March 23, 2010
March 09, 2010
February 09, 2010
Steve Crossan commented (on Facebook, of course) that he likes the new FB design.
I couldn't agree more. This is the first time I think Facebook have got it absolutely right. Of course, I guess this is the result of them buying in Friendfeed. But I'm intrigued ... was it the technology they needed from FF? Or the understanding of feed-based user-experience?
Whatever it was, if FF was a material contribution to the new FB, the synthesis was brilliantly executed (in less than six months!). And the result is a triumph. It's disturbingly compelling. Facebook have again shown themselves to be very clever at learning from others, at adapting to changing fashions, and taking their large base of existing users with them. (In this, they're reminiscent of Microsoft in their heyday.)
If I was running Twitter, at this point, I'd start to seriously worry. They aren't going to grow their network at Facebook's expense. Whereas the opposite is highly plausible. So what do they do now?
On first glance, Google's Buzz, reminds me of Microsoft in all the wrong ways. It looks like a "me too" clone of Twitter / Facefeed that exists for no other reason than that Google are frightened that there's a space they don't dominate. And now they want to muscle in on it.
A couple of things may change my mind :
1) Dion Hinchcliffe says Buzz has loftier goals. (Then again, doesn't Bing?)
2) At this point, the fact that it's hung off of Gmail is merely not dumb, as opposed to actively smart. Nevertheless, maybe this is the beginning of the wavifying of Gmail. In which case, that's an interesting evolution to watch. Gmail is a very nice upgrade of the standard email client. It could potentially turn into "the next Outlook" if Google do the right things with it. [1]
OTOH, lose the f***ing brand! "Buzz" is truly horrid; like a tired celebrity gossip page in one of those free newspapers you find on the tube. Except worse.[2]
But back to Dion's article. If the main claim of Buzz is that it brings better algorithms to the social web, then I think we need to be highly sceptical.
Firstly, the attraction of the social web, may not really be its data-processing efficacy. Yes, we all go round saying that it *is* useful. But it's also, necessarily phatic. Strip out that phatic, community forming flava, reduce it to factoid sharing, and your social network may become as charmless as dmoz.org. For many, FB will always be about little lost vampires turning up in your Mafia pizza emporium. And Twitter would never have found its way into my heart without Chinposin' Fridays.
Secondly, while Google are pretty smart at algorithms, returns diminish rapidly in hyperlocal social space. PageRank is not a genius algorithm : it's a clever heuristic based on some statistical characteristics of large datasets. By definition, neither the hyperlocal nor your meaningful social-network are anything like large enough for simple statistical algorithms to deduce much of any significance from. To add some kind of real value to that, we're talking "A.I. Complete"
As a comparison, think of it this way : Google is allegedly an algorithm company. Gmail has made a much better email experience. But Google have never been stupid enough to pretend that they can prioritize and schedule your email. Are they really going to add much value to a slurry of 140 character tweets?[3]
[1] With the right calendaring / feed-reading / tweeting / waving) Google could write a decent downloadable client (built on Chrome technology) as a direct replacement for Outlook, with their eyes shut. Why do this? Because it would signal that Gmail is ready to fight that battle.
[2] Buzz is not going to be Facefeed. It's not going to be a fun, populist social network. And Google already have too many brands; they don't need more. And they particularly don't need more failed attempts to be "groovy" that make them sound as desperate as Microsoft.
[3] Your tweet-stream is good because you've already chosen who's got a high-enough signal to noise ratio to pay attention to. And if you're wrong, you tolerate it 'cos it's your mistake. No way will a Google algorithm make that decision for you better than you could. And no way would you trust it to.
I couldn't agree more. This is the first time I think Facebook have got it absolutely right. Of course, I guess this is the result of them buying in Friendfeed. But I'm intrigued ... was it the technology they needed from FF? Or the understanding of feed-based user-experience?
Whatever it was, if FF was a material contribution to the new FB, the synthesis was brilliantly executed (in less than six months!). And the result is a triumph. It's disturbingly compelling. Facebook have again shown themselves to be very clever at learning from others, at adapting to changing fashions, and taking their large base of existing users with them. (In this, they're reminiscent of Microsoft in their heyday.)
If I was running Twitter, at this point, I'd start to seriously worry. They aren't going to grow their network at Facebook's expense. Whereas the opposite is highly plausible. So what do they do now?
On first glance, Google's Buzz, reminds me of Microsoft in all the wrong ways. It looks like a "me too" clone of Twitter / Facefeed that exists for no other reason than that Google are frightened that there's a space they don't dominate. And now they want to muscle in on it.
