If you’ve watched any of my Tech Shakedown videos here on ZDNet, you’d know that I’ve been asking viewers to let me know if they know of a breakdown that needs to be the subject of a Tech Shakedown. In cases where suggestions like these come from ZDNet’s audience members (and I have been getting them, thank you!), I do have to check them out. Well, this one definitely checked out.

A couple of weeks ago, Andrés, an engineer that reads ZDNet wrote the following to me via e-mail:

Lately HP brought on the market a series of pavilion notebooks that where on high demand because of their all in one features.

But it seems that there’s been a cover-up on the reliability of their performance. A lot of costumers who bought their notebooks are currently experiencing the same problem two major problems with their systems.

How does Andres know about these other customers? Well, since June 2007, they’ve been flooding HP’s Web site with complaints about how their Pavilion notebook computers are randomly losing any sense of the fact that they have wireless adapters in them (which in turn causes a loss of productivity). The thread is so flooded with messages that the only way I can get Web browser to view the entire thing without seizing is to close most of my other applications.

The issues affect both the HP Pavilion 6000 and 9000 series of notebooks and the real issue is that, for such a huge thread which seems to be the identical problem, HP is nowhere to be seen in terms of responding to its customers. Instead, message after message reflects how getting action from HP’s technical support group has been like pulling teeth. The result is that the customers have been left to help each other out — telling their own stories (multiple times) of how they’ve managed to get their motherboards replaced by HP.

Clearly, if you read every message as I have, the initial fixes that HP is still suggesting to this day (upgrading the BIOS, replacing the network adapter) are not working. This leads you to wonder why HP is still suggesting remediation that’s not working. At the very least, based on the stories being told in the forum, it doesn’t seem as though HP is telling customers “We’re aware of the problem… just try these two things and if it doesn’t work, we’ll fix your motherboard.” From the contents of the forum, you get the sense that the customers have to know that a new motherboard is the fix and then ask for it. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Need more evidence of how HP is slow to respond? I contacted HP last week (Thursday) about the problem. I showed them the thread and said this doesn’t look good. I was told I’d be hearing back from them but, after a scan of my inbox, my spam folder, and my voice mail, I still have yet to hear back from the contact who said he’d get back to me. When they do get back to me, I’ll get the official response into this blog. In the meantime, check out the video.

Sunday in the Berlind household is usually pancake day, a time when I get to clear my mind, plant the kids in front of the stove where we collaborate on a different kind of stack building (not software). This Sunday won’t be any different. But, come Sunday afternoon, me and the boys will be packing into the SUV and heading down to NYC for three back-to-back events.

The week starts off on Monday morning with Startup Camp at the New York Seminar and Conference Center. Startup Camp is an unconference that’s produced by my events company (Mass Events Labs) and it’s primarily for the various constituencies with a stake in startups: entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and people looking for employment with companies offering ground floor opportunities. I along with the co-founder of Mass Events Labs Doug Gold will be there and I’ll have my one-man video and audio production crew Matt Conner with me to find some good technology stories to tell. This is our third Startup Camp (our first on the East Coast) and, if you’re in the area, you’re still welcome to join us. Feel free to sign up on the registration page and show up on Monday morning.

Once Camp is over on Tuesday night, we dive straight into Mobile Business Expo the next day where I’m scheduled to do a mobile show-n-tell of a bunch of interesting mobile devices. I have a pile of them in my study right now. Some you’ve seen. Some you haven’t. So, if you’re near the Javits Center on Wednesday, try to swing by my session at 10:45.

Mobile Business Expo is actually a part of the larger Interop show where Matt and I will be rolling tape and hunting down even more interesting technology stories. The goal of course is to seize the opportunity of there being so much technology in one place at one time to crank out some great video of that tech in action. So, if you can’t make it to any of the events, try swinging by my blog to get the video coverage of them.

