For our first post in 2008, what about looking back at 2007 ? Any decent tech-related blog should go through the ritual overview of last year’s tech headlines. However, feeling quite lazy today, I finally chose to come up with a (personal) list of the big winners and losers of the year elapsed, which is a less exhaustive yet quicker way of recollecting the main events of the twelve last months.

Let’s begin with the flops:

1) Netscape. Last October, the last version of Netscape, Netscape Navigator 9, was released. In fact the browser was no more than a revamped version of Firefox 2 – fair enough, the Mozilla project was launched by Netscape after all. But apart from a tiny number of geeks or nostalgics, the Internet users did not see the point in using it rather than Firefox and its thousands of available plugins. Even the buggy Safari made larger inroads in the PC market. AOL finally discontinued the browser at the end of 2007 and announced it would no longer develop newer releases. RIP Netscape, Long Live Firefox !

2) YouTube users. In 2006 many people and corporations discovered YouTube. In 2007, many people and corporations tried to use YouTube to their own benefit, mainly for promotional purposes. The result can be just disastrous, like this EU-sponsored video.

3) DRMs. Since the DRMs were first introduced many pundits were skeptical about its virtues. After all these systems were mutually incompatible, introduced unwanted restrictions (such as preventing you from ripping music on CDs, which is absolutely legal as long as CDs are kept for a personal use, etc…).

Step by step, the vast anti-DRM movement strenghtened in 2007. EMI was the boldest major, the first to disavow DRMs, soon backed by music industry giant Apple (which also happens to sell PCs). Universal followed, and now Warner may have hammered the last nail in the DRMs coffin. SonyBMG, anyone ?

4) Apple TV. Steve Jobs is always bragging and this is becoming quite unbearable. Yet there is a subject on which he should really shut up right now: AppleTV. This expensive and limited multimedia set-top box was a massive failure, such a failure that in fact Steve Jobs refused to unveiled the sales figures of the little marvel. In fact the whole concept of multimedia set-top boxes seems quite lousy or at least immature for now. It might become more interesting when people finally get HD TVs though.

5) Optimus Keyboard. The vaporware of the year? In fact this next-generation keyboard, with keys that are actually tiny screens displaying dynamic pictures, was highly expected – and not only by the fools who pre-ordered it in May 2007. The product is still “in development”as of today…

Runner-ups: Mac OS X Leopard, Windows Vista

Not everything is gloomy in the high-tech world. Here are the Tops:

1) Facebook. With almost 60 million active users and a valuation well above the $10bln, everything is rosy for 2007’s most successful social network. Despite some recent mistakes, Facebook might very well be the next Google.

2) iPhone. OK, it has no 3G nor GPS, the touch keyboard isn’t convenient, and Apple’s third party application limitation policy is just loathesome. Yet the iPhone generated a huge buzz for Apple, sold quite well, and instantly unlocked the industry – competitors just have to innovate or lower prices. Why complain ?

3) Wii. The epitome of Blue Ocean strategy, the Wii turned out to be a considerable success this year, with almost 5.8 million units sold. The production facilities just cannot follow.

4) Zune. Zune’s latest avatars, which seem to have been more than inspired by the highly successful iPod, are quite decent MP3 players. So decent that they made it to the top-list of Amazon’s best sales last November. But since one of our flagship contributors no longer works for Microsoft, there is no need to insist to much on that point now.

5) Tech IT Easy. With a steadily growing reader base, we are happy to say that Tech IT Easy finally succeeded in finding its place amongst the blogosphere, and satisfying our readers. We hope 2008 will see even more improvements, blogposts, recruits, comments, and an even larger traffic.

Runner-ups: Twitter, Netvibes, Blackberry.

What is your list then ?

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…or is it ?

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=p1o1piRVsaE]

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The title of this post is pretty self-explanatory. No beating around the bush there, let’s go straight to the point.

1) Archive.org

OK well you probably heard about this one actually. Archive.org, also known as The Internet Archive, has branded as “Wayback Machine” its Web-snapshot technology. Thanks to this technology you can browse archived versions of most of your favourite websites. Snapshots are taken every month or so, pictures won’t be captured most of the time, and more importantly you won’t be able to go deeply in the website hierarchy – you are limited to the links featured on the welcome page. It doesn’t work with Flash either.

