Simon Wardley :

Following such a strategy, then it could be Game, Set and Match to MSFT for the next twenty years and the open source movement will find itself crushed by this juggernaut.

Blindingly obvious truth that needs to be spelled out :

Steve Jobs is very clever. If Apple had implemented Flash on the iPhone, it would have quickly become the cross-platform standard, and Adobe would have owned the whole mobile-app. market.

Possibly we'd have been talking about an Adobe App. Store.

Microsoft's nihilist "scorched-minds" advertising campaign continues.

Remember, the whole reason for these adverts is to make you believe that the universe is an absurd place where Manichean structures (such as Apple==cool/PC==uncool) don't obtain.

Your Company? There's an app. for that.

I like the comments on Cringely's outline of Google's work environment.

Bonepart rides again

In 2006 (with links circa 2009) :

What I'd suggest is that Winer understands, maybe better than anyone, how these things work as an "ecosystem". ...

Look carefully. Whatever Winer is promoting, he always has a tool and a format and some kind of hosting or central server and he's "dog-fooding" it and talking it up on his blog and he's finding new, quick-win, applications to extend the platform and he's making new connections into a user community and he's on the offensive, smacking down any potential rivals or threats to his authority ...

Ebay are selling Skype.

Which I guess puts the end of my whole "skypal" thing. I'm sort of surprised that nothing came of it. OTOH, I'm not that surprised given that Ebay doesn't seem to be much of a "visionary" company at all. Can't remember when they actually did anything interesting given their size / potential influence.

Dave Winer is enthused by the new iPhone Facebook.

You can see why.

Facebook buys FriendFeed

Listen to the linked mp3 piece about Craiglist's "demonetization" of the newspaper business.

People are still mystified this ... witness questions like "the money disappeared ... where did that value go?". Come on! "Money" doe NOT equal "Value"! That's the core of TCP/IP vs. the Dollar, money and the net are rival stores of / circulation media for value.

Bonus : A comment I wrote about "Free" over on Blahsploitation.

Has Microsoft got its edge back?

It's on the offensive, but I'm not convinced by the ZDNet piece. In every one of the battles mentioned, M$ faces an opponent who got successful doing something interestingly different ... whereas M$ is allegedly striking back more or less by copying the opponent.

Interesting state of The Mechanical Turk roundup.

This especially important :

For most users of mechanical turk (us included), it has become an API call that fits smoothly within their workflow. (Or as someone at the meetup wryly suggested, turk is a Remote Person Call.) The last pair of speakers, Lilly Irani and Six Silberman, reminded us that behind mechanical turk lies thousands of workers† ("the crowd in the cloud") working without (health care) benefits, oftentimes at extremely low hourly wages. Irani and Silberman suggested that rather than abstracting mechanical turk services as mere API calls, users should start thinking of the plight of the turks ("Mechanical Turk Bill of Rights") behind the service. As a first step they have a released a Firefox plugin that aims to narrow the information assymetry between the turks (those performing task) and requesters (those posting tasks). While requesters can see ratings for turks, requesters aren't rated: Turkopticon lets turks rate requesters. They need more turks to download and start using Turkopticon, so if you know any mechanical turks please enourage them do so.

Meanwhile, even Intel seem to be trying to get into the netbook OS game with Moblin.

Mike Loukides :

Google is providing the idea leadership that the Java community needs.

Mark Sigal :

I have harped repeatedly (HERE and HERE) about the fact that the next version of the iPhone OS (and the underlying SDK) will allow third-party hardware accessory makers to build external hardware accessory offerings that take advantage of the software, service and hardware capabilities of the iPhone and iPod touch platforms.

Personally, I'm very excited by Wave. I think it's going to be great (as in Google usually make quality stuff when they put their minds to it, I think it will be free enough to use with good conscience, and it will be uber-powerful)

I'm also willing to bet on the ultra-conservatism of the majority of users, and predict that they WON'T GET IT. This will have made hardly a dent on either email or M$ Office use by this time next year. Most people will be confused (rather than delighted) by the blurring of email, document editing and real time conversation. Early adopters won't be able to use it to send emails or share documents with late-adopters, so hardly anyone will be able to use it in enterprises etc.

The people who'll be most affected by this are 37 Signals, Huddle, SocialText etc. who are trying to sell web-based project management or enterprise blogs and wikis to early adopters. It's gonna be a tsunami in that market.

Nevertheless, can't wait to play with it.

Couple of interesting posts

Mozilla Jetpack

Programming your browser in native web (html, css, javascript)

Facebook's online-payment plans.

Everything is becoming Twitter these days :

- Facebook,
- FriendFeed
- Wordpress

Dave Winer continues to be clever and inventive.