Facebook Buys Instagram

How to think about this : 

1) Facebook is in the face recognition business. (They run algorithms on all the photos posted to them)

2) Facebook (as all the big social network are) is in the "find where people are" business. ("locative services")

You don't even have to go conspiracy theorist (Facebook part owned by the CIA) to see that Instagram gives Facebook another massive injection of photo data about who is where with who and when. And that this can be mined for all sorts of valuable information and patterns.

FB can discover relationships between people and places that no-one has explicitly told them about. They can tell advertisers where you like to hang-out socially. And who with. You think they aren't trying "sentiment analysis" to try to figure out whether people in photos are happy or sad? What's it worth to FB to know which bars in London have the happiest customers? Or which companies have the most drunken
employees? Or that you like motorcycles?

Google are after this data too. That's why they just brought out  wearable "glasses" that can tell Google what you're looking at. Instagram might very well be Facebook's response in the "grab" for rich visual data streams.

Some people are noting the potential threat to FB from Pinterest too and saying this is a defensive move. Today is a great day for Pinterest. Someone will be trying to snap that up soon.

Groupon's Troubles

Problematic business model :

“Groupon’s problem is similar to the subprime lending problem,” he said. “Groupon is saying we will give a restaurant cash now, but it doesn’t have to deliver a product. The businesses that sign up for Groupon are desperate, and when they go out of business, Groupon has to pay a refund.”

A Post-App World

Mobile apps. "must die" and be replaced by ... something more like web-pages?

It's an interesting idea. The problem with apps. is the "download, install and manage" part of things. As the number of apps. proliferates it becomes unmanageable.

What you want is the functionality of the app. popping up where it's appropriate (and wanted). In a sense, I guess the apps will have to be attached to things in your locality rather than a traditional web-address. Places like "in front of me" or "belonging to the institution I just entered", "by my left hand" etc. 

Amazon Buys Kiva Systems

Here's something fascinating. Amazon buys Kiva Systems. As far as I can tell, Amazon are the first of the internet giants to take robotics seriously. (I know Microsoft has a robotics platform and Android did that hook up with Willow Garage last year, but those are minor experiments trying to figure out a market.)

What's significant :

- Amazon have a real use-case for this. They're a customer and will undoubtedly be improving the technology to suit themselves.

- Amazon have a history of transferring the technologies they perfect for in-house use to products aimed at third parties. (Z-shops, AWS, Mechanical Turk).

How soon before Amazon start offering integrated supply-chain management with completely automated warehouses to third parties as a turnkey solution?

The Empire Of Paper

Venkatesh Rao is good on the end of the empire of paper.

DropBox

It's a major disruption.

Once you begin using Dropbox, you become more and more indifferent to the hardware you are using, as well as the operating system on that device. Dropbox commoditizes your devices and their OS, by being your “state” system in the sky. Storing credentials and configurations of devices, and even applications are natural next steps for this company. And the further they take it, the less dependent any user becomes of the physical machine (HW and SW) that is accessing that data (and state). Imagine the number of companies, as well as the previous paradigms, this threatens.

But can it be swallowed by its platform host?

All Platforms Are Potential Markets

People still don't get it.

Every site / platform you own is a potential market.

Why doesn't Blogger have a template market built into the dashboard? Where I can click a button and fire-off a 99 Designs style competition for a unique template. Why can't I hire writers for my commercial blog venture? Or get matched with potential co-authors of a group blog?

Or find a PR agency? When blogs are essential for PR / marketing, why isn't a blogging platform also helping with that stuff?

Update :

Or, hey, Google knows how much money you make on AdSense? Can't they calculate your taxes for that and sell that number to your accountant?

(BTW : this thought triggered by Venkatesh Rao's post here)

Mountain Lion's Secret Weapon

Integration

How Do The Playas Make Their Money?

Microsoft, Apple, Google?

What Pinterest Is Doing That Facebook Isn't

Pinteresting.

The Amazon Playbook

Venkatesh Rao has a very good overview of Amazon's strategy focussing on the coherence and long-term thinking of Jeff Bezos.

Interestingly he discounts Apple as a similarly strategic player, which I think undersells Jobs somewhat. (Though I also suspect this may be a rhetorical trick of Rao's to get a rise out of his readers.) Meanwhile Robert Cringely highlights the parallels, casting Bezos as the natural heir to Saint Steve.

What Is Google+ Really About?

Vincent Wong's presentation is entertaining and plausibly right.

tl;dr : Applications socialised

Why Do Professional Programmers Use Macs?

Someone just asked this question on Quora. My answer ballooned somewhat :

1) Historically, Macs were the preferred machines of desktop publishing and graphic designers, then web designers. As the web became an increasingly important platform (relative to "client-server" on Windows et al) individuals and companies who had started in web-design area became more prominent - think of the rise of 37 Signals and Ruby on Rails - and brought their Mac-ness with them. 

