I’ve been playing with Tafiti, an attempt by Microsoft to create a new kind of user interface for internet search - and as such also an attempt to improve Microsoft’s dismal share of the internet’s search eyeballs. It’s also a showcase for Silverlight, Microsoft’s rich internet app plugin.

While I’m not convinced that replicating the look and feel of a 1950s filing cabinet is necessarily the best starting point for solving a 21st Century problem, Tafiti is nonetheless an interesting experiment. As well as the crusty filing cabinet view, there’s also an arboreal view that lets you view the search results as if they were Christmas baubles strung on the twigs of a tree.

This tree view seems to me to be the most interesting aspect of Tafiti. It reminds me a lot of other experiments I’ve seen over the years, attempts at organising large sets of data through an intuitive, three-dimensional structure.

In particular it reminds me of Galaxy of News [PDF], an MIT project from the early 1990s, which was effectively a cross between what Google News is today and a navigable version of the Starfield screen saver. One of the key participants in that project - Earl Rennison - founded a company to commercialise the work, called Perspecta. The company was sold to Excite@Home, which subsequently filed for bankruptcy and I heard no more.

Tafiti’s tree view also puts me in mind of a defunct Apple project called HotSauce, which was meant to allow users to explore their hard drive or web sites by navigating through floating labels in a 3D space. That project also went nowhere.

I wonder if the combination of today’s desktops and our current web infrastructure have finally caught up with where Rennison et al needed to be to make Galaxy of News properly fly. It always struck me as a great concept dreamed up a decade before its time.

In the IT industry we’re all so used to hearing discussions about web 2.0 - like or loathe the label we all know at least vaguely what it implies - it’s easy to forget that lots of organisations still have a bit of trouble with web 1.0.

Yesterday I booked a hotel room, and was able to narrow down my search by looking at the enormous range of web resources that seem to be devoted to this topic. Not finding any suitable last-minute offers via the likes of LastMinute.com, I ended up trawling through the web sites of individual hotels, found via Google Maps. I’m going to a wedding reception and want a hotel that I can find when plastered, so proximity to the venue was paramount.

Most of the sites I looked at had online booking facilities, allowing me to narrow down my search to those that actually had suitable, vacant rooms at a reasonable price.

Eventually I got down to one hotel - good location, available rooms, affordable, and which wasn’t afraid to put detailed pictures of its rooms online. Visitor feedback on the various hotel-promoting web portals checked out.

At this point I would have happily clicked my way through the online booking form, credit card in hand, but for the fact that I wanted a room on the top floor (don’t ask). I couldn’t specify this online. So I dusted off my phone receiver and called the hotel.

I spoke to a very helpful receptionist who put me down for exactly the kind of room I would have booked online, only on the right floor. The surprise came at the end of the call. The rate I was quoted was much cheaper than online. A full 20% cheaper. I didn’t ask for a discount, I just got it.

Someone, somewhere, hasn’t got the hang of this web 1.0 thing. If I do the admin work - checking availability and filling in my credit card number, and don’t take up the time of a human being on the end of the phone, it’s supposed to cost me less. It’s not supposed to cost me more.

I’m going to have to think twice about this whole buying-things-online lark. 

I like quite a lot of what I read at Confused of Calcutta, a blog written by JP Rangaswami, who works as CIO of BT Global Services to keep the bills paid while he’s not blogging.

Today JP skilfully dissects a muddle-headed assessment of the economics of Facebook, run by the Wall Street Journal. This follows the news that TripAdvisor.com (a tentacle of online travel agency Expedia) has made free with real money (reportedly $3m, but I’ve not seen it confirmed) to own a minor add-on to the Facebook social networking site.

JP argues that questions explicitly raised in the article - such as “What’s in all this for Facebook?” - are obsolete and irrelevant queries, “questions that are typical of Web 1.0”.

“We have to move away from the mindset in the article, which represents the economics of scarcity, to one which represents the economics of abundance,” JP argues. “We have to move, more particularly, away from models which create artificial scarcities in order to support economics-of-scarcity structures.”

In other words what’s in it for Facebook is the prospect of a rich and growing community from which it makes money in other ways. From paid-for services it creates itself, or from (with dreadful inevitability) targeted advertising.

