So yesterday, when I was writing about Bill Buxton’s new book, I went to Amazon.com, thinking I’d grab a picture of the cover of the book, and as a thank you to Amazon.com have the image of the book cover link to their site. So, I started doing the same old rigamarole of saving the book cover graphic, opening it in Photoshop to tweak it (resize it, remove the gray background inserted by Amazon, etc.) and then I thought “wait, why I am I sitting here preparing a graphic that already exists on the web? Why not just point to that graphic?” So, I went back to the Amazon site and viewed the page source and trawled around to find the url for the image. And I’m sure if I had tooled around enough in the page source, I would have been able to find the right link, but after a while, I simply decided this wasn’t worth my time. At some point, while all this was happening, someone sent me a link to a video on YouTube (yes, it was another completely ridiculous but funny YouTube video, and no I won’t tell you what it was), so I went to watch it, but found myself instead staring at YouTube Embed/URL feature and wondering why in the world Amazon doesn’t add this to their site. Y’know something like this…

Let’s see what all the possible advantages might be of this feature:

• Authors of the book can easily promote it on their site, and the embedded content could include optional sales info or ratings info or whatever.
• People who have reviewed the book on Amazon’s site can display a snippet of their review on their website. Users who want to read the rest of the review would be taken to the Amazon site.
• Bloggers, like me, who want to write about a book could easily display a book cover (and maybe optional features like the search inside link in their blog entries.

So why hasn’t Amazon done this? Is there some legal reason that prevents it? Do they already have the feature but I just wasn’t able to track it down?

So my friend Brett just showed me the site xhtmlized, which is probably one of the coolest web 2.0 sites I’ve come across in a while, mostly because they aren’t doing the same old web 2.0 stuff, but are instead applying it to (I think) something new – pricing. In a way, they’ve entrepreneurialized themes and web standards. Anyone can throw up a few cool themes on the web and make them available for free, but in most cases, the person interested in those themes will want to tweak/personalize for their own needs – or maybe they like the theme but they also don’t want people coming to their site and saying oh, they used theme such and such. So then they’re stuck between trying to create something from scratch or using an existing theme and all the work has gone into it and then try to customize it – which they can probably do with little effort if they’re developers. But if you’re a non-techie or just plain don’t want to deal with the dev side of things, what you really want is someone who can add that extra personal touch – because that’s often what you need (at least that’s how it was for me), you like the theme, but you want to maybe move that thing over there and one of those widgets and put them down there, etc. etc. From their long list of testimonials, it looks like the guys at xhtmlized are doing quite well. It’ll be interesting to see if this model catches on and gets more widely used.

So you’re standing at the airport gate, ready to board your transatlantic flight on Google Airlines, and happen to look out through the large glass windows at the airplane. Just above the multi-colored Google Airlines logo, you notice four barely visible little gray letters: BETA.

A film of sweat forming on your forehead, you ask the gate attendant (a Mr. Page) how it is that the airplane still is in beta when you’re flying real customers to real destinations. “Oh that,” Mr. Page replies, “that just means that we still plan on adding major features and are continually improving our product.”

But isn’t a beta the same as a test version?” you ask.  Mr. Page shrugs, “Google Airlines will likely continue to be in beta for years,” he explains, “Have a nice flight!”

Ok, so what Larry Page really said, back in 2005 when referring to the continued presence of the beta label on products such as Gmail, years after their public launch, was:

It’s kind of an arbitrary thing. We could take beta off all of our products tomorrow, and we wouldn’t actually have accomplished anything. If it’s on there for five years because we think we’re going to make major changes for five years, that’s fine. It’s really a messaging and branding thing.

We’re now in late 2006 and Gmail remains in ‘beta.’ In my opinion Google would accomplish a lot by removing the beta label. For starters, they would tell the world that they stand behind the version of the product that currently is in use, rather than implicitly stating that, as a commenter on Digg so succinctly remarked, “the eternal beta is Google’s method of unaccountability.” How funny it would be if Google were to practice some truth-in-labeling and instead go with something like

As far as the whole messaging and branding thing goes, Google is of course applying the term in the Web 2.0 sense, meaning that modern web applications are constantly undergoing improvement, so the reasoning goes that they are always in beta.

Which makes explicitly displaying a beta label meaningless. Yes, Evolution is founded on the idea of constant change and improvement, sometimes through trial and error, but that doesn’t mean that we think of the environment we live in as the beta version :)

The reality is that the fundamental concept of a beta just doesn’t make sense when talking about a web 2.0 application, because a beta implies that at some point in the future the beta period will end and will be replaced by a release version of the application.

