Ross Mayfield's Weblog

No REST for the Wary

Over at the Socialtext blog, Chris Dent has a really geeky post for those with more APIs than business cards.  Our team has been playing with our new toys to create such things as a filesystem, a multi-wiki search interface or a Ruby on Rails client that was built in a couple of hours.

Office 2.0

Ismael Ghalimi is not only becoming the leading Office 2.0 blogger, covering small-scale productivity with zeal, he has turned it into a conference.  While I hope this doesn't mean that in the future everyone will be fameous for their own conference, the event has shaped up into something great.  I'm speaking alongside:

• Rod Boothby, Manager, Ernst & Young, [Blog]
• Jeff Clavier, Managing Partner, SoftTech VC, [Blog]
• Nik Cubrilovic, CEO, Omnidrive, [Blog]
• Scott Dietzen, President and CTO, Zimbra, [Blog]
• Konstantin Guericke, Vice President of Marketing, LinkedIn, [Blog]
• Kaliya Hamlin, Network Director, Planetwork, [Blog]
• Jason Lemkin, CEO, EchoSign, [Blog]
• Ivaylo Lenkov, CEO, SiteKreator, [Blog]
• Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext, [Blog]
• Jeffrey McManus, CEO, Approver, [Blog]
• Oren Michels, CEO, Mashery, [Blog]
• Jeff Nolan, Evangelist, SAP, [Blog]
• Tom Snyder, President, iNetOffice, [Blog]
• Jason Roberts, CEO, Preezo, [Blog]
• Narendra Rocherolle, Principal, 83 Degrees, [Blog]
• Raju Vegesna, CEO, Zoho, [Blog]
• Charlie Wood, CEO, Spanning Partners, [Blog]
• Ray Wu, Director, Venture Management, HP, [Blog]
• David Young, CEO, Joyent, [Blog]

Not suprising these days that every speaker has a blog.

Hi, I'm the Prince of Azeroth. Let's Network

BusinessWeek has a funny ego piece about my playing World of Warcraft in their issue on competition.  Like Tom, I have issues with a game that provides negative incentives for real life and have paired back my playtime.  But the game has been rewarding beyond the game itself.

One small correction, Joi Ito was the one who brought together the We Know guild.  And the phrase Warcraft is the New Golf should be attributed.

Events this Week

We are playing host to Web Montag tonight at Socialtext, come by for demos.  Das ist gut.

Web Monday is an informal gathering (in and around Germany) aimed at bringing together developers, designers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, researchers, web pioneers, inventors, bloggers, podcasters, end users and other folks interested in web 2.0 (in the broadest sense). The goal is to better connect the German web 2.0 scene as well as improve transatlantic idea exchange between Germany and the US (and – hopefully – help bring some of those good Silicon Valley vibes to Germany).

There's that damn Bowling 2.0 thing going on tonight too.

If you are going to LinuxWorld this week, as I am, stop on by our booth (#215) for a treat.  If you can't make the megaconference, the LinuxWorld Wiki is here.

The Wiki is not a Dump Truck

It is a series of people.

Enterprise 2.0 Think Tank Session

Participating today in a think tank session on Enterprise 2.0 hosted by SAP.  When I asked if the event was [ x ] bloggable, they agreed, but also gave the ability for someone to say something is explicitly Not Bloggable.  Susan Duggan from SVWIC came up with a great way to express this, Nota Bene is the new Not Bloggable.

NB! blah, blah, redacted, etc.

The first session was a talk by Jeff Nolan, which is inherently bloggable. This will fundamentally change the way that we build and distribute software.  This is software designed for users.  To me, everything is networked so the idea of something being bloggable is fundamental.

If you were going to start a company today, to get VC funding it would be

• Web 2.0 in nature
• Built on the LAMP stack
• SaaS delivry
• Rely on "community" for development or adoption
• Have "r" in the name...Flickr, Zoomr, GTalkr, Taggr, Twttr, Wankr

Within SAP not much has been done officially, but there are lots of smart people looking at this.  No broad adoption of scripting languages, which is an essential component, but Craig Cmehil on SDN has some toolkits and there are great examples of these leveraging Netweaver, for actual company value.  We need to aggressively adopt scripting languages. 

SOA is dead, Web 2.0 is what matters -- SOA benefits are for people who are publishing software, Web 2.0 benefits are for people who actually use your software.

Mashups?  What's a mashup?  In the consumer world, you are really doing some data integration for a service.  But in our world, a mashup is doing process integration.

REST: Representational State Transfer, is HTML + XML without SOAP, with a stateless client/server protocol -- and essential building block for Web 2.0 when combined with scripting.  State doesn't scale to consumer level volumes.  Instead every message can be self contained.

SAP Challenges.  We really don't relying on other people's code.  We think software has to be complex -- if it is important, it has to be hard, and dammit people are going to have to go through training to use it.  Whole generations of users coming into our clients expecting something different. We don't harness network effects.  Turning your app into a platform is making it easy for people to build things you could never anticipate.  We will give you, the lead user, 80% of the solution and let you innovate on top of us.  Today, people need permission to do this with SAP.  Network enable your applications.  Enable data sharing and data defaults. Linkify everything.  Syndicate your content.  Turn your app into a platform.  Open up and build a viral social architecture. 

SAP has some amazing assets to leverage for our benefit, and we would be foolish not to do it.  Some really cool services apps have been built and prototypes (Duet, Muse, Torrent).  The volume of conversation about Web 2.0 is rising dramatically.  What if Zimbra wants to create a new experience on top of SAP.

