January 10, 2008

P2P to take on Google & co.?

Christian Decker wrote this terribly early in the morning:
From time to time a really disruptive technology comes around that levels out the differences between the established companies and smaller competitors, opening the doors for creative startups and people with the right knowledge. P2P-Technology has been around for some time now, and it grew very well, allowing content distribution which could not have possible otherwise. Now, one of my favorite Blogs, Read/Write Web, has an article on the topic of P2P Search:

The barriers are not search algorithms. That’s easy. The first barrier is overcoming habit. I think that a genuinely better alternative will change habits. That worked for Google and with search boxes having multiple alternatives it really is simple to switch.

The second barrier is that success requires investing $$$ billions in server farms. Now that VCs have pumped money into lots of attempts and they are not seeming to get much traction we are entering a phase where nobody will put significant new money behind a search venture. This is like the decade or so when nobody would invest to challenge Microsoft.

That is bad news for everybody. It creates a monoculture and that’s always bad.

P2P networks are the only way to overcome that second barrier, avoiding the need for $$$ billions in server farms. P2P uses the infrastructure of the users.

I like the look of Faroo, the Peer to Peer Web Search company. There are some side benefits related to privacy and SEO spam control, but the core advantage of P2P for search is a very simple economic proposition. Because Faroo don’t need to invest in server farms they can return 50% of the search revenue to users. My guess is that models will evolve that give way more than 50% back to users. The payoff from scale without need to invest in scale is so enormous that ventures would be wise to give back whatever it takes to get scale. That is simple “show me the money”.

A really interesting thought. I’m sending my request to participate in the beta of Faroo right now :D

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February 15, 2007

OpenID & AOL

Christian Decker wrote this in the early evening:
As I posted earlier I’m really excited to see that OpenID is started getting ever more popular. It comes to no surprise after Microsoft announcing their support for OpenID that other big players jump on the train. This is AOL’s turn:
It’s not really a secret that AOL has been experimenting with OpenID.  As I’ve said, I think that user-centric, interoperable identity is hugely important to enable the social experiences we’re trying to provide.  This is a work in progress, but things are coming along thanks to our authentication team’s diligent effort.  Here’s where we are today:
  • Every AOL/AIM user now has at least one OpenID URI, http://openid.aol.com/<sn>.
  • This experimental OpenID 1.1 Provider service is available now and we are conducting compatibility tests.
  • We’re working with OpenID relying parties to resolve compatibility issues.
  • Our blogging platform has enabled basic OpenID 1.1 in beta, so every beta blog URI is also a basic OpenID identifier.  (No Yadis yet.)
  • We don’t yet accept OpenID identities within our products as a relying party, but we’re actively working on it.  That roll-out is likely to be gradual.
  • We are tracking the OpenID 2.0 standardization effort and plan to support it after it becomes final.
I hope that they accept OpenIDs for their products soon, as it obviously increases the reachability.

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February 7, 2007

OpenID and CardSpace integration

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:
OpenID is getting ever more dominant in the Identity 2.0 market, and this shows. Just like last year when suddenly all the big players in the industry picked up the Ajax-Hype, they are now adopting OpenID:

Working at Microsoft, it was frustrating to see “not invented here” and “we have to own it” attitudes often dominate when it came to interoperability and standards. Not only did this cause immediate harm to the consumer, but it was also self-defeating — it has unavoidably done great damage to Microsoft’s long-term position in the industry. Hopefully this will change, and is changing.

At the RSA Conference today, BillG made a keynote announcement that future versions of Windows Identity solutions will interoperate with OpenID. Work on the details is just beginning now.

A key part of Microsoft’s identity solutions is the new CardSpace (previously called InfoCard), which is included within Windows Vista, and is available as an optional add-on for both Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003 Server SP1 (tied to the .NET 3.0 runtime). CardSpace provides software for the user, and a set of APIs for web servers and services, which helps users manage and take control of their identity and and desired level of privacy for those services. Once OpenID is working with CardSpace, you could think of it as just another OpenID provider with some advanced identity management and authentication features.

This is still ultimately an “embrace and extend” strategy for Microsoft. But that is much healthier for everyone than no interoperability at all. OpenID will gain support on the majority platform, and a useful new authentication service (CardSpace) for those users. And Microsoft gains a feature that actually works with the rest of the ecosystem to keep people on Windows. And it’s optional in both directions — CardSpace does not need OpenID to work, and OpenID will continue to work with many other providers, on the Windows platform or not.

Good news.

I’m really excited that OpenID is picking up speed :-)

[via Leancode]

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November 16, 2006

Google Sitemaps

Christian Decker wrote this at around evening time:
Last year I was excited when Google announced the release of their Sitemaps Protocol which helps Searchengines to index content more efficiently.
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.
And today Microsoft and Yahoo are jumping on the train too, they announced today that they will be supporting the protocol. More information at sitemaps.org.

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