In May, Sun Microsystems approached us for assistance in launching a very cool social media site they were building in Drupal. Two months later we launched the Sun Video Learning Exchange, designed to let Sun staff easily publish training videos and resources to their global network of support engineers and customers. From the time of project kick off we had two months to complete two design passes, develop all features, test, and launch the site. Work progressed smoothly much in part to a very agile work process that paired our team with internal Sun developers working side by side to launch the site.

The site is a great showcase of the comprehensive media handling functionality available now in Drupal. Apart from the integration with LimeWire to store and transcode content and integration with Sun’s LDAP directory for authentication, the site is built entirely with very standard Drupal modules including Views, FiveStar, and Community Tags. It was a real pleasure for us to work with Sun to develop the Learning Exchange, we are really looking forward to seeing what else they can do with Drupal.

“They’re going to double in a year. That’s insane, in my opinion” Steve Ballmer (Microsoft, CEO), speaking of Google’s rate of growth as an organization

It’s one thing to see the Drupal community’s exponential growth curve plainly plainly graphed. It’s was quite another to walk into a massive conference hall packed with over 800 Drupal developers last week in Boston. It was honestly all a bit overwhelming.

Since I have been a member of the Drupal project, the incredible rate of growth for the community has been a given. When a relatively small piece of the ‘market’ knew what Drupal was, it’s rate of growth seemed more an interesting aspect of the project than a defining characteristic. But as more and more individuals, organizations, and Drupal specialized companies start betting big on the community, the pressure on the project created by this growth will only continue to increase proportionally.

What does this actually mean? Well, in the past few years it has meant:

• The difference between 20,000 users and 250,000+ on Drupal.org: Setting up the site on Kjarten’s spare server vs. deploying on an expensive cluster tuned and tended to by a dedicated team of highly skilled systems engineers.
• The difference between a volunteer organized DrupalCon for thirty people and producing a four day conference for near a thousand costing over $200,000 and hundreds of hours of heroic organizing effort.
• The difference between Drupal powering The Onion being huge deal and the news of another high profile launch becoming almost old hat.

Despite these changes though, in many ways the Drupal project appears very much the same as it did a few years ago. Yes, every release the software really does get that much better. More patches, better patches, rinse, repeat. But this kind of relatively painless growth is only possible because the open-source method has created an incredible medium of software production that can relatively easily scale to meet the demands of virtually any size project.

But past a certain point the open-source method runs it’s course. The demands of supporting communities, even if they are largely web based, catches up with the code. We clearly reached this point with the Drupal project a little more than a year ago. These new type of challenges the Drupal community has been confronted with in the past year will become the major challenges that the community will face. And as Drupal continues to double, they will double.

But of course, so will Drupal.

In April, NASA CoLab announced an RFP for “Partnership Software” which very explicitly requested the software to be built on an open source CMS, used for one particular use case, then packaged up and released as an installable application. Hello Drupal install profile! Chapter Three won the bid and we are now building a full downloadable Drupal product that organizers can use to facilitate participatory conferences ala BarCamp, DrupalCon etc.

It will support:

• conference invitation
• registration
• session proposals w/ voting
• note-taking
• forming post-conference working groups

Conferences can be quite complex and we don’t want this distro to be, so we’ve planned multiple phases of development to provide time for rethinking and refactoring. Development of the distro will go through the end of June.

Building on lessons learned from the DrupalCon Sunnyvale, DrupalCamp Toronto and other Drupal-based conference organizing websites, we’re constructing the distro in a sustainable and replicable manner: relying on as few and as stable modules as possible, implementing functionality cleanly, and producing thorough documentation.

If you want to keep track of the project please join our Drupal Group, Conference Organizing Distribution. We will be publishing as much of the “guts” of the project as possible throughout our development cycle. We’ve got a project vision, use cases overview, and technical specification pages up so far. You should expect a finished technical specification, a public rough prototype, and design comps later this week.

Please get in touch on the group and or via email if you or your organization are interested in this project.

Check this out. Web service Ma.gnolia.com had 12.2% of their new users register on their site using an OpenID in the month and a half between mid December and the end of January. And their OpenID users were significantly more active users when compared ‘normal’ registrants. OpenID adoption among websites and services is still very minimal, but this study is a start of what I think will be a very strong case for implementing OpenID in the pretty near future.

It’s been incredible watching OpenID catalyze the identity industry in real time. In terms of getting a new platform technology off the ground I can think of no single harder market to work in than the identity space (that is until now).

Identity technology is only really useful when it is widely adopted, that is when you can use your identity to sign into many different services — and at the same time it is very hard for a new technology to gain adoption unless it is generally useful — all of which is complicated by the incredibly large privacy, security, usability, and business concerns that come along with centralizing someones identity information.

