Year: 2007

Facebook is the web application Microsoft should have built

Post ImageYesterday at an event called f8, Facebook launched their new “platform” which enables third party companies to integrate applications right inside of Facebook. Mashable has a pretty good overview of thirty such applications. Everything about the Facebook Platform seems fairly ballsy, but you can’t argue with statistics like these:

  • Facebook is growing 3% per week, which is 100,000 new users per day.
  • 50% of registered users come back to the site every day.
  • Facebook is generating more than 40 billion page views per month. That’s 50 pages per user every day.
  • 6th most trafficked site in the U.S. More page views than eBay. Says they are targeting Google next.

In short, there’s no better place for such a platform to be built than on Facebook.

The last point above, as reported by Michael Arrington, is particularly interesting. I suspect there are millions of people around the world right now who think that Google is the Internet. Increasingly though, you might say the same thing about Facebook. If their user growth continues, and the Platform takes off, Facebook might become the new on-ramp to the web. No need to go anywhere else when all your friends (and family, colleagues, etc) and apps (webmail, shopping, stocks, etc) are in one place.

Not only is the name “Facebook Platform” incredibly obvious, it’s also very astute. Facebook is no longer just a social networking site. It really is becoming a social operating system, as some have called it.

What does this have to do with Microsoft?

Microsoft is a platform company, plain and simple. Think of a Microsoft product – chances are it’ll be a platform product. Windows, Office, SharePoint, .NET, Xbox, etc. Microsoft is pretty good at laying the foundation and helping others build on top (which only serves to make their platform all the more important).

The Facebook Platform sounds very much like something Microsoft would build. To see what I mean, read this sentence:

Facebook is a platform that provides a common abstraction of the infrastructure and guts of a system, allowing third parties to build interesting and useful applications on top.

Now replace Facebook with Windows. Or Office. Or .NET. See what I mean? It still makes sense. Facebook is very much taking a page from the Microsoft playbook with Platform. I think it’s brilliant. And I think Microsoft should have done it a long time ago.

But they didn’t. I think they are moving in the right direction with Windows Live, but it sure is taking a while. Perhaps Colin is right…maybe Microsoft should just buy Facebook. I don’t think it’ll happen though.

At least Microsoft isn’t totally out to lunch on this – they are partnering with Facebook to integrate Popfly.

Google Acquires FeedBurner

Post ImageLots of talk today about Google’s $100 million acquisition of RSS management company FeedBurner. Congrats to the FeedBurner guys! I do have to admit though that I am bit sad that FeedBurner is now a Google property. I guess they were too valuable to remain independent forever though. From TechCrunch:

Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point.

Must be pretty sweet to get an all cash deal. TechCrunch confirmed it today, but it looks like Valleywag had the story right last week.

Not everyone is happy about the deal. Todd Cochrane does a good job of spreading FUD in his post. Todd, you need to worry less!

Read: TechCrunch

Clever Marketing: Diamond Shreddies

Post ImageOn my way to the Stadium LRT parking lot I always pass a billboard…no surprise there, billboards are everywhere. Usually I just ignore it, because most billboard ads just don’t catch my eye after the first time I see them…again, no surprise. For the last few weeks though, I have laughed every single time I’ve seen this particular billboard. I finally took a couple photos today. The billboard is a bright gold and blue ad for “Diamond Shreddies”:

Recent advances in cereal technology have allowed us to take Shreddies cereal to a whole new level of geometric superiority. One taste and you’ll wonder how you’ve been so square for so long. Welcome to the 45th degree. Welcome to Diamond Shreddies country.

I love this campaign! Apparently they have TV commercials too (which I haven’t seen). I think it’s an incredibly creative way to spice up something familiar and old. Good job Kraft!

Read: Diamond Shreddies

Is Facebook the king of photo sites?

Post ImageI use Flickr to host my photos and I love it. I haven’t had any problems with the site, and I’ve been a happily paying customer for a couple years now. There are tons of photo sharing sites available though, and it seems Flickr is far from being the clear winner, despite having lots of positive brand recognition.

In fact, I think Facebook is probably the largest photo sharing site on the web.

