This is geek-dom. All geek-a-phobes, anti-geeks, geek-aholics, …. move along, there’s nothing to see here. Still with me ? Sorry to hear.

Today was a day of writing technical documentation. Not the most fun I get to have at my job but it needed to be done and everyone else took a giant step back when I wasn’t looking. Most of the text came along pretty well but then I hit the need for a UML Sequence Diagram. First, I should say that "U-M-L"  must be missing a letter because it clearly is a four letter word. Second, I didn’t know I needed a sequence diagram when I started out.

I needed to find a drawing tool that could create these obscure but very specific pictures. It had to be simple. Really simple. BRAIN DEAD SIMPLE! Did I mention it needed to be simple? I found the answer at websequencediagrams and it could hardly be simpler. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Let me tell you a story. It starts in a man cave, starkly lit by the light of a large window. In the distance you can hear a dog snoring … (wait, let’s try that again) … In a dark corner, you can hear the most horrific sound; so loud it would wake the dead ! … (there, that’s better) …

… for geeks only, the story continues in the sequence diagram included

I’ve wondered what all the excitement has been about Twitter. It’s not new by internet standards and yet I had not used it. So, I gave it a whirl. I ended that joyride last night. I posted a tweet saying ” no thanks”. Here are my thoughts and experience.

• Twitter has a very large user base
• Twitter is great for posting status updates and short commentary
• Twitter is used for mostly for transient content
• Twitter can be used as a marketing tool (this may not be for everyone)
• If you miss a tweet, it is not the end of the world
• Twitter lets you be aware of the daily minutia of your Twitter-friends

The last one is what killed it for me. I welcome a tool that lets me stay more aware of my family and friends. The catch is that only 2 of my friends were on Twitter (or they were the only ones whom I could find on Twitter). Neither were very active.  (One only tweeted once during my experiment.) I followed a number of acquaintances but I found the tweets (aka twitter messages) grossly out of balance. One contact was tweeting 20 or 30 times a day and others were tweeting 1 or 2 times a week. The difference in the tweet content was hugely disparate. I found myself “silencing” those with “twitter diarrhea”. (I hate to say it but I can almost bet there is a cute internet / Web 2.0 word for that issue.) Also, the interface had a fundamental flaw for me. Twitter lends itself well to mobile devices with simple text messaging (SMS). Unfortunately, I have a phone service that has such poor coverage that I could not use the phone most of the time. Not only could I not tweet very easily, but I would get bombarded with stale tweets when I finally did get a signal and then most of that was the “twitter diarrhea”.

So, I concluded that Twitter has a few basic requirements for it to be useful and addictive.

• there must be a critical mass of your friends, family, coworkers, etc. on Twitter
• there must be some level of consistency among your Twitter followings and followers
• the Twitter service must not impede your usage
• your access to Twitter must be ubiquitous

When these elements break down, so does Twitter’s “pleasure factor”. (Again, I hate to say it but I can almost bet there is a cute internet / Web 2.0 word for that characteristic). It’s hard to make a habit of something that is not pleasurable – diet, exercise, staff reports, house cleaning, etc. For me, Twitter was a chore and for anyone who has seen my office, I’m not much on doing unpleasant chores. I get them done but they tend to pile up for a while and then get worked on en-mass … “rince and repeat”. Twitter does function well in that mode.

If I had had good mobile service and if there had been 6 or 8 or 15 people I wanted to stay connect to *and* who were on Twitter *and* were using it in a somewhat moderate traffic pattern, then my little experiment would have likely turned out differently. I will repeat this experiment in 12 months and see if I get different results. (Unless of course, Twitter is passe’ by then.)

There are two answers to the question of “what’s the difference between RSS and ATOM ?” First, there is the technical answer. Second there is the end-user answer. I’ll start with the second.

For the vast majority of end-users today there is very little difference between RSS and ATOM. Both are used as means to get access to information and in nearly all cases that information has been formated into “feeds”. I took a look at my blog statistics and was actually surprised by the ration of RSS to ATOM readers – 250:135. Now, my blog is not a hot bed of traffic so these are small numbers but to be honest, I would have thought RSS was much more prevalent. For technical reasons, which I will get to in a moment, the growing use of ATOM is a good thing.

So, what is the technical advantage of ATOM ? Let’s start by thinking of ATOM and “second generation” RSS. This is not precisely true but many of the reasons for ATOM were direct results of issues that were hard to address with RSS – mostly because RSS was already widely used. In short, it’s hard to change RSS because is is so popular. It may seem strange but that is a big part of why ATOM was initially created. So, “out with the old, in with the new”. We have ATOM.

The big change with ATOM is the focus on interoperability and reuse. For simple feed readers, this is not really important, but ATOM is increasingly being used for computer to computer interactions – data sharing. The more controlled the data format, the easier it is to make two completely separate computers “play well together”. Further, computer programs were no longer just “reading data”. They also wanted to have a method for creating new data, performing updates, and even deleting data. (For the lay person, the technical community call this CRUD for Create, Read, Update, and Delete.) So, the ATOM specification describes the use of HTTP methods GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. Most system, prior to ATOM, only used GET and POST. For more details, you can get a quick understanding by reading the draft. An advantage of ATOM and it’s use of simple HTTP operations is that most of the internet is already optimized for these types of things. When we consider the billions of internet actions that take place every day, “optimizing” is a big-big challenge so the more that can work with the current internet, the better.

