Category Archives: Open Content

What Google+ is missing

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When Google + was announced I was very much excited at the prospect of using a more open social network that would also bring something different and refreshing to everyone. I do not really like Facebook. It’s not just their privacy policies, or the never stressed enough notion that if you’re not the customer then you must be the product -that also applies to Google +- it’s the website itself. I grew increasingly frustrated of Facebook, I got tired of what I consider to be a lack of elegance (the violet to indigo-blue palette is getting old) and a constant will to confuse users in pushing them to reveal more and more personal data.

For sure I do use Facebook, I am “on Facebook” just like many other people. But I also use Google Plus and Diaspora. While Diaspora aims at being something really different and relies on a fundamentally distributed model, it is in its infancy and I will not discuss it in this post. I will focus on Google + instead.

I had big hopes for Google + and still do. I still believe it is a better built, more powerful and less harmful service than Facebook, but I also believe that while any service has shortcomings of its own its operator/owner tends to correct them over time by bringing in more features for instance, something Google does not seem to be doing, hence my points below:

  • Tastes and colours should not be discussed as everyone has his or her own tastes and yet… I still like Google + much more than Facebook for that matter, however, something seems not all right in Google +: could users customize the look of their page(s), or are they condemned to the everlasting white background? (on the other hand you could point out that simplicity in design never hurt anyone).
  • Profiles: it’s amazing how hard it is to see someone’s profile. For this Facebook tends to be much simpler and clearer, Why can’t I just access someone’s profile in one click, instead of searching its own activity feed?
  • Sharing and circles is probably what Google + does best, although in many ways it was a Diaspora’s concept that was itself hinted in the discussions around the DISO concept (the early days of a distributed social network) but there is something, specifically about sharing, that I do not understand: sharing beyond circles, such as sharing on Twitter or StatusNet, let alone on Facebook is not possible. I know about the hack for identi.ca and twitter that works by sharing with one specific profile but why would I want to share that with this probably sympathetic, yet unknown person? The most surprising part of this is that neither Google, nor Twitter, nor Facebook, seem to be willing to provide that feature (the same goes for sharing from Twitter, StatusNet and Facebook to Google +). This issue alone, to me, is a major one, and I am pretty sure it’s the same for many people. Because of that posting on Google + is somewhat of a solitary exercise; you have to repost specifically on Google +.
  • More distributed content : obviously Google does perform data mining on the content we share on Google + and any of its other services, that’s not news to anyone. But while Google does handle data portability seriously (a big plus!) it might benefit from enabling some sort of “sandboxes”, that is, private spaces that could be self-hosted, yet easily connectable to the “central” Google + network. This would also allow many people to both feel more secure and enrich the overall content aggregation scheme; you would be able to use Google + as a content transport layer in between “pods” or peers and still using the big social network itself if you want to.
  • A Google Wave like timeline : as people become increasingly aware that their past posts and interactions can be monitored, reused by others or simply by and for themselves, an easy to use timeline, something completely missing on Facebook, might be useful and fun to use.
  • A professional page or job search as well as other specific services might also be useful; but it seems that Google + is very much like other services launched at Google: an experiment first, a product afterwards. I am usually fine with this approach, but Google + needs attention and extra features if it wants to stay and grow instead of being dumped and filed such as Google Buzz was. I really hope that won’t be the case.

A few thoughts on innovation

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I was invited the other day to a conference about innovation in the information technology sector. There was nothing remarkable about that event, except perhaps that it led me to voice an opinion I held for years: I do not understand what people are really talking about when they talk about innovation, at least in software, that is.

It might be odd to write this, but if there’s any concept that’s both fuzzy and dangerously misleading in the software industry, that would be innovation. I have read for many years and listened to people explaining how to “stirr and create innovation” in a company or in a community. Maybe these words have been used for lack of a better term; but I still don’t see how you can create innovation. I think you might be able to stirr it somehow, as it’s already a humbler verb. But frankly, can someone out there tell me what does innovation mean in the software world?

In general terms, I would define innovation as the big and small changes constantly leading to a change of the art in any given field. I think that’s pretty much what one usually understands by that word. So why could this not be applied to software? Precisely because software is rarely -if at all- the result of big changes happening all of a sudden and by accident. Software development usually happens at an incremental pace, whether openly so (think about the agile development practices) or even when there’s a structured corporate environment favoring traditional code reviews and quality assurance processes through stable product development cycles. Software is not produced by accident. Software is the result of process, and in theory accidents do not happen there. In fact, I could also point out that incremental changes or a period of technological incubation might be observed right before the emergence of almost any given technology. Take the medieval rudder for instance: it’s been rumored to have been imported in Europe around the 12th century by Chinese ships, but there are tracks and evidence of previous try-outs by European sailors and shipyards to design wooden rudders and articulate them with a complete mechanism. Similarly, it is hard to say how “innovation” happened in the sixties when the U.S. decided to send manned flights to the moon, but the wave of small and not so small innovation that was the result of this huge project is still visible to everyone (think of the Tefal pans, among many other things).

