I blogged about Shawn Andersen and the Roxy’s Pub discrimination case half an hour ago while on my way to work. 20 minutes later I go to add some hyperlinks to the post (the main problem with mobile blogging) and I decide google for shawn andersen roxys and find that my post is on the top of the search results.
Is that crazy or what?
I opened my google docs this morning (like I open it up every morning) and noticed that we now have the ability to create web based presentations from within google docs.
Not only did I find the interface fairly intuitive (after a 3 minute clicking session), but it comes with the functionality to actually present your presentation online, invite viewers etc.
There is currently no way to export as a powerpoint (although you can import) but it will give you a html version of the presentation for offline use.
Now I need to see what kind of API it gives for programmers. I can see this being LOTs of fun.
… of getting bought up by google?
If 100% of your revenue is through google adsense, and google is making 100% (or more) on your 100%, then wouldn’t your worth to google be cut by 50%?
This is disregarding my “community in a box” article.
Don Dodge coined Web2.0 as “Web App + 2 Founders + 0 Revenue”. Funny, and not too far off the money.
Don goes into detail about the various ways that Web2.0 firms are funding their efforts. This goes from Freemium (free basic membership with paid premium package) to Subscriptions to simple Advertising.
One thing that he doesn’t mention is the “community-in-a-box” business model. A community in a box is not about selling any specific product, it’s simply about creating an exciting product creating a buzz around it, and then delivering eyeballs and mindshare to a larger company.
Let’s face it, despite their best efforts Netscape’s Digg clone failed miserably. Google couldn’t do nearly as good as YouTube despite of the grotesque amount of money at their disposal. Yahoo’s Image Gallery could never do what Flickr does. Nokia could have never attracted a userbase the size of Twango. And whoever pays $x Billion for flixster (or the next social media site) is not going to care about monetizing the site they are going to care about the community they are getting.
One of the main differences between this boom and the first technology boom, is that, like Dan states, Web2.0 can survive as an idea + 2 young enthusiastic founders. All we need to build a community-in-a-box is a good idea, and a couple beat up servers somewhere and a couple hours a night spent cranking out some slick PHP or Ruby code.
Posted by mobile phone:
I am watching cnbc while on the excersize bike while blogging (multitasking++). They had a very.short piece about how yahoo customer satisfaction has grown 3 percent to pass google who has dropped 3 percent.
When I look at the two platforms, I have very little loyalty to google products.
Google search: I use it, but basically hate it. As soon as there is a viable alternative I am going to drop it.
Gmail: don’t really do the whole webmail thing. Gmail has some nice features, but hasn’t done much new in the last few years.
Google IG: pretty awesome, but for some reason I am not using it as much as I used to.
Google docs: Sweet, I love it. I wish they would add the concept of page breaks.
Adsense: a scam, I hate it.
Analytics: I use it but its not that great.
Youtube: great product, one of the only google acquisitions that has a community. We’ll see how google manages it.
And now some yahoo properties I use:
Flickr: premium member since they started. I love it.
Yahoo mail: great technology, by far the best webmail platform available.
Mybloglog: cool blogging community tool. Unique tool, nothing else like it available.
Stumbleupon: another awesome Y! buy a community based around what everyone does best: websurfing.
Yahoo finance: great product, far more features and more usable than the google counterpart.
Yahoo technologies: we use YUI heavily as well as other webservices provided by yahoo.
So you may have noticed that I hardly mentioned any products which were actually created by yahoo, and only a couple original google products.
Maybe the problem with google is that they merge the communities of their acquisitions with the general google brand. Yahoo does as much as they can to keep the communities intact.
We’ll see how google manages to break youtube and how the communities manage once the next big thig movie sharing site comes around.
I haven’t heard anything but pain from users of 8100s and 8800s. One of the guys I work with had to send his back 3 times before he got one that worked. The other guy is on his 2nd phone.
Stella has the 8100 ‘Pearl’ and I just got off of an 1 hour and 12 minute call with t-mobile and RIM. Basically it was crashing during its boot up and not getting to the point where you could even reload the OS software. I went through a million steps, including disabling the power on my USB hub from my system control panel.