So they are plenty of drawbacks…but then it is so cool if you want to feel a sense of nostalgy ….

2) Compete

Most of you would probably have heard about Alexa, a top-notch web traffic measurement tool. Despite having been heavily criticized by many pundits or bloggers (including TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington), Alexa is just unrivaled.

Or is it ?I have tried Compete, a similar Ajax-based service that features a more straightforward interface. And guess what: it is slightly quicker, results are as good if not better, and the neat, Google-like interface is a must. I mean – these traffic metering tools will always be partly useless because their data is just wrong. But website traffic comparison might eventually come close to the truth, and give you an idea of how a site competes with another. .. adopted as soon as tested !

3) Summize

Online reviews are cool. For example I am personnally interested by what other users think about a book I am planning to purchase (er, OK, right, I must confess I don’t read many books). The problem is that, if I can find most of the time plenty of point of views on Amazon, there are no clear equivalent for other products such as PCs, iPods, CDs, etc…There are some online vendors with a decent traffic, and probably the reviews are actually there – however they are scattered around various websites.

This was before Summize came. Summize is a “search engine for reviews”. Just type in the name of the product, and you’ll have a visually compelling display of the popularity of the product, indications about its price, and qualitative reviews from various sources. Of course Amazon is the main source but if the service manages to get other partners in it this might turn out to be an excellent service, much better than the usual shopping comparison websites. Although I doubt they can convince many sites to get in. Anyway, make your own opinion about this tool, which potential matters more than its actual possibilities.

Now…do you have your own suggestions ?

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Interesting piece of information found on the BBC website (also quoted in Macworld and probably dozens of other sources): the current use of the Internet could overload the current capacity of the Internet and even result in …crashing the World Wide Web. To be more precise, let’s say that the explosion of the demand for video on the Internet implies a huge investment from the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). In fact they must spend up to US$137 billion in new capacity before 2010 to avoid the aformentioned troubles. So far so good. The only trouble is that, according to Nemertes Research Group – a modest analyst firm -, this is more than twice the amount that ISPs plan to invest. So…shall we really get scared ?

Let’s get into more detail.

1) There is unquestionably a growing demand for bandwidth consuming services (such as P2P, video and data download, streaming). However no one seems really able to forecast that demand.

2) When it comes to innovation, everybody thinks of YouTube, Skype, an iPod (@Jeremy: and Zune of course). But innovation also exists in the less glamorous field of high-speed telecommmunications and networks. Actually there is a fairly large deal of activity deployed there. For example, just a few days before that study came out, two groundbreaking annoucements were made.

- First, a young Aussie researcher from Melbourne University has demonstrated 2 algorithms that considerably speed up existing DSL broadband connections – maybe up to 100 times faster. For instance, it could raise the speed ceiling of traditional ADSL lines from 1 to 20Mbps to approximately 100Mbps. Commmercialization is upcoming.

- Second, Korean scientists announced a new technology called “New Nomadic Local Area Wireless Access” that allows users of mobile phones to download data at a stunning 3,6 Gb/s rate – much more than what the “4G” technologies actually in the pipeline can offer. In fact Korea seems to be heading the race for the definition of the future 4G standard. (BTW, there is a highly valuable, landmark post about these mobile phone generations on Tech IT Easy : have a look).

So…getting back to our study. Innovation on infrastructure and telecommunications technology has been anticipated indeed. Yet it has been approached through a sort of “Moore’s Law”, which doesn’t sound very much as a good idea. Just consider the two previous innovation examples, that haven’t been included, obviously, in this piece of research. And if average broadband capacity was doubling every 18 months or anything, we would have noticed this earlier for sure …

3) Final element: I am a staunch believer in the law of supply and demand (yes, and I am French). If there is a need for further investments, money will come in. Granted, there might be a huge need for network maintenance and upgrading but then there are many, many Internet users, including wealthy governments and corporations. $60 billion are missing, on a three year basis ? Well, that’s only $67 a year per American, which means 30 dollars per household. Almost 6 times smaller than the defence budget…

So, all in all, when an almost unkown research company publishes a report part-funded by the telco industry, which openly calls for universal broadband deployment (with public support, naturally), saying that “Such gridlock would drastically affect how people use the web and could mean the next Google or YouTube simply doesn’t get off the ground”, well, I just don’t buy it.

