So…is anyone actually using Google+ (at least, for what Google hope you’ll use it for?).  Facebook perhaps wasn’t a great original invention, but it generated what you might call “critical mass” and has quickly evolved into a platform.  Google+ seems to think it has identified the fatal flaw with Facebook: that one’s friends are not homogenous group but rather, several smaller circles.  Paul Adams of Google had demonstrated as much over a year ago. We have circles of friends.  That’s wisdom so great that it verges on common sense.

I read with interest the complaints of Violet Blue (if that is her real name) about Google+’s “drama”.  Google is, after all, desperate to get this right.  And they believe that they are fixing the fundamental flaw of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter et al.

Google+ will

make connecting with people on the web more like connecting with them in the real world.

Except it won’t.  It may yet be successful.  Google may yet bring to bear the massive quantities of information they have and gather up Facebook’s users, but let’s not pretend Google+ or Facebook or anything else are like connecting “in the real world” was, or is.  Facebook caters to (amongst other things) exhibitionism.  It’s partly popular because exhibitionism is easier in Facebook than it is in the real world.  And it keeps friendships alive that would not survive, or simply were not possible in the real world.

As for circles of friend – yes, they certainly do exist.  But “circles” is the wrong name for them, as they aren’t circles, at least, not from the perspective of the person who is at the centre of them.  They’re irregular, they overlap and you are not equidistant from all points.  Who has not, at some point, had a “best friend”?

Just as social media is changing friendships, so is the nature of friendship informing how social media works.  But after nearly two and a half centuries of the dismal science, events of the past two years tell us that we retain a great ability to wholly ignorant of how we “really” work.

Personally, I don’t watch much television apart from football, (which actually means I watch rather a lot of television).  And with a new season, comes a heightened appetite for footy-ogling restricted only partially by family obligations, my family’s generous but observably finite patience, and the fact that still most games are played concurrently.

But  hope beats loud in the heart of this Fantasy League manager, and so I therefore enjoy services like the Guardian’s minute-by-minute and clock-watch, which enable me to keep abreast of all games at once.

But this season, those services are no longer auto-updating; as Jacob Steinberg explained in Saturday’s season-opening clock-watch:

3.32pm: A lot of you are asking about the absence of the auto-refresh tool. Basically we’re not allowed to use it due to the media’s disagreement with the leagues. You’ll have to press F5 instead. STOP FOOTBALL, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Got that?  No more hands-free browsing of live football scores.

While this conjures up a rather fanciful image of today’s custodians of the sport, in some bizarre echo of the game’s founding purpose, being motivated still by a concern to preserve the eyesight of the nation’s youth, you might almost forget that these are live text updates of football scores we’re talking about.

So, yes, live text updates pushed to the browser now fall under some definition of broadcasting rights.  And yes, we’re reminded yet again that a powerful and flexible browser remains a bulwark against some fairly crazy legality – in this case, the definition of what “broadcasting” a game means.  But still, Firefox users can install an extension such as Reload Every and get on with enjoying automatic text updates.

It’s 2011.  And by the time this season ends, it’s 2012.  And yet, I’m reminded of something Asa wrote back in 2005:

the user is no longer just a spectator, he’s a participant.

…and that’s true even when he’s a spectator.

p.s. not all open web doom and gloom around the Guardian’s start to the season.  I loved this css-powered kit guide.

A picture of me with Emma.  It captures something of how I feel about her.

On my way home, I read about Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble, an investigation of the notion that various Web phenomena (in particular, Google’s personalised search and the goldfish bowls of social networks) mean that we will increasingly only hear our own views reflected back at us.

It’s an interesting thought.  And one that it’s hard to latch on to a counter argument for – presumably any source I could lay my hands on is part of my own echo-chamber.   But still, I was delighted that  This Week in Google addressed the topic.  As Gina Trapani pointed out, seeking out contrary viewpoints is simply part of being a developed person: and of course, your online habits will reflect the extent to which you exhibit this behaviour.   For example, my favourite newspaper columnist is Howard Jacobson, which is not to say that I agree with him all the time, but rather, I frequently find myself instinctively disagreeing even as I am swayed by the man’s clever and humane prose.  I am probably far more closely aligned with the unreadable Johann Hari whose only mode of expression seems to be the self-righteous indignation of the politics undergraduate and whose column I would only read out of condescension.

