Krishwords

I posted this comment in one of the ReadWriteWeb posts. Since the topic fits well into the theme of this blog, the concept of open web, I thought I will also post it in my blog.

The death of Readburner brings into focus a very important question. How can we rely on a web service offered by a small startups whose longevity cannot be ascertained. Readburner is a different kinda web service where we do not upload huge amounts of data. What about those two people web services where we invest our time and upload all our data? How can we rely on such companies with our valuable data? Should we wait for some big companies like Google to acquire the service before we start investing our time?

These questions bring to forefront two of the important ideas in the technology world, Open source and Data Portability. All the web services should offer a way to take your data with us using open standards. This will ensure that we will have our data in the event of a web service shutting its shop. The second important point is that these web services should consider releasing their code in one of the open source licenses. Right now, some of the web services release their code under open source licenses. For example, if wordpress.com or wikidot.com or wik.is is going to shut the shop tomorrow, nothing will happen to me except a few hours of downtime. I can take my data from these web services in an open format, use their released source code to install the software on one of my servers or somewhere in the cloud and, more importantly, my life will not get affected. How cool is that? I hope that all the mom and pop web services startups take the option of data portability seriously and consider releasing their source code to public, at least, when they shut their shop.

Technorati Tags: Dataportability, Data Portability, Opensource, Open Source, Open Standards, Readburner, Web 2.0

I posted my thoughts on Sun’s acquisition of MySQL on TechBizMedia. Feel free to add your comments on the topic.

When Google announced Open Handset Alliance and the release of Android SDK under open source license, I was pretty excited. In fact, few people like Robert Scoble even questioned my excitement during a twitter conversation. Some of the arguments put forward by pundits against my excitement towards Google’s strategy were

• Android is boring and the phone features are not enthralling
• The device is not out. It is just a PR blitz
• It is Google’s attempt to get monopoly
• Certain ridiculous assertions like it is a security nightmare
• Certain sensible apprehensions like “Android is not released under GPL but Apache software license and network carriers can still maintain their walled gardens”

To all those who were skeptical about Google’s open wireless strategy, I had argued that it is a welcome move, even if their skepticisms turns out to be true. It was my hope that an open source kinda approach is the only way we can break the monopolies of the giant wireless carriers. The open source approach put a dent on the Microsoft monopoly, even in the not so competitive areas like desktop software. Also, the open source revolution moved the industry from its dark ages to the current Web 2.0+ era, where the market place is opened up so much that new players are emerging every day. It was my hope that if the open philosophy is introduced into the wireless market place, the free markets will then take care of everything else and we will easily move into an open standards based wireless world. Google’s Android effort just did that. It brought in the concept of openness to the marketplace. Now only a more and more open approach can survive the free markets. Today’s announcement by Verizon just proves this philosophy. Now, the competition will drive more and more openness and we will soon have an open standards based wireless marketplace, empowering the consumers.

Some people are more worried about the lost subsidies from the wireless carriers for the handset. This is an unwarranted skepticism. Open source mobile software like Android and mobile linux software will drive down the costs of the handsets. Heavy competition among the handset makers will also drive down the prices. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a decent handset for $25 (I have seen $35-40 handsets in India when I visited the country few months back). In fact, even a sophisticated handset offering capabilities equivalent to a low end windows mobile phone might just cost around hundred dollars. I wouldn’t subscribe to any FUDs regarding high handset prices. I am pretty convinced that it is just a matter of time before we are bombarded with low cost handsets. Low cost handsets with complete freedom to choose any network and install any applications is the ultimate empowerment of consumers. When it happens, we will turn back and thank Google for the first step taken in this direction.

One of the three Nobel Prize Winners in Economics this year (2007) is Eric S. Maskin. I am reproducing the conclusion of his recent paper.

Intellectual property appears to be an area in which results that seem secure in a static model may be overturned in a sequential setting. The prospect of being imitated inhibits inventors in a static world; in a dynamic world, imitators can provide benefit to both the original inventor and to society more generally. Patents may be desirable to encourage innovation in a static world, but they are less important in a sequential setting, where they may actually inhibit complementary innovation.

The static-sequential distinction is more than just a theoretical nicety. Indeed, it may help resolve a puzzle emanating from the U. S. natural experiment in software patents. Strikingly, the firms that obtained the most software patents (largely firms in the computer and electronics hardware industries) actually reduced their R&D spending relative to sales after patent protection was strengthened (Bessen and Hunt 2004). This behavior is difficult to reconcile with the static model, in which the prospect of patents should encourage R&D, but is quite consistent with the sequential model and specifically Proposition 7.