There is a technical infrastructure, economic model, development ideology, licensing models and delivery model for the Web -- but little has to do with technology.

Ending open question: How does our business model get blown apart when we let people innovate and repackage our services?

Disclosure: SAP Ventures is an investor in my company, Socialtext.

Ethics Gone Wild

Paul Kedrosky takes a look at Girls Gone Wild.  Or rather, the actions of the entrepreneur behind it, and raises the question -- is there such a thing as entrepreneurship morality?

I tried to comment, but got an error, so posting it here (consider this a disclaimer for not writing more on what could be a very big subject).

Does business have a morality? No, but it has ethics.  Although you can get lost in definitions.

Social entrepreneurship is class of business with a fairly well defined set of ethics. It is also a investment thesis (pornotube.com is an ethical thesis to the contrary).

Enterpreneurship is like many professions without institutional barriers to entry (e.g. PR, and yes, Venture Capital, increasingly in the hedge fund age) -- ethics will be defined in industry groups, in some cases to gain advantage.  In most cases, explicit normative development only happens when egregious errors impact the community.  Then they act out of profit motive and perhaps before regulation is called for.

Enterprise Wikimania

Sunday morning I was on a great panel about enterprise wikis with Josh Bancroft, Ned Gulley, Michael Idinopulos, Karim Lakhani and Andrew McAfee. The panel was a true conversation, drawing in equal contributions from the audience. Andy's takeaway was that with a freeform enterprise wiki you can positively accept contributions because it is different behind the firewall:

Ross Mayfield said that in four years of building wikis for corporations Socialtext has seen precisely 0 trolls and 0 instances of vandalism.  I was astonished by this and polled the entire room.  No one reported even a single instance of counterproductive behavior on the wiki. 

As I've written before, one of the advantages the Intranet has over the Internet is that people within companies share a culture and norms, and are usually quite reluctant to overturn them.  In addition, vandals and trolls can usually be easily identified behind the firewall.  So perhaps I shouldn't have been so suprised that employees aren't using corporate wikis to act out.

The zero bad behavior (so far) can also be seen as an indicator that people are more often than not, good.

My takeaway was a general consensus that while the tool matters, practices make wikis work and we need to share more.  Socialtext shares best practices openly to advance broader adoption.  The audience asked for way for the conversation to continue, and for resources mentioned be available. 

Of course, we set up a wiki: https://www.socialtext.net/ewikimania

 

Web 1.0 Pitch

Victorious!
Originally uploaded by eekim.

Last night Eugene and I won the Web 1.0 VC pitch judged by Mitch Kapor, Brewster Kahle and Jack Herrick. Our pitch was a B2B exchange for trading bandwidth derivatives...but I think we won by speaking the loudest.

WYSIWYG and Wikis

Notes from a technical session at Wikimania on WYSIWYG.

Christoph Sauer questions if WYSIWYG is a good thing, based on his experience with a wiki within his technical university in Germany and creating WikiWizard.  Leslie Lamport (helped create LaTeX) in 1987 wrote a paper called Document Production: Visual or Logical (pdf).  Visual is you see is what you get, Logical is what you see is what you mean.  A Canadian study, "Are Wikis Usable?" (pdf) with 4th grade students showed the biggest issue (49%) was link creation and management (understanding hypertext). 

Wiki Markup cons:

• "This is not for me," or people have to learn how to use it.  They just know Word.  There is no explorative usage.
• "Text processing of the old days."  A "sea of monospaced letters," losing overview in simple text editors
• "Wiki markup mess" or no standard for markup

WYSIWYG was developed for printing a document or using the same word processor.  But what about sending an email?  Will people see it the same way you sent it?  What if you copy and paste content between wikis, CMS, documents...what if the CSS layout changes over time and what if your article is published and is effected by a medium changes, or your audience changes (disabilities). 

Frederik Brooks Prediction in 1986: We will not see advances of scale in programming until we seperate accidental tasks from essential tasks.  Transferring this to web authoring: the accidental task is formatting layout, the essential task is information + basic structure (emphasis and linking).  Wiki markup is part of the essence of a document -- teach the public!

Wiki Markup Pros:

• Concentrating onthe content.  For the author a clean seperaation of layout and content, no typographical errors. 
• Context sensitive display: reader and designer have homogeneous design.
• Speed.  The tool for knowledge workers, e.g. bloggers don't lose the "flow"  No time for formatting.
• Simplicity.  Allows easy evolving of wikis, e.g. scripting.

He gives a demo of an editor that is like the Wikitext mode of Wikiwyg.  You can use familiar tool bars to add formatting, and you see the commands to do so, so people learn Wikitext as they use.  But it also formats on the fly like WYSIWYG mode.  It also has a table editor and a outline view.  Suggests standardizing on three image sizes for image uploads. (Someone asked about adding license info for images, I suggested looking at Greg Elin's Fotonotes) It does a basic paste from Word function.

His core argument: we should have an alternative to both extremes (I agree).  A forward looking vision would be computer literacy that involves undersanding the difference between the model and the view, and keep extending punctuation.  He also wants people to work towards a WikiMarkupStandard.

I can't really disagree with Chris' findings.  Ingy once called WYSIWYG within Wikiwyg "training wheels."  I like WikiWizard's dynamic display, but wonder how big of a payload it is and think it needs more editing modes to be usable.  Our usability interviews showed a tremendous uptake in adoption from introducing Wikiwyg and believe multiple edit modes and simplicity of the editor make a big difference.