Thus there are, I think, two points that need to be highlighted: First, innovation does not happen all of a sudden if the field of software field and more generally ICT. It is a set of processes that ultimately lead to new software, or software that’s supposedly not as bad as the former state of the art. Second, what’s unclear is how -to quote several people I listened to- innovation “happens”. It sounds sometimes that innovation is a mystery or the philosophers’ stone that require care and secrecy to happen. Yet in the software industry, it does not work that way, for all the marketing and bells and whistles that come out of software vendors do not brush aside the fact that even inside these corporations software development is a set of very well defined, but non-public, processes.

Innovation is not a mystery and I don’t think that you can track how it works. You can assume that a certain set of circumstances and an environment letting people code start-ups emerge and Free & Open Source Software projects grow will ultimately translate into something that someone, whether a journalist, consultant, politicians or venture capitalists will call innovation. Anything else besides that, innovation sounds more like vapor and magical boxes. This should probably express what I feel about software patents, by the way.

One last thing: Innovation is different than progress. Progress is usually applied to fields that do not necessarily belong to science or technology; it can be more a perception and may concern society as a whole. Yet the interesting thing is that while progress seems to be an even more elusive term than innovation, you can actually tell progress from regression or stagnation: people perceive it almost immediately, however relative it sometimes may be.

Enjoy the beginning of the Holiday season!

Links under the snow

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  • Julian Assange goes out of jail, fears for his life, while Bank of America blocks payments to Wikileaks. I didn’t know that Bank of America had so high moral standards. This is why I do expect that, after blocking the payments process to Wikileaks, Bank of America will also block payment processes flowing to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan whose regimes feed and harbor terrorists. What? Did I say something I shouldn’t have? Okay, so how about this: After having taken part in the most serious financial crisis in the western History, engulfed billions of tax payers’ money, gobbled up those same billions to its own traders and executives, it is only normal that Bank of America takes a unequivocal actions to protect the United States. Aha. When I was a kid I used to think we, the “free world” stood against this sort of things. Now it just reminds me of a quite dark reenactment of the french drama “Tartuffe” by Molière. Meanwhile Private Manning is tortured in a maximum security prison, without any trial.  Did someone say “Soviet Union”?
  • It’s Holiday Season, nonetheless, and I thought you may want to take a look at how Christmas looks in Paris, especially under the snow. (Paris is a city that looks particularly beautiful under the snow). Prête-moi Paris has all the details.
  • The EIF and EIS 2.0 are published at last. In many ways it is disappointing, but it is at the same time a clear political gesture in favor of open standards and true interoperability.

Best wishes for the Season!

    Discernement

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    The Wikileaks ongoing affair is taking an interesting turn. This is not a blog about how Julian Assange is currently being hunted down under some quite opportunistic sex offender’s charge. I would like to discuss why I believe that the man and site -hunt that’s going on around the world and around the Internet is a defining moment of our century and the ability of the western world to overcome both its contradictions and the limits of its own system.

    Simon Phipps wrote a much welcome post this week-end and quoted Voltaire “I may not agree with your opinion but I will do everything I can to make sure you can express it”; the Wikileaks “cablegate” is about that, as well as about two other issues.

    But first, I would like to clarify my opinion on the “cablegate” in the form of a cautious caveat emptor. Contrary to Mr Assange, I do not believe that transparency solves or will solve every problem out there. I believe transparency is good, in general, but transparency can sometimes become a deforming mirror, pun intended: Total transparency is an utopia. We all need and have secrets, and so have human societies. While crime and murky business of all kinds do require opacity to progress, it has often been shown that transparency is also a well made-up reality, whether hiding those criminal or morally reprehensible practices, or hiding conversations or more delicate but legitimate dealings under the veil. Our societies could not exist with total transparency. We could not be humans with total transparency: Or else one would have to explain that Comedy, Drama, and human subconscious are inherently bad and useless. What the “Cablegate” reveals so far is quite embarrassing for the United States of America. I read the newspapers, like Le Monde in French and the Guardian in English, two newspapers that had been working with Wikileaks on the cables. I also went straight to one of the Wikileaks mirrors and watched that specific section. My gut feeling? It’s unfortunately the world we live in. If you think this will make me become anti-American then you’re wrong. The US are failing in bringing Pakistan to become a sincere ally in the war against terrorism? I’m yawning. The US ambassador in Paris describes the French President as being nervous and extremely egotic? Guess what, watch french national television for two hours and you’d get that instantly. For the rest -and there’s more embarrassing material- killing two Reuters journalists and children from an Apache helicopter is an absolute tragedy that bears a name: War. Not that I support what the videos are showing: I hope there will be DoD investigations for this. But war is war, and if anyone thought Iraq, Vietnam, World War 2 or the War of US Independence were about pooh-bears throwing honeypots at each other, then there’s a word for it that goes beyond naivety: stupidity.

