bdg welcomes Michael Buckbee!

We're very pleased to announce that industry veteran, entrepreneur and Rails developer Michael Buckbee joined the bdg team today as CTO and Lead Developer on The Social Collective!

Mike's career path is surprisingly similar to my own -- in multiple ways. Fresh out of college, he joined a health industry startup called Aristar in 1999. They were acquired by SoftMed, which was then acquired by 3M HIS. (Recall that I worked at Plumtree, which was bought by BEA, which was bought by Oracle.) Unlike yours truly, who left Plumtree in 2002, Mike stayed on at 3M. As someone who just doesn't know what it means to get bored, he also started several side projects. The most successful of these was Fabjectory, which could best be described as a 3D printshop that allows people to take their avatars (or other objects from the virtual world) offline and reincarnate them as real life figurines.

Again, our paths resemble one another, in an almost uncanny way. As I was toiling away on Feedhaus, Mike was building FeedMail, which essentially tried to allow people to read and respond to email from inside a feed reader. Like Feedhaus, the idea never really took off. However, some of Mike's other projects -- like Fabjectory -- generated an amazing amount of buzz, including articles in the New York Times and WIRED. Prior to starting Fabjectory, Mike had yet another side project called Second411 which allowed people to search for virtual items both in-world and on the web. Second411 was purchased by ESC in October of 2006.

Never one to settle for just a few side-projects, Mike also worked on FoxyMelody, Watchlister, OneToFive, FeedSpeaker and an open source HTTP queue that runs on Google's Application Engine. Here at bdg, we've long been in the business of throwing lots of spaghetti at the fridge and seeing what sticks, so obviously Mike will fit right in. Visit Mike's blog and project page for more about his amazing career.

As Lead Developer on The Social Collective, Mike is already busy getting the site prepped for SXSW 2009, which will launch early in Q1.

Please join me and the rest of the bdg team in extending a warm welcome to Mike!

I Don't Even Like Radiohead, But. . . .

I wouldn't consider myself a Radiohead fan. But what they just did is about to turn the music industry on its head . . . again. Check out this snippet from an e-mail they just sent me:

To coincide with asking radio stations to think about playing Reckoner we are breaking up the tune into pieces for you to remix. After the insane response we got from the Nude remix stems and the site that was dedicated to your remixes...

Unique visitors: 6,193,776, Page Views: 29,090,134, Hits: 58,340,512, Bandwidth: 10.666 Terabytes, Number of mixes: 2,252, Number of votes: 461,090, Number of track listens: 1,745,304

...we thought it only fair to do the same with a tune that at least is in 4/4. You can get the stems (the different instruments/elements) from here.

Sample, cut, take the sounds, whatever. Play it in a club. Or your room. Then if you want you can upload your finished mixes to http://www.radioheadremix.com and be judged by everyone else. You can create a widget allowing votes from your own site, Facebook or MySpace to be sent through too. [Emphasis mine.] To start things off we asked James Holden and Diplo to do their versions.

Whatever you want to call this (user-generated production?), it's downright brilliant. The idea that I -- a mere mortal -- get to mix and produce the next Radiohead song and that my version (if the general public likes it) could be the next big Radiohead hit is simply a mind-blowing and totally game-changing idea. Starting with Napster, then Kazaa and other P2P networks, then the idea that a major-label artist like Radiohead would put up an album (In Rainbows) and ask people to name a price for it -- including $0 -- the music industry has changed dramatically over the past ten years. And Radiohead is, as usual, leading the charge.

Chris Bucchere's Oracle Open World Schedule

I'm headed to Oracle Open World on Saturday, 9/20. Here's my proposed schedule. Like I said earlier, I'm probably going to spend most of my time in the unconference anyway, but here's what looked interesting to me:



If you'd prefer, you can also access this schedule in XML or ICAL format.

SXSW to Use The Social Collective for SXSW 2009!

I am very pleased to announce that today bdg and SXSW have decided to partner to use The Social Collective to create a new registrant community for SXSW 2009.

More details will follow soon. But for now, please join me in a collective w00t for the entire bdg team while we celebrate this amazing milestone for us. We all look forward to seeing The Social Collective in action at SXSW 2009!

Sneak Preview of Chris Bucchere's SXSW RSS Preso at the Oracle Open World Unconference

For anyone attending Oracle Open World, I'm planning to give a preview of my SXSW 2009 talk entitled "Not So Simple Any More: RSS's Bleeding Edge" in the unconference track at OOW. (This will happen regardless of whether or not SXSW selects my talk for inclusion in the 2009 agenda.)

The talk is scheduled for Monday, 22 September 2008 at 2 PM Pacific in Moscone Overlook II. BTW, I'll probably be spending most of my time in the unconference track at OOW, because I'm just that kind of guy.

Conference Social Networking Made Simple

Three and a half months have transpired since our stellar debut at BEA Participate. (In internet time, that's a lifetime.) But better late than never, I'm very pleased to announce the launch of our marketing home on the web: www.thesocialcollective.com!

Please have a look and let us know what you think.

