The Real McCrea

Adobe is opening up Flash (a bit)…

VentureBeat reports:

“Adobe’s goal … is to create a consistent runtime environment for applications running on computers, televisions, mobile devices and consumer electronics.”

And, according to ReadWriteWeb:

“Adobe will be releasing the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv/f4v) and removing all licensing restrictions involved with the Flash format.”

Time for a “golf clap,” I say. Cheerio.

As a veteran of open standards for the Web, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Flash. It really delivers on the promise of the Web as a new medium, especially in applications like YouTube. Honestly, it blows my mind, and I love it. If only it weren’t proprietary.

Do you know how it all happened? Macromedia bought a little company with a vector-graphics runtime.

According to Wikipedia:

“To jumpstart its web strategy, the company made two acquisitions in 1996. First, Macromedia acquired FutureWave Software, makers of FutureSplash Animator, an animation tool originally designed for pen-based computing devices. Because of the small size of the FutureSplash viewer application, it was particularly suited for download over the Web, where at the time most users had low-bandwidth connections. Macromedia renamed Splash to Macromedia Flash, and following the lead of Netscape, distributed the Flash Player as a free browser plugin in order to quickly gain market share.”

Then, somehow, they got Netscape to bundle the Flash runtime with their browser. And it was that magical/crazy moment in the “browser wars” that created the conditions for something truly unprecedented to happen. Microsoft blinked.

Yep. The browser was to be the “new OS.” That made everything Web-related life-or-death for Microsoft. What should Microsoft do in response to Netscape integrating some random vector graphics animation runtime? Quick, quick, copy them and cut a deal to get that thing into our browser!

I was working at that time to get broad adoption of a competing vector graphics format, one that had the benefit of being truly open, but that’s another story…

And so Flash became a ubiquitous “standard” of the Web.

Fast forward 15 or so years. Microsoft is head-butting Adobe with Silverlight. And so we see “Adobe Open Screen.”

CNET shines a spotlight on the tussle between competing “write once, run anywhere” visions. Thank you.

More on the Flash vs. Silverlight battle at ComputerWorld.

I wonder what Marc Canter, godfather of opening up the Social Web thinks about all this?

I was heartened by a piece from the BBC, about how the Web is still in it’s early days, a piece done to mark the 15th anniversary of “the day the web’s code was put into the public domain by CERN.”

I feel so blessed to have been a part of the Web from the earliest of days. I came down to Silicon Valley (from Portland) at the beginnings of the ’90’s to go to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, after having a born-again-capitalist epiphany upon the fall of the Berlin Wall. (I had led a decidedly non-capitalist ’80’s, for sure.)

And I am about to have my 15th year reunion this weekend, so am in a reflective mood. Shortly after graduation, I landed at Silicon Graphics, then the hottest company in the Valley, where I ended up leading the effort to develop the first turnkey web server and the first WYSIWYG HTML editor, under the first “web” brand anywhere, “WebFORCE.”

I have to say, from the moment I first saw the Web, I was a believer that this was something of extraordinary proportions and potential impact.

As for whether the Web is in its infancy or not, I have to confess that I really like what Tim O’Reilly said at the recent Web 2.0 Expo, that the phase we are in the midst of is as important to humanity as the emergence of writing and reading and the coming together of societies in cities. While that might strike many as Silicon Valley hype, I have to say that I agree.

Human intelligence is about to ride the Moore’s Law curve in a way that was not possible before the emergence of the Social Web. Computing in the cloud, together with wisdom of (your) crowd, will make you smarter, more knowledgable, and more capable of withstanding the jarring changes coming down the pike.

For a little bit of (awkward) fun, here’s a link to the short video clip that I had developed for the press conference in January of 1995 to introduce the WebFORCE product line. Yes, it looks cheesy in retrospect, and the phrasing is clearly stilted. That said, there were many around me who maintained the notion that the Web was nothing much to get excited about, a frivolous diversion from the things that really matter.

Here’s to 15 years of proving them wrong, and to many more to come!

UPDATE: Here’s another image I found of the WebFORCE Indy (motto: “To Author and To Serve”)

As is our want, those of us who spend a fair bit of time blogging and tweeting like to jump on any juicy story about blogs or Twitter, and Kara Swisher has certainly served up one that everyone can sink their teeth into, including Robert Scoble, Sara Lacy, Larry Dignan, Jeff Clavier, and Dan Farber, to name a few. Her piece, entitled, “Twitter: Where Nobody Knows Your Name,” reveals the results of an informal survey she did of 100 people at a wedding on the East Coast. The finding? These decidely non-Silicon Valley folk hadn’t even heard of Twitter. The horror!

In many ways, I didn’t find that shocking. Twitter skews very much early adopter at the moment. It’s loudest advocates are professional bloggers, who use it to get an edge on their clay-footed rivals of “old media.” Just this weekend, I was at a dinner party in Silicon Valley, attended by a small cadre of startup folks whose experience runs deep in the enterprise software sector (not the consumer Internet funhouse). One person, who is now stepping over into the consumer space, asked my opinion of Twitter. Before I could answer, two people asked, “What’s Twittter?”!

So, should Twitter employees or investors be worried? I don’t think so. This service has legs. In terms of potential, I would liken it a bit to Yahoo! in 1994. Over the course of that summer, Yahoo! provided an early adopter crowd an invaluable way to discover the blossoming world of the Web.

