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Who should drive innovation?

One of the interesting things about Web 2.0 applications is that theres this gap that has to breach for them to be used. No matter what the application is, they are wholly reliant on a browser to access them. This is a very interesting concept and begs the question, where does the responsibility lie when it comes to innovation, with the browser vendors or with the websites?  And does the advancement, or lack thereof, limit the scope of the other?

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Is YouTube aquisition an admission of failure?

So, by now, everyone on the entire world knows that Google has bought YouTube for more than one and a half billion dollars, in shares.  That’s an awful lot of little pieces of paper that say “1 Google Share” on them, no doubt there multi-coloured with a bit of AJAX thrown in.

So what does this mean for the internets, that great series of tubes we all know and love.  Obviously it seems like a huge amount of money, and it is, so why now?  And what’s the future for Google Video?  Many people are pointing to a potential bidding war for YouTube prompting Google’s action.  With Yahoo, MSN and Google all launching video services and none coming close to the success of YouTube, its not a bad call actually.  With YouTube’s huge popularity, eclipsing all similar sites it offered the possibility to capture a massive market share in one foul swoop.  Its a very tempting proposition, even considering the numerous legal issues that are constantly hovering around.

There is another possibility of course.  Many have suggested that the purchase of YouTube by Google is an admission of failure, they are admitting that their own Video service hasn’t worked.  And you know what, there not that far off the mark.  Google Video is clunky and hard to use.  For a company known for usability, they’ve really dropped the ball on Google Video.  This is something YouTube just nails.  Its easy to find, view and upload videos.  There’s one thing that seems to have bee overlooked, and that’s the target audience of the two services.  I may not be a typical user of the internet but I tend to see completely different types of video on Google Video to YouTube.  Videos on YouTube tend to be short and dirty, usually not the greatest quality and typically reasonably short.  The videos on Google Video tend to be longer and of a better quality.  This seems inevitable really.  YouTube was based on MMS messages, the short, low quality videos that people take on their mobile phones or digital cameras.  The videos you take without planning, when you see something you’ve just got to record.  It seems obvious that Google video is set up a little differently.  The player, by default is bigger, and the way you find content is different, you have to really know what you’re looking for.  This lends itself more to higher quality, paid for content, such as TV shows.  While its true that Google launched without any paid for content, it came quickly and was widely predicted, for obvious reasons.  Also remember that Google video moderates video allot more tightly than YouTube.

So what will come of this?  It seems like a fair bet that Google Video and YouTube will polarise in terms of content.  You can quite easily see a future where Google Video provides promotional and high quality paid for content and YouTube keeps well away at the other end of the market, sticking with videos the kids are uploading.  That way Google corners two opposing ends of the market.  If that is their aim, its a very clever tactic.

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THE best RSS reader

In case you haven’t noticed, Google Reader has undergone a bit of a rework by those crazy lads over at Google.  And let me just say, it’s superb.  Its such an improvement over the old Google reader (which you can switch back to in preferences by the way, not that you’d want to) its hard to believe its come from the same place.  One thing that really caught my eye is the video introduction which has a great description of why you should use an RSS reader, it would be a good introduction to some non tech savvy friends or relatives and goes along the lines of “When you check your email, you don’t have to go to Bob and check whethers he’s sent you mail and then go to Lisa to see if she’s sent you mail, you just check your mail and it’s all there.  So why would you go and check all these different websites everyday, why not just check Google Reader”.
And its an email, Gmail infact, style interface Google Reader provides.  If you choose the “All Items” view you just get a list, ordered by time, of all the items from all your RSS feeds.  It is just like checking your email.  For the more organised amongst us, you can tag them, order them in folders and select them by feed.  You can also go through All Items while expanded, which is just like a giant web page.  And of course the Gmail like interface is very AJAXY and smooth.  Plus, adding feeds is so easy.  Not only do they give you a bookmarklet but theres also a superb, and very accurate search box.  Fancy subscribing to the Google Blog, just type in “google blog” and it will return a list of matching RSS feeds.  And seeing as its a Google powered search, its probably going to be pretty good.  You can also just paste an RSS feed address in there as well.
There are a couple of things I’d like to see.  Firstly, something I seem to keep going on about with Google Products is that I’d like to see better integration with their other products and really leverage the advantage they have in being the market leader in some key areas.  With it being Google, I’d also like the ability to search across the items in my feeds, preferably archived items as well.  Also, at the moment things like embedded video only seem to work with certain feeds, specifically the You Tube and Google Video top ten feeds.  Also, it still seems a little buggy.  I keep getting the “An Error Occured” message and trying to mark all items as read is a bit hit and miss, as is using their refresh button (you have to reload the entire page, not a huge problem).  Overall though, since trying it out I’ve not been to Netvibes, my previous RSS reader, once.  It’s THAT good.

