Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

Much is written about equity, capital and networking, particularly when prefaced with "social" to ascribe some value to sites such as Facebook, Yahoo or Twitter. Conflating these terms reduces their utility in describing the problem space.

Equity is a measure of value. Tells you how much something is worth, net net of whatever detracting, devaluing or impairing items surround it. Not just equity in the stockholder sense, but brand equity, personal equity, and

Capital is a working form of equity. Capital needs markets - networked communities - that agree on pricing, valuation, transfer, forward transactions, and membership. Capital markets may be the US Treasury auctions, or Kiva microfinance networks of affiliated microlenders.

Networking is what makes those values fungible. It's the basis for exchange of value and for disseminating values.

Assigning value to members of a community isn't a new idea: eBay has member feedback; Cory Doctorow introduced the concept of "whuffie" as a form of social contribution measurement in in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and that idea spawned Tara Hunt's Whuffie Factor. In a large technical community, what are the elements that create value, and what things detract from it? In particular, when you're dealing with technical documents and design patterns that share the half-life of the underlying technologies, last year's contributions have to be discounted versus updates and current interactions. On the other hand, this kind of value doesn't really fit into a market model - would you exchange two Hadoop experts for a graph theoretician? Measurement only makes sense if the semantic contexts are the same, and technologists are not necessarily players in an organizational fantasy league.

That's the set of problems that Peter Reiser and team set out to tackle when defining "community equity," a measurement of contribution and participation. Community equity rewards content publishers but equally recognizes those who interact with the content, as the commenters, redistributors and fine-tuners of content give the community heft. Can you imagine Twitter without retweeting or responses?

Peter and I talked about the state of equity measurement, code availability and what some more down to earth views of "semantic web technology" might be in the latest Innovating@Sun podcast; check out the audio stream and related links.

Glenn Brunette is a Distinguished Engineer and leading security practitioner at Sun. He and I sat down (virtually) to talk about the Immutable Service Container project, a set of tools designed to bridge OS minimization, virtualization, and security monitoring mechanisms. An increasing number of customers are thinking about deploying applications to clouds or other virtualized environments in which they can't attest to the provenance of the underlying hardware and host operating system - ISC provides a thin layer between hypervisor and guest image that re-defines the "trust, but verify" maxim for new current generation of deployers.

Latest Innovating@Sun podcast is up, featuring a discussion with John Jullion-Ceccarelli (Senior Engineering Manager of the NetBeans team) centered around NetBeans in a multi-cultural world.

Years ago, it felt like there were strong forces for convergence around languages, tools, and repositories. Sun was a vibrant participant in those discussions, with "Java" often the answer preceding the question. Sometime around 2001, that attempt at compression reached the Chandrasekhar limit, at least in terms of things like WS-* (thanks, Tim). The only things that result from such strong nuclear forces are supernovae and black holes.

Computer scientists have always invented new languages, grammars, and tools as the state of the art has evolved; new languages that fit the way data and applications will be deployed to clouds, or deployed with greater agility, are just natural evolution. NetBeans has evolved as well, no longer a "Java tool" and much more reflective of the richer state of the state, whether it's clouds, collaborative development sites, languages, or build tools.

I'll admit to a certain vanity with Facebook: I've been trying to build an audience for my personal blog, using a Facebook page to import blog entries and inviting just about everyone who's a friend to follow the page. Facebook very nicely provides "insights" (analytics) on interactions with the page - number of comments, ratings, and other feedback.

Today I noticed that the "Cayman Islands" were the top country for interaction with my page. I have no friends (that I know of) who call the Cayman Islands home, so I poked around and found the page comment that generated the trend. Sure enough, it's a US-based friend vacationing in the Caymans (his public content conveys the same information). So commenting on a Facebook page creates an indirect trail to whatever IP address is reported at the time.

IP addresses are a terrible mechanism for assuring location (due to proxies, carriers, firewalls and other aggregation/translation points) but in this case, they are a fair proxy for "not at home." You could argue that if I'm using Facebook on vacation (or while traveling) I'm disclosing a signficant amount of personal information anyway, but there are many Facebook users who hide their home geographic information and by extension, might want to hide their mobile geographic information as well. The fact that source IP address trumps "home" for determining interaction sources means that Facebook is at least ignoring the intent of, if not the exact letter of, these user preferences when it comes to clouding geography.

