So, after a lot of hemming and hawing, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade our blog comments to the fancy comment software offered by Disqus. I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen of it over at Fred Wilson’s blog and Popdose, and figured we may as well jump on the bandwagon.

I’m always hesitant to play around with our blog setup too much, given that WordPress is a fickle beast, but the upgrade process was surprisingly easy and fast. It took all of about 3 minutes, and required about 3 clicks of a mouse. Very nice.

The only negative to our Disqus upgrade is that, as you may have noticed, all of the existing comments on the blog have disappeared. I’m not sure if this is a bug with Disqus or if I did something wrong in the installation process (probably the latter). The good news, though, is that we do still have all of your old comments in our archive, so once Disqus enables its “Comment Import” functionality - which it claims is on its way - everything should be back to normal.

Until then, feel free to test out the new comments system and let us know what you think!

Sadly, the title to this post is identical to the title of a PCWorld article published in 2001. Although many people thought that we were close to IM interoperability back then, we still aren’t there even in 2008. Why not?

Before I answer that, and before I explain why I believe that we’re finally close, let’s cover a little bit of background.

What is IM interoperability?

IM interoperability is the ability to send or receive an IM, or use other IM features such as online status, across different IM networks.

IM is the only important communication service that isn’t yet interoperable. For example, an AIM (AOL) user can’t IM a Yahoo! user, and an MSN Messenger user can’t IM or call a Skype user (or even add that user to their buddy list).

Other communication networks that are interoperable include telephone and email. For example, you can call anybody on any cellular or landline network simply by dialing a number. Similarly, you can now (but not always in the past) use AOL to email a Yahoo user, or Hotmail to email a friend at their work address. You can even add your friend’s T-Mobile phone number to your AT&T phonebook, her Yahoo! email to your AOL address book, and so on.

You can’t do any of these things with your IM account. We deserve better, and the open standards for doing so have existed for many years.

This is not IM interoperability

In 2006, Yahoo! and MSN started interoperating with each other. So you can add a Yahoo! user to your MSN contact list and send an IM. But you can’t do the same with an AIM, Skype, Google Talk or other IM user. So Yahoo! and MSN are interoperating, but only in a closed way between their two systems. That’s not interoperability in the manner that telephone and email networks interoperate.

In 2007, Google Talk started offering access to AIM. But Google Talk and AIM aren’t interoperating at all — Google Talk merely allows you to sign in to Google Talk with your Google ID and, at the same time, sign in to AIM with your AIM ID. It’s essentially just like running AIM and Google Talk messengers on your computer at the same time. That’s the same approach taken by iChat (separate sign-in for AIM and Jabber networks such as Google Talk), Trillian, Meebo and other popular services that allow you to sign in to multiple IM services at the same time.

While these services are useful, I don’t think there’s any debate that much more innovation would happen if open standards were adopted.

Why hasn’t everyone embraced interoperability?

In short, the big guys (AIM, MSN and Yahoo!) don’t want to play with anyone new (like Google Talk, Skype or countless other innovators).

The big IM services depend on the “network effect” to attract new users to their already large user base, and to in turn monetize those users by selling advertisements. They’re afraid that if they share their users, they might lose their users completely.

The risk is perhaps real, but then again, these same companies will tell you that email interoperability was good for everyone. Letting everyone email each other made the email pie bigger, with plenty of pie (users and page views) for everyone to share. The same holds true for IM.

So why do I think it’s coming soon?

Well, for starters, not because of Rogomo (although in the spirit of full disclosure, it would be very beneficial to Rogomo).

I think it’s coming soon for one reason: Yahoo! is going to be acquired. Whether it merges with AOL or is acquired by Microsoft, I believe that the inevitable anti-trust review will finally bring about IM interoperability based on open standards. The government will at last have an excuse to break the IM monopoly. And if that happens, it won’t be the first time the government has taken action on this issue — when AOL and Time Warner merged in 2001, they were forced to agree to not launch video chat without first interoperating with other services (an agreement unfortunately waived years later).

So, my guess is that, although we’ve (needlessly) been waiting for IM interoperability for the past 7 years, we’re not going to be waiting too much longer. And I also think that when IM interoperability finally happens, it will truly revolutionize communication.

What do you think? Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments.

As a longtime music blogger, I’m a firm believer in the power of the blog.

Although very few blogs (my own included) have the web traffic of mainstream media sites (e.g., CNN.com, NYTimes.com, etc.), the fact remains that millions of people read blogs every day, and many of those people trust and rely on the content they find on blogs. Indeed, if that weren’t the case, would I be getting 20-30 emails from bands and music publicists every day about new records, new tour dates and the like?

So we at Rogomo understand the value that comes with being mentioned on a blog. And, fortunately, we’ve been getting a bunch of great blog (and other website) mentions over the past couple of weeks, both in the United States and around the world.

As a “thank you” to the folks behind these sites, we wanted to give them a quick shout-out here on our own blog. I apologize in advance if we’ve left anyone out!

