This is a copy of my recent post as a guest blogger on Christian Ahlert’s brilliant Openbusiness.cc.
I remember not so many years ago we were told we would never get more than 128K over copper wire. The renowned authorities told us this was the reason that the growth of the Internet into the home would always be limited because of the lack of fast connectivity that businesses enjoyed. The upstarts countered by pointing to the enormous investments that the telcos and the pure-play ISPs were putting into the market: it wouldn’t be long before we would in fact have as much as 512K, possibly more, in every home!!!
The experts scoffed; no matter how much investment was put into the backbones and local exchanges, there was no way the infrastructure providers were going to dig up the routes from the exchanges to the individual houses in order to lay fibre. No way. This was known as the problem of ‘the last mile’. The maximum speed over copper had been reached, we had hit the limit. The established wisdom was very clear on this point.
I tell this story to, a story of very recent history, to highlight the perils of predicting the future based on the evidence of today, because whilst izimi has its supporters it too has some critics who dismiss it as a pipe dream. Izimi, and technologies like it, will play a BIG part in the future of the internet, but as with any innovation there are people who just don’t know it yet.
I got involved in izimi in May 2006. It’s a long story, but to cut it short let me just say that a few smart people that I greatly respected asked me to come along and help them turn a piece of clever technology into a user product, something that helped people do some of the things they were already doing but faster, easier, better. When I saw the vision I was taken by the simplicity of it all. Izimi does away with middlemen, and turns on its head the notion that you must first upload your content to a third party website in order for others to be able to see it. Now, it’s fair to say that the technically adept were doing this anyway with static IP addresses and web servers, but your average internet user doesn’t have the knowledge to do this, so they have to rely on the third parties. The accepted wisdom is this: if I want to share something widely, I upload it to someone else’s servers, get a URL, and my friends use that URL to get to my stuff. OK, so there are upload managers for some of these sites, tools that make the upload process work in the background, but it’s still a kludge, a substitute for doing it yourself.
What is the internet all about? I’d say that the answer you get depends upon who you speak to and what vested interests they hold, but for me there’s a large dose of information empowerment and personal freedom involved. The internet is not heavily regulated, nor should it be, but there are corporations out there whose entire businesses are built upon owning, or at least controlling, our data, our lives. This will increasingly become a problem as the implications for the loss of control of our personal data become clearer. If we voluntarily give it away now, we become more dependent upon these giants simply to continue to operate. We get dependent, unable to move, its called supplier lock-in. Without us even knowing it we are giving over control, and losing our independence.
I believe the Internet should remain unregulated, power to the people if you will, and technologies like izimi, that let us do the very things that these third party store-and-serve providers, keep us free. Jeez, I’m an idealistic b******. But can my idealism really work, or do the technical limitations of today put a spanner in the works? Good question, and one that you can help me answer. Read on.
Business guru and VC Francis McInerney, who describes himself as a “futurist, strategist and realist”, has a similar view on all this:
“Basically, Izimi obsoletes YouTube. This is a phenomenon I advised customers about over a decade ago when I demonstrated that when information costs fall far enough, strange things happen… By disintermediating social networks like YouTube, Izimi precludes the strategy of Viacom of forcing social networks to pay for material that can no longer be copyrighted. Izimi software lets individuals syndicate whatever they want, from whomever they want, without using intermediaries like YouTube. This impels copyright owners to attack their customers, tens of millions at a time, or to create copyright-free business models.”
(http://www.northriver.com/blog/2007/03/07/izimi/)
What does all this mean? Well, the same forces operate in every business sector, and it goes like this: as the speed of business increases, driven by the availability of better and easier-to-use tools (generally technology) among those further down the supply chain, those who occupied the middle and upper tiers of the supply chain find themselves becoming marginalised, driven out, or at least forced to radically change their business models. It’s tempting to think that this doesn’t apply to our sector, the media/information/technology sector, and so we need not consider it, but the truth is it does.
We are in the information business, and what this means to us is this: “speed of business” means the speed of information flow, “availability of better easier to use tools” means technologies like izimi that help the laymen do what previously only the techies could do, “those further down the supply chain” means you and I, the information consumers and producers. In fact the effect is amplified in our sector because its less of a supply chain, and more of a supply net/web: with the advent of UGC (user generated content) the consumers and producers sit right next to one another, on the same tier, and those intermediaries that provide the service of store-and-serve of our content are the guys who have seen a need, seen a niche brought about by slow and unreliable internet connections, the behaviour of old school users who turn off their computers at night, and made a business for themselves by occupying the middle ground.
Well, guess what? The times they are a-changing, and now we have reliable and fast internet connections, computers that are increasingly doing more than just getting email or writing letters – and we are increasingly leaving them on – and software that lets us share files, not just to a closed group who have also downloaded the same software as us but with anyone on the internet with just a web browser, with just a few mouse clicks. Suddenly the masses can easily do what previously only the technically adept were able to do. So, izimi is not the established model, it is an innovative way to do what hundreds of millions of people have been doing for years – just faster (in fact instant), simpler, and free.
How is the product to use? Well, we got a lot of beta user feedback over the last few months, and it’s very humbling when you discover how supportive and how constructive beta users can be. For instance, we definitely need to improve the UI: it’s too clunky and takes too many clicks to publish one file right now. We also need to make it simpler to publish multiple files, and we need support for private sharing (today its all publicly indexed on izimi.com).
Are there practical challenges? Yes. There are a few, for example: what happens when I turn my machine off? What about the speed of serving content? What about transfer limits imposed by my ISP?
Does izimi have the answers? Yes, I believe we have many of them, and we’ll see technical solutions to these practical problems rolled out in short order. (We still have a few unknowns, and I have an idea to post some of those for discussion in the Openbusiness forum in the next few days – I think they would make for some stimulating debate)
I’d like to thank our existing users for their feedback to date, and also let you know that there’s a whole heap of new stuff and tweaks coming in June with the next version. I’d also like to invite more Minibar and Openbusiness fans to come take a look and tell me what you think - if you get the current version at www.izimi.com you’ll have a baseline against which to compare the next release. I’d love to hear your thoughts so please feel free to mail me (david at izimi dot com) or collar me at the next Minibar.
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