I was bang in agreement with JP right up until this point. But then came this oddly ill-fitting paragraph:

“From what I’ve seen, the guys at Facebook understand all this, so I do not expect to see artificial scarcities created. Instead, I will expect to see advertising-driven revenues. I will expect to see transaction fees, but more on an all-you-can-eat basis rather than a dish-at-a-time basis. I may even see vanilla-for-free and sophisticated-at-a-premium models. Or maybe a combination of these.”

I’m not quite sure how JP comes to these conclusions. Perhaps he hasn’t seen Facebook Gifts, the stupid, dollar-a-pop, limited-edition pictures of things that you can send to Facebook buddies. Let’s see: artificially scarce? Check. Dish-at-a-time pricing? Check. Completely lame-brained? Check.

Maybe the guys at Facebook should swing by JP’s blog and see what they ought to be doing.

Sometimes searching for information through Google and its ilk is like trying to find a needle in a haystack when you're not even sure that needle is there. So maybe a spot of web 2.0 crowd-wisdom tapping will help me instead.

IT Week needs an energy meter that can accurately measure the real-time power being drawn by equipment from the 240V AC mains. There are lots of little plug-in watt-meters available, but these are aimed at consumers and hence I suspect they will give a rough guide but not an ironclad answer.

What I’m after is a proper, professional quality meter that will give repeatable results over a period of months or years. Preferably one that uses standard mains sockets, not some sort of shunt that I have to manually put in series with the equipment I’m testing.

Any ideas?

I wish my pension were invested in VMware right now (the red line in this graph of the past five days), rather than in the Nasdaq (blue line) and FTSE 250 (green).

My previous blog post, on my frustration with Lotus Notes, attracted plenty of criticism. Commenters pointed out that my employer is providing me with an obsolete version of Notes - a fact that hadn’t actually escaped my notice, particularly given that it’s been the same for years. Others pointed out that I must have a poor grasp of the English language if I can’t tell the difference between a button marked “sent” and another button marked “send”. Given that I click the wrong button now and then, this accusation could be true, I suppose.

As a journalist I’m well used to vocal criticism. It comes as part of the job, along with obsolete equipment. Following one story I wrote about Linux in August 1998, I received a quota-busting deluge of emails, most accusing me of being in Microsoft’s pay. But not every blogger out there will have built up the scar tissue that comes from someone zipping their entire Linux workstation hard drive and sending it to you as an attachment.

It’s the tone of most blog comments that gets a body down. It’s one thing to disagree, it’s another to adopt a voice that says, “How could you possibly think that you ignorant, gibbering cretin.”

Just yesterday, I was reading a great blog post at GapingVoid.com, on “Why we’re all blogging less”. The blogger, Hugh MacLeod, listed the six main reasons why bloggers might choose to go and do something less taxing instead. The soul-sapping nature of the average comment came in at point 4:

4. Believe it or not, some of us have better things to do than to be continually justifying ourselves to a crowd of passive-aggressive, self-loathing, loser f**ktards. Thankfully these folk are a minority, but their one skill-set in life seems to be in the less-than-noble art of ‘using up too much oxygen’. Which makes ‘Engaging in The Conversation’ a lot less appealing for the others. Life is short.

I’ve said before that disagreement is more often a source of engagement with a publication than agreement. So perhaps this means the whole web 2.0 movement, of empowering the user and thriving on interaction, is in part built on and fuelled by discord.

If MacLeod is right, this may be its undoing.

Lotus Notes eh? You’ve got to love it. If you’re insane.

In my career as a journalist to date I’ve worked for four different publishing companies and every single one has expected me to do day-to-day work with Lotus bleeding Notes. That’s a decade and a half’s exposure to the program, in various states of upgrade, and I still can’t find anything. The menu structures appear to have been designed with the aid of a dartboard. Or perhaps a Ouija board.

Today’s boiling frustration is with the standard version 6.5 mail client with which I am forced to daily grapple.

