Platform Wars

2009-06-11T18:08:00.003-02:00

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.

2009-06-11T08:41:00.003-02:00

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

2009-06-11T08:36:00.003-02:00

Mike Loukides :

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

2009-06-06T14:38:00.000-02:00

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.

2009-06-02T16:48:00.005-02:00

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

2009-05-25T16:45:00.001-02:00

Mozilla Jetpack

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

2009-05-18T20:17:00.000-02:00

Facebook's online-payment plans.

2009-05-10T10:34:00.001-02:00

Everything is becoming Twitter these days :

- Facebook,
- FriendFeed
- Wordpress

2009-04-05T23:35:00.002-02:00

Dave Winer continues to be clever and inventive.

2009-03-25T18:19:00.003-02:00

Scoble very interesting on Facebook :

First, you’ve gotta realize that in Facebook’s life it will go through at least seven phases. We are moving from phase four to phase five right now. In each phase change people have gotten pissed off

[snip]

Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).

Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.

Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.

Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph.

2009-03-24T10:24:00.000-02:00

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.

2009-03-22T12:48:00.004-02:00

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).

2009-03-17T02:12:00.000-02:00

Dare on Feeds as the new Email.

2009-03-16T13:28:00.001-02:00

What is it like to be a bot?

Fascinating.

2009-02-25T21:15:00.002-02:00

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.

2009-02-23T16:35:00.001-02:00

Wow! Asus considering Android-based EEE-PC

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

2009-02-23T16:28:00.001-02:00

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

2009-02-17T22:15:00.002-02:00

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..

2009-02-17T17:28:00.002-02:00

ZDNet Bloggers :

Netbooks killing Microsoft faster than expected

Biggest threat to Microsoft revenue.

2009-02-17T00:52:00.001-02:00

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.

2009-02-10T14:28:00.000-02:00

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.

2009-02-10T08:31:00.002-02:00

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.

2009-02-03T16:15:00.003-02:00

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?

2009-01-26T22:16:00.003-02:00

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.)

2009-01-21T17:33:00.003-02:00

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.