Literally within minutes of each other (strangely coincidental), I received two e-mails — one from a colleague and the other from someone who concealed their identity — that basically told me I was out of line for questioning the chances that Microsoft’s Windows Home Server will succeed. My colleague Shawn Morton over at sister CNET Networks property Tech Republic simply notified me that he had responded in his blog. The headline of his post — Has David Berlind even used Windows Home Server? — probably could not do a better job of helping me to make my point. Before I get to that, here’s what the other e-mail (from someone who only identified him or herself as flamingkittens) said:

From: flamingkittens
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 4:16 PM
To: David Berlind
Subject: Uneducated Moron = YOU

I just read your review of WHS, and I have to admit; You’re a convincing idiot. If you’d even bothered to truly try the software rather than base your opinion on articles you’ve read about it, you would know that WHS is actually the best thing to come out of Microsoft since Windows XP Professional SP2.

nd a note on you attempting to set up a Linux server in your home: You’d have to be a one-eyed downs baby with no arms or legs to not know how to set one up.

Therefore my friend, you are a complete idiot who needs to think about going back to working at a fast-food chain before you start spewing proverbial crap out of your mouth. Just because you hold a BBA in CIS doesn’t make you what you think you are. You don’t know the first thing about good computing.

In summary: David Berlind = N00B

That’s the entire e-mail, unedited. Flamingkittens is probably right. I am an idiot. But not for the reasons s/he says I am. Rather, I’m an idiot for unnecessarily making my original argument more complicated than it needed to be. In that argument, I stated that WHS bucks the trend that entire market is heading when it comes to solving the problems it solves and that it’s complicated. Both s/he and Shawn hung the focus of their rebuttals on the latter point about complexity. They both point out that Windows Home Server is a great product and not so difficult to use.

I should have known better. In my original post, I pointed to things that Microsoft said about Windows Home Server that blink in neon the word “complicated.” You can go back to that post and read them if you want. But to be honest, I regret pointing these complications out. They really don’t matter. What matters is that Microsoft is attempting to start a market that doesn’t exist. Let’s be honest. Before Windows Home Server came along, there was nothing else like it on the market. There are other solutions that do some of what WHS does. But in totality, WHS stands alone. I argued in that original post that if the market for something like WHS really existed, then Apple would have done one already. There’s a reason it hasn’t.

If people need one of these (I’m not convinced they do), they probably don’t know it. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s another prescient clip from the Ars review:

At first glance, Windows Home Server seems built to scratch an itch that doesn’t exist.

This is almost exactly my point. “At first glance.” Clearly, Ars is going down the path of “there’s more to this than meets the eye” and there is. But the problem for Microsoft is that most market-starting products like WHS only get one glance. And it’s during that one glance that Microsoft must somehow convince consumers to buy WHS.

Asking people to part with their money for another “thing” in their house that they’ll have to pay some attention to (regardless of what it is or how much attention they must pay to it) is a very difficult sell. Particularly since there’s some opportunity cost involved in buying one.

Ars Technica’s very thorough review makes a great point:

Windows Home Server is available (a) as a complete hardware/software solution or (b) as OEM software for system builders. Joe and Jane Public will likely walk into their local big-box electronics retailer and buy prebuilt machines that will have Windows Home Server already installed and configured for use.

What’s that system going to cost in Circuit City or Best Buy? When someone goes into that store with that kind of money to spend, are they going to go there knowing they want to buy a Windows Home Server? If yes, what will Microsoft have done to insert this thought into their heads? If not, where are these servers going to be in the store (relative to other items that could be purchased with the same money)?

Before parting with their money for yet another computer to put in their house (and connect to their network), the first question that Joe and Jane are going to have are What is it?; Why do I need one?; If I need this, are there alternatives?; and finally, what else could I spend this money on? WHS could be the easiest product in the world to use. But Microsoft is still asking people to part with their money for something that most people have never parted with their money for before. At least not in one purchase. OK, I’ll submit that part of WHS’ appeal is how, for those of us that have traditionally “acquired” WHS’ functionality in parts, WHS kills those multiple birds with one stone. Again, Ars:

Over the years, we’ve cobbled together our own “home servers” using a variety of platforms and hacks to get the functionality we desired. Others have taken advantage of consumer-level storage devices such as Infrant’s ReadyNAS or Data Robotics’ Drobo to back up files and serve up media. These were haphazard at best, as it required piecing together both hardware and various software applications into a patchwork solution.