2) When Apple shifted to OSX they made it a real Unix. In the late 90s, one of the attractions of Linux was that it was the only way to get your hands on a proper command line and Unix tools, and to run the server-side software like databases that you needed. When MacOS became Unix, the Mac could do all that too.  

3) At the same time, Microsoft basically fell over. Believing that their birthright was to control every computer platform ever, rather than that their job was to make good tools, they spent the noughties trying to copy first Java (.NET), then Google (Bing), then Apple's iPod and iTunes (Zune), then Flash (Silverlight), then Sony's Playstation (XBox) etc. etc. The result was 5 years wasted on the appalling Vista, and a lacklustre successor Windows 7 (whose main virtue is that isn't quite as bad as Vista). (M$ clearly haven't learned the lesson, so it seems that Windows 8 will just be an inept attempt to copy the iPad while leverageing the rapidly evaporating "lock-in" they think they have in the desktop OS market.) 

4) Worse, the commodity PC market that Microsoft (and Linux) rely upon went through some rapid consolidation and price cutting. By my reckoning we expect to pay about a third of the price today for a PC compared to our expectations of the early - mid 1990s. But this didn't just happen in the nice "Moore's Law" sense. Commodity PCs got cheaper and nastier too. Sure they have faster processors, but the cheap bits often don't work together all that well. 

5) Despite Linux's maturity, the PC manufacturers have totally failed to get behind it.
Personally, I'm writing this in Chromium under Ubuntu on a beautiful Asus Bamboo laptop. And I'll resist the cult of Apple for as long as humanly possible. But the trend is obvious. Even in 2011, PC manufacturers refuse to support Linux (they won't sell a computer with Linux pre-installed, they won't help to make Linux run well on their machines and ensure that drivers are available for graphics cards etc.) 

Asus added a whole bunch of power management software for the pre-installed Windows 7 on this machine when I bought it. They offer no equivalent for Linux, so my machine runs unnecessarily hot (I have shorter battery-life and probably the machine will die sooner.)  

The combined result of the Microsoft debacle, changes to the PC industry and the refusal of PC manufacturers to support Linux is that Apple is the only company which now seems competent enough to make a decent personal computer that you can actually use for software development.  

Seriously! Think about going out and buying a computer and you think either it will be a substandard Windows 7 machine (packed with slow, buggy "extras" that the manufacturer was bribed to put there, and without the command-line tools that all professionaldevelopers need and use) or you contemplate getting the same PC and having to install Linux on it yourself and, if it's new, having to deal with driver compatibility issues etc. etc. etc. 

Or you go out and pay twice the price but get a machine which is of high build quality, you can trust will do everything you need out of the box, and where the hardware / operating system just work together.

6) Oh, and one more thing. You can't develop for iPhones and iPads on a PC or Linux machine.

Microsoft Remembers ...

Microsoft remembers that it's a software company.

(Earlier thoughts)

The Inside / Outside Dialectic

Mark Bernstein has an interesting post on Steve Jobs's Apple.

Metro and the Post-Windows PC

ZDNet has a good article suggesting that Windows 8's Metro stack is going to replace the win32 and .NET stacks of legacy PCs.

It sounds plausible to me. But what should worry everyone at M$ is that it's only the legacy applications which are keeping Microsoft in its dominant position in the enterprise. Metro may be a fine new UI / operating system stack, but without legacy support it's as precarious as WebOS or Meego. Or rather, the only difference between Metro and WebOS or Meego is the inherent conservatism of M$-loyalists in the IT department.

I presume M$ will try to handle legacy apps. with emulation. Which may work on very fast new machines, but I'll be interested to see if this works out on tablets and other low-power / long-battery devices.

What happens when, suddenly, all these Chinese internet playas start going international?

Everyone is focussed on Google and Facebook and Twitter etc. But Asia is full of equivalents. At some point, one of them will achieve some mainstream success in the West. And then what?

Another thought on Google+ while I'm waiting for someone to send me an invite (hint).

People are saying Circles are good. Maybe they are, but if they are, how hard will be it be for Facebook to copy them?

Until now, FB have been pretty good at the "steal good ideas from elsewhere" game. Witness buying FriendFeed and reorganising FB to be more like Twitter. If people find that Circles has a better UI than FB for organising your friends into groups, you can bet FB will soon adopt a similar UI. I'm sure they can do that faster than Google can build up FB's userbase.

Winer on Google+.

That's pretty much all you need to know.

Update :

You know what would have been funny? If Google had made invites computationally expensive like BitCoins. That would have shown the world that they were down with the zeitgeist, still l33t masters of algorithms, and still had a sense of humour. Which is what we want from Google. It's their brand.

Instead, this is a public admission that they're scared of Facebook, a reuse of 5 year old tactics, and apparently it's internally driven by an ex-Microsoft middle-manager.

They're just building a bonfire of their credibility here. And preparing to throw all their great products (Gmail, search, YouTube) onto it.

The Worst Decision Google Ever Made