Web 2.0 with Justin Duewel -Zahniser

On Email and Wave

You may have heard of ambitions like "Inbox Zero" and seen books like Inbox Detox floating around. You may be used to seeing this:

Inbox (627)

You may go to work every other day with a top priority of simply surviving your inbox. A curious state of affairs.

Noise

Business email in particular is full of noise. Customer satisfaction issues, more often than you might think, can be traced to the technically proper but mis-guided over-use of email. For example, picture yourself in a serious email chain with like 23 people included. Often, little breakout discussions from the main thread occur by replying to a subset. Someone might change a subject line, starting a whole new sub-thread. Tracking all this and rolling it back up is time-consuming, not easy to do, and sometimes requires editing inappropriate comments out of sub-threads. So it usually just doesn't happen.

Now, let's assume that one of these sub-threads involved a decision about how to handle a customer requirement. That thread comes to a conclusion and everyone likes the approach, so that's that. But everyone else in the main thread (or other sub-threads) may have their own conclusion or be unaware of the conclusion. Any number of these situations can lead to conflicting messages to customers or conflicting expectations about what will occur next, when it will occur and who will follow-up.

All because of a subject-line change. Should the specific characters used in the subject line really have this much impact? No. As Andy Moir would say, "eh, not so much."

Outlook

Many business use Outlook for their employee email at a certain scale. Many run Windows, the IT guys use Active Directory to manage that, and therefore it fits right in. And then it becomes the primary communication vehicle for the entire company.

Outlook stores things in these cool little .pst files. Some people have actually backed them up once or twice. Some IT guys may auto-back them up for you to the network. But that's not as common as you might think.

If you've used Outlook for a long time and you're a busy person, your .pst files are probably approaching a terabyte in size. This probably means that Outlook takes 3 days to launch, 3 days to shut down and sometimes it fails to shut down correctly as well. It also spins your disk a lot, even though you need to move threads around and handle messages at near warp speed to keep up with the influx of new items.

So you are paying a productivity price for local disk storage of an immense wealth of company IP, historical discussions of note and records of important decisions. And that's very, very risky.

Microsoft has recognized that Outlook has started to become a distributed corporate database. I think advances in the file system and the new search approach are at least a response in part to this phenomena. The big question is whether Outlook Pro (not Express) will start to move more and more towards a communication platform than a 'roid-raging email client. And, for the record, none of my gripes with Outlook are gripes with Microsoft. I think we're forcing Outlook to simply do too much.

Xobni

These guys turned down a huge buyout from Microsoft. So, clearly they believe in what they are doing. Xobni attempts to improve the utility of Outlook by adding analytics and incorporating other outside channels of communication (like Facebook and Twitter) in to Outlook based on your contact's identity.

I am a huge fan of this tool. It improves the utility of Outlook in important ways for me. But, it does not solve all the other problems I'm trying to outline here. It's an improvement to email, but it's still email.

MOC

Eventually, people began to notice that they were using email to chat. That was really inefficient. So, projects like Jabber and Microsoft Office Communicator came about to try to provide business-friendly chat. A lot of large companies that run on Active Directory and Outlook use MOC. The result of this trend has been that people now use email and chat programs to chat. And since many of these chat services don't auto-archive conversations, it has the effect of replicating many of the problems of email being used for non-repudiated records of business activity, but without the actual recording. And it's not durable like email such that it's very conducive to asynchronous responses. Also, it has a tendency to drop messages and entire conversations.

What's also insidious, and subtle, is that now people have to think about whether they should email someone or try to chat with them based on things like "status" (very gameable) and what type of conversation they anticipate they might end up having. Additionally, people receiving chat messages often feel like they must answer them, so their productivity decreases. But they feel like they can't turn it off, because people will view them as unresponsive.

So now the problem is in some ways worse.

Enter Google Wave

If you want to take a peek at Wave, Ars Technica has a good rundown, which I won't duplicate here. In short, Wave appears to be an attempt to unify multiple personal and business internet communication mediums in to a new baseline that solves many of the problems I've outlined here today. The question is whether it will live up to the hype. Once I get one of these coveted invites that are selling over $100 on Ebay, I will post some thoughts on the inside. I am interested to see how Wave, as an open protocol, may help facilitate trading partner communication in a supply chain context.