The problem for Microsoft is that the “we” that Ars is talking about isn’t a big enough market to make WHS a success. That “we” is people like you, me, flamingkittens (who clearly is a techie judging by the Linux background s/he implies) and Shawn; a group of buyers who would just assume own a WHS because it exists. That “we” is not Joe and Jane Public.

Case in point? My neighbor Sue. Recently, I told Sue’s story in this space. When Sue has problems with her PC (not unusual), she calls the neighborhood IT department (me). I like helping. There was a part of the Ars Technica review that took me right back to that story I told about Sue. According to Ars:

Managing users and permissions for Windows Home Server is done from the User Accounts screen. From here, you can view and manage all user accounts.

When adding a new account, Windows Home Server will prompt you to enter a user name and password and then select permissions for each of the available shared folders.

Now read the last two paragraphs in my story about Sue:

Before I left, I pointed out to Sue two other features of her investment. First, that she could fax directly from her PC without printing anything out (as opposed to printing out, and then faxing). Second, that she could give her daughters their own accounts on the system — accounts that would not only allow each of the girls to partition their instant messaging and Web preference from each other, but also accounts that couldn’t interfere with the system’s installation.

It was all news to her…..and a failure on behalf of the PC industry that’s impossible to quantify.

Here’s my neighbor Sue (could just as easily have been Jane Public) who didn’t have a clue that should set up separate user accounts for her family members. When I offered to do it for her, she said, “Nah, that sounds too complicated.”

This is the home that Windows Home Server is targeted at. They’ve got multiple systems, multiple kids, lots of music, etc. I’m not saying that Windows Home Server is complicated. But if it’s not, Microsoft must first educate Sue about its features (like establishing multiple users), convince her that she needs that in her life, help her over any perception that its complicated and get her to part with her money.

I just think this is a much harder sell than most people realize, especially for a company that doesn’t have a lot of experience in starting new markets (markets existed for practically everything it sells before it started selling those things).

IDG News Service’s Juan Carlos Perez has published what is probably one of his best works ever, this one an interview of Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen (also, see Reuters’ coverage of Chizen’s webifications plans). The questions Perez asks are absolutely spot on. For example, he asks:

It seems that in recent months, the Adobe story has gotten more complicated than it was a few years ago as the company moves into new areas and technologies like hosted applications. Are you concerned that this might confuse and alienate existing customers?

Chizen agreed that there’s more complexity than ever to Adobe’s portofolio. Given Adobe’s dalliance in hosted applications, Perez asked if online advertising would play a serious role in Adobe’s future revenue mix (a great question given how that other shrink-wrap desktop software company has gone full bore with on-line ads).

One great factoid from interview: 70 percent of streamed video is played through Flash. Wow. Chizen brought this up when Perez hit him with the Microsoft Silverlight question. Chizen is clearly not one to let Adobe rest on its laurels. He’s treating Microsoft as a serious threat but also reminds us that the Flash ecosystem has a 10 year head start on Silverlight. It will be a lot of ground for Microsoft to make up. Whereas the global footprint of Windows has afforded a certain distribution channel to Microsoft, much to the chagrin of the software giant’s competitors, Adobe’s global footprint is nearly the same as Microsoft’s (Chizen claims 99.1 percent penetration). That doesn’t mean that Microsoft can’t even the score over the long run. But what it does mean is that Microsoft’s natural distribution advantage isn’t much of an advantage in this case.

Chizen also points out that Flash is on 300 million non-PC devices which left me wondering what on earth he was talking about. A little Googling turned up a story from March of this year about China Mobile running a handset download service on Adobe’s Flash lite. China Mobile has 300 million subscribers. While it’s not totally clear from the text of that story —

Subscribers with supported handsets can access and download Flash Lite content from five different categories via their Monternet service which is available through their phone’s web browser. With over 300 million subscribers for China Mobile there’s a lot of opportunity for Flash Lite developers to sell their content to subscribers and we’re really excited about the opportunity in China for growing a Flash Lite ecosystem.

