I just acquired a few thousand smart coworkers :-)

Here is a presentation (in german) on Maintaining Web principles in AJAX that I'm going to give in about one hour at the EuroAjax 2006 conference. It is a co-presentation with Jürg Stuker who covers SEO aspects of AJAX.

I cover deeplinking into AJAX applications, supporting the back-button both inside an AJAX application and back-into-page. The described techniques should cover IE, Firefox and (recent) Safari.

Tags: backbutton, permalinks, ajax, webarch, talk

Finally, I can announce, that the first customer from my new project launched this week! Working together with Endoxon AG, the new online map for germany at goyellow.de/map is now online. Please go and have a look!

You will find a lot of similarities to map.search.ch, with a couple refinements here and there. It is a full AJAX map for Germany with hybrid and vector views. You can overlay a lot of information from GoYellow, a internet yellow pages site for germany with direct door-to-door public transport directions available to every such point. Additionally, we have global data for the first few zoomlevels, so you can get a decent view of the rest of the world.

Of course, you have nice URIs like goyellow.de/map/berlin or goyellow.de/map/muenchen/hildegardstr-1, so I wish happy linking!

We put a lot of work into the visuals, especially the image quality and the general UI behaviour. Please have a close look! Note the clarity of the colors and the labels. Or drag the zoomslider.

The project will move forward adding more countries in this way. And soon, we will have some new concepts waiting for you. Oh, and we will get an official name..

More soon!

Update: My coworker Gregor shows how you can link to all kinds of information layers. And it seems like we already got first sort-of mashup.

Tags: mapping, germany, ajax, goyellow

After a few posts on aggregating "Web 1.0"-style classifieds, I finally have something to blog on a possible next generation of classifieds:

At last, there is some news on edgio, Mike Arrington's new venture. As expected from the little we knew before it is primarily an aggregator of classifieds on blogs. Somehow, I wondered why that took so long, since the idea has been on the table for quite a while, but on the other hand there is not much selling-via-blogs going on yet anyway. I hope that edgeio and similiar sites will change that.

From the description it sounds like a solid and complete implementation. They ask sellers to use the 'listing' tag to draw attention, and although the article claims that they will "constantly crawl millions of blogs", my guess is that they subscribe the technorati feed for that tag. In this way, they re-use all the anti-splogs mechanism technorati implements. That would be a very simple and neat model to aggregate things, one that could be copied for many different things, too. In fact many geoblogging sites rely on one way or the other on such a mechanism. And of course, for events it is commonplace now to agree on a tag, to aggregate all related material. Edgeio would - if I guessed right - take this one further, by using the tag only as a means to find a URL and then going further and actually download and analyze the page.

Since structured blogging and microformats seem like perfect matches for edgeio. I wonder wether they even demand the implementation of one of these models for posters in order to get some structure. But if they do, then they should really mine all blogs and use the listing tag only as a speedup mechanism (i.e. being the Web 2.0 equivalent of 'Submit URL' at the search engines).

The article mentions an interesting usage of trackback. It sounds like they will automatically trackback every post they find and include. While that sounds pretty intriguing, I fear it can quickly become very problematic. Essentially, the whole process is automatic mass-trackbacking of all people using the listing tag. Sure, there is value in this trackback, but where do you draw the line and who decides what useful is? And what if there will be 20 more aggregators? I think that every form of trackback that doesn't result from a human choice on the trackbacking site (usually hand-picking a link to the trackbacked site) borders to spam, especially if high volumes are in the game. Well, as the other of the article says, he is not sure that he got every detail right, and the people involved in the project are definitely deep thinkers and well aware of the good and bad potential of these techniques, so I stop speculation and have another look after the launch.

By the way, here in Switzerland, Kaywa is doing something in a similar market with ichiba. There aren't many details out yet, but from the little I heard they seem to take a slightly different approach, that might sit a little closer to the way classifieds work for users today.

Tags: classifieds, disruption, aggregators, listing :-)

The term "perpetual beta" sums up an important feature of web based applications: You can roll out updates as often as you want and all users immediately profit from it.

