Aehso’s Output

Google on Microsoft

Fascinating, pot kettle black.

The Financial Memory Only Lasts About 30 Years.

Below is the first of an interesting series of videos about the 1929 Stock Market Crash, the quote (in Part 4) that the financial market memory only lasts about 30 years may bear relevance to recent events. Perhaps in our more connected world the frequency has accelerated somewhat since 1987 as the volatility in current global equity markets is difficult to discount as the potential precursor to another such ‘crash’.

This is Part 1, go to YouTube for Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5

On Jaiku/Facebook Scheduled Maintanance

I hope/suspect they are giving Jaiku a brain transplant or something - they are scheduling a 24-hour downtime window for Wednesday . Yep, that’s a whole days notice and they scheduled it for midweek - they must have something big on at the weekends.

$15bn-Facebook are also quite cavalier about making changes midweek - they seem to do midweek ‘pushes’ to their production server that they frequently have to back out or subsequently apologise for. Some of the posts to their platform status feed read like a car crash.

Both could both learn a thing or two from mission critical SaaS service providers like Salesforce who figured out a long time ago that trust is the key to building and operating a successful online service (though in Facebook’s case other issues may be eroding end-user trust).

Salesforce place so much emphasis on trust that they put considerable effort into building and naming an operations website called http://trust.salesforce.com/. They use it to announce things like scheduled maintenance well in advance. Oh, Salesforce scheduled maintenance is always is done at weekends.

Doing silly things like taking your service offline for a day in the middle of the week, when most of your users will be online, erodes trust.

VRM, APML and DataPortability.org

Joe Andrieu has an interesting take on the how the incubating VRM project is evolving.

I lean towards agreeing with Joe. I like the idea behind APML in that I can see the need for a standard format for publishing attention information. However I don’t think it is credible to attempt to specify how to safely distribute and share attention data (which has privacy and trust issues written all over it) using a simple annotated schema document and a php-based example parser implementation. Problems

• The core APML XML schema is woefully underspecified. The semantic meaning of the various elements/attributes is really not clearly specified at all. To illustrate what I mean, compare and contrast the Atom Syndication Format specification with the APML specification.
• There is no protocol specification how to access/update APML documents. Again, referring to a specification like the Atom Publishing Protocol highlights the need for such a specification.
• At this stage, I think anyone producing specifications that essentially contain lists of data for consumption by arbitrary web based clients should seriously consider extending the Atom (or RSS) syndication formats rather than rolling their own schema.  They should also consider adapting AtomPub for publishing this type of content (e.g. as Google did for OpenSocial APIs)
• The APML specification seems to have been developed in a sandbox. I know it is listed alongside OpenID, microformats and others at (what is now the buzz site of this week) DataPortability.org but it does not build on or integrate with any of these specifications (worth noting that Chris Saad is behind both efforts). There are no requirements, recommendations or guidelines on how to use APML within the context of existing and pending web infrastructure.  Sure I could build an APML service and then stick it behind an OAuth login system but then I may end up with a service that nobody can use with their client libraries.

That last point actually brings me to something else I’ve been meaning to blog about - DataPortability.org.  First off, I think this website is a commendable effort at raising the profile of the specifications it is linking to.  However, and this is a big however, I have seen this happen before many, many times in enterprise-software-land (I’m looking at you CORBA and J2EE vendors!).  Consortium of big vendors would get together to discuss reference designs or ‘profiles’ for combining various specifications into an “industry recommended solution” that is then vaguely referenced by each company’s website to claim ‘compliance’. 
However, in the absence of free and open reference implementations for these solutions (and I mean an integrated reference implementation here) true compliance and interoperability will never really be achieved.  There is simply no carrot there for the vendors to work hard to achieve this and there is no stick large enough for the community to beat them with to play fairer.  So I’m afraid that for now I’m not drinking the kool-aid regarding Google and Facebook joining DataPortability.org  Sorry, but given both Facebook and Google’s recent track records I can only assume that this is mostly a PR exercise.

Yahoo! Getting OpenID?