This is what happens with clockwork regularity... I begin composing a new message. I get halfway through, then want to paste in some text from a similar message sent previously. What I need to do is switch from the compose pane to the inbox pane and click on “sent” - a button at the top left corner of the screen - to view my outbox. Then I need to find the older message, copy the text, and switch back to the compose view. Then I need to complete the half-finished email and send it.

That’s what I ought to do but instead my brain always short-circuits at this point. In the top left corner of the compose screen is a button marked “send”. The position and wording is sufficiently similar to the “sent” button that I find myself clicking on “send”, then realising too late and cursing very loudly. If we had a swear box in the office I would be on income support. So if you know me and often get half-baked emails, I can only apologise. It’s Notes’ fault.

Why is the blessed outbox called “sent” and not “outbox”? After all, the inbox is called inbox, not “received”. And if Notes is so wonderfully flexible, why can’t I change the name of the outbox? And why can’t I change the position of the buttons? And did anybody at IBM ever do a use-case analysis of how real human beings actually employ their infernal email system?

Aaaargh!

OK. I feel better now. Till the next time.

While brushing my teeth this morning I listened to a segment of Radio 4's Today programme reporting on internet crime. The piece was triggered by the latest report [PDF] from the House of Lords’ Science and Technology committee, published today, which recommends that the UK should have a single point of contact for victims to report online crime to the police, funded by central government, backed up by a network of computer forensics labs across the country.

Today spent about 20 minutes on the topic, bringing in hacker-turned-security-pundit Robert Schifreen to give advice to listeners worried about phishing and fraud (top tip: get a second credit card for internet shopping with a £200 credit limit). The programme also interviewed a senior police officer, Sue Wilkinson of the Metropolitan Police, e-crime leader at the Association of Chief Police Officers. She carefully demonstrated that talking without really saying anything must be on the syllabus at Hendon these days. You can download a recording of the discussion from the BBC's web site.

I was amazed, given the Lords Committee’s recommendation, that nobody on the programme brought up the NHTCU, the central e-crime unit that once provided a single point of contact for victims throughout England. The English NHTCU was of course folded into Soca in April 2006, losing its central co-ordinating role in the process.

Who said the UK authorities have no idea how to effectively tackle computer crime? They know exactly which steps to take: one step forward, two steps back.

Tough luck if you ordered an iMac yesterday. Whether you like white plastic or grey anodised aluminium, today's new models are clearly a cut above the outgoing models in the what-you-get-for-your-money stakes. For example, yesterday £799 would buy a 2.0GHz iMac with 17in screen and 160GB hard disk. Today the same amount buys the same 2.0GHz processor but with a 20in screen and a 250GB hard disk.

I wonder why Apple doesn't discount its old models in the run up to a new launch? Apparently that's not the Cupertino way.

I also wonder whether the new iMacs will have grey cables, to match the spanking new casing and aluminium keyboards. The old white cables were practical only if your iMac lives in house maintained by Anthea Turner. In the grubby real world - our offices, for example - iMac cables seem to rapidly acquire the colour of grunge.

I’ve recently joined the throng at Facebook - the only place I’ve ever known where it’s easy to find someone else called Lem. I know my timing makes me something of a late adopter, but at least it means I don’t have to hang around waiting for all my friends to join.

Because I’m not aged 15 any more, there are many things about the Facebook world that I don’t really understand. Among them is the notion of the Facebook gift shop. Here you can choose a picture from a wide range of options - a picture of a sock monkey, say - which you can send to a friend for a dollar. Yes, a real US dollar, deducted from your actual credit card balance by the international banking system, not some sort of Facebook coinage whisked away from your virtual wallet by invisible sprites.

I can’t imagine why anyone would pay real money to send someone a 64x64 .png graphic, even if it is a "limited edition" virtual monkey made from a virtual sock. Surely giving someone, say, a real-world Mars Bar represents significantly better value?

I wonder how much money Facebook is making from this sort of thing. No doubt a fair bit, given that it has more than 30 million members and quite a lot of people seem to be both cash-rich and stupid these days.

