Visualize Your Facebook Friends With CurlGraph

With the release of Curl Version 7 Curl has created a fun RIA Desktop application called the CurlGraph.

One of Curl’s unique features is that it supports web applications that run outside the browser, installed on the desktop as is the case with this application.

Here's a video I made of the CurlGraph to give you an idea of how it works. Download it now and have some fun seeing how your friends are related to each other in Facebook.

Jeremiah Owyang on Social Media Strategies

Jeremiah Owyang

Yesterday I attended Jeremiah Owyang's web seminar "Social Media Playtime Is Over: How Brands Must Focus In A Recession." Jeremiah has been covering social media and on-line communities for Forrester for the last year and he offers a unique perspective on the state of the art best practices. In his position as a researcher he gets a first hand view of both corporate practices and vendor product strategies.

Here are some important insights from the seminar.

• The opportunity to use social media despite the recession is NOW. While the media maybe over hyping services like Twitter (Oprah and CNN vs Ashton Kutcher) with 3/4 of the US based on-line adults using social technologies this is a trend not a fad. We can expect adoption to increase during the recession as more people are between jobs and tapping into free social networking services to create and enhance personal brand.
  
• The companies surveyed are increasing their spending on social media programs but as a percentage of their overall marketing spend it remains small as most programs are not strategic.
• Most corporate use of social media is experimental with no clearly defined best practices and with many efforts underfunded and sporadic. Over 60% of the companies surveyed have budgets under $50,000 that are not dedicated but come from previously allocated marketing and advertising budgets.
  
• Jeremiah then offered 7 tactics that can fuel experimentation. These included:
  
  1. Socialize content - Make your existing connect available to be republished
     
  2. Word of mouth with Twitter - Establish Twitter accounts as communication channels
     
  3. Aggregate existing content - Provide a unified view on syndicated content relevant to your audience
     
  4. Crowdsource your support - Empower your users to provide answers and content for your community
     
  5. Sponsor bloggers - Give your customers a forum to talk about your brand and products
     
  6. Sponsor events - Not only provide venue and cover expense but actively participate
     
  7. Let go with APIs - Provide APIs into your service to allow others to build Internet properties using it in unique ways.
     

Bottom line is that we must treat social media as a long term strategy with the appropriate metrics and measurable returns and staff it with resources dedicated to its success that include a constant improvement feedback loop as best practices evolve.

Problems with Twitter Search

Last night as I was watching the Sharks game and conversing with the Sharks faithful on Twitter when I noticed Twitter search didn't provide any updates on the #Sharks hashtag for over two hours between 19:48 and 22:51. When it did start updating all the tweets that I made in the two hour window that included #Sharks didn't show-up in the results.

Anyone had similar problems? Know what's going on?

Here are screen shots that show the sequence.

Ulitzer's Questionable Practices and Curl's Endorsement

Late last year in my role as VP of marketing at Curl we were approached by SYS-CON to provide authors for their new service called Ulitzer. Having worked with Jeremy Gleelan to get Curl's message to the market at AjaxWorld events and in their numerous on-line magazines this appeared to be a good opportunity to continue the dialogue on Enterprise RIA. Jnan Dash, Bert Halstead and I all become contributors. During the period we published numerous articles on Enterprise RIA and saw their distribution in related SYS-CON on-line magazines.

As the beta of Ulitzer ended Jeremy asked if Curl could provide an endorsement. Feeling there was value in the service we did provide our endorsement.

However, given the questionable practices that have come to light over the last week I and Curl no longer feel comfortable with this endorsement and have formally requested Jeremy and SYS-CON to remove it wherever it appears. As of this writing I have been assured by Fuat Kircaali that my endorsement will be removed promptly.

RIA Fit Client and Cloud Computing

Image by David Simonds

As noted in the Economist a battle is brewing over standards for Cloud Computing as the big players begin to take measure of winning and loosing strategies.

While confusion reigns relative to Cloud Computing's definition there is no denying that a new class of application is emerging. The "Web-enabled, rich client, data-driven from Internet based services" application.

