Lonnie Knows Everything

Once any computing niche becomes established, established players seek consolidation.

Squeezing out rivals, creating firm leadership, is how you move from buzz to sales to profit.

Social networking has now reached that stage, and nothing marks it more than Flock 3.0.

Most observers are focused on the switch from Firefox to Chrome as the base browser, including the setting of Google as the default search engine. It’s a complete rewrite, and the business plan rewrite is the most important bit.

Flock is no longer content to be cool — it wants to make money.

There is a sense of urgency to that, and consolidation of the social space will hasten it. The new software is focused entirely on two social networks — Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn, MySpace, even Google’s Buzz are over the side.

These are good choices, but are they the market’s final answer? This is where I suspect Flock may have made mistakes.

Because not all markets consolidate as one or two mass market leaders and laggards who eventually fail. What can happen is the creation of solid niches, fortresses that are impregnable for parts of the market.

We saw it in PCs with Apple. We’ve seen it in cellphones with Blackberry, still the market leader. Apple established itself with artists, the Blackberry with e-mailers, and if that’s your thing these are the only choices you look at.

The same may be true in social networking. Twitter is for communication. Facebook is for kids. Linkedin is for professionals. And so on. By limiting its reach to just the two leaders, Flock may be missing much of the market.

This is far from fatal. Other networks and “special editions” are always possible, following suitable negotiations. And it’s clear now that if there is profit in it Flock will be happy to negotiate.

Social networking is here to stay. It’s time to make money from your friends.

The real Chrome threat to Firefox lies in add-ons.

This is currently Firefox’s strength. There are literally thousands of add-ons for Firefox today, over 1,000 in web development alone.

But by concentrating on niches, and signing exclusive deals, so the add-on makers work only on Chrome, Google is taking small but telling bites of the market.

The media is already flocking to one such deal. But a second extension better illustrates the trend, and it’s called (naturally) extension.

Extension.fm finds mp3 files on pages you visit and indexes them into a personal music library. This is a seriously cool thing for people like my own son, who loves to regale us at dinner these days by showing the latest music video he has found.

At 19 he’s never gotten into iTunes, and many feel the Apple-Google rivalry will define music in the future.  It’s the next evolution in the music business, from music you own to music you find. And the one rule of music is you want to be where the young folks are, not where I am.

Extension is the kind of game-changing add-on that can move browser loyalties. My son has been dismissive of Chrome in the past. When I tell him of this he won’t be, I guarantee.

And that seems to be the strategy. While Firefox acts like a typical open source project, listing whatever comes in, working with everyone, Chrome acts more like a proprietary outfit, strategically.

This is a key difference between Google and most open source companies. Most are looking to build an ecosystem however they can get one. Google can be more careful.

WordPress 3.0, dubbed Thelonius, is now available for download, filled with new features and bug fixes, including a merger of its single-user and multi-user versions.

A blog post at the site says the team is taking some time off to focus on other areas of the WordPress experience, like forums, themes and plugins.

The team said there were over 10.9 million downloads of WordPress 2.9. It’s released under Version 2.0 of the GPL.

Reaction has been enthusiastic. Bloggers, rejoice says Technorati, and DesignTaxi calls it a fine blogging service, while HTML Goodies hails the delivery of the new content management system.

Therein hangs our tail.

WordPress is known as a first-class blogging platform. It’s the platform we use here at ZDNet. I have grown accustomed to its face, and most bloggers I know say it puts other blog publishing platforms, like Movable Type (which I also use) in the shade.

But WordPress is not just a blogging platform. It is, in fact, a full-fledged content management system, a CMS. It has been given awards as a CMS, and beaten Drupal in that category.

Yet that’s not the way the market sees it. Blogging and content management have different markets. Blogging is well-understood by publishers and design houses. CMSs are the property of enterprises and communities.

This doesn’t mean the two types of software are unrelated. I have long believed that the failure of the 2004 Howard Dean campaign had less to do with the scream and more to do with the failure to upgrade from a blogging platform to a full CMS. That failure cost Iowa, and the dispiriting Iowa loss caused the scream.

The two blogger-consultants who recommended the upgrade to the Dean campaign were Jerome Armstrong, who now helms MyDD.com, and Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos. Both were engaged in such an upgrade when they made the recommendation. Kos now has the left’s largest online community and SB Nation, a competitive sports site.

The point is non-political. The market sees a CMS as big boy software, a blogging platform as mere publishing.

Since the launch of its commercial arm, Acquia, Drupal has solidified its niche in the CMS space. WordPress, meanwhile, has stuck to its knitting, hence commentaries like this one in FastCompany, 6 reasons small businesses need WordPress.

