Web work

Microsoft catching up with Google

Way too often do I hear from the Microsoft fans that the company is catching up with Google. Each and every time I disagreed, but in the heat of the discussion it’s not always easy to find supporting facts. Yeah, I know, I should come ready for such arguments, but I really take them when and where they find me.

Anyways, Google Android and Microsoft Mobile is only one side of a discussion. Advertising is the other. And search is yet another one. Well, I’ve heard the numbers before, but never bothered blogging them. This time I will. Slashdot links to a CNN Money article, which tells a really sad story.

Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) has lost $5.5 billion on Bing since the search service launched in June 2009, but the company’s search losses actually pre-date that. In fact, the software giant has never made money in its online services division. Since Microsoft began breaking out that unit’s finances in 2007, the company has lost a total of $9 billion.

There is even a little visual aid in case you prefer your trends simplified. It doesn’t look good, and it will never will. And the secret is very simple. Microsoft is not an online company. It never was and it is too large to change. If it will ever change, it will be as different from what it is now as IBM is different from the company it used to be in the last century.

ifttt – if this then that is awesome

If you are somehow involved with online tools, publishing, or social networks, then you should definitely check out ifttt. It is an abbreviation for “if this then that” and it is the best thing since the invention of sliced bread. ifttt is an extremely easy, or perhaps even trivial, tool that helps you to connect and integrate web services. Say, for example, that you use Google Reader and you want to publish your shared items to Twitter and Facebook and save starred items to Evernote or Delicious. Can you do it? Sure, the solutions are out there. But you will be solving each problem separately. And good luck with technical support. How about email or SMS integration? Or Foursquare check-ins to Google Calendar? You probably haven’t even thought of that…

iffft has a tonne of ready made solutions. And even if there is something that you need which is not there, you have super easy tools to make it. All you need to do is basically choose a trigger, like a new post in the blog, a new check-in, or a new shared item, and then choose an action like publish to Twitter or Facebook. iffft will handle the gory technical details on its own. If there is a need to authenticate a service, you don’t have to worry about it – it is already implemented. If you don’t like some of the defaults, you can almost always change them – for example, how the descriptions of the Google Calendar events are formed from the Foursquare check-ins.

Emails, voice calls, and SMS are supported with loads of web services and notification systems. The interface is very clean and simple. And everything just works. It’s been a long while since I saw something so well designed and implemented. Give it a try, if not for the specific functionality, then just to have more experience with good systems.

Google+ Search

Andrew Shen of Chrome Fans fame notified me of the new, very handy project – Search for Google+. I’ve tried it out and it, being Google’s own Custom Search Engine, works super well. The beauty of the whole thing is that it is available via web, Google Chrome and Firefox addons, as well as an Android app. The search can be limited to Google+ posts and profiles, Google Buzz, Google Reader, or a combined everything. Try it out – you won’t regret it, I promise.

Media landscape after 9/11

GigaOm runs an article on how much media landscape changed since 9/11.

But what strikes me every time I think about September 11 is how much the media landscape — particularly on the web — was transformed by those events, and how very different the world is now when it comes to how we experience real-time news.

When the attack happened, we were still in pre-social network era. No Twitter or Facebook or Google+. And even though quite a few people had blogs, the majority of the news were still coming from the TV and newspapers. For those of you, who don’t remember, most news websites were dead for a day or two immediately after the attack. Slashdot – a popular IT news website which is very much used to having tonnes of traffic was on the edge of collapsing too. Here is their article for this year with a link to the September 11th, 2011 archives.

I remember working in PrimeTel office at the time. I was involved with a project that dealt with video walls and window TV ads in multiple branches of a client’s business. I had a large 40-something-inch plasma TV mounted on a stand next to my desk. I was working on a piece of software that would combine video clips and images into a continuous playlist. I was using sample ads from the client as well as a bunch of landscape photography images for my tests.

Once the attack happened and most of the news sites went down, we established a public folder where all colleagues could drop images and videos they found anywhere on the web and those would get automatically added to the continuous video that was playing on the TV. I remember it was quite something. By the end of the day people from other departments and other floors started to come by to watch it. I remember even the owner of the company came in for a few minutes.

What I couldn’t realize then was how social that thing was. It wasn’t me or anyone else in particular. It was a collective effort of a few people. Each one would come across something and then share it in the public folder. That was very similar to how social networks like Twitter and Facebook distribute things these days. And with the last 10 years, it was proved several times of how well this works.

As Mathew Ingram notes in that GigaOm article:

Now try and think about what it might have been like if September 11 happened today, with ubiquitous smartphones featuring cameras and video and web access. Although cellular networks were overloaded in the aftermath of the attacks, some Blackberry messages got out of the towers — and today, we would almost certainly have gotten a real-time flow of tweets and images and video from people in the towers, at the Pentagon, even on the plane that flew into the ground in Stony Creek, Pennsylvania.

Update: Joe Wilcox of BetaNews also reminds that there was no YouTube back then.