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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: February 2011 (page 2 of 3)

Nokia falls in with Microsoft

Matt Drance bottom lines the Microsoft-Nokia “strategic partnership” with the following headline: “Microsoft Buys Nokia for $0B.”

I have absolutely no qualms about calling this new regime at Nokia a puppet government. This is far and away the most brilliant move of Ballmer’s tenure.

All the analysts are on the same page on this one — this is a huge coup for Microsoft. It’ll be interesting to see whether this deal turns out to be important in the long run. Can Nokia handsets running Windows Phone 7 carve out substantial market share somewhere between iPhone and Android? RIM seems to be having trouble, and is better positioned than Microsoft/Nokia.

Also relevant is Horace Dediu’s short history of Microsoft’s previous mobile partners.

The satellite television revolution

Hosni Mubarak has resigned.

The best explanation of the long term trends that led up to this is Rany Jazayerli’s piece on the impact of satellite television on the Arab world. Here’s a snippet:

For the last 15 years, then, the Arab world has had the access that was denied them for so long. They’ve seen the truth about how oppressive and hypocritical their own governments are, and they’ve seen the truth about how messy and imperfect and yet ultimately how ennobling and empowering Western democracies are. (In the words of Winston Churchill, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried.”) And having already opened the barn door to letting the masses own satellite dishes, the governments of the region were mostly helpless to do anything about it. Baywatch, it turns out, was a Trojan horse.

More on hash-bang links

Tim Bray offers a good high level explanation of why hash-bang links are a horrible idea and fundamentally break the web. I like this question:

So, my question is: what is the next great Web app that nobody’s built yet that depends on the simple link-identifies-a-resource paradigm, but that now we won’t be seeing?

I got a few responses to my question yesterday, which was, why are people doing this, and the one that I found most convincing is that it’s a resource issue. Let’s say you’re building a Web application and you want the ability to load items onto the page dynamically using AJAX. You have to pay engineers to build the JavaScript code that does so, and also pay someone to build the services on the servers that respond to the AJAX requests. Paying people to build the equivalent functionality that serves static pages costs even more money. So people who don’t really understand the Web cut costs in that fashion.

That probably explains the Twitter case, since Twitter is an application that rightly has many dynamic elements. But that doesn’t make sense for Gawker, a Web publisher in the business of publishing static blog posts on the Web. Why are they loading that content dynamically? My best guess there is that they hired a developer or manager who had done it that way somewhere else, probably for more sensible reasons. They came to Gawker and decided to just build things in the way that they already understood. That person should probably be fired.

Hash-Bang URLs and overuse of AJAX

Scott Gilbertson looks into the use of JavaScript in Gawker’s redesign:

The problem with Gawker’s redesign is that it uses JavaScript to load everything. That means that, not only is there no chance for the site to degrade gracefully in browsers that don’t have JavaScript enabled, the smallest JavaScript typo can crash the entire website.

I really don’t get this new trend (as Gilbertson notes, Gawker is following Twitter’s lead) toward sites that require JavaScript to load all the content on the pages. If a developer suggested such a scheme to me, I would be more inclined to fire them than to take their suggestion.

People were, at one time, hesitant to use AJAX to load all the content on their pages, because it made it difficult for search engines to index the content on those pages. Google offered a solution to that by way of hash bang URLs. And now, because Google allows it, it seems like developers are rushing headlong to adopt what sure looks to me like an anti-pattern.

I love AJAX and I think there’s a place for content that is loaded through AJAX but that should still be indexed by search engines. But generally speaking, if content should be indexed, then it should live at a static URL and be loaded through normal HTML rather than being loaded onto the page via AJAX.

Gilbertson’s source for his post is this lengthy explanation of why things went wrong for Gawker by Mike Davies.

What I wasn’t able to find is an argument in favor of building Web sites in this fashion — that is to say, loading everything via AJAX. Anyone have a pointer or want to make the case?

The currency of the Internet

The basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, our database holds a strong cash position!

Christian Rudder describes the OkCupid user base at OkTrends.

Why AOL bought the Huffington Post

Yesterday I linked to Scott Rosenberg’s pessimistic take on the AOL purchase of the Huffington Post. Felix Salmon is, on the other hand, optimistic about the deal. His argument is that the venture capitalists funding the Huffington Post and the CEO that they chose did a lot more to stifle the creativity of Arianna Huffington and the writers at the Huffington Post than AOL will.

Today, he follows in by comparing an originally reported blog post from the New York Times to a Huffington Post item linking to that post and argues that the chaos of the Huffington Post will beat out the New York Times over time. Of course, to me, the Huffington Post page is Hell on the Web, but to each their own.

If Arianna Huffington is a major strategic asset in the realm of Web publishing, his take on the deal is probably correct. I do not see Arianna Huffington as a major strategic asset.

Scott Rosenberg on the AOL-Huffington Post deal

Scott Rosenberg’s simple explanation of the AOL-Huffington Post deal:

The other, more likely possibility is that this whole thing is about the money, the investors needed to cash out, HuffPo’s numbers weren’t looking good enough for an IPO, and Huffington is basically improvising. She’ll spend a couple years at AOL and then move on. This means that, in 2011, Huffington Post will be playing the same role in relation to AOL that AOL played in relation to Time Warner back in 2000: selling itself at the top of a market bubble, pocketing the profit from a sale that couldn’t be earned from customers, and leaving a bigger, older company with all the headaches.

Nailed it.

Paul Buchheit on living life

I didn’t link to the original “tiger mom” story that was published in the Wall Street Journal because I’m not a parent and I don’t know a whole lot about parenting. Besides, people who criticize other people’s parenting styles are jerks. (If you missed the original article, it’s here.)

Today I read Paul Buchheit’s response, which discusses intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation contains a lot of wisdom. You can’t beat his basic approach to life:

My strategy can be reduced to two rules: 1) Find a way to make it fun and 2) If that fails, find a way to do something else.

And this hit home for me, as I’m sure it does for many people:

One of the problems I’ve faced throughout life is that I’m kind of lazy, or maybe I lack will power or discipline or something. Either way, it’s very difficult for me to do anything that I don’t feel like doing.

I think that a life full of things you feel like doing is a pretty good life. Oddly enough, for me they don’t necessarily have to be fun as long as they enable to attain a goal that is genuinely important to me.

Is Google a copy cat?

Over at O’Reilly, Mark Sigal makes a provocative argument about Google:

All of this is, of course, very funny because isn’t Google’s whole business model about imitating, co-opting and commoditizing?

I don’t agree with him that the kind of copying Bing is engaging in is fundamentally different than the kind of copying Google does. Google strikes me as a market follower — they bring the Google sensibility to paths that others have blazed. In this case, Microsoft is engaging in rank plagiarism.

What introverts get out of social games

Game researcher Jane McGonigal explains how introverts benefit from playing social games:

With introverts, their dopamine systems tend to work more with internal thought than with external, social stimulation. Whereas with extroverts, they have the dopamine receptors going off when someone smiles at them; for them, it’s like a hit of candy or crack cocaine, you know? And for introverts, that’s not happening.

But when we’re in game world, we do get motivated. We do get these dopamine hits from the game itself. When we’re getting them around other people, it can kind of shift our neurochemistry.

The whole interview is really interesting.

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