RIA technologies like Adobe AIR, Curl and Microsoft Silverlight are enabling this new class of application known as the "Fit Client" - Not Fat or Thin but Fit, web-enabled desktop applications.

The lower cost of the Fit Client application will help make Cloud computing real. Read more about the Fit Client in my post here.

The Power of Twitter

In today's Mercury News Larry Magid talked about his use of Twitter and how based on his experience he "didn't get it" but feared he might be missing something. And yes indeed he is.

Twitter is huge and here's why. It's Real-time search.

So many times a simple idea turns into something huge. Just as Tim Berners-Lee's simple idea of the URL morphed into the Internet so it will be with Twitter.

So what is Twitter's simple idea and why is it significant?

From a simple technology perspective Twitter is Publish-Subscribe SMS. It combines the publish-subscribe communication paradigm with real-time of instant messaging.

Publish-subscribe is a many to many broadcast protocol. I publish, many people listen. In fact as a publisher I don't need to know who is subscribing. If I have something interesting to say I can publish. If you find what I say interesting you can subscribe. This communication has its roots in the written word from cave dwellers hieroglyphs, to books, to newspapers, to websites to blogs and now to Twitter. Each technology transition from hieroglyphs to twitter has made publishing more immediate. Now by combining Publish-subscribe with SMS it's virtually real-time.

Additionally Twitter has opened up the network of subscriptions so that anyone can see who is subscribing (following) to who. Given the nature of social networks this means that interesting news has the ability to reach virtually everyone in six retweets.

This is significant because I can use Twitter to find what's happening in real-time and be alerted if something I care about happens when it happens. For example, just this morning using Twitscoop I was alerted to Lance Armstong's crash and injury in Spain.

Twitter is born of the same Cluetrain manifesto empowerment that drove blogging to prominent mainstream status. You can think of Twitter as real-time blogging. Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder described his creation as

”… an idea to make a more ‘live’ LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it.

Already Tweets have evolved from “I’m having breakfast” and “I’m watching it snow” to a powerful tool for building brand and a great way to keep up with what you’re passionate about. And because Twitter is open there is a whole industry for tools to help make Twitter even more effective. Now media giants like CNN are using such tools as a sort of police scanner to be alerted to the next news story. CNN broke the story of The Turkish airline crash which it was alerted to it by Twitter.

While Google, Yahoo and others tried to perform real-time search through their "Alert" function it does not work adequately. The main reason is their alerting mechanisms are based on repeated search of the database they build through "crawling" the Internet. The delay in that approach means that alerts to matches can be considerably later than real-time as I pointed out in this blog post, Cutting Through The Incessant Barking. Real-time works with Twitter because it limits Tweets to 140 characters which is exactly an SMS message.

As with any simple idea that drives a paradigm shift the number of use cases continues to grow only limited by the imagination of its users. While it took 20 years for Tim Berners-Lee's simple idea of the URL to morph into the Internet I think Twitter will be mainstream in a matter of years.

You can follow me at http://twitter.com/RichardTreadway.

Twitter Search About To Eclipse Google Blog Search

Since my realization that that Twitter could rival Google for real-time search I've been tracking various topics using Twitter search and I must say the results have been impressive. Steve Rubel noted in this post the Twitter is about to pass Google blog search. Using Compete.com's service I ran my own comparison shown below. Google's blog search is actually trending down at -3.2% compared to Twitter search's growth at 32.8%

When I was helping PubSub in 2005 everyone in the blog search space was waiting for Google's blog search to join us and Technorati. Many predicted Google's entry would mean the end for other competing blog search engines. My own experience with Google's blog search is largely disappointing. Many of the responses to my alerts are days if not weeks and in some cases years old.

RIA Round Up - March 14th, 2009

Here is this weeks round up. A collection of RIA articles and blog posts relevant to the market and technology trends.