But for those who hadn’t yet downloaded Mosaic and started “surfing” the Web (with the help of Yahoo!), the whole thing smacked of ridiculous. Free software. Services with silly names. And a bunch of fairly crude sites to poke around on at modem speed. It was all too easy to miss the potential of the new medium.

I believe that we are right now on the cusp of the Social Web, a massive transformation of the Internet via a new set of services that bring who-you-know to any website or application. It’s really hard to predict which of today’s early Social Web tools will be the next Yahoo!, Google, eBay, or Amazon, but I am fairly confident some of the new crop of Twitter, FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse, Pownce, Jaiku, or for that matter, the big kids down the block, Facebook, will graduate to the Big Leagues.

My advice? Keep an eye on that Twitter thing.

Also, Mathew Ingram makes an apt comparison between Twitter and ICQ’s early days.

P.S. While writing this, I reminded myself of the early days of Yahoo! with this nice little history. One anecdote that it omits, which I think is true, is that after Sequoia’s Mike Moritz funded David and Jerry, they started to look for a “real name.” Mike, a big fan of short memorable company names, said something like, “If you change the name, I’ll take our money back!”

Tonight, Louis Gray shared his “media consumption workflow”…

As my regular readers know, I am a proponent of the notion that we are in the midst of a profound transformation in media, a seismic shift as the Web becomes “social.” If I’m right, the pace of change is about to accelerate dramatically, as an open Social Web unleashes a wave of innovation as significant as what we saw in 1994 and 1995. This time around, it will be sites, applications, and devices that harness a new “who-you-know” layer of the Internet.

Not surprisingly, as this major wave begins its swell, the suite of social media technologies and tools available to us is evolving rapidly. RSS, readers, blogging, microblogging, aggregators. Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Plaxo Pulse, Seesmic, Thwirl, FriendFeed. Keeping up all these things sometimes feels like a full-time job.

As the tools available to us expands, each of us must find his or her own way forward. And, since the core of the transformation is social, we’re probably all well served by sharing our own lessons learned along the way. That’s the spirit behind a post this weekend by one of the rising voices in the blogosphere, Louis Gray, entitled, “My Social Media Consumption Workflow.”

His post inspired me to take a moment to share my own social media workflow — and how it’s been changing.

I confess, I’m a bit of a latecomer to blogging and to RSS. I have not (yet) become a user of a “reader” (other than the lifestream aggregators, which leverage RSS, but abstract that away by surfacing the notion of subscribing to people, rather than content feeds). Before last summer, when we launched Pulse over at my company, Plaxo, I viewed blogs as things that I read and sometimes commented upon, and I was obsessed with using blog search tools, like Google News and Technorati, to see what was being blogged about on subjects I cared about. Soon, I was heading further down the pathway, blogging myself, following hundreds of people’s lifestreams in Pulse, and then, Twitter!

So, how do I start my day now?

I fire up the browser, and open up a series of tabs: my blog, Techmeme, Twitter search engine Summize, Plaxo Pulse, Twitter.

Why my blog first? Advice from Jeremiah Owyang, who, early in my blogging days, encouraged me to take my blog seriously, and to start each and every day looking at the metrics.

Then, Techmeme — to see at a quick glance what the top tech “memes” are. At a minimum, that let’s me know if my day is to be consumed with controversy (as it was early in January during what came to be called “Scoblegate”). It also lets me see emerging stories that are relevant to my readers, and that I might want to embrace and write about. These are typically items related to the opening up of the Social Web, such as when a large player implements OpenID, Oauth, or microformats.

I then quickly pop over to Summize and do searches on my name and my company’s name, again to see if either trouble or opportunity is brewing. I love this tool, and I love how people in the Twittersphere react to outreach from strangers. (I need to do a separate post on the “return of civility” that Twitter is bringing about.)

From there, I head over to the tabs for Pulse and Twitter.

In Pulse, I get the lifestreams of people I know fairly well. The joy comes from seeing stuff from my family, my co-workers, and my real-world friends. Increasingly, though, I am finding key nuggets from people I don’t know all that well, such as seeing whenever Louis Gray comments on a blog that uses Disqus for its comment management.

In Twitter, I never know what I’m going to find. For me, it’s a bit like a party, full of randomness and social play. Many of the people I follow in Twitter I don’t actually know. (Although, over time, I come to feel that I do.) Twitter tells me what’s bubbling up, long before it gets on Techmeme.

One other tool I use, but don’t start my day with, is FriendFeed. It’s and aggregator that is very popular with the A-list bloggers and Twitterati, so it, like Twitter and Techmeme, offers a good insight into rising memes.

Okay, enough for now. Who knows how I’ll be using all this stuff next month, or which new tool will get added to my kit?

Today was a great day at Web 2.0 Expo. There was a *huge* turnout and lots of interest in the meme of “opening up the Social Web”. The topic gave rise to many talks and panels, and was featured prominently in a keynote by no less than Tim O’Reilly himself.

Joseph Smarr of Plaxo (a guru of all things “open”) brought his A-Game to a presentation on the emergence of the open Social Web. He laid out a vision for an ecosystem with the user at the center, an explosive growth in the number of socially-enabled sites, and intermediating between the user and those sites, a new service layer, comprised of identity providers, content aggregators, and (the missing piece of the puzzle) social graph providers.

His talk got rave reviews in the Twittersphere (and in “meat space”). I captured most of it on video, so will share various nuggets. Here’s the first clip I’ve uploaded, where Joseph lays down the vision for the ecosystem:

Joseph’s post on his talk, including a link to download his slides, is here.