Willy Dobbe - Web2.0

OpenSource and clouds

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:47:26 +0200

There are two big trends in ICT; Service a a Service (SaaS) and Open Source Software (OSS). And I do think those two go hand in hand and are reflecting changes that are coming towards the ICT landscape. When I say "hand in hand", I do mean that they are complementary (like people are in a relationship) but also that the are in contrast of each other (like in many relationships). It is my opinion that you either outsource
(parts of your) IT activities, or build the solution yourself. You will either use a cloud to deliver your needs, or make your own cloud. It will either be service from the Microsoft's or you will have to build and manage the solution by yourself. You either well use a cheap commodity service with limited customisation to have the complete freedom to fit the software to your business objectives. Let me try to make clear why this is my opinion and how this influences your role as a user or provider of ICT services.

Recent trends have shown that release cycles of software have become shorter and shorter; to keep ahead of our competitors you have to be able to release early and often.

Release early and release often as a way to be able to quickly add new features for the future, fix problems for the current software and to prevent that software becomes obsolete ("end of life"). The perpetual beta as the new adagium. Where flickr was able to deploy during it's booming period a new codebase every 15 minutes, Microsoft was able to make a new operating 7 years. One is using the "service" (cloud) way of offering it's software, the other is using the "fat client" approach. So on one hand proprietary fat client software s facing competition from cloud based services. Sure Google Docs is not as feature rich or reliable as the Office suite of Microsoft but most agree that this is just a question of time and network reliability; in due time Google Apps will be good enough for the masses. Mind you, most if not all cloud services are proprietary and are doing well; salesforce as the most prominent example.

On the other hand, proprietary software faces problems from the Open Source alternatives. OpenOffice.org is a real competitor for MS-Office, the Ubuntu distribution beats Microsoft in many areas and MySQL is giving the absurd licence fees of Oracle a hard time. If proprietary closed source software wants to stay in business, they have to move. Not to a "long tail" niche but in the other direction, to the left side of the tail where you can offer a highly standardised yet customisable version of their product. That way they are able to release early and often and go for a low margin per product sold but sell a lot. So I do think that closed source software has to move towards a service model, away from the client into the data centre.

This means that the other trend (Open Source Software) -that has written "release early and often" written all over it- will dominate the Do It Yourself area. OSS will be used by people and companies that have time and resources to fulfill their needs via highly customisable software. You will see this first with applications that are by nature webbased; the can move to the cloud with less legacy baggage. Software with much interaction with local legacy products will follow later, much later in some case So Office Automation for existing companies will take some serious time to migrate to the cloud since hybrid solutions (some data local, some in the cloud) will be rather expensive and complex to many from security, identity and manageability point of view.

One of the webbased applications that will dominte the "DIY" will be Drupal. It i already the best Content Mangement System ("looking outside") on the market and it is moving more in the direction of the core of business processes ("looking inside"). Drupal will more and more be used as both a frontend system and a backend system; a system where you can aggregate and enrich data for internal use that can be pushed towards for example an external Drupal site.

If you follow this logic (proprietary moving towards commodity cloud service, Open Source solutions towards customisable client service) you might conclude with me that Open Surce CMS-es have nothing to fear from closed source CMS-es like sharepoint. Sharepoint will be the shell around your office data if you want to use that from a cloud perspective, Drupal will be used by enthusiast and enterprises that need more power and have more resources to kickstart and operate that power.

So some people will use an iPhone and the cloud service "Mobile me", others will build Android. Some will use digital TV solutons from their cable providers, others will build MythTV. Some will run an OpenID service themselves, others will use it from a Google/Yahoo! And some will use voicemail (the most used cloud service in the world) and others prefer a local answering machine. I, I use all kind of differtent services, cloud and local, like most people will do.

PS: This posting as very late for last years' Drupal prediction posting or very early for next year, whatever makes more sense to you

PPS: Sure, you can have Open Source "SaaS" solutions as well, for example hosted and managed Drupal instalations but it will be a niche crossover, if that makes sense to you. Also, when I say "build", it can also mean "let other build", aka buy.

PPPS: I do think that SaaS is a complete wrong term; it is a technological acronym. First, people do not want "Software" as a service, but they want a service (as a service). As long as the ICT things about acronyms like SaaS, true adoption of using a "Service as A Service" will only stall. It is time to stop the technology lingo where it should stop; at the door of the customer and think of services instead of software. Second, Software as a Service is a very limited view on what truly can be accomplished with services; it might be disk capacity from the cloud (like S3, Storage as a Service), it might be CPU capacity (like EC2, CPU as a Service), it might be housing (Rackspace as a Service), hosting (Linux box as a Service) or to give an everyday example we are used to, voicemail (Answeringmachines as a Service). Therefor I plea to stop using the term SaaS and use XaaS ("Anything as a Service") or use SaaS for the acronym "Service as a Service", whatever makes more sense to you.