No matter how much money Facebook is making - and we don’t know, because it’s privately held - I bet it would make more if it applied a bit of proper web 2.0, long-tail hand-waving to the problem. If a reasonable number of people will pay a dollar to send a stupid picture to a pal, surely an unreasonable number would follow suit if the amount charged was much less? Charge a cent instead of a dollar, and even a miserly old curmudgeon like me might send the odd picture of a moth flying out of a wallet. And if the number of people then tempted to participate was more than 100 times greater (as I suspect it would be), Facebook might make more money.

Traditionally the problem here has been that when you bill people one cent you lose money paying the banks to process the transaction. However, it seems Amazon has been working to correct this problem, to make micropayments a reality with its Flexible Payment System, now in beta.

IT Week contributor Tim Anderson explains the new system well on his blog: “If both buyer and seller have an Amazon Payments account, then you can receive a tiny payment at a realistic cost. You could even pay me a single cent, three-quarters of which I would get to keep.”

The snag of course is that this only works as long as Amazon can aggregate many of my micropayments into one larger transaction, which can then be run through the conventional banking system without prohibitive charges. So as a consumer I either have to rack up lots of transactions with one site or buy lots of almost-worthless things at various other FPS-compliant sites.

Amazon’s plan may or may not pan out. Even so, I can’t see why Facebook is not approaching its silly gift shop from a micropayment perspective - why not sell 100 pointless gifts for a dollar, since it costs nothing to make more?

Incidentally, reading around this topic I noticed one significant observation: insubstantial virtual gifts work best in social networks where people don’t know each other’s true identities, and thus don’t have the option to send a real sock monkey. And this is the problem. Facebook is explicitly a network for people who do know each other, which is why it feels so wrong to pay 50p to send a stand-in for a proper gift.

I’ve been trying out a new phone over the last few days - a Sony Ericsson K550i on the Orange network. It’s a bit of a mixed bag. It’s slimmer and about 20 percent lighter than my Nokia 6233, also on Orange. But the K550i has an inferior keypad, and doesn’t support 3G.

Both the phones seem to be have ample battery life for my needs. Both offer a 2-megapixel camera, but only one takes snaps of any quality. While the Nokia is a tiny, fixed-focus jobby with no lens cover, the K550i has a larger lens, a sliding cover, and focus control. There’s also the option to switch on a couple of intensely bright white LEDs to shed some light on the scene.

The Nokia seems slightly more robust in construction and could probably survive a drop that would kill the K550i, although I’m not about to test this supposition.

The menus and operating procedures are very similar, particularly given Orange’s makeover of the basic underlying software.

I’m reliably informed that the K550i plays music quite well, but I haven’t bothered trying this out as I have an iPod - and an ear that doesn’t work with in-ear headsets.

However, after a few days’ intense use I’m very happy to switch back to my old Nokia. The Sony Ericsson looked good on paper and felt good in the pocket but fell down in one small but not unimportant respect: I couldn’t really hear the people talking to me on the other end of the phone.

Even in areas of good mobile coverage the little black Sony Ericsson suffered the gamut of audio defects: variable volume, choppiness, distortion, clipping and a really annoying buzz that proved to be the camera’s lens cover vibrating in time with the terrible sound coming out of the earpiece. Switching to speakerphone made the caller sound as if they’d swallowed a kazoo. Going back to the Nokia afterward, by contrast, felt like growing a new pair of ears.

I’m not entirely alone in thinking that the K550i exhibits poor call quality, although I’ve also seen a review praising the audio “from the company that makes the top-selling Walkman”. They must mean a 1980s tape machine with worn-out batteries that hasn’t had its head cleaned in a decade.

Hmm. Surely no phone can be this poor. Maybe I just have a bad one.

Over the weekend I spent an evening in the company of a merchant banker who specialises in mergers and acquisitions. This job entails spending many long hours talking to chief executives, of companies in both predator and prey mode. At one point my banker friend said, “Of course there are only two things that motivate CEOs...” leaving the observation hanging. I filled in the blank by suggesting “budgets and bonuses”. But he was actually thinking in even more elemental, visceral terms: “Fear and greed,” he said.

After a moment’s thought I decided my version of events was pretty much the same as his. Budgets, and the blowing of them, are the prime source of fear among CEOs, while greed and executive bonuses are not exactly disconnected, particularly in the headlines of newspapers of late.

