January 2008
42 posts
How does your garage startup schedule releases? →
.. maiken is no longer lurking on the company blog :)
“You won’t see us building a RescueTime Facebook app any time real soon”
– Tony Wright hahaha - that’s great
Unplanned maintenance →
Wow - Jon Favreau is the man
Tonight, for the seventh long year, the American people heard a State of the Union that didn’t reflect the America we see, and didn’t address the challenges we face. That was the opening sentence of Obama’s response to the state of the union speech. It’s fucking brilliant. And one assumes that it’s another example of the work of an amazing team led by a 26-year old speechwriter...
Twitter is like Napster
The Revolution: Both opened people’s eyes to a significantly new type of online collaboration/communication. Napster: music file sharing. Twitter: short message sharing. The Limitation: Both were fundamentally centralized services. For Napster, this became a legal problem. For Twitter, it has been mostly a scaling problem to date, but expect other issues soon. It’s not that file...
If you would like a Mergelab invite...
…and you have not yet been directly pestered by me to help test out our latest features, please give me a shout at mail@mergelab.com (or if you’re feeling shy you can leave your request in the comments). We are definitely going the Launch Early, but Launch Small route that Tony describes in his recent post as we work through the initial kinks. But things are starting to get solid...
“Hey guys, we just lost $7 billion!! lulz!!!!111”
– via umair - don’t miss the link to the WSJ article he provides…
“[…] here’s the general theory: to clarify, add detail. Imagine that:...”
– Edward Tufte - watch the video (via Slashdot)
News about your friends →
Ultimate Guide for Seattle Entrepreneurs →
January 30th is International Delete Your Myspace... →
.. via Mashable. LOL. See also: Joe, always leading the pack.
It's just a website, right?
Memo to PC software producers: raise prices now and maximize profit over the next few years, because the next generation might never even consider the idea that software actually could get installed on a PC. Witness: my 10 yr old son, upon hearing that Bonnie had discovered some nifty new musical notation software (Finale NotePad), saying: Hey Mom, I want to play with the new music website! After...
Friends of Mergelab →
The Bill Problem →
.. what he said: “We Democrats are nuts, idiots, fools - you name it and it fits - if we let another 4 to 8 years of the presidency go down the tubes because of misplaced and unearned loyalty to Bill Clinton.”
OpenID: Google tips over as well, all the dominoes...
Google’s Blogger takes the OpenID plunge, see Google Operating System It’s starting with bloggers now, but watch for mainstream adoption in 5 .. 4 .. 3 .. 2 .. 1 …. The providers are in place, now watch for a couple high-profile destinations to switch partially or even exclusively to OpenID login.
Next: sharing your Mergelab feeds →
Yahoo Implements OpenID; Massive Win For The... →
.. yeah baby. It’s happening.
“I do think that for smart liberals, the depth of conservative-hatred on the left...”
– Hating Rightey
Learning from failure
In light of this announcement, it is well worth reading this book: Dreaming in Code if you haven’t already (or borrow my copy if you happen to bump into me), and learning from what went wrong on this project…
“I think there should essentially be a stratification of privacy such that...”
– Degrees of Privacy
Verizon Buys Twitter
San Francisco, CA March 28, 2008 — In a bold and unexpected move, Verizon Wireless announced this morning that it is acquiring the assets of Twitter, Inc. for an undisclosed sum. According to Verizon officials, the company intends to continue operating the popular messaging service under the Twitter brand indefinitely. “We understand the magic that Twitter brings to its legions of...
High definition video is a royal pain in the ass
Let’s say that Santa brought you a nice shiny new high-definition video camera for Christmas (he did - a Canon HV20 to be precise). Now let’s say that all you want to do with it is shoot a little clip and upload it to Vimeo because that’s what all the cool kids are doing. Here are just a few of the obstacles you will face: Cable not included. That’s right, the Firewire...
OpenID, OAuth, user-centric identity .. it's...
1. See “Yahoo!, Flickr, OpenID and Identity Projection” - here 2. See “The OpenID Train Steams Ahead: Google, IBM and Verisign Said To Be Joining” - here 3. See “Facebook, Google And Plaxo Join The DataPortability Workgroup” - here with additional commentary on the latter by umair and yours truly (in the comments). I’ve been telling everyone I...
Last Obama post for today
Substance, not Style Obama’s preference for reducing healthcare costs while preserving the freedom to choose whether or not to participate in the healthcare system, as against Clinton’s (and Edwards’s) insistence on mandating participation, is not a one-off discrepancy without broader implications. Rather, Obama’s language of personal choice and incentive is a reflection...
“But as important as the iPhone has been to the fortunes of Apple and AT&T,...”
– Wired Magazine, “The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry”
Kerry Picks Obama →
.. also here
The OpenID Train Steams Ahead: Google, IBM and... →
1 tag
Edwards vs. Obama
Edwards, October 7, 2002: My position is very clear: The time has come for decisive action to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. I am a co-sponsor of the bipartisan resolution we’re currently considering. [emphasis added] Source: http://www.cfr.org/publication/5441/ Obama, October 26, 2002: I know that even a successful war against Iraq will...
Comments
I am trying out Disqus for comments on this tumblelog, since I’ve written a few more long form blog-style posts lately. Let me know what you think.
Angry, vindictive, unforgiving
A side-by-side comparison: Read about The Angriest Man In Television in the latest Atlantic: This is a message—a searing attack on the excesses of Big Capitalism […] and the interview on Slate linked from that same article: […] it’s about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We’re worth less every day, despite...
The language of trust
I’m obviously reading too many VC blogs these days, as I catch myself saying things like the consumer has become the distribution channel and talking about the Beaconization of the Web as though everyone speaks this language. I suggest that this language itself is a problem (nod to George Lakoff) because social advertising and social commerce are based on trust, and it’s really hard to...
Social Network Aggregation, Killer App in 2008? →
.. very much related to my recent post - I don’t like to call it social network aggregation, because that sounds awful, but the problem of keeping track of what I called the “constantly-evolving soup” of personal communications networks is for real.
Email is not the social network - A Rebuttal
Several weeks ago I posted a neat quote from a NYTimes article about Yahoo and Google trying to parlay their email assets into social networks. Michael Arrington responded to that article complaining that these companies were indeed failing to capture the “vibrant social networking that already goes on daily via my email inbox”. And lately Jeff Nolan has taken up the theme in his 2008...