    Other leaks tend to be somewhat more interesting: it shows how private companies and special interest groups are framing entire legal frameworks in Europe, how the US put spies in political parties and hosts them in their embassies worldwide. It’s obviously embarrassing, but please let’s ask ourselves: Is this all new? I don’t think it is.

    In fact there’s two ways to understand what the Wikileaks cables’disclosure reveal. One is the factual disclosure of actions, affairs, skeletons in the closet, various projects and information that enlightens the perception of the US Government on worldwide topics. You can feed anti-Western sentiment or anti-american feelings with this material, but frankly it’s not like these two memes would be fading away anytime soon without the leaks. Another one is the notion that all of a sudden transparency will fix the state of the world, starting with America. Transparency helps, but some things have to remain buried for a long time, some things are not meant to be disclosed. And talking about transparency, we should not be anymore naive and demand that the same kind of information be disclosed from countries like Iran or North Korea: I’m sure it would highlight another well-known reality: that US or democratic countries are not just no worse, but are in fact much better than these countries (some people are ready to absolve them from their wrongdoings on various grounds).

    So why did I call this post “Discernment”? For various reasons; the first one is that the US Government in general is behaving in such a way that few will believe that they have a legitimate defense to present. Mafious-like pressures, persecution of one man, denial of reality, outrage do not serve them. The world we live in isn’t the Sopranos’ BadaBing strip club; and if I may write so, even if “shit does happen” one should try to think about not being seen as the culprit. I must indeed say that I find it extremely concerning that a man like Eric Holden is behaving the way he does, using expressions alluding to underground actions used to fight Julian Assange. A government does not fight one man; it discredits him, or it reuses his ideas to gain an advantage, otherwise that government is weak. It only leads to one result in the end: Assange is seen as the victim, the US Government and Barack Obama as the black knights (excuse the pun).

    The second reason why I titled this post “Discernment” is that to the best of my knowledge, and interestingly enough many US lawyers seem to think that way, Julian Assange has not violated any US Federal or State Law. This means something quite terrible for the United States: There is simply no due process of law in this affair, only angry politicians. But angry politicians do not constitute a law themselves; you need a legislative and transparent process for this, otherwise you’re no better than in a dictatorship. This law has so far failed to materialize. Meanwhile, Wikileaks is being hunted down around the Internet, large companies withdrawing essential tools for its infrastructure. Julian Assange just went to the London Police and will remain there in custody until the 14th of December under the alleged charge of sex crime. Let’s stop the hypocrisy and speak out the truth: making up a lace of lies will only reinforce Assange’s position: Otherwise, Facebook’s Fan page of wikileaks now has over a million “terrorists”, the Internet should be censored and Wikileaks banned, (China-style) while the KKK, anti-semitic and djihadist groups are free to graze and prosper. And I forgot to add to the list: Pigs can now fly. Unfortunately, that seems to be the situation we are in. But there’s more.

    As one may see I’m not exactly a fan of disclosing diplomatic cables, from the US embassies or elsewhere -while in some cases such as private corporations wrongdoings the disclosure helps and is important- but it’s not so much about what Assange did or did not do. Let’s consider this: the whole affair should never have been about Assange in the first place: Wikileaks has not stolen the cables, a whistleblower uploaded them, but nobody really cares. No, the whole point of the scandal is that we now have a great democracy whose government is incompetent in addressing a massive disclosure of confidential material, and its incompetence is now setting a precedent on free speech and free press. What Wikileaks did -and dare I add the newspapers that collaborated with the site to the culprits- was disclosing an information from an “unknown source”. That’s what newspapers in the free world do all the time. Does this mean that under the quite specious argument of the fight against terror we should now ban this? By the way, who will be able to “ban the ones who are banning free speech”?

