Today I had to get some writing done, so I stayed away from the final sessions of Web 2.0 — where apparently, among other things, Google announced a new RSS reader (which was totally slammed and unreachable when I tried to visit earlier). But here are some notes from yesterday’s sessions.
I hadn’t heard of Writely before; it’s another Ajax-style Web app transposing a traditional software function into web-based software — in this case, word-processing. I’m putting it in the “check out when I have time” bin.
By many accounts, Zimbra was the hottest product to launch at the conference’s 13-company “Launchpad,” which featured plenty of other interesting debuts (Jeff Jarvis has good notes on the others). Zimbra is an Ajax-based Outlook replacement (e-mail, calendar, contacts). Its apparent homage to an old Talking Heads song was duly noted by whoever was running the music at Web 2.0; “I Zimbra,” the cryptic lead track from “Fear of Music,” could be heard between panels.
At the open source panel, Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz tried very hard to persuade us that what was really important about open source software isn’t that the code is open or that anyone can improve it but simply that it’s given away free. Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker did an excellent job of debunking this point of view, not by directly disputing it but by explaining exactly what’s so great about Firefox: “Our goal is to make things easy to change,” she said. “It’s easy to try things out. You can try things out quickly. We can try 15 or 20 things at once and see which work.”
And, she added, that “we” there? “It isn’t us.” That is, the people trying out 15 or 20 things aren’t sitting in the offices of the Mozilla Foundation or even part of the core development team; they’re all over the Web. And they can try those things out because, er, the code is open, not because the product costs zero dollars. Sure, most Firefox users aren’t programmers and can’t do anything with the source themselves. But they can benefit from a much broader set of improvements and options made possible by the open source model.
Jeremy Allaire debuted Brightcove, which looked basically like a content management system for video — not that interesting for end-users, but more for video producers or large-site managers looking to integrate more video. Still, pretty impressive as a well-thought-out approach to bringing more commercial video content onto the Web in ways that don’t totally freak out the “content owners” yet are not entirely hostile to the medium.
Jason Fried of 37signals offered a ten-minute rant on the virtues of “less” as a competitive advantage: “It takes three people to build anything online these days: if you have more than three people, you have too many.”
AOL’s Jonathan Miller told an amusing story of how, when he took over the company in the depths of the dot-com doldrums, he handled the resentment he found at various divisions of Time Warner, where employees and execs were disgruntled about how the AOL/Time merger had gone — they felt they’d been snookered by AOL. He told them about having his car towed in Manhattan, and visiting the godforsaken place you go to get your car, and waiting in line forever, and getting angrier and angrier, and finally getting to the front of the line and seeing a sign that read: “The person here did not tow your car. They are here to help you get your car back. If you cooperate, you will get your car back faster.”
That’s what he told the unhappy Time campers: “I did not tow your car.”
Mickey Hart was on stage at the end of the day Thursday, talking about the history of the Dead and the “tapers” the band allowed to record their shows. He pointed out ways in which that community was similar to today’s file-trading hordes, and ways that it was different. But one thing he said stood out for me: The Dead played for pay and they played for free; “we always played better when we played free.”
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.