The Real McCrea

I wrote last night a bit about Google’s just-launched App Engine. Quite frankly, I sensed it was something big, but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I needed a night to reflect and a chance to hear how folks who were at the announcement thought about it. So far, I think the best analysis is from David Recordon. I highly recommend his post on the subject, which includes:

“During the presentation, I tweeted, “Thinking App Engine with Google Accounts integration is a threat to both Facebook Platform and OpenSocial. Metaphor shift.” I thought a decent amount, well at least a few seconds, before I SMS’d that, since I knew it would be lacking quite a bit of context.”

Similar thoughts from Silicon Valley Insider, sealed the deal for me. Something big is going on here. With App Engine, Google is changing the rules of the the platform wars, in a way that is consistent with the vision behind Open Social. I do think the relevent competing platform is not Amazon or Microsoft, but rather Facebook. App Engine is infrastructure for accelerating the emergence of the next generation of applications for the Social Web. Smart move, me thinks.

Not everyone sees the startegic threat to Facebook, though.

As to whether this move is in line with the vision of “open,” it’s worth hearing a strong voice of dissent from a company that may feel the competitive threat of App Engine more directly than anyone else, Joyent.

The platform space is heating up again, which I think is a good sign for Silicon Valley. Back in the day, it was often a question of the Microsoft monopoly vs. any-and-all alternatives. Netscape made the suicidal strategic decision to pick a platform battle with Microsoft, poking a stick in the sleeping bear’s eye, when, instead, they should have simply risen on the Web wave and leveraged their default-homepage-advantage for as long as possible, without creating any enemies. In parallel, Sun hyped Java as an alternative the OS juggernaut, but we can now see in hindsight that the browser and Java were distractions to a more significant platform war: proprietary vs. open source.

With last night’s “campfire” behind us, it’s time to reflect a bit on what “platform” is relevent these days. From an opening-the-Social-Web perspective, we often think about Facebook’s platform vs. the Google-led collective effort of OpenSocial. In this domain, it is about whether one writes a social application to a single platform, to many platforms, or just once, and sees it run everywhere. (It’s the promise of Java revived for the Social Web.)

But what to make of the latest move? Google App Engine is a whole new kind of creature. It will take us all a while to digest exactly what has just happened here. Rather than tell you my early opinion, let me suggest that the real question for us all is, “Given what is happening overall, which platform war is most important?”

And a second, equally important question, is: “What is the relevant competitive set for this new platform?” That is taken up by Silicon Valley Insider’s Nate Westheimer here:

“If the Silicon Valley echo chamber wants to make up a competitor for AppEngine, its proper correlate (by a whisker) is Facebook’s F8 platform. If you must cram this new service into a pigeon hole, think of App Engine as the Facebook Platform for the grown-up web.”

What do you think? Is Google going after Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, or all three?

Also, don’t get distracted by the little tempest in the teapot…

Okay. This post is decidedly off-topic for this blog, so hardcore readers interested only in updates on the opening of the Social Web feel free to skip over…

I’m writing to comment on a story emerging not in the blogosphere, but in the world of traditional media. It is the story of changing attitudes toward — and business practices around — that necessary evil of businesses, “meetings.”

It got started with a piece in the L.A. Times by Jessica Guynn, entitled “Silicon Valley meetings go ‘topless’.” (Meaning that some companies are banning laptops and other devices from meetings.) In it, she also references a more radical innovation started by Joseph Smarr and Mark Jen at Plaxo, which seeks to banish meetings on all days, except Tuesdays:

“That frustration is so widespread that some start-ups cut meetings short or do away with them. Mountain View, Calif., Internet company Plaxo Inc. took a “meat ax” to meetings, moving them all to Tuesdays with the goal of making other days more productive. (They called it “Meataxo.”) ”

The story then spread “across the pond” to the UK, in a piece by Dan Glaister of the Guardian:

That frustration has led to yet another innovation: meeting-free companies. That too has a snappy moniker: “meataxo”, as in take a meat axe to meetings. “No-laptop meetings make sense,” Zawodny blogged. “No meetings makes more sense.”

And now, the story has jumped over from newspapers to television, in a piece by ABC News, entitled “Going Topless in the Office”.

My hat is off to Jessica Guynn for a truly viral meme!

Posts this weekend by Loic Le Meur and Michael Arrington have stirred up discussion about the emerging ecosystem of the Social Web that is the central topic of TheRealMcCrea blog. Indeed, we, too, believe that the landscape is shifting rapidly, and that the walls are coming down.

What will happen next?

For one, aggregators like FriendFeed and others, will emerge all over the place, as the barrier to creating one falls to nothing. Indeed, each week we hear of a new one.

Next, the building blocks for the Social Web will be completely assembled. Most are now already out there: OpenID, Oauth, microformats, OpenSocial, and the Social Graph API. Together, these enable the “centralized me” discussed by Loic and Michael, as well as application portability, and to some extent, data portability (microformats allowing machine readability). But the last block or two missing is that which liberates the social graph data and makes it portable (under the control of the user). Keep you eyes on that space…and prepare for an exciting 2008.

And to see a real live example of a “centralized me” brought to life via aggregration, see my public profile page on Plaxo. How was it created? Plaxo implemented support for Google’s Social Graph API, which traverses the publicly asserted linkages people make out on the web about themselves. This “rel=me” allows an application, like Pulse, to present to a user a menu of items discovered about that person out on the public web. The user, me in this case, can pick and choose which pieces to associate with my Plaxo account, and whether and how to share each feed through the Pulse aggregation and sharing system. Some feed I choose to share only with family or only with friends — or even only with a specific group of people. Others, I wish to project publicly, and these form the living foundation of my public profile.

If all of this sounds interesting to you, but you’re interested in more depth, I would suggest diving inside the heads of folks like Joseph Smarr of Plaxo and Marc Canter (who needs no introduction). They are the primary co-authors of the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web.

According to TechCrunch, one of my preferred online news sources, in a piece by Duncan Riley:

“Figures released by the Newspaper Association of America show that the decline of newspapers is more rapid than previously thought, with total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunging 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006, the biggest drop in revenue since 1950, the year they started tracking annual revenue.”

We are witnessing a major upheaval in the media landscape, as the Internet makes the print news model increasingly untenable. Printed news is expensive to produce, arrives so slowly that it can hardly be called “news” upon arrival, and is an absurd waste of trees and energy.

What does that mean? The race is on to figure out the winning model for online news. Somewhat ironically, the New York Times wades in on the topic, with a piece by Saul Hansel, entitled “PaidContent vs. TechCrunch: Two Visions of Blogging’s Future.” It might have been better titled, “Two Visions of the Future of the New York Times.”

My previous post here.

And the original source here.