Bubble Anxiety
April 28, 2008
Kara Swisher over at All Things Digital wrote a nice piece about Twitter and how many people she found outside the tech bubble who had no idea what it was. This kind of shock and disappointment is common for people who don’t come up for air often enough.
Last Christmas I asked the members of my family about various aspects of technology. I didn’t even bother with things like Twitter. I was probing mostly about RSS. Some knew of it. Fewer had a good idea of what it did and none used it. They all read blogs directly from the websites, no aggregation. Shocking. The Internet, like the entire Silicon Valley, is a giant reality distortion field. If you don’t check things out from a different point of view, you can get a very inaccurate notion of what is true.
As Kara so aptly points out, while Twitter looks like the hottest thing since sliced bread, when you take off your reality distortion lenses, you realize we’re not even close to being there yet.
I Dig Sprout
April 27, 2008
Web widgets are one of the hot topics of 2008. Sprout is a company I found recently that makes creating and publishing widgets super easy. Everything is based on Flash technology which gives your widget a lot of power and flexibility. The interface for creating sprouts couldn’t be easier and there are built in components that make adding things like rss feeds, Twitter and audio files easy. The program also does everything needed to prepare the widget for publishing on a wide variety of web sites. I love tools that empower the common person to harness the Internet in more powerful ways and Sprout certainly fits that bill in the widget category.
iJustine Speaks The Truth On Flickr Video
April 10, 2008
I love iJustine. She’s gorgeous, smart and funny. If I wasn’t already happily married I would probably be a stalker. Anyway, here is a great video about the complaining going on in some circles about the new Flickr video features. Personally, I think the video quality is stunning and the integration is fantastic.
What ever happened to Joost?
April 6, 2008
It’s never a good thing to have a story about your company begin with “Whatever happened to…” but in this case I have to ask it. When Joost launched in beta it was the hottest thing going. Everyone wanted an invite and many thought the newest creation by the guy who brought us Skype would surely be a hit. High quality online video with commercial content and interactivity, how could it loose?
I had an early Joost beta account and I had high hopes as well. While the downloadable client application was slick, there was virtually nothing to watch. Someone once said content is king and with regards to Joost it was never more true. Months and months dragged on. There were announcements from Joost about content deals, but I never saw anything compelling in my client. You only have so much time to hit when you announce yourself in the Web 2.0 world. There are so many things happening so fast, if you don’t get some traction, the next big thing will wash ashore and you’ll be all but forgotten. What ever happened to…
Joost had every reason to succeed. They were formed by known entities with a proven track record. The weberrati were ready and willing to embrace it. But content really is king and if you can’t deliver the goods, it doesn’t matter how slick your client is or how good your business plan is. At his point, Joost is stuck with a large, heavy desktop application while the rest of the online video world has moved to web distribution. The real nail in the coffin was Hulu. Hulu does everything Joost purports to do but does it on the web and actually has high quality content.
There have been stories this week about a Joost restructuring, a new plan that includes US only distribution. Paidcontent.org has sources that say that’s not so. Either way, I don’t see how Joost recovers and becomes important again. They’re way behind the curve and all the mojo has drained out. With enough money they can hobble along for awhile, but mark this one down as a success that should have been. I guess you can’t win them all.
Why is Goggle “unnerved” by MicroHoo
April 3, 2008
Google’s Sergey Brin is freaked out by the proposed merger of Yahoo and Microsoft. Why?
Partly Google is trying to trough as much cold water as they can on the deal. Having two weak competitors hanging around instead of one possibly larger and stronger one is better for Google.
Google says the merger is bad for innovation on the Internet and bad for users. Partly this is driven by the fact that Yahoo is a an open standards based company and Microsoft is not. It is a legitimate fear that Microsoft will take what good Yahoo has done and turn it into a proprietary mess. But Yahoos impact on the net is not very strong right now, so that loss wouldn’t do much. Most of the innovation lately is coming from all the web 2.0 companies popping up like daisies. We would all morn the loss or degradation of Flickr and Delicious though.
It’s unusual to see Google show any fear lately which makes me thing there might actually be something to a Microsoft Yahoo combination. I still think most of the Yahoo talent will leave and the whole thing will crumble apart. What is left of Yahoo will be overwhelmed by the Microsoft dominant culture.
