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[Hoo-boy. via infovore on twitter] “Microsoft just announced what has been rumored forever: a formal offer for Yahoo. Microsoft’s proposal to Yahoo’s board of directors represents $31 per share (a 62% premium over yesterday’s closing price) or about $44.6
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“Social discovery for the real world. Your friends and the places and events they “touch” light up so you can pick what’s interesting to you. You control your privacy to share what you want with only the people you select.”
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[via atmasphere] “SyncTunes synchronises tracks and podcasts from iTunes with a mounted volume (e.g. such as a SD card in a card reader, a PDA’s expansion card using Missing Sync, or mobile phones’ internal memory).”
Linearity is killing the Living Web: Blogs don’t work anymore, Google search is useless.
In this age of the Fragmented Web, action streams, multiple personas, and a huge increase in the amount of data out there, how will we Find, Navigate, Recombine, and Contribute?
I’ve come to the conclusion that the linearity of the most popular Web tools is killing us.
Blogs are linear
Stowe hints to the inadequacy of blogs as a site or as a linear output. I think a blog is a really bad tool to follow a conversation – you can only follow it one piece at a time, and the longer it is, the less you can follow. RSS readers were an attempt to make this easier, but you really end up missing most of the action. And it is still linear.
True, blogs arose out of tight nit groups of friends sharing links online, evolving into the conversations pieces we see today. And services like Vox and Twitter show the value of close groups writing and sharing info, owing their heritage to blogging habits. But, the way we live and do on the Web has become more dynamic. And I think what we want out of the internet, as plumbing, has changed too.
DNA blog, anyone?
What set me off in this direction was a comment from the publishers at Public Library of Science. They were extolling the wonders of bringing blogs to science, wondering how great it would have been if Watson and Crick (and Franklin) made a post on their discovery of the structure of DNA and that every new grad student would be asked to go and read the post. Also, the comments over the past 50 years would serve as a valuable record of the discussions since then.
Uh, 50 years of comments? I have a hard time on posts with more than 10 comments. How the heck will any value come out of reviewing thousands of comments? Who can get a view of something so linear?
Google search is so 2005
But, in a broader sense, there is more stuff out there, more posts, more videos, more comments – and it is all being thrown into the Living Web in a linear fashion. This needs to change.
And Google? Well, Google’s results are quite linear and is built on the notion of sites. Technorati is a good step towards adding more meaning to what we FInd, meaning derived from real people, not robots.
I think it’s time to build a new way to Find things on the Web, a way that reveals the interconnectedness of all these activity streams, a way that has different levels of resolution to Navigate by, to allow us to get a summary, but also dive as deep as we wish.
And of course, once we Find things and Navigate the found space, we’re going to need to be able to easily Recombine those actions streams and feed it back, Contributing to the Living Web of actions streams.
Gosh, my head is bursting with ideas around all this and I’ll be randomly rambling about this for some time to come.
links for 2008-02-01
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“The One and Only Tablet Mac® The Axiotron Modbook™ is a revolutionary slate-style tablet Mac that enables users to draw and write directly on the screen.”
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Hypercard hack on Web. Can’t wait to check it out.
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[Geez, I wonder how man we bought. Heh.] “That implies that around one in three iPhones are being purchased in order to unlock the device for use on other networks and/or for use with unapproved third-party applications.”
Stowe Boyd on: Action Streams And The Next Cycle In The Social Revolution
Alex tipped me off to Stowe’s post on Action Streams (link below). I’ve heard these streams be called many things, but the concept is that as we go through our lives, interact with services and people, we leave a contrail of actions behind us.
Link: /Message: Action Streams And The Next Cycle In The Social Revolution:
The proliferation of hundreds — perhaps thousands — of highly specific social applications that will produce streams derived from people’s activities, writings, and media is leading to a fragmentation of web identity and social connection.
I’ve been harping about this for a long time, in one way or another (even more so, recently). Actions streams are not the Next Thing, but became big in 2007 with Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook (the news feeds), Tumblr and the like* Needless to say, I have been having a ton of discussions lately, much like Stowe, as to how then does this get organized and presented to our social network and the public. For example, in my discussions, we have been trying to build models for how to categorize the value of streams, to understand when, how, and what folks want to spew out or follow. Also, being mobile-minded, I am trying to figure out the role of the mobile device, as a sensor**, in contributing to these streams.
How we take these Action Streams and make them useful is the Big Thing of 2008. Clearly Stowe is thinking of how to do this. So am I (or at least, what I have been thinking has been passed on to the Ovi team).
To me, the developments above have been stressing the linear and location model of the Web. We need to fix it.
Also, Stowe laments the ‘dumbing-down’ of these action streams (next quote). We need to, not only make these actions streams smarter, but we need to make them two way. Only then will the flow be truly hyper-connected.
I get an RSS stream from Dopplr, for example, and plug it into my blog as a widget. However, the blog technology knows nothing about it, and the various trips that Dopplr is streaming don’t flow into my blog’s RSS feed. And should they? After all, Dopplr has a well-defined sharing model within the application, which allows me to share trip information in a controlled fashion. Exporting it outside of the context of Dopplr means that those controls are lost.
I hope to have many wonderful discussions about this at LIFT.