— I think it’s safe to assume that not all of them have access to the Flash Lite-based service just yet. 300 million devices or not, the keys to Adobe’s ongoing success lie in both the company’s global cross-platform footprint and and the developer community that, for rich Internet apps (and even rich desktop apps) still sees Adobe as the go-to solution provider for the rich platform of choice (see When it comes to RIAs, is Adobe winning a one horse race?). So long as Flash is the go to video platform for giants like YouTube (it is) and big developers like eBay and Nike see it as the future to the interactivity of their sites (as they do), the Microsoft Silverlight team has at least a decade if not more of work cut out for it.

Speaking of decades, Perez very insightfully asks about Adobe’s plans for software-as-a-service based architectures (where Adobe is dabbling now). Though he doesn’t ask about it directly, you can’t help but wonder if Chizen is also thinking about offering platforms (as opposed to just applications) via the SaaS model. That of course is one of the gospel’s of salesforce.com.

A lot of people don’t get the implications of salesforce’s platform as a service (PaaS) strategy. But it’s really quite simple. Today, a lot of companies run their in-house applications on J2EE or .NET servers and they have developers writing code to run on those servers. They’re also running those servers themselves. Both platforms have baked in system functionality but not a whole lot of business functionality. In other words, J2EE and .NET are agnostic to the type business logic that runs on them. Meanwhile salesforce offers pretty much the same thing, only you don’t need your own hardware (so you don’t have to worry about the scalability of your apps), ID management and security are baked in (they don’t have to be programmed in), and there’s all sorts of hard core business stuff that’s baked into the system for the developer’s taking (in the Java and .Net worlds, you have to add that after).

In fact, speaking of Java and .Net, this sort of PaaS approach is absolutely ideal for runtime architectures which is, after all, what salesforce is running. A few years ago, when utility computing as a concept was starting to get some traction, I spoke with Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos about running exactly such a hosted Java utility and wondered why, with so much of Sun’s energy going into utility computing, Sun wasn’t (a) building such a utility, and (b) in the case of Java, figuring out a way to commoditize billable units of Java compute power by allowing that utility to be equally powered by any server that could run Java (eg: Solaris, Windows, Linux, etc.). He liked the idea but Sun clearly wasn’t anywhere close to having something like that. Surely, such a clusterable architecture could have profound implications for organizations wanting to run their own behind-the-firewall utilities as well as Sun who theoretically could have put itself into the multi-tenant Java hosting business the way salesforce.com is also now in the multi-tenant “progammable platform” hosting business. After all, who wants to worry about hardware and scalability?

Theoretically speaking, there’s nothing preventing Adobe from moving to the same model where they run some giant multitenant Flash (or AIR) utility thereby saving companies all the trouble of setting up their own Flash laden datacenters. Like salesforce, such a utility would be a real attraction to the current crop of Java and .NET programmers if it offered some canned business logic the way salesforce.com does (not to mention that there’s no reason that Flash developers couldn’t simply call upon functionality from salesforce.com itself — a point that salesforce.com veep of developer marketing Adam Gross made when I interviewed him visualforce.com). Or maybe there could be other forms of canned logic that Flash is well-suited to.

In the interview, Chizen says he doesn’t see Adobe going the same direction Google is going with Google Apps. Adobe just acquired the Flash-based hosted word processor Buzzword but he sees that as being complimentary to Adobe’s efforts to make it easy to collaborate around PDF files rather than being the part of some master plan to build a Google Apps-like productivity suite. But just supposing Adobe did offer Flash on more of a PaaS on-demand utility-like basis and just supposing that it did offer canned libraries of logic in Flash’s areas of strength (eg: video) the way salesforce did with CRM and SFA, that would theoretically put Adobe in competition with the likes of YouTube or Brightcove. It’s a move that Chizen will carefully have to consider since it might not be good for business to put yourself in competition with some of your biggest customers.

Chizen does wax a bit on the SaaS-based delivery of desktops apps but rightfully notes that quantum leaps in network bandwidth are not keeping pace with the quantum leaps in horsepower on desktops and notebooks. Said Chizen:

The desktop is a powerful, powerful machine in which to run applications. Broadband, as quick as it gets, is still going to have some limitations in the short term.

