NotesIn reality, all of these services make money from your content. Either they serve advertisements next door to your content or they are targeting advertisements towards you, specifically, depending on whatever it is that you are sounding off about on these services.Unfurl
NotesThese projects are all very different, but the dynamic is the same. Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again.
Whether or not this is done in good faith, in practice this kind of 'exit event' is a pump-and-dump scheme. The very popularity that attracts a buyer also makes the project financially unsustainable. The owners cash out, the acquirer gets some good engineers, and the users get screwed. Unfurl
NotesGrove, a new hosted IRC chat service for teams, launches today. It's IRC without the fuss, providing hosting, account management, access controls and fully searchable chat logging, as well as a sparkling new Web chat client.Unfurl
NotesIn case it helps, I hereby declare the following iron law of âfreeâ internet services:
If youâre not paying for something, you have no reason to expect it to be there tomorrow.
This is an important corollary to the law âIf youâre not paying for something, youâre not a customer; youâre the product being soldâ.Unfurl
Notes<blockquote>Fred Wenzel refers to error mascots, such as Twitterâs Fail Whale (Figure 1) as fail pets. Fail pets are of particular interest in terms of branding because they can result in brand recognition through earned media. However, that same recognition carries the danger of highlighting service failure. This article discusses the rise of and changes to the depictions of fail pets, from the initial, highly recognizable fail pets, to markedly more cautious error message imagery in later products.</blockquote>EmbedUnfurl
Notes<blockquote>But we've also learned that while web APIs enable us to tap into a wealth of data, they can only be relied upon in the short term. The expiration date of software we create has been shortened due to the whims of those who create the web APIs we rely on.</blockquote>
IMO, this goes for almost anything with net-based DRM, as well.
Unfurl
NotesLast night the changes to Google Reader went live, and as promised, they've removed the sharing features. This means that the sharing features in FeedDemon which rely on Google Reader will eventually stop working, so I'm forced to remove them.Unfurl
NotesGoogle released the previously announced set of changes around G+ integration and UI updates today, and boy is it a disaster. Since the general changes were pre-announced last week, most of us were prepared for the letdown, but actually seeing how it works end to end has made several flaws abundantly clear. Let's start with the obvious.Unfurl
Notes"We're happy to announce support for the OpenID OAuth Hybrid Protocol, which combines OpenID authentication (sign in) with OAuth authorization (access control) in a single interface. The Hybrid Protocol makes it easy for the hundreds of millions of Yahoo! users to sign into websites with a Yahoo! account, and to enable two-way data sharing of their Profile, Contacts, and Updates, without having to register a new site-specific account or share their Yahoo! password."Unfurl
Notes"IGN/Gamespy is shutting down its public hosting services as of August 31st, 2009, doing away with its Classicgaming.com sites and possibly others (e.g. Strategyplanet, RPGPlanet), according to a forum post by Kurt "discoalucard" Kalata."Unfurl
Notes"The Social Fresh Cruise is your opportunity to enjoy a Cruise vacation while also connecting with others who are leaders in the Social Media industry. It is a networking vacation; a Netcation if you will. Sharing the unique experience of a cruise is one of the best ways to strengthen relationships with your peers. Although you will be getting away, you will actually be making your network much stronger than if you would have stayed at home and worked. There is no focus on going to tons of speakers and sessions. Instead the focus is on relaxing and personally getting to know one another. Organic, quality discussions will happen. This is the goal."FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes"This morning at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku and now Google employee, spoke about building sites around social objects. What this means is that the social sites we visit today are not just friend networks - they're also built around objects that connect people with shared interests. These social objects could be anything from a photo on flickr to a video on YouTube or a track on Last.fm. This concept may not be new information to some of you - Jyri has been talking "social objects" for years now. What is interesting, though, is how well this information has held up over time. "Unfurl
Notes"FlickrEdit is a Java Desktop application that allows you to display and edit your photos in a variety of ways. It also allows you to download/backup or upload your photos to and from Flickr. FlickrEdit is written in Java and it uses flickrj framework to access Flickr."Unfurl
NotesI hope not. Google's not a monopoly - it's got plenty of lesser competitors. They just happen to be really successful. It's easier to live Google free than MSFT free. "Obama's pick to head the Justice Department's antitrust unit, Christine Varney, believes that Google has a monopoly in search and will soon have a monopoly in cloud computing and that the government should act aggressively to prevent monopolies. So will she try to break Google up?"Unfurl
NotesHonest look at what happened to ma.gnolia. Painful, but honest. In a nutshell: Make sure your backups are recoverable, and prove it regularly. Someday, something *will* go boom. It'll really hurt when the data loss is over half-a-terabyte. "This week Chris and Larry discuss the Ma.gnolia's data loss, what is has meant for the service and in the community, and what may be coming in the future."Unfurl
