Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Finding People


So, not wanting to be the last to notice this but, it seems more and more that KM 101 is now being applied to people, not just to people in the enterprise (that was KM 102) but to everyday users of the Internet, to you and me..?

This started a while back with online dating sites that matched seekers by basic attributes in the context of finding companionship. More recently finding people through the things they share with you has become the norm on Amazon etc where you can see people who bought what you bought and then see what else they like. Pandora.com, the music site makes use of this along with the very inventive (and uncannily accurate) music genome algorithm that finds music similar to the music you like.

Facebook and LinkedIn, Spock and Ecadamy followed and these are very much more wide ranging (at least Facebook is) in the context in which they operate and while the last three purport to be focused on managing your professional network, for most of us there is a good deal of overlap between professional networks and personal.

Getting a little more specialized here, I recently had some fascinating discussions with a few of the managers at Gerson_Lehrman Group  whose flourishing business is built around matching your expertise needs to experts with those skills in thousands of different professions. To do this they use a very complex and wide ranging Taxonomy to describe people. 

This struck me as a very interesting development as it opens the door to building virtual teams of people for one-off projects. This is something any small consultancy or indeed, more recently, larger business, without the desire to keep experts on staff full time, needs constantly and can make good use of.

The most recent development is a service like Peoplejar which is simply about helping you find people. No predefined context at all but all sorts of ways for you to create custom context as you go. Sort of like a phone book with lots of other attributes about the people listed.

This looks like a very novel and interesting way to push the envelope a little further and I will be spending a little time learning how it works and what lessons we can learn from it. 

It almost seems like KM 101 is spilling out of the office and onto the street and who knows where it will lead us.



Friday, September 5, 2008

Its the browser, stupid.

Scanning the news this week covering the just-announced beta of ‘Chrome’ the Google empire’s open source browser, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop....it did not. Where was the big bang news story about what this will mean for the future of computing..?

There are two competing models for computing out there right now. One, the model we have grown used to is all about expensive PCs for the home, loaded with expensive and largely unused products and prone to regular data loss due to crashes, virus's, security holes etc. This is the Microsoft world and it is predominant..currently.

The other model, still to be fully defined, is based on the premise that the Internet supplies the functionality we want as we need it in the form of 'services' delivered on demand from the 'cloud' which is the Internet. Additionally it stipulates that storage, search and backup are plumbing you need not worry about as your data is also resident out in the cloud somewhere along with all these services, always secure and available.

So far Google is the vendor that has single-handedly done most to push the cloud model and is the biggest threat to the Microsoft computing hegemony. From the introduction of Google desktop search, Gears, and the Google Docs portable working environment, Google has been steadily assembling all the components for a complete cloud-based alternative to the current PC desktop.

Nowhere that I could find was there much more than a fleeting mention of the deeper implications of how Chrome will fit into all of this. There was of course (and rightly so) a lot of talk about what Google might do with a much more detailed click-stream covering what users are actually looking at now coming out of the new Chrome browser but, what about all the other stuff? Nada!

So I have installed the Beta and, it is pretty darn sweet with a minimalist look and all sorts of smart, smart features built right in, nothing less than we would expect from Google of course.

If you want to know more out Chrome, the first thing you should do is read the excellent comic book (yes a comic book) that Google has created to showcase the project and the product. Most of what follows is based on the revelations therein.

Given how key the browser is, lets remember that the browser was the thing that landed Microsoft in such hot water here in the US and serious trouble in Europe because Redmond thought the browser held the keys to the future and so sought to integrate it very tightly with the Microsoft desktop while stuffing it full of compelling new features and making it very hard for any one else to get in on the action.

Nice try guys but you have the picture the wrong way around.

The way forward (in my humble opinion) is not by tying the browser to the desktop but using it as a gateway for everything beyond the desktop that the user is reaching out to. The browser must work seamlessly with all those services out there on the web, not be a barrier to using them.

The steps taken by Google with Chrome seem to me to be the first ones set, with the heft of the Google empire behind them, and likely to lead forward rather than into some small and limited backwater as we have seen with others in this space.

Lets discuss a few of the more substantial elements of the new browser’s design that articulate fairly clearly what Google is thinking and did not seem to be well appreciated in the press.

Chrome, in a browser first, is not only multi-threaded but actually has its own process manager. Just like a real Operating System (OS). This implies a very substantial plumbing investment on Google’s account, much of it an investment whose value will only start to be realized down the road.

There are some immediate benefits in this regard however in the increased stability and partitioning ability of the browser so that bad things can be quickly identified on a tab and killed before they bring down all browser sessions. Down the road, this underlying architecture will be crucial to running large, complex applications, many at a time.

It should come as no surprise that the new browser shares an underlying component for page rendering with the Google phone OS ("Android") and this means that pages should look roughly the same in both places and certainly should function the same. In this way, pages optimized for Chrome will also run very well on Android, a nice benefit and one likely to increase acceptance of both quickly.

Google’s developers make no bones about the fact that while JavaScript is now everywhere on the web, it is a really poorly designed scripting language and needs a lot of help to do what we need it do today. Guess who is giving it a hand? With a new Just-In-Time compiler and new memory management features in Chrome, Google has actually created a virtual machine for JavaScript, an industry first and a great way to get a handle on this ungainly language. The benefits to you..? Faster page loads and fewer crashes.

On the security side, the developers and engineers have redesigned the standard security model for the Internet and used it as an opportunity to throw a few brickbats at Redmond along the way. The areas considered and carefully tightened up cover Malware and Phishing exploits, security holes that today enable some of the worst scams on the web. While acknowledging the inability to also cover up plug-ins with problems, they are at least able to cover most anything that comes through the usual channels.

The other major implication is that Google Gears (the nascent web API standards) are built right into Chrome allowing others to integrate new features and new applications right into and through this browser. That the whole thing is open source is of course to be expected, what better way to start a stampede than by giving away free money!

Google would like to move things off the desktop and into the cloud. We see this in everything they do and say, yet up until now the gateway to the cloud was controlled by a vendor with an entirely different agenda; hence Google had a serious problem in moving forward.

With Chrome, the gateway is now in their hands and, just as importantly, as an open source product, Chrome is also in the hands of a huge community easily capable of overwhelming the Redmond developers with innovations and smart new things to deliver cloud computing right into our daily lives.

Welcome to the new beginning.