Alex Hochberger

So, back in September, I mused about how AOL could have become the open platform that twitter is, and mused about why they didn’t.  Back in the day, AOL was THE game in town for communication, especially after purchasing the ICQ network.  Failure to integrate the network and failure to open it up, ultimately, propelled competition to their IM Client.  Concerned about losing advertising revenue, AOL wouldn’t allow third party clients with real access to the OSCAR Protocol, instead just a barely supported Talk to OSCAR Protocol.

(NOTE: Back when I was in school, the Unix machines lacked an AOL Client, and the weird TAC Client that ran under Motif.)

Had AOL simply provided a few APIs, perhaps just sending messages (for automation), as well as login and authentication, they’d be where the Open ID type plays are.

I still use AOL IM, but I use it via a LibGAIM Client, Pidgen at the office, AdiumX at home.  I have multiple AIM Names, plus the other networks for those on the others.  Interestingly, I was using IM less and less, but the support for Facebook in Adium recently brought me back.  I think that this is a great move on AOL’s part, as it will help bring AIM back to relevancy as a great communication medium, especially as casual Internet users are all on Facebook more than a computer with an IM client.

When my wife and I were discussing social media, and I mentioned that at Third Solutions we use Skype for IM, and at ASG Group we were using Twitter, she asked me if we had gotten old? When I arrived at MIT in 1997, I ran ICQ for friends from home + Zephyr for talking to classmates, the next year the freshmen showed up with big lists of AIM friends, and by the time I left school, ICQ and Zephyr were basically dead and AIM dominated communication.

Here is it, over 10 years later, and I still use AIM as a constant business communication tool, but it certainly lacks any hype or excitement. Gmail accounts form the basis of OpenID, yet AOL with 20 years of AOL accounts and 10-15 years of AIM accounts couldn’t make themselves the login option of choice for the community web or the Web 2.0 world.

An old AOL hand asks, “Could AIM Have Been Twitter?“  AOL fought third party integration, mostly because Microsoft was at the time masters of embrace and extend, and the only on-ramp was the weird open access AOL published for the Tik client that we ran on Unix, with limited access.  While AOL had the users, they didn’t have the culture of centrality.  Openness may have helped, but the open-IM groups pushed by Yahoo and MSN fizzled, Jabber went nowhere, and even though Google via Google Chat supports Jabber, Facebook chat seems more vigorous.

I think that AOL could have done a lot with their platform.  But the corporate culture, more than the business around technology, prevented them from being cool.  Everything AOL bought saw talent flee to start-ups and generally fall apart.  Other than picking up Time Warner for a steal, they weren’t able to use their early lead in the Internet, perhaps because of their Internet for the Masses reputation, they couldn’t be “cool” to the technologists, so even if the masses used AIM, nobody was building upon AIM.  That, more than AOL’s internal walled garden mentality, is why AIM didn’t become Twitter.

I am really concerned by the movement to boycott Whole Foods because of a political position taken by the CEO in an editorial to the Wall Street Journal.  In the editorial, CEO John Mackey expresses his fear of the proposals from Washington, and shares with the readers what Whole Foods has done regarding health care for its employees and urges some common sense reforms to the system, some of which are in the proposal.

Aghast that Whole Foods is a business operation, the upper middle class liberals took to the Internet to punish this company for its CEO being proud of what they did in the company and sharing the experience with the readers of the Wall Street Journal.

Now, Health Care Reform is a pressing issue in America, and has dominated the news and the political cycle for this summer.  Mr. Mackey expressed his opinions and experiences.  He hasn’t used his position at Whole Foods to affect the political debate, he isn’t having the stores he runs promote his agenda.  He, as a private citizen with some knowledge of health care costs as a major employer wrote a well thought out, intelligent editorial, one that some of his customers might disagree with.

As a result, they are calling for his head and a boycott of the firm, putting his livelihood in jeopardy because he disagree with them on a political issue.  Now, this isn’t government censorship directly, but given how much of corporate capital is controlled by pension funds for public employees, for example, that could vote their shares to endanger his job, there is just a wee bit of potential government censorship here.  More importantly, Americans should all be discussing this issue and debating it, and by attacking Whole Foods for the CEO disagreeing with them, it is simply shutting down debate.

If Whole Foods was endorsing his position and broadcasting it in the stores, fine, you have a cause.  But to attack a business because of the CEO’s personal politics, that seems like a way to simple stifle debate in America.  If Whole Foods is neutral, but Mr. Mackey takes a position, Whole Foods should be left alone, and Mr. Mackey should be able to express a position without people going after his livelihood.

It’s amazing how the Web has come and quickly.  The original web was based on the idea of interlinking informational resources, the hypertext nature of things.  The original Backrub (AKA Google) research project was based on this notion, with PageRank using a unique combination of academic citations and democracy to evaluate websites.  Unfortunately, the NoFollow attribute was a terrible idea, and it’s use on Twitter and other social network sites has resulted in a horrible perversion of the concept of the interconnected Web.