One interesting “feature” was a strip located near the battery which turns red if it gets wet, nice way to determine if there was water damage to the phone.
Anyway, I am 100% happy with my 8700… I have kicked it across parking lots, had it fall out of my pocket on several occasions, and dropped on a concrete floor by an over-ambitious colleague. It still runs great!
I am tired and rambling, so I’ll stop. When is the google mobile wifi device coming out anyway?
Yesterday I read the an article on Network Neutrality on CNN.com. The article was written by Craig Newmark of Craigslist and was VERY wrong.
Here’s part of what bothered me:
Here’s a real world example that shows how this would work. Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That’s not fair, right? You called Joe’s and want some Joe’s pizza. Well, that’s how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others. For them, this would be a money-making regime.
That is a VERY misleading analogy on many levels. Here is my counter-analogy.
Steve runs a Pizza delivery service. When his service started he used to charge per-pizza he delivered. The prices weren’t that high, and since I’m too lazy to go out and get my own pizzas I appreciated the service. I didn’t eat as much pizza as I would like to, because Steve’s surcharge was always in the back of my mind.
Once Steve got enough clients, he expanded his business and realized that he could offer a better service by charging a flat-fee. Using this new business model everyone paid a flat monthly fee, and the cost of people who ate a pizza every night (like me) were subsidized by the people who only ate 1 pizza a month.
Everyone had hot pizzas, everyone was happy.
A couple months ago Gpizza opened, they offer all the regular pizzas, but also offer the GSuper 4-course MegaPizza. This pizza comes in 4 parts which are served by midgets waiters. The midgets waiters need to be transported with the pizzas and then brought back to the Gpizza store.
For the first couple months Steve is happy to provide his loyal clients with Gpizzas, even though it did require substantially more resources for Steve to transport the Gpizzas and midgets. As Gpizzas become more and more famous, people start to complain that their Gpizzas are arriving cold, the midgets were tired from the slow ride and weren’t as enthusiastic with their serving the pizzas.
Ypizza, which has been using Steve for 10 years, sees how much money Gpizza is making and decides to make the Ysuper 4-course MegaPizza and one-ups Gpizza by providing a dancing leprechaun along side the 3 midget servers.
Steve sees that he will not be able to provide any service if more Pizza places start offering MegaPizzas. He has two options:
1.Revert to a Per-pizza business model and charge his clients for the delivery of MegaPizzas
2.Charge pizza places for the delivery of MegaPizzasGpizza catches wind of this and prepares the “Pizza Delivery Guy Neutrality” bill which mandates that Pizza delivery guys are unable to charge pizza shops extra for delivering MegaPizzas.
Now with silly analogies out of the way, a bit of mythbusting:
The Network is NOT Neutral
Craig says “So let’s keep the Net as it is now: Neutral, fair and free.” The network is currently NOT neutral, it’s free for ISPs to do what they want. Network Neutrality regulation will not free anything, but will restrict the ISPs in the service they can provide.
Bandwidth / Latency costs Money!
High Bandwidth/Latency applications cost money to transfer. The money has to come from somewhere. Creating laws that stop ISPs from charging the Googles, YouTubes and Skypes of the world mean that YOU and I will be paying for it instead.
YouTube/Google/Skype and Craigslist are making money
They can allocate a bit of money to provide good pipes.
When Google rules most of the Cable in the US
How neutral do you think that will be?
During my early morning browsing session I noticed the truth behind FF2’s choice in abbreviating the title from Jeremy’s latest blog entry “Google as our Culture“.
My name is Aaron Wormus, and I’ve been a card-carrying member of the Google Cult for 3 years. I grovel when my ranks are dumped, and squeal with joy when I get back on (yes, I am listed again!), and track every change in my ranking for the term “aaron“. I grovel for invitations to every google product, and rejoice when I have the honor of being an early adopter.
Oh great google, where would we be without you?
In the footsteps of a couple good friends I’ve decided to make the first blog entry of the new year yet another year in review round-up for the year 2006.
It’s hard to believe that we’re already done with 2006, this one went by fast. A lot happened, and due to the overflow of work, I missed a lot of what I did last year (specifically LinuxWorld Expo and LinuxTag).