But because being out in the public domain is an intrinsic part of the very iterative design process of web 2.0 apps, the traditional alpha/beta/release candidate/gold release model is completely turned on it’s head. In other words, modern apps like Flickr (which by the way have replaced the beta label with the far more creative ‘Gamma’ label) and Digg have to grow organically out in the world, as it were, because they are so extensively based on aggregation and syndication and other exchanges of services and content between their application and the web as a whole.

While Web 1.0 apps are sort of grown in greenhouses, and then brought out and planted in the public domain fully grown, Web 2.0 apps are merely seedlings when planted out in the public web, which is where the site is nursed into maturity (or falls victim to the sometimes unforgiving elements of the web.)

As Gmail goes, the seedling or incubation phase was probably the early period when access to the product was invitation only, in which the product was being tested by real users and used for real-life activities, but in which the user base was limited. After that, when the product became publicly available, continuing to call it a beta is akin to Starbucks calling small drinks ‘Tall’ drinks. They do it not because it has anything to do with reality or because it in any way makes sense (except if you’re in the marketing dept.); they do it because they can.

So I’m sitting here tooling around with the new features of the Google personalized homepage (last time I visited, they did not have the tab feature, for example), and finding myself not at all thinking about Google; I’m thinking about Microsoft, more specifically their forthcoming operating system, which legend has it is to be released sometime in 2007. Every time I turn around, I seem to be discovering and trying out some new feature or product released by Google, but with Microsoft, I mostly find myself reading about them, as in that it’s either been delayed, or that there is some security issue. On the one hand, I’m really comparing apples (eh, not to be confused with Apples) and oranges here – while Google is churning out one little app after another, what Microsoft is working on is the far more extensive effort of developing an operating system, of building the environment in which apps like Google’s can live. But at the same time, I have to wonder how all this would be different if the tables were turned…

Imagine for a moment that it is Google who is busy working on a new operating system while Microsoft is developing a bunch of tiny web-apps. (Btw, some of the apps Google is producing are quickly becoming less and less tiny, like the enterprise version of Gmail, which essentialy is a repackaged version of what they’ve been using internally – I am guessing we’ll be seeing more of their internal tools, such as their internal Help Desk system, also being made publicly available before too long.) My guess is that the process of implementing a Google OS would be approached very similarly to how Linux was created, with an initial seed kernel created by Linus Brin and Larry Torvalds (ha ha), followed by an open-sourcish approach, where the OS essentially is allowed to grow out in the open (as opposed to behind closed doors in Redmond) – a continaul flow of tiny improvements and design changes.

But that would only be the beginning of the differences. I can not imagine a Google OS that is not a fundamental departure from any of the major operating systems in use today. For starters, I would assume that the entire notion of a browser would vanish. In other words, once you boot up, if a network can be found, LAN, WAN, WiFi, whatever, you are online (OSX already does this to a degree.) In other words, it will be considered the default state of the operating system (akin to a UNIX terminal, which is never anything more than a network node), rather than a special state. Unfortunately, Microsoft Live notwithstanding, from my own tests of Vista, it seems that the new MS OS will continue to treat being on a network as a special state. No, I’m not talking about being on a local network (MS’s OS’s have handled that quite well since NT), I’m talking about full connectivity. So what’s the big deal about this distinction? Well, going back to what I mentioned earlier about the browser vanishing, what this means is that the operating system and what we currently think of as a standards-based browser would be completely fused. No more launching Firefox or whatever to get to Amazon or eBay or what-not. When the operating system boots up, you’d be greeted with, among other things, a big fat text field (yes, only one text field for URLs, searches, commands, everything – and I should actually credit my good friend Liz, for that idea), where you type in whatever it is you want to do or find or run or whatever. Of course, you wouldn’t want to have to type in things you do all the time, which brings us back to that personalized Google homepage. Functioning very similarly to a personalized homepage, the desktop keeps track of all your recent activities, your favorite locations, applications, etc. And better yet, as you work, all your data, and all your preferences would be stored in a central location, so that when you’re logging in to your computer, it really doesn’t matter what computer you’re logging in to – all your personalizations would be available to you as long as you are able to be online – and for those situations where you can’t get a connection, your personal machine would have lots and lots of storage, and automatically keep a synchronized local version of your data and preferences, doubling also as a continual backup system. But all these features would be emergent in a Google OS – in other words, they would not all be available right away, but would appear piecemeal, which brings us back to the core difference between the fundamental philosophies underlying how Google (and other Web 2.0 folk, like 37s or Flickr) approach design – rather than trying to get everything perfect before releasing something (which is what Microsoft is trying to do with Vista, and which we all know can never happen), the approach is to release something when it is good enough, when people can start to use it and react to it, and then keep adding to it. That’s the very evolutionary approach that I think Microsoft needs to turn to, or (and forgive me for sounding all doomsdayish here), Microsoft may not be releasing many more operating systems after Vista, because I think operating systems like we know them today will become virtually irrelevant before too long.

