ProjectSlice and Online Shopping
May 26, 2011
ProjectSlice aims to help you organize your online shopping by analyzing your inbox, as Leena at TechCrunch puts it. I’m on the waitlist for the beta.
I’ve started using the Yahoo mail app, which has found a recent purchase from Amazon and the recentish purchase of an iPad from Apple. I can’t think of anything recent that the Yahoo app has missed. I was surprised that its request for an OpenID was out in the open. I’m pleasantly surprised that it didn’t insist on a Facebook or Twitter id.
Some other purchases go through my ChangingWay email (andrew@). I’ll have to wait for the beta to see how well it integrates mailboxes. It’ll be interesting to see how it handles requests to sign up for ProjectSlice from people who are already using the Yahoo app. Seamlessly, I hope, but we’ll see.
ProjectSlice has received quite a lot of coverage already (e.g., GigaOm, RWW). That’s not surprising, given that those who blog about tech are likely to do a lot of their shopping online. The $9M in funding probably doesn’t hurt, either.
Facebook, Google, and Privacy
May 12, 2011
So, Facebook “hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy.” I am rather late to the party in using that quote from Dan Lyons at the Daily Beast.
But I can’t resist jumping on this rather lovely insight into how low Facebook will stoop. And I can’t resist adding further quotes, this time from Michael Arrington’s account of the story:
- “it’s not an exaggeration to say they’re changing the world’s notions on what privacy is.” They are Facebook. I hope that they are not changing the world’s notion of privacy. But they are certainly demonstrating how much of it people are willing to trade for being part of a large online herd.
- “secretly paying a PR firm to pitch bloggers on stories going after Google, even offering to help write those stories and then get them published elsewhere, is not just offensive, dishonest and cowardly. It’s also really, really dumb.” Yes, and that’s the feel-good aspect of the story: the stupidity of Facebook.
- “Google is probably engaging in some somewhat borderline behavior by scraping Facebook content… But many people argue… that the key data, the social graph, really should belong to the users, not Facebook.” Yes it should. But Facebook users should by now understand that they are the product, not the customer.
- “Does anyone not see the irony of having to sign in via Facebook to leave a comment on this Techcrunch article?” That’s the first comment on Michael’s article (as of right now), and several other comments make a similar point. If TechCrunch knows Facebook to be dishonest, cowardly, and dumb, why is it inflicting Facebook’s comment system on the TC community?
Amazon Cloud Drive and Player
March 29, 2011
Amazon Cloud Drive is your hard drive in the cloud. You can use it, along with Amazon Cloud Player, as a music locker.
There’s coverage all over the place. NPR is mainly positive, but points out that there are legal challenges to music lockers. TechCrunch describes Amazon’s offering as fierce competition for existing music locker services, given the space it offers and its integration with Amazon’s MP3 store.
At Mashable, Ben Parr actually used the service before posting about it. Good for him! His first impressions are more positive than mine. To Ben, “it became apparent that Amazon wasn’t launching some half-baked product.” To me, it seemed strange that deleting just one MP3 file caused Amazon Cloud Drive to think that I had no files left, even though I was using some of my space allowance.
I’m confident that Amazon will fix the early bugs quickly, and otherwise improve its cloud drive and player. As an example of an improvement, how about looking at my prior Amazon MP3 purchases, and offering to shift them into my locker without having to locate them on my computer and then upload them?
This music locker service combines several of Amazon’s strengths: cloud management, MP3 store, brand name, etc. You get 5 GB of storage for free. To add another 20 GB, you only need to buy one MP3 album. MP3 purchases are automatically added to your locker, and do not count against your storage quota.
Now, let’s see what Apple, Google, and others come back with…
AT&T, T-Mobile, August, etc.
March 21, 2011
The big tech/business story of the week is the AT&T/T-Mobile deal: AT&T wants to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom, and Telekom wants to sell, given the $39 billion price tag. One of the things I mean by “big” is “lots of coverage.”
If I had to pick two pieces of required reading, the first would be Om’s account of who loses in this deal. “It’s hard to find winners, apart from AT&T and T-Mobile shareholders.” I can’t see that consumers will win from a deal that reduces the number of mobile phone competitors in the USA to two (or three, if you’re Sprint, or a lawyer for AT&T).
The second piece of required reading was the agreement on my T-Mobile G1 phone, to see when the agreement expires. It expires in August this year. I expect the regulatory scrutiny to last beyond then. I’m not sure what I’ll do for a phone after August…
Apps = Web 2.0 + UX – Lots
March 20, 2011
One of the definitions of Web 2.0 was “the web as platform.” I used to think that was a good thing, and am still inclined to do so, and hence to regret the rise of platform-specific apps.
John Battelle (via Toni) seems to think along the same lines, and to have been prodded to commit his thoughts to paper, or at least to presentation and to pixels. Here’s his slide comparing core values of Web 2.0 from way back in 2004/5 with today’s web and with today’s apps.
When it comes to apps’ popularity, the bottom line is rich user experience. Apps’ UX lead is “so compelling we may be willing to give up all the other principles of Web 2 just to have a great experience.” Who’s this we? Well, it may include me once I get my iPad 2… but I doubt it.
Must… buy… iPad 2
March 11, 2011
After years of being annoyed by Apple, I find myself at the online store, with an iPad 2 and a smart cover in my shopping cart. Since you ask: 16GB with Wi-Fi, black, engraved; orange.
