Wow. That's an insane number of programs available for any platform. Many are free, many cost a few dollars. Clearly a pile of companies and individuals think of this as a whole new market place, a new ecosystem here good tools can be made available to a willing consumer-base. There have been press stories of the cash made by some of these applications. Riches! A whole new market! Let's all write iPhone applications and get rich!
I disagree with that assessment. The Apple AppStore is not an ecosystem and it's not a new market where companies can participate freely. It's a trap baited with fools gold - and a lot of folks fell into it.
I know many of you think I'm a heretic for saying these kinds of things. After all, Apple is the nice underdog and boy, they make such nice things that are so easy to use. So why do I think Apple has created the modern equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits?
First of all, to be an ecosystem there has to be an open marketplace. The only place you can buy iPhone apps is through Apple - unless you jailbreak your phone (voiding the warranty) and use unofficial sites like Cydia. Few users will do that - they will go with the flow. So Apple controls the gateway to even offer an application to the market. Imagine the reaction by the market if Microsoft tried that! What if the only place to buy applications for your PC running Windows(tm) was through an online application store run by Microsoft. Ha! That would have been laughed out of town. But for some reason when Apple does it, the consumers think it's OK.
So suppose an enterprising developer looks past the fact that it's a closed market controlled by a single vendor. 100,000 such developers already have. The aspiring developer takes the time to develop an application - several months of work at least for anything non-trivial. They submit the application to Apple for approval. That will take a few weeks to a few months to grind through the process. If approved, Apple adds the application to the App Store. Party time! The market can now buy the app! Money should start pouring in! Of course Apple takes 30% as their cut. Ouch. You have to price your application at the consumer level and Apple still takes the middleman hunk out of it. What did Apple do to add value? Nothing. They built a wall around their pretty new 'market' and charge a toll for every sale that happens in the market. Oh, and the application may not even be approved! If it's not approved, the developer wasted months of time and will see no financial return.
Closed, controlled marketplace. No assurance that goods produced can be offered for sale in the market. Implicit cap on the price you can charge based on what others are charging. Apple takes 30%. These facts alone should make a businessman think twice about the viability of a business selling iPhone applications.
But it gets worse! Even after being approved Apple can reverse their decision and remove the application from the App Store. The developer has no recourse. The developers customers are stranded.
Apple's stated policy is that they will reject any application that is too similar to something they provide. They apparently will also reject anything that violates some provision of a deal they have with a partner - like AT&T for example. Google Talk came to the iPhone, allowing free SMS text messages and voice calls over the Internet. Bang, Bang! Apple rejected the app.
And this gets to the core of the problem: Apple is also a seller in this marketplace that they control. If an application does not compete with them or their partners, it's fine. But what about downstream, as they add their own functionality. Will third-party Twitter apps be banned when Apple offers their own? No one knows, and frankly, it's just too much risk to take for a company that wants to make a viable business selling iPhone software.
And I'm not alone in this thinking. The brain drain has already started. Other blogs are making the same points. Michael Fern analyzed the potential market for iPhone applications and determined that the potential revenue is not there - certainly not with the risk of revenue loss if Apple unilaterally decides to ban your app.
The crazy thing is that Apple could fix this easily. Just open the iPhone for third-party developers and allow other application stores. You know, like the Blackberry and Android phone markets. Allow a free market. Encourage competition. I bet most Apple users will still buy Apple software - probably because it usually is better. Apple will still make more than enough money - maybe more, since there's ample evidence that open platforms do generate more revenue in the long term.
But, as my colleague and friend Alan Stein says, "Apple is the new Microsoft." I don't hold out much hope that Apple can wake up and steer clear of their greedy ways.
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( 3 / 481 )A while back I blogged about Why Twitter is Important. Essentially, my point was that Twitter is the first application going mainstream that exemplifies the new 'real time stream' type of service.
Clearly I'm not alone in my analysis. On Friday I'll be attending the Real-Time Stream Crunchup. Speakers and panelists from Facebook, FriendFeed, Microsoft, Salesforce, Seesmic, and Tweetmeme will all participate, and there's going to be some new services demonstrated too I hear.
What's important to me about this is that it's a chance to hear from the cutting edge what they are doing and why. I'll get to meet a bunch of other folks who - like me - think that real time streams of data will be the next wave. I cannot wait.
Will you be there? If so, tweet me @gherlein.
UPDATE: Unfortunately I won't be there, but one of my staff will be. I'm disappointed I'll miss it but I look forward to the report, and I'll catch part of it via the live web stream.
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( 3 / 404 )I've been digging into Facebook development the past few weeks, as well as Twitter and a few other even newer things. I may or may not be all that interested in actually developing a Facebook application - but I'm extremely interested in the concepts and foundations behind the so-called 'real time web' intersected with the social networking that's surging into the mainstream. As I read different Terms of Service (ToS) and play with various APIs I'm solidifying my opinion that it's all about the data.
