Is it still “really simple” when it involves choosing among 35 options?

If the object is to baffle, annoy and repel the masses, then what we have here is a remarkable success.

Is social software a phenomenon or a passing fancy? The reality seems to lie somewhere in between, though considerably closer to fancy than phenomenon. “Social software,” writes Phil Edwards today, “looks like very big news indeed from some perspectives, but when it’s held to the standard of actually helping people get stuff done, it fades into insignificance.” Edwards looks at some of the reasons why it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that “everyone’s doing it,” when in fact only a very few are doing it, and they’re mainly doing it in narrow, well-defined domains:

Put it all together – and introduce feedback effects, as the community of geek commentators starts to find social software apps genuinely useful within its specialised domain – and social software begins to look like a Tardis in reverse: much, much bigger on the outside than it is on the inside.

Edwards quotes from an essay by Ryan Carson called “Why I don’t use social software.” Carson, who like Edwards is no technophobe, gets to the heart of why there’s less to the social software movement than meets the eye:

I just don’t have time to use all of these amazing apps, and I’m guessing you might not too. I’m a fairly typical web citizen. I’m 28, married, make a reasonable wage, own a house and I have a few close friends. You’d think I’d be a web app company’s dream, but I’m not. How come? I’d love to add friends to my Flickr account, add my links to del.icio.us, browse digg for the latest big stories, customise the content of my Netvibes home page and build a MySpace page. But you know what? I don’t have time and you don’t either.

The crux of the problem is that, in most cases, social software is an extremely inefficient way for a person to get something done. The crowd may enjoy the product of other people’s inputs, but for the rather small group of individuals actually doing the work, it demands the investment of a lot of time for very little personal gain. It’s a fun diversion for a while – and then it turns into drudgery.

The scale of the net means that it’s very easy to confuse fads for trends, so it’s always good to keep in mind that, out in the real world, hardly anyone has even heard of Flickr or Digg or Delicious. And even very popular services like MySpace and Facebook appear to be used mainly as substitutes for email and instant messaging rather than platforms for social production. Carson quotes Yahoo’s Tom Coates: “The social aspect of technology rather comes in and out of fashion every three or four years and we’re definitely in the middle of a particularly sizeable peak.” When the faddish phase subsides, something useful will remain, but it will be considerably less than world-changing.

UPDATE: Stowe Boyd and Fred Stutzman offer rebuttals, making the case that love conquers all. Boyd calls it a search for “belonging” while Stutzman calls it a search for “affection” – and, they say, it trumps such mundane concerns as efficiency and utility. If you squint, you can just make out in the shadows cast by their high-flown words a sad tableau of lonely people peering into computer screens. Or is that just a trick of the light?

In an interesting post yesterday, Chris Anderson discussed how the YouTube model of syndicated video (upload your file to YouTube, then embed the video, with its supporting application, in your own site) could be extended:

Now imagine the same model working for data. Rather than me posting static jpeg charts and links to Excel spreadsheet files, what if I could post data the way I post videos: as an embedded mini-app that simply displays the data in a useful way, allowing readers to manipulate or copy it at will? … That’s what I want. Not an online spreadsheet that simply replicates what Excel already does perfectly well on my laptop, but small spreadsheet elements that I can paste into a blog post in the form of a specific data set or graph. The fact that they’re hosted elsewhere is what would make them simple enough to use, just as embedding YouTube video is so head-slapping easy today.

That makes a load of sense. But why not take it one step further? I’d like Apple and Microsoft to build into their OSes a universal “Make Widget” command. So you right click on a spreadsheet or a chart or a movie or a slide show or a presentation (or whatever), choose “Make Widget” from the contextual menu, and a widget is automatically created and uploaded to a web server (owned by Apple or Microsoft), and you’re given a simple URL to paste into your blog or site.

In one fell swoop, the OS giants would make the publishing of content and mini-applications butt-simple while also disintermediating go-betweens like YouTube and Google. I don’t know how the economics would work – you’d have to charge for storage above a certain level, I guess, or incorporate some kind of advertising – but I’m sure they could figure out something. And the competitive benefits would be substantial.

UPDATE: On a related note, Amazon today introduced a retail store widget that allows you to embed a custom shop into your blog or site. It has its shortcomings – as Mitch Ratcliffe describes, the customization options are extremely limited – but it has a lot of potential. And, yes, there is now a Rough Type Store for your shopping pleasure. Call it user-generated consumerism.

