Late last week, Microsoft Research shared a couple of things about Social Desktop, a prototype of which they are debuting at TechFest 2009 in a couple of days (along with dozens of other things). From the looks of it, this will be a much talked about product even if it stays in proof-of-concept phase for now.
And if they decide to open it up even just a little, this could be a major breakthrough in tearing down the virtual wall between the desktop and the web, a trend we’ve been noticing for years.
The service would essentially be capable of providing you with a secure unique ID for all the files and folders on your desktop, enabling users to share, comment on, tag and search files like photos and videos via a dedicated web page powered by .NET. Think of this as social URLs that link to files which could easily be pushed to third-party services like Twitter or Digg but also Microsoft’s own Windows Live Messenger without the need for you to copy, move or upload anything. Furthermore, social interaction around the files would be visible from inside the Windows desktop OS, blurring the line between the desktop and the web even more.
You can have a URL drill into a subportion of a document or a PowerPoint deck, or data can come from a Web service or a database. Social Desktop is a local service that maps the user’s local data into a .NET service bus service, enabling local data to be accessible through firewalls. Social Desktop also provides a Web-service view over the same data, with inherent RSS event streams for any container. New data sources can be mapped into the URL hierarchy, enabling a distributed view to be built. There are simple sharing paradigms that enable URLs to be shared temporarily or permanently.
Social Desktop runs on Silverlight and leverages both the Windows OS and Windows Azure, the software giant’s very own cloud services platform which Microsoft announced in October 2008. TechFlash reviewed the service as well last week, and asked the project leads how Social Desktop differs from Live Mesh. The response came from Lili Cheng, who manages Microsoft Research’s Creative Systems Group: “In the Mesh model, you can almost imagine your PC being pushed to the cloud,” she explained. “In this, you can almost imagine the Web being embedded inside your desktop.”
I don’t know about you, but to me this all sounds very promising and I’m curious if using Social Desktop would change my file sharing habits. Even with the plethora of free, simple and fast online backup and sharing services around, there’s still a trust barrier not easily overcome by startups who need to market their services extensively on an inherently low budget to reach any kind of scale. Besides, Social Desktop even relieves you from the not-so-cumbersome task of moving a file to the cloud in order to store or share it, so that makes for one hell of a substantial benefit compared to other services where you’d be required to register and do a series of actions before that happens.
Unfortunately, a Microsoft spokesperson told NetworkWorld that Social Desktop at this point is merely a research prototype which will not be a feature in Windows 7, nor will it be available for public use.
But I still want to get my hands on Windows 7 Beta (it makes use of the new operating system’s file-preview functions) right now even if just to test this application once (and if) they release it.
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As Facebook hits its fifth birthday on Wednesday, it’s nearly impossible to find a recent news story that doesn’t refer to its growth with terms like “lightning-fast,” “exponential,” “skyrocketing,” or some other expression that would be quite at home in a space-age comic book from the 1950s.
That might be true now. And with an executive lineup sourced from Bay Area elite (including a handful of former Google leaders), high-profile conferences and parties, not to mention developer “hackathons” all over the world, it has all the makings of a landmark Silicon Valley craze. But don’t let that fool you: Facebook owes its early growth, and hence the foundations for its wildfire expansion of late, to its roots in a more buttoned-up tradition of the East Coast elite. The site’s conservative, calculated debut and blueblood allure were what sowed the seeds for Valley success.
Facebook’s origins at Harvard University, created over many dorm room all-nighters on the part of founder Mark Zuckerberg and his friends, are tech press canon by now. They have surfaced in dozens of magazine and newspaper articles, the occasional courtroom spat, and now apparently a book penned by Bringing Down The House author Ben Mezrich. What’s not talked about as often is that when Facebook, then called TheFacebook, made its quiet debut early in February 2004, it was just another entrant in a pack.
That was the same academic year that some colleges and universities launched online “facebooks” of their own as supplements to the paper directories that were then a staple in dorm rooms across the country. Plus, entrepreneurially minded students at a number of colleges, including several at Harvard in addition to Zuckerberg, were trying to best their alma maters by doing the same thing.
“When Facebook launched, the first week at Harvard was incredible because the adoption was through the roof,” said Sam Lessin, founder of start-up Drop.io, who was a classmate of Zuckerberg at the time, “and this was in the context of a lot of stuff other people had been doing online, including quote-unquote social-networking sites. The beauty of the product was that it was super simple and super easy to use.”
In keeping with its roots at one of the world’s most selective universities, Facebook’s initial allure was not that everyone had a profile, but that not everyone could have a profile.
When Zuckerberg and his team first launched the site, it was restricted to their fellow students at Harvard University. Then it began to roll out to the rest of the Ivy League and other prestigious universities: Stanford, Yale, and Columbia were the first three, in March 2004. A valid e-mail address from a participating school was required to sign up.
From a technical standpoint, this was smart because it allowed Facebook to manage its growth, avoiding overloaded servers and skyrocketing bandwidth bills. On the PR side, however, exclusivity fueled Facebook’s early buzz. MySpace, at the top of the social-networking heap at the time, was the massive nightclub where you might spot celebrities from afar. Facebook was the quiet cocktail lounge a few blocks away that required a password, but where you could be sure to see all your closest friends.
“There was a cachet to it. Everyone wanted in, and wanted to see what it was and how it worked,” Lessin said. When the site launched at a new school, he added, “you’d have this incredible initial bump of people who had heard about it and seen clippings or articles about it, and were excited to jump on board.”