Here’s what I have been able to find:

Notice how for Photobucket I said “images” – that’s because they host a lot of icons, graphics, and other kinds of items that aren’t really photos. There are a bunch of other sites that fall into that category as well. Another site that probably should be on the list is Zooomr, but I couldn’t find any stats for them. I suspect they are somewhere between SmugMug and Flickr.

Clearly, based on the number of photos stored, Facebook is the winner. They have incredible growth too (over 60 million photos added per week) as outlined in yesterday’s post. Certainly just hosting the most photos doesn’t make one site better than another, but it is still pretty interesting to compare. SmugMug’s Don MacAskill is always talking about speed and performance, and for good reason – SmugMug is the clear winner in terms of load times. There are a lot of other metrics that could be used to compare sites.

The one disadvantage Facebook has (depending on how you look at it) is that all the photos are behind their walled garden. Otherwise, you could almost consider them a photo sharing site instead of a social networking site!

For me, the most interesting thing is the total number of photos across all these sites – over three billion ignoring Photobucket, just from the sites I listed. I find it unlikely that there are many duplicates (ie, most users don’t post photos to multiple sites), so the number is particularly astounding.

Just imagine what the first photographers back in the 1800s would think of this photo sharing craziness!

UPDATE: Turns out my estimate for Zooomr was horribly off the mark. Don points out in the comments that they have 1 million photos – and that getting to the million mark is a big deal (Thanks Don for the info). I think I guessed so high because of the many TechCrunch posts covering Zooomr! Oh well.

Notes for 5/21/2007

I didn’t post notes last night, but it’s a long weekend, so I figure tonight is fine 🙂

  • We’re still working on an update for Podcast Spot. Not going home until we’re done. Like Dickson remarked, it seems we always work harder on holidays!
  • Went to see Shrek the Third last night. It had it’s moments, but I wouldn’t have been sad if I had to wait for the DVD. I am disappointed more people didn’t join us though!
  • Every time an online store announces DRM-free MP3s, I am going to think of this comic.
  • Mark Shuttleworth says that Microsoft is not the real threat. He predicts Microsoft and “Linux” will be working together in a few years (I put that in quotes because it will really be IBM, Red Hat, etc). His post is worth a read…I think I agree with most of what he’s saying.
  • I’ve been harping on Firefox for being a resource hog for years. The press seems to have caught on this last week. (That link is for Wired, here’s the NYTimes article.)
  • I really like data visualizations. I came across Breathing Earth this week via Darren. Pretty cool.
  • So I’ve been looking for a full-time programming job lately. Had my first interview Thursday, and it went very well. More on this later.
  • Halo 3 has a release date: September 25th, 2007.

Gummy Bears at FlickrBlog

Post ImageIf you aren’t currently subscribed to the FlickrBlog, you should be. Here’s the RSS feed. I read a lot of feeds every day, and most of them are just text followed by more text. The nice thing about the FlickrBlog is that in addition to site news for Flickr, they often share “photo posts” like yesterday’s post on The Secret Life of Gummy Bears:

Since we don’t know how many gummy bears have actually been released into the world, there’s just one immediate solution: Eat them — as many and as fast as humanly possible. It’s not too late.

I don’t know why exactly, but the post just made me smile. Some other recent “photo posts” include Dogs on Roofs, Dogs in Pools, and the paper crane project.

It’s amazing how much time you can waste just hopping from photo to photo on Flickr!

Read: FlickrBlog

Coming Soon: Dell Tablet PC

Post ImageAs you may know, I am a big fan of the Tablet PC. I’ve had a Toshiba Portege for a few years now, and before that I had the first Compaq model. Unfortunately, most people still buy regular laptops. I think there are two reasons for that:

  • Tablet PC’s are a little more expensive than regular laptop computers.
  • Computer stores don’t showcase tablets, so not as many people know about them.

Both of those things might change in the near future! According to a post on Dell’s blog today, the rumored Latitude Tablet PC is real. There’s a short video with a few details. I think there’s hope that Dell’s tablet will be cheaper than the competition, taking care of point #1. And as for point #2, I imagine the tablet will be included in Dell’s mailouts, which are kind of like the old AOL disks – everyone gets them!

Elsewhere in the world of Dell today: some really nice LCD monitor technology and design.