Forrester brings Drupal in the boardroom

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:27:23 +0200

Selling Drupal. Not a contradiction but not as easy as selling a license of a proprietary CMS. Selling something that is "free" (gratis) seems like an odd idea to many. So how do we get our beloved Drupal CMS spread in a broader range that home blogs, new media sites and the like?

Well, some prospects have functional requirements for their CMS like "It has to start with a D and end with Drupal". Usually there is a passionate user somewhere in the ICT department that convinced some people to go for Drupal. And while this technocratic approach does have its drawbacks, it is a good way to gain more ground and bring Drupal on a higher level.

But most of the time the prospect "just wants a CMS". And since there are zillions of Open Source CMS-es it is hard to choose. Most OSS CMS-es do not have a local "sales" so the company will end up with a proprietary CMS that is years lagging, only have a dozen developers and a couple of hundreds users but with a sales person that is a member of the same club as the CEO.

However, now most bigger companies are moving towards their third CMS implementation, people know what they want from a CMS and people are actually looking for an Open Source CMS and hence an Open Source implementer like my employer is in the Netherlands. And those bigger enterprises all read Gartner, Forrester, MetaGroup and other IT research and advisory companies. I have a very strong opinion about those companies (just echoing yesterdays news for companies that will be in today by tomorrow) but that is a different story. In the boardroom magic quadrants, hype cycles and two by two tables are the goal for any powerpoint wisdom, so if you want to be in the boardroom you have to play chess on the management chessboard; a 2 x 2 matrix.

CNet (writing many rtiles about Drupal in a positive way!) has a piece called Forrester calls out Alfresco and Drupal as the top-two open-source WCM systems. This is really /great/ news, instant boardroom Fähigkeit for Drupal. Forrester says so so we need Drupal!

You can read the excerpt of the report over at Forrester:

This document answers frequently asked questions about the role that open source plays in the WCM market.

You have to pay for the real article but even without reading 20 pages about community, functionality etc, I think it is fine to say that Drupal will be a word you can say in the boardroom from now on. "Could you please fill my cup with some coffee Drupal's" for example.

Thanks to Kieran and others who gave input for the report

Usual suspects... with a new kid on the block

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:29:21 +0200

Read this entry at freesoftwaremagazine (a drupal site)

Every field has its own key individuals who donated much of their time to the ideas they believed in. Each one of them is a reminder that it’s up to individuals to make a difference — and to make history. Their work affects large chunks of the world’s population, and bring amazing changes to the way we see and experience the world.

And then it lists the usual suspects.. like Richard Stallman, Pamela Jones, Linus Torvards, Mark Shuttleworth, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Bob Young and Matthew Szulik, Jimmy Wales, Lawrence Lessig, Tim Berners-Lee, Blake Ross, Keith Packard, Dries Buytaert, Bram Cohen...

Wait a minute, Linus, Richard and.. Dries?

I am not a fan of anyone or anything apart my own two loves. But I think it is cool that Dries (and more important Drupal) is now listed amongst the mainstream OSS projects! A big step from a small village (dorp), to a big town to conquering the world!

BTW: I like the work of RMS but his style, ego and narrow vision is not something I appreciate. For the rest of the group, Dries can be proud to be one of them, standing on the shoulders of the community.

Twitter Earth

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:13:11 +0200

I am not as big a twitter user anymore as I used to be, but it is still nice to see from a social and technoly PoV what is happening in the community.

I for one like the twitearth.com API implementation; track your twitter timeline in a geo-way. Available as screensaver for Windows XP, soon for MaC OS-X.

Drupal as a Home Service Bus (beyond Home Automation)

Fri, 30 May 2008 13:57:14 +0200

If... If I would start my own company... But I won't. I do not have the skills, money, balls and most of all, I am rather happy with my current employer Dutch Open Projects. But if I would start my own company, the services would not be based upon Location Based Services, a carbon copy of free available software or "Social Networking two dot ooo". It would be based upon my hobby in combination with my "vision"

Part of my (IT) related hobby's include Drupal (the best Content Management System), MythTv (the best way to watch less junk TV) and everything Mac related (the best way to communicate with a CPU).

Combining these elements will give you nice opportunities. For example your iPhone could be your remote control for your telly:

(Youtube)

But you could also use your iPhone as a device to watch television on; recorded streaming television based upon your preferences towards your telehone!

