MattMaroon.com

Interesting article about the Scrabulous lawsuit. It will be interesting to see if they truly go after Facebook. I can’t imagine they won’t if Facebook doesn’t remove Scrabulous quickly.

I was having a conversation with some guys in the fantasy sports industry this week, and we were talking about the Facebook platform a bit. We all agreed that it’s just the new AOL, and just like AOL, it will lose to open platforms. There was a time (long before I’d even heard of AOL) when developers all wanted to develop for the AOL platform, and as such AOL had tremendous power. And they did what any corporation with that much power would do, which is convert it into money, largely by selling exclusives.

Facebook has already done that with the NCAA brackets, and I expect them to expand on that. For instance, I would be surprised if, in a few years, there is more than one fantasy sports app on Facebook. Yahoo or ESPN or CBS will pay enough to ensure they’re the only game in town.

No matter how much Facebook uses the word “open” when talking about their platform, developers will always be subject to their capricious rules and licensing deals. The big money will buy it up, regurgitate the same crap over and over, and chase the good developers to the truly open platform. Just as AOL in the end prospered (before broadband took hold) as an on ramp to the internet, Facebook will in the end succumb and be little more than an on ramp to a truly platform. Open Social? Something not yet invented? I don’t know, and don’t really care.

Also, I made a bet with a friend that I thought I’d document here, as the proof I’m sure I’ll need when the time comes. I bet $20 (which, if you knew this friend, you’d know is a lot to him) that Facebook will not be a publicly traded company with a market cap of over $100 billion by the end of 2012.

Anyone else want in? If I can get enough action (perhaps get it up to a couple hundred bucks total) we can all put it into a CD that will mature then, so whoever wins will get extra cash out of it.

There’s been some hubbub on Wall Street over Google for the last couple days, and share prices are down drastically. I did some investigative reporting to try to find out exactly why Google’s earnings underperformed analyst expectations by such a wide margin, and I think I found which of Google’s many properties might be responsible: (click thumbnail for full size)

I’ve often wondered why many of the people I’ve met who’ve come out of CS departments are liberal to the point of near-socialism. After I saw this Bill Gates bashing article by Richard Stallman that somehow got published on the BBC’s website despite being nothing more than a poorly contrived attack piece regurgitating the same old anti-Microsoft propaganda we’ve seen for two decades with a dash of Free Software Foundation shilling at the end, I realized that it’s a meme perpetuated by the people at the top and passed down. It’s just programmers emulating their heroes, like little leaguers chomping on Big League Chew.

Stallman, upon any research at all, appears to be the tech-industry equivalent of a communist. He thinks that proprietary software (software whose source code is not freely available) is essentially evil, and free software has become religion to him. He evangelizes it at every opportunity, demonizes anyone working toward a dissimilar goal (as in the Gates piece) and seems to be immune to any evidence that there might even be an opposing argument, let alone one that holds any truth.

The sad part is, I want to like the Free Software Foundation because I like free software (or free anything for that matter) but when they do things like this they remind me of PETA. They’ve crossed a line to where, even though I agree with some of their points, I still can’t support them. They just seem a little too rabid, their methods too extreme (insulting the Gates foundation’s work is equivalent to tossing paint at people wearing fur coats, except not hilarious) and their overall goals too ambitious and unrealistic.

And personally, I like proprietary software too. Don’t get me wrong, in principle I like free software better, by both definitions of the word free. If there were two otherwise identical programs, but one was free and one was proprietary, I’d be a moron not to pick the free one. Proprietary software, if anything, is fighting an uphill battle.

Unfortunately it has been winning many of those battles for decades due to economic reasons. There are lots of great open-source projects out there, especially in the development world. Most of the top sites run on free operating systems, usually with free server and database software. At Draftmix we use more open-source technologies than I can count. It’s a wonderful thing, and a large part of why our operating expenses are so low and our small amount of funding makes running a fantasy sports site feasible. I’ve run dozens of websites in my day and not one of them on Windows, so I appreciate the benefits of free software as much as anyone.

But at home I use some proprietary technologies too. Windows and OSX can be found on the computers there, because they’re still both much more user-friendly than the free alternatives for everyday use, and they have a far more vibrant ecosystem of developers and applications. I use Adobe products like Illustrator and Photoshop because they are considerably better than their open counterparts in terms of power and usability. I won’t bore you with the incredibly long list of proprietary products that are vastly superior to their open competitors (if they have any at all) but there are tons of them.

Up to this point we’ve had both open and closed source software competing freely, and the revenue figures for companies like Microsoft and Adobe show that the market has decided that in some cases, the economic incentives provided by proprietary software lead to better products. The fact that free operating systems power most of the sites in the Alexa Top 100 has likewise shown that in some cases open-source products prevail. Both seem to have their strengths and weaknesses.

The market and the individuals who comprise it, rather than Richard Stallman, should decide, as they have in the past, which software people use. Both open source and closed source software should exist, and compete for slices of the same pie. Neither are evil or unethical, neither are good or ethical, and certainly the creators of both should be above vilification, at least for that particular decision. It’s just software.