If the rest of industry was standing still, I guess Adobe could freeze its investment in client-side development and focus on offering the same functionality via a SaaS delivery model. But the industry isn’t standing still and if Adobe doesn’t continue to drink up whatever horsepower Intel has to offer on the desktop/notebook side, there are plenty of Adobe wannabe’s who will.

That headline is an exaggeration. But if you’re a FaceBook user, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

A couple of months ago (not sure exactly when), I wrote about how the number of invitations I was receiving through LinkedIn far exceeded the number of invites I was getting from FaceBook. That trend has since reversed itself. It seems as though not an hour goes by now without some sort of Facebook notification showing up in my inbox. Every one of them however leaves me wondering why everyone is so fascinated with the social networking site. I mean, c’mon, let’s be honest; the Facebook social process is encapsulated in what has to be of the worst user experiences I’ve ever encountered. Maybe it’s a matter of taste. But, if the goal of a social networking business is to be viral, FaceBook seems almost anti-viral. In fact, for a social network, I find it to be downright anti-social.

For example, when some invites me to join their Linked In network, the e-mail I receive appears to come from that person. Their name is in the sender’s line and the return address is invitations@linkedin.com. This by itself is anti-social. As long as most e-mail systems aren’t rejecting mail with spoofed “from” addresses (and LinkedIn.com’s reputation is good enough that it would get a hall pass anyway), why shouldn’t the return address be the actual address of the sender. For example, if Jason, who I like, but haven’t heard from in years reaches out to me via e-mail with an invitation to join his LinkedIn network, of course I’m going to join. But the idea that I have to go back through LinkedIn to finish forging the connection and then use LinkedIn’s messaging architecture to write something like “Great to hear from you” back to Jason seems pretty anti-social to me. What is LinkedIn protecting here after all? A couple of page views at most. It’s not worth it.

Quite frankly though, as bad as LinkedIn handles this sort of “friending,” (the new verb du jour), it’s the hostess with the mostest compared to FaceBook. For starters, the invitations appear to come from FaceBook (not from the person who’s issuing the invitation). Next, FaceBook invitations are very spartan. They could at least offer me a bit more information about the person who is friending me, but at most contain some barebones text and a link. One thing the each e-mail could tell me is how many FaceBook invitations are currently outstanding. It doesn’t.

Now that I’m getting anywhere between 2 and 5 FaceBook invitations a day, it’s really inefficient for me to visit FaceBook to confirm each one separately. I’d rather visit FaceBook once a day or once every couple of days and confirm them all in one fell swoop. But I challenge you to do that when you don’t have access to one of the outstanding e-mail invitations. For example, unlike with LinkedIn where, on my next visit to the site, it’s relatively easy to find the outstanding invitations, a visit to my FaceBook site reveals no obvious place to go to do the same thing.

Thinking I was missing the big blinking neon link that says “Four people have friended you, check it out!,” I asked my office mate (and more experienced FaceBook user) Matt Conner to show me where to go. With no luck, he tried all the same “suspects” I tried. It wasn’t under the “Friends” top navigational element. Nor was it under Inbox (”How could this be you ask?” I haven’ the foggiest). It wasn’t one of the links under my picture. It wasn’t on my so-called Wall. Despite there being four outstanding invitations, he couldn’t find his way to them. I’m sure the link to them is there, somewhere. But, for a site that clearly wants you using its pages as much as possible (in lieu of other tools like e-mail that are more efficient for certain forms of communication), there’s a certain irony in having to go back to the e-mail to find the link that takes you to the page that lives at the heart of FaceBook’s supposedly viral nature in the first place.

But it gets worse. There’s a certain weirdness to the invitation process that I don’t quite understand. Call me old-fashioned, but it seems rather odd that, in the course of confirming a “friend request,” FaceBook asks me how I know the person but never asks this question when you’re friending someone else. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? That way, when you receive an invitation, it might say:

Jason, who claims to have worked with you at Acme Dynamite Co, has added you as a friend on Facebook. We need you to confirm that you are, in fact, friends with Jason.

