Loïc Le Meur has written a nice succinct post about social networks and software and decentralization: My social map is totally decentralized but I want it back on my blog. It’s pretty clear to me that this is where all of this stuff is going to have to go – partly for convenience, but also because that’s where the really interesting data/service mashups will most easily originate, I think. One thing I’ve been thinking about, though, is what this looks like on someone’s blog. I thing part of the barrier to this kind of thing is that the current state-of-the-art – widgets in someone’s sidebar or rich footer – is pretty marginally usable and definitely not scalable.
Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo
The big news this morning is that Microsoft has offered $44.6B to buy Yahoo, the figure representing a 62% premium on the share price at yesterday’s market close. It’s very unclear at this point what will come of this, but as a user I find it hard to see how such a tie-up could be beneficial to me. From my perspective, although MS has done some interesting things on the net, none of their initiatives have been focused on delivering the best quality of user experience or even innovation – their plays have seemed to by cynically based on scaling up so-so experiences and hoping that the brute force of that scale can make them important. What we learn from Google, however, is that though scale is important, it is deeply related to quality and innovation in a way that consumer software never was.
Curious:
Does anyone know how/where to download a copy of MetaPhilter? There’s a project I want to do and I am curious to see if it will do the trick or if I should try something else.
Steven Berlin Johnson:
Tool For Thought. An article about the software he uses to help him do the research for his articles and books.
What’s on your Mac?
I know that a high proportion of my readers (both of you!) are Mac users. I haven’t really kept up with what’s going on in the software world lately, but I’m always curious. With that in mind, what cool software have you found lately? What interesting tools will help me manage my email or perform some important function I don’t do often enough (like backups for instance)? Any suggestions?
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