Strategy/The Narrative

Plaxo is acquired by Comcast, Zyb by Vodafone

Posted on by charlie

Ok. This is last week’s news.

But, I am not seeing much discussion about this. Why?

Mashable picked it up right away. But not one person commented on Plaxo’s own site (link below).

Is this significant? Does it matter? Does this remind you of 1999 when Telcos bought Web-heads and did nothing with them?

FWIW, I just deleted my Plaxo account. Never really got anything out of it. BUT, with Pulse, they had an uncanny way of adding things I was thinking of. I think Pulse could have been like FriendFeed (and was about much earlier), but it happened to be attached to a company that made its name in corporate contact management. Eh. Brand dissonance.

Also FWIW, Zyb announced it was picked up by Voda two days later. Their post got a bunch of comments. Zyb was on a similar trajectory as Plaxo. Both were considered the leaders in this area, but we always felt Zyb a better mobile offering. (and I did not delete my Zyb account just yet)

We followed both closely since synch is a part of the (ever) upcoming Ovi.com that I was a part of (and Nokia also has the My Nokia Back Up service). Yeah, both companies had set out to mix PIM back up with social networks. And, yes, the company who can solve this issue will do well.

Do you think Zyb and Plaxo have done well with this fusion?

Link: Plaxo’s Personal Card: Comcast to Acquire Plaxo; Pulse to Become Central to Creating Unified “Social Media” Experience Across the Web, the TV (and more)

Joining forces with Comcast is a real win for our customers, our investors, and our employees. Comcast has an exciting vision to bring the social media experience to mainstream consumers. Together, we will be able to help users connect with all the people they care about, across all of the devices they use, with all the media they love to consume, create, and share. This is also great news for the Internet industry at large, where Plaxo has been – and will continue to be – a strong advocate for opening up the Social Web.

Science/Strategy

From my sideline seat, Thompson Reuters seems awfully archaic

Posted on by charlie

Picture 1-3

Can someone please explain to me how and why Thompson Reuters Scientific has such a grip on scientific journal Impact Factors?

If you look at the list of various indexing services, you can see that they are all brushed aside for Thompson Reuters. It seems to me that unless a journal is indexed by Thompson Retuers, then it really is not considered to have any relevant impact on the scientific literature.

OK, so maybe these guys were anointed by the community to stand in as the über-authority index. I can deal with that. But, I think also there is an opportunity for an independent authority index, à la Technorati.

I think it just might be my natural inclination to suspect a single source of authority ranking. But I think it’s more likely because I see so many tools available to measure impact that could be more responsive and maybe more granular than what the current system seems like to me.

I’ve started looking into this. People are coming up with alternatives. It also seems like Thompson Reuters realizes that they might lose a hold on their position.

Yeah, my brain has been munging on this lately.

Link to article that set off this brainwave: BioMed Central Blog : Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases tracked by Thomson Reuters and set to receive first impact factor in June 2008

Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases was recently accepted for tracking by Thomson Reuters. It is included in the ISI Web of Knowledge database and will receive its first impact factor this summer. We are delighted with this achievement, which confirms the prominence and reputation which Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases  has achieved in its field.

Link to recent journal article: Effectiveness of Journal Ranking Schemes as a Tool for Locating Information

As de Solla Price observed [3], the number of scientific journals and the number of papers published in those journals is increasing at an approximately exponential rate. The size and growth of the research literature places a tremendous burden on researchers—how are they to select what to browse, what to read, and what to cite from a large and quickly growing body of literature?

Innovation/Strategy/The Narrative

Mechstreams – when machines start lifestreaming with us

Posted on by charlie

Ok, so lifestreaming is the rage of ’08, what with SocialThing! and Friendfeed and all similar services hogging all the attention.

But I also see something that’s been bubbling under the surface that I call ‘mechstreams’. I see machines edging in as equals in our lifestreaming services, sending out streams of data indicating what they are up to or thinking or what. And I don’t mean info alerts like weather or news, but info about what is going on.

This is not new, really, but I think the time is right for these things to mix with real lifestreams.

Examples:

  • Tom Armitage hooked up the Tower Bridge to Twitter so that it can say ‘What am I doing?’ every time it goes up or down.
  • I heard yesterday from Jan Chipchase of a teapot that says when it’s boiling water. In this case, it’s an unobtrusive tool to keep an eye on elderly folks – if the teapot is being used, then the old folks are doing fine.

I think this is fine and dandy in this day and age of the re-birth (again) of ubicomp and semweb (both of which I have been waiting to bloom for a very very long time).