Tim Bray and I sat down (albeit 2,600 miles apart) to talk about the Sun Cloud APIs in all of their RESTful grace. We got into why a Creative Commons license makes sense for an API, why the top-level API set is so small, how and why a cloud deployer might want to expand the APIs, and what lessons Tim learned from slogging through more developer documentation than is considered healthy, even by Canadian standards.

Hockey was not discussed.

Transcripts and pointer to the audio are on the Innovating@Sun blog or click to play away below:

I'm participating in a technology roundtable for one of the services industries this week; it's a closed-door session with some pretty heated discussion. The economy is definitely hurting this segment and one of the recurrent themes is that personal (low volume) customers are going to be the growth engine, not business (high volume) users as companies cut back on their spending. Without disclosing industries or players, here are the themes I presented as ways to reshape the services experience for a broader range of current and potential customers:

1. Open up interfaces to what you do. It's a time-honored tradition to think of a business' data as its very own. But what if that data can create new ways to think about the service, new market segments, or new demand for the service? Web mashups are interesting if they have useful data sources to draw from; this doesn't mean that services companies should expose personal data but they can provide interfaces to widely useful, logistics, location, or inventory information. The New York Times has done exactly this with the Times APIs, a set of services that let you search Times content by keyword, context, or specific parameters like dates and by-lines. It doesn't create new newspapers; it creates new ways of using the news that hopefully driver readers back to the Times site for additional information or context. It's not sufficient just to think about consumers as the endpoints of a transaction. Which brings me to...

2. Determine the value of social networks. In the words of Tim O'Reilly, it's not the network radix, it's what gets shared. What experiences are valued, or not valued? What are people saying about you? What does a Twitter search on a hash tag or keyword associated with your service turn up? Simple example: the 3rd generation of my family's cousins have a group on Facebook; every time we think about having a reunion somewhere we end up discussing air fare, hotels, meeting rooms, babysitting, photo sharing and mass quantities of food (it is my family, after all). All of those services businesses could find a pre-aggregated demand pool if they'd build a "Book Your Family Gig" application in Facebook.

3. Create an inbound channel. More informally, this is "listen" but it's the corollary to using the social network to get a pulse on what people think of your service. What are the limits on elasticity, choice, price, and user generated content that demonstrates new uses or specific value add to your service? Far too much services marketing is outbound only; I'm awash in email promotions, coupons, special codes, and one-time offers. But very rarely am I asked what I'd pay for something, or what my trade-off points are. Even more direct: just watch Twitter for "brand name #fail" and see where the exceptions are happening. Reach out and address, listen indirectly, because that creates....

4. Pleasant inconsistency drives loyalty. Give -- don't offer -- me a better seat, better room, nicer car, or 9 holes on the course that I'm going to bludgeon with a golf club that I can't control (this is in fact how my golf badness started). The first time I experience something out of the ordinary flow, I'm likely to decide whether or not I'm willing to use it again, pay a premium for it, or arrange my brand loyalties so that I'll get the benefits of being a repeat customer. Obviously, bad inconsistency, or consistently bad experiences, drive loyalty to other players.

All of these conversations have to happen with input from multiple demographics: Millennials, Gen Y, Gen X, Boomers and now Gloomers, crossed with various degrees of online experience, social networking utility and trust. If you don't figure out how to meet the demands of the Millennials, you won't be in a position to sell, serve or employ them in 5-10 years when they are riding the economic recovery as the core of the spending and working public.

We are going to host and sponsor another WordCamp, once again at Sun's NYC office. The date is October 24, 2009, the place is 101 Park Avenue, and the details are being worked out. Last year we had Matt Mullenweg as a keynote, and some spectacular speakers covering everything from building a personal brand to writing code. Where else do PHP, MySQL and HTML hackers congregate with budding journalists, photographers and other micro voices? Video from previous WordCamps is now part of WordPress.tv, a great way to fill the 9 months it's going to take to gestate our next show.

Early shout out to the GSE Divas for their continued support and efforts in making these happen.

I'm convinced that "productivity" is a dumb word. It presumes some magic metric for how people create value in the workplace, and that metric is usually, inexorably tied to a clocking problem. Work faster, work harder, work more hours - and my favorite - waste fewer hours! I hear Tock's admonishments ringing in the back of my head every time I see the red flag of Facebook notifications. The open question: is Facebook the new Solitaire?