Instead of the far less mind-jogging current text found in a FaceBook invitation:

Jason added you as a friend on Facebook. We need you to confirm that you are, in fact, friends with Jason.

Anyway, let’s distill the FaceBook way of hooking up into English. It’s as if the default invitation process at Facebook is the equivalent of someone saying to someone else “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere? Do you want to be my friend? Tell me where I know you from.” Did I miss some generation gap? Do we have a new way of speaking to each other?

As bad as the invitation process from FaceBook is, there’s an e-mail that’s even more impersonal. I received two of these yesterday. One said:

Allison sent a message in reply to a thread. To read the rest of the thread and reply, follow the link below

With the thousands, perhaps millions of threads running on FaceBook at any given point in time, the presumption is (1) I have an interest in the one thread that Allison replied to, and (2) I have an interest in what Allison had to say on that one thread. These may very well be true. But once again, how many page views is FaceBook protecting by not giving me some friggin’ clue in the e-mail as to what the thread is about and what Allison had to say about it. You user interface people at FaceBook, help me out here. Enslaving me to your pages just to see if I want to participate in some conversation that my friend is a part of is perhaps the most anti-social form of digital behavior I can imagine.  What if I want some idea of what’s going on, but am in a situation where I can’t get back to the Web site. Like, I’m viewing my mail with a mobile device that isn’t so handy at jumping from e-mail to viewing the Web, much less your pages over some super slow connection.  Or, what if I’m viewing my mail offline on a plane?

Bottom line? FaceBook is a fun cool “place.” But it’s also so painful to use that the site’s success confounds me. That friction has got to go.

We’ve seen ads show up in all sorts of innovative places.  I don’t think I’ll ever forget when I first saw one on the back of a bathroom stall door. And then just recently, I saw one plastered on the seatback tray in front of me on an airplane. I thought eating was one of the sacred moments that no advertiser messes with.  Oh well.

Of the many automatic software update services that I’ve seen, I think this is the first time I’ve seen the notifier for one of them advertising some other product.  For example, not counting the times it has installed stuff you don’t want, without your permission (another problem altogether), when a Windows Update pop-up bubble has told me it has updates that need to be installed, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an advertisement to try some other Microsoft product or service. The same goes for some other products I use (or have used) that have auto-update mechanisms.  For example, software from Symantec, McAfee, and Mozilla (Firefox).  But, as you can see from the image (left) of the bubble that the Java update service surfaced (a bubble that eventually leads here), it looks like the times are a changin’.

Back in August, I wrote about the Twitterization of mainstream media and how I’ll bet that you’ll see more of what I’m doing with Twitter from the mainstream media. Now, I’m taking it to the next level using Zude, Facebook and De.licio.us.

Look to the right side of this blog page (you may have to scroll up or down) and you’ll see my last 10 “Tweets” (Twitter entries). First, I don’t use Twitter the way many people use it — to let the world know what’s happening in their lives at any given moment (or to engage in the Web equivalent of fishbowl text messaging). I use it to drive news items that may be of interest to readers of my Testbed blog right on to my blog’s pages. Think of it as the marquee you see sliding by at the bottom of CNN or ESPN on TV. Twitter’s HTML badge is an easy way to drive that sort of programming onto any Web page (there’s also a Flash badge, available here). For me, Twitter is basically a news item publishing tool. Other bloggers accomplish roughly the same thing using link blogs. Some number of people are following my news posts through the badge on my blog. Other are subscribing directly to my Twitter feed with their RSS readers.

But, after forming the Twitter-to-ZDNet connection, I noticed the way Facebook allows you to follow all the changing status updates coming from your “friends.” Facebook’s “status” box isn’t all that unlike what most people use Twitter for. In fact, by default, it starts with the word “is” underneath your first and last name (as in “XYZ Facebook User is…..” and you fill in the blank). If you’re a Facebook user, whatever you program into the blank after the “is” bubbles into the FaceBook user experience of anybody who has “friended” you. In some ways, it’s just like Twitter which is why I was inspired to figure out how to pump my news summaries into yet a third place where people could be watching for my updates (place #1: Twitter, place #2: ZDNet, place #3: Facebook).