(Youtube)

And these are just two simple examples; it could be expanded to controlling and integrating the Squeezebox (cheesy: WiFi to your HiFi) I own and towards all the other electric equipment in my house with X.10 (cheesy: control your house from your mouse) like Mr House does. But you will directly see two problems; all these devices and software packages act like they are the master:

they do not talk to each other
they do not provide a nice consistent user interface

In fact, most of the user interfaces these devices provide are really really bad, if you think Drupal pre4 sucked usability wise, try a MythTV distro from one year a go or even the current version of MrHouse! Now the time might not be right for my "business plan". I know that in the USA the concept of Tivo is rather normal for early adapters but here in the EU harddisk based PVR's are just catching on. It will take some time before the public sees and needs that these devices should be integrated .And by that time I am sure that our friends from RedMond have a very nice "solution" for you; "Vista Home Automation # 1984".

By not combining, not integrating, they do not give the user the option to co-related information about their house. For example, if my central system that my family would not be in the house since there are no blue-tooth telephones detected at 2:00h in the morning while the camera sensors motion, I would like to be paged, see the camera images from my iPhone and when I will not react within a certain amount of time, the system should dial out to the police. Okay, bad example, I do not want that since most likely I forgot my phone or the battery is dead and I am in the kitchen to make some milk for my son to get him to sleep. But you get the idea; a centralised place where information is gathered from multiple sources, co-related and with work-flow, action upon this information.

And by not combining, not integrating, they do not provide the user with a good user interface that is consistent and adapts (context aware) towards the client (text messaging, instant messaging, telephone, full browser etc). A key factor forsuccess beyond the usual geeks.

I would like to be able to solve these two problems, make a central place that talks to all devices and can be "smart" and provide the user with the best UI (s)he can get. Now before you state that there is such a product, I am aware of pluto. Pluto combines music (squeezeboxes), television (MythTV), voice (asterisk) and much more into a central box. See for more information their (nasal!) presentation. But they do not combine it in what I would call a "central smart box". That and the fact that they can use some competition :-)

A central smart box would be able to adapt fast, if there would be an API for a grocery shop, it will be in the software in the box within days, weeks. It would know my spending habits and my income and would swap money to places where it would get the most interest, it would read my RSS feeds and based upon time and location "read" them to me, it would know my agenda and the availability of my friends and it would do so much more that I can think of right now.

And by now, you should see why I would like to add my other hobby; Drupal. I think that a central system that acts upon actions and can do more then that could be a Content management Framework like Drupal. I know that PHP by nature would not be very good for acting as a real time broker between information, but I still would go for a Drupal solution instead of J2EE. Drupal is easier, it adapts way faster, can integrate, has a geeky loving community that probably has some of the devices I mentioned, can look beautiful, has a very small footprint and can be context aware.

I would like coin the phrase Home Service Bus, after the Enterprise Service Bus. More the Home Automation that enables a user to control electronic elements, it would be able to make decisions on its own, based upon input from my actions and the status of electronics devices. It would be a broker of information; it would be a Home Service Bus! Now let's just wait until the Gartner People catch up on this phrase in half a decade :-)

So, if I would start my own company it would be based on building this. But since I will not, you a free to make it. And -lazy as I am- I will buy it from you!

Twitter Charts

Fri, 23 May 2008 18:06:18 +0200

Over at Xefer.com you can find a cool use of Yahoo! pipes and Google Charts. If you add your (or mine) twitter ID, you can see a nice graphical mashup of some meta data about your posts.

Twitter Tip: tweetstats

Tue, 06 May 2008 00:51:08 +0200

On Tweetstats you can find information about a user's tweet. Tweets per hour, per day of week, per month, , when does he post, how many tweets in what month, replys per user and client used. All in nice graphs. The first time you look for a user (and yes, we are all ego surfers so your first search will be yourself! ) it will take some time but once completed it looks like this, also available as a cloud.

Twitter Tip: Twist. Spot twitter trends

Fri, 02 May 2008 07:46:36 +0200

At the twist site you can compare different words and see how often per day they are mentioned on twitter, a bit like Google's trends.

It is funny to see that the audience of Twitter is a rather niche one, look for example at Drupal vs Joomla on twist. Drupal is always mentioned a lot more. Now take a look at Drupal vs Joomla "in the real world" on Google Trend; Joomla outranks Drupal at least 5 times.

Conclusion: Twitter peopel are more intelligent.