Friday Fun: Rails, Django and Caprese Salad

I had this Twitter argument today with former coworker, fellow web developer and friend Bryan Hughes:

bucchere: The Spring Framework is driving me crazy. If this were Rails, I'd be done already.

huuuze: @bucchere If it was Django, it'd be faster and ready to scale.

bucchere: @huuuze I'm not interested in a religious war right now. Please don't provoke me. ;-)

huuuze: @bucchere No war -- even the Rails guys agree: http://is.gd/1ZZu

bucchere: @huuuze Apparently Gluon is even faster than Django. But is anyone using it? You have to consider factors other than performance.

huuuze: @bucchere Um, Django's used by thousands. It's not some fringe framework. Guaranteed anyone that's used RoR and Django will prefer Django.

bucchere: @huuuze How could you make that "guarantee" when you've never used Rails? I said I didn't want a religious war, you damn Python Nazi. ;-)

huuuze: @bucchere I've built a couple site using Rails. How many sites have you built using Django?

bucchere: @huuuze bdg's svn server just crashed. I have more important things to do than continue this pointless argument.

huuuze: @bucchere Then quit wasting time on Twitter. I'm not trying to start anything with you. Just be aware that RoR isn't the only game in town.

bucchere: @huuuze There are lots of religions too. And if I want to pick one and say the others are "wrong" then that's my prerogative.

huuuze: @bucchere Whatever dude. Not sure why you'd say Django is "wrong."

bucchere: @huuuze All I'm saying is that language/framework wars are like religious wars. I have mine, you have yours. Leave it at that.

bucchere: Enjoying a homemade caprese -- my favorite salad. (Now watch while @huuuze tells me his favorite salad is better than mine.)

huuuze: @bucchere Having never tried caprese, I have no opinion on the matter.

bucchere: @huuuze LOL. I'm glad we can still be friends. :-)

huuuze: @bucchere Get real. I'm only friends with Christians and Django users. ;)

* * *

So the time it took me to compile this discussion made me wonder why Twitter doesn't have threaded discussions. Summize (now search.twitter.com) has "conversations" but, like Facebook's wall-to-wall feature, just because the posts occur consecutively, it doesn't mean that they're actually "in" the same thread. If I were re-writing Twitter, adding threaded discussions -- and with it, the ability to reply to a specific Tweet -- would be near the top of my list.

Happy Friday everyone (and happy 3-day weekend for hard-working and hard-twittering Americans)!

Shameless Self-Promotion

At last year's SXSW I said to myself: "Self, you need to be speaking at this conference next year."

Help me fulfill my self-fulfilling prophecy and please take a minute to vote for one (or both) of my proposed talks! Unlike the SXSWi Web Awards last year, you don't have to vote every day -- once is plenty.

The first is a solo presentation on the future of RSS.

The second is a panel discussion on whether it's better to have one horizontal social network like Facebook or loads of smaller, niche social networks.

Thanks for your support.

Middleware for the REST of us

I'm sitting in my third Oracle Fusion Middleware briefing, this one at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC. Thomas Kurian has been going through all the products in the Oracle stack in excruciating detail.

First let me say this: Thomas Kurian is a really smart guy. He holds an BS in EE from Princeton summa cum laude (that's Latin for really fucking good). He holds an MBA from the Stanford GSB. He's been working for Oracle forever and he even knows how to pronounce Fuego (FWAY-go). I'm dutifully impressed.

Unfortunately, all those academic credentials and 10+ in the industry is barely the minimum requirement for getting your head around the middleware space. Either I don't have enough (0) letters after my name, or I just don't get it.

For starters, there are way too many products -- the middleware space is filled with "ceremonious complexity" (to quote Neal Ford). App servers, data services layers, service buses, web service producers and consumers -- even portals, content management and collaboration has been sucked into this space. Don't get me wrong: the goals of the stack are admirable -- middleware tries to glue together all the heterogeneous, fragmented systems in the enterprise. Everyone knows that most enterprises are a mess of disparate systems and they need this glue to provide unified user experiences that hide the complexity of these systems from the people who have to use them. That makes the world a better place for everybody.

That was also, not coincidentally, one of Plumtree's founding principles and the concept -- integrating enterprise systems to improve the user experience -- has guided my career since I got my lowly undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Stanford in 1998.

So, it's a good concept, however, if you're considering middleware because you're trying to clean up the mess that your enterprise has become, you need to ask yourself the following fundamental question: does middleware add to or subtract from the overall complexity of your enterprise?

Your enterprise is already insanely complicated. You've got Java, .NET, perhaps Sharepoint, maybe an enterprise ERP system like SAP and say, an enterprise open source CRM system like SugarCRM or a hosted service like SalesForce.com. The bleeding edge IT folks and even (god forbid) people outside of IT are installing wikis written in PHP (e.g. MediaWiki) along with collaborative software like Basecamp written in Ruby on Rails. I'm not even going to mention all the green-screen mainframe apps still lurking in the enterprise -- wait, I just did. This veritable cornucopia [editor's note: I love those two words, especially when used together!] of systems just scratches the surface of what exists at many large -- and even some mid-to-small-sized companies -- today.

So clearly there's a widespread problem. But what's the solution?

