Second Brain – All Your Content

Web2.0 chaos and consolidation

There seems to be a new theme on the agenda in the blogsphere - it's about social network fatigue and update overload.

From Conversation Agent:

Why do we need so many tools for social interactions? Have we suddenly become incapable of interacting with our friends, neighbors and colleagues?

Have we become so isolated in our daily work life as agents of our destiny that we need to have surrogate environments to hang out?

More importantly -- What about the work it takes to update all these networks? I have a hard enough time updating my LinkedIn! Has anyone thought about integrating?

The post quotes an email:

One biggish issue that nobody is really talking about is that anyone who starts using more than one of these services (or multiple social networks, sharing sites, etc) finds herself with multiple circles of friends, constantly updating various profiles/status posts, etc - there isn't any way for a user to bring all of their stuff/friendships/updates together in a single interface -- which can be a real pain if you're in MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube and del.icio.us.  YIKES!"

There are still lots of new social networks popping up and asking people to create new profiles and new content stuff, Pownce being one of the most profiled late entrants. Also referenced in one of the comments was another less profiled new-comer called onXiam. It's a good approach to collecting online identities and showing them off collectively on a common  user profile page.

I'm starting to feel that the timing of our public release is going to be just right. I've never seen this much chatter about Web2.0 overload and consolidation, and no one has ever asked specifically for a one-stop-shop to manage and update everything. I must find a smart way to ride this wave in terms of PR and agenda-setting. How should we position Second Brain to this market need? Need to pick up one of my old books on public relations again...

 

Looking for social content management

I was reading a few blogs and magazines recently, and there seems to be a certain social network fatigue around the web right now. People see that the web is social, and they are gaining experience with Facebook and MySpace. But they are starting to complain that these new social services are resembling the walled gardens of the 90’s, like for example AOL. People find it exhausting to keep all of their networks active and up to date, and Rolf Skyberg is envisioning a social client. 

Wired just gave a Slap in the Facebook, asking social services to open up.I studied the comments to the Wired article  and it seems people are divided into two camps: one enjoys the convenience of FB and finds the privacy protection sufficient, the other don’t appreciate the closed nature of the network and find the internet content management features lacking.

I think this is an interesting trend. Everyone believes in the social nature of the internet. It's built into its DNA on the level of hyperlinked web-pages in the open WWW environment. But adding people to the equation has generated several new "do-all--for-you" -style web portals.

Every content service on the web will have a social community component, YouTube has its own community, Delicious has a community, and the same is true for Flickr (and many other smaller niche services like skribd and slideshare). I don't believe there will be a single social service to cover everything from people relations, privacy and content creation and management. People who believe that are betting on the old portal strategy of the early days.

I believe that people will be members of different social networks and they will participate on various levels with certain types of contribution on a wide variety of services. Just consider the flickerish nature of the younger audiences. Ask your younger nephew how many internet sites he has used regularly the past month. Then ask him how many he has used the past year. Finally, think about this over let's say a five year period - and you will start to see that people will take part in a very much richer internet life than the walled gardens of a single social network.

Scott Gilbertson in Wired asked for a system to help people manage their participation and contributions on the internet - and open service where people are in charge of what goes in and out of what and where. He came a long way in proving that it is possible to build a big mash-up of exiting services and replication most of the features already provided by Facebook.

Second Brain is on this challenge. Our goal is to help our users manage all the  content they create online and their contacts in their personal internet library. No walled gardens, everything based on open APIs.

We will help you remix and share content from unrelated services on any webpage - heck we'll even help you move content between the services you're already using. So next time you sign up for something, and you want to publish some of your favorites on the site, you can just push it to the site via Second Brain. And over time, if you ever switch do a different social service, you can be sure that you can always access everything in Second Brain.

Everybody wants to become a platform

Inspired by R/WW's post on Yahoo and how they should open up their platform for 3rd party developers, I'd like to share a few of my own opinions on this trend.