But then, I suppose there is still rather a lot to be indignant about.  And perhaps there are few books to be sold in writing about as well diagnosed a problem as the global digital divide, but it’s that, rather than people’s natural inclination to associate with those with whom they agree, that’s more worrying.  To take a rather gloomy example: the Faces of the Fallen website places an exact figure on American service personnel killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2002: it’s 5,885 at time of writing.  But meanwhile, there seems to be no general consensus even to the nearest half million how many Iraqis have died since the invasion of 2003.  Estimates range from under 100,000 to over 1 million.  Obviously, there is no equivalent online epitaph to these people.

We aren’t in a filter bubble to my mind, or at least, if we are, it’s a trivial problem.  The issue is how much digital naval-gazing we’re able to do at the expense of our consideration of that part of the world that still remains predominantly analogue.  Only Ted Nugent would disagree.

But I do profoundly believe that Firefox is the best browser for a user for a number of reasons, even in 2011 when we see some very large organisations making some very large investments in browser development.  Anyway, if you’re looking for some talking points, here’s my pitch on why I, hand-on-heart, prefer Firefox.  Thanks to Danishka for posing the question.  Mozilla.com is of course, much more authoritative on the topic.

Security & Privacy

It’s hard to speak to the security topic on IE9 given that you often tend to see problems retrospectively in closed browsers.  IE’s track record certainly doesn’t seem so stellar.   And personally, I do not find their independent research on “socially engineered malware” all that credible (nor do Opera and Google, from what I read) .

Firefox and Chrome use a lot of the same back-end for anti-malware and anti-phishing, but Mozilla has clearly offered a vision on privacy and Firefox has a very impressive selection of customisations for enhanced privacy and security today.

Chrome’s privacy approach is reliant upon customisation at the moment,  and IE’s “tracking protection lists” appear somewhat vulnerable to gaming.

Performance

This topic has partially defined the browser market for a long time: but right now, all modern browsers seem very, very fast.  They all win on some benchmark, and in the “real world”, which browser is fastest appears to depend on which website you use.  I’d argue no browser is currently outstanding in this area, although I would acknowledge that Firefox is not that fastest on the one-off activity of starting up.  It’s still very fast though…

User Interface

The user interface in Firefox 4 is “minimalist” in the same way IE9′s is, Chrome is,  etc. but what’s important to me is that we haven’t just chopped menus off and hidden them (which seems like a fair description
of what happened in IE9).  Rather, the UI is still very intuitive and contains features such as switch-to-tab, pinned tabs (which does have an equivalent in Chrome and IE) and tab groups that help the user manage
their workflow.

One obvious gap that’s often cited is the lack of a “new tab” page in Firefox: but the blank screen is intentional as the browser gets of the way of the user and doesn’t distract them in their workflow.  It’s hard to quantify the impact of that, but I’m aware of how distracting technology can be.   It possibly takes a browser without an agenda beyond that of the user to really and truly get out of the way.

Firefox 4′s interface is in fact still very customisable (Alex Limi’s blog on the Fx 4 UI is a great reference ) in a
way that IE and Chrome simply are not.

Customisation

I’d argue that Firefox still leads customisation broadly – although Chrome may quote a higher number of extensions, it’s worth bearing in mind :

• questionable levels of curation in the Chrome add-on collection, some of the add-ons I’ve used are very disappointing (e.g. they open a pop-up window for a page on an expired domain…)
•  Chrome add-ons are similar to Jet-Pack add-ons in terms of functionality supported.  Firefox offers that plus much richer, deeper customisation options
• Firefox has a very strong tradition of user-generated customisation, including the Personas gallery.

And Firefox 4 has a new add-on manager which makes customisation of Firefox also much easier and restartless add-ons.

Sync

Lastly, Firefox Sync is both more secure and more useful that the equivalent in Chrome (and there is no “native” solution for IE, as Microsoft would say).  Firefox Sync is fully encrypted on the client side and allows you to
open tabs up across instances of Firefox.  If you use more than one instance of Firefox, this is incredibly useful!

Clearly, the market is much more competitive than it was 1, 2 or 6 years ago – and clearly there are many topics (especially platform support) that I didn’t go into here.  But I feel that the quality and philosophy behind Firefox still make it the best choice for users.  And if you’re a Windows XP user (and most people on the Web are), there are much, much better options available to you than Internet Explorer.

Tristan notes the courage involved.