EmilyChang.com
Geekissimo (Italian site)
Generation Web
KillerStartups.com
The Museum of Modern Betas
Simple Spark
Web2Null (German site)
WebInside (Polish site)

Our thanks to all of these sites, and to anyone else who has posted about Rogomo or tested out the site!

(Photo source)

There was an interesting article in Tuesday’s New York Times about the so-called “Bubble 2.0,” and the growing belief of many that we’re on the verge of a second Internet bubble burst. One quote really stood out to me — one of the people interviewed stated that “entrepreneurs [have] begun to think that the financing game is best played by avoiding actual revenues — since that only limits the imagination of investors.”

The article made me ask myself — why does history repeat itself?

Consider that from 1999 to 2001, there were plenty of people who, like now, were happy to throw out their finance textbooks and leave startup valuations to “the imagination of investors” rather than looking for actual revenue. And for a while it seemed to be working. People got rich. We were told that we were in the middle of the “new economy”, and that the rules of the “old economy” didn’t apply anymore. In fact, people were so convinced of this “new economy” that some even tried to create wholly new, Internet-based currencies like Flooz.com (remember the Whoopi Goldberg commercials?)

We all know how that turned out. The majority of the hot new Internet startups burned through incredible amounts of money, and investors eventually bailed out of their investments when “the imagination of investors” became less important than future profits. Tech workers went from being paper billionaires to collecting paper checks from their nearest Unemployment office.

The lesson that I thought we had learned from Bubble 1.0 was that we shouldn’t invest solely on “imagination.” However, instead of learning this lesson, investors repeated their mistakes just a few years later as they poured money into the real estate market. There was no rational reason for the sudden and dramatic increase in home prices, aside than the fact that everyone else was investing. Many investors started “flipping” homes for a living or buying up many homes as investment properties. And for a while it too was working. People became rich overnight. Real estate was clearly “different” (just as our “new economy” had been).

As we’ve learned, though, real estate is not different. People overcommitted themselves, and now are being foreclosed upon left and right. Homes and apartments are sitting empty. Condominium buildings are being converted to rentals. Prices are falling quickly. What we’re seeing is that popular thinking — best demonstrated by a popular Miami real estate website’s tagline, “Bubbles are for bathtubs” — was clearly wrong.

To be fair, the real estate investors that helped build the housing bubble were generally not the same people involved in either the first tech bubble or the current tech market (I’m not ready to call it a bubble, yet). But others, including the homebuilders, banks and even the Fed, should have been able to look at the market and see that history was repeating itself.

So, to get back to Tuesday’s New York Times article — are we repeating our mistakes of the past and will this lead to a Bubble 2.0? It’s hard to say. There are some key differences between the tech market now and in 2001. It’s less expensive to start an online company today than in the past (something Rogomo has benefitted from), meaning that the barriers to entry are lower and that it’s a new crop of investors in the current market. However, much like Bubble 1.0, it seems clear that many investors are still basing their investments on “imagination” rather than hard numbers. In addition, much like the real estate market, established companies are overpaying for innovation for the simple reason that their competitors are doing so as well (i.e., eBay/Skype, Google/Doubleclick, etc.). The value of these startups are increasing dramatically. People are getting rich (again). But will it last this time?

The reason that history repeats itself is because we refuse to learn from our mistakes and instead let greed and hubris cloud our judgment. The investors driving up the so-called Bubble 2.0 valuations don’t believe (or at least hope) that the lessons from the original tech bubble apply to them. They should know better than to ignore history.

Personally, I learned my own valuable history lesson from the original tech bubble that will forever guide my investments — don’t take investment advice from Deloris Van Cartier.

As I’m sure you know, the Internet has gone widget-crazy over the last year or two. It seems like everyone and their grandmother has their own widget these days, which is why it seems so weird that I can’t seem to find a widget for what I want to do with this blog (and my other blog).

Specifically, I want a widget that I can drop in my blog sidebar that will display 5 to 10 (or more) of my favorite news or blog posts of the day. I want the widget to be dynamic, so that if I’m on a blog, oh, say Valleywag, and I really like some article they have about Fake Steve Jobs, I just click a button and automatically that article (or at least the headline) is displayed in the widget back on my blog. Readers of my blog could then easily click through to the original article.

I’d use this in a second over Digg, Delicious or the like. I used to do a lot of posts on my other blog that were essentially “roundups” of interesting articles I’d found around the web, but I stopped doing it because it required me to keep a continuous log going of the articles (and URLs) as I found them until I had enough to amount to a post. If I only found one or two interesting articles in a day, often times I’d forget about them and never post them. A widget like the one I’m talking about would solve this problem.

So, anybody know where I can find myself this type of widget?

(And while we’re at it, does anyone know how to edit a post in WordPress without it defaulting to a “Visual” view and totally screwing up my line breaks? Almost makes me miss Blogger.)