In short, Facebook is a valuable business tool provided you treat it as a context creation vehicle and not actual work product (for most people; Sun has people whose primary work product is created via Facebook and that's because they're primarily recharging employee workplaces). If you spend hours a day creating goofy groups and inviting random friends, or searching for the transitive closure of your friend(friend(cousin(high school buddy))) relationships, then you probably do have a time management problem. But the problem with casting any activity as a "bad use of hours" infers that there's some sorting and prioritization of hours that belong to your employer versus your friends, family or co-workers. Whose hours are they, anyway? The subject is at the heart of what is typically called "work/life balance", but I've more recently heard simplified to "life balance". That's the right emphasis -- when you're always connected, always thinking, frequently Tweeting to inform your e-crew (and self-selected marketing bots), there's no thick-drawn line separating the two. While Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and their social relatives are heavily colored by non-work relationships and content, they can improve rather than impair productivity.

How?

Productivity is about reducing problems of time, geography, and knowledge. Who can help me with a problem, where is the information (or the expert) that I need, how quickly can I find the best answer? There's a negative side the scale as well - what's impairing progress, what if I take the first answer that later creates a myriad of issues, what if I follow a bad link (people, website, or driving directions)? Building -- and maintaining -- relationships drives the positive side of productivity, because they help you navigate to a suitable win more quickly. Actually paying attention to the content traversing those social graphs sometimes addresses the productivity impairments.

This was brought home, literally, last week when I twittered that I was "pissed off." Immediate Facebook status comments echoed Journalism 101: What upset me? Why? When? My status wasn't work-derived, only the after effects of a bad conversation with someone who sent me a very incorrect bill, but without the context it was an attention-grabber. I even got a ping from my boss, who readily admits that he follows me on Facebook as a way of managing me. There's probably some obtuse managerial treatise in that statement, but his outreach kind of snapped me to attention and quite honestly -- got me back to work. Well within the usual hour long damping factor needed to get productive again after such aggravation. Whose hour was it? No need to debate ownership: it was a useful chunk of time.

I was talking this week to a company that builds communications technology. More than one, actually, and their definition of "communications" is as broad as it should be in a world of wireless, digital, social, and voice flavored bit streams. We had a great sidebar on who they believed their developers are: their in-house team? An outsourced team hired to complete a project? Customers? Integration partners? And I couldn't resist bringing up: What about open source communities?

Somewhere in this story is a moral about balancing protein and caffeine before afternoon meetings, but I missed it. I suggested that perhaps the Asterix community was a good leading indicator of how complex communications systems would be built in the future. For the reaction I got, I might have suggested the other Asterix as a source of modern technology insight.

But let's face facts: the hacker culture has thrived on being able to play with phones since day one. Taking a platform that was in-band and invisible for so long and making it a developer play is just a natural evolution -- one driven by the growth in power, performance, and real-time capabilities of general purpose operating systems, availability of general purpose hardware on which to run them, and application level communications software. Put another way: Any comment about software not being "ready" or "capable" has been proven untrue over time.

We saw it happen with Linux, MySQL, and Drupal, and now we'll see it happen in the classic embedded spaces as well. All you need to do is follow the hobbyist space to sense the edges of the market: Linux on Linksys in the hackable router market is a perfect example, and it leads to creative applications of open platforms, like turning the Internet upside down. Go ahead and laugh, but there's an entire suite of access control, identity management, and auditing applications waiting to be built in slightly less user-inhibiting ways.

For true star power not related to the star (asterisk) key on your phone (calling by name, not by value), check out Sun's own Brian Aker discussing how he builds (current tense, as in work in progress) his own PBX - his musing on Asterix are even funnier than the Francophone Asterix. [note: Four letter words, Pecha Kucha style, mash-ups, and Brian's love life. Simultaneously.]

If you aren't thinking broadly about where your developers will come from, they'll surprise you and possibly your product plans.

I was digging through old paper files this weekend and found a note I had scribbled on a hotel phone message notepad that read simply "Newt Gingrich and candles." Truth be told, I was doing a periodic office purge and happened to find a manilla folder of clippings, notes and sketches I had for a random book idea back in 1998. The Newt-onian mechanics actually sent me on a Talmudic scholar-like Google quest for the original quote (also verified here) which was along the lines of "If Thomas Edison invented the light bulb today, [the news] would report it as 'Candle making industry threatened'". Put the quote in historic context: Gingrich was railing against CBS News at the time, he was reacting to stories about how the budding Internet phenomenon was going to upset retail, and he was looking for a sound byte.

