The more I sit and contemplate MobileMe, the more impressed I am of its sheer audacity.
Apple decided to suddenly unleash this product to the world whose purpose is to keep your data in sync no matter where in the world you are, no matter which machine you happen to be using, no matter which operating system you happen to be sitting in front of. Marketing aside, pushing this data all around is one pretty heavy feat.
MobileMe: just a slicker (but still broken) .Mac?
It's not an easy thing to do. Look at MobileMe's launch, which was plagued with problems for days (weeks if you include the email issues some users faced). Amazon's tried the cloud computing for a year or two now, and they've had some well-publicized downtime. Google's just starting its own foray into the market with Google AppEngine, and they've had some issues as well, possibly to a greater extent than Amazon due to its role as the newcomer.
The problem is that the classic SLA mentality that has stuck with web hosting for the last decade or so just doesn't mesh with the idea of the cloud. Your website goes down, it sucks for you and your visitor. S3 goes down and it sucks hard for you, your visitors, your competitors, their visitors, your favorite social networking site, all of its visitors, and so on. It's the classic centralized/decentralized problem: in a decentralized model the reliability of the system is unmatched, and in a centralized system you gain in terms of efficiency and performance. On top of that, MobileMe has a special consideration: if it bombs more than a beached failwhale and things like your phone contacts get lost on your iPhone, people are going to be pissed off. Business information is one thing, but with MobileMe tackling personal information — phone numbers, photos, calendars — some really important data is at stake.
Let's talk storage
So let's assume that MobileMe will sort out the kinks and maintain a relatively workable uptime. Once it gets reliable and Apple has the ability to scale and maintain the cloud, some really interesting things can happen. One of the most audacious is ubiquitous media. My 16GB iPhone can certainly hold a large amount of music (remember, the first generation iPod started at five gigabytes). But even with that amount of space available right now, it's going to be awhile until I can squeeze my nearly 300GB iTunes library onto one device. For the last three to four years we've been playing the scaling game. First we scale hard drives (jumping from 1st generation iPod's 5GB to today's 160GB iPod Classic). Then we scale flash memory (from a 1GB iPod Nano to today's 32GB iPod Touch). We've been so reliant on the increasing expansion of storage that we've missed sight of some other bigger possibilities. With Wi-Fi built into every Touch and Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity in iPhones, we're hitting the point where you really don't need to have all of your media in pocket as long as you can access it. Last.fm has pushed out a pretty innovative iPhone app that lets you stream recommendations to you (or stream your actual library to you if you pay for their premium service). Pandora also has made a perhaps superior iPhone app that also lets you stream recommended music to your iPod. Just today, Simplify Media released their app that brings you even closer to this ubiquitous ideal; set up their software and you actually can stream your very songs from your Mac or PC at home. It still could be quite some time before Apple could reach the point of supporting such a bold strategy, but the foundations are being built: Back to My Mac keeps track of your devices and lets you talk directly to them no matter where they (or you) are, iTunes is getting better at streaming between iPhones and iPods and Apple TVs and Macs, the MobileMe cloud is starting to be reliably scaled, and with iPhone 3G we can start reaching a state of ubiquitous high speed connections for music streaming.
At that point, it's not a big stretch to imagine video, documents, perhaps even scaled-down (or full?) applications running in parallel between an iPhone and a Mac at home. Why do you need to somehow figure out a way to sync your personal finance desktop app over USB with your mobile app when you could just shoot updates between the two over the cloud? We've been struggling for decades to hit some sort of thin client utopia, but seemingly no one could figure out a good way to make the jump into mobile. Bill Gates has been pushing speech recognition and the Tablet PC for at least a decade, and even though it has produced some cool stuff, we haven't nearly met the visions that Gates and Microsoft themselves had made for the late 1990's. For years, Palm was getting closer and closer... its platform was perpetually two years away from making the leap from business mobile needs to the normal consumer, thus bringing about a revolutionary new way of life. Never happened. Even today, hundreds of whiz-bang web 2.0 sites are struggling to fill this niche that everyone knows will be conquered but at the same time no one has the slightest idea how to go about it. Microsoft had the desktop but not the mobile device. Palm had the device but not the desktop. Today's websites have the cloud but not much else.