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Podcasts Vs Netcasts

I’m sure many of you reading this are a fan of Podcasts, there a great way of keeping up with the goings on and I for one find them an easy way of assimilating alot of information which also doing work.  I’d also be willing to bet that if you are a fan of Podcasts you’ve also heard of Leo Laporte of This Week In Tech (TWiT) fame and podcaser of the year.  I was suprised to hear him speak up against the word podcast in a recent TWiT podcast.

My suprise if born from two things, firstly, Leo is a Mac (and therefore Apple?  Debate…) fan.  In fact one of my favourite podcasts as a Mac user is MacBreak (check out the MacBreak vidcast, its production values put most TV shows to shame), which is presented by Leo among others (It’s strange that I feel comfortable calling Leo, Leo, almost like I know him through his shows).  The second reason is that Podcast is actually a very clever term to use with regards to marketing.  The iPod brought digital music to the masses.  No longer was it the preserve of nerds in their bedrooms, the average person understood that this white box could store their entire music collection.  It broke down barriers.  Now we have podcasting which, for the most part, is limited to tech savvy people, standing on the brink of wider acceptance.  I would argue that by associating it with the iPod, rightly or wrongly, will give it the final push into mainstream acceptance.

One other thing that sticks out with this, as the unofficial apple weblog (TUAW) points out, is that Leo wants to coin, and trademark, a new term, netcasting.  I can see two problems with this.  Firstly the term conjours up nerdy images for me, things which alot of people don’t want to be associated with for whatever reason.  i can’t see people like Ricky Gervais, the UK’s number one podcast, using the term, its just not cool enough.  The other problem I have is the fact that Leo wants to trademark this term.  Supposedly the reason for this move away from Podcasting is partly down to Apple putting legal pressure on people using the term.  Now correct me if I’m wrong but I was under the impression that under Americal Trademark law you have to make efforts to protect your trademark or you will lose it.  This is the reason Apple gave for their legal pressure and I for one would like to believe them.  The flipside of this is that if Leo is successfull in trademarking his term, he also will have to enforce it or risk losing the trademark.  Its the use it or lose it mentality.  I’m not suggesting that Leo Laporte wants to trademark this term for personal gain but surely he will have to become the thing he hates, a litigous entity, if he is to be successfull in establishing the term.

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Standardising the unstanderdisable

As some of you may have read in a previous post, I’m a recent convert to Mac OSX.  One of the problems I’m having is that my tried and tested ways of working in Windows are now being challenged for the first time in ten plus years.  I had these pre-conceived notions of how an OS should work, and they just don’t hold true for OSX.  Take downloads for example, in windows I download a program, probably zipped.  I then unzip it and run the installation executable file, done and done.  Compare this to the OSX process.  Typically it will be a dmg file I download (sometimes compressed), I have to “mount” this file and then do whats required, which is usually just dropping the .app file into my applications folder.

Am I getting to the point yet?  Well, yes.  If you consider the fairly common process of downloading and installing a program in the two operating systems you get a feel for how differently they perform.  And bare in mind this is just one very small aspect of what they do, imagine how different things like system administration could be.  The other thing to bare in mind is the fact that these are both locally residing operating systems, imagine the extra confusion that could potentially be introduced when we consider remotely hosted operating systems and working environments (is that the point I see on the horizon?).

I may have picked operating systems, and I accept (and am gratefull of the fact) that we are a long way away from having stable, reliable, usable and standard hosted operating systems but the same principals apply to applications.  The point is we already have this added third dimension of confusion (trade mark pending) with the proliferation of web apps.  The one thing we don’t have currently is any consistency, and this causes huge usability headaches.  This is something I’ve harped on about before, within an OS you have accepted standards for interacting with you applications.  In OSX, hitting control and , brings up preferences, in Windows Alt and F4 closes the active Window etc.  This truly fundamental level of predictable design is sadly lacking in Web apps.  In fact, there only seems to be one standard.  If text is editible in line, then highlight it in Yellow when the user mouses over it, and that seems like a forced standard.

What I would like to see are some evolved standards for web applications, its not too much to ask.  My concern is that one of the big companies that offers web applications (Google, MS, Yahoo, I’m looking at you) will accidently create standards.  All it takes is a suite of applications to take off and the others will follow.

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