Back in the 70s, when personal computing entered the mainstream, they came about as a means of providing individuals a tiny piece of the computing power available to governments, corporations, and universities in the form of mainframes. But in contrast to the mainframe/terminal paradigm, in which the network is an inherent aspect of the model, personal computers were mostly islands. Rather than being delivered via a network, virtually all data input came via a floppy disk or the like. Networking for personal computers would not become a mainstream reality until thousands of miles of fiber optic cable later. While mainframes efficiently stored and managed all data and provided all processing power centrally on the mainframe mother ship, with dummy terminals limited to input/output, the personal computer ended up being like little pioneers, required to be completely self-sufficient in terms of processing power, data storage, and software. Even after the World Wide Web entered the mainstream in the mid 90s, it would be quite some time until broadband networks would become widely accessible and allow for offloading some of that burden to remote servers, so the little pioneers settled and became beefy workstations with massive storage capabilities and mainstream processor speeds eventually surpassing that of supercomputers of old. This evolutionary path has continued in a steady progression, to the point where personal computers are starting to look like their own little mainframes, at least in terms of the extent to which they need to be maintained—owning a personal computer today means being a mini-administrator, dealing with software updates, security issues, networking, etc. But, of course, personal computers are not mainframes. More importantly, they have long since ceased being islands. As networking becomes an increasingly central aspect of personal computing, the personal computing paradigm as we’ve now known it for the last quarter century is making less and less sense. It’s making less and less sense for files and applications to reside on a local machine, considering that more and more people work on multiple computers, and more and more people have access to broadband connectivity, which negates so many of the original reasons why personal computers came about in the first place. In my view, what instead would make sense would be for a mainstreaming of the mainframe paradigm. In some ways, that process already is underway, in the guise of the Web 2.0. web-as-platform model. Building on that, I would like to not only store these blog entries online, but all my files (some of which of course I would choose to keep private.) In addition, instead of sitting here typing this in Word, a desktop application (yup, even though it will eventually end up online, doing a lot of typing in a text area isn’t exactly an optimal user experience, so I always type everything first in Word), I would want to be able to have a web-based version of Office, in which it was provided as a service, and I never again had to worry about installing it or keeping it updated or having to attach Word docs to emails whenever I wanted to send it to someone. After having typed this, rather than clicking on a save button (which would be gone, since it would always be automatically saved), I would just publish it, without the need for any FTPing or anything like that, since it would already be online. Then, instead of sending someone an attachment, I’d just send them a link. And let’s say I wanted to collaborate with someone on writing a document – well, I would just need to give them access to it, and suddenly we’ve got a collaborative workspace, or I could open it up even more and turn the document into a Wiki. I could go on, and talk about all the advantages of moving personal files to an online space and turning desktop applications into either free online apps or subscription-based online apps (e.g. no more dealing with backups of your files, since that would be part of the subscription service), but the funny thing is that there really is nothing about these ideas that is infeasible. It’s more a question of whether or not companies that have a strong interest in retaining the status quo of personal computing, such as, oh I don’t know, Microsoft? (and Apple too), would have the boldness and vision to make their products available as an online service. The good news is that there are companies, such as, oh I don’t know, Google? (and Yahoo! too), that in many ways already are either realizing or creating the momentum for just such a shift.

