharing) uses many Office specific document type (And I think active X based) recognition to acheive embedded editing type functions.

So in summary it looks like they are taking a number of their existing server based products like Exchange, Sharepoint etc.. and hosting cut down versions of them on your behalf.

For existing Office users in a micro business that only use IE (IE specific support at the mo) and windows (Not macs or other OS) this is a easy management version of their server products on demand.

What it is not :
1) A web application, more a web presence / ondemand service for a closed platform (Windows+office)
2) An online office replacement for micro business
3) Microsoft building Web 2.0 Apps (This is'nt one, building an Office add on does'nt count)

I think that the 'Office Live' moniker is quite frankly deceiving to most people. C'mon Microsoft this looks like a backward step, more like a response to google than new or innovating web 2.0 applications.

Update I have a better name for the new product suite, they should have called it what it really is : MBS - Micro Business Server
P.S. Someone else suggested Microsofts Bulls**t Sever, but personally I find that a little harsh ;)

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, officelive, windowslive

Sorry about that title but it just reflects my disappointment with Microsoft's Office live announcements today (or is it pre announcement?).

We here at Folknology labs were looking forward to this new revolutionary way of working on line with Microsoft's new Office live product. After all we should be exactly in their sites as this product is aimed at micro businesses like ours.

But alas the product suite dissapoints badly, for it resemble not Office in any real way. Instead the title was obviously a stupid marketing ploy by the old school marketing droids apparantly still resident in Redmond. The use of 'Office' in the product name is a pure marketing/branding move, they just tore up the clue train manefesto and slid back into their old ways.

One of the main features is domain based email, web site and contact management (basic at that). Well we already have those, they come free with the domain now-a-days. The rest seems to be some kind of lame CRM thingy, not really what we need as a small business.

The reason for the vagueness is we can't actually try because we are not in the U.S. and you have to be to count as relevant to Microsoft for this product.. Doh.....

But we can tell you it does not provide any word/Excel,PowerPoint, access etc.. features at all and thus resembles not office as far as small businesses are concerned. Are they saying small businesses don't need to use word-processing, spreadsheets, databases or presentation tools?

Me and the other folks here just don't get it, ho hum..

Update more comment here : What Office is not
Scoble here : office live released to microbusinesses
Jupiter : What Office Live is not
Microsoft : About office live
Greg Linden : Office Live is not office live
ZDNET : Office Live goes live today

Technorati Tags: live, Microsoft, officelive, web2.0, windowslive

Over the last few weeks we at Folknology have been working on a new project, hence the total lack of blogging. Apologies for the deadly silence but normal service willl be restored shortly!

Technorati Tags: Folknology