Enter Zude. Zude is unquestionably one of the killer sleepers of 2007. I’ve talked about it here in this blog. Robert Scoble liked it so much, he called it his Demo of the Year (and Scoble sees a lot of demos). One of the cool things about Zude is how you can pull all your points of social presence on the Web into a single page and then give the URL to that single page out so that your contacts don’t have to go all over creation to experience your virtual persona. For example, if you go to the page in my Zudescape that I’ve entitled “David’s Social Nets,” not only will you a bunch of references to my ZDNet blog, my Flickr account, my Del.icio.us account, my Twitter feed, and my profile on Linked In, you should see how, by clicking on the down arrows on the right hand side of any one of those references how an entire, fully functional browser window opens right up, right inside of Zude (usually with no waiting). With the exception of how it can’t include sites like Facebook that framebust HTML (technically it’s possible, but legally?), it’s really quite remarkable.

But, whereas Zude can be a Switzerland of the Social Web by acting as an aggregator of all your points of social presence (in other words, it can read them in), what about going the other way? To prove that it truly is a Switzerland, Zude CTO Steve Repetti used Zude’s Open5G programming language to build a one stop widget that can update your status in Facebook and add a new tweet to Twitter with the same text. You can see the working version of this widget that I use on my main Zudescape page. Not only does it update both Facebook and Twitter at the same time, it updates itself as well which means I get to kill four birds with one stone. By entering a news item into the Zude “Status Widget,” it shows up on Zude, Facebook, Twitter, and ZDNet.

But wait, there’s more.

Most of the news items that I toss into that pipeline are ones that I pick up through my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader. One thing I’ve noticed when cruising all those RSS subscriptions is how you’ll see lots of coverage of the same story from several sites and bloggers. For example, earlier this afternoon, I noticed how Dave Winer, InfoWorld, ZDNet, and Digg all had coverage of Nokia’s newest N810 - a Linux-based Web tablet. Before today, I’d pick one of those and point to it (usually using TinyURL.com to shrink the length of the native URL) in a blurb that’s 140 characters or less (Twitter’s limit) that I publish via the aforementioned Zude widget. But why pick just one? Why not offer ZDNet’s readers all four?

There are several ways I could do this, the most obvious is which to publish a separate string of text for each version of the story. But not only is that inelegant, it’d be way too verbose for anybody watching. So here’s what I ended up doing. While discovering these items in Google Reader (my RSS reader), using the Firefox plug-in for Del.icio.us, I can right click on the permalink to any story and tag it right there. So, in this case, I right-clicked on all four of the aforementioned stories and tagged them in my del.icio.us account with the tag “nokian810″. In del.icio.us, the resulting set of social bookmarks for that tag gets its own page: a page that I can point to natively or with via TinyURL (if the native del.icio.us URL is too long to fit in my text blurb). That way, when people want to find out more about what I’ve blurbed about, I’m not tying them to one point of view. I’m giving them all of the POVs I found.

But what’s even better about this approach is that, if between the time I publish that blurb and the time you see it for the first time, another story about the Nokia N810 shows up in my RSS reader, I can tag that too so that by the time you get to my nokia810 page on del.icio.us, there are even more links there than when I first picked up on the news. If you see what I’m doing with Zude, Twitter, and Facebook as a twist on linkblogging, my inclusion of del.icio.us in the formula is more like dynamic linkblogging.

It was just a few weeks ago at salesforce.com’s DreamForce Conference that the company known for its on-demand CRM solutions rolled out force.com and a new development tool it’s calling visualforce. In hopes of getting a demonstration of the product, I caught up with salesforce.com’s vice president of developer marketing Adam Gross for a reviewcast. Reviewcasts, for those of you who have never seen one, involve a unique blend of WebEx style Webcasting, 2-camera videotaping, and usage of a podcasting rig to support a more interactive dialogue where I can ask questions — all of which results in the sort of video that you see above. It’s an experimental format that I’m still working on, but given the feedback we’re getting, it appears to have some legs and I’ll be looking to do many more of these over time.