Political contexts often remain invariant over time.

I used that quote frequently when talking about Java, networking, and the .com boom of the late 90s and how the ability to directly interact with customers, consumers and potential users of your product completely reshaped distribution, and that any company that chose to ignore those factors would become less interesting. It is, and was, a matter of perspective on massive market disruption: opportunity or threat.

Market contexts often remain invariant over time.

I won't whitewash the current financial crisis: the markets are a mess, and we probably won't know the true extent of the mess until the cyclic graph problem known as counter-party risk is sorted out, assets priced or auctioned, and some senses of liquidity restored to the credit markets. But actually traversing these graphs and identifying the risks highlights the opportunity, rather than the threat - we have a chance, as technologists, to create the infrastructure, tools, and data management mechanisms underlying any improved transparency in the financial markets. In the words of my ever-cranky buddy Geoff, if you want to understand the risk of a zloty-denominated futures contract on the price of oil in emerging markets to be delivered to Eastern Europe, you better have transparent market information for all of the intermediaries and end points.

The information exists, but it's not evenly distributed or acknowledged. That is, by the way, what William Gibson says about the future. With the .com boom, we had the good part first, then the correction; I'd prefer to think about the current credit market crisis as the correction preceding the next build-out of financial market infrastructure. Compute grids used for Monte Carlo simulation of interest rate and credit quality future-looking scenarios, often used to price mortgage-backed securities, will not be the sole banking infrastructure that rebuilds confidence and velocity in the credit markets. Those scientific HPC systems are going to be supplemented by data-rich, "commercial HPC" installations to examine systemic, structural and market risk based on transaction data, market data, and multiple sources of public data: less prediction and more counting.

Thinking anything less lets financial candle-makers extinguish the possibilities enabled by the electric light bulb.

What would make 130 bloggers, mySQL hackers, PHP coders, writers, journalists, photographers, and other assorted geeks come into a midtown New York office building on a rainy Sunday morning when the Big Apple is more traffic impaired than usual?

WordCamp NY.

And it was worth every bit of logistical challenge -- even for those of us who just got to hear WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg go apolitical about the "State of the Word," including an update on WordPress 2.7, how plugins become part of the core, how the WordPress community is thriving, and why he does what he does (and he's becoming more of a softspoken Jimmy Wales and less of a PHP hacker elite, and I think that's A Good Thing).

First principles: Sun was a sponsor of this event, which was held in our midtown NY office, and the obvious question (asked by a few people) was "Why Sun?" In my opening, caffeine-addled comments, I tried to outline three reasons:

(1) mySQL, the database on which WordPress is built, is part of Sun, and therefore WordPress users are indirectly Sun software users, whether by intention or default

(2) WordCamp epitomizes the sharing of good ideas. Sun has always believed in building on the ideas of others and sharing our ideas with others, whether through standards work (think NFS), open source projects like GlassFish and OpenSolaris or direct employee participation in a variety of smaller open source projects like noodling around with WordPress plug-ins.

(3) The digital divide is an information one. Bloggers help bridge it daily. Every great consumer technology - cell phones, printers, GPS systems, digital cameras - had its start as a very high end, professional (read: sometimes military) version which came down in price and up in accessibility, empowering an entire host of users to apply the technology in new ways. WordPress gives the power of a rich publishing system (not just word processing, but producing something with a vibe) to individuals.

But in the words of Marty Debergi, 3 minutes was enough of my yacking - Matt Mullenweg provided data points that had me scribbling as fast as I was nodding and remembering to keep my mouth closed.

- WordPress has 3 core developers and about 90 contributors. It defines "good community" and "global" - the core team lives in England. And Florida. And Vancouver - one each.

- WordPress has hit the big time - it powers the NFL blogs and CNN's blogs, the latter of which provided the best up to date Hurricane Ike information available. With over 230M daily page hits, wordpress.com aggregate content is a "significant percent" of Internet viewership.

- There have been over 11M downloads of WordPress, with 2.38M new blogs this year, 35.8M new posts and a run rate of about 4M posts a month. In larger units of measure, that's the equivalent of two full English Wikipedias a month.