Identity in the Cloud

I've been thinking more lately about user identity and user accounts in cloud computing. Some exposure to both the Google App Engine user account model and Microsoft's Azure system based on Windows Live ID versus the Amazon roll-your-own approach have presented a nice contrast model. My thoughts are mostly from the perspective of Enterprise products, rather than personal-use products. There's this open question of how we handle user accounts, preferences, profiles, etc. across services--common identity in the cloud.

Here's my question: is common identity in the cloud a hot item? To date, common identity in web applications has been appreciated when available within a single cloud platform (e.g. Windows Live ID, Google accounts across their product suite), but so far not widely demanded across services. Initiatives like OpenID that strive to reduce proliferation of accounts and allow multiple web applications to present users with more of an "approval" model to access new applications have not made great inroads into most web properties commonly touched by casual and business surfers.

There's also the argument that inadequately conceived or executed common accounts across multiple service providers could lead to security concerns. Access through one system could proliferate across other trusted systems. While I would not be the first to argue that the current proliferation of accounts in personal-use web applications is inherently secure--convenience and human nature lead to common passwords used in most cases--it does provide some buffer against a spreading intrusion.

I am inclined to say that the jury is still out on this. In the near future, we will likely see a few internally-consolidated models like Live ID provide convenience within certain platforms but we will be unlikely to see sufficient adoption, if we see proposal, of a standards-based, cross-cloud model. The advantages to enterprise companies of owning full and exclusive access to the identity, coupled with security concerns will likely make this a hard sell in much the same way as it has been in the "home use" web. Trust/assertion models for federated identity, rather than a common account system will come up between two cloud platforms--indeed, we have had more than a few discussions about this with Trading Grid customers--but these will be standards-mediated links between two different models, rather than the sharing of a common model. It seems like that's the near future for cloud identity unless some big wave (or should I say, storm front?) comes along.

And now for something completely different:

On a personal note, I am heading off for vacation to the Adirondacks in upstate New York. This will be the first trip to the family cabin for my wife and two boys. Lack of internet access will mean no blog entries until I return, unless I write one out on birch bark and mail it to Bryan Larkin to post for me.

I am sure that this trip will renew and strengthen my appreciation for the green supply chain work we do at GXS. The family cabin was built by the author of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and my summers there growing up are part of the reason I participate in our green team and pay attention to conservation at home and at large.

Thanks for reading and I will write to you again soon.

On Google Chrome OS

A lot of buzz kicked up over the announcement of Google Chrome OS last night. In short, Google wants to build a a windowing system on top of Linux that is optimized for running web-based apps (read: Google Apps). The target is netbook devices, which further distinguishes this from Windows, Mac OS X and Linux distributions such as Ubuntu that provide an environment historically focused on local data storage and native applications.

Reactionaries are starting to predict the end of Microsoft. How many times have we heard that one? I don't see many web-based apps replacing the hardware-accelerated 3D gaming market, for example. Needless to say, this is interesting and it at least has the potential, alongside the evolution of modern smart phones, to change the face of IT. The target seems to be business users. A serious "instant boot," backup-free, ultra-portable operating system designed for email, chat, web browsing, document authoring, presentations and spread sheets for mobile professionals? Sound like you? Throw in some image editing (Photoshop Express anyone?) and you just described 90% of a lot of our working days.

Of course, there's also still that looming regulatory, security and privacy issue of business data stored in the cloud to figure out. But, we'll worry about that tomorrow. I'm going to keep an eye on this because I'm always interested to see how Trading Grid Online works in new browser offerings. A web-based, hosted, more native-feeling supply chain appliance is an attractive proposition.

GPS Cell Phones to Simulate Disease Spread in Japanese Elementary School

Geo-location technology in modern internet phones has interested me quite a bit of late. There's a market for location-aware gaming on the horizon, not to mention commercial and advertising opportunities for retail and travel industries. My wife pointed me to an AP story this morning about a Japanese experiment in which GPS on elementary school children's phones will be used to simulate the spread of contagious disease by tracking participant proximity. What a novel use of technology.

