Mike Arrington:

Facebook is now well over twice the size of MySpace, according to recent worldwide Comscore data. And what's worse, MySpace is losing audience while Facebook absolutely hockey sticks: MySpace lost 2% of users in just one month, while Facebook grew by nearly 40 million members in February alone. MySpace currently has 124 million monthly unique visitors, compared to Facebook's 276 million.

Here's something interesting : look at how Chumby is not all about their hardware, but is making reselling their personalized feed handling to other companies and devices (including TV).

Dare on Feeds as the new Email.

What is it like to be a bot?

Fascinating.

Just discovered a Bespin which I believe to be *really* significant for the software industry.

Essentially, all the important parts of the software industry have now migrated into the cloud. Including the software development environment itself.

Wow! Asus considering Android-based EEE-PC

Things are moving *very* fast, aren't they?

Mary-Jo Foley tracking Microsoft's Red Dog : Microsft's non-Windows(!!!) web-operating system for Azure

Will live (Twitter) search kill Google?

Unlikely. But an interesting read (and trend to watch)

Especially when you compare what Clay Shirky says about filters in the last part of this interview..

ZDNet Bloggers :

Netbooks killing Microsoft faster than expected

Biggest threat to Microsoft revenue.

Dare Obasanjo on Google's cancellation of side-projects.

Good points. Though I thought that Jaiku and Dodgeball were buy-ins rather than 20% time projects.

Larry Dignan, Sam Diaz, Tom Steinert-Threlkeld :

The most likely scenario is that Amazon didn’t want to talk about its Kindle-iPhone connection, which may have people wondering why they need a Kindle in the first place. However, whispersync lays the groundwork for a few interesting possibilities.

He he!

Phil Wainewright wrings his hands :

Have we brought up an entire generation to believe that cash isn’t important?

To which the right answer is "Yes". Because it *isn't* so important. And NOT because of the same ultra-cash-focussed casino games of the financial sector although Wainewright tries to tar "free" with the same brush.

Mary-Jo Foley highlights the confusion of Microsoft's Windows upgrade roadmap.

I've no idea what corporate Windows users are likely to do, faced with this mess. But M$ could be making it a lot better. Here's one suggestion : Give Windows 7 away, free-as-in-beer, to all existing Windows Vista licensees. XP users still have to pay to upgrade, but M$ should get everyone off Vista and on to Windows 7 as quickly as possible.

This is, of course, assuming that Windows 7 is as good as everyone says it is. But what about earlier incompatibility issues? Once again I ask, isn't Windows 7 based on the same core as Vista? Are they making it better than Vista by undoing some of the things that were new in Vista? Can 7 be both more compatible with XP and more compatible with all the new .NET stuff that came out on Vista?

Unsurprisingly netbooks are hurting Microsoft.

Allegedly Windows 7 will run pretty well on netbooks. I'm totally ignorant of the details here, but this surprises me. I always assumed that at least some of the reason that Vista appeared so clunky was that more of Windows had moved to Managed Code in a sandboxed virtual machine. Does the performance improvement mean that Windows 7 moves some things out of that? Or have they found a way to make it more efficient?

Whatever the facts of that, it's clear that M$ are cutting the price to compete with free Linux on netbooks. And that's a loss that isn't going to be recovered if (as I predict) the O/S for netbooks remains a commodity. (As in, they won't be able to make Windows an essential as opposed to more-familiar-and-therefore-preferred option.)

So ... what's 2009 bringing us so far?

Wardley's dream of an open sourced cloud standard comes closer.



While Zuora creates a billing SaaS :

I don’t intend to denigrate the undoubted capabilities of other SaaS billing vendors ... But all of them take a traditional, project-based approach to implementation that means the usual to-ing and fro-ing before you can get anything up and running. Whereas Zuora lets developers work directly with its APIs, charging nothing until the service is ready to go into production. That’s a major advance and one that means developers at last have a low-threshold option for including proper subscription management and collection in their pay-as-you-go applications.

Two trends to watch.

Incredibly, enterprise RSS is dead!

My first, flippant thought : Enterprises just take forever to adopt stuff ... give it another 10 years or so.

But that's not really true. I'd suspect that the real issue is this. Enterprises are a life-form with a certain kind of structure, held together by specific forces. Like a single-cell organism, puncture the membrane and it dies as its resources just drain away.

And RSS is rather like a nano-needle.

We *imagined* that social-software would burst the enterprise. Instead, the enterprise resolutely rejects it. No senior manager (who has a certain amount of "between-ness centrality") wants to legitimize the automated software streams that would route around him (or her), bypass the company's official PR outputs, bypass the company's official sales department's inputs.

RSS is an example, but the same is true of blogs, wikis and other social software that threatens the corporate structure. Hell! If you're in a Windows shop you don't even get a web-server on the corporate intranet as standard. If there had been demand from corporate clients, Outlook could have been a web and RSS and a wiki server (out-of-the-box) to allow colleagues to co-operate more effectively. It isn't. Because M$ didn't want to piss off IT departments by taking away their control of the corporate servers.

You may think that new, RSS powered upstarts will come along and defeat the dinosaurs who reject social software.

But maybe the fluidity, interpenatrability of such social companies will prevent them ever growing large. Maybe there'll remain a sea of small companies whose boundaries are too malleable to congeal into the next generation of dinosaurs. The sea will get bigger, and the dinosaurs will dissolve. But RSS will never be "the next big thing"

Could 2009 be the year that someone tries to hook a micropayment system to a YASN?

I missed until now, but enjoyed, Stowe Boyd's 2009 predictions.

Great Danny Sullivan series on the search giants : Microsoft, Yahoo, Google

How Facebook Could Kill Twitter Overnight

It's not true, for a dozen reasons (Twitter's locked-in community, less openness etc.) But worth thinking about.