10/10 to Michael Arrington

I love a good arguement. It enlivens the soul. More than that I love a strong opinion strongly worded. Especially when it’s against the big guy. In a suitably subtley named post “Digg should sue wired” on TechCrunch today Michael Arrington kicks it to Wired for being down on Digg.

Mincing words isn’t the TechCrunch style, but this made me actually CLAP as I read it “Wired is putting Digg in an impossible situation, and they should be called on it. Reporting news is one thing (although they should note the conflict of interest there as well), but actively creating negative news about a competitor and then using the massive reach of Wired to promote that “news” is way over the line.”

Keep up the good work TechCrunch. My techcrunch fanboy status has been assured for another month! At least.

Interoperability nirvana awaits?

With Google launching the pro version of their web apps (Google Apps Premier)I have returned to my day dreaming of a world where I don’t need to tell another system my name… ever. I will just give it permission to know.

When I signed up to Explode, the meta social networking service based on ELGG I wrote about earlier, I had to give it my email, my name, my ‘username’, an image to represent me. That’s a lot of stuff.

Wouldn’t life be sweeter if I could just give it my Flickr address and an authorisation key so that it could pick up my details and avatar from there, or my Second Life key, or my Google Apps key, or just whatever OpenID type device I chose.

The only reason I use Google spreadsheets over Office or another online spreadsheet is lack of friction. It does 90% of what I need perfectly well, and the 10% I can usually fudge. The one thing it does really well is not ask me for another password to access it.

Once that hurdle has been jumped, since I’m daydreaming anyway, wouldn’t it be cool to play Sim City, drop into the stadium for a game of madden while your Sims watch, then jump in a Ferrari for a quick GT. All with common physics engines, refresh rates, and cool streaming commercial free radio.

Oh, and fat free ice cream that tastes like ice cream!

Real world meets web world

I love it when the real and online worlds collide, and some really neat examples have caught my eye on my endless list of RSS feeds today.

Problogger  has managed to gain a sponsor for his first gathering: “I’m really excited to announce that it looks like there will be a chance for the first ever ProBlogger readers meet up while I’m in New York in late March” Finding a sponsor is a nice extension of the usual ‘I’ll be in bar X for a couple of hours on the 6th” typemeet up.

One of my favourite website blogs is that of zooomr, yesterday had a slightly less formal: “Maybe we can organize a dinner somewhere too afterwards and then shoot some more if folks want. Come on out and join us if you have time on Wednesday afternoon or evening” invite to someone elses event – total spirit of the internet.

This has to be a badge of honour for any blog, that people get off their bums to come out and say hi.

How many networks? Explode

Curverider is a company I’ve stumbled across quite independently a couple of times this week.

The first time I was looking for a social networking platform for a small project I’m working on and was impressed with their approach on ELGG “The leading open source social networking platform.” according to their site.

And now they are turning up all over the place as an implementation of ELGG called Explode is doing the blog rounds. It’s a direct competitor for mybloglog, taking a simplified approach to the social browsing space. I assume this is phase one of an ongoing development which will be community driven.

As they say on the main Curverider site “We believe people come first – technology should always fit your requirements.”

I’ve been trying out mybloglog for a couple of weeks now, and while it’s an interestng service, it has a few strange habits. I think I’ll run both in parallel and see how they do.

So that explains the addition to the right hand column.

LinkedIn

I’ve been meaning to write an article on LinkedIn for a couple of weeks now, and someone has saved me the bother. The link love. (via)

“I recently posted a question on LinkedIn, to get some feedback on my
blog. I asked people what I should write about on my blog, and for
general advice.

I got a number of answers back quite quickly, many of which were
quite good!”

technorati tags:startup, linkedin

Web2.0 tougher than we expected? Odeo up for sale

Is the web2.0 landscape tougher to survive in than we all expected a year ago? I’m pretty sure the answer is yes. With news that Obvious corp are selling Odeo is up for sale I asked 3 ‘web savvy yet not web obsessed’ friends if they had:

• heard of odeo
• used odeo
• thought odeo was any good
• thought odeo was profitable

I got a pretty consistent set of answers

• yep, yep, yep
• yep, yep, nope it killed my flash instal on firefox whiccaused me untold….
• pretty good, yep, apart from killing my peecee the stupid….
• probably, oh yeah, i don’t care they killed my firefox

Now I expect the firefox demise was down to some other more specialist site in actual fact, but that aside, he Odeo public perception is strong, the numbers seem strong too:

“Williams reports the site saw 684,951 visitors last month, 3,012,921
pageviews and perhaps most importantly these days 1,523,963 Flash play” from Techcrunch coverage.

Those are pretty strong numbers, and with AdSense covering the hosting costs I’d expect someone to buy this pretty quickly, possibly to integrate with some other service which has a gap in the speaker interface.

Personally, I just don’t get Twitter, the other obvious product. But hey

technorati tags:twitter, odeo, music, web2.0

Techquila Shots Idea Flow

The flow of ideas over at Techquila Shots is still healthy. If you haven’t made your way over there yet then DO SO. An interesting mix of references to existing services and the interesting holes in a given space lead to some thought, and arguement, provoking reading. It’s like TechCrunch for ideas, not businesses.

An example proposition from a few days ago:

“Ever run into that problem of trying to recall a website — and
remembering what it looked like, but having no clue the name of it?
Maybe you were lucky enough to bookmark it, but even then, that may not
help you.” (link to the rest)

I recall a site from WAY back called ShouldExist.org which tried this, but the quality of the content let it down badly. Way too many submissions along the lines of “Apple should release an even SMALLER iPod the size of a coin” or “TV shouldn’t have ads”.

The range of topics, and the quality of the posts make Techquila Shots a standout in the tech speculation sphere. Not surprising with Steve Poland running the show. I also quite like the idea that someone working on a dark Beta innocently fires up the site and reads his ‘big unique idea’ being given away by Steve to allcomers, showing that while it may be big, it sure ain’t unique.

Link