Thus we would suggest a cautionary note about intellectual property protection. The reflexive view that “stronger is better” could well be too extreme; rather, a balanced approach seems called for. The ideal patent policy limits “knock-off” imitation, but allows developers who make similar, but potentially valuable complementary contributions. In this sense, copyright protection for software programs (which has gone through its own evolution over the last decade) may have achieved a better balance than patent protection.

In fact, this is the premise behind open source. Open source, by allowing “imitation”, helps companies and organizations innovate. We have seen many examples of such an innovation including Linux, Apache, MySQL, etc. If we even look back further, we can note that science had the same kinda approach from the beginning. Sharing of knowledge leads to innovation. Software is knowledge and its sharing is crucial in future innovations.

According to Businessofcinema.com

Eros International has collaborated with Internet television service Joost (www.joost.com) to provide more than 200 Bollywood movies and over 600 music videos from Eros’ catalogue including films like 1942 A Love Story and Salaam-e–Ishq.

This move is fascinating because Joost consumes quite a lot of bandwidth and bandwidth is expensive in India. Who are they targeting? Non Resident Indians? I don’t think Joost will pick up in a big way in India till they sort out the broadband mess. NRI community using Joost is a small audience for this deal to be significant. Unlike many people in India, I wouldn’t put Bollywood on par with Hollywood in getting worldwide audience. Under such a scenario, this deal doesn’t make any sense to me. If you have an alternative opinion on this, feel free to add it in the comments.

Some of the tech bloggers are claiming that Microsoft has open sourced .NET libraries. There is a discussion in Techmeme too. In fact, Microsoft blogger used the correct term but the tech blogosphere has got it wrong. I am pretty sure this post will be damned as one of an extreme ideological position. But there is a huge difference between open source and releasing the source code. Open source means more than just releasing the code. It means the associated freedom to use the code in the way user wants. Open source licenses are meant to offer this freedom to the users. Microsoft Reference License, under which .NET libraries are released, doesn’t offer this. It is my humble request to the tech bloggers not to use the term open source when they are referring to Microsoft Reference License. Please do not dilute the importance of the term “open source” by decoupling the associated freedom from it. In fact, this is exactly the strategy of Microsoft. They want to paint a picture as if they are embracing open source whereas they are not actually doing it. Let us be more careful if we have to cultivate the concept of freedom in Microsoft.

PS: Thank you in advance for future cooperation. Scoble and Marshall are great people whom I admire and hence a friendly suggestion. Let us not confuse them with some other tech bloggers and media personal who intentionally misuse this term.

Update: Scoble has changed the title of the post. Kudos to Scoble for listening to his readers. Remember this post on Scoble. It still holds true :-).

The Register reports

Oklahoma-based web developer Danny Carlton has succeeded in rejecting any user who visits his sites with AdBlock Plus installed, and he insists that each and every site owner has the right to do the same. Palant and his cohorts, Carlton says, shouldn’t be allowed to block AdBlock blocking.

“It comes down to whether they’re going to be like adults and support the concept of freedom, allowing site owners to block AdBlock users, or they’re going to be like children screaming for more bread and circuses,” Carlton told The Reg.

Bold emphasis is mine

I find this downright funny. This again goes back to the proprietary mentality where people believe that business models can only survive with restrictions. You can dissuade people from using adblock plus in many ways. Banning them outright is not one of them. You can develop ad technologies that can beat the shit out of adblock software, you can makes ads more engaging (we had a discussion about it in Seattle Lunch 2.0 meet at cardomains) and make readers participate in the ads, you can develop more sophisticated business models to monetize, etc. Instead, whining about the freedom to ban appears naive to me. I have already written about this topic at TechBizMedia.

Duncan Riley of Techcrunch says

Google Reader’s share tools on the other hand republish full blogs post for all to read without obtaining permission from blog publishers. So-called link blogs in Reader already break copyright and in a small way undermine blogs and content creators. If Google offers a comment service on “shared” items they are in effect creating copyright infringing blogs; after all they’ll have chronological entries and comments so they’ll look like blogs, even if they don’t provide a fully customizable CMS.