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Bon appêtit.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dr5zAOc7-0]

Steve, too tired to post anything consistent tonight, is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement.

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Since a few years, a couple of websites have provided Internet users with the ability to sketch their genealogy online, very much like some of you must have already tried with conventional desktop software (such as Family Tree Maker, or for Mac users, Mac Genealogie).

Nonetheless, these services, be it MyFamily, GeneaNet or Ancestry.com (the latter two being the most successful of the lot) have not had a considerable impact for now.

This was until Geni came. Geni, created by some of the founders of PayPal and eBay, provides a new viral approach to the old online genealogy concept, in line with the now famous Web 2.0 trend.

Basically, its specificity is to add a “social networking” flavour to the traditional, plain vanilla genealogy web services, besides being quite user-friendly. People you define in your tree can be identified through their email addresses. This will encourage non-members to register (at no charge) to Geni, joining officially your tree and completing it themseves: viral growth, once again. Obviously a powerful search engine allows you to browse through all profiles, and contact the ones you’re interested in (your family, I guess), through their emails.

You will certainly discover a number of relatives you have lost contact with, while parsing the trees. And thanks to the email adresses provided, if and only if you are a member of someone’s tree, you’ll be able to get back in touch with those people, very much like other social networking websites. Ultimately, and although the feature isn’t implemented as of today, the trees of any members will be potentially connected to each other – once again, with the agreement of tree managers – thus allowing Geni to recreate the genealogy of mankind ! Geni already displays a stunning 5-million large profile data base, along with a much smaller user-base ; which is still very nice for a website which has been in the market for less than 6 months… I am not sure whether this is the fastest viral growth rate of the Web 2.0 or not, but this definitely remains impressive.

At this point I shall make two comments:

1) Obviously, for me, the request “Steve Danino” could only display my profile (although, wait, according to Google I’ve got apparently a homonym, who won a couple of poker tournaments. Great). But what about Mr Michael Jones in the U.S., Mr Zhang in China, Mr. Jean Martin in France ? I suggest that finding a way through the thousands of homonyms will be a nightmare if further information (such as location, age, etc…) is not filled in. Since these fields are not required to be completed by Geni, we should expect a nice mess in the end.

2) One cannot spend its life registering on social networking services, and browsing them. Although I know a couple of freaks addicted to basically all these services, this will not be the case of the majority of humans. So here’s my suggestion: a leading, advanced social network – say MySpace, Friendster, Plaxo, or Facebook, in which faithful readers of Tech IT Easy will now find a dedicated group – should take control of Geni before it grows too fast. There are a number of rationales for connecting the two underlying concepts. (Let’s take aside privacy issues, although a family tree should surely remain private, or at least reserved to close relatives).

i) I suppose anybody would like to add automatically all the family members to its contact lists, albeit with a number of restrictions. After all, I personnally use Facebook mostly as an online address book, and one should always possess the contact details of its family members.

ii) Furthermore the ability to visualize relationships also proves useful, while it is both useless and unmanageable when it comes to friends – you have got 300 so-called friends on Facebook, right ? But then

iii) it is even more useful if you can access to further information about your relatives, such as the overloaded profile pages of social networks. Something nobody would like to replicate on Geni in its actual form, because no one wants to get pissed off twice…not mentioning the fact that with a 1:20 active user base/profile base ratio, such effort will appear pointless. And finally,

iv) although fully detailing profiles of deceased persons sounds like a bad idea, a short description of your ancestors provided by members of your family tree, will surely appeal to many, all the more since you can leave open messages to them, in their defunct walls.

To say it in a nutshell : I cannot see very well for now how to integrate such different services, but I guess I would be interested by a family tree-centered subnetwork (Geni) amongst a wider network (Facebook, Friendster et al.).

