Richard MacManus: “Perhaps Google should take a leaf from Yahoo and Microsoft’s book and start immersing itself in RSS, instead of trying to harness it.”

John Battelle wrote a great post yesterday comparing the rise and fall of Microsoft in the late nineties to Google today. Dave Winer responds, saying the more appropriate comparison is to Netscape. He goes on to suggest that Google think harder about its long term role in the search world:

I think Google misunderstands that their platform is advertising, that’s a temporary transitional thing, the real platform is (doh) Search.

Dave is so dead on correct here. Google has to open up their search API or, in the long run, someone else will. The internet is the ultimate destroyer of the tragedy of the commons – and those who continue to remove friction are the only ones that can possibly win.

And I also note this: While Google seems to struggle finding its product direction, Yahoo (and increasingly Microsoft) continues to roll out success after success. Yahoo is now my default map and email service (and they weren’t last month). And there is a good chance Yahoo will also become my default RSS reader.

Discussion is evolving on Memeorandum.

Tom Raftery interviewed me last week about TechCrunch and posted it today on his excellent blog. It’s worth a listen just to hear Tom’s cool accent (he’s Irish).

Thanks Tom!

J Wynia has done something interesting with our Web 2.0 Workgroup OPML file: He’s taken the individual feeds and is running feed posts through Yahoo’s search API to find the most interesting stuff. The end result is here. His overview of what he’s created is here:

So, what’s exactly going on? We’ll take an OPML file, load a snapshot of each feed’s current contents. Then, we’ll loop through each feed item and ask Yahoo how many pages link to it. For each feed, we’ll extract the one item that is most linked to (aka the equiv of Google’s pagerank for choosing the top page for a search). That “top” post will be put on our sampler page as the example of of the feed’s content. The sample page will then contain one item from each feed as well as some information about the feed itself.

I like seeing innovation like this, and since he is linking back to the original post I don’t personally (as a writer of some of the content that appears there) have any copyright issues with what he’s doing.

This is clearly not generating real time data on par with Memeorandum, though. The Yahoo API isn’t able to track links fast enough to understand what’s important just a few minutes after a post appears. But it is a good way to find interesting content that is a week or so old. If you don’t mind being that far behind the cutting edge, its cool.

I’ll be interested in seeing if there are other ways to bring this to more real time.

We’ve added J’s mashup to our web 2.0 workgroup page (link at end of first paragraph).

bmindful is a tagging site for affirmations (positive thoughts). It needs an RSS feed for each tag.

I love people’s enthusiasm, but what in the world are they doing putting their heart and soul into building sites like these? Maybe someone should build a platform to allow people to build tagging applications quickly and easily (and get it out of their system).

This list really hit home and is funny if you are familiar with all the web 2.0 companies out there. I actually do go through a sort of checklist in my head before I post at TechCrunch to make sure I’ve noticed all the features (“did I miss the RSS?”). And I’m a sucker for the landing page with nothing but a logo and an email box. Thanks, Robert.

Rojo has a great weekly summary of “most read stories”. If you are a Rojo user they email it (I get it 3x because I’ve tested them so many times and set up extra accounts), and they also put it on their blog. Good weekly summary. Here’s this week.

Ambika Sukla’s Glypho is a cool and very flexible tool for group novel-writing.

I wrote about a similar idea (with a very different rule set) at TechCrunch called unblokt a couple of months ago. Unlike unblokt, which actually has each sentence written by a separate writer, Glypho takes things on a chapter by chapter approach, with users voting on the best next chapter. Things then move forward.

Here’s how it works: Someone posts a story idea, and everyone contributes with character and plot ideas. People write chapters, and users vote on the “best” chapter. That is set, and the process continues.

It has a small but growing audience and 20-30 dedicated writers at this point, and is growing. It will be interesting to see what kind of content comes out of this process.

Story rights are ‘Creative Commons – Attribution, Non-commercial, Share Alike’ and the completed story is owned collectively by all contributors. Glypho only retains the right to publish the story royalty-free. Publishers also elect to set different licensing terms at the start of a project.

Dave Winer is using the OPML editor to write his wordpress.com blog. His approach will work with other blogging tools as well. Cool.

I just posted an update on TechCrunch about the Web 2.0 Workgroup we started last month. We now have twenty blogs and are adding new blogs regularly. Take a look if you haven’t already.

We’ve provided some basic functionality for readers who would like to subscribe – RSS, OPML and a rough breakdown by category.

In a New York Times article about how Google is adding inventory information from local merchants into Google Base, John Markoff (a writer who, until this very moment, I had a great deal of respect for) says:

Many publishers had become concerned about the potential of Google Base, which could allow the company to dominate the classified advertising business. Now, publishers of services like the Yellow Pages are facing a competitive threat from Google.
(emphasis added)

My God, John, have you even looked at Google Base? Is this what you have to do to get on Google’s short list of publications they ping before launch? Write whatever they tell you to? These statements are…unsupportable.

Later in the article John marches in Marshal Cohen from the NPD Group, someone else who’s apparently never looked at Google Base:

Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst at NPD Group, a market research firm in Port Washington, N.Y., said that if Froogle delivered up-to the-minute inventory updates from retailers, “consumers will finally know whether a trip to a store is worthwhile.”

