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So 3:30 to 5:30 or roughly 2 hours. And that two hours was interrupted by my family. Brief embarrassment, maybe I'll be caught blogging instead of doing those important things I need to do. But this is important - to me. I need to be able to clear my head once in a while and look at other people's cool ideas (Lately it's mostly been Ray's - need to review my RSS feeds.) Not sure why I find this useful. But it makes me feel that I am excercising my brain - not just doing the dishes or shoveling snow or, for more brain usage, reconciling statements. Got to go... 
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63 5:43:03 PM
G!.
Five years ago today was my first day working on Groove - an incredible journey, and yet it's only just begun. In 1996, I had begun to feel some frustration within the Notes customer base as they were trying to push it in ways that it hadn't been designed for - particularly outside the enterprise - and as its eMail component began to dominate the usage model. Upon further analysis, this relentless drive toward eMail caused me to question the fundamentals of centralized, application server-based architectures as the basis for effective dynamic collaboration. I'd been working on Notes at that time for thirteen years, and in that it was my first day after leaving Iris/Lotus/IBM, October 1st of 1997 was quite exhilarating and more than a bit scary: I was returning to zero. My mind was abuzz: the first order of business would be to write up a document that described the essence of where my head was at. Over the next two weeks before incorporation, I'd use this rambling "Market Opportunity" document, along with a companion technical piece, to recruit the core team. We worked out of my attic for the next few months, and then moved to a big space with just some tables and whiteboards, trying to get our minds around "peer" communications and transaction systems, pouring through Richard Light's XML book that we found at Borders - trying to figure out if we should bet on this stuff, making early key decisions about C++/COM vs. Java (it was first supposed to have been in Java), and so on. What a blast... It's been fun to revisit the founding documents, if only to put things into perspective. The technology and business environments have gone through extreme highs and lows in the interim, while we've sought to stay focused and persevere, believing in that specific business value proposition. And with the help of those who have believed in us, we've been afforded the opportunity to touch hundreds of thousands of users with self-empowering desktop collaboration software, and to work very closely with about fifty of our blue-chip global enterprise customers to create real and immediate business value, growing steadily month after month. What has been accomplished through these five million lines of code in these five short years, and in terms of bootstrapping and building the beginnings of a new geometrically-growing market in 18 months, has been nothing short of breathtaking. (By comparison, Notes was first launched on its fifth anniversary - Dec 7, 1989 - at a half million lines of code.) With deepest sincerity, I salute my co-founders Ken Moore, Eric Patey, and Jack Ozzie, and the hundreds of talented, caring and believing people at Groove Networks. An incredible team, amazing individuals. Happy fifth. But we've surely only just begun. Although centralized contextual collaboration has been yielding value for many years and continues to mature (congrats) and merge into the application server market, dynamic "desktop collaboration" empirically shows all the signs of a new and substantial growth market, as business units return to basics in terms of understanding how use technology to make their extant interpersonal work practices more productive, and as IT continues to struggle with supporting dynamic interpersonal work in the hostile and unsecure environment that Internet eMail has become. Here's to creating real and substantive value through technology, and here's to the next five, ten, and fifteen years... [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]
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62 5:08:58 PM
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Another interesting Ray Ozzie Post. This time he goes on about the concept of public searchable email. Oddly, I generally treat my email as though it were public 80% of the time. I am reminded of the days in the early 90's listening to intimate voice mail messages that were left in a corporate voicemail system! I became extremely careful about what I ever said. And later what I ever sent. Then you combine that with stories about people who get fired for forwarding some off-color joke and that did it for me. In the late 90's I would send such jokes around to friends, but stopped once it became clear that I could not trust others in the new non-loyalty filled corporate envoronment. Once someone is out to get you or besmirch you - your records become fair game. Email's and voicemails they saved can easily be forwarded. People build whole cases around trails of emails - showing harassment, or showing failure to complete assignments. And so... But it's a terrible shame that trust is such a ================= Peter, it's great to hear your thoughts; I couldn't agree more. John just gave me a demo of the latest & greatest, and I'm truly pumped. He demo'ed it to me using a WinForms web services program running against localhost, which kind of blew my mind as we were brainstorming about the kinds of "outboard" cross-telespace utilities that could be whipped up in nothing flat. Later - a coincidence: Jon also talks about localhost web services. Jon, your talk about mail brings up a discussion that I had with someone lately about email, linking, and transparency. One of the unfortunate aspects about "googling email" is that there are really no inbound links except those that can be reverse engineered through threading. But in social