Twitter Tip: stop smoking wit the Twitter

Thu, 01 May 2008 08:39:57 +0200

Qwitter is the funny name of the tobaccofreeflorida.com site that can help you stop smoke cigars. Follow iquit and tell the bot how much you smoked.

@iquit 1

After having spend 5 days in bed being ill, I am now on less then one cigar a day (unless I drink), far less then the 10+ I was on 3 weeks ago. Want to quit? Follow these instructions!

Twitter Tip: Follow I want Sandy

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:12:41 +0200

Twitter tip of the day: Make an account on IWantSan.com, a PA that can help you with your agenda, sends iCals, understands BCCed mail with text like: "remember to blog in 4 hours". And that can be followed on twitter so there are extra channels to manage your agenda. See the help page on IWantSandy and follow Sandy on twitter, she is "S" (just one letter). Note: if you have a non US mobile number, Sandy will not help you on twitter. I hope they fix this soon.

Follow the DrupalCon twitter

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:32:41 +0200

It is always the people who don't have any time, who do the most time consuming things.

If you do *ahum* twitter, be sure to follow Drupalcon to stay up to date with the latest news regarding the Drupalcon Szeged 2008. And if you want your backchanel #drupalcon to be logged, add for example hashtags so your postings will be updated here.

Looking forward to meet you all there!

Vote for Drupal!

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:37:45 +0100

In 2006 Drupal was the runner up for the precious Webware CMS Award. And last year our beloved CMS even was the overall winner. By winning the competition, the Drupal Association got 5000 Dollars that was used for amongst others funding Drupal Conferences and to buy hardware for hosting the Drupal infrastructure. But even better then the money, Drupal got more airtime and more and more people recognized the power of Drupal.

This year, Drupal was once again nominated in the category "Publishing" and you are encouraged to vote on Drupal to make sure we win again this year. Please help by spreading the word and vote, you deserve it!

Twitter using Amazons' S3

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:25:10 +0100

While changing the background picture of my twitter profile, I noticed that Twitter is using S3 as their CDN/storage solution. Now I know that lost of companies (including a small division of Microsoft) are using S3 but this seems like a rather big implementation for S3. It is weird to see how Amazon has changed its core competence from selling books to providing services. Or maybe, made the services they developed for selling books a commercial service as well.

In unrelated twitter news, see also the twitter100.com service for my tweets.

DIY Digg clone with Drupal

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 11:54:32 +0100

When Digg.com started there were some rumors that Digg was build upon Drupal. While these rumors were quickly demystified, the point was that in Drupal it would not be too hard to build something like digg, as the search on google shows

Now over at Wired (I used to read the dead tree edition back in the 90-ies) it says:
Build a DIY Digg Clone with Drupal

Drupal developer Tony Mobily has built a new module for Drupal which enables anyone to start up their own Digg clone. You can grab the code and contribute to the project at drigg-code.org, or you can see it in action at drigg.org.

I am sure that some old mainstream media who are eager to get on the 2.oooh boat (or will drown!) are willing to use something like this. I am not the type that says "there is a module that will do exactly what your business problem is" as some do. Yes, more then 2k modules but most sites need drupal core, views, cck, workflow and a handful of custom modules. But having a Digg-clone.module around sure is easy for those that see "digg-clone" as their business objective.

The funny thing is, back in 2000 / 2001 there was no Drupal. We had drop.org in those days. Drop.org was running Drupal and in fact it was like a Digg without the fancy AJAX (and the overhyped budget.. and the big audience... and...)

KickApps Single Sign On with Drupal

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:11:23 +0100

Over at businesswire.com you can read the pressrelease of KickApps and how it integrates with Drupal for the identity management part.

KickApps [...] today announced the availability of a Single Sign-On (SSO) module that enables a seamless member login experience between Drupal powered sites and KickApps hosted social media sites.

KickApps is an ASP service (nowadays people prefer to call it SaaS) that enables easy integration of rich media. Mind you, all that KickApps does can be done within Drupal but is sure more easy to use this as a service from someone else for the SoHo market.

The downside however of using an ASP webservice is that there is no integration with your own site. No:

cosmetic (look and feel) integration
meta data integration and
user / identity integration

The first one can be solved by sharing CSS files, the second one is hard but most people -even information managers- do not understand why the lack of meta data integration is bad. The last one is the real problem, you want personalization with identity integration and a seamless experience for the user. KickApps now released a Drupal module to enable this last point, identity integration from Drupal to KickApps.

You can read about how to integrate your Drupal site and KickApps at Kickdeveloper and download the Drupal module over there (rightly GPLv2 licensed).

Personally I dont care much for this service but any service that helps to let Drupal grow in any direction is welcomed by me.