What Google's Chrome OS means

I've never had to do a software update on my dishwasher, remove a virus from my T.V., if I want to have a cup of tea at a friend's house I don't need to take my kettle and I'm unlikely to lose priceless memories if my microwave breaks down. The PC is by far the most complicated device in the home because it has all these problems.

Right now, if you work in a reasonably well run, large organization, I'd say your desktops are fairly well sorted out, backups are done automatically, you can roam with your login to any machine to get your desktop where you like, you can't mess much up or if you do the desktop can be reset within a day if not sooner. Data and/or desktop is available remotely. At least that's how I run the desktops I manage. Fundamentally I'd say in large organizations there is no real problem with desktop IT.

Now what about the other end of the spectrum? non-tech families, small non-tech businesses with no IT staff etc. How much backup is going on? can you roam from one machine to another in the house/organization? can machines be replaced quickly? what about remote access to documents/photos etc. - probably not.

It doesn't seem that either Microsoft or Apple have made massive inroads into this problem. Even with products like Apple's Time Capsule, your backups are in the same physical building as your Macs, so if your house burns down or your equipment is stolen, everything is lost.

I find that I already mostly have my data in the 'cloud' so to speak. I regularly switch between 3 systems my home desktop, my personal laptop and my work desktop. For any notes, lists, documents, spreadsheets I use Google docs & spreadsheets. I put photos on Facebook and Flickr. My bookmarks are in Xmarks and Delicious. My email is available via the web or IMAP. My programming code is generally stored on servers that I can SSH into from anywhere. In most cases I can get all the info I need, from anywhere in world, with a machine with a web browser and SSH terminal. There are a few exceptions, I can't easily access my music from anywhere and the photos I haven't published aren't available - though these are not unsolvable problems.

I think my experience has shown that you can store your data largely in the cloud. Google's Chrome OS, properly marketed, could popularize this type of computing. If Google provides a system on which you can't install programs, where all data is stored in the cloud, then people would start doing this. The benefits would be, the machine it's self is disposable, if the machine dies, you can buy another and no data would be lost - since it's in the cloud, being looked after by people who know what they are doing.

This is certainly not a new idea - though no-one of note has tried to push it. Microsoft and Apple were never likely to push it since it goes against the ecosystems they have created.

What do you think? is this Google's plan or are they are doing something else? What about offline? or does that matter anymore? Will people trust Google and others with their data?

Cutting features is not scaling

In July 2008, Twitter limited unauthenticated requests to 100/hour by IP. This stopped people from working around the per user limit which by then had also been raised to 100.

In April 2009, put a limit of follows per day, the most obvious reason for this is so that it puts a cap on "spam" following. I can see some other reasons though. On reason is to stop people following large numbers of people, I could see the logic that people won't just be limited to following 365,000 new people a year, but more likely they will just give up on the practice altogether.

Now twitter is limiting who some of your updates go to, so that replies don't go to most of your followers. This of course has caused a massive backlash typified by the #fixreplies trending topic on twitter. Twitter initially said it was doing this because it was confusing for users, even though it had been the default for months. Now twitter is saying it is a technical issue which makes more sense. I can see that when someone posts a reply now they will have vastly fewer places to update that which will cut the load. I suspect that under the hood twitter are redesigning database and this change is baked into it (Marshall Kirkpatrick from RWW has some thoughts on why that might be).

I can only think of one reason they might be changing it, and that's to allow threaded replies. Twitter now has in_reply_to_status_id field and clients are being updated to support it so you precisely what something was a reply to. You can't currently get the thread of replies easily. I wonder if twitter is moving toward storing these replies to an entry somewhere for easy retrieval so we can get the threaded replies.

Twitter is known to have various scaling issues from time to time and with these changes and other they seem to be limiting several features in order to put off hitting limit until another day. They don't seem have definite plan for scaling and cutting more and more features is not a solution. If you look at facebook for example which must have similar issues, they seem to have solved how to scale since they are at 200 million users and rarely have any downtime.

Twitter has about 30 employees, it seems they could do with some people that really know how to scale big sites i.e. people from facebook, myspace, friendster etc. but if you look at their jobs page, there doesn't seem to opening for a scaling expert. It's perhaps because they have the right people for already, but if that's the case, they should be scaling everything, not turning off features they can't make work.