After Facebook opened up their platform, it seems like the new holy grail of the internet is to become the next platform. After a few years with deportalization and widgetization as the trend, it seems like platformization is the new direction. Platforms do have an advantage over old school portals in that they may provide services and content from 3rd parties - not necessarily controlling and owing everything they users can access. But, I still think this just the modern day equivalent of the good old portal. We already have a platform, it is called the World Wide Web, and there are lots of nice protocols that enable us to create cooperating systems on the world's biggest desktop. We don't need to create new platform silos on top of the application silos that already exist.

The main reason I am not "all in" on Facebook, is that it is still a closed social network (even though everyone can join).  Developers can create applications that work on Facebook, but to me this is a bit analogous to Microsoft - everyone can develop applications that work on Windows and people who have Windows PCs can use the applications on Windows (i.e.Facebook).

I think there is a need to help people manage all the fragmented services that exist today. The growth of Facebook is proof of this. They have introduced many fun and social applications to people that never read TechCrunch. And they have provided several of their application providers with new users that would never have heard of them otherwise.

After the explosion in innovation for the collaborative web, there are so many new services around, each with their unique features and benefits. (OK, not all of them.) We should find a way of organizing them, but I don't think we should put them into new social silos. I believe more in the approach of Netvibes, Pageflakes and iGoogle which basically work as open placeholders for other applications content and their basic features,  than in forcing an application to work within a closed social network on top it's own community.

Facebook will become a great platform for conspicuous internet applications and work very well as a social network. They've definitely staked out a very strong and attractive position in this market.

But as a platform for  the collaborative web - I think we should focus on interconnecting what already exist on the distributed desktop via open APIs and work towards greater cooperation between the services. We don't really need a Facebook or a Yahoo platform to do this - we just need to open up and work together, independently and synergistically on the World Wide Web.

Back to the core

We've been through several major iterations on Second Brain since we started a year back. Every iteration starts with a few hypotheses about how it should work and how we should build it. We finish it, test it and listen to the feedback. Usually we find that lots of things don't work as expected, even though we were damn sure it would. Then we have a big discussion, review our assumptions, and question everything. We remove the things that don't work, and focus on the things that actually do work.

This is obvious for most people - but for me personally - it has been quite challenging at times. The process has opened my mind to see that even the strongest hypothesis may be wrong from time to time - even my own(!). But this doesn't really disappoint me, because my experience is that as soon as I take away the stuff that doesn't really work, and that has given me lots of headaches - my creativity starts blossoming again. I see lots of new things that we can do that I had never previously thought of. I become able to think about the core of what we do - how we can add the most value to our users with the information that we generate. This fuels a momentum for the next iteration.

I've been analyzing this process in my head during my summer holiday - and I found that the common experience of every major iteration we have been through is that we are able to "kill our darlings", like mind-mapping, automatic tagging, and this opens up the canvas for new ideas. When I look at all the new ideas which come out of this process, I can see that we are constantly getting closer to the core of what I envisioned for Second Brain in the very beginning. The lesson I'm (still) learning is that one will need to test out assumptions along the way when developing something new. It is very easy to become bloated - trying to do to much too soon. But, if you're able to iterate, and remove features and complexities along the way, you will get closer to the core purpose of your system. Do one thing, but do it well.

Reloading for the fall release

We made the preview release a few weeks back. And it turned out quite OK. There were a few more features that I wanted included, but it was not possible during the time that we had available. The purpose of the release was to show the world what we are working on and use it to promote Second Brain during the summer.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we are going to rebuild the whole service from scratch. This is a necessary step in order to get the features we want and scale over time. To prepare for this, we've done a lot of work on the strategic and product specification level - and we've ended up with a much more focused product strategy and development plan. For example, we are not going to deliver any mind-mapping functionality - there are other services who do this very well - and we don't think this is a feature most people look for in Second Brain. We're also going to work hard on expanding the social features and do a facebook application.

We've also made a few changes on the team. Previously there were anything from five to ten people involved every day. Some were part time workers, some had part time assignments, and we were working both in ASP.NET as well as in Adobe Flex. For the Reloaded release, we have put together a smaller and more focused team lead by Maciek, our development manager. We've also decided to build the service without any Flex features, at least on the short term. So we have a smaller team which is only working in one development framework. This reduces complexity and risk. And with our SCRUM development process pretty well implemented, we have an excellent opportunity to build a great service for the Public Release which is scheduled for September.

