Tom Conrad

We weren’t the only company to announce a platform last week. I’ll leave it to others to judge the importance of our announcement, but the more I look at what Facebook has done the more I become convinced that this is very big news, and an incredibly smart play.

The whole idea that the web needs a social platform feels very right to me. It’s ridiculous to have to re-create your social network on each and every site you encounter (flickr, linkedin, flixster, last.fm, and on and on). To have Facebook step forward and say “ok, we’re the open social network platform, come deploy your apps here against our plumbing” feels like it addresses a very real set of consumer desire.

Sure on a philosophical level it feels like the closed nature of this is perilously close to the CompuServe/Prodigy/AOL pre-Internet days and I do hope that there’s a day where some kind of open standard for these kinds of social connections solves the problem in a truly open way (FOAF++?) but until then I think Facebook has nailed it. And with 28MM engaged users they have exactly the momentum they need to be successful. I think there’s a good chance we’ll all look back at last Thursday’s announcement as the moment when Facebook truly stepped into their $2B shoes. Frankly, I suspect they’re already worth quite a bit more than that.

I think the interesting question is what happens to all the niche social networks? Sure, they can all move into a new home inside Facebook, but they’ll have to be careful to maintain some element of protectable IP. Let’s say for example that you’re a community focused around the love of movies. You move into Facebook with the new platform and start growing by leaps and bounds. How do you differentiate yourself from others with access to the same content (movie reviews, etc)? Seems tricky. Let’s say you go it on your own (don’t give your community over to the Facebook world), then how do you get people into your network? I sure would rather use a movie “app” that was deeply integrated into Facebook platform than one that wasn’t. Seems like a tricky place to be as a vertical social network. If you plug in you risk losing your real value (your network) but if you try to stay outside you miss out on the what I think will be a viral machine the likes of which we’ve not seen before. Sure seems that the social networking scene may turn out to be a winner takes all kind of situation. Should be fun to watch how all this plays out.

I met up with Robert Scoble yesterday with the plan to talk a bit about Pandora and then head over to the KFOG kaboom concert. After checking out the latest at the Apple Store we walked out to the water only to find a line of people (literally) a mile long waiting to get in. And those were the people with tickets.

We gave up and decided to head back into the city for some sushi and then managed to snag a great spot in the bar on the top floor of the Marriott hotel. Perfect view for the fireworks. I had a great time — lots of great conversation, some of which turned into several blog posts up at scobleizer.com today.

After months over a year of neglect, I’m shutting down my blogger account and moving to WordPress. Glad you managed to find me here. I’ve imported everything from blogger-land… looking forward to starting over here.

Late last week I decided to dust off my trusty PowerBook G4 and make it my main machine again. A new battery and RAM upgrade later and I was in business. I can’t begin to describe how much more capable this machine is with a gig of RAM under its belt. The battery life is still poor (2.5 hours); but it used to be abysmal (30 minutes). I figure I’ll make this do for another year or so while the native Intel apps are making their way to market and then upgrade to a MacBook Pro (god I hate that name).

As part of the transition, I’ve switched from Bloglines to NetNewsWire for feed reading. Mostly I’m happy with the change — it’s very cool to be able to read offline and to have good integration with desktop-based blogging editors.

This did, however, create a conundrum for me: what page to use for my browser home page? It’s been Bloglines for quite a while now. After a few days spent playing with blogosphere favorite tech.memeorandum, I started to realize that most of what was showing up there was already in my feed reader. Then I remembered that Kevin Burton’s TailRank has been evolving a good bit lately.

I first met Kevin back at Barcamp and he immediately struck me as one of those really clever guys you occasionally bump into around Silicon Valley: smart, passionate, full of energy and opinions. When I heard that he’d started working on TailRank I was really intrigued. The idea of using linking behavior in the blogosphere, combined with OPML reading lists as the basis for creating a self-organzing view of current hot discussion topics felt just right to me. Sure Gabe Riviera is doing something similar with memeo; but for the moment, I like the story mix that’s turning up on TailRank better. What’s working here for me is that TailRank is bringing in interesting topics that I’m not already bumping up against in my normal feed reading.

At any rate, TailRank is my new homepage. So far I’m enjoying the news it brings each time I pull up the browser. Nice work Kevin; looking forward to watching TailRank grow and evolve. You’ve got a winner here.

Niall Kennedy has put together a dinner tonight @ Henry’s Hunan in SF. I’ll be there. If anyone that’s attending would like an invite to the Pandora preview, just drop me an email (tomconrad-at-gmail-dot-com). I’ll make sure you get an invite today.

