It’s mid-summer blogging time
We had a great weekend, doing nothing but hanging at home and swimming all day long. Ah California.
This excellent analysis of Plurk’s rise and fall proves a point I tried to make about Ning. As 100,000’s of worthless networks get created on Ning, there is valuable data in there about what it takes to build a successful, niche social network. How many Ning networks really gain traction? 1 in 1,000? 1 in 10,000? Plurk has shown that those who REALLY want to talk (ala Plurk) can - and the Twitter downtime helped bring allot of tire kickers to Plurk, and some have actually hung around. So now imagine that petrie dish on Ning. What does it take to stick around? Is it about featurss, people, timing, - what? The rise of vertical niche networks is our future and Ning is a great viewfinder into that future - if only they would release their real stats - not just brag about the total # of networks - which is totally worthless. IMHO
Great News! Evan Prodromou is working hard at getting messages to work ACROSS Identi.ca instantiations! Now we’re meshing!
AOL implement’s Vidoop’s OpenID - congrats to Scott et al!
I agree with Dare - we are often asked “does your platform scale?” I mean - what do they want me to say “No - we have desigend our platform NOT to scale!” - What a stupid question!
David Ulevitch (of OpenDNS and EveryDNS) has some ideas on how to help enable the open mesh.
Lets be very clear here - Michael Arrington will take the money an RUN! But he won’t agree to the same terms as Jason “boo hoo Mahalo sucks and I’m leaving” Calacanis. And Jason should realize why there are people who hate. It may actually have to do with him. And BTW Jason “they booed Dylan at Newport” - you my friend, are no Dylan. 
MySpace Data Availability in iGoogle
Just got invited into Eventful - via some ’social media’ kind of functionality. They have a feature called ‘Demand’ (which has fans request bands in certain areas.) Events are a key kind of micro-content and Eventful is leading the way. The Groups are fairly worthless and you can’t import from Facebook or MySpace - this is typically what happens when “just about every” adds social media features. How can they POSSIBLY keep up with the Jones? And it’s only going to get worse.
Dare Obasanjo used the ’shit’ word - and he’s right. Giving stuff away is not a business model - so don’t be fooled by Twitter. Their model is to be sold. Same with Ning.
$15M for hosting Ruby on Rails apps.
Facebook’s Cassandra project (their 2nd open source) is inspired by Google’s BigTable - thanks Dare!
Here’s a quiz - what did Jimi Hendrix have to do with Stephen Stills? What Stills album did Hendrix play on?
Synergy in the making - CBS + CNet - = timely, appropriate, relevant mainstream media. What a concept!
How much does Gnip cost?
I agree - Happy Birthday to Woody Guthrie - is the party at Alice’s Restaurant? We need more of Woody’s machines nowadays.
Been using Blurb and their EXCELLENT BookSmart app to create my “How to build the Open Mesh” book.
Order your drinks on a screen. Nolan Bushnell - hmmmm - now that’s a past life.
Even Google apps go down - just one word I have for that! Redundancy
John Battelle knows how to live
The early days at YouTube - while J.D. Lasica was calling us up, treating us like employees (we build ourmedia.org - for free - and were never even thanked for it), they were rocking at YouTube - getting paid.
Metcalfe’s Law is a drag when ti comes to conversations
Scour, August, ZKOUT, Streetline, AtomKeep,
