I was interested to see Microsoft announce the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7 this week. I think they’re doomed (not the company, but the release/product). “Now with some security!” isn’t a great sales pitch.

Death of Microsoft predicted, film at eleven.

But wait, there’s hope for them yet. I know a way Microsoft could make IE7 an interesting, vibrant, active platform for development, taking back the lead the Firefox team has stolen from them (not in gross installations, yet, but certainly in momentum, press, mind share, and viability).

Here’s my idea: Microsoft, you should make IE7 support the Firefox extensions and themes. Then, you should (forgive the redundancy) extend the extension format to support other Microsoft products — on Windows only, naturally.

In my view, the Firefox browser has taken off for three primary reasons:

1. The development team got it close enough to the IE interface that switching became nearly painless.
2. The browser allows better control over web junk like pop-ups, and the Firefox team has marketed user control and security very well.
3. The extension mechanism in the browser makes it very easy to write great extensions, and development of those extensions has exploded.

Microsoft can’t copy the first of these without copying itself, obviously. It can try to backfill on security and user control, but then it’s just we-said, they-said as to who is really more secure. The really new and interesting features going into Firefox are going in through extensions — but the UI to get them isn’t that great yet. If IE7 comes out supporting that body of code, and provides a better UI to get at it, all the benefits of those features will accrue to IE as well as Firefox. Wouldn’t it be great if every contribution to Firefox was also a contribution to IE?

To state it in the inverse — unless Microsoft adopts an extension mechanism or creates a more successful mechanism of its own, I can’t see them getting back momentum for this product. They stopped development of the browser after IE6 for a reason: their work was done. The question is now, who else can they get to work on the product for them?

Microsoft needs to open up the browser — not the source code, but APIs to make the browser sing. I think the best way would be by embracing the format already emerging, and doing something to make it more useful on Windows.

See, open source isn’t so scary after all. You just have to learn how to use it.

Related link: http://blog.ask.com/2005/02/welcome_bloglin.html

The rumors are true: Ask Jeeves has acquired Bloglines, the well-loved and well-used web-based RSS aggregator.

This morning I spoke with Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines, and Jim Lanzone, SVP, Search Properties from Ask Jeeves, about the acquisition. They both emphasized that they planned to allow Bloglines to continue to exist as a standalone brand and to keep it running much the way it is now, following the product roadmap Fletcher already had laid out. “That’s one of the primary reasons we decided to go to Ask Jeeves,” Fletcher said. “Unlike their competitors, they have a multi-brand strategy.” Being a part of Ask Jeeves, he said, will allow Bloglines access to the Teoma search engine and other Ask Jeeves properties, as well as funding for additional employees. Lanzone, who heads up the Ask Jeeves search business, also talked about using the Bloglines database to create a blog search offering.

When news of the acquisition broke on Mary Hodder’s napsterization.com this weekend, the funny congeniality of the blog community prompted newly-minted Yahoo! employee Russell Beattie to publicly declare his love for Bloglines, and to wish for Ask Jeeves not to screw it up. Both Fletcher and Lanzone insisted this wasn’t about to happen. “We’re not looking to slap ads all over it, or to put the Ask Jeeves logo all over it,” Lanzone said. He said that the acquisition would relieve any immediate pressure for Bloglines to figure out a direct revenue plan, and would allow them instead to figure out the business model as aggregator usage grows. “It could just serve to drive traffic to our search engine,” Lanzone said, mentioning as well that Fletcher’s ideas about profiling users’ interests might lead in a worthwhile direction. Fletcher also said the Bloglines API would continue to be available, and would be expanded over time.

Fletcher strongly denied Mary Hodder’s assertion that any company could recreate Bloglines in a short period of time, but he agreed that the Bloglines database of “nearly 300 million blog posts” was very valuable, and that the Bloglines’ team’s knowledge of the blog space would also be a big asset for Ask Jeeves. Lanzone said he hoped the acquisition would also make Ask Jeeves more visible to “mainline bloggers,” bringing to their attention the changes Ask Jeeves has made in recent years. “We’re not the dot-com era Ask Jeeves any more,” he said.

