New Skype for Mac and Other Web 2.0 Tales
Its a rather rainy Thursday in San Francisco. I am busy finishing up a story rewrite, so perhaps won’t get to the big stuff (BellSouth comments, cable ala carte debacle and e911) stuff till much later. However, for your amusement some latest developments that can be summed up in a few links, and fewer words.
- Skype 1.4 for Mac is available for download as well. Interesting feature: “Pausing of iTunes when a call comes in.” In response to previous Skype post, Ben Metcalfe left a great comment earlier: “If you don’t want others to provide true value-added services that could potentially eclipse your own base-product, than perhaps you shouldn’t provide an API. “
In a video chat, John Doerr sizes the Web 2.0 boom. and well its not the “greatest money making opportunity ever” but instead he quasi trashes bloggers by saying – there are more bloggers than blog readers. Err isn’t that the point! Paul Kedrosky says, “I would have expected Doerr to skip the easy putdown and dig deeper.”
Talking about Web 2.0, Adaptive Path has another take on What is Web 2.0? Why are they saying the obvious? I don’t need to say anything – 37Signals is doing the bitch slapping for me.
All hail the emperor Craig. While a lot of people are writing about Microsoft imitating the Craig$list, read Fortune and SF Weekly, and decide that why its not a slam dunk for Bill’s boys.
Google Talk has its own blog. Yeah, but do they have anything new to talk about?
Did you know that more than Linux, tabbed browsing is a threat to Microsoft. “… takes away user attention from the taskbar, to the browser tabs. This makes users do more on the internet via the browser.” Good point Venkatesh! Check out this extension for Firefox (it like Expose for your firefox) and you realize that it all makes sense.
Later folks.
That SF Weekly piece about Craig’s list is a hackjob, the whiny style alone is grating. Instead of moaning on and on about Craig’s list taking away newspapers’ revenue and jobs, he should be looking at how the newspapers are completely incompetent at it. They’ve been listing apartment classifieds for years and yet their experience is completely useless, as all their attempts at craig’s list-alikes (apartments.com, careerbuilder) get blown out of the water by craig’s list. Or he could take an opposite tack and see that for limited funding, anybody can compete with craig’s list because it has very low barriers to entry and barebones technology. The only barrier, the network effect, is not much of one for local community sites (you can pick off one community after another individually) and craig’s list makes mistakes like limiting the network effect by not allowing people to search multiple cities at once. So, the article could have been about how craig’s list is making many mistakes and could be taken out (although this would further highlight the stupidity of his employers, the newspapers, as they’re getting spanked by this amateur). Of course, all this would require some analysis, something most twits in the media are incapable of. I read some pretty good blogs (and I’m addicted to gigaom) but I don’t come across whiny crap like this in my reading. The irony is that he’s complaining about the quality of blogs and citizen journalism in his transparent, whiny, misdirected attack on Craig.