One of the big work-related events is a new venture that I’ve been working on this year. <project-pimping>HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website Creation was officially launched on December 1st, however about 18 months worth of work had gone into the product and building a client list before the site launch. The sprang out of my work with HedgeCo Networks which involved a the development of a high-end statistics/graphing package which generated quantitative statistics for Hedge Funds. After deploying the product on their flagship product, they started receiving request to license the package on various other website platforms, so the package was reworked into a slimmed down edition which can be deployed in smaller sites.
As we started deploying the product we realized the potential, and reallocated some of the design talent that we had been working on other project into creating entire websites and Hedge Fund start-up consulting/compliance packages. Since our Dec. 1 launch we have had a fantastically profitable month 
(to keep up-to-date with what we’re doing check out the Hedge Fund Websites blog)</project-pimping>
All of the above required me to reallocate my own time away from other projects, until the point that for the last year I have done little else. So as of Jan 1, 2007 I am officially working full time for HedgeCo Hedge Fund Websites… Freelancer no longer! This year I’m also moving my family up to West Palm Beach, Florida and will be working in the brand new HedgeCo offices (will post pics of when we move in later this month).
OK, so now that I’ve spent all my time pimping my current project I’ll skim through the news.
January: Slow month, Sid officially joined our family as “brother”. I weighed in on the PHP Security debate du jour wondering when good security verges on paranoia and the side effects.
February: Traveled to UK for PHPLondon conference. This was a fantastic event (looking forward to next year), as far as I remembered there were about 250 geeks attending the 1-day event. Got a cool new LCD. In defense of PHPNuke (and other applications of low repute whose name starts with PHP*) I responded to Marco’s post reminiscing about how great PHPNuke was back in the day.
March: Slow month… google releases finance portal, barra stops reporting S&P numbers and screws up my webservice. Tom Fox is Executed.
April: Gearing up for the world cup 32Cards PHP-based card game is released. I start using backpackit to organize my life (note to reader, I stop using it in a couple months, when it stops scaling with my needs). I spent 10 days in Florida, unfortunately missing PHPTek by 10 days.
May: I question open-source for highly specific niche applications (more specifically my statistic package). I enjoy Scott Sigler’s “Infection” which is in full swing. I start watching theshow with ze frank.
June: DSL CRASH!!! I try to “upgrade” my connection by switching providers which turns into 3 weeks on dial-up. During this time I camp at friends houses during all night product launches, and drive everyone around me insane. I finally return. World cup is in full swing, and Germany is World Cup CRAZY! I take pictures.
I travel to Norway for the eZpublish conference & PHPVikinger. Ammar Ibrahim comes to Frankfurt, we watch some football!
July: A slow month… I try Fedora Core, only to get frustrated when I can’t mount my ntfs external drive with the correct permissions (worked fine in root, was able to find no usable explanation). Infection ends. Put out a notice for css code monkeys get more response than I can handle. Macs Rock? During one of the hottest months on record the kids have chickenpox and we are confined indoors.
August: I subscribe to Gail Orenstein’s Flickr feed during her trip to Israel. cool pictures (quite possibly NSFW) with political commentary. Two talks are accepted for ZendCon. I manage to squeeze into the PHPConference schedule at the last minute. We take the kids on a mini-vacation to Legoland and then visit some friends in Switzerland.
September: Catch Mark Nemcoff on in a 5-minute-review. I deploy a site using eZpublish, blog about lessons learned. RIP Lilo. Do some myspace defending.
October: The Pear book is out!. I speculate about google world domination, and yahoo opens up the login api. Spend a week in WPB Florida, then fly to LA and drive down to San Jose for Zendcon.
November: Conference season. Meet Scott Sigler!!! Give talks at Zendcon, fly back home and give tutorial at IPC2k6. After seeing that the Zend Framework is more than hype I take a look at it and start my Zend Framework Hidden Gems article series. I dump backpackit for google docs (which I am still happily using). When is it a good time to rewrite your platform?
December: HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website launch. Fantastic month on the work front, however not a whole lot of time for anything else. David (CPUNerd) on the other hand has way too much time on his hands, and immortalizes me in kilt.
