Jeremy Allaire is streaming himself in from Newton, MA where his wife just had a baby. It’s a jerky talking head, a bit Max Headroom-y. Why do these streams still suck? It’s a problem with the economy, not the technology.

Anyway, he says he’s an optimist. He points to rich clients that bring more of the action to the end-user edge. By “rich client” he apparently means Flash 6 which is produced by Macromedia, the company for which he works. Of course, that was the moment at which static – which Bob Frankston recognized as “analog static” – made his presentation un-hearable.

Next Jeremy was going to talk about Web services. Instead, the panel has ascended the dais: Karl Jacob, CEO of Cloudmark, a distributed anti-spam product.; Mike Helfrich of Groove; Doc Searls.

Karl (Cloudmark): For the past ten years, we’ve had to interact with the Net the way the site or browser wanted. Now the power is moving to the edge where we users actually live.

Mike (Groove): He really likes the words “decentralization” and “rich client” because that’s what Groove’s about. He says we need more “flocking” and “swarming” behavior. And decentralized architectures enable apps to build themselves to adapt to the ways individuals want to work. Now Mike gets to the Security Spin: We need decentralized decisions because we wouldn’t want our “war fighters” to be unable to communicate. (Barely perceptible Freudian slip: “We’re very happy about where we are in the Mi…market.”

Doc: The supernova metaphor is a good one because we’re blowing up things to make a new world. The new world is all ends. The middle makers make nothing. What’s critical about the Net is that no one owns it, everyone can use it, and everyone can improve it. Finally, Doc says that we’re short some important services (identity, directory, IM) on the Interent and it’s up to the geeks among us to build them.

Doc says that you give away the underlying protocols and services and charge for proprietary stuff built on top of it. Jeremy says that Macromedia gives away their client and document all the APIs and file formats.

Marc Cantor says we need to move away from HTML. Why? Because it doesn’t have absolute positioning and it ignores time. We need rich media platforms. (I’m assuming that “move away” means “still support.” The importance of the simplicity of HTML can’t be over-emphasized.)

Mitch Ratcliffe says that technology won’t change us unless and until it recognizes the existing social fabric and behaviors. (Save it for my panel in 2 hours, Mitch! :)

Karl got asked what was surprising to him working with spam. First, he says, 99% of people agree about what is spam. Second, “these communities are remarkably good at self-regulating.”

Karl adds a ratings system(like eBay’s) to the needed services that Doc has mentioned.

Mike says that Ray Ozzie’s first inspiration for Groove was watching his children play a massively multiplayer online game.

Doc offers some closing thoughts about infrastructure. One type is the infrastructure of the Net itself; Vincent Cerf said “The history of the Internet is the history of its protocols.” Flash isn’t a Net protocol and doesn’t make the Net bigger and richer.

Categories: Uncategorized dw