OpenOffice.org seems surprisingly controversial to me.  Having been a StarSuite/StarOffice/OpenOffice.org user for over 10 years, I have almost certainly developed some form of immunity to its undoubted shortcomings, but I know many people involved in Free software who refuse to use it on the grounds of general user experience cruftiness.  Yes, it has bugs, many of which one is surprised to find in software as mature as OpenOffice.org is.  And what’s more, I gather that the codebase is also a bit of an Indian ocean (boosting Sun’s ranking in terms of lines of code contributed as Free software).  I’ve also heard criticisms about slow release management and the difficulty of getting fixes integrated – I recall Michael Meeks pointing out to me that many of the fixes he and his team had landed were only available in the Linux build.  The contributor agreement has also come under attack (also by Michael) even though it was there for fairly sane reasons (and it was certainly nowhere near as painful a read as the Canonical one).  But in spite of all of these things, OpenOffice.org has attracted a real community which has -let’s say it- changed the world.

When people complain to me about the OpenOffice.org user experience, I like to laughingly tell them how much better it is than in 1998.  While that might not convince many users, it is the literal truth, that OpenOffice.org has made massive strides in UX, and I am sure that LibreOffice will only push this harder and faster.  OpenOffice.org has become a viable alternative for governments and businesses around the world: it meets the needs of the vast, vast majority of users.  I consider myself a heavy document user and I consider that OpenOffice.org meets my needs.  OpenOffice.org’s market share is also a great deal higher than many people suppose (although I suspect that this figure is inflated by Sun and Oracle’s bizarre habit of distributing OpenOffice.org through Java platform upgrades).

Above all, OpenOffice.org and OASIS drove Microsoft to the standards table.  The Open Document Format was passed as an ISO standard in 2006, truly threatening on of Microsoft’s cash cows.  I (and may others) think that Microsoft’s response to this – incentivising Microsoft partner companies to go  rampaging through ISO member organisation, was a low point in Microsoft’s history.  But now we have two ISO document standards, ODF and OOXML, one of which, ODF, has been implemented in multiple programmes and web services, and is playing the role of a standard (the OOXML spec is around 12 times longer than the ODF one and has yet to be implemented to my knowledge).

To be clear, this post isn’t about bashing Microsoft, although their behaviour has lead people to question if ISO is indeed a suitable organisation for any software standard.  No, this is about something much more important than any organisation, business or foundation, that exists today.

Web standards are well understood as being important to the development of the web itself.  But if we care about the Internet, we should also care about the rights of individuals with respect to documents.  One of the strangest features of Microsoft’s enormous market share over the past 20 years has been the effect of creating a set of effectively proprietary standards: Word, Excel and Powerpoint are synonyms for text, spreadsheet and presentation.  But the creation and sharing of such basic artifacts of modern communication as these should be something that can be done by anyone, without being beholden to someone else, and innovation in this field should not be controlled by a single entity.

OpenOffice.org and OASIS have achieved this today for a brave or needy or innovative few.  The creation of an independent foundation and a new development direction to create a much more usable office suite seem like excellent next steps.  Indeed, it’s a delight to read in the FAQ that the Mozilla Foundation provides some of the inspiration for these developments.  My favourite perspective (one that I shared upon hearing the news), comes from Guy Lunardi of OpenSuse

Ultimately, we envision LibreOffice doing for the office productivity market what Mozilla Firefox has done for browsers.

…and the Document Foundation doing for document standards what the Mozilla Foundation has achieved with web standards.

So, starting today, I’d like to announce the Mozilla Market Insights community list.  This list is for anyone with an interest in tracing market developments in Internet software, and especially the web browser market, for sharing of both  qualitative and quantitative data, and for getting access to the expertise of others in those activities.  In scope for discussion: demographics, market shares, product comparisons, methodologies for all of the above, and how they relate to Mozilla and open web projects.  Not in scope: marketing campaigns and events, changes to Mozilla (and especially Firefox) product road-map.

Why another list?

18 months ago, we dusted off the Marketing List which I think has become quite vibrant. At the same time, “marketing” is a rather broad term, from campaigns to product information to newsletters to events.  And while I think there is some level of interest in discuss market insights within the marketing list, I think we are at a a volume of traffic now where not all threads are getting followed up on.

