Yesterday I downloaded Skype 3.0. There are now some interesting plug-ins. There's a cool, shared white-board for collaborative drawing over your Skype call, and a Chinese checkers, a game I used to play a lot with my parents.

What's also cool, of course, is that these plug-ins are viral. Before you can use the whiteboard with other people, they also have to download them. I imagine that makes Skype quite an exiting place to develop software for, right now. A chance for your apps. to take off ... very, very quickly.

There seems to be a torrent-style file-sharing software. Hope it's better than Skype's relay. If it is, and it really is like BitTorrent, it could be very useful.

There also seem to be a couple of plug-ins for finding people and asking for live advice. This is really significant ... Skype could end up really running the "live" web. Especially if they get live people searching. Essentially anyone will be able to set themselves up to sell live phone services without having to work for a call-centre, a phone-sex company or the Mechanical Turk.

What I find strange, though, is that Skype still don't seem to have sorted out some kind of PayPal integration that would allow people to pay for services directly over their call. I don't see a plug-in for that, but it seems obvious. And an obvious revenue stream for Skype. Skype don't charge for the calls themselves but at least skimming something off pay-by-the-minute services should be possible, if they get involved in the payment part. And as both Skype and PayPal are owned by EBay ...

Not sure whether this is actually already going on and I just missed it; or if Skype have a blind-spot about this; or if it's going to be announced next week; or if there's some glaring technical or legal impediment I'm too dumb to notice.

Any ideas from the readers?

Steve Jobs says Apple are willing to give up DRM.

It's a plausible story. I imagine Robert X. Cringely won't take it at face value though.

I, Cringely:

Mobile phone carriers are eager for video to succeed on their 3G and 4G platforms because it represents a major new source of revenue. Apple's iPhone is the best handset yet for displaying that video. But Apple isn't going to allow this to happen without Cupertino gaining a substantial piece of the action. I'm sure discussions are taking place right now with Cingular where Apple is arguing that the carrier should make its video service iTunes-compatible.

I have better things to spend my money on than a computer that can run Vista.

Vista has already failed. You know the game is pretty much over when its most (allegedly) innovative software can be faked in Ajax in the browser. And Microsoft really should have noticed that if people needed more 3D graphics in their lives, VRML would have taken off and the web would have been full of virtual environments a decade ago.

The web-as-platform has decisively beaten both Apple and Microsoft as the platform for building useful software applications. And both Apple and MS are now reduced to fighting over who'll be putting the prettiest packaging around good-old-fashioned music, photography and home-movies. They've effectively succumbed to the worst tendency of the games industry : zero innovation (in fact boring rehashes of the same formulae, dumbed down) smothered in lashings of eye-candy that demand ever-more absurd hardware specs. in order to run; all in a desperate attempt to titilate the jaded palettes of the customers one more time.

It's the WaterWorld theory of software-making.

Really, really hard to see how Microsoft are going to make back their investment in Vista. Sure, they'll tax new PCs for a while yet. But, frankly, they could have done that anyway with a 10th of the effort. We know where they're headed; we've seen it with IBM : monolithic, unfocussed, and ultimately unprofitable, until someone finally breaks them up and lets a few of the pieces fly off in their separate ways.

ps : Remember if I ran Microsoft?

pps : Yes, Platform Wars is back with a new look - thanks to Google finally giving a minimal upgrade to Blogger. I approve. It's not ambitious, but it is nicely incremental, and feels a bit less clunky to use.

John Robb wants what could be one of the world's coolest jobs.

Meanwhile Adobe's Apollo makes a lot of sense.

One thing I'm always curious about. Where is Javasript as a scripting language for desktop apps?

Sorry, this really isn't meant to be a Dave Winer fan-site, but this is worth watching.

Not sure I get this.

Why does a telephone company want to be a broadcaster?

Intel “SuiteTwo” Product Suite Launches

Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet

Java Community News - Amazon.com - A Developer Platform?

Go Dave!

I think maybe I should write a book about how you invent and promote standards for fun and profit, because what I'm doing here is exactly what I did when I started blogging, or publishing in XML and then RSS, or started pushing audio blog posts as enclosures in my RSS feeds. You start by putting two things next to each other that you think should work together. Then you shorten the distance, and shorten it again, and keep optimizing until you have something that other people could use. Then you tell them about it, and tell them again, and again and so on until you have a standard.

Jeff Jarvis on GoogTube

Accelerated suicide

Great Steve Yegge post on the importance of Javascript.

This OTM :

This phenomenon will happen in the browser space. I can assure you it will. It's an economic certainty. There's money at play here, lots and LOTS of money; every company in the world wants a cool website. Not just a cool website; they want cool apps. Companies are realizing — glacially, yes, belatedly, yes, but inexorably — that most people with computer access in the world today live inside their browser, and they'd prefer not to leave it.

"Everyone in the world" — that's an awful lot of money at stake.

So as soon as "Scheme on Skis" or "JavaScript on Jets" or whatever comes along, that Rails-like radical simplification of the huge ugly Browser Swamp, the game will change almost overnight.

Kind of makes up for the dumb things he said about Agile a couple of posts ago. ;-)

Hendy commented that Ning isn't open source.

Agreed. I'd like to see an Open Source online web-app development / code-generation / code-management / code-sharing platform. Possibly Trac could evolve in this direction (from a very different starting point.)

I notice that I missed something from the list of improvents (in that previous post I linked) in web development. I said templating-oriented development (eg. PHP), and object publishing systems (eg. Zope) were the only real changes from trying to program web-apps as though they were any other kind of app.

Perhaps I need to add continuations based servers like Seaside. I finally watched these videos and got how cool this is.

Essentially you're allowing the language to hide all the session / interaction management.

Who owns the on-demand customer?

Joel trolling the Ruby community (yes you are, you know it)

Meanwhile, wouldn't the practical thing to do be to write the little bits that need to be fast in C?

The moral of the story is simple. You should see Heavy and YouTube as opposites in strategic error. Heavy doesn't create enough value consistently enough to be able to exert enough pressure to capture a significant share. YouTube, on the other hand, is creating a great deal of value - but also can't exert enough pressure to capture a significant share.

Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab

Trac Hacks is the free-for-all wiki-market where you can find Trac plug-ins and extension macros.

What's one of the most amazing, cool, web-based apps that no-one talks about?

Trac.

It's not flashy, or Ajaxy. But this packs so much useful functionality. Every time I show this to a developer, they drool.

Right now, if I was building a wiki-like application product for use in enterprises, or something to compete with Basecamp, I'd seriously consider starting here rather than with the usual Rails or Turbogears etc. It feels so well thought out that I bet the code is nice. And it's extensible.