At the end of his impressive presentation, I asked Thomas the following question: "How can middleware from Oracle/BEA help you make sense of the fragmented, heterogeneous enterprise when you have existing collaborative (web 2.0) technologies written in PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc. running rampant throughout IT and beyond?" (Okay, so I wasn't exactly that pithy, but it was something close to that.)

His Aladdin-esque answer came in the form of three choices:

1. "Take control of" and "centralize" your IT systems by replacing everything with Oracle Web Center spaces


2. Ditto by migrating everything to UCM (Stellant)


3. Build a services framework and aggregate everything in one of four ways:
   
   
   
   1. Use a Java transaction layer (JSR 227)
   
   
   2. Use a portlet spec like JSR 168 or WSRP
   
   
   3. Build RESTful web services
   
   
   4. Use the WebPart adapter for Sharepoint
   
   
   
   

I like to call answers one and two "The SAP Approach." In other words, we're SAP, we're German, wir geben nicht einen Scheiße about your existing enterprise software, you're now going to do it the SAP way (or the highway).

Will companies buy into that? Some companies may. Many will not. ERP is a well understood space, so this approach has worked for SAP. Enterprise 2.0 is not terribly well understood, so that means even more diversity in the enterprise software milieu. [Editor's note: English, German AND French in one blog post -- not bad!]

So the only approach that I believe in is #3: integrate. Choose the right tool for the right problem, e.g. the WebPart adapter if you're using Sharepoint. Use REST when appropriate, e.g. when you need a lightweight way to send some JSON or XML across the wire between nonstandard or homegrown apps. Use JSR 168/286 for your Java applications. Even use SOAP if the backend application already supports it. Keep things loosely coupled so that you can plug different components in and out as needed. This requires a lot of development -- the glue -- but, I don't think there's any way around that. (You should take that with a grain of salt, because my company has been supplying the government and the commercial world with exactly that kind of development expertise since 2002.)

As for the overarching, user facing "experience" or "interaction" product -- that's where I've always used Plumtree (or AquaLogic Interaction). Will I start using Web Center Spaces? At this point, I'm still not sure. If it can be used as the topmost bit of the architectural stack to absorb and surface all the enterprise 2.0 software that my customers are running, then perhaps. If it's going to replace all the enterprise software that my customers are running, then no way José.

This conundrum really opens up a new market for enterprise software: I call it "Middleware for the REST of us" or MMM (not M&M, 3M or M3, because they're already taken): "Mid-Market Middleware" -- similar to the way 37signals approaches (with a great deal of hubris and a solid dose of arrogance) the Fortune Five Million by marketing their products toward the whole long-tail of small and medium-sized companies. Maybe the world needs a RESTful piece of hardware that just aggregates web services and spits out a nice UI, kind of like the "Plumtree in a Box" idea that Michael Young (former Plumtree Chief Architect, now Chief Architect at RedFin) had back in the last millennium.

Oracle Web Center Spaces might be the right choice for some very large enterprises, but what about the REST of us?

How the New Facebook Utterly Destroyed my Favorite Application (and Why That Makes Me Sad)

I used to love Feedheads. It's a simple, elegant and beautiful application that does one thing really well: help you share your Google reader shared items.

Unfortunately, the "new" Facebook has rendered the application utterly useless and I can't think of a good way, as an end-user, to fix it. In fact, as someone who's built two facebook apps, I can't even think of a way that the Feedheads developers can fix it. What a calamity.

So here's the problem: the News Feed (and the Mini Feed) introduced an option that allows end-users to set the story "size" as shown on the right. When a Google shared item story comes through Feedheads now, it defaults to the "one line" size and as a result, it doesn't say anything other than "Chris posted an item to Feedheads."

Thank you very much, Facebook. That piece of information is completely useless. People who are reading your feed need to click through into the Feedheads application in order to see what story you posted -- and the whole point of Feedheads is to help you share your shared items, not make them harder to find.

(As a result of all this, Facebook also broke one of my applications, called WhyI. It has < 200 users, so very few people care, but . . . the point of the app was to help people ask themselves and their friends questions that have to be answered in five words or fewer. And of course, the questions and answers would show up in the Mini Feed and News Feed. But not anymore! Now it just says: "Chris posted a new mini-update using WhyI." Again, a totally useless piece of information. Drats.)

As an end-user, I can set the "size" of each feed item. So that means, after I hit Shift-S in Google Reader -- which doesn't take much effort -- I have to wait for the story to be published in Facebook and then, if I remember (which at this point is unlikely), I have to go into that little drop down on the right and set the size to "small" instead of the default, which is "one line." And here's the best part: I can't tell Facebook to remember this, so I have to do it every time.

All this just to share a shared item on Google Reader through Feedheads . . . ick.

Here's the best part. I just noticed that Facebook added their own feature to the new and "improved" news feed. You can import your shared items from Google Reader! And, not surprisingly, the news feed actually shows the stories' titles. In other words, Facebook took a great application -- Feedheads -- and replaced the functionality with their own feature; in the process, they rendered Feedheads useless.

This makes me sad. I only have one thing to say:

Wow, Facebook, how very Microsoft of you.