Blogging at the beginning of April ‘08
Plenty to catch up about.
My favorite story lately (besides Michael Arrington going off on Rafat Ali) has to be the on-going Yahoo-Microsoft saga. No need to link to anything - we all know what’s going on. I really think the juncture point between Microsoft and Yahoo - will be the APIs. That’s how Microsoft will integrate all of Yahoo’s properties. Which bodes well for an OPEN mesh!
php meets ASP .Net in the valley of APIs.
Meanwhile some of that expensive Microsoft R&D is finally getting productized.
With the introduction of Google’s App engine, Ray Ozzie’s vision of the mesh and Amazon’s continued innovation - we developer types now have multiple sources of ‘cloud’ resources to rely upon. NOW we can build us a distributed mesh NOT controlled by any one entity! I think you’ll start to see some serious uptake of this kind of technology - from all sorts of vendors. Even the pigs are happy. And Scoble has some videos.
Getting back to the Yahoo-Microsoft situation: “…..18 of Yahoo!’s top 25 shareholders own more shares of Microsoft than they do of Yahoo!. This is a powerful block. They own 42% of Yahoo! shares. And, on average, Hilal found members of this group owned 4.4 shares of Microsoft for every 1 of Yahoo! “There clearly are some shareholders that are a bit conflicted,”
Sure looks like Arrington is listening to himself! And that he’s starting to grok what he calls ‘the centralized me’. And Eric Shconfeld is discovering how different it is to be a blogger.
So now that YOU’RE ready to start using OpenID - here’s a guide to usng it!
Its also amusing for me to see people start to grok that portals ARE social networks, or is it the other way around? This means that VERY artist, musician or author can be their own brand and have their own portal!
And in case you thought banner ads were the business model - look how they’re making money in Asian social networks! Selling digital goods which are completely synthetic.
Scoble has some great interviews with Kaliya Hamlin.
Joi Ito is now the CEO of the Creative Commons
And congrats to Ian Rogers - wherever he’s going
One thing I haven’t written about is the rampant ageism perpetuated by VCs like Fred Wilson in this business. Tom Foremski and Dan Farber are proof that you can always teach an old dog new tricks and that us old folks - may have something to contribute to the“trajectories of ideas” which keeps this industry moving forward. Dan is certainly shaking things up - at CNet.
SocialSpark, HotPads, Imeem, Powerset, Wordpress 2.5, Woopra, Shine, theUnFunded, Ping.fm, Rasba,