And it is. At its most basic, TopCoder stages programming competitions, both for itself (that is, its direct consulting clients) and for third parties like Google. Companies hire TopCoder to stage competitions to build functionality for them (as well as to scout for new talent). TopCoder also provides consulting services and uses competitions to create the requested applications, and heavily reuses its portfolio of applications and components to drive down development costs.

An old friend from the open-source world, Ira Heffan, called me today about his company, TopCoder. Ira is a smart guy so I figured anything with which he was involved must be good.

As an example, TopCoder has its premier competition in Las Vegas next week at the 2008 TopCoder Open (May 12 through 15), hosting 120 finalists from 30 countries. $260,000 in prize money is on the line.

I think this is absolutely brilliant. Most open-source companies are adept at finding bugs after a product release because their customers and system integrators - their community - discover these when trying to go into production. But getting qualified volunteers before a release to find bugs, and getting bandwidth post-release to fix the bugs, would be invaluable.

…[T]he Bug Races might be an interesting way for open source companies to do bug fixes. The companies could post issues on the site with a bounty on them, and then review the member’s submissions to see if they take care of the issue. The companies would need to provide the members with information on where to get the source, and environment requirements, etc., but that’s something that open source companies would already have in place anyway. TopCoder already has in place the developer community and the payment and IP transfer processes, so it could be a very easy thing for us to do.

Now imagine what this could mean for commercial open-source projects. Despite the myth of open-source development (zillions of eyeballs making all bugs shallow), the reality is that most projects don’t have the luxury of zillions, or even hundreds, of qualified people actively looking at their code to find bugs. Here’s where rent-a-bug-killer comes in handy, as Ira noted to me:

Rent-a-community. It might not fit the myth of open source, but it seems like a direct hit on the reality of open source. If you’d like an introduction to the company, ping me.

Bug races are a way for TopCoder to do maintenance on the software it develops, but the company is considering opening the program up to third parties interested in “renting” a community to spot and fix bugs. It’s a great way to provide comparatively small dollars ($25 to $200 per bug fix) to find quick fixes for TopCoder’s internal stable of Jira-reported bugs.

Ira told me that one developer made over $500,000 last year in TopCoder prize money. Not too shabby. This, coupled with recruiting interest from top companies means that developers may be winning themselves a new job, as well as a competition.

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Despite having the lowest number of integrated services (see chart below) Galligan tells me the team is on track to add about 200 others in the coming months. He believes Socialthing’s implicit understanding that you don’t want to track down people you’re friends with will draw people who are using these services to make social data aggregation easier. To help that cause, the service will soon be adding a discovery feature that will automatically show data from networks your friends are a part of, even if you’re not. This means that if a friend of yours is using a service you’re not familiar with, you’ll still see whatever he or she posted–something that might help you discover new sites. Friendfeed has something similar, and it’s definitely helpful.

Monitor your friend's activities from multiple social streams with Socialthing. Unlike some others, it will seek out people you're buddies with so you don't have to add them.

In addition to its desktop browser experience, Socialthing has a slick-looking iPhone app. It looks and functions similar to Facebook and Plaxo’s
iPhone apps, with tabs and large streams of eyeball-friendly data. Unfortunately, it doesn’t perform as well, or do as much as either of the two competitors, which double as massive, portable phone books with up-to-date contact information. Socialthing’s CEO Matt Galligan says the company has much more in store for the iPhone app, including ways to post a message to several services at the same time. In its current form you can post to Twitter and Pownce with the same message. Facebook is being added later tonight.

Socialthing was nice enough to give at least 1,000 Webware readers access to the service starting on Monday morning. You can sign up on this page with the invite code CNET.

As with some of the others in this space, Socialthing takes your log-ins and usernames from each service and grabs data from each throughout the day. I give my kudos though, if you’re already signed into any of the services, authenticating them in your browser doesn’t even require a single keystoke–this is going to be incredibly helpful when you’re adding in several dozen services at a time. It’s also smart enough to seek out all the people who are your friends or contacts from each service without you having to add them on your own. It’s a great feature that kept competitor FriendFeed from being as easy to jump into immediately.