Of course, folks will talk about the relationships and the real-time and the social graph. But that's all data. It's all data yet it's only data, and yet it's the most important part of the puzzle. Control the data, or the access to the data, and you have an advantage - if and only if the data is useful. If someone can create value with the data then you have isolated a new natural resource that you can monetize. It may take some time to figure out how to efficiently monetize it, but it will happen. It always happens - only often it's not the first mover that taps the money well.
Most of the work going on feverishly about Facebook application development is purely to get access to your data. Whoops, I meant [ul]Facebook's[/ul]data! For all the protections they provide for your data (and if you don't know them well I recommend you read this blog entry. ) That will at least protect your data from others, but Facebook can do whatever it wants with your data. It can, and is, cross-referencing it, sifting it, looking for connections and useful things. So far they don't seem to be finding ways to convert this natural resource into money (at least that we can see).
But given that they control the data, they could be poised to be a huge provider of '4th party' services.
What's a 4th party service?
A 4th party service is a means of connecting customers to suitable vendors who can meet their needs. This kind of connection is what was always existed in human commerce, but in the age of mass advertising modern culture lost much of it. We came to have conversations about 'brands' and such - like a brand really matters. Brands mean nothing more than 'reputation.' And reputations amongproducts are earned - you cannot really bamboozle your way into it and expect it to last. Funny, reputations among people work the same way. But back to the 4th party concept. I read a very good blog entry about it that defines it as:
" A fourth party logistics provider is primarily coordinator of
other supply chain partners through the ownership and maintenance
of information systems. This is differentiated from third party
logistics providers that provide physical handling and or
transportation of goods."
The definitive book about this revolution is now almost 10 years old. Here's a link:
If you have not read it, buy it now. Of course, I'd love it if you bought it through my link so it would help defray the costs of operating this blog.
So how does this matter with the data? The data holds the reputation. The APIs to access the data are about accessing the reputation. Who do you trust and what do they trust? You will trust that by association. Once you start down that path you won't care about 'branding' messaging any more - unless that brand is one that has built trust through your own trust network!
There are folks who envision a future where the data is not centralized in only a few companies. They say:
" Tomorrow, as everything becomes social, you will be able
to shop Amazon directly from within your iGoogle page without
ever having to visit the site. What's more, Amazon will
show you what your Gmail address book friends have publicly
said about a product and/or its category in any one of
thousands of online communities. Finally, to help you
further Amazon will offer an aggregated view of your
friends' friends opinions in a way that protects their
identity."
That's a great vision. But it will be awhile before we all can own and share our own data as we choose. Today there's data in Facebook that's as valuable as oil sitting under a Middle-East desert. Tapping that well is there for the taking. If they think in the old way and focus on traditional advertising they will miss the boat. That's the past, and I'm of the opinion that the age of advertising is seriously in decline (though most ad folks don't know it yet). However, if Facebook can grasp the revolution happening in the way customers seek data - and try to connect with reputation - then they will have that billion barrel well they can tap for near-endless money. But, and this is the important part: do they have the vision to grasp this? Or will they fall into the trap of the past and just sell demographic targeted advertising?
And perhaps the more important question: who's in a garage startup right now working on the technology for the customer driven real time web - and when do they launch? And who will recognize it?
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( 2.9 / 230 )I spent to evening playing around with Facebook Application Development. I'll tell you about my grand application idea another time (but you can be sure it's an idea centered around the real-time web and Vendor Relationship Management (VRM)). I've built a ton of PHP code in recent years so the only learning curve is the Facebook API.
I have to say that I wanted to create a clean sand box to play in so I bought a SliceHost virtual host to use for development. Incredibly easy and a basic slice good for development is only $20 per month. They say the cost to start a web-based business is dropping by half every two years. With this kind of easy virtual hosting it's got to be dropping faster than that! Within 5 minutes I had an Ubuntu server live with a full LAMP stack installed. Amazing. Do you realize how many hours I've spent formating disks and installing linux over the last 15 years (yes, I started doing linux in 1994).
I bought two books to help climb the API learning curve. Both are helping a lot though are already slightly out of date. They are:
and the excellent reference:
I have two big initial observations:
1. There are very few useful Facebook Applications that I know of;
2. Setting up the Facebook Developer with a new Application is mind-numbingly detailed and complicated
Useful Facebook Applications
I don't know any useful Facebook apps. Do you? There's all sorts of play applications - where have you been, what City should you live in, etc. But what's really useful? By useful I mean one that really uses the social graph to increase the value for the user. I've not seen one yet, but I'm sure they are there. If you know of one I'd appreciate it if you dropped me a note or comment.