But once a site attracts a non-trivial userbase, this might also be its achilles heel: It can be hard and risky to impose major updates on your regular users. Sure, you can add a major set of new features, but that leads down to the path of complicated sites. But if you want to progress by changing how a current feature works, then you can get yourself in trouble. To limit risk, only small changes are considered. Which is smart for many other reasons, too, of course.

But what if the web around you progresses and a major shift of course is in due? What if your userbase is nicely in the early and late majority. With shrink-wrapped software you could jump on the next curve with the next release, sell it to the early adopters and give the rest some time to get comfortable.

You can't really do that with a website. Sure, you could add a special beta section an run that in parallel, but only real innovators go there and you'd have to keep it separated quite a long time, would loose even more power to keep the majority of users and if your site has social aspects cut out the the network effects.

So, you have a choise: Stay at the top of major shifts and risk alienating the most faithful users or eventually get caught up from behind by a competitor starting from scratch or coming from another field.

It was impossible for Yahoo to radically cut down their Homepage when the early adopters rallied around Google. Even now, their AJAXified Mail (guess why it is taking so long since the oddpost acquisition!) will keep all major principle in place. Gmail was able scrap folders and replaces them with tags.

If you understand german, you can watch the dilemma in the comments of the immo.search.ch launch. While it was in beta, there were 100+ mostly positive comments, in fact extremly positive. Once it was officially launched, that is, it replaced the old immo.search.ch - a pretty standard form -> resultspage -> detailpage type site - by a new ajax-centric site, old users took the general tone in a very negative direction. They want the old system back. They obviously copy arguments, which you can easily spot: One user mentions an actually quite obscure bug that appears when you search for a house to rent (and not a house to buy or a flat to rent, the majority cases) and that was also present in the previous version, as it is bogus data not code. But it serves them as an argument, so they use it. Fascinating to watch the dynamic in the comments.

Now search.ch is bold enough to hold to the new concept. They believe that it is a genuinly new appraoch that will ultimately beat the older system. But the real estate search was never a really important for search.ch, so they can take the risk. The commenters in the blog are probably a vocal minority and I would guess that a reasonable part of the current users will stay and even spread the word. But even if the complete userbase would have to be replaced with this step, the payoff vs risk made sense.

But not so for the other big real estate sites. For them, the current userbase is one of the core assets. And every step that might piss off a good part of it is a bet-the-company step. At the same time, they will surely loose users to immo.search.ch and other companies that are freeer do innovate in bolder steps. The best would probably be to time the transition to a new paradigma to a sweet spot where they can still get back a couple of users and really keep some so far loyal users that at least saw the new style and probably get used to it and the users they would loose are on balance. But they will come out hurt one way or the other.

Shrink-wrapped software with its granular update cycles and a self-adopting userbase don't know any such risks. Only to miss out an important change of direction, i.e. to not innovate enough.

So what could a site do, that built its success over the years with a model that is bound to be replaced over the next couple years? Are there any good examples where a site mastered a difficult transition in a fine way? What could be done by clever communication in advance and during the transition?

(All of that assumes that you know what you do and don't innovate in the wrong direction. That of course is whole different topic to analyze. For small steps in the wrong direction that perpetual beta is actually more forgiving - if you see the signs early enough. And you see them correctly, which is not easy: Just go and read the comments in the search.ch blog entry linked above)

Tags: innovation disruption ajax

After a data-rich and fascinating talk about the specialization of communication channels at LIFT yesterday someone asked if the introduction of position-information of your communication partner would alter the communication patterns. Stefana's suggested that there probably would be not much change in the pattern, since the 4-6 people that you do the bulk of synchronous and nearly synchronous communication with, you know well enough to know where they most probably are at any time anyway. Taking this further, these would of course be the same set of people that would probably give you the trust rating to expose their position. Thus, the question: Is there any market for all these mobile location based communication systems?

Not in the obvious implementation case. Maybe either by restricting types of locations, like Plazes does (which maps places I'm online, thus probably working and almost never my spare time) or by coming up with a system that is anonymous enough, but yet useful and not annoying (permission spam) so that you could extent the service to a much wider circle.