Doesn’t this sound like Sam Zell’s complaint against Google News? I am not sure if Mike Arrington subscribes to this view of Duncan Riley. If he does, I would say that techcrunch is still in the Web 1.0 era while covering a lot about Web 2.0 companies. Isn’t Mike Arrington the guy who was pitching Digg as a replacement for New York Times? I wonder what he feels when his employee takes an entirely opposite stance when it comes to new social media technologies. Duncan dude, get over it. The way we consume media has changed a lot. The ideas about copyright has changed. As long as the original source is linked in the linkblogs, it is not a copyright violation. If linkblog is bad, techmeme is bad, digg is bad and we can extend such a logic to claim that the whole idea of social media is bad. It is not Google that should drop the idea. It is Duncan Riley who should drop the old fashioned thinking about media consumption. Times are changing dude. Being the torch bearer of Web 2.0 companies, it doesn’t look good to talk in Web 1.0 slang. Robert responds to Duncan’s comments here.

Electronic Frontier Finland has released a report that points to an interesting piece of data. The countries where corruption is high has voted in favor of Microsoft. Add to this the news reports about Microsoft employee who was caught offering compensation for partners who are willing to say “Yes” to OOXML. Sounds fishy to me.

International Organization for Standardization (ISO) rejected the fast-track approval of the controversial Microsoft-supported OOXML document format as an ISO standard in a vote on 2 September 2007. During the voting process the reputation of ISO as a dependable technical standardization organization was questioned. For example, in Sweden a Microsoft representative was caught offering to recompense partners for voting yes to OOXML. Also a sudden interest from countries like Ivory Coast to the OOXML issue has been found suspicious. We studied the relation between the corruption level and voting behaviours of the countries. We found that more corrupted the country is, the more likely it was to vote for the unreserved acceptance of the OOXML standard proposal.

Image Credit: effi.org

Robert Scoble kicked off a discussion today with his prediction that Mahalo, Techmeme and Facebook will beat Google. In the videos, he seems to be pretty convinced that Mahalo can beat Google. I disagree with Robert’s take on this. I had a few back to back tweets with Robert on the topic. In one of the tweets he asked whether several Mahalos can get together to beat Google. In this post, I am going to disagree with the thesis that “Mahalo can beat Google”. I am using Mahalo here but it applies to any human powered search engine with Mahalo’s approach to search.

Before I offer my views on the topic, I want to make the following clear.

• I completely agree with Robert that SEMs (Search Engine Marketers) are a pain and we need better search results.
• If, by any chance, Robert had meant that Google should be beaten in the search game, I am in full agreement with it too. We need to stop Google’s possible search monopoly and there should be heavy competition to force Google to continue innovating.

Having said that, I want to categorically state that Mahalo, in its current form, can’t beat Google. The reasons are many. Some of them include

• Human powered search cannot scale like machine based search
• Human powered search has built in bias in the system
• Human powered search will definitely lack in freshness
• Human powered search doesn’t mean much in non text search world like Image Search, Video Search, Book Search, etc.
• Human powered search is a ridiculous thing when it comes to desktop search.

There are many other reasons where Mahalo and other similar search engines will fail. However, these are the few reasons that just popped out immediately after watching Scoble’s video. Let us dig a little deeper on these reasons.

Human powered search engine in the Mahalo mould cannot scale like an algorithm based search like Google. Even if we assume that Mahalo grows like how Robert expects in the next four years, with 100K “volunteers”, it still cannot cover all topics in the world, it still cannot cover all languages in the world, it still cannot cover all the specifics in a particular topic, it cannot cover all the variations of a particular query, etc.. It might cover a search query “HDTV” much better than Google. But I searched Mahalo with queries “Dent on HDTV” and “Scratch on HDTV”, an hour back. It returned back saying there are no matching results. Even though it offers better results for HDTV, it fails miserably when you get into specifics on HDTV. Imagine the variations in queries on HDTV from all over the world, “HDTV with a spot”, “HDTV with a broken edge”, “HDTV and Bestbuy problem”, “HDTV with loose switch”, “HDTV’s remote not working”, “I just peed on HDTV”, etc. There is no way Mahalo can scale to take care of such specifics on even a single topic, along with everything else. Comparatively, HDTV is an easy problem to solve. There are much more difficult problems in this world which Mahalo cannot solve or may not bother to solve. Let us say I make a web page about a topic HDTV that contains a sentence like “not gone triple ribbon belt mother cook with mould acumen”. If someone searches for HDTV, my page may show up after the first 50 pages of Google results and not at all on Mahalo. But if someone searches for the sentence I mentioned above with double quotes, it will show up in the Google results and there is almost zero chance that it will show up in Mahalo (unless if my content is a killer content except for that particular sentence I quoted above). Now imagine endless new queries. Ask.com CEO claimed that 60% of their searches are unique. Even Google seems to have claimed that 20-25% of their total queries were not made before. Mahalo cannot even attempt to solve the search engine needs of all the internet users in this world, even if it scales like what Scoble hopes. It is like trying to build a 200 storey building without involving any machines and just with one brick at a time. It is just not humanly possible. Scaling problems will ensure that any attempts to create a completely human powered search engine is a failure.