Business Case for RIA

Virtual Panel on "The Current and Future State of RIA"
Impact
By Staff Writer, March 04, 2009

Info Q has just conducted a Virtual Panel on “The Current and Future State of RIA” featuring the thoughts of many individuals from well‑known and well‑respected companies in the space such as: Mozilla, Curl, Java, Microsoft and Adobe. Each spokesperson was provided with a series of questions relating to whether RIA technologies have “made it”, what the optimal user experience of the RIA should be, what other applications will be driving RIA technology adoption, as well as an overview of the various RIA frameworks and languages.

It's Time To Update The Enterprise Software Licensee Bill of Rights!
Forrester
By Ray Wang, March 05, 2009

With the market now in favor of the enterprise software licensee, its now time to update the Enterprise Software Licensee's Bill of Rights to include newer topics such as virtualization, SaaS and subscription pricing, newer usage based pricing models, open source, and vendor lock-in avoidance. As mentioned in a call to action in a December 2008 Monday's Musings, this groundbreaking report, originally published in December 2006, will be updated to reflect current market conditions. The goal - improve this reusable contract negotiation model that cuts across the 5 key phases of the software ownership life cycle:

RIA technologies and the downturn
ZDNet
By Ryan Stewart, March 05, 2009

The news is a pretty depressing place right now but there was a small article in the Economist about how the Fashion industry is responding to the downturn that caught my eye. Towards the end of the article the Economist mentioned how designers are looking for ways to leverage digital distribution:

Technology Comparisons

Flash is Dominating the Landscape, but Silverlight is Growing
InfoQ
By Abel Avram, March 10, 2009

A RIA statistics page is publishing the numbers of browsers having RIA plug‑ins installed on a daily basis. The RIA space today is occupied by Flash but Silverlight is catching up.

RIA User Interfaces

The Weekly RIA RoundUp for March 9
Inside RIA.com
By David Tucker, March 09, 2009

This week the Flex SDK gets some bug fixes, iLog releases a new set of visualization components, the new version of jQuery UI was released, Microsoft provides some guidance on Silverlight development, and a talk on the future of Rich Internet Applications. All this and more on the Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

Microsoft heralds Silverlight‑Eclipse link
Info World
By Paul Krill, March 09, 2009

Microsoft is touting support for its Silverlight multimedia application technology in the Eclipse open source tools platform.

Schwartz Explains Sun For You Part 2
SD Times
By Alex Handy, March 06, 2009

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, has been laying out the case for his company's future in his blog recently. Earlier this week, he gave a broad overview of his three‑ or four‑part talk. This is part two of that series. Go watch if you're interested in the company.

Framework for Flex Developers Goes Open Source
Dr. Dobb's Journal
By Staff Writer, March 05, 2009

Farata Systems has open sourced its Clear Toolkit 3.1 framework for developing enterprise Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java. Sun loses Apache and Spring vote on latest Enterprise Java

The Register
By Gavin Clarke, March 05, 2009

Updated: Sun Microsystems' rocky relationship with open source over Java is again in the spotlight, after it lost support of two influential groups for the latest update to enterprise Java.

Twitter The Next Google?

I recently read with interest Chris O'Brien's column, How Twitter could be a threat to Google. At first the headline gave me pause, "yeah right and how's that?" As a novice Twitter user I hadn't seen the connection. Then I got it. Real-time search.

Back in 2005 I spent a year helping a small start-up called PubSub with ambitions to be the next Google. PubSub was the creation of Bob Wyman who had studied the problem of real-time search and realized that in a publish-subscribe model the solution is to store the queries and match them against the published data. He called this "prospective search" because you're essentially saying "Tell me when this happens." Google search is "Retrospective search" as it searches what has already happened. Surely the argument went, the prospective search world must be as big if not bigger than the retrospective world.



But unfortunately in 2005 the Internet had few real-time publish-subscribe data feeds. One such data feed that was experiencing exponential growth was blogs. So PubSub's first popular use was as a real-time search service for blogs. PubSub's many followers used the service to track mentions of anything of interest as it occurred in the blogoshpere - providing immediate notification and the opportunity for immediate response.