Where does Google end and eBay begin? It’s not an easy question to answer, particularly after the announcement yesterday that Google would incorporate eBay’s Skype telephone service, along with its own Google Talk service, into its “click-to-call” ads, while eBay would run Google text ads on its sites outside of the United States and offer Google Toolbar to Skype users. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in an interview with the Financial Times, also suggested that the partnership would expand to include payment systems. “I expect we will do a PayPal integration at some point,” he said. Google recently launched its own payment service, Google Checkout, which has to date been seen as a competitor to eBay’s PayPal.

Further complicating, or confusing, matters is eBay’s recent partnership with Google rival Yahoo. In that alliance, which was widely viewed as an attack on Google, Yahoo gained the right to supply text ads on eBay’s US site in return for incorporating eBay’s PayPal service into its own sites. In announcing the Yahoo deal last May, eBay CEO Meg Whitman said, “I think it plays to the complementary strengths of both companies.” In announcing yesterday’s deal with Google, Whitman also said it drew on the two companies’ “complementary strengths.” Eric Schmidt said of the two companies, “I don’t think there’s much overlap at all,” which seems like an odd thing to say given the many apparent overlaps between their services.

The Google-eBay deal is only the latest manifestation of what the FT’s Richard Waters calls “a network of grand alliances taking shape on the internet.” Among the other recent alliances are ones between Google and MySpace, Google and AOL, Microsoft and Amazon.com, and Microsoft and Facebook. Yahoo and Microsoft also have a partnership for their instant messaging services, and rumars continue to swirl about a broader link between the two companies. Even Google’s new services for business customers, including Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain, have been presented by the company as “complements” rather than competitors to Microsoft’s related products and services.

There are some common threads running through many of the grand alliances among powerful internet companies. One is the insistence of top executives like Meg Whitman and Eric Schmidt that, contrary to appearances, the companies involved aren’t really competitors. Another is the fact that the terms of the agreements are kept secret. The public knows that very large pools of cash are being carved up among a handful of companies, but it doesn’t know exactly how they’re being carved up. The structure of the commercial internet is coming to be defined by technological transparency and financial opacity.

All transport networks, of which communication networks are a subset, evolve in the same way, from incoherency to coherency, from heterogeneity to homogeneity. Railroads come to share standards for track guage and coupling design. Electric systems come to operate on the same current. Telephone systems become interoperable. E pluribus unum. The economic benefits of such standardization are enormous. It removes friction from commerce, and it makes life easier for consumers. But by opening the way to more centralized control over shared infrastructure, standardization also raises the potential for corporate abuse, in the form of monopolies, oligopolies, trusts, and various forms of collusion. It’s little surprise that government regulators have played crucial roles in the development and operation of all major transport networks.

As standardization spreads throughout the web, syndication and complementarity are becoming ever more important in defining the structure of commerce, and the relatively small number of companies that control, in one way or another, a considerable portion of the flow of cash across the consumer internet are becoming ever more intertwined. Their operations and their interests are merging. Will the coordinated management of those shared interests ultimately come to be more important to these companies than competing with one another? At the moment, that appears to be the trend, and, should it continue, it seems likely that governments, and the public, will begin to take notice.

There is no love lost between Google and Microsoft. The antipathy of Google’s founders toward the Colossus of Redmond is embedded in the very identity of their young company. Google is, by design, the anti-Microsoft; the company’s rallying cry – “don’t be evil” – is aimed implicitly at its northern neighbor. It’s fair to assume that Google would enjoy nothing more than toppling the house that Gates built.

But business, like politics, makes strange bedfellows, and the relationship between Google and Microsoft is beginning to look as symbiotic as it is competitive. Today’s introduction of the cumbersomely named Google Apps for Your Domain, an expansion of the private domain Gmail service announced last February, would seem on the face of it to be the beginning of a frontal attack on Microsoft’s Office franchise. But the combination of calendar, email and web publishing applications is actually being positioned as a complement to Office, just as Google Spreadsheets was introduced as a complement to Excel. “The right way to view Writely and Google Spreadsheets, especially in the context of a larger business, isn’t necessarily as a replacement for Word or Excel,” a Google executive told Information Week. “They’re the collaboration component of that.” Speaking specifically of Google Apps for Your Domain, Dave Girouard, who heads Google’s enterprise unit, underscored to Reuters “that the Google Apps platform is not designed to replace Microsoft’s core software … ‘We are not really out there to eliminate any applications. We are looking to introduce new ways to solve problems people have been having for years.'”

