Dimming the Beacon

November 30, 2007 |

With today’s announcement that Facebook’s Beacon will be more obviously an opt-in program than before, and hence less valuable for marketers, I am once again faced with the need to explain my overall dislike for Facebook and most other social networks.
I think I finally figured out what bugs me about these social networks: I want […]

(Via Techcrunch)
From the PPP forums:

Oh. My. God. Oh my god! I can’t believe this is happening. I NEED to earn money with my blogs, I’m going to have to take every single opp I qualify for every day in order to keep up with expenses. When I looked at the 21 qualified, $5.00 opps, I […]

Dave Winer is looking at the state of podcasting today, and its promise in the future. Besides outlining his ideal, mobile podcatcher (wifi, recording, open software), he also talks about the expectations and reality of podcasting:
In terms of expectations, a lot of people seemed to think they could start making podcasts and quit their day […]

Michael Rogers, on MSNBC.com, makes an interesting argument that I have been trying to make, but never quite put into the right words, for a long time:
The big Web 2.0 winners will be the ones who recognize that difference and aren’t afraid to adapt their products for a broader audience. Of course, the early adopters […]

GMail just got a new feature called Group Chat. 
Chat with multiple people without multiple windows. Invite your friends to a group discussion. To start a group chat, click ‘Group chat’ from the ‘Options’ menu when chatting.

Also, a little icon for emoticons has been added at the bottom of the chat window.
Interestingly, none of these […]

Facebook Caves In

November 28, 2007 |

Looks like Facebook might finally cave in after it’s Beacon advertising project was met with a lot of criticism by users and in the blogosphere. According to Business Week, the changes might come as soon as tomorrow:
In the wake of mounting criticism, Facebook executives are discussing changes to a controversial advertising tool that publicizes users’ […]

(via Paul Thurrott) Sometimes Microsoft gets stuff right and today, the best blogging client for Windows out there, Live Writer, has come out of beta. If you have the betas installed already, it should show up in your latest batch of updates, but otherwise, you can find more info on the MS Support Page.
There are […]

We are smarter than me did a good interview with Mike Arrington about his career and especailly his thoughts about the A-list.
A must listen for everybody who still cares about the A-list discussion and/or wants to get some more background info on TechCrunch from the man himself.
Mike emphasizes the role of the blogging community. Good […]

I have been thinking about Dave Winer’s posts on how digg has started to suck and his idea of letting a thousand digg clones bloom instead.
Imagine Digg in the old days, when there were just 25 people using it. Maybe that wasn’t enough. Maybe it didn’t really get interesting until there were 100 users or […]

The Beacon at Work

November 27, 2007 |

(hat tip to Doc Searls for this)
While I have my issues with MoveOn taking on Facebook (I prefer them to take on more directly political issues), they did put together a nice presentation about it.
Funnily, the same thing shown in the demo happened to me when I bought movie tickets on Fandango. Didn’t […]

While Google likes to forget about a project now and then, Google Maps is getting better and better.
The new terrain layer is absolutely beautiful and, given that I often use it to plan bike routes, a definite plus.
Some other changes:

No more ‘hybrid’ mode. You can now choose to turn ‘labels’ off and on under the […]

Cory Doctorow, in InformationWeek, sums up the reason why Facebook will ultimately fail:
Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I’m inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook’s-law parallel: “Adding more users to […]

This afternoon I was thinking about where to take this blog in the next few months.
The blog is now just a bit more than two years old. It seems I have comfortable settled somewhere in the D-list of TechMeme commentators. I had one story on the digg homepage; a few posts that were StumbledUpon; […]

Zoho today announced that it’s flagship product, Zoho Writer, will allow editing documents offline, thanks to Google Gears (you could already read them offline, btw):
In August, we made Zoho Writer available offline. When we released it back then, the documents were available in read-only mode when offline. With today’s update, you’ll now be able to […]

keep looking »