systems, those are the "strong ties" - the obvious relationships. What is more interesting, I believe, are the "weak ties" that would emerge if people outside of your social group started pointing into an interesting message of yours. (Weak Ties are precisely why I read blogs!!) Imagine the field day that Google could have if 1) all email files had access controls removed, and 2) people started surfing each others' email messages. Unrealistic, right? Well, think again. Why have we grown so accustomed to the social norm that email should be private? Think about it. Start small. And remember that your company owns your inbox and outbox. What if all engineers within a company were given a new email address when they started, and were told "just use it for business" and "please note that everything that you do in email is in public view. In order to prevent embarassing moments, please keep matters of your personal privacy OUT of your assigned email box; use Groove for private matters. Oh, and by the way, here are the URLs of all of your team members' mailboxes, in case you care. Oh, and by the way, here's a site where you Google across all of them. Oh, also, I should mention that we never delete any email, by policy." I truly, seriously wonder what would happen!? At first, people would be shocked at not having private email, and private hotmail addresses and "groove spaces" would appear when people wanted to do something privately. But people are creatures of convenience and habit, and more and more work would be done in the open. And what would be the benefit to the collective productivity if we could all watch and listen to the thought processes of the stars on our teams? What kind of interesting bots would emerge that started to watch and subscribe to relevant queries? (I'm not just talking about voyeurs. Customer support email interactions should be continuously watched by engineers every bit as closely as the public forums, don't you think?) Thinking even more over the edge, imagine if part of being a public company, or being a paid government employee, involved doing your email in public? Who needs FOIA ... how about "real time disclosure"? All of the stuff that got us into this most recent debacle - accounting - is an attempt to take the messy reality of business complexity and risk and spin it into a dubious "standardized form". But what if all of that messy reality were known by everyone equivalently, in real time, everywhere, interpreted-as-you-will? (Yes, for those of you who recognize the similarity in arguments, I am indeed a proponent of allowing insider trading as a better indicator of internal corporate conditions than packaged quarterly Productions.) Surely everything can't and shouldn't be transparent: SCIF-like privacy is what products like Groove are for. Doing M&A, or concocting a stealth project? Start a Groove shared space. But let's get real: email is already a semi-public space. 100% of corporate email today - YOUR email - is already being read at least once before you get to read it, probably many times more. By your ISP, by your admin. If you're paranoid, maybe by law enforcement, your school, your Dad, your spouse, or the RIAA. They call it "content scanning" or "virus scanning", and it's for Your Protection. So why not just "go for it" and open up email to public viewing, so that the rest of your team, or company, or world has the benefit of linking into it?? (Ummm ... no, I won't be the first. Sorry. YOU be the first.) [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]
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61 5:06:44 PM
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I really like the shifted librarian's weblog, and anything that sounds like Liabrarian-Porn captures the imagination... Kudos to shifted. Brewster Kahle's Librarian Rant
I haven't had a chance to watch this yet, but if your employer lets you surf the net, you can watch it at work!
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60 4:03:31 PM
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This link caught my attention since it pointed out some cultural phenomena surrounding RSS news aggregator reading behaviors. Now there are jokes about guys like me. And guys who are more steeped in this than I'll ever be. I mean I can't look at my news aggregator on a daily or sometimes even weekly or monthly basis! But I do love it when I get around to it. At least it is mentally stimulating and helps to shift the focus onto stuff that can actually be intriguing. Unlike say watching TV - even in light of things like the space shuttle destruction...
Pat Kalaher, Donna Wentworth's brother-in-law, showed up in my Technorati Link Cosmos today. In addition to his wonderful Kalaher's Law of Obsessive XML Newsfeed Collection, he's trying his hand at punchlines:
That last one is pretty funny, because we just got a huge network attached storage array at work to back up all of our servers. The big in-joke is that it's really just for my email. [The Shifted Librarian]
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59 3:57:46 PM
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This is the second time that I've heard of this book - I was inspired by his earlier work about Chaos theory. It altered my view of entropy from negative to positive! Pretty cool heh? I do not have an opinion on this book, but I am sure to get it.
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58 3:49:04 PM
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Henry Copeland: "If you can read this you can be a journalist." [Scripting News] If you can read this>> you can be a journalistOne of the funny things about reading some print journalists try to "get" blogs is just how bad their information is. You wonder whether an article was written three months ago and just stuck in the can or whether the journalists just don't bother to read the blogs they write about.
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57 3:31:49 PM
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