- There have been 18 WordCamps this year, with 9 more planned. Matt showed pictures covering the spectrum from a hotel venue that surrounded an outdoor pool to a restuarant to a formal lecture hall. My note to other-selfs: local organization is key; without Jonathan Dingman driving this in NY, there would not have been a WordCamp, and his able team of volunteers made this fly. Thanks, guys.

- WordPress, like OpenOffice and Firefox (nice company!) is a widespread consumer open source phenomenon. I had to think about this - but it's a very strong statement about the permeation of "that open source stuff" into not only the broad market, but the next broad market that matters: the people who have grown up empowered by consumer technology.

- Great distribution enables great customization. With an average of 4.96 plugins per blog, but a very long tail of plugins available, nearly every WordPress instance is unique. If I was looking for a powerful statement about mySQL, that was one that fulfilled the wish in an unexpected way. The underlying database schema, database tables, and interfaces are the same through (nearly all) of that dynamic range of plugins, but the combinatorial possibilities are measured in scientific notation. This isn't a case of powerful being good -- as Matt later commented, simple is good. Simple but solid enough to do the job worked -- which is why they chose mySQL and PHP to power WordPress.

- Akismet, the anti-comment spam tool, remains the most popular plugin, attesting to the widespread nature and depth of the issue. Matt's take: Spammers are clever, and if AI is going to be invented, spammers will do it first.

Nothing like hard data to make my hastily scribbled notes look good =- and get us thinking about WordCamp NJ this summer.

The phone interview that sparked my long rant on innovation frameworks has been published online by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. There is, as always, a backstory to the front story: Lise Rybowski, a principal at AHRQ, is (was) a classmate of mine who found me on Facebook. Intersecting circles of trust sometimes produce more than cute Venn diagrams.

WordCamp NY is now in full-bore {planning, scheduling, registration} mode. I'm providing local support in terms of Sun office space and some logistics, and I'm looking forward to hearing about everything from CMS to spam reduction. Thanks to the GSE Communications Divas for working the details (and using "hygroscopic" in a sentence!)

Top question I'm asked when I mention this: What does WordPress have to do with Sun? Primary: WordPress is written in PHP and uses mySQL as a content and metadata storage engine. Every WordPress author is indirectly a Sun product consumer. Secondary: Wordcamp is about blogging style and structure, and that's directly aligned with the culture of transparency and public discourse that we've been living for several years.

Despite having half a dozen computing devices within reach at any time (Eric Schmidt was right in 1995 when he said "In the future your body will have 5 IP addresses; where you put them is your business"), I'm still a stickler for sticky notes, notebooks, scribbled thoughts on the back of tear-off calendar pages, and literally back of the envelope calculations. At one point I had two "work notebooks" (one new, one old), a collection of stickies on my home iMac, another set on my ancient TravelMac, and an assortment of things that seemed to accrete in the reporter's notebook I keep in my car's center console.

I crave simple. I still use vi for editing text files, and I send email without capital letters (this is because of a long-standing belief that "chording" on the keyboard contributes to carpal tunnel syndrome, so I attribute 28 years of healthy paws to my devolved typographical style. Thanks, pep). At the same time, I am constantly tearing items out of print materials or bookmarketing them for later blog ideas (not at all obvious from the lack of recent writing) and need to be able to sort out work ideas, the "honey do list", and a pun waiting for a blog to congeal around it.

Enter Evernote. It combines the text editor like functions that us habitual list makers crave, with a web clipping function, tagging for easier search and organization, and it has a variety of mobile interfaces. Voila. I can start an idea at home, finish it in the airport, edit it or review it on my (somewhat despised) iPhone, and even print off an old-fashioned hardcopy for the close-paren function of the habitual list maker: ticking things off when they're done.

In ten days it's become a top-five application along with Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.

The hullabaloo, hoopla, hearsay and hand-wringing over the Microsoft-Yahoo deal has me more than mildly amused, and not just because it would fill the H-stanza in King Crimson's (entirely appropriate) Elephant Talk. Somehow, Google thinks that the deal will damage the internet in some way that having opaque code that colors our search glasses doesn't. Having one overwhelming path to an answer, whether it's search, email, personal productivity apps (there's a misnomer), or advertising, is bad for the internet. I'm regularly reminded of Larry Wall's comments about the ornate and duplicative nature of perl: it's is about having many ways to accomplish the same thing, it's about having paper and crayons and not just an Etch-a-Sketch with which to express your crudely drawn ideas. That's what makes the internet good, frightening, disruptive, harsh and useful, all at the same time: there are many paths, some of which seem wrong but all equally transparent.