A couple of things may change my mind :
1) Dion Hinchcliffe says Buzz has loftier goals. (Then again, doesn't Bing?)
2) At this point, the fact that it's hung off of Gmail is merely not dumb, as opposed to actively smart. Nevertheless, maybe this is the beginning of the wavifying of Gmail. In which case, that's an interesting evolution to watch. Gmail is a very nice upgrade of the standard email client. It could potentially turn into "the next Outlook" if Google do the right things with it. [1]
OTOH, lose the f***ing brand! "Buzz" is truly horrid; like a tired celebrity gossip page in one of those free newspapers you find on the tube. Except worse.[2]
But back to Dion's article. If the main claim of Buzz is that it brings better algorithms to the social web, then I think we need to be highly sceptical.
Firstly, the attraction of the social web, may not really be its data-processing efficacy. Yes, we all go round saying that it *is* useful. But it's also, necessarily phatic. Strip out that phatic, community forming flava, reduce it to factoid sharing, and your social network may become as charmless as dmoz.org. For many, FB will always be about little lost vampires turning up in your Mafia pizza emporium. And Twitter would never have found its way into my heart without Chinposin' Fridays.
Secondly, while Google are pretty smart at algorithms, returns diminish rapidly in hyperlocal social space. PageRank is not a genius algorithm : it's a clever heuristic based on some statistical characteristics of large datasets. By definition, neither the hyperlocal nor your meaningful social-network are anything like large enough for simple statistical algorithms to deduce much of any significance from. To add some kind of real value to that, we're talking "A.I. Complete"
As a comparison, think of it this way : Google is allegedly an algorithm company. Gmail has made a much better email experience. But Google have never been stupid enough to pretend that they can prioritize and schedule your email. Are they really going to add much value to a slurry of 140 character tweets?[3]
[1] With the right calendaring / feed-reading / tweeting / waving) Google could write a decent downloadable client (built on Chrome technology) as a direct replacement for Outlook, with their eyes shut. Why do this? Because it would signal that Gmail is ready to fight that battle.
[2] Buzz is not going to be Facefeed. It's not going to be a fun, populist social network. And Google already have too many brands; they don't need more. And they particularly don't need more failed attempts to be "groovy" that make them sound as desperate as Microsoft.
[3] Your tweet-stream is good because you've already chosen who's got a high-enough signal to noise ratio to pay attention to. And if you're wrong, you tolerate it 'cos it's your mistake. No way will a Google algorithm make that decision for you better than you could. And no way would you trust it to.
January 27, 2010
December 05, 2009
November 23, 2009
Android and ChromeOS will converge.
Like all ostensibly sensible ideas, this is probably a bad one. The whole point of Android and ChromeOS, right now, is that they're "playful experiments", tweaking Microsoft's tail, exploring new markets. There's no point Google having a big, boring engineering consolidation project to bring them together. That's just going to alienate internal developers ("but this is my baby!") and confuse third-party developers ("shall we wait for the convergence?").
Better to have a reasonably decent Android emulator running on the ChromeOS machine so that Chromebooks can run Android apps.
Update : read the comments on this blog-post. ("this blogpost" meaning this one, on Platform Wars). Lots of good discussion there.
Like all ostensibly sensible ideas, this is probably a bad one. The whole point of Android and ChromeOS, right now, is that they're "playful experiments", tweaking Microsoft's tail, exploring new markets. There's no point Google having a big, boring engineering consolidation project to bring them together. That's just going to alienate internal developers ("but this is my baby!") and confuse third-party developers ("shall we wait for the convergence?").
Better to have a reasonably decent Android emulator running on the ChromeOS machine so that Chromebooks can run Android apps.
Update : read the comments on this blog-post. ("this blogpost" meaning this one, on Platform Wars). Lots of good discussion there.
November 17, 2009
Tim O'Reilly :
Update : don't miss this analysis of Google's "less than free" model and mapping data too.
It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we'll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we've enjoyed for the past two decades. But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.
Update : don't miss this analysis of Google's "less than free" model and mapping data too.
November 03, 2009
Good overview of smart-phone market in light of latest Droid phone.
Pundits seem to agree : motorola + android == win. Bad news for RIM, Palm and Nokia.
Pundits seem to agree : motorola + android == win. Bad news for RIM, Palm and Nokia.
September 27, 2009
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.
September 24, 2009
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.
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.
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.
September 17, 2009
September 12, 2009
September 08, 2009
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 ...
September 01, 2009
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.
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.
August 28, 2009
August 15, 2009
July 20, 2009
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.
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.
July 17, 2009
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.
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.
June 11, 2009
Interesting state of The Mechanical Turk roundup.
This especially important :
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.
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