What can you do with ATOM and the HTTP operations ? You could write a blog. More important, you could edit a blog. You could search for a list of artists who have recorded a particular song or search for songs that contain a lyric. Then you could select one title and pay for it and get a link to download it. You could have you computer at home automatically publish updates to your friends or co-workers. You might have a little measuring device in your hot water heater or your air conditioner that provides electric usage to the power company. The power company might send new settings to your hot water heater or air condition to make it conserve electricity. A website could get news from the Associated Press news wire, relevant photos from Flickr, clips from searching blogs, and video from CNN and loads it all into an electronic news paper that refreshes every morning just as your coffee pot finishes brewing. This last one is partially here today using Feed Journal to create a PDF of your blog interests, formatted like a newspaper and the sent to a Kindle digital book and with the structure of ATOM, the reality of the individualized digital newspaper is a programming exercise a high school student could do in less than a day.

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Disclaimer: I’m sure, for the technical reader, this post has been a big let down. It may even have been so simplistic that it misrepresented a few things. But technical explicitness was not the the focus. The focus was the “internet minus 1″ generation – those people struggling with what their kids are talking about when they explain the computer and the internet. Everyone needs to get up to speed and even a rickshaw can go 100 miles an hour if you accelerate it enough <grin>

Back in the 1990′s there was this idea of “network computers” – computers that did nothing without their connection to the network. The idea fizzled. Now we are on the verge of the “web computer”. Same idea but with better timing.

The emergence of Amazon S2 & AWS , Force.com, Facebook, and Google Apps & Gmail demonstrate the viability of software applications – corporate and personal – being served via the world wide web. Before I continue, I acknowledge the evolution of software from local installations to web based services assumed high speed internet and that is not a ubiquitous fact today.

These technologies have replaced personal computer software with web versions and provide the large data center infrastructure for building the complex custom applications traditionally relegated to corporate mainframes.

So, what does this mean for the personal computer and for the corporate software vendors ? I think there are currently two answers and they divide along the lines eluded to above – “corporate applications” and “consumer software”. Let’s look at these in reverse order.

Consumer software will evolve to take advantage of web applications. While Gmail, Microsoft Live, and Google Apps can function completely from a web browser, consumers have pushed for integration rather than replacement of their existing applications. The most anticipated features of 2007 were IMAP support for GMail and mobile sync for Calendars. The web solutions for spreadsheets and word processors were integrated with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. The evolution of desktop applications as “front ends” to web applications is likely to be with us for a number of years with the separation of the two becoming harder and harder to distinguish.

I expect the PC software evolution to take on a “mergers and acquisitions” model for the next few years where the lines are drawn along four primary lines – communicating with (1) words, (2) numbers, (3) images, and music/video. “Mashups” will provide for the the areas between these. An example of what I mean can bee seen in the “words” category. There is little difference between the high priority features of a word processor, email client, and web page design tool. There is little reason for them to be separate solutions, rather, they just have separate “inputs” and “outputs”.

Corporate applications are another story. The human resource applications, payroll, compliance, and sales applications have long been heavily biased toward the server with very light – end users would say too lite – client experiences. This is a good characteristic for evolving to web solutions. The challenge to these systems has been dealing with growth, administration, and the fact they are “necessary evils” of business rather than the purpose of it. Every company – whether it be building and selling cars or books or ideas – needs the basic tools for managing the business. The only exception is the business that is “in business” to provide HR tools, or Sale trackign tools, or inventory and supply line tools. These companies are becoming the suppliers of the web solutions or they are partnering with those who are already web solution suppliers. Rather than let the business management necessities be a drag on the corporation, pushing them out to the web makes good sense.

In the “dot com” era, it is easy for startups to use web solutions because they had no legacy data or processes to contend with. They wanted to hit the ground running in their respective “hot markets” and not be bogged down by infrastructure. The old iron horses were not as nimble. But eventually all tools wear out and need to be replaced or upgraded and when they do, they are prime candidates for moving to the web. The “iron horses” are learning where and when to change.

This post is in some ways my “prediction” for 2008. I look forward to seeing how much of it comes true and how quickly. In thinking through some of the players in the “web applications” space I hit upon an interesting question of a statistical nature.

Which company uses more computer processing power every single second of each day on behalf of it’s customers – Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Google, IBM, Apply, Sun, Facebook, or someone else ? For extra credit, what is the ordering – from most MIPS to least MIPS -for this group ?

Anyone who hasn’t woken up to Google’s plans to take over the world, needs to start reading a bit more. The latest “launch” has happened with Google making simple slide presentations over the web a “no brainer”. 

The presentation can be shared with everyone and any viewer can follow the presenter or take control of the presentation. The preview includes a group chat feature based on Google Talk’s gadget that shows the active collaborators and viewers. If all the viewers click on “View presentation”, they can watch the presentation at the same time.

Source: Official Google blog

Google seems to have adopted Brain’s slogan …