Steve, also a proud member of the Middle East geopolitics-focused think-tank AFIDORA, is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement.

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A few weeks ago, Tech IT Easy has switched from its previous URL (http://www.jeremyfain.net or http://jeremyfain.wordpress.com) to the current one (http://www.techiteasy.org), thus acknowledging the fact that the very nature of this blog has dramatically shifted – previously a personal blog with occasional outside contributions, now a truly collective blog, capitalizing on our original “out-of-the-box” approach and our diverse and complementary blogger profiles. This, besides, was perfectly in line with Jeremy’s expectations, back in January 2007, when I was first approached to participate to Tech IT Easy.

So far so good. But in the process, we partly lost something we were dearly attached to: our Web rankings. Our traffic is still largely satisfying for our egos (having slightly decreased though), our reader base keeps expanding steadily, and posts tend to be more and more commented. However I personnally still find unsatisfactory our visibility through search engines, at least in comparison of what it was before the migration. More precisely, the numerous trackbacks (featured on a variety of blogs, the ones of regular readers – O. Ezratty, Joseph Cargo, etc… – as well as more exotic ones) helped us reach a significant ranking: now, these trackbacks are inoperant. The blogposts which were all highly visible have now been discarded by Google, which should not come as a surprise since their URLs are now obsolete. Nonetheless, a majority of them have not yet “recovered” and been restored through their new address. So I will ask two simple questions :

1) How on Earth are we meant to operate (through Wordpress or whatever) in order to restore the visibility of all the previous posts in search engines, now that they have a different URL ? Is there any way to do so, except waiting for Mr. Google, Yahoo and Live Search – OK, just kidding, this was just to please Jeremy – to crawl the integrality of the blog once again ?

2) Would new, up-to-date trackbacks help us to get to this point faster ? If so, shall we ask our fellow bloggers to update their trackbacks – and if we do so, will they fulfill our demands ? Or should we just strive to provide ever more better posts, in order to obtain further recognition, something we should do anyway ?

Thank you for your insights. SEO specialists are a rare species, since it implies evolving as fast as Google, which is non trivial.

Steve, also a proud member of the Middle East geopolitics-focused think-tank AFIDORA, is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement.

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Thank you Mr Pogue, this is hilarious.

 [youtube = http://youtube.com/share?v=vniMR6Ez9cE&embed=1]

Steve is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement.

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“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

OK folks, I must confess this post will surely be of little interest for most of our readers. Nonetheless, I felt like sharing with you a few personal thoughts about world’s leading CMS, Joomla.

To say it in a nutshell, I truly believe that these CMS (content management systems) are quite valuable, and could very well meet a wide success. More powerful than most wikis or blogging platforms, they already power corporate or community websites. Amongst all the existing solutions, Joomla! (formerly Mambo) seems to be more or less the best option, although I can only compare it with Wordpress and SPIP, having only a superficial knowledge of Drupal, the most serious contender. Wikipedia lists another 30 platforms, so please feel free to provide us information on those if necessary.

So here I go with ten points, some of them very favourable to Joomla, other being mere pains in the ass. Up to you to make your own overall opinion, mine remaining positive at the end of the day.

Here for the pros :

1) Joomla is both free & fully open-source. Even better, the developers are actually trying to make their little jewel GPL-compliant. Since according to Jeremy, all open-source developers cannot decently work with commercial stuff, that ensures at least a steady support from an important developer community.

2) Joomla has a large, growing user base. So that means: plenty of free advice, forums, feedbacks, suggestions, etc…Many forum threads are so active that should you report a problem, you might expect an answer within the next hours ! Great.

3) Joomla’s modular structure rocks. There are simply billions of additional components and modules available, some of them useless, other being swarmed with bugs, but then the important user base ensures a large documentation thanks to forum+evaluations. What’s more, installing/removing them is piece of cake, and guess what: entries on the database are kept, so you do not need to bother backuping/restoring the SQL database if you just feel like removing a component for a better one, then change your mind. (I have done this like 10K times. Maybe I am not well organized, though).