Even granting the disingenuousness of such comments, they contain a great deal of truth. Google has, wisely, designed its products to extend the capabilities of Microsoft software rather than replace that software. Google may wish, for instance, that Microsoft file formats didn’t dominate the business desktop, but it’s willing to exist in a world defined by Microsoft products. Google is competing with Microsoft’s nascent Live services more than it’s competing with Microsoft’s existing office suite.

The competition will raise challenges for both companies, posing a particular threat to Microsoft’s traditional and very lucrative software-pricing structure. But the biggest threat is to neither Google nor Microsoft but to every other company hoping to get a foothold in the broad market for personal productivity applications. The combined might of the two companies, with their vast user bases and their billions of dollars in annual investments in infrastructure, should put a chill, and probably a fatal one, into any other company looking to enter this market. Entrepreneurs and their investors, in particular, will not be eager to battle the de facto Google-Microsoft axis.

Right now, it appears that the long-time monopoly in office applications may not be dismantled but rather replaced by a duopoly, and that the expected wave of innovation in web-based productivity applications may die long before it reaches shore.

The following list will likely lengthen as Rough Type’s summer hiatus continues. Newest entry at top.

“The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003,” reports the New York Times. “As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s.”

Google adds instant messaging, calendars, and web publishing to its existing “private label” (ie, domain-specific) email service in a bid to entice small businesses and nonprofits away from Microsoft. Here are the terms of service.

A YouTube video of a Korean guitar virtuoso moves Virginia Heffernan to “find beauty in the speed and accuracy that the new internet world demands.”

The Washington Post covers the entry of news fraggers (formerly known as social bookmarkers) into the price system. Says one of the salaried elite: “I do not think this is about paying users. I consider this paying people to contribute quality content, which is not a new concept on the internet by any means.”

The New Statesman finds that “suddenly corporations are all over the blogosphere.”

Google’s Marissa Mayer says the internet “should cause users to consume more.” Finally, the truth slips out.

Writes Christopher Caldwell: “Although YouTube users describe their self-filmed offerings as creative and individualistic, viewer-generated video is unlikely to be more appealing, on average, than ‘diner-generated food’ would be in a restaurant. So a lot of the offerings have a corporate, even consumerist orientation. Some of YouTube’s most visited web pages are advertisements. The site is a meeting place for what Harold Rosenberg, the American art critic, called ‘the herd of independent minds,’ where everyone is unique in the same way.”

Bill Thompson, of the BBC, looks warily at Wikipedia’s emerging “architecture of control”: “What makes Wikipedia special and encourages those of us who are registered with it to participate in the community is the sense that we can all make a contribution. Putting more and more steps between editing and publishing risks damaging that sense of engagement and, as a result, could rapidly diminish Wikipedia’s usefulness.”

Fred Stutzman looks at the natural emergence of an A List at Digg: “The assumption that Digg is purely egalitarian falls apart just as any assumption that the blogosphere is egalitarian.” The rich are different from you and me; they have more links.

Unbubbly: The US IPO market remains in a deep funk, according to the latest data from Thomson Financial.

Amazon.com expands its utility computing service to encompass processing as well as storage.

An experiment in the German edition of Wikipedia points to much tighter controls over the editing of the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

Steve Rubel notes the rickety Ponzi scheme emerging as one of the economic drivers of Web 2.0 media: “The Web sites and blogs that cover Web 2.0 … are largely supported by ads from startups that also are hoping to capitalize in the rising interest in online advertising.” Take a look at the TechCrunch home page for a good example.

Calling digitally recorded music “atrocious,” Bob Dylan says, “I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, ‘Everybody’s gettin’ music for free.’ I was like, ‘Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway.'” Relax, Bob, it’s good enough.

“Why is banking IT so boring now?” asks Computerworld’s Mitch Betts. The “culprit,” he says, is commoditization. “It’s as though the industry is trying to prove Nicholas Carr right.” I don’t think banks are trying to prove anyone right. They’re just acting in their best business interests.

An AMD executive suggests that Big Software’s resistance to simplified pricing may push more companies toward open-source alternatives.

Writes Dan Farber: “… we now have evidence of an appropriately simpler, virtualized, utility computing-based future (em)powering the entire planet, reducing the insoluble complexity quotient, but exactly what constitutes this transformation and how it transpires remains to be seen.” I would have said “(em)powering and/or controlling,” but otherwise it’s on the money.

Professional blog wrestling: Our Resident Billionaire versus Our Resident Philistine.

Steve Gillmor stops gesturing long enough to actually make some sense.