While Google, Yahoo and others tried to perform real-time search through their "Alert" function it never worked adequately. The main reason is their alerting mechanisms are based on repeated "retrospective search." The delay in that approach means that alerts to matches can be considerably later than real-time as I pointed out in this blog post, Cutting Through The Incessant Barking

Unfortunately for all of us at PubSub and everyone that had grown to depend on the service our efforts suffered and untimely death.

But now the real-time search concept lives again with the latest publish-subscribe phenomenon Twitter. Twitter is born of the same Cluetrain manifesto empowerment that drove blogging to prominent mainstream status. Twitter is real-time blogging. Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder described his creation as

”… an idea to make a more ‘live’ LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it.

Tweets have evolved from “I’m having breakfast” and “I’m watching it snow” to a powerful tool for building brand and a great way to keep up with what you’re passionate about. And because systems like Twitter and Facebook are open there is a whole industry for tools to help make them more effective. Now media giants like CNN are using such tools as a sort of police scanner to be alerted to the next news story. CNN broke the story of The Turkish airline crash which it was alerted to it by Twitter.

Hopefully with the $35M in venture capital Twitter can accomplish what PubSub couldn't. I look forward to the day in the meantime I'm becoming a Twitter power user. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/RichardTreadway.

RIA Wars - Game On

"Tech Titans' Web Battle" - The headline of an article by Brandon Bailey in today's Mercury proclaims as news the story I've been telling for 2 years now - The war for dominance of the next desktop is on. The big boys have realized it for a while now and the battle lines have been drawn within the new RIA platform category. The fact that this story has caught the attention of the Merc is further proof the fight is going mainstream.

Gartner's recent Market focus report on RIA and Forrester's planned wave are further evidence the market is heating up and that RIA is a legitimate category.

We are now seeing a class of applications that are going beyond the simple dynamic interactivity possible through Ajax and into complex standalone desktop applications. With the more sophisticated RIA platforms it is now possible to replace client-server applications with much lower cost web applications.

Of course the Mercury article only mentions the titan products: Adobe's Flash/AIR, Microsoft's Silverlight and Sun's JavaFX but notes:

"analysts say it's unlikely that one company will dominate this field — at least not in the near future. But the market is huge"

This leaves plenty of room for lesser known platforms like Curl's Enterprise RIA to position itself as successfully meeting the needs of enterprise class applications.

Indeed many of Curl's over 400 customers found Curl only after trying and failing with Ajax or Flash. While sites such as Google or Yahoo handle very large numbers of users, the interactivity with business-critical databases and existing legacy applications is not a requirement. Enterprise RIA focuses on Fortune 1000 companies who spent a lot of resources during the 1980’s and 1990’s building client-server applications using the rich user interface of desktop clients such as Windows.

2009 should be a defining year for RIA platforms as more and more enterprises look to replace and modernize their old client server applications with web applications.

Tour of California - Tracker

I've been watching the Amgen Tour of California on TourTracker. While there have been some bugs with this complex Flash application overall the experience has been great. Yesterday my friends were in Santa Cruz waiting to see the race pass by and I was alerting them with status via SMS. I felt like I was Chloe running "command central" at 24. I even saw my friends in the live video as the race whizzed by them.

Below is a screen shot of the application which features live video and live telemetry including time, distance, speed and grade and well as GPS tracking in map and profile views. Very cool.

RIA Wars: Microsoft vs Adobe

Elizabeth Montalbano at InfoWorld reports on the RIA war going on between Microsoft and Adobe.

Microsoft's Tim Sneath lashed out at Adobe over Silverlight comments made by Mark Garrett at Thomas Weisel Partners Technology & Telecom Conference 2009 in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Garrett claimed that adoption of Microsoft's Silverlight RIA technology has fizzled. But Sneath countered in a recent post.