Mind Numbing Options
The Facebook New Application page has more configuration settings than you can shake a stick at (as my Grandmother would have said). It's insane! I realize that this is complicated business, but geesh. Anyway, I set up the name (had to do that to create it) and the most important configuration options were on the Canvas tab.
Te Canvas Page URL is the catch all place where the Facebook platform will go to get content to render within a users Facebook page when they are running your application. The Canvas Callback URL is where the majic happens though. That's the calculation engine.
Getting a List of Your Friends
So, the Canvas Callback URL I tossed together does not format or anything - it's just a small extension to the example code they provide.
<?php
require_once 'facebook.php';
$appapikey = 'yourkey';
$appsecret = 'yoursecretkey';
$facebook = new Facebook($appapikey, $appsecret);
echo "<p>Friends:<br>";
$friends = $facebook->api_client->friends_get();
$friends = array_slice($friends, 0, 500);
foreach ($friends as $friend)
{
$uids=array($friend);
$fields=array('first_name','last_name');
$users=$facebook->api_client->users_getInfo($uids,$fields);
foreach ($users as $u)
{
$f=$u['first_name'];
$l=$u['last_name'];
print "<br>$f $l ";
}
}
print "</p>";
?>
This little snip of code will go grab a list of up to 500 friends getting their Facebook UserID. Then it gets those users names and prints them.
Of course, this doesn't do anything useful either, but in about an hour total I was able to fiddle around and learn how to pull real data out of Facebook. Not bad for an evening's fiddling.
What have you done with Facebook apps? What would you like to see done?
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( 3 / 238 )RTP: Audio and Video for the Internet by Colin Perkins is a must have book if you are interested in modern streaming media. My recent post on RTP drew some interesting comments by Randell Jesup. I don't seriously disagree with Randell. But to discuss the subject you first have to understand it. Randell is clearly an expert. I think I am too. For those of you who are interested in streaming media and want to learn more about RTP I can recommend the following book on the subject:
Well worth the money in my opinion. The discussion of jitter and lip sync alone are worth more than the book costs. It's very far superior to trying to get an understanding purely from reading the RFCs (like I did intitially!)
But on to my topics. It's late tonight (again I worked late into the night) so I cannot really go into the detail that I want to. But here's a short jab at it.
There's some great work going on with scalable codecs - methods of encoding media where a client can decode only the part that they need. A lower resolution client can tap the stream, basically, and show a low resolution version. These are borderline magical, in my opinion. Great stuff. Only I don't see where they will be deployed in the real world yet except for on PC clients. Cell phones - where it would potentially be the best bet - operate on walled garden networks where the wireless provider is going to control it anyway, likely in a greedy attempt to monetize a controlled video source (yes, I'm being harsh - but cellular video is pretty rigidly controlled in my opinion - open solutions need not apply). Set Top Boxes are mass manufactured to get low cost through economy of scale. The chip sets in them have MPEG2 and H.264 decode and built in MPEG2 Transport Stream decoding. The scalable codec support is not in the chips (yet, at least, to my knowledge). That leaves PCs, mostly. Interesting, but I still think that video streams are for lean-back watching, and I lean forward on my PC. It's where I work, not watch video. I think most people think that way, though my really young friends are certainly busting that model so maybe I'm wrong.
I came to my MPEG-centric, broadcast-centric view of the RTP landscape through my work mostly. I've spent the last 5 years building and deploying a 'narrowcast' IPTV system. It's a hybrid store-and-forward system where the media is streamed onto a private network from a media server in the venue, but media is delivered to the server as files. I map the same solution pattern onto homes. I suspect that in the future media will be delivered to a streaming-capable device - which may or may not be a server - that will in turn stream to edge devices. The link local bandwidth from the media source to the media sink will be large compared to the number of streams and the value of a scalable codec will not be enough to justify the costs. In this scenario the same economics that drive the capability set of today's STB units will still prevail: MPEG transport streams will still carry the day, and the software complexity of RTCP (needed if you split the audio out from the video into separate streams) is exactly what I keep hearing folks say: too complex, too costly, serves no purpose for the given application.
So, Randell is right, for the world he works in. The world I work in seems to resist even using RTP. I argue with vendors who think that just tossing MPEG transport stream frames in UDP packets is enough. I have yet to convince any of them to do a real RTCP implementation. Even before the economy tanked, these vendors have to pay real cash to real programmers to implement real features. The market is asking for a pile of things that those programmers need to implement. RTP/RTCP is not on the list. So I'm right too. As I get older I've lost the passion for the most elegant Engineering solution and found an affinity for the solution that I can sell at a profit. I think the business-side folks never had that conflict to start with.
But I live and work in a microcosm. What do you think?
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