Read: Direct2Dell

Smallville Season 7 Confirmed

Post ImageI just watched the season six finale of Smallville and it ended in a cliffhanger as expected. And it’ll be back next season, also as expected. It was consistently one of the CW’s top-rated shows this season, so I figured it was very unlikely to suffer the same fate as Gilmore Girls. The seventh season should get underway late September or early October.

There’s a chance that Smallville may have an eight season, but that would be its last according to Executive Produce Al Gough:

We’ll officially find out about season 7 on May 17th [during the CW upfronts], but obviously we feel very confident we’ll be back. As for season 8, who knows? There are a lot of factors that will play into that decision, not the least of which is the quality of season 7, so that is what we are focusing on at the moment. If there is an 8th season, that would be the show’s last. Every hero may have a beginning, but every story has an end.

With that in mind, I hope they go the full eight seasons! It’s a nice round number (and lucky in Chinese culture). Would make for an excellent DVD set.

As for tonight’s finale, it was pretty intense. Perhaps not as good as last season’s finale, but still pretty good. I won’t give anything away here, so if you want to read some discussion regarding the episode, check out KryptonSite.

The one thing I will say is this: the Martian Manhunter was entirely underutilized. Such a waste.

Creating a Thought Stack

Post ImageI came across a really interesting post yesterday at Mashable! entitled Why Google Is Making Us Dumber. Eye-catching title is it not? Stan, the author, argues that our growing reliance on Google might cause problems when Google isn’t around:

I used to be able to quickly convert pounds to kilograms. Currently, I lack this knowledge, because I know that Google has built-in unit conversion capabilities. Simply type X pounds to kilograms into Google and you get the answer.

What happens if I’m abroad and need to quickly convert between pounds and kilograms? Problem.

As for being abroad: the Internet is almost everywhere! Soon it will be, so I am not sure we should be so concerned with that. It’s true, Google knows all kinds of great information: math, conversions, capital cities, currency conversions, etc. I relied very heavily on the conversion capabilities while doing my astronomy homework this past year. Does that make me dumber? No.

I think Stan is wrong to suggest that Google is making us dumber. Instead, Google allows us to put our energy towards more important thought activities. Generally speaking, math or unit conversions are just small pieces in a larger puzzle. If we don’t have to worry about these smaller pieces, we can put more effort into solving the puzzle.

I think Google is just one piece in a “thought stack” – roughly analogous to a web server in a technology solution stack. Imagine if you had to build a web server every time you wanted to create a website…you’d never get the website built! It wouldn’t be worth the effort. So instead we have a general purpose web server that we build on top of. Google is like that general purpose web server, but for basic kinds of thought activities. Instead of doing a conversion everytime you are designing a widget, Google does the conversion and you focus on the widget.

(It should be noted that Google could be replaced with something else, just like Apache and IIS do the same job and are replacements for one another.)

If you like the idea of the technological singularity, this “thought stack” should make a lot of sense. Perhaps one day the Google-like module will be embedded directly into our brains.

Read: Mashable!

We need someone to complain to!

Post ImageTwitter is in the news again (at least in the blogosphere). Yesterday Jason Calacanis posted that he’d be willing to pay for a premium account on Twitter. Dave Winer then chimed in and said that it could be accomplished without Twitter’s help at all. And then Boris Mann posted a bit of a rant saying that Twitter is Jabber. Boris says:

My only explanation for the Twitter craze is that North Americans are still enamored of anything that can do the tiniest bit of mobile integration.

No Boris, there’s a very simple reason that Twitter is all the rage right now and Jabber is not (and never has been except among geeks) – we need someone to complain to. XMPP is great, but when something goes wrong, what do you do? Who do you turn to? At least when Twitter breaks I know who to contact.

It’s a fundamental problem with almost all open source projects – accountability is lost. This is especially true when you want to use the project for something serious, like Jason does. That’s why companies like Red Hat, IBM and Bryght are the ones we turn to for integrating open source technology. If something goes awry, I know there’s someone out there who will take my money to get it fixed.

Twitter doesn’t have that many users. It doesn’t have really impressive technology, as Boris has pointed out. Twitter is where it is today because it was created by and continues to be run by a corporate entity.

Read: Boris Mann