Notes"Donât blow anything into the Cloud that you donât have a personal copy of. ... Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a âsharingâ site that makes you push stuff in that you canât make copies out of or which you canât export stuff out of. Make fun of these people, and their shitty little Cloud Cities running on low-grade cooking fat and dreams. They will die and they will take your stuff into the hole. Donât let them. ... Are you paying for these services? No? You are a sucker. You are giving people stuff for free. ... These are parties. And parties are fun and parties and cool and you meet neat people at parties but parties are not a home."Unfurl
Notes"Anyway, hereâs the question I want to put into the readerâs mind: should one spend time and effort making a frontend into an informal API through microformats, or to instead spend it on building a fully supported API or data publishing system that exists and operates separately? I think my stance is clear - iâm not against the theory of microformats, but iâm certainly going to differ with anyone who thinks itâs practical."Unfurl
Notes"Timeago is a jQuery plugin that makes it easy to support automatically updating fuzzy timestamps (e.g. "4 minutes ago" or "about 1 day ago")"Unfurl
Notes"Reading the Google Chrome comic strip made clear the parallel to the emergence of QEMM and DESQview: All todayâs browsers are effectively single tasking, in that only one tab can be actively processing, say, a JavaScript application at any given time (âinherently single threadedâ), yet the tabs are interactive to the point where the misbehavior of an âapplicationâ in one tab can impact â and sometimes crash â the operation of the entire browser. Web 2.0 has brought about an array of browser-based applications and activities that require a more robust, stable, multiprocessing browser with each process assigned to its own memory space and associated data structures â which is basically how DESQview operated. Indeed, when I pointed this out during yesterdayâs SquawkBox, someone labeled Google Chrome as âDESQview for the cloud.â Talk about âBack to the Futureâ!"Unfurl
NotesI guess this explains why I don't see Last.fm events on FriendFeed. Funny how it happened almost a year ago: "A number of FriendFeeders complained that Last.fm was showing up too often in their feeds because we tracked every song you listened to. We updated our service so that we will only publish the songs you explicitly marked as "loved" in Last.fm. We hope this will make the Last.fm entries more useful and a bit less frequent."FeedUnfurl
Notes"No more secret handshakes, no more private invites; weâre proud to open the doors to Raptr and share the service in an open public beta! ... Raptr was born out of a stellar team of people who are passionate about playing and discovering games. ... In every case, each game or system seemed to require a separate login before we could even begin to see whether our friends were playing. There was no single place to go to see what your friends were playing - until now. ... Know when your friends are playing ... See how your friends are doing in their games ... Discover new games you might like ... One thing we think is pretty cool about Raptr is that we intelligently recommend games to you that you didnât even know existed or that you didnât even know were out yet."FeedUnfurl
NotesI'm on pretty much the same page as Joshua. I was amazed it launched, which is a credit to the remaining team of heroes. It'll be interesting to see what happens nowâgiven a 2-3 year innovation time-debt, a brand-new bespoke infrastructure, and a load of enqueued we'll-fix-it-laters. Selected joshu quotes: "I think the open question now is whether the remaining team will be able to innovate or be stuck in complicated codebase hell. ... I have significant regret over what ended up happening with Delicious. We could have gone so much farther. ... engineering was focused on the rewrite so nobody had time to replace the old search engine ... They had the technology, but the relevant staff had higher priorities."Unfurl
Notes"Realize You Can't Do It All In One Release ... You Can be Date Driven or Feature Driven but not Both ... Don't Lose Track of What Made the First System Successful"FeedUnfurl
Notes"After I discovered Fluid's ability to change browser agents, however, I realized that it has quite a bit of potential to create SSBs for mobile web apps that are a bit more friendly to desktop real estate."Unfurl
Notes"If you want to get all that value, don't destroy the startup after you buy it. Give the founders enough autonomy that they can grow the acquisition into what it would have become."Unfurl
Notes"But who am I to complain? We got paid right? So sit down and shut up. Except I am also a user of these services. I see what happens when a company gets purchased."Unfurl
Notes"It remains to be seen whether Iâll stay at Magnolia. Even though it is functionally and cosmetically superior to del.icio.us, that might not be enough"FeedUnfurl
Notes"Yahoo fell on some hard times but never lost her smile. She still wore her pretty purple dresses around town and acted as if nothing were wrong..."Unfurl
Notes"This is not going to be amazing, but I had to find / write a script like that for every hackday / barcamp I attended so far. Being lazy, I just wanted to create one I can re-use later on."Unfurl
The Evolution of Fail Pets | UX Magazine
Study from Yahoo shows that 50 percent of all tweets come from just 20,000 users
Multi-touch finger paintings
Why You Should Think Twice About Opting-In to the Delicious-AVOS Transfer | ZDNet
Super Awesome Buttons with CSS3 and RGBa - ZURB Playground - ZURB.com
Social Fresh Cruise, a Netcation | Social Fresh Cruise
Bit.ly Builds Business on Libya Domain | Workbench
sunkencity.org: flickredit
Adactio: JournalâTo protect and to preserve
Robot Wisdom auxiliary: Twitter's two cultures
Will Obama Break Up Google? (GOOG)
Cornify - Unicorns & Rainbows On-Demand
timeago: a jQuery plugin
FriendFeed Blog: Last.fm Loved Songs
Raptr Blog » Raptr Public Beta Launch!
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Avoiding the Second System Effect in Software Development
Use Fluid to bring mobile web apps to your Mac desktop
Why There Aren't More Googles