Simon Willison has noticed that Flicker photostream pages now have rel links to an as yet inactive OpenID 2 identity provider. He also highlights the important point that it appears that Yahoo! (owners of Flickr) are developing a general OpenID infrastructure that can be used by their other properties, augmenting their proprietary BBAuth scheme.

This is A Good Thing.

Medieval Helpdesk.

A bit of Friday fun, this one should ring true for anyone who has ever had to introduce a new technology to a family member, friend, colleague or (worse of all) a boss. From Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) way back in 2001 (thanks Liz!):

The Future of Rails

Is it a Ghetto or will it Rule?  Fairly diverse opinions (understatement!) but I think I’ll side with Tim on this one

Taking Personal Data Out Of Social Networks?

As we’ve seen recently screen scraping Facebook pages violates their Facebook Terms Of Use.  Dare suggests that the Facebook Platform APIs can be used to get some (but not all) of a users data but I think he’s forgetting about the conditions governing Storable Information which does not permit storing friends IDs (amongst other things).  Also, in order to use the Facebook Platform in the first place, developers have to agree to the Developer Terms Of Service which clearly indicate that any data gathered (above and beyond that defined as Storable Information) while using the Facebook APIs can only be stored for 24 hours (section 2.A.4).  The TOS definition of a data repository is fairly all-encompassing:

any spreadsheet, database, physical document, server, network, or other repository of information, whether centralized or distributed.

Pretty all-encompassing eh!  I’ll bet there are more than a few facebook applications that are actively breaking this term of service. (Aside: The 24 hour restriction can be avoided if, and only if, the application explicitly asks the user to opt-in - see section 2.A.6. I wonder does the OutSync tool that Dare uses do that?) 

I am of course picking bones here - I could go on but enough said about the minutiae of Facebook legal mumbo-jumbo.  A much bigger and much more important question is. How did we end up in the situation whereby we need to take personal data out of social networks?  The answer of course is that we allow multiple web services and social networks to indefinitely store overlapping subsets of our personal data as they see fit.

Let me put it another way - what would happen if we inverted the location of your personal data?  What if social networks had to (periodically) contact your identity provider to get your personal information and social graph? Then this type of problem would not exist and everyone would have far greater data and service portability. 

However, there are several large barriers to this happening:

• We don’t yet have an established global identity scheme for storing the critical personal and social graph information that social network websites need to operate.  OpenID and OAuth provide the low level plumbing for such a scheme but a  higher level standardized portable personal information protocol is required to allow 3rd parties to find out more about a user with an OpenID.
• Assuming the above existed, it would be impossibly difficult for 99% of the internet users to manage/use/understand unless it (their identity service) was managed on their behalf by the organization their work for or their broadband provider.  I was going to initially say ‘was built into their OS’ but nowadays people use multiple computers that have no fixed public internet address so that’s not even close to an option.
• No large social network will ever willingly volunteer to support this.  Legislation/Regulation will be required to force the existing social networks to evolve onto this identity model.

The last point is probably the biggest barrier and is likely the reason why no big player is expending significant effort to developing standards for user owned identity profiles.  Given the relative lack of voice that average internet users, or even groups of users, now have (Scoble aside) legislation and/or regulation is IMHO the only way to compel the incumbents to change how the whole social network operates.

The Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis Explained

The arrival of the inevitable Irish housing market slump/slowdown has coincided with a massive global credit crunch caused by a “sub-prime mortgage crisis” in the US. There’s been lots written in the Irish press about the credit crunch and the effects on the domestic housing market but understanding why the crisis developed in the first place is best explained by this eye-opening BBC article. One amazing nugget in this article relates to the collapse of the housing market Cleveland. The graphs are amazing but the mere fact that “Deutsche Bank Trust, acting on behalf of bondholders, was the largest property owner in the city.” is amazing.

I wonder will the guys at DaftWatch or The Property Pin start doing heat maps of repossessions in Ireland.

Google Knol

There’s an interesting comment from Mark Pilgrim on Tim Bray’s post on Google Knol that pretty much summarizes why I felt creeped out when I first read about Knol.

Google dominance of the search market along with their current moves to monetize the average users second click seems to leave other web content producers at a disadvantage. Perhaps there is nothing to worry about but when you own the primary entry point to the web that so many use and when there is so little transparency…