Bringing it together
Maybe Apple's in the best position to finally crack this nut. They seem to be holding or trying to acquire all of the cards. Their mobile device is fresh, new, and most importantly, selling. Their traditional desktop business is blooming, and even if their Mac business collapses tomorrow, MobileMe works on a PC, too. And MobileMe is the cloud that, while new, aims to unify everything else. You could make even make the argument that if MobileMe itself collapses tomorrow, Apple could still be in a good position to succeed here: those whiz-bang web 2.0 sites, while mostly harmless, are onto something big. MobileSafari (and WebKit, in a broader sense) is literally pushing web development every step of the way. If Google Apps ultimately win out, or Microsoft's forays succeed, or SuprCuilBetaSpaceAwesome 2.3 comes out of nowhere and takes the world by storm, Apple is still in a good position with a solid mobile browser to build on top of the winning platform.
IBM vs. Apple is dead. Apple vs. Microsoft is dead. Microsoft vs. Apple is dead. Microsoft vs. Netscape is dead. The early part of the millennium left us broke, stagnant, and without a Great battle. The browser wars were finished, search was just starting to get re-invented, and we were a bit shell-shocked from the blistering pace of innovation during the nineties. Even four years ago you could do some digging and find a general feeling of "oh, well, things are always interesting in the technology sector, but the glory days are behind us". We might not reach the days of the bubble again (for better or worse), but it's shaping up to be a battle of epic proportions: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, the countless bright-eyed entrepreneurs in the Valley and around the world. It's hard to count anyone out at this point. Each of those four companies + startups are the type of places that tend to attract the smartest, most energetic employees in the world. They're led by bright people that understand technology who have been through rough times before. It's not Xerox pissing away PARC redux or HP ignoring Woz and his invention or IBM not really caring about the implication of a couple of nerds selling some sort of OS.
It's going to be an exciting decade.
Facebook just launched their previously-rumored IM functionality. It offers the opportunity to chat with your facebook friends in real-time over the network in your browser.
The walled garden approach
Kottke mentioned in the past that Facebook is the new AOL. Over the last few years, they've taken increasingly greater steps towards the walled garden approach: sure, interact with our users, but only if you do it via our proprietary methods. AOL neglected HTML in favor of RAINMAN. For Facebook, you have to dive into a world of FBML and FQL. It's a tradeoff between consistency and flexibility, to be sure, but the discussion of the viability of a closed system like Facebook applications on an open system like the internet is rather substantial and best left to a different blog post entirely.
Facebook and AOL diverge
After an interesting few years of back-and-forth battling, AOL eventually ditched their walled-garden approach for their IM protocol and moved towards some openness by publishing guidelines to OSCAR for 3rd party projects like Pidgin or Trillian to use. It could be argued that the growth and ubiquity of the AIM network is sustained through the ability to run AIM over Trillian, Adium, iChat, and others. My entire generation (say, those in college right now) tends to use AIM nearly exclusively, with few of my personal friends using the official AIM client itself.
The thing that's interesting about today's development is that Facebook has diverged from AOL's model, albeit in a backwards way. Facebook Chat uses their existing web interface to deliver their new functionality. Whereas AOL moved from walled garden to tentative openness, Facebook moved from walled garden to, well, walled garden. You can only chat while on facebook.com, you can't use it via their Facebook iPhone/mobile apps, and you can't use a third-party app to interface with the network.
The limitations of a closed IM network
This is a relatively new thing, at least for me. I've dabbled on most major networks: AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Jabber, and Bonjour. The common link between them all is that they're all based on relatively open protocols, at least to the point where you can use them in an Adium or a Trillian. If there was a closed IM network, they at least provided desktop functionality. Facebook doesn't. A straight web-only interface makes it difficult to really be a viable communication medium.
There are a few reasons why I enjoy Adium (though my arguments will likely apply to Pidgin or iChat or whatever your flavor of IM client). For one, I'm a habitual conversation history tracker. I have logs dating back six or seven years. It's helpful to me—I can't tell you how many times someone says something, I close the conversation and immediately forget which time I was supposed to meet them or the line of code I was supposed to check out. Facebook logs your conversations between sessions but not permanently, supposedly (Facebook, as its customary style, is fairly ominously-vague when it comes to your personal information and longevity).