To highlight my arguments, I am adding the picture of the result I got in Mahalo when I queried “mod_security rules for SQL injection attack”. You can see how badly it failed for this query. The scaling of Mahalo in the next 4 years, which Robert describes, may answer this particular query well. But, there are billions of other queries which may throw up similar results even after four years.

Human powered search like Mahalo has inbuilt bias which is difficult to manage. Jason feels that this bias can be managed with stuff like transparency, ethics codes, hiring people well, firing bad people quickly, early warning systems, etc. He claims that they take a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) on stuff like abortion, 9/11 and George Bush. I agree with him that with stuff like transparency, ethics code, etc., you can take a NPOV on few things like the queries he has quoted. Bring in diversity of queries and the different points of view attached with it. Now bring scale these number of queries. There is no way you can maintain NPOV consistently on all the topics and various queries associated with these topics. Jason even suggested the idea of Mahalo Ombudsman and included Jeff Jarvis as one possible candidate, which he rejected immediately. Even if he makes it ombudsmen instead of ombudsman, the scaling problem will ensure that the bias will stay in the system. Add to this the issues like embargo. For example, the embargo on Iran might prevent Jason to hire guides from Iran and this may result in inferior Mahalo results as far as topics related to Iran are concerned. But, an algorithmic engine like Google can just crawl the websites in Iran and have better results on the topics related to Iran.

Human powered search engine like Mahalo cannot keep the content fresh. Google crawls the web more frequently to keep its contents fresh. Now, I think, we can even inform Google about how often it should update our websites and this helps Google to update its results with fresh contents. There is no way Mahalo can keep the content fresh on all topics and related to all queries. The scalability problem described above, will make sure that the Mahalo content is stale except for a smaller percentage of terms.

I think it is pretty obvious that human powered engines like Mahalo cannot do much in the areas like Image search, Video search, Book search, etc. Add to this, the search in other languages, reverse phone number look up, etc. I don’t even have to talk about how ridiculous it will be to consider human powered search when it comes to desktop search.

Robert ignores the longtail concept when he talks about human powered search engines replacing the algorithm based ones. The very concept of longtail came into existence due to the phenomenon called internet. Under such a scenario, betting the future of internet on something that uses the hits and ignores the longtail (remember his discussion on social fabric? He talks about bumping the results up based on the number of people who trust a particular person (Michael Arringtons and Robert Scobles of the world)). I do agree that Google uses pagerank which can, in some ways, be likened to the hits in the longtail concept. However, a well structured query in Google will also get results from the longtail of web pages whereas it will not be fetched in the social fabric approach of Mahalo. This is a very important point and I just hope I have put it forward clearly.

So what is the solution to the search engine problem? Is Mahalo doomed for failure? What about 100s of Mahalos? Well, I am not an expert in search engines to offer a solution to the problems, in the current day search engines. But I strongly believe that human based search engines like Mahalo cannot replace (or beat) algorithm based search engines like Google. My solution is still algorithmic based. My hunch feeling is that the future search engine will be a collection of vertical search engines which may use Robert Scoble’s trust concept to optimize the search results. As I told Robert in our twitter conversation, Mahalo can, at the very best, be a Google optimizer but not a Google beater. Vertical search engines, with Mahalos in the front for optimization, may offer the much needed solution to our search engine problems. Humans cannot replace machines in the search engine world. Mahalo may serve well for a niche market but it is not a Google beater. At best, it can be termed as a Google optimizer.

What is your take on Scoble’s thesis that Mahalo and other trust based human search engines will beat Google? Do you agree with him? If not, why do you think human search engines cannot beat Google? What do you think will be the Google killer?

PS: It is 2:15 AM. I will correct any mistakes in the morning.