Jonathan Miller: 破釜沉舟

Jonathan Miller wasn't a charismatic leader.  But he recognized theneed to fundamentally change AOL's strategy, mappedout a new direction, and got people moving the way that he waspointing.  Since last year, especially, he had been executing well andreally seemed to "get it".  Giving AOL's services away for free thissummer forced the organization to focus on the new world rather thanthe old; a Rubicon crossing, or as Jon's Sifu might say, "Break the woks and sink the boats(破釜沉舟)".  And as Ted notes, the strategy that Jon architected is starting to show good results.

Given all of this, Jon's departure wasa shock. Neither the communications to the rank and file nor to Jonhimself were handled well.  There are plenty of rumors and speculationflying around.  I hope that the Time Warner leadership team handles thesituation going forward with the openness and honesty that are due tothe people who have worked so hard to turn AOL around.

Jon, you'll be missed.

The AIM Network: AIM6, AIMPages, Buddy Feeds

I love launches.  This week, we're launching AIM 6 along with a major upgrade to the AIMPages beta.  And they work together!

The new AIM is a big improvement; I've been running the various betas over the past many months and they've been both rising in quality and slimming down in footprint.  And the UI is finally reasonable: I can now once again edit my buddy list right there in the main window.  And buddies now have a little (i) icon that tells you when your buddy has published something -- anywhere.  Like blog entries!  Profile updates!  Or, if they've set things up, new Flickr photos, Diggs, Myspace or Blogger or Xanga updates, or any custom Atom or RSS feeds you care to add.

There are some problems:  It keeps telling me about their away message status, and I don't really care that Kevin Lawver is away at lunch.  And I see that Kevin posted a photo but there's no thumbnail in the feed...  but this is a first release, we can fix these nits.  (The feed data is available at http://buddyfeed.oscar.aol.com/rss-push/aol:buddy_feed?request=user&sn=<screenname>, and as an AIMPage module named "What's New" which I demoed at Widgets Live last week.)

There's a good review of all of this on GigaOM by Liz Gannes.

The only downside of all this is that I'm mostly on a Mac these days, and there's no Mac AIM 6 client right now.  On the other hand, Adium plus a feed reader works pretty well too.

AIMPages has also added AIM Pages Buddies.  I don't think this is the best name, but the concept is good.  It's two way, meaning that both people have to opt in to it.  And by default your AIM Pages Buddies are shown on your profile (so you really don't want your whole Buddy List showing up there).  The invitation mechanism is easy:  When you start to add, the system sends an IM to the buddy asking if they agree.  A lot better than email, if they're online.  If not, they'll get reminded with a little status link at the top of their AIM Page: "Buddy Requests (42)".

Aside:  By default, for newly created profiles, only your AIM Pages Buddies can post comments on your profile.  You can change this in the settings to open it up if you want to.  On the other hand, it's also a way to get more buddy requests.

Tags: aim, aim6, aimpages, buddy feeds, social networks, launch

Gold stars for good feed readers!

Over the past few weeks, we've been rolling out support for proper cache control on the Journals blogging platform, which will help reduce both bandwidth and database load, and also make things faster in general.  Last week we added ETag based cache control for both Atom and RSS feeds.  Today I took a quick peek at our logs to see how things are going...

The good news is that a lot of feed readers are being great citizens.  Around 33% of our feed requests get satisfied with 304 responses, meaning that clients only need to do a quick validation that they have the latest content, rather than fetching everything all over again.  Here's a quick list of feed readers, in no particular order, which are doing the right thing with our servers.  Gold stars for everybody!

• Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com)
• FeedDemon/2.0
• NewsGatorOnline/2.0
• NetNewsWire/2.0
• LiteFeeds/2.0
• http://www.squeet.com
• Firefox/1.5.0.7
• Thunderbird/1.5.0.8
• FacebookFeedParser/1.0 (UniversalFeedParser/4.1;) +http://facebook.com/
• Windows-RSS-Platform/1.0
• LiveJournal.com
• Planet GBT +http://planetgbt.priyadi.net Planet/1.0~pre1-terasi+http://www.planetplanet.org UniversalFeedParser/3.3+http://feedparser.org/
  Google Desktop

Pretty clearly, the UniversalFeedParser library should get a lot of the credit.  It's great that the Windows RSS Platform is doing the right thing, considering the likely amount of traffic it's going to generate.

Surprisingly, we actually have a lower cache hit ratio for Atom feeds than RSS ones... mostly due to one major crawler that seems to prefer Atom feeds and never gets a 304, presumably because it's never sending an If-None-Match header:

• Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)

Hey Google: It would really help the stats if you guys could support ETags and If-None-Match.

Tags: feeds, caching, etags, gold star, google-why-oh-why

Web 2.0: 2 Quick Takes

• Digg Labs' Swarm demo is hypnotic.
• Marissa Mayer is all about the data.  Also, she has hypnotic sparkly things hanging from her belt.
  

Launching AOL Developer Network

We've been talking about the launch of our new dev.aol.com site all week.  The goal is to provide a place to talk about our open services in one standard place.  (We've tried the strategy of hiding our APIs in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the leopard', but it didn't work out too well.)

We really want to get feedback on both the site itself and the APIs that we're exposing.  Both are evolving rapidly and I anticipate that we'll be adding some new APIs there in the very near future -- there are a couple I'm going to be pushing for.  So please, give us feedback, or just link to dev.aol.com and we'll pick it up.

Web 2.0, Sudoku, and EC2

I'm at Web 2.0 now -- it took secret ninja moves to actually get a pass, even though AOL is a triple iridium sponsor.  The place is so thick with VPs you can barely reach the free food.

In breaking news, our own Michael Chowla just won HCL's Sudoku contest and will be taking home a very nice trophy.  I'll add the picture... as soon as the network actually lets my camera phone upload it... oh darn.  Apparently the Ning demo suffered from some network issues earlier today too.  Infrastructure!

Speaking of infrastructure:  Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud looks very cool.  You could run a startup now with nothing more than a laptop and a table at a WiFi-enabled cafe.

Tags: web20, sudoku, ec2, amazon, infrastructure

AIM Pages Blog Widgets

Just finished the Blog sidebar widgets panel at Widgets Live!.  I was the only one foolish enough to try a live demo... which of course crashed and burned.  I'm so glad I made a backup animation to show instead.  I'm also told that I was nearly inaudible during most of the presentation.  Note to self: Lean into the mike! Also, I forgot my VGA converter cable and had to jump off the platform right as we started to go grab it. 

On the other hand, the panel discussion was fun.  We're certainly in early stages; we had four people on the panel, and four completely separate terms for essentially the same things (widgets, gadgets, modules, parts).

Link: Widgets Live! AIM Pages Blog Widgets Presentation (html).