So what does this acquisition mean for the RSS world? Why did Ask Jeeves make this acquisition, and why did Mark Fletcher, who sold his last company to Yahoo!, sell to Ask Jeeves? Neither company would discuss the acquisition amount nor any firm plans for Bloglines’ future growth, so all we can do is speculate.

Certainly Bloglines is well-used and well-liked in the tech world, and I imagine their user growth numbers are very impressive. Those of us — including Russell and myself — who love the service use it in the way another generation channel-surfed their televisions. Many people who try it find that they largely stop using bookmarks, and instead organize all of their daily online reading into Bloglines.

All of that said, Ask Jeeves is clear that Bloglines brings them no immediate revenue and they have no plans to change that immediately. Jim Lanzone’s comment about user profiles, though, is tantalizing. I’ve long thought that Bloglines would be better able to price a text ad against a keyword than Google could, since Bloglines could tell advertisers:

• how many blogs about that keyword a reader reads;
• how often they read them; and
• how recently they subscribed to blogs related to the keyword.

Ad purchasers could do much better targeted matching for at least some kinds of ads with this kind of information.

Great. But who profits from these ads, and where does Bloglines put them? If Bloglines runs ads against an RSS item, and the publisher runs ads against the HTML version of the same item, the publisher has a strong incentive to stop publishing (at least, full-text) RSS, so that they get the ad revenue instead of Bloglines. Likewise, if the publisher uses Feedburner or a similar service to run ads inside their RSS feeds, does Bloglines turn into a morass of ads?

Maybe this leads us to the real reason for the Ask Jeeves acquisition. Ask Jeeves is looking for a way to compete more aggressively with the search industry leaders, Google and Yahoo. Bloglines is looking for a way to turn its rich user profiles into profits. Google and Yahoo have a model that works today, and they are less likely to experiment with a new pricing model if it means competing with their existing models — but Ask Jeeves, with more to gain, may be willing to to try something new. A cookie set on the Bloglines site would allow Teoma, the Ask Jeeves search engine, to match ads not only against your search terms but also your Bloglines profile. Bloglines builds the profile, Teoma runs the ads, and both sides win.

It’s a theory. Let’s see what happens when Teoma and Bloglines start working together more closely.

Related link: http://www.roombacommunity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1077

I moved recently. The new place is great: I now have a bona-fide office, and a place to put all the hardware, and a spare bedroom, and a gigantic living room and … But with new places come new problems. And so, after a month, I realized the quadratic law of vacuuming:

The amount of vacuuming you have to do is quadratic in the amount of floor space you have..

And so, after much deliberation, I bought an evac
(though not from Sharper Image. I bought a reconditioned one from a seller with an excellent base price but exorbitant shipping and handling).

It works well. I can honestly tell you that setting up the cones and then starting the robot before going to work is a genuine pleasure: I know that while I’m in traffic, my carpets are getting cleaner.

So I called my mom up, thinking I would get her one. She’s a little old lady who hasn’t really gotten the hang of any of the technology I’ve given her over the years. The computer is mostly unused, she’s sent exactly one e-mail to me in the past 5 years (”Hi. I have an internet account.”), and she doesn’t want a TiVo because it seems too complicated.

Me: Ma, I found a great robotic vacuum.

Ma: I have two.

Me: Huh? This is a small robot; it travels around on its own and cleans the floors. All you do is charge it and then let it clean.

Ma: I have two. We got them last year. I use one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom area.

Me: So you don’t need a new one then?

Ma: Not unless it does a better job picking up crumbs than the ones I have.

The moral? People adopt the technologies that are appropriate for them, and do so very quickly. I had been thinking of my mom as a late adopter; it turns out that she’s perfectly willing to be an early adopter, as long as she can see the value in what she’s adopting.

How do you learn more about robots anyway?