I got my start in the IT business in the early 80’s as a software developer. I cut my teeth on some Cobol but when I discovered dBase II on the PC, it was like pure oxygen compared to building forms driven database applications on a mainframe using CICS. To a programmer like me, what made dBase special was how quickly I could build and debug custom database applications. The DOS-based software made it simple to build some relational databases and generate rudimentary data entry and viewing forms. But its real power kicked in when you wrote your own custom code and laid-out your own forms. Over time, there was dBase III, dBase IV, and dBase V and then, a variety of third party offerings that worked with dBase databases (.DBF files) and source code in a way that they could be substituted for the dBase software itself. One of those was Foxpro which eventually found its way into Microsoft’s portfolio of development tools as Visual Foxpro. It became the go-to tool for anybody developing PC or LAN-based database applications not just because of its DBF backwards-compatability (dBase files with mission critical data were everywhere), but also because of how easy it was to visually customize the user interface (thus the “visual” in Visual Foxpro).

Visual Foxpro wasn’t alone in this capability to, in the context of a PC, strap wizard-driven or custom user interfaces onto flat or relational databases. There was of course Microsoft’s own Access (at the time, equally configurable for non-mortals), Lotus’ Approach (named after its approachability), and Borland’s Paradox. But that was PC-based stuff. Today, the need to create custom schemas with custom user interfaces is no different (in fact, there’s more demand for it than there’s ever been).

What’s new is the Web and how a growing number of service providers are delivering what was essentially Visual Foxpro, but they’re like hosted versions of it that run in a browser. For example, there’s the database that’s built-into WebEx’s WebOffice, Intuit’s on-demand Quickbase, dabbledb, and Zoho’s database just to name a few. One advantage of these Web-based offerings over the old PC approach is how much simpler it is to roll a database out to a workgroup of users. In phase one, you design and deploy the database. In phase two, you give a URL and some credentials to each user needing access to the application (without going into detail, the PC way of deploying multi-user databases was extremely painful).

But whereas most would probably classify those offerings as software-as-a-service based Web-based database offerings (proficient at data management, forms, and reporting), salesforce.com sees visualforce as a part of a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) strategy. As you can see in the video, Gross walks us through a sample database application (in this case, it’s a blogging app but it could be anything). He shows us the database schema and then several “views” of the the final product. One view, the basic database view, isn’t so friendly. But, through what Gross describes as “pixel-level control over the user experience” (kind of like what you had in Visual Foxpro), the customized views, built using visualforce, are far more friendly and suitable to the context of the database app at hand (again, blogging, but, again, it could be anything).

But beyond this pixel level control is where the PaaS part kicks in. It’s one thing to be able to throw up some forms and reports into a browser as the other offerings do. Sometimes included with that is some multi-user capability and the ability to scale up (both in terms of database size and number of users). But, it’s an entirely different beast once you need to strap some business logic to it and it’s still yet another beast to be able to draw upon a library of business widgets for inclusion in that logic.

As you can see in the video, once your forms are generated, the source code for the pages is easily viewable and includes a mixture of HTML and hooks (called visualforce components) into salesforce.com’s underlying infrastructure. Once your HTML forms have access to an infrastructure like the one salesforce runs, that’s when things start to get interesting. Not only is the sky the limit in terms of integrating business logic into your database app, but you also get to pull on everything from the CRM functionality that’s baked into salesforce.com to the “plug-in” functionality available from third parties through salesforce.com’s AppExchange. For example, if you need volume e-mail capabilities, you could draw upon that functionality from an AppExchange member whose specialty that is, like ExactTarget.

Personally, as a former database and custom app programmer, when I look around the technology industry for places to drop anchor and latch onto an ecosystem, visualforce really reminds me of that aha! moment that I had with dBase, where I (a) instantly saw a quantum leap over the de facto approach to the same problem (IBM CICS on a mainframe with Cobol for the business logic) and (2) felt I had encountered a platform-based ecosystem that had strategic legs (in other words, skills developed for this ecosystem would be highly marketable for the foreseeable future). Bottom line, if I went back to the future and was at that crossroad of deciding what basket to put my eggs in, I’d probably put them in the force.com basket.