If you aren’t a professional SEO or linear algebra geek, here is the summary: take the entire web as individual pages, give each page a single vote (in the linear algebra, 1/N votes were N is number of pages, so we’re dealing with fractional probability), then take that vote, and divide it amongst the pages it links to and assign that to the next page.  So if 20 pages link to me and 4 others sites, I get 20 1/5 votes, or 4 in the next round.  Next round, my score of 20 is divided by my links out and assigned to them, rinse, lather, and repeat.  Over the iterations, this ranking, PageRank moves towards the sites with the most incoming links.

This is academic in the idea that a paper cited more often is probably better, likewise an Internet resource linked to more often is probably better.  It’s Democratic in that each page starts with a single vote, whether put out by a powerful corporation or someone with a website dedicated to their dog.

Now there are plenty of mathematical models that you can read out there helping you understand how PageRank works, and how much it matters, but essentially, it let the rankings on the Web be determined by the publishers of content.  Yes you can game PageRank, and it used to really matter a lot, but it was also nice to think of a world where all publishers were considered.

Now, 12 years ago (1997), having a website meant that you were a corporation that could pay someone to do so, a university student that played with a text editor, or a computer geek interested in running a website, animated GIFs were all the rage.  A few years later, when the Backrub project at Stanford was a PhD project, Stanford’s academic use of Hypertext made this ranking of things a perfect way to identify useful content.  As it moved to the general Internet (or critical subsets), it did a good job of identifying the most relevant link.

If you remember the pre-Google search engines, simply turning up the New York Yankees home page for the phrase New York Yankees was quite an accomplishment, many major corporations didn’t have websites, or if they did it was hung on a local ISP’s domain name, not their own.  So in that regard, the links worked wonderfully.  Given a sizable number of pages in the index (Google used to brag about Index size), adding one or more pages wouldn’t give you enough votes, but spamming by the millions would.  Google wrote more and more sophisticated methods for detecting spammers, and while their percentage of searches increased, they became targeted more and more for spammers.

The worst link spamming was the harassment of community forums, posting garbage links in forums looking for PageRank, link popularity, and traffic.  Many semi-abandoned blogs and forums, or the older posts/threads on them, were filled with spam.  Our SEO friendly and ranked TV Show Site, The OC Files, was basically ruined by spammers.  So Google created an attribute to add to links that said “don’t follow this link, I don’t know if its good or now.”

Why would anyone create a link without knowing the value?  The webmaster wouldn’t, but if they have a section for user created content, the users might put it up looking for links.  By adding NoFollow, you stripped the link of its value to the spammer for ranking reasons, helping Google, and hopefully helping yourself reduce spamming.

Now let’s look at Twitter and the other Social Media sites.  The links on Twitter and Facebook are some of the MOST legitimate “votes” on the modern web.  If I read an article of interest, I no longer put it up on my website, I share it on Facebook and maybe Tweet about it, sharing this information with my friends and followers.  That’s a huge vote.

If you treat all Twitter Users like PageRank treated pages, and allocated “votes” based on how many people you were Following, you could probably identify the most valuable Twitter users, and assign accordingly.  A bit of Twitter’s structure hurts that, as internally the links go to those Following you and those you are Following, but regardless, most people share content they like not with a blog, but with this micro-blogging power.

By NoFollowing these links, apparently at the request of Google,  Twitter is discounting the value of this “voting” and reserving the voting for those still maintaining a normal web presence.  As more and more of our online social lives are on these sites, and less and less on blogs and personal home pages, the individual “votes” are getting thrown away.

Perhaps Google shouldn’t think of themselves as a Web Democracy, but more of a Web Republic, where only the “white male property owners of the web” (the people running web sites, i.e. the pros) get to vote, and the “rabble” of common users on the social web get no say.  When Twitter was a haven of coastal users getting spammed out to game Google, the change made sense.  With its growing importance as a finger on the pulse of the Internet, it’s terrible to discount it.

If that isn’t “Doing Evil,” than Google doesn’t know what that is.  Regarding NoFollow, I don’t use it on my sites, don’t use it when doing site management for clients, and generally avoid it accept in the case of Comment Tags and other spam-infested areas… and even then it’s only when I’m using pre-canned software that adds it.  Using it the manage “Google Juice” as recommended by SEOs and to some extent Google is adding non-standard HTML elements solely for the purposes of affecting search rankings, and that’s SEO spam, pure and simple.

The AP was complaining about Google News and the linking to stories was denying them revenue.  Reuters MediaFile blog is carrying a column by Chris Ahearn, President of Media entitled, “Why I believe in the link economy.”  Some points he makes are that if you link and attribute, he has no complaint, and attacking new players and suing everyone is like what the music industry is doing, and rhetorically asks how it is working for them.

The news industry is going through a MAJOR transformation, in a manner that hasn’t hit it since the original wire services involved themselves in the market in the late 19th century.  But the AP is foolish, they aren’t at risk.