2007 was the year of platforms, and I’m just about ready to call 2008 the year of social aggregators, or services that help you group together and manage all the social sites you’re a part of. Opening up (in private beta) on Monday is Socialthing, a new contender that joins the ranks of Plaxo, MyBlogLog, Spokeo, Iminta, Profilactic, Friendfeed, and Facebook in giving you a single place to aggregate and interact with all that information in one, centralized feed.

It’s interesting that Microsoft is making these changes separate from Service Pack 1. I asked if this might be a trend toward updating operating system components outside of Windows releases. Here’s the response I got back, in the form of a statement.

These changes are separate from moves Microsoft made within Vista Service Pack 1 to address concerns from Google. As part of those changes, Microsoft changed the way it displays search results in the operating system and created a mechanism for both users and computer makers to specify an alternate default desktop search program.

Windows Search 4.0 is available both as an update to Vista’s built-in search engine and an updated version of the XP add-on that Microsoft has had available for some time, previously under the name Windows Desktop Search.

Desktop search is one of those really great things for people who have a lot of files and tend to forget where they all are.

From my experience, such engines can also be prone to glitches and slow performance. Microsoft is hoping to change some of those perceptions with an updated version of its desktop search product. Microsoft says Windows Search 4.0, of which a preview version was made public on Thursday, can speed query response time by a third as compared with the version of the search tool included in the initial release of Vista.

“Microsoft does not have any specific plans for releasing future updates to the search engine separately from Windows.” the company said. “However, the company is always listening to customer feedback and will plan future releases with their feedback in mind.”

Following HD DVD’s demise, there’s been a lot speculation that Microsoft would add a Blu-ray option to the
XBox 360. The latest rumor has a subsidiary of Asus, Pegatron Technology, making a premium Blu-ray-equipped version of the XBox 360 that will arrive in time for the holidays. This one follows on the heels of a report that Lite-On was going to be the one making the Blu-ray drives for Microsoft’s game console.

All that said, don’t expect Microsoft to put out any games on Blu-ray any time soon. With the current XBox 360 installed base having only a DVD drive to play with, Microsoft would be looking at movie playback, not gaming.

Source: Gizmodo via Kotaku via Economic Daily News.

If you speak Chinese, you can translate the Asus rumor from Economic Daily News, a publication that Gizmodo calls a “Taiwanese rag.” While we may not have tremendous faith in the specifics of the rumor, Taiwanese companies aren’t known to keep secrets all that well (that’s a gross generalization based on a few comments I’ve heard from industry insiders, but I believe it). And it does seem logical that Microsoft will add a Blu-ray option to help eliminate any perceived advantage that Sony might have with the
PS3.

The current premium XBox 360 is black. Is blue next?

Of course, the rumors could be wrong and Microsoft could simply put out an external Blu-ray drive similar to its discontinued HD DVD drive offering. Or perhaps there will be a premium XBox 360 with Blu-ray, as well as a separate Blu-ray external drive for current owners. Sounds inevitable, right? Comments?

Obviously, it’s easier to build just another single-function service than it is to come up with a plausible growth strategy and a unique service back-end. So both Fried and Kelton are right: Users gravitate to simplicity and focus. But if your business itself is so simple that anyone can replicate it, you don’t have much of a business after all.

The real problem, he said during his talk, is not that Web 2.0 technology is easy to use, it’s that it is too easy to build. Which means that there is “too much noise”: too many new products vying for the attention of the early adopters who can give a start-up its first taste of success. And blogs don’t help, he says: They encourage readers to skim without “chewing” on content, just as they encourage writers to post often and quickly, without writing thoughtful pieces.