Forrester Research boss George Colony believes that replacing the term “information technology” with “business technology” would have a magic-wand effect: “If you are the head of IT, you are no better than a glorified librarian, dispensing information. In contrast, if you are the head of BT, you are shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow executives who are running the operation.” It’s a nice, tinkerbellish notion, but it doesn’t wash. It’s who you are and what you do that matter.

Salesforce.com will on Tuesday announce a new service incorporating Google’s AdWords into its software for managing customer relationships, Steve Hamm reports.

Mitch Kapor describes the “spiritual experience” he had while watching a YouTube video of Suzanne Vega’s avatar giving a performance in Second Life: “And all of a sudden my sense of what was real expanded a million-fold. A fundamental shift of my awareness happened.” I can only imagine what’s going to happen when he watches the Duran Duran gig.

John Battelle worries about the supply-side boom.

Is illiteracy the new literacy? Berkeley’s Dan Perkel writes, in a paper, Cut and Paste Literacy, on MySpace profiles: “A social perspective of literacy helps show that a part of [the] problem in this framing of copying and pasting as a literacy practice is that it does not neatly fit within common educational practices. From the perspective of the social niche of traditional schooling, to copy and paste is to plagiarize, unless there is careful attribution of sources … An ‘ideological’ perspective points out that even the word ‘literacy’ is loaded with meaning and has ideological implications.” It doesn’t seem quite so complicated to me.

If you stare too long at a long tail, will you go blind? asks Douglas Galbi, in so many words.

“almost every discussion in cyberspace, about cyberspace, boils down to some sort of debate about Truth-In-Packaging.” I was rereading the infamous humdog rant from way back in 1994 when that line jumped out at me.

Writes Daniel Akst in the New York Times: “The digital revolution may be empowering amateurs even as it undermines the ability of blockbuster-free professionals – who often do the best work in writing, music and other fields – to make a living, since the long-tail effect is redistributing downward the scant share of rewards that the pros now enjoy.” Also in the Times, Kurt Eichenwald continues his important series on the internet’s dark markets.

What happens to those cute baby wikis when they grow up? They turn into bureaucracies, as Andrew McAfee discovers. (I’m with the wikipedian on this one. Enterprise 114.12.2.0, maybe. Enterprise 2.0? C’mon.)

Alex Bunardzic makes the case for throwaway software.

Kent Newsome gently dismantles a house of cards.

Stowe Boyd critiques my Great Unread post and some of the reactions to it. I’m going to withhold the “amen,” though, however charmingly innocent the fraud of his penultimate paragraph.

Jeez. Just when I’m getting comfortable in my hammock, Boeing goes and pulls the plug on its in-flight internet service. My wife and kids are going to laugh at me – bloggers are ridiculous people – but, dammit, I can’t let this one fly by unremarked.

Boeing’s failure is a perfect example of something I’ve called “outflying the market.” A company, or an entire industry, gets caught up in the excitement of a new technology and massively overestimates the demand for a new product or service. It finds out, after making a big investment, that most of the expected customers don’t particularly need the new offering – not enough to pay the going rate, anyway. Another great example, also from the aviation industry, is the Concorde supersonic jet, which despite being one of the great technological marvels of the last century failed to find sufficient demand in the marketplace. This kind of misjudgment about people’s desire for new technologies, or at least about the pace at which they’ll adopt new technologies, also lies at the heart of the recent dot-com bust and telecommunications meltdown.

Demand for in-flight internet access, and a successful business strategy for supplying it, will probably materialize in the future, but in the meantime Boeing has lost a load of money. When it comes to technological innovation, getting too far ahead of your customers is every bit as dangerous as falling too far behind.

By the way, this is a serious setback to companies looking to supply personal productivity software as a service over the internet. The lack of in-flight connectivity is a huge barrier to business people’s adoption of such services. As long as it exists, no meaningful segment of the market is going to abandon the copies of word processing and spreadsheet and presentation software they have installed on their laptop hard drives. So this is bad news for Google and the Web 2.0 newcomers and good news for Microsoft. As long as barriers to continuous connectivity exist, Microsoft gains time to move its huge customer base to its own on-line services. Don’t underestimate the powerful advantage of having the ability to provide a hybrid of traditional installed software and software-as-a-service.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised, in fact, if Google ultimately moves in to subsidize in-flight internet service in some way or another. It’s got a lot of capital to invest, and it seems more than happy to invest it. So why not a free Google Sky-Fi service supported by ads?