Correlation does not imply Causation

I’ve started playing with RockMelt that launched this week.

It is definitely an innovative approach to socialize a browser but they may have been anticipated and thwarted by the rise of browser extensions.  The key useful feature is the prominent share button.  The other main changes to Chrome 6.0 were a Friend / App Edge on the side of the browser and a search preview.  

I disabled the edges immediately as they seem to “fix” chrome’s simple UI with needless complexity.  The second search bar reminded me of Mozilla’s Ubiquity.  Type a friend name get a chat box, type a search term and get a preview of the search results.  This is a nice but didn’t do much beyond Chrome’s Omnibox.

All said, Rockmelt (and a number of extensions) have demonstrated Chrome should integrate a simple share button. 

Facebook announced tools for adding a social and personalized layer for any webpage at F8 earlier this week.  The announcements reflect Facebook’s intention to extend their social graph and platform to the full web.  They are clearly poised to make strong gains there, primarily due to  value they deliver to developers and partners on their platform.

Three Announcements From F8 (blog posts 1, 2):
Open Graph Protocol: The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your web pages into the social graph. This a step towards a true semantic web allowing for rich display of relevant metadata.

The Graph API: an open OAuth 2.0 API created for developers to share structured data across social graphs.

Social Plugins: The five plugins introduced are:

• Like Button When a users likes anything, it automatically gets added to their profile.
• Activity Stream is a filtered view of the Feed containing only updates just from your site.
• Recommendations provides suggestions for things a users might like, with the algorithm based on both interests of all your site’s users, as well as the user’s personal friends.
• Facebook Login now shows users photos of all their friends who have joined the site
• Social Bar is a comprehensive toolbar that includes the Like button, friends who like the site, and Facebook Chat.

Rival social graphs still exist (Google, Twitter, FourSquare, Blippy …) and I think will likely continue to exist due to very different needs for different social actions.  I will never want to broadcast getting the “Crunked” badge to my coworkers.  Similarly, I don’t need to let friends know I’m OOO (Out of Office).  Some actions and items should be broadcast to the broadest social network possible (Facebook) but with the closed nature of specific actions corresponding niche social graphs seem to retain alot of value.

Facebook’s true ambition should be to create the ability to create sub-social graphs and not to kill these other social groupings.

Net Neutrality is increasingly in the public’s view with the DC Court’s ruling that the FCC has no mandate to enforce net neutrality and EU regulators expressing support for net neutrality principles.  Supporters of net neutrality need to recognize that the end goal to support consumer benefit should be a fair competitive marketplace.  Regulation is just a means and not the ends.

I have to admit I don’t understand the promoters’ of net neutrality response to the ruling.  The DC court’s decision (full text) simply stated that the FCC has no power to mandate net neutrality.  Net neutrality is important, but allowing the FCC to overstep its mandated boundaries is not the way to facilitate it.  If congress, the FCC or the FTC (which would correctly enforce limitations on Comcast’s service) really wants a more neutral net, they should focus on promoting true competition in the market.

Matters in the EU are interesting as well.  Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, and other EU regulators have expressed that net neutrality means no network can block, or limit the speed of commercial websites.  The telco companies are gearing up to continue fighting such a view and have stated:

We need to explain that this will reduce incentives for us to invest in much-needed networks.

Read more: http://www.geek.com/articles/news/eu-to-telecoms-companies-try-charging-google-and-well-take-action-20100414/

Additionally, the EU Telco’s have specifically targeted Google’s non-existent “free ride” serving YouTube video traffic.  Telefonica, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom all jointly insisting that Google should be paying them a special toll:

Cesar Alierta, chairman of Telefonica, said Google should share some of its online advertising revenue with the telecoms groups, so as to compensate the network operators for carrying the technology company’s bandwidth-hungry content over their infrastructure. “These guys [Google] are using the networks and they don’t pay anybody,” he said.

As Karl Bode of TechDirt puts it:  If electric companies went to AT&T or Telefonica to inform them that they wanted a cut of revenues on top of payment for electricity “just because” — they’d be laughed out the building.

Read more: http://techdirt.com/articles/20100412/0111098965.shtml

Developers are the foundation for good platforms.  The iPad / iPhone platform’s fate depends on the innovation of developers whereas Twitter, as an app, needs to develop a true platform to benefit from an active development community.

With the recent announcement of the v4 iPhone OS / SDK and subsequent controversy and the fear generated by Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie and upcoming developer conference Chirp, developers are rightly at the center of the debate over the fate and future of technology and tech companies.

Apple’s move to solidify a closed platform is seeking to create developer lock-in and maintain control over their entire ecosystem from design and development to distribution.  This move also alienates and limits their developer base.  From Greg Slepak’s Steve Jobs’ Response

In my opinion, 3.3.1 only serves to make the platform less attractive to legitimate developers, giving them reason to write their software for competing platforms instead.

Additionally, Apple’s strategy is predicated upon the assumption that the iPhone is and will remain the dominant device and that developers need Apple’s iTunes App Store distribution.  Why would developers stay within a constrained environment?  In my view (and Tom Tunguz’s of Redpoint in “Android Marketshare”), while no single Android device will overtake the iPhone, Android as a platform will.  This will inevitably result in a shift of the developer base away from Apple hamstringing Apple’s closed system.

Where will they go?  Google’s focus on an open platform and App Store has engendered itself to developers.  Although admittedly, Android’s ecosystem has not been without issue with Google’s Checkout implementation being a significant pain point.  This developer focus combined with the growth of the platform will serve to seduce the development community.

The fear surrounding Twitter upcoming conference and inevitable move to monetize their app is largely unjustified.  The Twitter platform up to this point largely facilitated development of lacking features (that will inevitably be included within Twitter the app as demonstrated by an acquisition of Tweetie).  As a result, the development ecosystem is unsustainable.  Hank Williams’ argument in “Twitter isn’t a platform. Yet” is that until Twitter provides true plumbing they aren’t and can’t be a sustainable platform.  Going forward, Twitter needs to develop a true platform comparable to TCP/IP to provide the foundation for a series of true app development on an open system (as opposed to feature development currently).  Until that low level development is enabled, Twitter’s APIs will be relegated to an (admittedly rich) data service as opposed to a platform.