"Similarly, the idea that Silverlight is in anything other than rude health is more to do with what Adobe would like to be the case, rather than what actually is the case. The suggestion that “Silverlight adoption has fizzled out in the last 6-9 months” is pretty risible, in fact. For starters, Silverlight 2 shipped four months ago, and in just the first month of its availability, we saw over 100 million successful installations just on consumer machines. That doesn’t sound like “fizzling out” to me – in fact, it makes Garrett’s comments seem as if he’s living in a fantasy world."

Yes indeed - Fantasy-World - game on! With this economy we've all been living in a fantasy world.

2008 RIA Review in eWeek

Jim Rapoza of eWeek summarizes the year for RIA Platforms. The hardcopy eWeek edition of the story featured the results of the RIA Survey conducted at Inside RIA by ORielly. We were interested to note Curl came in second with 16.1% responding that Curl was next on their list to use.

Looking Forward to 2009 with Curl

While 2008 was a break out year for RIA technologies we expect 2009 to be even more exciting. It was good to see the recognition that Ryan Stewart gave Curl in his recent ZDnet post Looking Ahead to 2009. Thanks Ryan.

Over the last year we have considerably raised the visibility of Curl as the Enterprise RIA platform. We have grown our customer base to over 400. In 2009 we plan to continue to document the customer use cases to help highlight the bottom line business benefits of RIA adoption.

Over 2008 we made numerous releases and continued to deliver on our strategy build out our open source offering with
the WSDK (March 2008) and the CDK (July 2009). We also introduced our Version 7 beta release code named Nitro that significantly improves the ease of installation for off-line desktop applications. Finally we added Eclipse support with the release of the CDE. All in all it was a very busy and productive year.

Already 2009 has started with a bang as we released the CDK-DS which have gotten considerable visibility. With the CDK-DS Curl now has and end to end story for data intensive applications. Next up will be the release of version 7.

Wolf Camera

Last Saturday I bought a camera at Wolf Camera. I would normally have gone to Best Buy or Frys but this being the Thanksgiving weekend I wanted to be as far away from those zoos as possible.

I was pleasantly surprised at the buying experience. I had thought that with the advent of discount electronic box stores, ebay, Shutterfly, Snapfish, etc that honest to goodness camera stores were dead.

The sales agent was informed and took time to show me different options and didn't rush me. And to top it off I was overwhelmed with free offers. The camera I bought (Cannon Powershot SD1100 came with a free printer/scanner/copier and free camera lessons. But wait there's more. It also came with a free rain jacket valued at $100.

So let's sum up I bought a $179 camera and got a printer, photo lessons and a jacket. The total value of the free items exceeded the purchase price of the camera.

I guess that's how you beat the box stores.

Auto Industry Bailout - Give me an iCar

Thomas Freidman's How to Fix a Flat has really spawned a lot of commentary on the failings of the auto industry and much creative speculation on how Steve Job's creative genius could change the car much as the iPhone changed the phone.

I'm sure there is a complex intertwined web of factors that have contributed to the auto industry digging itself into such a hole. Is pouring more money into that hole to save the economy the right path? As the markets free fall and my savings evaporate part of me says, "please stop the bleeding." But putting more money into a failed business can't be the answer. There was no dotcom implosion bailout and yet we now have Amazon, eBay and Google.

When gas was approaching $5 a gallon, secretly I was hoping it would go up to $10 and higher. While that would hurt our wallets it would truly force a new way of life. Now as gas prices fall back down again it's back to the same old ways. The auto industry is living in a false reality that just isn't sustainable and doesn't follow free market rules. How can it be that we are giving the auto industry money to fund innovation. That can't be right. Shouldn't competition spawn innovation.

If we bailout the auto industry to save the economy it can only be a temporary fix. We need a game changer. That change can come out of the ashes of the the failed big 3. At some point we have to let that failure play out. That collapse can enable a new business model that values innovation, imposes its own mandates on MPG and sets a time line for no emission vehicles. We don't need bigger car companies we need are smaller more innovative ones.