It’s the same, to me, with DRM. It’s not unethical. It’s a bad idea, I think, for everyone involved, including the content creators. And it’s definitely a big enough hassle for the end user that it’s a bad idea for me personally. But bad ideas aren’t unethical. They’re just stupid.

Since I don’t like DRM, I simply don’t buy files that have it. I’ve never paid for songs from iTunes (I got some for free, but they’ve long since been lost). I use mp3 players that support whatever form of DRM, but it makes no difference to me because all of my files are clean. It goes unused. And I believe that the inconvenience for the end user and the ineffectiveness of DRM at preventing piracy will ensure that the market eventually decides in favor of DRM-free products.

That, rather than insults, should be the Free Software Foundation’s approach. Don’t argue that Bill Gates was unethical for promoting proprietary software. Argue that he would have better served Microsoft shareholders (that was his job) by building and promoting open ones instead, because proprietary software is a bad idea. Raise awareness for your cause, but do it without vilification.

The problem is, Stallman clearly can’t win that argument. It’s hard to argue that the man who was the world’s richest for decades could have somehow done better for himself or his shareholders, or the world at large. It’s obvious that up to this point, proprietary software has created a vibrant ecosystem and immense profits that probably would not have existed were all software open source. It’s driven the computer revolution, which is the most significant shift in technology and user behavior in living memory. It may be that the tide is turning, and it’s becoming easier every day to make money from open technologies as well. But Bill totally won round 1.

So rather than trying to pose a logical argument, which cannot be done, like any religious man Stallman resorts to insults and vilification. Bill Gates isn’t a tech and business genius rolled into one (something incredibly rare) but instead he’s an enslaving, monopolistic, unethical software super-villain, whose only purpose in life has been to ensure that you cannot do what you want with your computer. He’s a very narrowly-focused Satan, the Beelzebub of the Free Software Religion, and therefore anything he does, including being by far the greatest philanthropist in the history of the world, is, by definition, evil.

I realized recently that I’ve been thinking incorrectly about Twitter all along. I was taking it at face value, and that was a mistake. I assumed that since the site was ostensibly a place where everyone answered the question “What are you doing?” it was basically a glorified Facebook status update.

But then I downloaded Twhirl, broke my rule about not following anyone I don’t know or allowing them to follow me, added a few more people to my buddy list who use it much more than I do, and I came to understand that it’s not about what you are doing at all. It’s the new chat room.

It has a few advantages over old school chat rooms. It’s slower and more deliberate. It’s well-integrated with mobile devices via SMS. But most importantly, you don’t have to see anyone’s chat if they’re not on your buddy list. You only see the chat you want to.

That last part is pretty big actually. Anyone who has ever been in a chat room knows that at some number of participants they become entirely useless. That number can be as low as a few people, or as high as maybe a few dozen, depending on the location and subject matter, but it’s generally pretty small. The Onion even has a running feature called “Ask A Chat Room” that makes fun of it.

With Twitter, you control whose chat you see, so if your signal to noise ratio gets bad, you just remove some friends. If your chat room is out of control, it’s your fault and you can fix it. That’s a pretty significant difference.

There are a few problems though. For one, the 140 character limit is not a good thing. It seems like it is, because if there’s one thing almost anyone who writes anything (myself included) could use, it’s a little brevity. But the short limit makes it impossible to express a unique, coherent thought. That’s why despite following a lot more people, I rarely found anything of any serious value there. You can say “Facebook is never going to monetize. $15b is an absurd valuation.” But you can’t give any logic behind it. The best you can do is write it in a blog post, then link to it on Twitter, but what’s the point of that? Nobody wants links to blog posts being SMSed to me. If I cared, I’d already see it either in Google Reader or FriendFeed.

Of course, none of that matters when they shut down the reply feature, which is what elevates Twitter from status update to chat room in the first place, due to scalability problems. It’s unfathomable to me that they did that. It would be far better to just close signups than to change your site from one thing people enjoy into something else entirely. But I guess we’ve already established that the people running the show there are grossly incompetent, so this should come as no real surprise.

Even in status update mode, Twitter is still good for one other thing, breaking news. If you have SMS alerts on, only one person on your contact list has to know that George Carlin died and you will. So if any one of the 100 people you follow is watching CNN or surfing the news sites on the web, you’ll find out about it instantly.

But unless you’re a blogger that depends on “breaking” stories, this is of little value. It’s certainly of none to me. And once I realized what Twitter really is, I pretty much checked out.

I think there’s value there for certain types of people, don’t get me wrong. If you or your startup are trying to build a brand in the tech community, it’s pretty useful. Follow everyone who is anyone, and engage in conversations. People Twitter for much the same reason they blog: to converse with strangers, so they’re pretty open to it.

But beyond that, it’s just another time-sucking chat room. I’ve already got more demands on my time than supply, so I don’t see myself really getting too involved. That said, people sure do love new ways to sink their time, so maybe it will expand beyond the tech crowd. I’m still skeptical, but then given the grossly disproportionate amount of time they spend online they might not have to, assuming they can get their house in order. Which is probably not a safe assumption.