On the other hand, IM-style presence indicators (from "away" and "busy" to "phone", "meeting", "in the zone") potentially fulfill a much more important note in this context. Maybe phones start listening to things like how many voices (and at what volume?) there are in the room, how fast the typing-sound is, etc. They could at least switch to silent mode in this case? Hmm, how reliable could you detect that the owner is sitting in a movie or a talk? And why is there no "silence please" beacon installed in every cinema that mobile phones could pay attention to?

Tags: lift06 lbs socialsoftware mobile

I'm currently at LIFT. And I have a theory:

(This post will take particularly long to get to the server)

Update: 1. Most of the conference is actually quite interesting 2. Anina is coming up, I expect low latencies this afternoon. 3. Dang, do I sound geeky today.

Tags: lift06

search.ch just launched the new beta real estate search (immo.beta.search.ch). It is one of the last projects that I started when I was still CTO at search.ch and it's great to finally see it online. See the post on the company blog (in german) for more details.

It aggregates objects from about 20 real estate sites in Switzerland, constantly adding more. It even includes sites that offer rooms for students.

It's AJAX all over the place. With neat details like to incrementally loading result list on the left, the small bar charts above the sliders (so that you know wether you have to allow higher prices or smaller flats, or just get a general feeling for an area), updated in real time.

You will see all available objects in the map, and the ones visible in the list at the left are highlighted (try scrolling and see how they change). Actually just missed objects are also still on the map. One of the neat feature the team added after I left is the behavior there: The non-matching criteria is highlighted red and when you click it the according slider is adjusted to include this object.

Another nice part is the list management. Looking for the next flat or house is a process that goes on for a longer time, so you'll want to keep track of what you liked, tossed out again and so on. You can mark objects and you can keep notes. Best of all, when you return you get the exact same query that you had when you left last time and all the new objects since your last (and the one before) are separated by a marker.

The search.ch team did an excellent job, I'm proud of them! Congrats!

Update: A small translation table until the site is translated:
Wohnung, Einfamilienhaus, Ferien, Mehrfamilienhaus, Büro, Garage, Grundstück: Appartment, Single Family Home, Cottage, Multi Family Home, Office, Parking lot, land
mieten, kaufen: rent, buy
Preis, Zimmer, Fläche, Ort: Price, Rooms, Area, "Where".

Andreas Göldi has a brilliant analysis on the classifieds market as follow-up his earlier and my post (thanks for the kind words!).

He nicely structures the discussion: He observes that we are talking about a market, and as such a system that works better when liquidity increases and transaction costs decreases.

Many of the suggestions in my last post can be catalogued under the transaction costs aspect, which are mainly outside the actual cost to publish a classified, just as Andreas notes. Thinking about it, lowering could grow the classifieds market manifold; or maybe this already happened, just look what is sold on ebay that nobody would put in the classifieds section of a newspaper.

Then Andreas splits liquidity in two factors: Presence and positioning. Presence, i.e. the cost of just being in the market, is quickly driven to zero by the aggregators and things like Google Base (Forget about usability gripes, the important point of Google Base is really to lower the entry barrier to put stuff on the web, something that will drive Google's bottom line - along with allmost other's bottom lines - in a much more significant way than anything to do with competing with craigslist. [Update: Or so I thought... Apparently Google is going the wrong way here]). Full agreement here.

But on the positioning, I'm not so sure, at least in this case. His point is that one could essentially sell ranking, exchanging money for a better position in a market. But for many important categories I don't have a problem specifying my query precise enough, that I can browse through all matching ads, thus ranking is not important. It would be easy to look at all classifieds for flats in Zurich in a given size and price range, and in fact many people do that and currently go to all the sites and read all the papers to not miss any.

(Yes, ranges are actually not that useful tools, but users usually give extra room to include ads just outside their range to double check. In fact we tried relevance ranking for real estate for a couple of years in immo.search.ch - you can just enter a target price and size and the engine will rank ads by proximity to this values, giving cheaper/bigger a slight preference - and it works quite well but in the end never got the traction with the users, thus in summary I think the idea was rejected by the market. And in fact the next version of immo.search.ch will swap these features out for something else...)