Click here for full coverage of Web 2.0 Expo

Kelton has two possibly workable solutions to the start-up’s dilemma: First, “make magic,” he says. But on the back end, not the interface. Build a simple interface to a complicated service that isn’t so easily replicated. He points to Google search. Simple UI. Rather complex on the server side.

NEW YORK–After listening to Jason Fried (37 Signals) give his compelling Web 2.0 Expo talk Wednesday about building companies in the modern world–which could be summed up as “simplify, and don’t work too hard doing so”–I walked across the hall to hear Fraser Kelton (Adaptive Blue) discuss the negative ramifications of this strategy.

Second, improve on existing products. Pointing in this example to Summize (acquired by Twitter) and Disqus (we’re waiting) as services that add important improvements to existing platforms (Twitter; blogs), Kelton says that a start-up can ride on the success of a previous wave if its founders find a smart way to embed their technology in that of the key players in the market.

In other words, there’s a deluge of choice. Yet at the same time, social technologies moving into Web 2.0 products lock users in. Who wants to try a new, possibly better photo-sharing site when he or she has 10,000 photos already in Flickr?

I’m giving this service a thumbs up, although if you’re already tied to one of these services, its feature set is nearly identical to Geni and Kindo, so give it a look before trying to get your whole family to convert. Grandma will say grazie.

It’s Our Tree is a genealogy service that lets people create very simple family trees using Adobe Flash. Like Geni (review) and Kindo (review), the idea is to get your entire family involved by inviting them to join and add family members they remember. It doesn’t offer some advanced services like DNA sleuthing using cheek cells, but it’s incredibly simple to get started, and the finished product can double as a Rolodex, birthday reminder, and private e-mail system for you and your family.

Each family member you (or others) create gets his or her own profile in case you feel like turning the service into an updatable family phone tree. My one irk with this is that they don’t take advantage of a pre-existing contact-management service like Plaxo, Gmail’s contact list, or LinkedIn to save you some time of having to dig all that up. What does make these profiles interesting is that you can add all sorts of geo-data to your family members including the place of birth, death, burial, and present location. This information can be toggled on a large Google map, which can lead to some really great exploration if you’re willing to spend the time researching and inputting it all. Ancestry.com’s DNA service will do something similar, although it actually shows you where your family is from based on cultural migration.

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Make your family tree quickly and easily with It's Our Tree. It's got support for half siblings, deaths, and geo-location for where people were born. (Click to enlarge.)

He’s consulting with us a few days a week working on this new product we’re launching very soon….

He’s fired up about what we’re doing (which I can’t tell you!).

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Mike Olson sold his open-source database startup, Sleepycat, to Oracle and earlier this year left Oracle to spend time with family. The family, however, had other plans and has booted him out of the house. “Get a real job, Honey!” were the words his wife used to chase him from the house, eyewitness reports reveal.

Javier is like one of those people that tell you they have a secret but they won’t divulge it. I want answers!

In all seriousness, landing Mike as a consultant/advisor/interested onlooker is a real coup. Mike has been sniffing around for his next gig. No doubt it will be big. In the meantime, he’s going to be helping to make Hyperic even more successful.

Well, Mike hasn’t managed to get a real job just yet, but he will be spending some time with Hyperic, a leading open-source IT management company. According to Javier Soltero, Hyperic’s CEO, Mike will be “helping us develop the next generation of killer products.”

And now, the latest in social network developer platform announcements: Orkut, the community site owned by Google, has rolled out a directory of applications to its users in India and will continue to expand geographically over the next few weeks.

Announcements about social network developer platforms are a dime a dozen, now that Facebook’s example made developer applications practically mandatory, but Orkut has drawn particular attention because it’s owned by Google. The OpenSocial API, on which Orkut’s platform is based, was launched by Google last year.

Google has since announced that it will relinquish control of OpenSocial, turning the project into a nonprofit organization in collaboration with Yahoo, News Corp.’s MySpace.com, and other partners.