4) Security issues are now (fairly well) dealt with. OK, some security breaches are corrected every month or two, which is not very engaging. Nonetheless, Joomla’s latest version now tells you when you compromise your site security with risky settings (ever heard about chmod, globals.php…?). This is just plain cool.

5) Joomla’s administrator interface is damn good. Ever tried SPIP ? Well, its interface compares to Joomla pretty much like Windows 3.0’s compares to Ubuntu+Beryl (or Mac OS X, of course Vincent+Kari:-). Besides it is handy : while Wordpress is OK, and may be slightly more straightforward, I am quite sure it could not handle dozens of additional modules in its current form, while Joomla ’s usability would seem unaffected.

6) Templates are great. A single site can handle multiple templates, and each of thoses are quite easily customizable. Don’t bother too much though: hundreds of really nice templates have been designed, just make your choice…Drupal and Wordpress lag far behind there.

And the cons:

7) Online documentation is poor. Really, there are many things you ought to find out by yourself. Hopefully, forums are flooded with help topics (see point 2). But it’s not really the way one should proceed, right.

8 ) Installation is tough. Very tough sometimes, depending on your server. Of all the solutions I know, only MediaWiki can compete in terms of complexity – which is stupid since some wiki solutions are just as useful, without any hassle about Apache configuration, PHP/mySQL and all that jazz (PBWiki for eample). Anyway, I guess it’s the price to pay for running such a powerful software.

9) Upgrading from Mambo to Joomla is painful. Which is surprising since the source code is almost exactly the same. Nevertheless, you’ll have to reinstall all components and fiddle with some files (.htaccess, etc…). Not very user-friendly…

10) SEO is an absolute nightmare. This will be the subject of a forthcoming post….

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 “Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

 I have explained earlier why I believed in Leopard, a truly innovative system despite the apparent lack of “wow” features. In the same post I expressed sarcastically my criticism of Apple copying Microsoft, mainly when it came…to delivering their OS on time !

Now Apple has unveiled a newer version of their latest OS. And apparently a few things have been directly inspired…from Vista !

Here we go :

1) Semi-translucent menu bar. No comment there, this is a pure ”photocopy” of a feature from Vista.

2) 3D & translucent dock. Although the dock was originally developed by Apple, Microsoft has also launched a kind of dock in Vista (and so did Sun by the way, in their breakthrough Looking Glass interface). And, guess what ? The latest dock from Mac OS resembles Vista’s !

 3) QuickLook seems quite familiar to the users of Windows XP or Vista. Now there is an instant preview system in Mac OS. Apparently the system seems slightly superior in Leopard since you are now able to browse directly pages of a document without opening it. Nonetheless, listening a MP3 or viewing a video on the system was a Windows feature  for decades (at least 2001).

Let me tell you a last thing : actually,  I couldn’t care less about all these copycat games. In the end, these interface improvements benefit the end user, right ? So some kind of inspiration/copying is useful, and, dare I say, necessary for the progress of mankind.

Now, Kari, Vincent, and Marc, you can start firing in the comments section

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“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”            

         OK then, I admit this title is slightly intriguing. Of course, it is still hardly conceivable to use a social network in order to perform Internet search. But Facebook has at least 3 common points with Google indeed :

1) First of all, it is one of the brightest success of the Internet industry. Although its revenues are not known for sure, many pundits estimate them at somewhere between $50 and $100 mln per year, not including the nice undisclosed sum Microsoft agreed to pay in order for Facebook to use their online advertising technology. Moreover, Michael Arrington (Tech Crunch) revealed that according to an internal document leaked from Yahoo!, the Internet giant considers that Facebook will generate around $1bln revenues annually by 2015. No surprise then that Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year old whizz kid who designed this social network a couple of years ago, turned off a stunning $ 985 mln takeover proposal from Yahoo!. Apparently Facebook really believes it is worth much more than that, which is confirmed by the weird growth rate of their already huge 25 million-large user base (see chart). In fact, it even seems that an IPO could be very, very successful….

