Category: Software

The New York Times writes:

Love it or hate it, though, its success is past denying 6.8 million registered users worldwide, at last count, and 1.8 million separate articles in the English-language Wikipedia alone and that success has borne an interesting side effect. Just as the Internet has accelerated most incarnations of what we mean by the word information, so it has sped up what we mean when we employ the very term encyclopedia. For centuries, an encyclopedia was synonymous with a fixed, archival idea about the retrievability of information from the past. But Wikipedias notion of the past has enlarged to include things that havent even stopped happening yet. Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news

Robert Cringely writes:

In terms of software applications, I can think of only two that have reached the point of ubiquity and hence invisibility — Flash and PDF, both of which come from the same company, Adobe Systems.
…
Adobe is moving into developer tools in a big way to support its grab for mindshare in the interactive/rich web application space where much of the excitement lately seems to be. Some people think of this as Browser Wars 2.0, but I think it is more fundamental than that. Here are the players. Microsoft is putting massive resources behind Silverlight. Sun is trying to take Java to the next level with Java FX. Mozilla is trying to improve its position through AJAX, Canvas support, and better offline support. And Adobe is leaning hard on Flash, Adobe Integrated Runtime or AIR (formerly code-named Apollo), and Flex. My money is on Adobe simply because of those two invisible weapons, PDF and Flash.

BBC writes:

Fans of MySpace and Facebook are divided by much more than which music they like, suggests a study.

A six-month research project has revealed a sharp division along class lines among the American teenagers flocking to the social network sites.

The research suggests those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college.

By contrast, MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education.

In India, a teenager I know put it thus: “South Mumbai uses Facebook, North Mumbai uses Orkut.”

TechCrunch writes:

Mitch Kapor likes to solve problems. In the 80s, he was the guy behind Lotus 1-2-3, the first killer app for computers. More recently he decided to tackle a a simpler problem – synchronizing Firefox bookmarks across multiple computers. His popular Firefox plugin, Foxmarks, has been downloaded 700,000 times and has 350,000 active users.

All those users create some very well organized bookmark data. Unlike Del.icio.us, where people throw thousands of bookmarks for later reference, users tend to have fewer, but more important, bookmarks linked directly from their browser. And they spend more time properly annotating those bookmarks, Kapor says. So far, Foxmarks is tracking 250 million bookmarks, from 20 million unique URLs.

Liz Strauss discusses the Information and Relationships Webs:

Two very different world views one informational, one relational. Each point of view defines the experience differently. Static or dynamic, take your pick.

This elephant is standing on the web.

What is a link? Is a link clicks and traffic and Google rankings? Or does a link represent that I know you, that Ive read your content, that youre relevant and of value to me? Is a comment conversation or something I can buy or rent?

Were living in two Internets. It looks much like the companies we find in the world of brick and mortar. One is about places, information, and data. Its the buildings in which people work. The other is about people, relationships, and conversation. Its the people who work in those buildings. One is a structure. The other is social.

Dan Farber writes:

[Yahoo’s] Speiser described search and social networks as dealing with two different problems. Search is more like the index of a book, with keywords with pages references. A social networks, like Facebook, is like a table of contents, and more about discovery and easier navigation.

We know who is winning on the search front today, and if Google were to acquire Facebook, we know who would be one of the leading table of contents, at least in terms of user profiles and relationship connections, in this second (Web 2.0) round of the battle.

We can be a giant table of contents for the Web, Speiser contended. We intend to be one of the players providing a social graph.

HipMojo.com writes:

If news is still wide open, this begs the question: what would constitute the perfect news product of the 21st century?

I think I can sum it up with three things: Topix + TechMeme + Digg. But, theres something missing, or rather, all of those things have something to be desired. Oddly, none of those are search engines!

Don Dodge writes about how widgets can be monetised:

What is the business model for widgets?

* The Freemium model, upselling from free to premium services seems to be the best bet, at least for now. Many of the widgets provide a free service with options to buy premium services such as more detailed traffic statistics, more powerful services, enhanced customization, or higher levels of service.
* Sponsorship might make sense. A simple “Sponsored by Big Company” tagline across the bottom of the widget might fit well. I don’t see how larger advertising units would work for a small widget, and I doubt the “hosts” would allow it.
* Revenue sharing with your host – Facebook and MySpace don’t need to share their advertising revenues with the widget guys, but a smaller social network might want to. If I were the owner of a social network and wanted to build an ecosystem of developers building cool widgets on my platform I would indeed share some advertising revenue with them.
* Syndication network – If your widget distributes content widely,, think YouTube, then the content owners might want to pay you to get their content on your widget.

Nicholas Carr writes:

The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. Today, we seem to be operating under a new and very different dictum: the unrecorded life is not worth living. Thanks to digital technologies, we now have the tools to chronicle our daily actions and thoughts in the minutest detail – and to share the record with the world.

The desire to bear witness to one’s personal experience isn’t anything new, of course. Long before words and pictures turned into strings of ones and zeroes, people set down accounts of events in their lives. They painted on cave walls, wrote in diaries, took snapshots and collected keepsakes and souvenirs. What’s changed is the scale of the effort. Whereas in the past we tended to record only important events, today we can, and do, record pretty much everything. Nothing we do or think, it seems, is too insignificant to be preserved or broadcast.

JP Rangaswami writes:

Relationships first. Then conversations as a result of relationships. And finally, only where necessary, transactions.

Cluetrain. Markets are conversations. (Doc has a Nigerian pastor story that shows how universal this structure is. I will link to it when I have something more than a BlackBerry to use as my internet connection.)

A few hours ago, I read that Facebook now has more transactions per day than eBay does. Given that eBay has 8 times the number of participants, this is a fascinating trend.

Normally I would expect conversations to be a multiple of relationships, and transactions to be a subset of conversations.