You might also be asking what I’ve found annoying about Apple. There are three main things: smug, overpriced, closed. The first of those is still there, and is unlikely to go away any time soon.
As for overpriced, $500 doesn’t seem like a lot to pay for such a cool tablet. And there’s free shipping! And free engraving! (At least, right now there is.) And think of the hundreds of dollars I’d be saving by getting the Wi-Fi version, which doesn’t involve a contract with a phone company!
So why haven’t I ordered the thing already? Partly because $500 is still a lot of money, and I can’t claim that I really need an iPad.
Then there’s the closed thing. That’s troubling enough to deserve its own post – or at least, to cause some more soul-searching before I finally rationalize my decision to actually place the order.
Identity: Usernames, Rings, etc.
February 11, 2011
Three years ago, I was pretty enthusiastic about OpenID.
Those of us who use (or at least try) too many web services tend to regard OpenID as good news: it means that each of us can sign in to one service in order to access multiple services… Now we get to the bad news. Most of the services I use don’t accept OpenID.
The bad news never went away, and is in some ways getting worse. 37signals will cease to support OpenID on May 1.
There are at least three other strikes against OpenID, besides the fact that many sites don’t accept it. Your ID is a URI, which might seem a little weird unless you are actually a web page. That URI can seem like one more thing to keep track of, bookmark, etc: the OpenID as well as the sites you use it to access. And what do you do when your OpenID provider is down?
So, more and more, we see web services inviting us to sign in using our credentials from one of the big sites, often Facebook. This may seem a little like using the one ring forged in, and always owned by, Mordor.
But we do have our choice of lords of the login. Mike at RWW recently noted that LinkedIn is growing as the login of choice for business-to-business (B2B) sites. He deduces from this that “users prefer certain identities for certain online activities.” So maybe Jekyll and Hyde is a better literary reference than Lord of the Rings when it comes to logins.
Super Bowl Wins Super Bowl in Super Bowl Shock
February 8, 2011
This was one of those rare years when the Super Bowl game outshone the Super Bowl ads, declared CMO.com. The declaring was actually done by my friend Constantine von Hoffman.
Kid care took me away from the TV, and hence the Super Bowl, at the end of the first half. That means I missed what seems to have been an excellent second half. On the bright side, it means that I was spared the BEP’s halftime show.
As for the ads, consensus seems to be that they came in second place, behind the game and ahead of the BEP. I’d seen the Darth Vader VW ad before the game, thought it was great, and even enjoyed seeing it again.
Then there was that other ad that got a strong reaction: the Tibetan Groupon ad. It struck me as clumsy more than anything else. I think that reasonable people (e.g., Marshall at RWW) may differ on this.
For the most part, the ads simply weren’t interesting. I’m glad that the game was.
RIP Ken Olsen
February 7, 2011
Ken Olsen, who founded Digital Equipment Corporation (usually known as DEC or Digital) in 1957, died yesterday (Sunday). DEC had considerable influence on the computer industry, on New England, and on my life.
Many years ago, I joined DEC in the UK, the land of my birth, as an instructor teaching software, mainly database software. Staying with the firm and with database, I moved to France and then to New England. After a few years, I felt that it was time for a change – from the industry, but not from New England.
DEC was acquired by Compaq, which was later acquired by HP. Most of DEC, that is. The database part was acquired by Oracle.
Years after that, I was on Newbury Street in Boston, and came across this sign. It had obviously been buried under another sign, which was in turn making way for yet another sign, at the same building. It was a rather sad relic of the firm.
That sad stuff said, I’m glad that I was part of DEC, and that it was part of my life. All the best to Ken Olsen’s family, and to everyone else who ever referred to him as “Uncle Ken.”
Acquia’s Strategy: Drupal as the Standard Platform
January 24, 2011
Acquia is a for-profit company, based on the free/open source content management system Drupal. When Acquia was founded, a little over three years ago, I remarked on its similarity to Automattic (which is based on WordPress).
Today, Acquia and Drupal founder Dries Buytaert posted about “the vision that we’ve been working towards for the last 3 years, and… how Acquia can help simplify your web strategy.” That’s based on the premise that “you” are (or are a member of) an organization with multiple websites. Since the sites differ in many ways (scale, rate of change, etc.), you find yourself with a variety of platforms.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a platform on which it was feasible to standardize? Acquia’s strategy is to provide that platform, in the form of Drupal and services to go with it.
That’s the big picture: Drupal as the Enterprise 2.0 platform (not a quote from Dries, but my summary of his post). One of the interesting parts of the picture is Drupal Gardens, which provides Drupal as a service. Dries contrasts Gardens with typical software as a service.
Almost all Software as a Service (SaaS) providers employ a proprietary model – they might allow you to export your data, but they usually don’t allow you to export the underlying code. Users of Drupal Gardens are able to export their Drupal Gardens site – the code, the theme and data…
We call this “Open SaaS” or Software as a Service done right based on Open Source principles.
I’ve been interested in the “open software as a service as a trap” issue for a while. So it’s good to see this issue addressed head on in an account of a vendor’s strategy.
Please feel free to leave comments on Acquia, its strategy, and related issues here. You don’t have to read Dries’ post first, but I recommend you do.
