Active in Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing
I have a theory that the startup industry exists to funnel venture capital dollars to Amazon.com. Here’s some evidence.
Active in Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing
I have a theory that the startup industry exists to funnel venture capital dollars to Amazon.com. Here’s some evidence.
Great set of photos of the first man to walk on the moon from Alan Taylor.
Neil Armstrong, First Man on Moon, Dies at 82
On one hand, the most spectacular individual achievement in human history. On the other, the fruit of the combined work of an entire civilization. John Noble Wilford, the writer of Armstrong’s obituary, wrote the front page story on the moon walk for the July 21, 1969 edition of the New York Times.
And that’s what makes this so uncomfortable: Android’s and particularly Samsung’s copying of Apple was egregious and shameless, but since that itself is not illegal (and how could you even codify that as law?), then does settling for a victory over stuff that probably shouldn’t even be patentable count as a victory at all? Making things worse, the jury had the option of invalidating patents on both sides, and declined to do so on every count.
Chris Adamson in Bittersweet Ending
Today Twitter cut off Tumblr’s access to the Twitter social graph, preventing people from using the list of people they follow on Twitter to find friends on Tumblr. This is yet another lurch toward stinginess on Twitter’s part. They obviously feel like people are hooked enough on their service that they’ll stick around despite the fact that they’re claiming your list of Twitter followers as their own property, and have decided to slowly starve third party developers who build Twitter clients.
One alternative to Twitter is App.net, which has certainly started out by saying the right things but will either never catch on or become yet another proprietary network that finds itself in conflict with its users. The just-announced Tent.io is a proposed protocol that would enable people to create their own Twitter equivalent in a federated fashion, in the style of other popular federated Internet communication systems like email, IRC, Usenet, or even HTTP. With Tent.io we’d have a large number of “Twitters” that pass messages between themselves so that there’s no one centralized service upon which everyone depends.
The tough challenge they face is figuring out how to move from a protocol with no available implementations yet to a service where all your friends are. This service will, at least initially, require you to set up your own instance of the software on a server somewhere. If the service catches on, services will arrive that enable users to simply sign up on the Web and start participating, just like they can get an email account through one of any number of free email providers. But the effort required initially will be greater.
The way to get started is to write a Tent.io implementation that also works as a Twitter client, so that you can publish to both your Tent.io server and to Twitter at the same time, and so that you can read messages from both Tent.io and from Twitter in the same interface. Then if things go unrealistically well, traffic gradually moves from Twitter’s service to the Tent.io network.
The second important step is making lots of friends. Is it possible to get Yammer to implement Tent.io so that companies can federate their Yammer networks with other Tent.io networks? The people behind the Identi.ca service were talking about the federated social Web back in 2010, but their service hasn’t really taken off. They have an open source Twitter clone called Status.net. The folks behind Tent.io should be working with them and learning from them.
The third step is moving beyond Twitter in some important way that compels people to switch over. “Like Twitter but open” is not a value proposition for mass adoption, or even for significant adoption. Compelling features will be required.
This effort reminds me a lot of XMPP, the open, federated instant messaging protocol that was created as an alternative to proprietary instant messaging networks. It has been successful as a protocol, but not necessarily as a means of liberating people from proprietary networks. Google Talk is built on XMPP and supports open federation, but almost nobody takes advantage of it. They just use Google Talk. Worse, none of the other major instant messaging networks have ever bothered to add interoperability with Google Talk via XMPP.
In the end, the best hope is that Tent.io gains enough traction to be adopted by would-be Twitter competitors, thereby insuring that people do have some control over the network they create on the service, have access to the full archive of posts that they wrote, and can generally be insured that the investment they make in the service won’t be devalued over time through business decisions made by the service provider. An alternative outcome where people run their own Tent.io servers in the same way that they run their own blog software seems less plausible to me.
Austin Considine reports in the New York Times. Reminds me of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, a novel which is also mentioned in the article’s first comment.
Ferguson’s critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of academia or the media. Neither is right. Look at his speaking agent’s Web site. The fee: 50 to 75 grand per appearance. That number means that the entire economics of Ferguson’s writing career, and many other writing careers, has been permanently altered. Nonfiction writers can and do make vastly more, and more easily, than they could ever make any other way, including by writing bestselling books or being a Harvard professor. Articles and ideas are only as good as the fees you can get for talking about them. They are merely billboards for the messengers.
Stephen Marche explains the economics of hack punditry in Niall Ferguson Newsweek Cover – Culture of Public Speaking
Languages, Verbosity, and Java
Dhanji Prasanna sums up the strengths of Java as capably as you’ll ever see.
Adrian Holovaty announces his departure from EveryBlock five years after founding the company. It’s a great rundown of what EveryBlock accomplished — its impact in the areas of open data and custom mapping was impressive.
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The advantages of mass production
The August 13 issue of The New Yorker had an article by Atul Gawande (one of my favorite writers) about how hospital chains are increasing quality and lowering costs by taking the individuality out of the practice of medicine. In it, he compares the way hospitals treat patients to the way Cheesecake Factory treats customers. It’s a great article, and the lessons in it apply to more than just the medical industry.
I particularly liked this description of the value proposition of chain restaurants:
There’s an important point to be made, which is that the idea of manufacturing is to produce things at a predictable cost and at a predictable quality level. In some case, that means flimsy T-shirts that you can buy for two bucks, in others it’s a Mercedes Benz car that costs many tens of thousands of dollars. In most cases, the best handmade items incorporate no small amount of individual brilliance and have many advantages over manufactured alternatives. At the same time, there are lots of handmade items that are just terrible. If you haven’t invested the time or effort to choose between them, the predictability of the manufactured option is often a safer bet.
I think about this a lot when it comes to restaurants like Chipotle. Is Chipotle as good as the better California-style burrito restaurants? Of course not. But most towns don’t even have a non-chain burrito place, and even in those that do, there are plenty that aren’t as good as Chipotle. Your best bet is to do research ahead of time and find a truly outstanding dining experience. But barring that, trusting in the luck of the draw can often turn out to be a poorer choice than going with a known quantity like Chipotle.
Gawande’s argument is that the discipline imposed by chains may make even more sense in the medical field than it does in restaurants. Certainly it’s the case that for the person who wants to find excellent food to eat, the resources to help out are nearly limitless. Not so for the person seeking excellent medical care. Having the option to choose a hospital with predictable, high quality results would represent an upgrade for nearly every patient.