A couple of folks, Bob Chao and Majken Connor both expressed concerns about creating a new list, concerns which I want to acknowledge. Bob’s point (at least, my paraphrasing, which Bob can correct if needed) was that my motivations of creating a “quieter” place for this kind of work might reduce participation and that we should, essentially, be loud and proud in everything we do.  He has an excellent point, but I still maintain that a specific list will increase participation amongst a few interested parties.  I think that Majken’s shared some of these concerns and was also bothered about potential fragmentation.  So, I think that sets the bar quite well – I’d like to get this list up and assess it by the end of the year.  If we feel that participation has declined or that we feel fragmented as a community, then I’ll happily kill the list and revert to the old state.  Of course, I will do whatever I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.

So, if you enjoy numbers that have been crunched, or have some of your own to crunch, if you have a view on just how many web-capable devices there are per person (and what it was 2 years ago and what it will be in 2 years’ time), or if you have an idea just how many browsers there are for Android right now, please join the list.  Right now, I’m putting together a forecast for adoption of Firefox 4, and I’ll be delighted to share and hear other perspectives.  So, if this is appealing to you, please sign up here Mozilla Market Insights community list or market-insights-subscribe@mozilla.org.

See you on the Internet…

1. it’s important, and
2. we (meaning the Mozilla project) need to articulate what sets us apart from other browser producers.

Let’s first assume one hurdle: the difference between the Internet and the Web.  I wonder how many people outside the industry understand that?   (I even wonder how many people in the tech sector do not.)  But let’s put that problem aside, and assume for a moment that net neutrality is a given, and not in grave danger.

We want rather to be able to articulate the importance of technology choices such as a preference for webm and Ogg Theora over the H.264 codec.  Mozilla (and, let’s remember, others) make these choices for a very clear set of reasons.  At least, they are clear to us.

While I like the commentator Tiago Sá’s comment about Firefox being fundamentally participatory, and that a small number of users who have internalised the proposition of the open web is preferable to a large number of users who haven’t, for me, whether or not an individual Firefox user cares is moot.  I think part of Firefox’s success and impact in the market was that you didn’t have to care about what it stood for to love it.  But of course, the more people who do understand, the better.

But what concerns me more is that within the industry, in my perception, the level of understanding of Mozilla could be better.   We need to be loud and unambiguous about why an Open Web matters.  We have to articulate why the ability for anyone to pick up a set of tools and go and build on the web without being beholden to anybody else is important,  what that means for both the capabilities of the tools the have, but even more importantly, the terms (yes, the licensing) by which they can do that.  And then, we need to articulate what the societal impact is – and there are in fact several: economic, social, cultural and so forth.  And that, in the parlance of our times, is a non-trivial task.

It’s already genuinely difficult to remember life before the Web.  I say Web, and not Internet, because Web is how almost all of us first experienced the incredible power of the Internet to connect people and ideas in ways we had not envisaged before.  Sure, I used email first, and yes, it was amazing, but it did not open up the world, it merely made it more efficient.

The Web’s virtue isn’t contingent upon the specific technologies that make it, another set of technologies with the same properties and freedoms would do the job, but if we didn’t have the Web, we’d have to invent it.

Dria sets out of set of possible and useful analogies for explaining the web as a public resource.  Some of them are very good, some might suffer slightly from some culture-specificity (e.g. volunteering in a public library), and she starts to address the point of the web as a public good.  One analogy I especially like is considering the public road network.  The road network is something that is almost entirely subject to public provision and regulation (let’s not shy away from it), and the cars that drive on it – although subject to stringent regulation – are privately provided and serve primarily private objectives.    Now, imagine for a moment a road network which was run on a commercial basis, where the main interests represented were the car manufacturers.  Unless you’re an Ayn Rand acolyte (and maybe even then) it’s a much bleaker picture.

But let’s also try another tack – I am not in all cases a fan of argument by analogy (to refute argument by analogy with an analogy, one often ends up comparing apples and pairs), so I first want to think a little harder about what’s important – what this public good is, how it manifests itself, and how it exists at all.

Software is both machine and information.  It’s a tool composed of intricately expressed ideas.  In this way it is quite similar to mathematics, language or a theoretical science.  Private ownership, or perhaps better expressed, any form of public exclusion, is clearly negative outcome for the world, to say absurd in many cases (although the distinction between applied science and invention is a blurry one).

So, as I say, I’m still thinking, and maybe you are too.  But my definition of the Open Web would comprise two parts:

1. what is important about the web: not the intrinsic qualities of the technology, but the incidental ones, i.e. the behaviour it facilitates
2. what are the specific qualities of the technology that engender this (both capabilities and licensing, in combination with the previously-assumed net neutrality)

With these, I think our analogies will butter a few more parsnips.