Open Source for Business

Posted on June 8, 2009

I didn’t get this posted yesterday because the Internet crapped out in our area. Nothing but excuses, I know.

I’ve been working beyond the bleeding edge, using a version of the Nutch code that’s not even made it into the Apache SVN for the project yet. To celebrate the fact that my contributions will make it in I figure its a good time to get into open source and business.

To put it briefly, and as you can probably guess, I’m pro open source. I use it extensively and I push back as much as I can. When it comes to the most of the code I write there really isn’t much commercial benefit in keeping it hidden so it just makes sense to give back.

There are two types of business on the web, one where you provide a software service and that is the product and others where you provide access to data. It’s pretty easy to tell which camp you’re in.

37 Signals for example, they’re in the first and their software probably isn’t something they just want to let people download – unless they’re incredibly brave. Doing that would mean that they’d be competing on margins for the cheapest hosting, users would flock to the cheaper services, have a poor experience and blame the software.

Sproozi on the other hand is the second type, our data is what users mostly care about and we’re not planning to be precious about our code. I’ve already been pushing some of the changes I’ve made to Nutch back into the project and we’re planning open source projects of our own in the coming months.

One of our plans we have is to build iPhone, Andriod and other phone based applications for our service and release them as open source projects. We’re planning to write them (or have them written for us) and release ‘official’ versions. Then release that code as open source project to provide a framework for developers so that they can build great things from it and on our API.

If there are any experienced iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian or Pre developers out there that want to get involved, drop me a line were a ways off yet but would love to chat about it and get some very early feedback.

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Location services – must try harder

Posted on September 26, 2008

Location based services, another area where there is certainly a case to be made for someone to make it suck less and probably a number of successful application to build on it.

Why it sucks

Location services suck because it’s inherently hard to map the collection of information on the Internet to physical locations.

Most of it just wont map because it’s not about something physical.
It’s obvious, but true – most of the Internet isn’t about a place, or a thing that is likely to stay in one place. This post for example, or this blog’s homepage – neither are about anything specific. My house isn’t

It’s hard to map because language is imprecise, physical location isn’t.
When you’re looking for a nearby restaurant a blog post with a review of a restaurant in London probably won’t give you an address and probably won’t even link to a site that will. It’s become the job of search to try and link the post, a very difficult job – was the post about London, England; London in Ontario or one of the dozens of other Londons around the world. At best the search engine might be able to link the name with another URL that contains an address – but there are no guarantees the name is unique or the address is right.

Sending letters for physical addresses with an activation code is one approach Google has tried, I’m not sure how successful it’s been though – I haven’t noticed locations search has stopped sucking, so I assume it’s not the silver bullet.

Sucking less

How to go about fixing it? If I knew the answer I’d be coding the solution right now and wouldn’t be sitting her writing and thinking about it.

The rise of location aware internet devices
It’s inevitable, the rise of the iPhone, Andriod phones and other location away devices with Internet connections mean people are going to want to consume location based resources. Though they’re not the first phones on the market to do any of this, they’re game changing because they’re the first platforms that make it easy to consume and more importantly produce location based content.

The other key ingredient these platforms offer is a browser, not just a cut down browser – a real browser, with tabs and javascript and all the trimmings!

Like any good problem, this one can be solved with metadata!
We’ve got the consumers with their million plus iPhones, we’ve got the producers who all want to start geo tagging. The problem is how do we link the two and how do we make it easy? We’ve got a few standards for location tagging document, but no clear forerunner.

Suddenly it doesn’t suck anymore

Services for producers and users to announce and tie information to physical locations is going to be the catalyst that really makes local search and local information portals of all kinds take off. It won’t be long until someone comes along with a killer solution.