And yet the OpenID did it, and relatively quickly! By minimizing scope and getting the technology down to it’s bare essentials, aligning players in the market as allies in ‘coopertition’, and executing beautifully, the OpenID community has pulled off something incredible — started something huge.

Here is a look back at notable events in last year and a half in the world OpenID:

• July 2005 Brad Fitzpatrick releases OpenID to the wild
• January 2006 JanRain OpenID libraries start hitting the web.
• April 2006 David Recordan leaves SixApart to work on OpenID at Verisign
• June 2006 Scott Kveton leaves OSUOSL to become CEO of JanRain.
• July 2006 Over a dozen companies put up $50,000 for open-source OpenID code bounties.
• December 2006 Simon Willison creates a video tutorial that explains OpenID.
• Febuary 2007 Bill Gates announces that Microsoft is adopting OpenID.

Tremendously successful web startups tend to solve very obvious problems. They innovate in how they do things, not in what they do.

Take for example:

Sold for $1.65B, now the ninth most trafficked website on the internet. Their innovation? Making it stupidly simple to put your videos online and share them.

Making a successful business is incredibly hard, you’re nearly always best off keeping things as simple as possible. Most people I talk to seem to think the success has more to do with the right idea with the right people at the right time, i.e. luck… it is that, but much more. Just as important (if not more) as those obvious factors is something much more subtle. In a startup a million and one things can go wrong. The wrong hire, the wrong market, wrong brand, wrong back end technology… etc etc. If you get just one thing wrong chances are you’re toast.

But people win… some routinely, the ones that seem to play the game with ease. The savvy ones have read the rules better than anyone and apply strategy where as others rely on just their guts and friends. The general two-bit understanding of the business horizon for the technology sector reads as follow: backed by the drum beat of Moores law, technology will steadily advance at an exponential rate, and in our lifetimes we will see innovation flooding all technology gaps until all floats atop a seamlessly perfect techno-utiopian first class world.

It is in the quickly flooding narrows of sillicon valley that the nerd-cowboys catch their waves and jostle for control of the floods, navigating their carbon fiber racing yachts and suborbital starships from opportunity to opportunity. But it is not brawn, speed, or fitness that counts the most in this race, it is your timing.

As my Bulgarian fencing coach Iana Dakova could demonstrate with ease on her students, the best fencers were those who were not competing through their blades and finessed footwork, it was the ones who had such impeccable physical game that they could afford to think and strategize, in the middle of the bout, in between the tenth of a second second actions and reactions. These were the ones who could always kick your ass. The ones who could turn your own sense opportunity, your own sense of timing, and spin it’s momentum back around and impale you with it so quickly and cleanly that you knew you were through even before the blade hit, and the buzzer sounded, and the judge or anyone else watching had time to even think about what just happened.

Since YouTube.com got bought for 1.65B everyone i’ve heard talk about it mentions something like “But it’s just a stupidly simple website that people used to upload video, how could it be worth so much!” But think back a bit. In 2005 it was nuts that nobody had yet figured out how to make video work the web. We had 40% broadband penetration, and our juicy 25 and under target market spending more time on the web than on any other medium… the kids who used to watch more tv than anyone and watching more and more each year were suddenly ramping back the tube watching in favor of online games, websites, and im’ing. But nobody figured out how to get them video. I guess in the mentality of the time it could be rationalized that “The web is so much richer a medium than tv. Kids don’t care anymore about video”. But that’s a load of crap. Kids were only online because the content available in a medium no richer than FM radio and newspapers, was better than the extremely well produced video content pumped through the now ignored tv’s in their living room.

It wasn’t that they didn’t want video, it was that they found internet non-video more interesting than TV. But as soon as YouTube figured out how to create internet TV they had a new daily destination, and one little dot-com miracle came true.

Ok, but couldn’t that be explained as simply right place right time?

No, I don’t think so. People have been putting video on the web since the web took off.

So, what did YouTube get right?

I think the biggest reason YouTube was successful was something so incredibly simple that when I explain it you’ll probably think I’m full of crap (which often times I am). YouTube won because they encoded their content as flash files. Hear me out… The norm for video content at the time was to offer it up in a stream-able format such as Real Video or WMV which were theoreticaly easier to copy protect. The only problem was that they hardly ever worked. Do you remember buffer hell? Of course video on the web never took off, it never worked. But YouTube did theirs in flash, with a big play button and a pre-loader, so videos would load instantaneously and would never stop halfway through. And so people watched them, uploaded their own, told their friends, and within half a year YouTube had a daily audience of more than 100M.

YouTube won because they solved the simplest problem, literally how to put video files on the internet in a way that other people could actually play them. And that was stupidly ingenious. And that is why they won.