Back to positioning: Of course, one could sell the appearance of non-matching (maybe by a short margin) ads. Of course strictly separated from actual search results, please. But then again, a good site would be able to generate good suggestions here anyway and besides, in the classifieds case this looks like a rather small opportunity.

Thus, positioning so far makes sense where the number of results is huge (web search engine, where the top 10 are critically more important than all the others) - i.e. almost equivalent to where relevance ranking is important search quality is generally bad and almost more a means to stumble around and get ideas (e.g. ebay, where you can pay to increase attention to your products) transaction costs for the seeker are high (thus artificially pushing the barrier for "too many results"-rule much lower), e.g. on ebay "which of the zillions ipod offers should I bid in?" or when the next step would be applying for a job. This only applies where I can't distinguish offers otherwise, either because they are nearly identical (ebay) or because of lack of further information (jobs).

"Too many results" is subjective and while some wouldn't mind skimming real estate ads half an hour per day, for others this is too much. But since the cost of a suboptimal decision outweigh time saving by just taking the first offer, these persons rather create an own market for assisting them (Andreas mentions this, too). And tools and methods for increasing skimming speed and accuracy will be what differentiates future aggregator sites.

Thus, I think positioning isn't where the profits will move in the case of classifieds. If, then only for the jobs market, which exhibits its own very complicated dynamics and very high transaction costs; my gut feeling is that this part will take different directions than all other categories in a big way anyway. Sounds about right, since that is very the aggregators will be and there (unlike for general search like Google) entry costs will be low and thus profits will move somewhere else in the value chain. Which doesn't mean that the operational profit for these outlets won't be handsome, but they most probably won't take the billions that are left on the table by slow moving newspapers (sorry guys).

Will the money be in lowering transaction costs? And if transaction costs go down and the market grows, who will profit? The sellers, the buyers (or the new class of seller-and-buyer), the new middlemen?

Jürg blogs about language selection on web pages over at the namics blog (in german). He wrote up his guidelines, most of which are quite sensible, but also read the comments for a good discussion.

As a contribution to the discussion, I'd like to explain how we did this at search.ch: In general, very similarly to his guidelines, i.e. the language selection is in the upper right corner and the labels are text and in the destination language (a few pages still have the selection in the history/navigation bar at the left, but the upper right corner is really where it should be).

But the interesting details are within the initial detection and the URIs. An URI could end in help.html, but also in help.en.html; exactly how Apache content negotiation suggests, i.e. the first one would trigger automatic language detection, the second one is fixed on english. The important difference is in how the links in these pages look. We took great care (and credit for this goes to Urban Müller) to keep the links on those documents in the same style. That is, the help.html document would come in the user's language (e.g. german) but wouldn't contain language links (e.g. .de.html). Thus, the url would also reflect the information the user put into the system: The language was only set if it was actually overrided by the user. Since the language is usually guessed right, this keeps nice and tidy URIs (directory indices go from /index.de.html to /!) for most users, and even more importantly doesn't leave to much information in the URI when it is used in a link or an email! Unless the user explicitly set the language, automatic language detection will still work when the user comes from an external link.

Another detail was, that we override an automatic detection of english with german. This might be a special situation that suits only for search.ch, but let's look at the reasons. Tests (comparing the language of queries with the detected language) showed, that english-instead-of-german was the most common mistake in detecting. Quite obvious actually, since still many people prefer to install their computers in english (I do) and then don't change the browser settings. And german is the most common language in Switzerland. And this wrong detection is quite a loss since many parts of the site (e.g. news) are not available in english. On the other hand, by the nature of the site search.ch an english speaking user who doesn't understand german would still get quite far in the wrong language. Thus, the false positives for english were worse than the false negatives are now after the overriding.

Of course, both differences are small details in the big picture, but for a fraction of the users getting those right matters a lot. As does hiding the details from all the others.