Personally, I think the Microsoft-Yahoo mash-up is a Truly Bad Idea, but not because of competitive or market forces. It's something that "can only end in tears" to quote one of my favorite staff peers. I'm neither a financial analyst nor do I play one in my blog, but on the surface, the deal seems to have interesting, material impacts like accounting for the premium paid, and the minor bump in net income to cover other Microsoft experiments in media. And finally, I don't see how owning an advertising platform makes Microsoft into a media company, if that's where their joint strategic vector is aimed. It's difficult to discern sources of other operational leverage, unless Microsoft wants to re-engineer Yahoo's platforms (pure cost always has a bad return on investment unless the future cost savings are measured in orders of magnitude, not percentages). The New York Times summarized the situation quite neatly by comparing the deal to building a spaceship out of spare parts.

So what bugs me about the whole deal, and makes me smile to see Google grating? It's a long prolegomena to any future meat-physics, built on three premises: (1) The difference between advertising platforms and media companies; (2) Yahoo's creed of "connecting people" and (3) the decreased utility of thinking in hierarchies.

Yahoo is an advertising platform, not a media company. True media companies make their money from end users paying for content, and in a world of long-tail economics, they grow those markets through other types of content -- blogs, linked references, word of mouth, email, tagged content, or just about anything else that expresses opinion or organizes ontologically related thoughts. The "head of the tail" will still be advertising driven, but the long tail doesn't rely on ad displays, click throughs, or content analysis to drive volume. Part of the itchiness here is that Microsoft only makes those "head of the tail" products, and monetizes essentially nothing in the long tail. So buying an advertising platform aimed at other heads seems reasonable -- and is a reflection of the media company == advertising platform structure that brought us the writer's strike.

Yahoo's creed is to connect people to their passions. I love ice hockey, eBay, baseball, the New Jersey Devils, Princeton, and my family, and aside from some very infrequently used Yahoo group-based mailing lists, there's zero net interaction with Yahoo there. I used flickr but switched to SmugMug; anything I want to tag I put on Facebook. I'm not sure where the connections are supposed to come from, and I certainly don't find clumps of targeted ads useful in these narrow, single-topic facets of my life. So Yahoo hasn't helped me find any other parts of my interest taxonomy, nor have its ads stimulated me to buy things based on intersections of those interests. Some might claim that I'm not taking full advantage of the Yahoo experience, but that's because I find the experience too much like using the Yellow Pages (the alphabetical, printed kind, not the maiden name of NIS). I don't want more content, I want more organization. Which leads me to...

The "H" in Yahoo means "hierarchy". Perhaps the root cause of Yahoo's consumption stems from holding on to the "H" in the likely ex post facto Yang and Filo acronym for too long. Hierarchies imply that you start at the general and work your way to the more specific; in the advertising platform of the future (or better yet, the media company growth platform of the future), you'll go from specific to specific. When I do my annual Locus magazine sci-fi shopping run, I'm not starting with "Books" or even "Space Opera" but rather looking for additional input from writers and editors whose output I trust, and in three years of picking my beach reading this way I've discovered half a dozen authors and consumed all of their works. No click-throughs, no banner ads, and no in-store display required.

That, in a nutshell, is the issue: connecting people to concepts (things, communities, ideas, markets) is a graph problem, and if you want to focus on the graph problem, you need to think about the edges of the graph, not the nodes in the graph. Let the nodes (the content sites, the media companies) flourish, and build a better, richer, more wonderful graph traversal experience, and you have succeeded. It's why I read BoingBoing and why getting slashdotted is so powerful. It's why FaceBook has promise, once it figures out how to get around the walls of its content garden.

But unless Microsoft dramatically changes its designs on media company status, I believe the focus will be on the nodes in the graph, and advertisements for those nodes, rather than the edges connecting the nodes. And at some point, the "Yet Another" part of the acronym expansion dominates the end result, while the "Officious" and "Oracle" potentials - to create node-to-node links that nobody suspected were interesting until they discovered passion in their targets - are forever encapsulated in the cells of an M&A spreadsheet. And that's something to cry over.