Remember the BMW Isetta? It was basically a motorcycle trying to be a car, with a miniature car-like body, but with a single cylinder motorcycle engine. These days, when working on a web site, I somehow feel like I’m living in an Isetta world, like I’m being asked to design cars with motorcycle parts, asked to turn web sites existing within the confines of a browser universe into all-out desktop applications. Remembering the good old days when web sites dressed and looked like websites (as in more content and less functionality), today’s websites are becoming more and more like desktop Isettas, web sites trying to emulate something they simply are not and will never be—at least not as long as they remain within what we currently think of as a browser, for the simple reason that browsers, in their original incarnation, were never designed for anything like what many users on the web are using them for today; they were designed for easy exchange of (scholarly) hyper-linked documents. But, of course, the Internet allows for so much more than distributing dry academic fare, so we’ve been busy piling functionality onto our little single-cylinder browser, trying to make web pages mimic desktop apps—Microsoft with ActiveX, Macromedia with Flash, and Google and Yahoo! and just about everyone else with the cobbling together of Javascript and XML functions that we (thanks to fellow IA Jesse James Garrett) know as AJAX. What drives these efforts, of course, is that (except for the likes of the scientists at CERN, where HTML was invented), users never asked for or wanted browsers to work the way they originally worked in the first place. In fact, after the launch of the Mac in the mid 80s, the desktop paradigm sort of became the gold standard for how non-geeks were meant to interact with computers. By the time the web entered mainstream computing about a decade later, anybody with a computer (*nix and DOS heads notwithstanding) was pretty much indoctrinated into a desktop world of files and folders and copying and pasting and dragging and dropping and generally immediate responsiveness. So it’s no wonder that usability had to take center stage in the web world to try to reconcile the unruly and awkward behavior of browsers with the then far more familiar desktop world. And for the last 10 years, we’ve been patting ourselves on the back every time we make browsers work more like desktop apps, which is really to say that we’re working our butts off trying to retain the status quo of ca 1984. Yes, 1984, the year that the Mac was released, because frightening as it may sound, we really haven’t moved much beyond the paradigms that were in place back then. To paraphrase former Silicon Graphics chief scientist Bill Buxton, if a Mac user fell into a coma in 1984 and woke up today, they’d pretty much be able to turn on a computer and generally recognize what they were looking at and be able to use it. That’s 20+ years of patting ourselves on the back for all kinds of user interface innovations, and what do we have to show for it? We’ve transformed web sites into desktop application emulators. Not exactly Insanely Great. Ah, but we’ve done so much more than that you say, like leveraging the power of interconnectivity toward creating the Web 2.0 internet platform, like creating new geographically independent relationships, like making content (theoretically) universally findable. Yes, but do we have browsers to thank for that, or was that just the result of fiber optics and satellites? In other words, what have browsers done for us lately, except create a lot of jobs for people who have mastered (or pulled their hair out trying to master) the black art of web design—a black art because building cars with motorcycle parts will remain a messy business, no matter how hard we might worship at the altar of the Zeldman Church (er, Synagogue…) of Web Standards, the browser will still be a browser and we’ll be stuck inside it. Unless of course Apple and Microsoft (or Google via Sun? or Google via Google…) got smart and decided to do away with the whole browser thing and just make the platform the browser (or the browser the platform or whatever.) No more Safari. No more IE. No more Firefox. Just connectivity. Period. While Microsoft is busy turning their next OS, MS Vista, into a beefed up version of Google Desktop (and unabashedly skinning it to look like Mac OS X), Google and Yahoo! and other future thinkers are busy working on that thing we call Web 2.0, which I expect/hope/pray(?) will finally blow that 20-year-old dinosaur, the desktop paradigm, out of the water. I would venture a guess that the reason why there’s been a lot of buzz surrounding a possible Google browser (such as Google having registered the domain name gbrowser.com) but that we’ve not seen them launch a browser, is because whatever they release will be more like a platform than a browser. When you fire up a future version of the Google Desktop, you fire up Gmail (as in the one they are working on now which will eat Outlook for breakfast), and I am hoping something like a Google Office, where—just like your Gmail data—all your word files or excel files or whatever run not in a local application, but in a remote application, of which you are just temporarily consuming a single instance. All the data and all the applications exist on the gNet, as it were, such that it doesn’t matter what computer you’re using; you always have access to all your personal files (that normally would live on your computer.) No more downloading files or applications to your local computer. No more annoying notices that a new version of this software is available and would you like to download and quit out of all your applications and restart your computer to install it? (I think iTunes for Windows has released 4 such updates to their software in the last month alone.) This concept isn’t new – Marimba and other technologies are based on exactly this paradigm. The big difference is that, with broadband and wireless becoming increasingly pervasive, the groundwork for making such a paradigm a reality on a broad scale has been laid. There are of course major obstacles, such as privacy, trust, and security issues (after all, all your personal files would be living on someone else’s server) but I think the incredible value potential of this model is so high that all such issues will (or already have been) addressed. Web 2.0 should really be called Platform 2.0, because the future incarnation of the “browser wars” will likely be more like platform wars, between Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! with Mozilla and Apple in the mix somewhere as well. Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean the total extinction of what we currently think of as the desktop; it only means that the use of this paradigm has reached a critical mass (as in you now have thousands upon thousands of individual files on your computer, to the point where trying to manually keep them organized and being able to find them by browsing to them is becoming a tragicomical exercise for everyone except the most anally retentive users) and that I think it will be replaced by a browser-desktop hybrid paradigm, in which you have content and pages but you don’t necessarily have to name everything or place everything in a specific location, rather your content will self-organize, like a kind of personal folksonomy based on your behaviors, habits, and implicit preferences, as well as those within the social networks with which you (and your content) interact. In this future, the browser, like that little three-wheeled single cylinder Isetta, I think will be looked at as a quaint stepping-stone toward a web-based platform, a pretty cool and useful thing that was simply not up to the task of being the vehicle for the Web 2.0 platform.