Secondly, you lose out on the natural behavior of your operating system. I actually just received an IM from a friend right now. How did I know? I'm in a different Space in OS X, so my IM windows aren't visible. It's because of OS behaviors that, as a user, you grow accustomed to. Step one: I hear my normal IM ding. Step two: I get my Adium duck flapping its wings on my Dock, with a OS X-standard "1" icon superimposed on the Adium icon, signaling to me that I have one message to check out. Step three: I get a growl notification that tells me the sender and their message, if I want to bother to check that section of my screen before command+tabbing over to Adium to actually read or respond. Beyond that, there's a multitude of OS-specific behaviors you expect: on a Mac, I expect command+W to kill the current conversation tab, shift+command+]/shift+command+[ to tab between conversations, and hey, Adium does a great job with interacting with Address Book to grab user icons and first and last names. You don't get any of this with Facebook Chat.
Even the web interface isn't very standard. For one you have to remain on facebook.com to receive messages, you have to resist a stale session (after 10 minutes or so you're auto-logged out unless you visit another page), and some pages don't even work (try the "People You May Know") link on the main page.
Open and shut case
With these limitations, it might not surprise you to learn that I'm not too enthused about Facebook Chat's prospects. I can't really see it being much more than a "hey, I'm in a cluster on campus and can't get on AIM or MSN... here's the info you wanted". I don't necessarily see it as taking the place of existing networks, particularly because it's so closed. Not only is it web-only—you can't use it with Adium—but it's also Facebook-only—you can only use it with your Facebook friends. That kills prospects of those who want their IM handle public and don't want to have to befriend every user.
Google ran into similar circumstances with GTalk: they gave easy web access to GMail users to talk to existing email contacts, but at the same time pushed open and accessible Jabber standards to allow interoperability. If Facebook wants to really push Facebook Chat (which, since they tossed a floating div on the bottom of every one of their pages, seems to suggest this), they would be smart to take a move out of Google's handbook and add some open operability to their network.
Great post by Dan Grossman today about Google's actions in penalizing sites who happen to sell a few text links on the side. I don't have too much to add to Dan's thoughts; it's a conundrum from a technical standpoint that Google can't tackle this without a penalty, and it's a conundrum from a policy standpoint that completely irrelevant AdSense ads on my page are okay but topical, more relevant links that happen to be paid ads are uncool.
Perhaps it's indicative of Google's search capabilities lately. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Google and their work, but I've been a bit less than thrilled about their search progress lately. Ask.com in particular has been burning the midnight oil to try to differentiate themselves and improve, but Google has remained the same for ages. The stripped down, straightforward aspect of Google is their trademark (for good reason), but I've been running into more and more less-than-helpful results in Google lately. Just some idle thoughts for today.
A few things happened today that I can finally talk about. Google announced the Google Lunar X Prize, which is a form of the X Prize that is targeted towards getting a privately-funded robot on the moon. It's a $20 million prize for the first group to do it, with additional prizes for runner-ups.
My university, Carnegie Mellon, has been at the forefront of robotics for decades. The Red Team robots have done really well at the DARPA Grand Challenge the past few years, and Carnegie Mellon's going to be fielding Boss in the new DARPA Urban Challenge later this year. Naturally, this is right down our alley.
A few hours after Google announced the Lunar X Prize, CMU announced their participation. About a week ago I was recruited to toss up a website for the CMU Moon Prize Team, so that's what I've been doing the last week or so. It's all very exciting stuff- some of the possibilities are very interesting, even for us non-robotics folk out there. Live video streaming from the surface of the moon, using the robot as an email server, letting web users drive the robot, interacting via different communication options for visitors to the website, and so on. It's not your old-school Apollo 11 mission anymore. This is something that could really be an eye-opener for your average guy who can hop online. It'll be interesting to see how this might change the public's perception of space travel.
I know this is rather old news by now, but I recently went in and checked by Feedburner stats on who's watching my feeds, and was greeted by:
Needless to say, a little suprising. Turns out Google added reader stats so that apps like Feedburner can figure out how many readers you have at Google. Interesting stuff... kind of interesting at how many people use RSS nowadays. (Note to self: try not to muck up the Good-Tutorials RSS feed any time soon!)