So, where do you see this going? Tom Armitage gushed about this about a year ago. Have things really developed further?

[PS: In the course of actually slowing down to write this post, I keep finding more discussion of this topic. The inestimable Julian Bleecker used the term ‘blogject’ for objects that blog. He wrote up a minifesto 2 years ago. Krap, I need to get out more. Some days I feel like Rip van Winkle waking up and missing a huge chunk of the discussion.]

Innovation/Strategy/The Narrative

SwitchAbit as the great data switchboard in the cloud

Posted on by charlie

Just stumbled upon this (no longer remember how):

Link: At SwitchAbit, Twittergram Shares a Common Future – GigaOM

So what is a SwitchAbit? Think of it as a web services switchboard that allows you to plug any type of content from one service (say Flickr) to another (say Twitter) — or even between multiple services. The dashboard is likely to be released later this summer.

Last year I had a few Ramblings on noise that focus on the internet as a noisy environment with data emanating from apps all over the place and how can we find, navigate, recombine, and contribute to that noise in a human way.

I’ve read a few recent posts that revolve around this topic and that I am still trying to digest. But, these thoughts tie three key trends I see unfolding before us: lifestreams (human streams of data), mechstreams (streams of data from machines), and the semantic web (meaning attached to everything).

Innovation/Strategy

Mowser and dotMobi: Ouch, the cognitive dissonance is huge here for me

Posted on by charlie

What do I get when I mix a top level domain I really do not like, with a concept (transcoding) that I have been grappling with for years, and two really smart guys I highly respect (Russ Beattie and Mike Rowehl)? Severe cognitive dissonance.

I don’t know what to think.

DotMobi

Ok, I am not of the ‘one Internet’ crowd that believes that mobile devices need to be able to view the Web same as any PC. I think that there is and should be many ways to mobilize Websites or use Web services on mobiles. But, I am not of the camp that thinks we should have a top-level-domain specifically for mobile sites.* To me, that’s a ghetto, a return to the bad parts of WAP. So, dotMobi has never sit well with me (this is NOT my employer’s view, mind you).

Transcoding

There is a place for transcoding, depsite what some very very good friends, who know better than I, advise me. Yet, Mowser, which was recently acquired by dotMobi (see link below), is a transcoder. I like it. Some folks (even dotMobi, it seems) are not into transcoders (such as Google’s proxy) that munge all the hard work the Web developer has done. Mowser does a good job trying to stick to that work, and also provides options to go to the full page.

Miker and RussB

Gosh, these are two very smart guys who truly understand the fusion of mobile and Web. And they have the tech chops to put their ideas in practice (magdat and Mowser are examples). Russ and Miker took the ultimate gamble to get Mowser off the ground. Unfortunately, they need to recharge their batteries now before putting in another crack at their ideas, with the learnings from Mowser strengthening them. I am looking forward to them coming back in a few months or a year, reinvigorated and ready to shake the tree some more.

So, yeah, it stinks that Mowser didn’t catch. But, is it good that a top-level-domain company is getting into transcoders? Eh, could be, at least for dotMobi. They already offer a tool from mobileSiteGalore to help folks make .mobi websites (I use Winksite for my personal site and Nokia Conversations, I also use Mippin for Nokia Conversations). Mowser can be well integrated into that.

What do you think?

So, yeah, 1) good for Mowser, 2) good for Miker and RussB, 3) good for dotMobi. It’s just the dotMobi part that must be grating on me. Eh, my problem, not theirs.

Congrats Miker and RussB!

Link [via Tweeps @twhume and @mtrends]: dotMobi Acquires Mowser Assets

dotMobi’s acquisition of Mowser’s technology, developed by Bay Area mobile pioneers Russell Beattie and Michael Rowehl, is another way for dotMobi to provide a complete range of mobile content creation solutions for businesses of all sizes.

…

“At its heart, Mowser is a PC website-to-mobile website content adaptation engine,” said Trey Harvin, CEO of dotMobi. “dotMobi has been vocal against ‘blind’ content adaptation because it doesn’t allow site owners to have control over their content. dotMobi believes that brands and businesses should always have the final say over how their material is presented, and that the content should uniquely take advantage of the capabilities of a mobile device. This has been one of our core philosophies all along, and something dotMobi is looking forward to addressing with the integration of the Mowser assets into the dotMobi product line.”

*I do think .sex would make a great top-level domain. It can be typed with just the left hand, and might cause a flurry of left handed domain names to be registered. Heh.