I imagine there are some privacy or safety concerns that could play into this, but the results of modeling disease spread using actual people in an non-controlled environment rather than a computer simulation could be quite useful. I'd like to find out if and how they plan to control for behavioral differences in the children under the assumption that they will be aware of the different implications of their contact with other kids during the study.

I'm resisting the urge to make some kind of joke about Logistics Visibility for school kids, here.

I enjoyed Lydia Leong's post about Scala at Twitter

I enjoyed Lydia Leong's post about Scala at Twitter. If you're interested in high-traffic web services and/or cloud-computing from a philosophical standpoint, the discussion of developer productivity versus infrastructure cost and related arguments is an interesting one to follow. I'd link you to the tweet from which I referenced Lydia's blog post, but I got yet another fail whale just now :-P 

My Own Little Cloud

Last Friday, my feed reader picked up a post from Adam Wiggins at Heroku on Personal Cloud Computing. He was describing some of what they do with Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform for development work. They're hitting cost, growth and mobility issues with this approach.

Shortly afterwards, I ran in to EUCALYPTUS. It's an open source project that provides a Linux-based local emulation of the EC2 API. I came across this in the beta description for Ubuntu 9.0.4, which I track since my home computer runs Ubuntu Linux. Thanks to the order in which I encountered these bits of information, I was better equipped to understand why someone might use EUCALYPTUS. One might be to develop against EC2, but leave all the instance and usage costs to the production cycle rather than starting to incur them in development. Another might be the convenience of being able to work on this without regard to connectivity (in theory, although clustering tends to require a static location anyway).

This is a pretty interesting model, the home-brewed personal cloud. One thing utility cloud computing models have provided is a very low barrier to entry for technology startups. This helps the ecosystem flourish and gives formerly riskier businesses more of a fighting chance (though debate is still out on whether this mostly leads to widgets and ad impressions versus sustainable innovation). Imagine lowering that barrier even more by providing tools to build for that platform at zero utility cost prior to even rolling out the product. Very attractive.

SaaS developers. Go native! But, you know, not like Kurtz, of course.

Overcast

I've been appreciating Overcast, a good podcast on cloud computing. I highly recommend the episode on security and PCI compliance in the cloud.

Unit Testing Trading Partnerships

As a proponent of modern software development practices, I have a soft spot for unit testing.  It also helps that I spend most of my after work coding time in Ruby, whose community has unit testing in its DNA.  If you're not familiar with the practice, unit testing involves writing scenarios in code that prove a given object or method you have created behaves correctly.  

Chrome and Ubiquity - Two New Stabs at Better Browsing

Control of the desktop browser market (or at least a chunk) continues to be a big focus of some of the major players on the Internet:  Mozilla (the open source foundation), Microsoft, Google and to a lesser extent Apple, Opera and other smaller % players.  The latest salvo has been fired off by Google with the release a few days ago of their Chrome browser.  If you're not familiar with Chrome, I think the comic book introduction actually does a great job of highlighting the differentiators, the architecture and generally why you should care.I've been using Chrome for a bit now and have to say that I'm initially impressed.  I think Amith (our usability wizard) is a fan as well.  I've been using Chrome with Trading Grid Online, for example, in advance of qualification testing--they aren't kidding about client-side javascript performance improvements from what I can tell. 

The Busy, Effective Screen

A busy discussion bubbled up in the usability community recently regarding a trip logging app a company developed for the iPhone.  The UI's front screen is quite busy and tons of people rapidly chimed in to criticize the design on Flickr.  The creator responded by pointing out that the design, while busy, is optimized to let you accomplish the task that you would use the app for 90% of the time (not the other 10%) linearly in one shot.  No need to use menus, tabs or change screens.  His response was later reviewed on the 37signals blog, discussing the balance between a well-designed screen that's busy but effective and a poorly-designed screen that's clean and simple but inefficient for daily use.