If any of you have any suggestions about what features you want to see in Second Brain, please let us know by using the comments feature on this post.

Looking for the strategic sweet-spot

Om Malik wrote about the end of Web2.0 innocence after Google launched My Maps in direct competition of the many mash-ups based entirely on the Google Maps API. The main thesis was that the happy love-all, no-competition days in Web2.0 are over. The big players serving most mash-ups will eventually compete directly with the many services using their data.

I agree that it is a risky business to build a mash-up based entirely on one company’s API. But I truly believe in the internet as a distributed desktop. I see a future where computing will be internet-based with lots of small, independent internet applications serving the needs in the market. I don’t believe that Google will do to the internet what Microsoft did to the desktop.

Second Brain is to some extent a big mash-up - but our strategy is to bring in all available internet-services into one simple library for the user. This way, we depend on other services opening up their content and functionality, but we hedge our bets by connecting to the many, not just to a single service.

We're trying to solve the information/service chaos involved in using many different internet services.  We think that the main challenge holding back further adoption of internet-based computing is that it is difficult to manage many services, logging in and out and getting familiar with many different interfaces.

The main benefit we deliver to our users is to let them see content from all the different services they use in a single library. If they want to access/edit any of their stuff, they are forwarded to the source/service. We sometimes describe this as the Windows Explorer for the internet.

The main benefit we provide to other internet services is that we make it easier for their users to access their content among the other services that they may be using. People can also sign up to new services via Second Brain.

In short - we we want to make it easier for people to use many internet services, and make it easier for services to reach existing and new customers. We are looking for the strategic sweet-spot between users’ needs for simplification and services’ need for more users.

The Long Tail of start-ups

I see one of the more untraditional VCs, Paul Graham of Y Combinator, is talking about how new start ups can get their business going with little VC money. All though he hasn't made any killer investments from his existing portfolio yet, I do think his approach is very appropriate considering how cheap and easy people can start new internet-based companies these days.

But the old big-money model is not dead yet. There will always be new ideas that need large scale initial growth, think YouTube.com. And the traditional VC will definitely open their pockets for them. Where I think Mr. Graham will get the most out of his money is on the Long Tail of ideas and businesses. This could be the niche for smaller companies, with marginal audiences, who need smaller investments and also have a smaller exit. If he makes an efficient investment model/process, this could be the first VC who makes more money from many small investments, than he would from betting on a few smash-hits.

I'm not sure yet where Second Brain fits in this picture, but our strategy is to finance it ourselves as far as we can, before we go looking for external funding. That was also the advice we got from the Sillicon Valley investors we talked to this spring: Keep it Small and Keep it All.

Developing on the Web Platform

Alex Iskold at Read/Write Web has a review of companies that use web-services as part of their platform/backbone.They list six building blocks of the Web Computing Platform and give an extensive review of companies who offer the components to 3rd parties, like f.x. Amazon S3, and the customer fronting services that use them, like f.x. SmugMug - a photo sharing site.

Using the web-platform is at the core of the Second Brain strategy. We are already using Amazon S3 for file-storage, and we are looking for other applications and services that we could integrate to expand our offering and functionality. What we really like about the Web platform is partly the ease of integration, but most of all, that we don't have to invent and build everything ourselves.

We also believe, that in the end, this will be a benefit for the users. Let say for instance that we want to offer photo sharing capabilities, or blogging. Instead of creating a brand new service, why not just use the APIs of Flickr and Typepad, and have people retrieve and publish from these already familiar services. Flock is doing this to leverage their browser, and I think this is the right way to go as far as competitiveness goes as well. We only want to compete on our core capabilities, for anything else, there is web-services and open APIs.

Planning the Fall

It will be a very exiting fall. We will finish the first early version of Second Brain in September, and start testing and promoting it to people we know in and around the Making Waves network in October.

Web 2.0 reinforces the promise of Secondbrain

I thought of Second Brain long before I heard of Web 2.0 - the new wave of innovation on the web that is  centered around people, not technology. The two main features of Web 2.0 applications is (1) the web as plattform and (2) the architecture of participation.