 2) Technology. Now this is more interesting. According to an interview of Zuckerberg by a CNN journalist, “Facebook will no longer consider itself merely another social network. Instead it is becoming a technology platform on which anyone can build applications for social computing“. Or to say it briefly: Facebook wants to be the next-generation OS, competing in a way with Apple, Microsoft and Linux ! To be honest, their project seems slightly less ambitious: the management envisions to foster (through partnerships) the development of a vast online application ecosystem around the website Facebook.com, application being here modules for Facebook – try it, and you’ll understand better. Although these little applets fall short of matching true applications for now, one must admit that Facebook is very convincing when it comes to grab its share of the time spent online by Internet users. So applications may be just at the right place here…

 But the most striking news here is that recently, Google as unveiled a bunch of online services more or less likely to replace some traditional desktop applications, such as Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Maps, Picasa, Notes, Calendar… An IT engineer friend of mine revealed me that some of his reknowned teachers at France’s top-notch Computer Science School EPITA truly believe that this approach will eventually meet a large success, and that an online Google OS could very well pose a serious threat to Windows. In fact, we could be reverting to the old terminal/mainframe conception of computing – you know, the good old time of IBM giant systems -, but on a larger scale. So instead of debating of Vista vs. Ubuntu vs. Mac OS X, we could be comparing Facebook and Google OS in a few years time.

3) Finally, the founder of Facebook (Zuckerberg) is as Jewish as Google’s fathers (Brin&Page) which will certainly nourish the vivid sentiment in some countries that Internet is basically a Zionist conspiracy . Right, who cares about what they think in Malaysia ?

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“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”            

      Considering the number of comments and most of all very interesting private emails I received from a number of readers (to them: THANK YOU), apparently there’s a real case for posting about Web 2.0 here. In the ever-going process of sucking up information from you guys to complete my working paper, here’s the next step: trying to identify the major trends affecting Web 2.0.

First of all, let’s recall my definition of Web 2.0: Web 2.0 = user-generated content+social networking features (sorry Jeremy, I disagree about your definition).

OK, so now, here’s the big question what’s next ?

Let us explore just a few possibilities.

1)  Mobility. Although one might consider this only as a non-disruptive, incremental innovation, it seems clear to me that social networks, including the most advanced ones, who can understand well the needs of the PDA/smartphone/handhelds devices market will gain a significant advantage. Geolocalized services might prove more than useful for most Web 2.0 companies. Imagine a social network able to track automatically people (OK, it may sounds like Big Brother): this means that you might eventually find a friend in no time who happens to be hanging around next door. Of course telcos operators could eventually provide themselves such a solution, but hey: who wants to be dealing with 36 different social networks ? I believe the most successful social networks will eventually end up as “social life webcenters” - sites you just visit every single day of your life to get in touch with the world. The best candidates for these are networks you are actually using most of the time – ie websites you essentially access through a PC, be it a laptop. By the way: I believe Google Maps services for the iPhone and other smartphones, as well as m-facebook.com are the forerunners of such an evolution.

2) Mashups. Right, so definitely most readers actually understand better these strange things than myself. What I understand personnally is 1) basically mashups consists in APIs or Web Services provided by various sites, and aggregated in brand new website 2) more fundamentally, this implies a growing modularity of Internet sites, favored by XML and Javascript technologies (or else one must explain to me why these nasty little bits of HTML codes you just copied-paste from various websites to implement, say, a traffic counter on your 1990’s website cannot be dubbed as mashups !). It seems like the dream that Apple failed to concretize with OpenDoc, ie shifting the focus from application to “document”  and designing specific workplaces on the go (thanks to various modules), proves to be more useful in the Web sphere. So far so good.  But…What next ? Can a website really consist in a collection of bits of websites ? And what about IP issues ? Whereas mashups can wisely complete the user generated content trend (FlickR feeds on a blog, for instance) I am not that sure that they will deal a new hand for the Web 2.0 economics.