What do you think motivates the captain of industry in your vicinity?

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I recently met Sashi Reddi, who is chief executive of services firm AppLabs but is also a self-confessed serial entrepreneur. Privately held AppLabs, which Reddi founded in 2001, has achieved strong and sustained growth but Reddi’s previous efforts were not nearly so tidy. He has evidently learned what works and what doesn’t the hard way, so I was keen to hear his tips for success.

“Finding the right product idea is one key activity, but a lot of times it’s about how you fund your idea, how you position it, how you market it,” Reddi said. “There are some extremely smart people with great ideas, but the companies that succeed don’t necessarily have anything to do with those people and those great ideas. So one important lesson is that there is a real disconnect between great ideas and what becomes a great company.”

In other words you can create a good company from an average idea, but it’s all too easy to launch a bad company on the back of a good idea.

“A bad company from a good idea is actually like my first company,” Reddi added, referring to EZPower Systems, a supplier of workflow and document-management software sold to DocuCorp in March 1998. “We got a lot of awards, good reviews from Gartner and we crept up into the upper right-hand corner" - a reference to the so-called ‘magic quandrant’ containing firms with both a complete vision and the ability to execute, according to Gartner’s air-finger interface experts at least. "But the problem was that me and my two friends were all doing this for the first time. We didn’t realise that we needed $20m to do the marketing of the product. When we raised the first couple of million we thought that was a lot of money because we’d never seen two million dollars before. But once we’d built the product we realised it was far too little.”

As Reddi emphasises, lots of technology entrepreneurs don’t fully grasp the true costs of starting and then growing a successful business. Not because they’re not smart, but because they’re not aware of exactly what goes on in the opaque worlds of marketing, PR and accounting.

The lesson for budding entrepreneurs, therefore, is to make the right friends early. When you take the plunge and leave regular employment to start up on your own, make sure at least one of your buddies has a solid background in marketing.   

I had lunch recently with some people from AppLabs, including founder and chief executive Sashi Reddi and Graham Smith - the only “vice president for Southern England” I’ve ever encountered. AppLabs is a consulting, services and outsourcing firm that specialises in software quality and testing.

Don’t nod off: testing is interesting.

Or at least it ought to be. For years testing has always been the unglamorous, unloved sister of programming. The work done by gifted open source programmers is frequently lauded, for example, despite the fact that most of the tough work that has made Linux so phenomenally stable has been corrective. Not programming per se, but refinement and error removal. Testing.

Despite such a large example, the AppLabs guys reported that it’s still tough to get testing taken seriously. Relatively few firms seem to ken that it costs less to correct a software problem if you catch it early, and that if you’re working with a testing specialist you should bring them in at the specification stage, not at the throw-it-over-the-wall-to-see-if-it-works stage. “We often get called in to work in ‘hero mode’ - to sort out a mess,” said Smith. “Almost all firms don’t have adequate testing throughout the full lifecycle.” It’s not atypical, Reddi added, to see code shops with 60 programmers and one tester. A common excuse is that “the developers are so smart their code doesn’t need testing”. Yes, and I never make speling mistaks. No wonder business software seems to make such slow progress toward a more stable, more secure future.

It’s not always winter, however. On a brighter note Smith said that attitudes are slowly thawing.

AppLaps employs 300 people in the UK, 1800 worldwide - many in its home base of India. Most of its testers-for-hire work onsite, embedded in development teams, although heavy lifting can be done offshore. The firm tackles a broad spectrum of testing including static (checking the code for detectable errors); functional (verifying that the program does what it should and, crucially, that it doesn’t do what it shouldn’t); performance assessment and security reviews.

CEO Reddi describes himself as a serial entrepreneur, having founded two other companies prior to AppLabs: EZPower Systems, focused on large-scale web applications; and iCoop - not an online home for chickens but a startup offering software for cooperatives.

I’ll come back to Reddi’s recipe for success in my next post, although there seems to be a big element of winging it among all the entrepreneurs I’ve spoken to over the years. When I asked Reddi what’s the single most important thing someone starting a business should do, he said, “I don’t know - but I would like to know if you find out!”