With the exception of a short-lived file-sharing side project called Wirehog, Facebook’s team kept the site a purely networking-focused tool at the start. Although you’ve been able to “poke” your friends from day 1, the original Facebook had none of its current media- and information-sharing features; initially, you couldn’t even add friends from other participating schools, just your own.
But Facebook grew, both in accessibility and in flashiness. Members could start registering with e-mail addresses from corporations rather than just universities. It launched a photo album application that now hosts more than 10 billion pictures.
The “news feed” feature launched in September 2006, shortly before Facebook announced that it would let anyone join the site, setting off a brief wave of privacy-conscious member panic before becoming one of the site’s defining functions.
Then there was the developer platform, which hit the scene in May 2007 with the first of Facebook’s now-ubiquitous “hackathons.” Even after relocating from Boston to Palo Alto, Calif., and in spite of a billion-dollar buyout offer from Yahoo, Facebook hadn’t enjoyed much real “tech cred.” The platform changed that.
Creating a Facebook application soared to the top of Web companies’ priority lists, and even though Facebook’s traffic had started to take off when open registration launched the previous fall, this was when it really escalated.
With Facebook now five years old and reaching more than 150 million members worldwide, it comes into question whether it has abandoned those austere New England roots and that strategy of calculated growth in favor of Silicon Valley’s get-big-now attitude.
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Twitter developer manager Alex Payne has updated the Twitter FAQ with the actual, real, honest story on the return of Track to its users. First, the relevant text:
When will the firehose be ready?
By late January, early February 2009. For at least Q1 2009, the “firehose” (the near-realtime stream of all public status updates on Twitter) will only be available to a small group of trusted partners. The firehose is a stream HTTP solution; a client connects to it and the stream begins, ceasing only when the client disconnects. Once we’re confident in the stability of the service, we’ll add partners on a case-by-case basis. We may allow a wider selection of clients to consume subsets of the public stream (that is, updates from a collection of user IDs or matching specific search terms). We do not intend to allow anonymous, unregulated public access to this stream for any number of legal, financial, and technical reasons.
Now, the translation:
Real soon now, especially now that FriendFeed has a quarter of our page views with a stunningly familar hockeystick of growth, we will release the firehose to trusted partners. Trusted means those vendors who will agree not to allow access to… see below. The firehose is the full stream of our data that has been blocked from its contributors since May, 2008. Once we’re sure it is stable, we’ll continue to make it available while adding what must be semi-trusted cases. It’s also possible we’ll deliver a subset of the firehose (analogous to somewhat pregnant) defined as Track on identities and keywords. The keyword here is “may”. Finally, we won’t allow anonymous unregulated access, period. That is, even though we have numerous partners and untrusted startups currently recording Twitter notices and storing them for unregulated anonymous access since Twitter began.
FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor appeared on NewsGang Live Friday, and told me relationships with Twitter continue to be good. The two companies are working through some problems with the rate limiting curbs introduced by Twitter several weeks ago, but Taylor anticipates a resolution shortly. Several third party Track projects, most notably including Dustin Sallings’ TwitterSpy, have been disabled due to the 20,000 API call limit imposed. Sallings is blunt in this FriendFeed thread:
They’re going to offer a friendfeed-style HTTP firehose to a limited group. My suspicion is that that group will be limited more by how threatening a business is than even by how much twitter’s traffic may be reduced by such a partnership. I might be wrong, but the only ideas they seem to have for making money from their business involve removing value their customers want.
Meanwhile, Taylor says FriendFeed is moving forward with enhanced realtime tools to help model Twitter and other data. Rooms will gain new controls for aggregating multiple streams, a major search-related announcement is coming later this week, broader filtering and track functionality awaits a several-month rewrite of some parts of the core architecture, and most importantly, FriendFeed will continue to employ an open, inward and outward-facing data strategy. This is in sharp contrast to both Twitter and Facebook, who allow ingress but limit outbound flow.
There are several efforts underway to work around or via the back channel with Twitter to reengage track services. Services such as Twhirl that have released betas with “track” support may fall into both categories, but eventually Twitter will find a happy medium where monetization will begin to flow. In the meantime, FriendFeed continues to offer a more conversational and flexible model, making it a significant competitor for user contributions. Even now, it’s trivial to maintain a Twitter presence via FriendFeed that would require a fundamental change in developer relations to undermine.
Now that Twitter has achieved a certain stability and clarity in its rate-limiting strategy, the next phase will focus on identifying and rationalizing its trusted partners. The fundamental value proposition of track – the filtering of micromessages based on a combination of identity and conversational context – can now be achieved in FriendFeed with greater fidelity and, soon, realtime alert mechanisms that allow more personalized and affinity-powered flow regulation. The result: time-efficient information at the center of the user experience.
Over time, Twitter’s huge audience size and mainstream media acceptance will become less significant, forcing Twitter to name its price for its unique value even as it is watered down by more flexible tools and micro-community adoption of its competitors. Regardless of the anger in the community, which clearly has been discounted as a small minority in Twitter’s game plan, the clarity of Twitter’s rate limiting and brute force approach in managing its developer community now stand in sharp contrast to FriendFeed’s approach.
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Late last week, Microsoft Research shared a couple of things about Social Desktop, a prototype of which they are debuting at TechFest 2009 in a couple of days (along with dozens of other things). From the looks of it, this will be a much talked about product even if it stays in proof-of-concept phase for now.