3) Market dynamics. This is more serious. I expect most social networks to gain more and more functionalities and enrich permanently their mission statement. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook and MySpace actually tried to compete, in the end, with eBay, Match.com, Monster.com, Youtube etc…

This particular point deserves an explanation. Becauses uses are so different, many specific websites have gathered a huge user base, and occasionnally a very nice traffic. Meetic has million of users, so has eBay (a true Web 2.0 company Matthias ), so has LinkedIn, etc… The finality of such companies are not the same, but wait a minute…couldn’t it be the same users (mostly) for all these services ? I think this is likely. So instead of subscribing to a social network, maintaining an active eBay account, searching for job on monsters,etc… why not try to MERGE IT ALL and provide a unique service, where a unique login can make you access to all the different activities: dating, netwotrking, buying&selling, providing UGC, commenting news, etc…

I definitely believe that the company which will eventually design a simple way to introduce smart privacy settings, while keeping a simple switch for a user from a service to another, could actually end up as the big winner. I have no clue yet if this will be done by a merger, a series of partnerships (OK, so Facebook develops a marketplace on its own, fine…but the experience will be just so bad for people trying to sell rare/peculiar objects) or adding new functionalities to existing sites. But I may be thrilled by such a result.

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“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

    FYI, I am in the process of completing my working paper (its subject being “The different business models of individual user-connecting websites”). Basically I am exploring the business models of any services built upon connecting individual users, be it dating sites (Meetic, Match), auction systems (eBay), job boards (Monster, JobEtudiant), pure Web 2.0 services (Flickr, deli.cio.us) professional social networks (LinkedIn), or even “social life centers” (MySpace, Facebook) – the latter being a concept I have just invented in order to point out the extraordinary possibilities of what were previously personal homepages or advanced personak social networks.

Rigt now I am trying to understand the revenue stream of a few significant players, in order to infer a general picture for the revenue mix of each category of websites. So here’s my input: as you can see, some boxes are empty. Besides, the revenue mix here are just suggestions I propose thanks to the examples+general feeling (sorry, no serious material there).

So, can you help me fill in the box ? And do you agree with my understanding of each business model ?

NB: UGC stands for “user-generated content”. Billing could be either pay-per-view or paying a fixed fee for any service.

PS: While I am considering “eBay”’s revenues, I am not interested by eBay as a group (which includes PayPal, Skype, etc…) but rather by the actual revenues of the auction service www.eBay.com

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         “Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

     Along as my working paper (The various business models for websites based on connecting users), for which I would still welcome any kind of help (just mail to steve.danino@mailhec.net), I am also conducting a project for a large industrial company to reorganize its (large) IT department. The problems should sound familiar: costs are through the roof, quality of service is desperately poor, and many valuable projects proposed by other divisions of this group are just scrapped off because the IT Manager just doesn’t have any budget left…

 I felt it could be interesting to provide Tech IT Easy’s readers with some of our current findings. We’d be glad to know, by the way, whether the organization for which you work or have worked for has experienced already the same problems and implemented the same type of solutions.

 Here we go then :

- First of all, it appeared that the IT department was a discretionary cost center, ie the headquarter would simply pay for all its expenses. Costs were not allocated, and certainly not allocated by customers (the other firms divisions), which considered this internal service as “free”. Instead of having a P&L for the IT department, or even a line estimating IT expenses within the P&L of the divisions, all the costs would be grossly included in the overhead costs. Problems: 1) It’s difficult to identify and punish the black sheeps who are responsible for overconsumption 2) Free ? this of course is an illusion. Nothing is free. At the end of the year, the overall budget for IT will be systematically reconducted – if not capped by the HQ.

- And here comes the problem of misallocation. Since the IT department is under pressure by the HQ to reduce its costs, it might refuse to engage in some of the projects the other divisions would ask for. But then, one might say that this department did indeed accept to work earlier for least valuable projects … first come, first-served ! This is not a serious way to deal with a 1 billion dollar large IT budget. And what about trade-offs when it comes to suppressing maintenace fees, which are piling up little by little, until they become unmanageable ? Just bear in mind that an organization like the one we consider uses hundreds of systems and thousands of different applications….

 So, there are some very serious issues here. It has been estimated that this company could save up to 30% ot its IT costs – a mere 300 million dollars per year ! And here’s how:

1) The first possibility would be outsourcing the IT department to an external provider, such as IBM Global Services, Cap Gemini, Accenture, EDS, etc… Empirical data shows that very significant savings can be performed this way – up to 40%.

