Why Apple gave the iSight “end of life”, I will not understand? Sure all Mac now come with iSight built in except for the Mac Pro. Those users have to use a not so cool model from other manufacturers or pay a premium for a used one on ebay. The camera used to cost $149, now it’s going for over $200 for a used one. Screenshot below for a completed auction (I found one going all the way up to $284!!!!). I shouldn’t have sold mine!
The buzz word for the second half of 2007 is: PLATFORM! Anything that wants to create some buzz has to have ‘platform’ in it somehow. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs went from doing simple apps that leveraged new programing techniques and the social graphs, to full blown Microsoft-killing conspiracy theories! Startups are realizing the true potential of their apps, and thinking in more general terms how they can create an ecosystem around it.
Some companies think that if they build a platform, suddenly they are going to get flooded with apps and those are going to ensure their existence, just like Windows, Office, Photoshop etc. Things have changed a lot since then.
How?
Well for starters now there’s a lot of platforms to build for: Mac, Win, Linux, web, cellphones etc…Back then, things were limited to just a couple of platforms. Since web apps are built on open standards and languages (except for FBQL) there’s really no developer lock-in. People use web services freely no matter what OS they’re on: so there’s no user lock-in. So having a bunch of apps in your ecosystem doesn’t really doesn’t matter in the web, since there are tens of other out there and migrating them would take very little time.
For a user choosing a platform to invest time boils down to the number of friends rather than app diversity. There are no “killer apps” for a particular platform…that is if you don’t count the facebook Zombie application which literally kill people.
OpenSocial will probably make it easier to build stuff on and end the facebook user and developer lock-in. Still a bit more of standardization is needed to ensure that the web and not some company is the platform.
The web has evolved. It has matured.
Web frameworks are now a commodity and ajax went from being a cool novelty to simply standard. This is all good since developers can now focus on what really matters: “desktop collaboration”. Social networks focus on collaborating with others. That’s great and all, but now we need web apps to collaborate among them. For instance in my Mac I can write an email in Mail.app and add pictures from iPhoto by brining up the media inspector. This type of desktop collaboration is easy on a Mac since Cocoa does all the heavy lifting for you. Hopefully OpenSocial will evolve to do something like that. It can be done now through APIs, and REST services but never like a Mac. It will someday be like that. Where I can easily add a picture from my flickr account to my gmail message.
It’s funny how things evolve: Terminals to PCs to Web services (terminal-like).
So last week it was all Apple. This week it’s all Google. Word of the new OpenSocial platform is starting to spread. It is interesting to see how Google sticks to their “algorithm” strategy (it killed Jeeves!). Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg once said that he considered his site to be one of the top news sites on the web. It could be called that since it has a personalized feed of “relevant news” from your social graph. Here is the catch: facebook has taken the closed Microsoft-like style of doing business(if you had thoughts about their partnership). Unlike Google’s OpenSocial which is just a new protocol for context communication. The want to become a pathway for everybody to communicate and share (while using open standards). NO MORE FBQL(facebook query language?!?!?!). The web is the platform. Not meebo, not facebook, not myspace: Google is investing in the open web platform. They figure, they don’t need to control all the data (as long as they control the standard). So far facebook has taken the semi-open stance, where developers can import and develop for facebook, but the sweet user info stays inside their little(40 mill users) garden.
Mr. Zukerber BRING DOWN THIS WALL!!!!!
This whole social communication(not social network) thing is panning out to becoming the next wave of web dev. I am declaring it Web 3.0.(suck on that Calacanis)
Social Communication (according to me): Communicating in context. Using existing social graph connections for in-context communications. i.e. Instead of sending an excel spreadsheet, you would send a sharing notification, via social graph communication protocols. So if you don’t know someone email, but you’ve added them as a friend in facebook, the system would know how to delivery it. Sounds pretty cool huh?
I am hoping that Google can do it!
(ohh it’s also google week since the GPhone stuff is starting to heat up again…but who cares, now that the iPhone is selling well)
So Hulu launched… as I went to their blog page, I came across what seems to be an error. a default page that shows Mephisto. So I am assuming they are building hulu on rails or at least doing the blog on Mephisto….nice!!!
I am going to be migrating this blog to Mephisto pretty soon!
I have finished upgrading my system to Leopard, it was fast easy and it feels really cool!
I have some more notes on the experience…right now I am going to continue to play with it!!!
David Pogue on iChat’s cool preferences:
Here’s a little tweak that nobody ever mentions: the preference setting called “Watch for my name in incoming messages.” It alerts you any time anyone, in any of the open chats, types your name, even if you’re doing something else on the Mac. (As in, “David, are you there? David!? DAVID!!”)
What if people call you Dave?
(Via NYTimes.)
A 3D email system that simulates LAX airport?!?!? Stupid? I wouldn’t use but I know a lot of people that would(aviation background).
My email life just got upgraded. Gmail finally added IMAP support! This means I’ll Be able to read everything everywhere without having to zoom by thinking: oh I read that already!
(Via Gmail Blog.)