CBS, which owns ZDNet, is not a small company. We depend on WordPress. How about a story about 6 reasons big companies need WordPress, with examples?

I think Matt Mullenweg’s team might be well advised to spend less time working on the software, working in their business, and more time working on their business, seeking a way past Drupal. Mobile platforms represent a new opportunity to shake things up, but it won’t happen unless y’all make the competition explicit.

What open source needs right now is a good old-fashioned marketing war. WordPress vs. Drupal, WordPress.com vs. Acquia.

I’ll get the popcorn.

Want to beat the you-know-what out of your local newspaper “monopoly?”

Open source has found a way.

Your two ingredients are:

• OpenBlock, an open source version of Everyblock, which lets you organize police reports, real estate sales, restaurant reviews, and anything else in your local area, keyed to location, and
• YouTube, which now offers online video editing, social network marketing services, and YouTube Direct, which aims to leverage what it calls citizen reporting.

Your site will live locally only in part. Much of it  — the high-cost video part of it — will live mainly in the Google cloud, brought to your readers through embed links.

The key to it all is OpenBlock, which was first funded by the Knight Foundation as Everyblock, then sold to MSNBC in 2009.

The expansion of the open source project is pushed by two newspapers, The Boston Globe and the Columbia (Missouri) Tribune. The funding, again, comes from Knight, but the largest part of the funding goes to OpenPlans, which already has a number of geo-based projects underway.

As the deal indicates this is all aimed at making local newspapers relevant in the Internet age, but since OpenPlans is an open source project there is no reason why new entrepreneurs can’t take advantage of it.

You can start by looking at another OpenPlans project, StreetsBlog, or consider another open source project, the new WordPress. It is, as noted earlier today, a full-fledged Content Management Service, meaning it can scale to where you want it. Or, if you think you need professional help with your CMS, check out Acquia.

The point, as I have said many times, is to organize and advocate your local market. Geographic-based services help with the organizing, and community-created videos can create the advocacy.

The time is now, and the opportunity is here. Newspapers will never seize it. They haven’t over 15 years. You can. Just remember to start from the ad side in, linking buyers and sellers, then move out to advocacy, not the other way around.

The future of local news is open.

In the run-up to the Oracle acquisition of Sun, America’s open source advocates were mostly on Oracle’s side.

Oracle made big promises. They wanted the open source assets — Open Office, Java, and mySQL among them. They said they would invest in those assets.

CEO Larry Ellison called predictions by one analyst of massive Sun lay-offs “irresponsible garbage.” Anyone speculating in that direction should be ashamed of themselves, he said.

I wasn’t ashamed. I believed Oracle bought Sun for its hardware business, not its software. I saw Oracle’s promises as pie crust  — easily made, easily broken.

Many Europeans were even more skeptical. People like Florian Mueller of FOSSPatents and mySQL co-founder Monty Widenius stirred up anger across the continent to the pending deal. The European Commission emerged as the key roadblock to the deal.

But trustworthy open source advocates, like Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center, were adamant. “For its own business reasons, Oracle will heavily invest in MySQL’s future,” he wrote.

The deal was approved.

Now that Sun has been inside Oracle for a few months I believe the skeptics are being proven right. While some analysts say they’re not surprised at recent job cuts, they are pretty deep, in line with the predictions Ellison called “garbage.”  The Wall Street Journal has estimated the job cuts will cost Oracle $1 billion in severance. Sales are slowing.

Worse may be to come. Java is fragmenting. Solaris is increasingly being treated as proprietary, not as open source. Sam Dean of OStatic agrees with me that Open Office is drifting. CNET’s James Urquhart sees mySQL as a minus, not a plus, for the cloud. The M in the LAMP stack is falling behind.

Larry Ellison’s pattern with acquisitions is clear. He engages in asset stripping. He uses vendor lock-in with those he acquires to reach deep into their wallets. He pushes those customers toward proprietary Oracle technologies.

Nothing wrong with that, in theory. But when these assets are created by a community, not a company, when they are part of a commons, I think they deserve protection. They shouldn’t be treated the way BP treats the Gulf of Mexico.

Why anyone expected something different with Sun and its open source assets is beyond me. Ellison verbally attacked all who questioned his motives, and his intentions, but his record had already spoken for him.

As it seems to be speaking in this case.

You may disagree. If you do, I want to hear from you.

Certainly there is an argument to be made that Oracle is increasing its investment in mySQL. But if open source is all about ending vendor lock-in, Larry Ellison is its worst nightmare. And since acquiring its crown jewels, I would argue, that nightmare has slowly come true.

How do the open source advocates who argued for this deal feel about it now?