Problem: this very company already tried this a couple of years ago. And the quality of service was an absolute disaster. Besides, contract management was tough and supplementary expenses were billed on and on by the provider, (the name of which I will not disclose – or only by email). The result: within less than 3 years, the services were internalized once again.

2)  Another possibility would be transforming the IT department in a profit center, very much like Siemens did with its new subsidiary Siemens Business Services. The big picture: you tell your IT guys that instead of being “civil servants” of their company, they should endorse the market principles, and try actually to make profit…which is far from obvious since all the other divisions are now allowed to purchase their IT services on the external market.

Problem: the IT department is absolutely non-competitive. So let’s forget about this one.

3) Last possibility: keep the current structure, but make the IT department bill its services to each division (ie allocating the costs) and make sure that a market reference is taken into account when negotiating transfer prices. If the head of any division complains to the HQ that the IT service is billing twice as much as an external provider would, then a “positive” pressure would be built upon this division. Problem: this solution sounds slightly awkward, since very few companies, to my knowledge, have chosen this organization.

So, have you ever heard of similar cases ? What would be the best choice according to you ?

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 “Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

As some of you already know, I am currently working hard on a working paper about “The different business models based on connecting Internet users .” I have already posted a help request, and the proposal remains valid …

I have already begun my research, and I am struck by the absolute mess around some concepts such as Web 2.0, social network, Web 1.0, etc… It is a headache to define precisely those keywords. We already had several posts and controversies about that on this blog, here and here. Seems like most pundits, entrepreneurs and journalists just have their own definition, and don’t bother about reaching an agreement.

Well, I’m not satisfied. So I just felt like presenting you a preliminary model : I’ll be happy to put it to the test of your sagacity. After much wandering about, I now consider that Internet has been slowly switching from a “showcase” to a “platform” paradigm. Although the trend has been there almost since the Web’s beginning, it has gained momentum in the last years, and will get some more in the forthcoming ones since Web 2.0 is the final step of this mutation.  You’ll probably recall Tim O’Reilly definition of Web 2.0 as “Web-as-a-platform”. This is not my opinion since some old business models and websites have done this for ages.

In fact, I suggest to identify three types of Web sites which appeared one after the other, following this “platform” approach (see Fig.1): Web 1.0 – such as Meetic or Monster.com ; social networks – such as LinkedIn or Friendster ; and Web 2.0 (Facebook, Youtube, deli.cio.us…). All these companies are really about connecting people, and making money for providing that service. But they are part of three different models.

OK, so what are the objective criteria which allow us to distinguish between these three layers ? Here’s my theory:

1.  In the first case, Web 1.0, the main point is about making “static profiles” interact. If you consider Meetic, for example, the business model is just about filling a database with static profiles and allowing each profile to browse the database.
2. Social networks introduce a further refinement: profiles are not static but dynamic, ie. what matters most is not the initial information disclosed by the profile’s creator, but rather the context in which this profiles evolve. The main point here is about enriching permanently our own profile, adding connections, or joining groups. Instead of having a glance at a profile, you’ll now “enter the world” (generally the network) of this profile. The database gets more complex, and profiles contextualization may improve without even an intervention of the profile’s owner. [ ex: the groups you've joined keep inflating, by themselves]
3. And here comes Web 2.0 ! Basically, the criteria here is about introducing user-generated content. What matters most is not the profile (take Youtube: who gives a f… about the description of each users, and who uses channels ?), but rather the content provided by the user. On top of the classical database - just filled with “profiles sheets” -, you know have a worldwide repository. Users provide content, tag it, “contextualize” it…profiles are still there, but what matters most is their actual activity, rather than their mere presence. In most cases, the Web 2.0 websites would also keep most of social network’s aspects.

These are just subjective criteria, and no Chinese Walls. It is not difficult to jump from one paradigm to the other. For example, allowing to browse a specific user’s relatives on Meetic would be enough to make it a social network. And Facebook is indeed a social network which can boast itself as “Web 2.0″ compliant, just because users can enrich their profiles with photos, articles, etc….

 Now, let’s get into it: what is your opinion about this model ? Can you help me improve it ?

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