Sunday, June 18, 2006

Movie of my plane landing at SFO today. Uneventful. 

Rene Blodgett notes that the air smells different on the two US coasts. I have to say I noticed this too, on this trip. And I like the smells of both coasts. I esp like that at 8:45PM here in Berkeley, the temp is 57 degrees, and when I go out in a few minutes I'm going to have to wear a jacket. 

Nick Carr says lock-in works, that's debatable, I have been around that loop a lot of times, but that wasn't the point of my piece. Lock-in may or may not make sense for vendors, but it clearly is not in the interest of users. I was writing as a user, since BloggerCon is a conference for users, not vendors. But I also believe that any business whose interests are counter to those of their customers doesn't have much of a future.  

Scott Rosenberg says the results you get often depend on how you ask a question. For example, you could ask if people want to aggregate RSS feeds, or if they would like to try automated web surfing. Scott says asking it the first way would be like asking if you want to access web pages with HTTP. 

I'm back in California, watched a really good movie on the way back, a thriller with lots of twists and turns, great acting. It seems I can't not like any movie with Nicole Kidman.  

Ze Frank in the NY Times. 

Great picture of Lisa Williams who's leading the Emotional Life discussion at BloggerCon later this week.  

Interesting issue to discuss at the 2008 Election session.  

It's the users, part II 

There's been a lot of discussion of It's the users, dummy, and that's great.

There's actually a neater solution, especially if you've put a piece of software on the user's desktop to facilitate uploading and editing of the data -- keep a copy of all the data on the user's desktop, and just mirror it in your web app. There goes the problem (or is it an excuse) that your competitor would be using your CPU cycles to grab a copy of the user's data (with the user's permission, I should add, you need a username and password to get access, so the argument that they're protecting against scrapers and abusers doesn't hold water).

With a local copy, the user can point any service at the data, and it can suck up a copy, and the competitor's app would run on the user's desktop too, using their (abundant) CPU cycles. The vendor's server (in this case Flickr) wouldn't even know that a copy of the data has been made, and since it's the user's data, that's exactly as it should be.

Yet another reason to use rich clients. I use Flickr Uploadr, always. It's just a bit easier to work with than the browser-based method of uploading, and that bit of easiness has proven to be worth it. Then of course the competitor has to offer a desktop tool as well. We do it with the OPML Editor. The server components, the directory browser, blog renderer, work with a copy of the data, the originals reside on the user's machine. It also protects against a system failure, or a company failure.