I thought I’d capture all the links as they appear in Google news – to represent the news as and where it comes out.
Following on the heels (or should that be the leap that wasn’t pre-looked) of Facebook’s consumer advertising platform Beacon, Amazon has allowed its users to build up records of what they’ve bought and share it with people (friends) on Amazon. Obviously the big prize here is not accumulating friends like other social networks, but actual consumer items. Ca-swipe!
Amazon is one of the companies that deploys simple business ideas and are probably a step behind the early adopters. Their user reviews and comparison purchases model was peer-production and user generated content (UGC) before they became buzzwords. Now this. Their efforts in cloud computing also brand them as a player in the post W2 world.
Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, has a great way of putting internet terminology into focus, from his unique vantage point. I reproduce some concepts here for simplification:
The Net
aka: The Internet (http, nntp, ftp, email), International Information Infrastructure
Era: 1980s-1990s
Realisation:
It isn’t the cables, it is the computers which are interesting
The Web
aka: World Wide Web
Era: 1990s-2000s
Realisation:
It isn’t the computers, but the documents which are interesting
The Social Graph
aka: Web 2.0, semantic web, now
Era: 2000s -
Realisation:
It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important” or “its not about the social networking sites, its about the social network itself
Tim has put things nicely into perspective. I especially agree with the last point: I don’t care about Facebook, but I like what Facebook has taught us thus far and wrote a little ditty about it.
He goes on to say “The less inviting side of sharing is losing some control. Indeed, at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits.”
IBM announced today their version of cloud computing, Blue Cloud. This comes shortly after Amazon’s announcement of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
“As more Web 2.0-style applications, which include lots of content contributed by end users, come online, companies will need to have better tools to handle them”, said Dennis Quan, chief technology officer of high performance on demand solutions at IBM.
“What’s at the heart of this is the realization that this technology is not restricted to universities or academic institutions. There’s a broad applicability for this technology,” Quan said.
Cloud computer primer
Cloud computing is essentially the harnessing of computer power to scale to a massive size, which allows for the following:
Just like the first eight of engerland, Microsoft get to the loose ball slowly, but they drive on relentlessly, onward and on. Pardon the analogy, but that’s how MS is being interpreted by my RWC2007-addled brain. They are johnny-come-lately (not Wilkinson) along with other ERM giants to the benefits of enterprise 2.0, but once they’ve arrived their presence is felt. SharePoint had already adopted blogs and wikis for internal use in its product, today they cemented that vision.
Taken from McManus’ article:
Today Microsoft is announcing two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The partnerships link togther Microsoft’s SharePoint product with Atlassian’s wiki collaboration product Confluence and a new offering from Newsgator called ‘NewsGator Social Sites’, a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft – it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and “social computing” capabilities (Microsoft’s term for ‘web 2.0′, according to this page on Microsoft’s website).
The aim of the partnerships is to add more “social computing platform” capabilities to SharePoint, which up till now has mainly been promoted as an “enterprise productivity platform”. In other words, Microsoft is adding more web 2.0 functionality (e.g. collaboration, personal publishing) to SharePoint, using best of breed web products from Atlassian and Newsgator.
Update: definitive article from Susan Scrupski.
Google buys out Jaiku, the microblogging platform that is a bit more serious than Twitter and Pownce.
Why? Well, Twitter is the popular kid and has all the gadgets and messaging interfaces, but you cannot extend it beyond its mass appeal interface. Pownce was always aimed at the teen market with its buzz and image-video upload.
No sirree, Jaiku is the effort of some Finns, the most always-on culture on the planet (this is an abysmal sentence…). Threading and an element of moderating allow it to be used in serious apps.
My interest in microblogging is across various theatres (of war), but especially for the enterprise. Real time status updates, always-accessible team members (phone, email, site, IM) and a bit of sharing on the side.
You know which microblogging service is really underrated? Tumblr. Its more microblog than the others. The others should really be termed something like Gadget-Bridge or PresenceBlogs.
A recent analysis by Bear Stearns (BS) recommends that Yahoo! adopt a social networking (hmm, sound familiar in the local context?) by buying Facebook. One of my favourite Web 2.0 characteristics is that comment to a feature is regularly more illuminating than the feature itself, and in this case its true again; roll the good comments please:
Yahoo!, WTF? You were the web for many years, synonomous with search, free mail and free hosting. I was hooked from 1999. Sure, I got mad when Yahoo! shut down my account after 6 months of inactivity and when my girlfriend dropped me via Yahoo! mail, but you were like the rock band one grows up with at 13 who can never do wrong.
PS: I’ve registered for another account and am giving Yahoo! another chance. They have the brains, for one. Its surreal writing about Yahoo!s fortunes as I did the same for my dissertation in 1999 when Yahoo! stood for everything the web could be.
RSS is recognised as one of the salient tools that enables the distributed nature of the Web, allowing users to get the news pushed to them (who can browse for news on all the world’s websites?). However, this feature did not answer the same problem it sought to address – what happens when you have too many RSS feeds to monitor?
AideRSS came up with PostRank (not only similiar in name to Google’s killer PageRank, but also in methodology). It takes all your feeds, monitors the trackbacks and you can view popularity of posts at a glance.
I’m still a fan of email newsletters in some cases. Why? I probably would never have found this story be glancing over popular RSS feeds as its still early days.
Wasn’t HTML meant to move gracefully over to XHTML so that we had a seperation between:
You know, death of the <font> tag parties and no more bgcolor, tables tables tables etc. Well, HTML is being revived as version 5 by the w3c. I’ve read some of the debates, but I haven’t got the exec summary, please share. Will love to know what will happen to web standards now <sigh></font></blink>
Brilliant video of the foreseen merger of Google and Amazon by 2014, and the way that “news” will be created. I actually think we are almost there, after all, if you can dream it you can build it. And if you build it, they will come.
All my mates in online media, heed,
http://idorosen.com/mirrors/robinsloan.com/epic/
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