India, along with Brazil, is one of Orkut’s main hubs of popularity; in Brazil, it faces many of the same issues that massive social networks like Facebook and MySpace do in the U.S. Despite having been developer in-house in Google’s Mountain View, Calif.-based headquarters, the site has never really taken off stateside. Meanwhile, rival MySpace is currently launching an India-centric portal that will compete with Orkut.

Here’s something interesting: At least for the time being, Orkut users are limited to 25 applications per profile. Google representatives were not immediately available for comment on whether this is permanent restriction.

Still, I think Microsoft is onto a big idea: a cloud service where users can tap into an always-available online hub that synchronizes all their digital data. But haven’t we seen some of this before? A service which offers both synchronization and replication? Remember Lotus Notes and Groove? Hardly a surprise, then, to learn that Ray Ozzie was the creative force behind Notes, Groove, and now, Live Mesh.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

•&nbsp The success of Notes–which was both a application and platform–was predicated on fostering a vibrant ecosystem of developers. Groove never enjoyed that same support because it was hard to build distributed applications. But creating a third-party community of developers is old hat for Microsoft.

Ray Ozzie

Live Mesh takes things further, where the Web is the hub, but you incorporate a client. The architecture is designed to embrace all of your data. True to Microsoft form, this is your classic work-in-progress. Developers will get a look at the preview version this week, while a broader beta test begins around October.

If some other company had produced it, Mesh would be just another interesting product. But because it’s coming out of Redmond, that can’t be the case. It never is.

By now, everyone–yours truly, included–will be hitting the “publish” button to weigh in on the cosmic significance (or insignificance) of Microsoft’s Live Mesh technology. But I’m not going to snow you. At this juncture, it’s too early to predict how this is going to play out.

Steve Ballmer’s got Ozzie’s back on this one. And if Microsoft needed further incentive to get it right, there’s always the specter of Google picking up the pieces…and the users if Mesh fails. Failure is just not an option.

If it works as advertised, this will be the culmination of Ozzie’s career. Live Mesh is a core technology underpinning Microsoft’s vision for software and services. It’s a hybrid approach based on practical user scenarios. At this stage, the client is good for some things while meshing with the cloud is the path of least resistance for most users. It’s not a zero sum game where it’s cloud or client.

What are the odds Microsoft can sidestep that same fate with Live Mesh? A couple of items to consider:

If you follow Ozzie’s career, there’s a consistent theme to his thinking about the nature of work in the computer age. In the mid-1970s, he worked on the PLATO project at the University of Illinois, where he explored how to use networked computing for communication and group collaboration. That idea later found partial expression in Lotus Notes, which synchronized e-mail online and offline. However, Notes was a client-server technology where everything got stored on the server. After IBM acquired Lotus in 1995, Ozzie went on to found Groove, where he created a product that was about synchronization. However, it approached the question through a highly decentralized P2P topology where there was no notion of a “center.”

However, Ozzie’s also fighting against a corporate legacy for botching big ideas. Hailstorm never got off the ground. Passport was a bust. The jury’s still out on Trustworthy Computing, and Longhorn promised a lot but delivered a lot less in the form of Vista.

As the first social network to become a nationwide teen craze, MySpace became a frequent target for safety advocates–including state lawmakers, who ended up working with the social network to create a safety plan for kids and teens online.

Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. subsidiary that owns social sites MySpace and Photobucket, has signed on as the latest member of the Family Online Safety Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to “identifying and promoting best practice, tools and methods in the field of online safety, that also respect free expression.”

Other prominent members of FOSI include AOL, AT&T, Cisco, Comcast, Google, Loopt, Microsoft, Ning, Verizon, and a number of international telecommunications carriers.

“FOSI has been a dedicated leader in promoting online safety and we look forward to contributing to the work they do,” Fox Interactive Media Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement Friday. “Internet safety is a key priority for us as we strive to keep all teens safer online. This new membership will further strengthen our efforts and will also allow us to share our expertise with other members.”