So Sergey, rest easy, there is nothing to fear. And the Internet, it will survive. That’s what it does best. Adapt and change.
Yahoo - Fish on a Hook
February 9, 2008
Microsoft has been fishing for Yahoo for years now and finally they have snagged them. Yahoo is doing alot of flopping and trashing around, but they’re a fish on a hook at this point. Fighting is only going to make it harder.
It is sad to see though, because Yahoo was one of the Internet pioneers, one of the first websites many of us old timers ever went to. It was simple and useful and fun. Now Yahoo is a convoluted, complex mess. If Microsoft can do anything worthwhile with Yahoo is an open question. They will also have to deal with massive culture clash and most likely a big brain drain. But Microsoft is desperate to compete better with Google and this could be their best shot. Competition is a good thing in this market as Google could become as fat and lazy as Microsoft has with too much dominance.
Note to Yahoo: when it’s checkmate, there are no options.
Web Development in the iPhone’ed Mobile World
December 13, 2007
With great fanfare, Steve Jobs told the world the one of the biggest innovations of the iphone was bringing the “real” internet to a mobile device for the first time. No more junior, stripped down websites, with the iPhone you can view entire original websites as they were intended to be viewed.
Because the iPhone did not ship with the ability to run third party native applications, Jobs boldly told the development community they should build web 2.0 applications that would be just as good as native applications. Than Apple release development guidelines detailing how developers could build custom web applications formatted perfectly for the iPhone.
Thousands of web applications have sprung up for the iPhone, many of them very useful and well done. But these are custom applications that only run on the iPhone. What about the rest of the mobile market? What ever happened to the “real” internet? The point that you didn’t need to develop any kind of special or stripped down version of a site just to view it on a mobile phone? Apple has fallen into its own bear trap. I’m not complaining too much, being an iPhone user myself, but the rest of the mobile world is getting a little bit of a rip off with more development time being put into iphone specific web applications.
If you’re a business and you are looking to make some noise in the mobile market, should you create an iPhone custom web app? Probably, especially if you believe your target customer is likely to own an iPhone, but don’t forget about the rest of the mobile universe. It’s still a great deal bigger than the iPhone market, at least for now.
Facebook Fights Back
December 12, 2007
Punch and counter punch. As I have pointed out already, 2008 is going to be the battle of the social platforms. Google Open Social fired the first real shot toward Facebook and now Facebook fires back by making their API platform available to any other social network that wants to use it. Of course, this is a double whammy for Facebook because they are not only spreading their technology wider, but collecting a licensing fee as well. This all assumes other networks take them up on the offer. Bebo already has, being the first.
The Facebook advantage: Open Social is a dream, but the Facebook API is real and here now. Thousands of apps have already been created and by adopting the API, you gain access to them all instantly. That’s a powerful proposition.
Two smart, aggressive companies going at it toe to toe; This should be fun to watch. And once again, Microsoft is asleep at the wheel.
Technorati Tags: facebook, google, OpenSocial
Social Networks to Social Platforms
December 12, 2007
The hot buzzword in 2008 will be social platform. Rising social network star Facebook got the ball rolling this year when they announced their open development platform which allowed software developers to create custom applications to run inside Facebook. This has turned out to be wildly popular and other social network sites are following the leader. Myspace has been working on a platform and more recently, news that LinkedIn, the popular social network for business professionals is also creating an application platform.
Social networks will become much more than networks in 2008 as more social platforms arrive, allowing users access to more features and marketers access to more of the so-called “social graph“.
Twitterposter and Measuring Influence
November 28, 2007
A few weeks ago, an application called Twitterposter made a splash in the Twitter community. Twitterposter is an interesting Twitter API application that purports to display the relative influence of Twitter users. The problem is that it uses the number of followers as it’s measure of influence.
We need to stop getting caught up in raw numbers as the measure of anything significant. How many followers do you have on Twitter, how many friends on Facebook? Those numbers are not what really matters. It’s not how many people are following you, but more who is following you. What is the real influence power of those following you and are you even saying anything interesting or worthwhile?