And that’s about it… probably the longest blog entry ever! I’m looking forward to this year as being the craziest yet. I’ll be flying to WPB next week, and for this first quarter will probably spend more time on that side of the pond.
A big THANK YOU to my readers (let’s make that anyone who made it this far into the blog entry). And most of all thanks to Stella, Annie and Mia for putting up with me during this hectic time.
Just a quick note to let everyone know that I’ve stopped using Backpackit completely. It was cool at first but then when we get past a certain number of articles, the system breaks down.
Plus google has spell checking, tagging, and a ton of other goodness. The only thing that I have to get used to is the “organisation-by-tagging” system that google uses. I have a TON of stuff going by me, so it might make it slightly more difficult to use than just a simple “folder” metaphor.
What more can I say, why pay for something when you can get something better for google for free.
This is an extension to my latest comment on this blog entry.
If you search for just about any term in google, you will find that if a wikipedia entry exists it will be ranked among the top few entries.
This exposes a flaw in the concept of Google search algorithms, as despite the quality of the content of the page, simply because it exists on wikipedia and is well linked within the framework of the site, it gets shuffled to the top of the google search page results.
Creating a page which is within the first page of the biggest search engine freely editable by anyone with any agenda is just asking for abuse.
Del.icio.us has been pretty free of spam and spammy links. The reason for this is their very logical decision not to allow search engines to index the pages by adding the following metatag.
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,nofollow,noindex"/>
If wikipedia would do this it would solve a LOT of problems. The fact that wikipedia ranks so well not only means that objectionable content often floats to the top of the search engine rankings, but you also get a lot more random people who surf in through google (most likely looking for information) and end up editing the article and bringing the quality down.
So this is a callout to wikipedia, please get your pages out of google and work towards refining your content rather than being a nesting ground for link spammers, people with personal agendas and random vandals.
I’ve been waiting to reveal my conspiracy theory about the Google acquisition of YouTube, but then I saw this post about Sun’s Project Blackbox, and decided it was time to let the cat out of the bag.
Project Blackbox, is a mobile datacenter from Sun. About this time last year Cringley reported that Google was working on exactly this.
From Cringley’s article:
Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.
Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example. Replicating that Victoria’s Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It doesn’t matter. To Google’s local data center, bits are bits and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.
Sounds a lot like YouTube doesn’t it? One of Sun’s new Blackboxes will hold 1.5 petabytes of data, this is probably sufficient to hold most of YouTubes / google videos popular videos. Drop a couple hundred of these at the peering ISPs and you will have the latency and speed to pipe HD video into any home in the US.
The next step is obviously the YouTube DVR, which you just plug into your network cable and your TV screen, Google will then make deals with the major networks (like we’ve seen following the YouTube acquisition) and you can forget about terrestrial and cable TV.
The last thing I want to mention is the concept that google has to monetize YouTube, and the fear that google will start splicing the videos with commercials. This is not true, and if implemented would take away what everyone loves about youtube. There is no way that Google could monetize YouTube through advertisements to create an acceptable ROI for their stockholders. Google bought YouTube as a stepping stone to grab the largest market share of internet video, which will be monetized once we all sit down in the living room to watch the latest movie releases from YouTube on our big screen TVs. Some people have also mentioned that the stock jump in GOOG prices on the day of the acquisition paid for the purchase.
The move to video is the only way that Google can continue it’s growth as an advertising giant. They have saturated the Web space and need to provide other ways to provide advertising inventory to their clients. This was discussed by Garret Rogers last year.
Whether or not “Project Blackbox” was a surprise to Google, or if Sun even got the idea from Google, I doubt that it will have much effect on the final outcome of what Google’s larger plan.
So here’s to hoping that when Google owns the internet, we don’t wish we had Bill back!
I’ve finally gotten around to testing this new google docs and spreadsheet thing they have. It’s pretty nice. Like with all things google I’m impressed with the speed and simplicity of the interface.
It looks like I’ll be dumping backpackit soon 
Now I need to see how I can publish this to my blog.
You should have a “Remove this domain from all searches” button next to your search results. There are some domains that just come up for everything, and you wish they would just die.
This would only be active when you have “Personalized Search” on.
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