Facebook pages vs. Twitter

Continuing the theme from my last post (which was 4.5 months ago!), people are now saying that Facebook's new "pages" features will compete with Twitter (and here)

It doesn't sound like what Facebook is doing will be much different than before, that said, often initially boring changes turn out to have interesting effects. Facebook is essentially improving it's pages system, so that you can follow various brands on Facebook. This is similar in way to going to a company's site and posting a comment on their forum, though without the sign up hassle, different interfaces and presumably I will be able to track replies better. Even with these simplifications, however, it will not be as easy as posting to Twitter. Facebook's approach is akin to looking up something using Yahoo's directory rather than searching for it on Google. On Facebook I will have to find somewhere appropriate to post my message (if it exists) and then post and probably not post if someone has made a similar comment.

User Interface
Twitter's system is, no system. It's the simplest system, since it a text box and button (like Google). So on Twitter I just post. I don't need to read what others said before I post. It's likely my followers haven't seen that yet and even if they have, multiple people saying the same thing strengthens the message anyway. Even though I haven't categorized my message through the power of search.twitter.com people will be able to find it, it may appear as part of a trending topic and someone from the brand can find if they so wish as can anyone else via keyword searches.

Immediacy
I can't imagine that Facebook's system is going to allow quick comments due to not having a limit on the message length and the categories system (as mentioned above). It seems for this reason Twitter is likely to remain the home of breaking news.

Discussion Types
There is another key difference in the way I expect people will use the sites other than the interface. On Twitter I am primary broadcasting messages to people on a variety of topics as they are to me. In Facebook's system, much like in a forum, I will be talking to a community of people that know the topic very well. This will make the process more daunting and less rewarding. For example, imagine going to a Britney Spears group to complain about her music when you know the group is full of Britney's Fans. You still want to make the comment but probably to a similarly like minded set of friends (such as your Twitter friends).

Freedom of speech
On Twitter I can say anything and only I can delete my comments. On Facebook, I expect as in common with most of their site, page owners will control the discussion allowing them to delete comments they don't particularly like. Brands will like this since they have some control, but users are likely to get frustrated by it.

In general Twitter and Facebook are so different I can't see the two competing on this. Twitter is going to have more regular, quicker, critical comments which are publicly searchable. Facebook's method is likely to attract a smaller proportion of it's users, who may in turn maybe more detailed due to Facebook's lack of message length limits and probably less critical.

Flickr shouldn't fear Facebook

A few days ago Stan Schroeder of Mashable posted a entry entitled Facebook Trumps Most Photo Sharing Sites With 10 Billion Photos. In it he says about Flickr that "ultimately people use Facebook for the same thing - sharing photos with their friends" and that "It’ll be interesting to see what photo sharing social networks will do to differentiate from Facebook".

It is possible that Stan still uses Flickr in this way, but I suspect many people already use large social networks (like Facebook) if they only want to share photos with their friends.

This is not a problem for Flickr, however. Flickr has established a community of people who want to share their photos with the world. Links to photos on Twitter or blogs often use Flickr for that purpose because twitter and blogs are by their nature public and Facebook is not. Through Flickr I have (re-)discovered photography, Flickr has a fascinating array of photos on it which can be easily found by going to the interestingness pages or one of numerous groups. Flickr also has a number of features which support it as a place to share photos with the world, not just your friends:

• Tags
• Public Groups
• The API and various applications built on it (e.g. bighugelabs)
  
• A community of photographers
• Geo tagging
• Search

(Facebook also has something called tags but that is for tagging people, which makes it useful for sharing with friends but is not the same as what Flickr uses tags for)

In short, Flickr is a way to share your photos with the world and Facebook is way to share photos with your friends.

Disqus

It seems everyone is talking about disqus these days so I have added it to my blog.

Updated Digg stats

There is a new article on ReadWriteWeb now featuring updated Digg graphs that I gave them, "The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg".

phpMyAdmin 2.11.5 / PMASA-2008-1

phpMyAdmin 2.11.5 has been released today which contains the fix to a security bug I reported, details are in the security announcement.