Over the years I’ve been involved in a mix of things ranging from consumer products (You Don’t Know Jack, Apple, Pets.com) to enterprise software (Documentum, Relevance, Kenamea). While my years working on enterprise stuff where interesting, rewarding, and often at the cutting edge (for example, at Kenamea we built an AJAX platform almost 4 years ago), I’m never happier than when I’m working on consumer products. That was even true for one that failed horribly.

14 days ago we launched a preview release of Pandora a music discovery service that helps you create personalized “stations” that will introduce you to all kinds of music that we think you’ll love. Ever since we launched we’ve been getting lots and lots of feedback from our early listeners. Here’s a blog post that’s consistent with the majority: One Sweet Nothing. What could be better than that?

We created this service because we love music and we really do want to help people out there who struggle to connect with all the great stuff that’s out there. So far it seems like it’s working and I can’t imagine anything more gratifying than that. If you’d like an invitation to join the preview, drop me an email. I’d be happy to get you connected and listening right away.

It’s been fun to watch the mac-o-philes dissect the new two-button, scroll-ball sportin’ “Mighty Mouse” that Apple released last week. By all accounts it seems to be a nice little mouse. Now taken by itself it’s hard for me to get too excited; for some time the Mac would work with just about any mouse you threw at it and if there’s one thing the computer world has in abundance it’s mice.

There is however, a good reason to be excited about this development when you consider Apple’s decision to move to Intel CPU’s. One of the dimensions to the Intel story that hasn’t received much attention is the possibility that Apple’s next generation Macintoshes will be able to run Windows (PC World). I personally think this is a very big deal. While the real magic of the Macintosh may be the whole hardware/software integration, I think there are a lot of Apple devotees out there that buy Apple primarily for the industrial design of the hardware. This is particularly true for their laptops. I think there is an even larger contingency that would buy a Macintosh if they felt like they could drop back to Windows should circumstances require it. I think they’re going to sell a lot of hardware to this crowd. Remember, Apple is a hardware company and those market share numbers we hear so much about are really hardware numbers.

How does Mighty Mouse fit into this? It’s not so much the mouse that is exciting, but the possibility that they’ll build similar “buttonless” two-button technology into their PowerBooks and iBooks. To me, the lack of two-button support on the portables was the last hurdle to making their Intel-powered hardware appeal to the Windows crowd. My money says that we’ll see two-button support similar to the mighty mouse implementation in the PowerBook and iBook line just as soon as they switch to Intel. And then things get really interesting.

Mindjet MindManager is being presented at the opening session today at Gnomedex. Designed for people who think non-linearly. Designed to support thinking associatively. Think first and then use drag and drop to organize your thoughts. They call it “information mapping.” Their customers use it for brainstorming/thinking. Nice pen interface for Tablet PC uses specially designed gestures for quickly entering ideas and organizing them. (Tags: gnomedex)

I’m sure that I’m the last gnomedex’r to post about the rss announcement that Microsoft made this morning here in Seattle. They’ve announced that Longhorn will have a set of system services for synchronizing RSS (and atom and rdf) content to your machine. This is a background service that pulls down the feeds when they’re updated and tries to respect other processes that might require bandwidth at the same time. It will use the same background data transfer mechanism as Windows Update.

They’ve also updated IE (in the form of IE7 which was publicly demo’d for the first time today) to facilitate subscription. Apparently they’ve been paying attention to what Apple is doing with SafariRSS in Tiger because the UI is, quite literally, identical. In fact the whole UI for IE7 looks more like Safari than I’d have ever imagined. The version demo’d had a brushed metal skin, a very simple toolbar, a flexible search box to the right of the URL entry box. Very similar.

A good bit of time was devoted to the power of RSS with enclosers. They demo’d Outlook calendar population driven by RSS with iCalendar enclosures and a photo slide show powered by an RSS feed with jpg enclosures. So, pretty much it’s the whole “embrace” thing… they were very clearly saying “we love RSS” and it will be everywhere in Longhorn.

Now… for the inevitable “extend” bit. They’ve also published today an extension to RSS 2.0 to make it capable of delivering ordered lists. This new tag makes it possible to use RSS to describe, well, lists. For example: Playlists, Events, Wish lists, To Do lists, Top 10 lists. Unlike publication feeds, lists need different semantics - in particular the ability to reorder or delete items. The tag makes that possible. They’re also adding an extension for describing how item metadata (via namespace extension) should be interpreted in the context of a list. For example, which attributes should be used for filtering.? Which should be used for sorting? What is the datatype of each item? All of these extensions have been released under a Creative Commons license. It’s not clear to me what exactly the value of that bit is, other than the PR benefit. (Tags: gnomedex)

Gnomedex is underway… Dave Winer just finished his keynote on his new GPL-licensed open souce OPML editor. Good discussion with the audience; no drama. The Microsoft guys are on stage now getting ready to talk about “Longhorn Browsing and RSS.” This is going to be the big one for the show.