“The only thing missing from the online retailing equation is ‘Do they have what I want,’ ” Mr. Cohen said. “But putting inventory on the Web, by store location, means now all of a sudden I have that final piece of the puzzle.”

Yep, I guess they finally found that final piece of the puzzle to fix Froogle.

In my opinion, Froogle should have been taken out back and shot years ago. Has anyone ever used it to find or sell a product successfully?

I just love this quote from the middle of the article:

The limitation of the service, Google acknowledged, is that the inventory information might not be precise or necessarily up to date.

I’m sure nobody will mind.

Richard MacManus has last week’s web 2.0 wrapup up on his site.

MicroSoft’s Ray Ozzie announced Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) this morning, a “specification that extends RSS from unidirectional to bidirectional information flows.” And, wow, is Microsoft starting to get with it. They’ve released it under Creative Commons license, the same license that covers the RSS 2.0 specification. Anyone can remix, tweak, and build upon the specification even for commercial reasons.

See Ray Ozzie, Dave Winer and the FAQs.

For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse’s calendar, and vice versa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and add new appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or a doctor’s appointment.

SSE allows you to replicate any set of independent items (for example, calendar entries, lists of contacts, list of favorites, blogrolls) using simple RSS semantics. If you can publish your data as an RSS feed, the simple addition of SSE will allow you to replicate your data to any other application that implements the SSE specification.

SSE can also be used to extend other formats such as OPML.

New companies will be built on the back of SSE.

I’ll be writing about Dogster sometime soon on TechCrunch. In the meantime I’ve put up a page for Laguna (more pictures on Flickr). Throw her a bone!

If you are a dogster/catster user, ping me with any interesting stories that I can add to the TechCrunch post.

Make sure you are in town (Menlo Park) for the next BrainJams “unconference” on December 3, 2005. Chris Heure writes about it here, and the wiki is here.

I’m a big believer in these types of events, and TechCrunch is one of the event sponsors.

Lots of companies are addressing the identity problem – the “problem” ranges from the need for a single sign in across applications to spam reduction. Email has long been the only real choice, but the spam/noise to signal ratio is, of course, out of control. And the problem with the companies currently offering alternative solutions is that the data is essentially centralized. Users and applications shy away from this, and so nothing has really gotten a foothold.

Dave Winer posted a document yesterday that may have the seed of a solution. He’s asked for a discussion to begin and it has (see the comments and trackbacks).

If the right partners jump in, this could fix a lot that is broken with the web today.

I just read Jeff Jarvis’ post on Google Base and he makes some excellent points.

Google Base has a lot of problems. The big one for me is that it is another centralized content play, when all of the really interesting content is created at the edge. Jeff points out some other issues with Base, including the fact that the data is not only centralized but there is no API for non-Google search engines to access the data.

I like what he says about microformats and the need to better leverage all the great blog content out there. He talks about putting tags on blog reviews to make them more findable – a very good idea.

I’m working on a post at TechCrunch on Riffs, a new company I saw on Fred Wilson’s blog today. Riffs is yet another centralized content service…and I think companies like these are going to have a lot of trouble getting users to come to them and create content. Do we need Riffs when everyone seems very happy writing reviews directly on their blogs? And if the answer is not everyone blogs, then how do we get them to start? Jeff seems to be on the right track.

I spoke on a panel called “Valley of Destiny or Valley of Doom” at the HBS Tech conference this morning. I was working on very little sleep and was a bit…tired after my party last night. That’s my excuse for straying a bit from the assigned topic of “outsourcing”.

The other panelists were Jack Harding, Dave Winer and Dan Gillmor. We tried to stay on topic, for a bit, but we were soon talking about whether or not Silicon Valley is, was and can remain the intellectual and technical capital of the world.

The audience chimed in, and there were heated comments. Dave told me at one point to “get a life”. The audience went quiet until they realized that Dave and I were both chuckling and Dan mentioned that we are good friends. I don’t think anyone realized that Dave and I are in a bit of a disagreement over my planned inclusion of advertising on TechCrunch as well (Dave published a podcast on this topic today before the panel). But as Dave says, he wouldn’t really be my friend if he didn’t tell me exactly what he thinks of my decisions, even when he disagrees.

Jeff Clavier has a great summary post here.

It was a crazy week. I lost two blogging days travelling to Washington DC for the Weblogs.com closing dinner with Verisign. Keith Teare and I flew out on Thursday morning at 7:55 AM, had dinner with Dave Winer and the Verisign team, and flew back on Friday at 8:00 AM. We stayed at a Marriott and their internet access was down so I wasn’t online for the entire trip.

I arrived back in San Francisco at noon and had to get ready for the party last night at my house. It was a great party, but after three days of little sleep, I was barely able to stay awake.

And today I had to get up and speak at an event at SAP’s headquarters. Dave Winer was also on the panel, and since neither of us has slept much in the last few days, we got a little punchy. More on that in a new post.

I randomly ran into Robert Scoble tonight. Well, not really randomly since I was at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus for an event, but random because Robert was just sitting in the empty cafeteria in Building 1 working away. He saw that something was going on and dropped by.

Luck! Robert had a couple of galley copies of Naked Conversations, the book he and Shel Israel wrote (to be released soon) and gave one to me (signed!). I can’t wait to dig in.

Pre Order Naked Conversations here (with Robert and Shel’s Amazon affiliate link).