    Therefore, unless we specifically have a due process of law following a public and opend debate on whether initiatives of Wikileaks could be condemned on specific grounds, unless it’s clear for everyone that Free Speech is safeguarded and is actually enacted and thoroughly protected, Assange and every anti-American will have won.

    Again, let’s have a public debate about this: It’s well worth the effort, and it’s well worth using our sense of discernment.

    It’s the Document, stupid!

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    Today the Document Foundation has issued a press release that marks the beginning of something exciting; but it’s likely that not a lot of people will understand what’s being explained through the multiple layers of buzz and general statements that were made. Here’s the statement:

    “”The Document Foundation is about documents and the associated software is pivotal to create, exchange, modify, share and print documents”, says Thorsten Behrens, a software developer and a member of TDF Steering Committee. “LibreOffice 3.3 is the first flavour of this long term strategy, but the journey has just begun, and the enormous advantages of our developer-embracing environment are not yet fully reflected in the upcoming software release”.

    LibreOffice 3.3 is based on OOo 3.3, with code optimisations and many new features, which are going to offer a first preview of the new development directions for 2011 and beyond. TDF founders foresee a completely different future for the office suite paradigm, which – in the actual format – is over 20 years old, to be based on the document (where the software is a layer for the creation or the presentation of the contents).

    TDF developers are working full steam at improving the overall quality of OOo code, which is a good starting point, and making easy testability of the code and quality assurance a priority. This is an area where new developers and code hackers, whose number has grown to over 90 in just a month, are instrumental for the bulk of the activity.

    In addition, each single module of LibreOffice will be undergoing an extensive rewrite, with Calc being the first one to be redeveloped around a brand new engine – code named Ixion – that will increase performance, allow true versatility and add long awaited database and VBA macro handling features. Writer is going to be improved in the area of layout fidelity and Impress in the area of slideshow fidelity. Most of the new features are either meant to maintain compatibility with the market leading office suite or will introduce radical innovations. They will also improve conversion fidelity between formats, liberate content, and reduce Java dependency.

    “The Document Foundation is going to be at the heart of the Free Software universe, where users want to build a different future for office suites, working together with developers”, says Italo Vignoli, a digital immigrant, and the oldest member of TDF Steering Committee. “Users read, write, modify and share documents, and are focused on contents rather than software features. After 20 years of feature oriented software, it is now the right time to bring back content at the centre of user focus”.”

    The statements quoted above unveil several items. This is not a press release about the community itself, it’s a press release showing the result of a liberated community at work. And what does a liberated community at work do? Not only does it fix what can be fixed on the spot; it  is not shy in assessing whether the code base it’s working on is going to be relevant in 5 years and whether the state of the art has changed. Therefore we, the community, gathers around a few simple (but in fact quite complex ideas):

    1. Our code base is getting old. Worse, the whole frigging software looks  and feels like we’re stuck in the Bush area. Many things were not fixed, some others need a complete rewrite.
    2. The Document is really the epicenter, the conundrum’s point, and software should be built around it, not as if documents were some sort of odd appendices. It’s not just the user that matters, it’s that when the document is what the software is running for, rather than running with, you end up with much more ability to create, share and innovate.  In fact, designing software following this concept leads you to develop something quite different from office suites. That’s a shift of paradigm.
    3. It’s time to realize people hate using office suites. You can make them more visually compelling, more practical, and we want that too. But it’s the tool that is the problem in itself. No one really knows why we have to stick to specific features; Powerpoint was a nice visual concept in the eighties; it became a management tool. Who could have guessed it?  Therefore, there is an urgency in making office suites fun to use, by allowing users to unleash their creativity, win time and efforts, there fore make their lives easier and more enjoyable.

    The way the Document Foundation is going to address these issues is twofold: First, we will have incremental changes on LibreOffice, although these changes will sometimes be quite visible. This will allow to solve real and identified issues by maintaining the overall code stability and homogeneity. Second, we will open new development initiatives aimed at rewriting entire portions of the codebase (leading in the end to a complete rewrite) that we think are the most urgent to be rewritten. Mind, however, that we won’t have a rewrite for the sake of a rewrite. I think that Ixion, the spreadsheet rewrite project, will show that we’re in this game to change it. Yes you read well: Initiatives such as Ixion will not lead to a nice MS Office clone. It will be a radical departure from what we have today.

    These two tracks will thus offer the choice between improved stability and radical innovation, and somewhere down the line, these two will merge, somehow. But that story has yet to be written.

    Stay tuned!