The internet was better before...

Over the past few years I've heard lots of complaints about 'the internet was better before everyone used Facebook' and it got me thinking.  That much like the strata in rocks you can determine your geological internet age based on the first thing you remember complaining about.  So moving backwards

Smartazoic - the modern era (2011 to present)
If you haven't yet complained about the new entry into the internet of any groups at all then the odds are that you are part of the latest major influx characterised by a dominance of mobile usage.

Socialem - the social era (2009-2010)
Socialem's are characterised by their complaints that things were much better before everyone started using mobile phones to use Facebook or other social media sites.  These people complain bitterly about instagram.

Broadem - the broadband era (2003-2008)
This is the era of major adoption of broadband and the rise of YouTube these people tend to complain about the rise of Facebook and other social media sites and don't understand why people can't just be happy with Yahoo and BBC News.  They complain that all these new 'social' users are just adding rubbish to the internet rather than the managed content of their day.

AOLem - the dialup era (1998-2002)
This is the era of the mainstream pioneers, the people who used AOL and other elements to get online.  People who remember what lag really is and complained bitterly about the new stupid sites with their insane bandwidth requirements and 'why oh why would anyone want to watch video'.  Their complaint was that the broadem era took away the 'personal' nature of a dial-up modem and also meant that they couldn't use their home connection when they went to their parents or friends house.  The explosion of broadband also meant there were 'too many people' around.

Establishism - the foundations of the WWW (1994-1997)
These are the folks who had access before the dialup era and who complained bitterly as AOLers started coming into Usenet and ruining the internet.  These folks used the WWW in fact many built the WWW but a distain was had for those who hadn't coped with Mosaic.

Jurrassic - Before WWW (1980-1993)
These are the folks who had network connections and lived in FTP, MUDS, telnet and Usenet and bemoaned the sudden lack of technical skills required to 'browse' these new fangled websites.  What was the fun in something that displayed an image in one go rather than requiring a uuencode/decode process?

So which era do you belong to?  Or are there other classifications and strata that should be used?

Wasting the time of a PPI scammer

There are a number of scams going around today which really demonstrate how mainstream outsourcing has become.  There is the current one around the 'unique' number that proves the scammer is from Microsoft and today I got a new one.  This time it was someone claiming to be from 'iClaims' (another Steve Jobs legacy, 'i' is the new 'e') telling me that I was entitled to a PPI or bank charges refund.  They had my address and phone number but nothing else so after saying that Lloyds TSB was my bank (it isn't) I flicked on the recording on my iPhone and away we went.  The game here is to waste as much of their time as possible while giving them as much incorrect information as possible. The total waste of time was about 20 minutes, but I only managed to record 18 minutes....

What surprised me about this scam was that they get all your Visa/Mastercard details but then want to set up a second call at which they will do advanced fee fraud part of the scam.  Almost 'honest' of them to do it at a second call rather than just ripping your bank account then and there (although as its all fake number I have no evidence that they wouldn't do that as well).  What I find most depressing about this however is that, as with the Microsoft virus scams, the drones in the call centre are just like drones in a call centre providing service support, they genuinely think they are doing a good and valuable job, they are just keeping to the script they've been trained to do.  They don't realise that actually they are part of a criminal act, I've even had one guy beg me not to report me to his supervisor as he'd get fired if they realised I'd played him.

Behind these folks lies true scum, total and utter scum.  People who appear to have access to credit card validation software and have a list of 'valid' numbers for UK accounts.  Its a depressing evolution of the outsourcing model that these days people are outsourcing and industrialising crime via India, and its not as if India doesn't have enough corruption of its own.

Now clearly people reading this blog are smart folks and wouldn't fall for this, and I dare say like me also entertain themselves in moments of boredom by playing along with these scams, but its worth mentioning (probably again) to relatives that this stuff is bollocks and they should hang up.

American Express - Which number is greater?

Sometimes you just sit there and wonder about how the code managed to get to a certain end point... take my current Amex online bill...

Now it could be the surprise that its the lowest monthly bill I've had since I got the card, but I don't quite think that "surprise" is something that should be built into a financial system. But some how the amount that I have to pay (the last bill) is now less than the minimum payment, which includes stuff for which the bill hasn't been sent yet.

Part of this is because Amex have two billing elements, the first is the date that they want you to pay by, the 2nd is when the next bill comes out. If you pay before the later then everything is fine, but they'd prefer you to do it before the former.

This is clearly a historical thing with Amex and it clearly reflects back into their core operational systems which are almost certainly batch oriented. What this also means is that like many companies out there Amex haven't really adapted their systems or processes for the web they've just lobbed the paper processes on line which delivers oddities such as this which aren't possible in a paper only world.

When people put systems on-line they often seem to forget that the interactional model for on-line working is significantly different to off-line working. If you want customers to engage more in your on-line solution and move away from the more manual and higher cost channels then it really isn't good enough to shift crap processes onto the web, you should be looking at how customers will be interacting with your company in real-time and therefore what new processes and opportunities this can bring.

I did feel like phoning up the call-centre and asking "which minimum payment should I make, the one that says minimum payment or the one with the lowest value" but I decided my life was too short to waste time on that.

Religion as a Service

Okay a few weeks ago I had a brain-wave for a new business. What do you really need for a business to take off in the "as a Service" space?