Silicone valley has the chance to be the next center of the auto industry. Pioneers like Tulsa motors are leading the way. Up next the Apple iCar. Watch out Detroit

Web2.0 Expo New York

Last week I was with Curl at Web2.0 Expo in New York. The show was at the Jacob Javits center and shared the exhibition hall with Interop. The Javits show floor is huge with Web2.0 and Interop each sharing half. The difference between the 2 exhibitions was dramatic. The Web2.0 had the typical start-up small booths where as the Interop side had sophisticated presentations and lots of consumer style gimmicks like a race car replica / video game and a beautiful custom made motorcycle shown below.

See additional pictures here.

It's clear that Web2.0 has gone main stream as large companies like HP and Microsoft had their mega 3 story booths staking a claim to the new wave.

It was busy and I barely had time to see any sessions or walk the floor as I gave more than 25 demos over the 2 days. It was interesting to note that visitors to the Curl booth were much more informed on RIA than our first experience at Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco, April 2007. Many said they had heard of Curl as the new cool RIA. It seems all our efforts to be seen in the RIA landscape are gaining momentum.

Bert Halstead, our chief architect did a great job of positioning Curl in the podcast with David Berlind of Tech Radar. You can hear listen here.

All in all it was a fun show and great to visit NY. You can see my post with hotel and restaurant reviews here.

WOA vs SOA Driven by RIA

Now that's a mouth full of acronyms that 2 years ago no one would have had a clue about. But as movements go Web2.0 technologies continue to penetrate the enterprise and the old stodgy SOA is increasingly taking a back seat to WOA. As Joe McKendrick of ZDnet points out WOA wins the popularity contest hands down.

At Curl we see this phenomenon first hand. Many of our customers are enterprises that have SOA initiatives and see Curl as the RIA for SOA. We continue to enjoy our position as "The Enterprise RIA" which links us directly to SOA.

But 2008 is proving to be the inflection year for Web2.0 enterprise adoption and increasingly RIA is leading the way. Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester has commented numerous time on how the Gen Yers are driving adoption of more dynamic web applications. Coming from academia to the enterprise you can't be satisfied with boring, clunky old corporate applications when all the tools you used at school offered a compelling dynamic user experience.

At Curl we observe WOA popularity is largely driven by RIA. Increasingly we are finding enterprises are being forced to address application usability and seriously considering RIA implementations.


From the Desk

Summer's Over - Back to School

Well it's been a hectic several months and as a result I haven't had time to keep up my Weblog. But summer's over and its time to get back to watching and commenting my postcard observations.

With Web2.0 Expo in New York coming up there will be a lot of interesting RIA things to see and comment on.

Heading to Web2.0 Expo

I'm headed up to Web2.0 Expo with Curl. It was one year ago at this same event that we launched Curl into the US market. It certainly has been a fun year.

Ryan Stewart has a good post highlighting the RIA related things that are happening at the show.

Over the last year the RIA space has really heated up and Curl is now regularly mentioned with the big boys Adobe and Microsoft. We've received some great coverage with our recent announcements of Eclipse and Ubuntu support and our next version of the Curl platform code named Nitro.

Some mentions include:

Curl IDE To Be Integrated in Eclipse
Application Development Trends By Will Kraft
April 21, 2008
http://www.adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=22493

RIA Is Dead! Long Live Web Applications
Mark Finkle’s Weblog By Mark Finkle
April 21, 2008
http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2008/04/ria‑is‑dead‑long‑live‑web‑applications/

Product review: Adobe breathes fresh AIR into RIA
InfoWorld By James R. Borck
April 21, 2008
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/21/17TC‑adobe‑air_1.html

Revenge of the desktop app
CNet By Dan Farber
April 21, 2008
http://www.news.com/8301‑13953_3‑9923421‑80.html?tag=newsmap

Curl Enters Desktop Wars
eWeek By Darryl Taft
April 18, 2008
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application‑Development/Curl‑Enters‑Desktop‑Wars/