The model for news has been, a few wire services publish information, AP being dominate, and UPI and later Reuters being competition, and a few other services provided the global and national coverage.  Most local news markets bought their national/international feeds instead of sending out reporters, leaving them to add a little local flavor and advertising.

The fact is, the AP has the product people want, the news story.  The “editorial” provided by local media to pick and choose which wire stories to run may seem important to people in the industry, but seems like minimal value add, especially since bloggers and other people seem willing to do it for free.

Mr. Ahearn suggests that public discussion as to what is a reasonable quotation and other codes of conduct seems perfectly reasonable.  The term Fair Use is intentionally broad, left to the courts to interpret, and therefor causes lawsuit adverse people to shirk back from.  Publishing a reasonable usage guideline could include Fair Use rules, and most people will behave if you are reasonable.

Reuters and the AP have the product people want, and it isn’t them in danger if they are smart.  Threatening to sue bloggers and Google is foolish, building your own advertising model makes sense.  The Internet cuts out middlemen, Reuters isn’t the middle man, the local paper is.  I expect the local papers with news feeds are going to die out, and ultra-local papers covering city and regional issues without national feeds, no subscription model, and advertisements for local pizza shops are the future of local news… and that’s okay.

Reuters collecting a lot of links helps them with traffic and search engine ranks, and gives them the ability to build a real business model online, the death of local papers in smaller markets seems to be okay, if there is a demand for local news, a business will materialize.

When I was in Middle School, I learned the Scheme programming class as part of an experimental math program.  While most computer science students recall wrapping their mind around functional programming languages (most elite Universities offer some LISP derivative instruction, Scheme, Common Lisp, Haskel, etc.).  As someone who loved playing online, this knowledge base made learning MUSH programming for TinyMUSH derived systems great, creating objects with commands on them in the internal LISP dialect.

So when Second Life hit the scene, I took immediate interest.  Alas, my personal life didn’t leave much time for video game playing, and I never got involved in what turned into the most fascinating “old is new again” story, where what looks like early 1990s Virtual Worlds combined with 1980s online gaming via TinyMUSH has developed a small but dedicated following.

Who uses it, I have no idea, as all my gamer friends seemed to spend a few years on World of Warcraft (my wife can describe making me shower after playing Diablo 2 for 3 straight days, so I can appreciate the obsession with a new Blizzard game, even if I got bored after leveling by guy to 60 pre-expansion), and my technology friends were into other areas, and Second Life seemed just too low tech to be interesting.  The media, latching on to whatever seems unique, appeared to have taken a huge interest in a non-technology company… a category I put Twitter in a few months ago, other than an example as to how Ruby on Rails was NOT a solution for a scalable need.

Yet while the media attention has moved to Twitter, the Online Worlds are minting money.  The subscription model, plus online items that can establish value, other in game or out of game, has created its own economy.  Twitter has tremendous influence on the media, and the application has a huge following in metro areas (where people go out taking cabs or mass transit, and update from their phones) where the media is located, but seems to have a small number of users compared to other mediums.

The recession is forcing companies to focus on what works.  Twitter can help drive the press and bloggers, bloggers help move the press and search engines, and search engines and the media move traffic.  But if you are looking for cash, Twitter won’t generate it immediately, but if you can use it to manipulate the press and bloggers, two gateways of traffic and ability to influence search engines, you can market in the 21st century.

From a business point of view, the Virtual Worlds still mint money, the online purveyors of walled gardens of information like Facebook, and the mass disseminators of information like Twitter can’t make a dime.

In the early days of the Internet, the term Walled Garden was used to refer to private content areas, and the debate as to which content should be private and which should be public.  In those early days, Walled Gardens were seen as an differentiator… one might pay more for AOL than the local ISP if the unique content was of value, which led to the acquisitions of Compuserve and Time Warner.  The search driven Internet pushed Walled Gardens out, and free content in, and that has dominated for years…

But now, Facebook establishes a walled garden, with huge amounts of content only available to members, but interestingly, it’s all user generated.  Who would have thought that the users would support hidden content, but that is Facebook’s appeal.  I see what my friends are up to, they see what I am up to.  The fact that the content is only available inside of Facebook seems incidental, since my family photos are now private.

I see news articles posted by friends, and we openly comment on them, in a way, it’s like a miniature blog, only the content isn’t available to the outside web.  You need a Facebook account, and to by my friend to see it.

In technology, everything moves in trends.  The mainframe centralized computer system and the client server model of the 3270 Terminal (with a smart GUI viewer), moved to the minicomputer and the dumb terminal, we then moved to PCs with the power back at the terminal, to a network centric model (both the Winterm push in corporate environments, and browser-as-computer in the public one), to smart applications that talk via APIs back to the web-based systems.  Is there really that much of a difference between an iPhone application that connects back to a web service as a 3270 Data Entry screen that draws the interface locally and sends the data up the serial line?