*Stowe was set off by Six Apart releasing a Actions Streams plug-in for MovableType. To me, that just means that the concept of aggregating actions streams is becoming accepted and more available. Also, I have a friend who is building a service to turn Second Life actions into bloggable streams.
**Paul Saffo points out that sensors are the next big thing in tech.
Really cool: Dopplr Raumzeitgeist 2007
Dopplr is not a service. It’s a pretty and fun toy that the Dopplr folks built for all of us to play with. And while we play with it, they get to play with it some more.
They’ve just published the Raumzeitgeist (see quote below), leading to a lovely image of where Dopplrs have been (heavily European and North American).
For me, the scary thing is that HEL-LHR was a top route (gosh, how many times did I do that one?) and Finland was in the top ten destination countries (albeit, 10th).
Go see more interesting tidbits on their site (link below).
Link: Dopplr Blog » Dopplr Raumzeitgeist 2007: Where we went last year:
Zeitgeist of course means “Spirit of the times”. You’re probably familiar with Google’s wonderful ‘zeitgeist’ report they publish annually, reflecting culture in what people were searching for that year.
“Raumzeitgeist” translates literally as “Space Time Spirit” and that’s precisely what we’ve got here. It’s about where we, the users of Dopplr, travelled through space and time on our little planet last year…
links for 2008-01-31
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[cool] The NEC Flask which will be released sometime in 2008, it is powered by a liquid fuel cell that disappears as power is drained away.
IDC is forecasting single-digit handset market growth in ’08
Wow, that’s harsh. The last few years’ growth has been over 10%, mostly above 20%, per year.
But, we’ve known that it couldn’t last. I mean, in the next few years, anyone who wants a phone will have one. Then what?
I had a discussion with a friend of mine who is an investor. His analysts watch the ASP and number of devices sold as a gauge for the health of the industry. The problem is that looking at those number are enough if these companies were only in devices and that the device market still had more to go (like the PC market).
Alas, this is a market quite different from others. I remember seeing presentations back in 2002 about how the pone market would soon be like the watch market – saturated and stable.
But, at least for my company, we’ve been trying to go beyond the device. Indeed, the latest big upheaval was all about focusing on services.
So, my comment to my friend is that numbers of devices sold and ASP are not longer the main indicator for Nokia. As Nokia heads deeper into services (though along the way fusing services with mobiles), analysts need to look at other indicators, such as Web service competitors, mobile offering from other services, and even devices from services, to gauge the future of the company. My challenge to my friend (and part of the reason he initiated the discussion) was that his analysts need to get their heads out of device numbers, parameters, and specs and more into the internet-fueled services world.
Link: IDC: Single-digit handset market growth in ’08 | CNET News.com:
“Over the last three years, growth in the industry during the holiday quarter has fluctuated from 18.0 percent to 30.0 percent, and this past quarter we saw it drop to 11.6 percent,” IDS senior analyst Ryan Reith said in the statement.
“The expectation that the market would maintain the level of growth it saw over the last three years was unrealistic. We expect growth to be in the single digits throughout 2008, and most likely for years to follow.”
During 2007, 1.144 billion cell phones were sold worldwide, 12.4 percent more than a year earlier.
Fjord designing sweet things for Barcelona World Mobile Congress
I was over at Fjord‘s Helsinki office, visiting Christian, who was in town. He pointed out that Fjord is going to have a booth at MWC and that they will be having a chef, David Royer, from Chef à Domicile in Helsinki, on hand making some cool sweet things specifically designed by Royer and Fjord for this event.
Ha! This is _so_ something Christian and gang would think up. Food and design and mobile and user experience in one place.
Someone please get a picture or video and send me the link.
(image from email invitation from Fjord)
links for 2008-01-28
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It’s good to begin the year in a country where coconuts are cleaved with nonchalant grace and the air is salty-sweet and there are guys on the beach from the “Life is Too Short Surf Club” and the minister of tourism advises those frustrated by long
Venter’s team takes the next step toward custom-built organisms
The biology maverick, Craig Venter, has rapidly taken the next step in creating custom organisms (link below to news article).
Recently, his team managed to test if they could replace a genome in a bacteria with one of their choosing. Now they took the next step and stitched together a whole genome.
He’s taking the right first steps. But, just keep in mind that there are many intermediate steps in what he is doing. He’s using existing organisms to help him build and grow the sequences he needs, something done in labs all the time.
That’s fine. I don’t think his goal is some purist ideal of creating a synthetic organism from scratch. I think his goal is to be able to create an organism that does exactly as he wants it. Hence, the first step was being able to prove he could hi-jack the whole machinery of a cell by replacing the genome. Next, he then creates a completely synthetic genome, based on an existing sequence, but with ‘watermarks’ and some deletions (for control reason). Which is what he’s done now.
I think his next step is to create 1) larger and larger genomes; 2) a set of lab organisms based on synthetic genomes to be used as a foundation for creating products (whatever they may be).
Heh, once again, this guy is radically changing the face of biology.
Link: Genome stitched together by hand : Nature News:
The genome for the pathogenic bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium was made in the laboratory by Hamilton Smith and his colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland. The genome has 582,970 of the fundamental building blocks of DNA, called nucleotide bases, making it more than a factor of ten longer than the previous-longest stretch of genetic material created by chemical means.