1. It needs to be 80%+ commodity
2. You need a large customer base
3. You need the end customer to add their own differentiation

Above all I wanted a business that would be a much higher margin one than simply a SaaS business, which meant including the actual business process work as well.

Hence the idea for "Religion as a Service". Focusing initially on the Abrahamic religions (where lets face it around 80% of the rules and processes are the same) this would expand to enable a more active selection of deity (or alien race) and a greater degree of customisation around the rules of your newly created faith.

Religion as a Service goes far beyond simply providing you with a customised version of your "one single book that has all the truth in it" to actually providing you with a modern industrialised solution to your religion's needs. This includes

1. A multi-language call centre to handle donations
2. A set of "white-labelled" preachers who can be branded to your own faith (for cheaper religions this can be mutualised if the demand isn't there yet)
   
3. An "avoid damnation" generic TV show including presenter with amazing hair that can be tailored to your religious target market
4. Believers on Demand - a set of white labelled individuals from your core demographic to create the impression of an already thriving faith
5. iPhone versions of your sacred text
6. Place of Worship in a box - a high value service that converts buildings into a faith centre, in a similar manner to the successful "Irish pub in a box" model
7. PR support to help you claim discrimination and subjugation
   

All of this is backed by a robust IT and BPO solution that handles training, indoctrination, HR, payroll, finance and accounts.

Because "Religion as a Service" isn't limiting itself to a single religious ideal it will be able to offer dramatically cheaper costs than establishing your own religion from scratch. For people looking to establish a new evangelical Christian sect for instance you can be up and running in a matter of hours and proclaiming yourself to be the 2nd coming of Christ without all of the massive overheads that this normally entails.

People with more demanding needs, for instance wanting to create a full church for the flying spaghetti monster, are still able to leverage the underlying resources and staff of RaaS but will need to invest more in the customisation of the central "core text", as this is however simply a reference volume and our staff are supported by the very latest holy knowledge management tools even the most esoteric demands can be met and scaled. This means that your local Cargo cult can rapidly be turned into a world wide phenomenon.

Religion as a Service's ability to leverage knowledge and resources across multiple faith channels means that it can offer new religions a much more efficient manner of scaling its followers and help a sect turn into a profitable business much more effectively.

Now all I need is a VC to fund it and I'm away.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

REST is a crap name in a web world

Okay I was looking around for some REST stuff today, specifically around performance tuning for the mandlebrot stuff. So I thought I'd search for "REST performance tuning" and its no better on yahoo. Like when Microsoft talked about having a language called "COOL" and its bad enough that they ended up with .NET (image searching for COOL .NET application tuning).

For something that was designed for the Web, indeed which helped design the protocol behind the Web there really wasn't much thought put into naming it so it works well on the Web.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

REST is dead long live the Web

REST met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. REST is survived by its offspring: mashups, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on the web.

REST had begun to gain some traction in 2008 as the "next big thing" in technology, promoted by vendors, analysts and champions as being the only way forward, often by the same people who had promoted both EAI and Web Services as the only way forward. The economic downturn however has led to people looking at REST as nothing more than a new technology driven fad that was disconnected from the daily problem of a profitable business. Proponents would laud Google, Amazon and a small number of new startup companies as being the example that all the old crusty companies should follow.

These old crusty companies however have heard it all before, both from the .com boomers who were meant to replace them and from the technology vendors who have shipped them varying degrees of snake-oil over the year. Fortunately all is not doom and gloom for REST as these old crusty companies are doing exactly what they did with .com and looking at what they can do to drive down costs and increase profitability by using the web. As REST proponents shout about PUT/DELETE/POST and GET and whether anything from a browser can truly be "RESTful" because it doesn't have DELETE then the business users are looking at the Web, and more especially the services delivered via the Web as an excellent way of managing their IT costs.

Integrating these new Web delivered services into their enterprise often means using exactly the approach that REST proponents advise, but it is not REST that is important it is the Service. REST vainly tried to make itself the thing that people should care about but the sad reality was that its role was simply in helping people connect to the services that they use.

Already REST advocates are leaving the funeral a promoting the "web centric view" as being the only way of the future, but the crusty old companies continue to operate successfully often using systems that predate the web and chuckle at the cute naivety of these technology prophets.

Surviving REST are a series of technologies that at their core are about using the principles of REST hidden away in their dark hearts like a secret that must not be told. Mashups and SaaS often rely on REST but proclaim instead the business benefits, the productivity gains or the business service that they deliver. The biggest child of REST is the Web, it shouts as a colossus across the globe a shiny beacon of light which proclaims the success of its heritage, but no-one knows or cares about its parentage only about its usefulness.

So RIP REST the business never really knew you at all.

With deference to Anne

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture

Fibonacci - word of the week

I haven't rolled this into the project yet but its something that I've done before to raise the sense of community. Basically you pick an unusual word, but not too unusual, that people need to get into either a conference call, document or email. The word must fit within the context of the communication, not just a random shout out, and the non-included people on the call must not notice.

Today I decided on the word Fibonacci to test out the theory again, this was placed into a call with the phrase "we are starting from 1 and with any Fibonacci or exponential growth that means its about getting the next one".

Its the sort of little thing that helps bring people together and works very well in small teams within large scale programmes. Don't make it ridiculous or offensive just make it so its a word that could be used but requires some elegance to get it into context.

Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture