Varud

I ran across an article at Function Web Design that was written a few weeks ago. It discusses the conundrum of starting a new company in the Internet age. Everybody must have an online presence nowadays, particularly companies.

Varud.com is a domain I bought a long time ago because it was available and I knew when I noticed it that I should snap it up. It’s based on an old family name which according to lore means ‘Good Earth’ in Danish. I haven’t been able to confirm that although it does appear to have some Danish entries in Google and it appears to have some Indian meaning as well. Please comment if you know more about this.

The irony is that when my great great grandfather came to the country, his last name was ‘Nelson’ (or some variation thereof) – and so was everybody else’s. If you look in a phone book in the Minnesota/North Dakota/Montana region where my mother’s family is from, you’ll notice how many Nelsons (and Olsons for that matter) there are. Anyway, in an attempt to differentiate, my predecessors had to do the same thing people are doing today; they had to come up with an identity that would differentiate themselves.

I was reading this post today from Guy Kawasaki about five lessons for startups. I like reading what Guy Kawasaki has to say and this is no exception. Unfortunately, it’s a brief posting but it gets the point across:

1. Cash is king.  Enough said
2. Make progress.  Sometimes people (i.e. myself) stare at the computer screen for an hour wondering what to do.  Maybe they’ll read the news but that’s not going to help with step 1.
3. Try different things. Unless the options are expensive, it’s usually cheaper to do than to decide.
4. Ignore naysayers. Better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all. That sounds like the logic of the formerly successful. Those who failed badly might say otherwise.
5. Do unto others. I would modify this a little bit by saying that one must always understand what is being asked of another – even if one doesn’t really want to do it. Empathy is the important part of the equation.

On a side note, on the right bar of Guy’s post is a link to Sun’s startup-friendly server program. This is a great idea because it gets people locked in early. Sun makes some of the best hardware on the planet next to IBM and HP. As any Sys Admin will tell you, Dell is the worst – but that’s a different story.

Unfortunately for Sun however, I think the age of normal people touching these machines is coming to an end. There has been talk of this future by people such as Nicolas Carr in his book The Big Switch. I’ve only read excerpts so far, but the main thrust is that we are moving to an age of utility computing in which compute power is managed by large providers such as Amazon and Google. The interesting point is that this has all happened before with electricity. In ‘the beginning’, electricity was generated in a power plant that would service a given factory. Only later, did larger power plants get built which would then service individuals and companies through the electrical grid.

The same thing is happening with compute power that once happened with electrical power.

Long story short, I’m using Amazon EC2 and I love it. When I need higher uptime (say 99.9%+), I will then set up another system on an independent utility. People say things to me like, “You’ll lose control. There’s no future in that setup.” I reply simply that not only is it more efficient to have somebody else manage this, it’s also more reliable. None of these utilities will ever hit 100% reliability but that can be managed just like the data center I used to work with managed power outages by having electricity come from two different grids. Don’t get me wrong, utility computing is only the right option for new web sites/services. Internal systems, highly sensitive systems, and existing organizations don’t yet benefit from this option.

Anyway, to tie this all together, Sun is doing the right thing to get startups that aren’t in the vanguard to use their introductory offers and then build a relationship over time. Maybe they’ll find even better ways to monetize their customers in the future.

Wow!  There’s a ton going on over the past few months in the field of what I am going to call social networking applications.  Until recently, social networking advances were about communication to (and later in coordination with) other people.  Now, we’re beginning to see social networking beginning the process of maturing:

1. Shared authentication systems: These haven’t really taken off yet but they’re gaining ground.  OpenID is gaining traction – allowing users to use the same identity across platforms (including Yahoo!).  ‘Undercover’ shared IDs are in use at Ning and other aggregative services that use the same ID for many networks on their platform.
2. Aggregating services: Ping.fm is a neat service that acts as a communication hub for a user’s online life.  It allows somebody to post to multiple networks simultaneously using the same interface.

When I look at recent history, a corollary exists in enterprise computer networks in the 90s.  When Windows first released Active Directory (AD), it was a great leap forward (in Microsoft’s special way of co-opting existing technology).  AD is, for all intents and purposes, the same thing as LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).  AD was a product first introduced by a smaller company under the name Banyan Vines.  The important part however is not this history but that it was the point at which unified identity and access privileges became prevalent in larger networks.  Previously, people would be given an individual username for their email perhaps, or the PC at their desk.  However, there was little else to govern people’s movement within the network (like the ability to print, or access files on other computers).  Security was mostly aimed at keeping outsiders out and hoping that insiders were either trustworthy or not skilled enough to cause harm.  The early days of social networking had similar issues where fake identities were common and it wasn’t always clear who somebody was.  Amazon changed this by implementing their Real Name service so that you knew somebody was who they claimed to be. Facebook was founded on a similar emphasis on tending to ‘real’ users.

In the end, alternate identities are not only unavoidable, they are necessary.  Credit cards and building passes offer insight into the future of social networks.  Typically, people have multiple credentials for purchasing goods through the credit card network, or accessing money through the ATM network, or getting into a building through that building’s authorization list.  This type of situation where you have a single prime mover (not to be too Cartesian, ‘me’), associated credentials that identify the user on different networks, the ability for those credentials to be passed across network boundaries, and authorizations for each of those credentials on each network.

We are only just barely able to manage credentials in a portable way.  Let’s hope that OpenID or something similar to it really does gain acceptance.  Then, we need to hope that groups like Ping.fm become gatekeepers in a way that makes credentials portability possible.  Finally, when those two steps have been successful, the final step is for social networks to become neutral.  By neutral, I’m not implying that there won’t be exclusivity or that networks won’t have their own rules.  Rather, I’m theorizing that networks will be able to exchange the credentials of a prime mover without that prime mover having to be involved in the process.  This allows users to have relationships managed in a way that is isolated from themselves.

This probably sounds esoteric, but this solution allows users to find other users in a much more user-controlled way.  Similarly, it also allows users to protect themselves without the help of the networks in which they participate.  For example, in this landscape, a person’s identity on one social network could find a person on another network with similar interests without either person knowing about the transaction nor with the social network itself mediating that interaction.

Enough for today … back to work on the project.