Technovia

Jaiku: Not yet out for the count

This pleases me immensely. After a heated conversation on FriendFeed, Jyri posted a quick note on the Jaiku blog to let people know that the service isn't dead, isn't mothballed, and is being actively developed:

"Also, contrary to some voices out there, we DO have plans for future development and we will involve our developer community as much as we can. Just to reiterate, we are working very hard to ensure you have a useful and usable service. We feel the short term pain, too. Thanks for sticking with us!"

This is really good news, as I really like Jaiku. Now here's hoping for an iPhone client in the pipeline, too... :)

Windows 7 - it's like Longhorn, all over again

Ouch:

"Microsoft spent some time talking about Windows 7 (the current name for whatever comes after Vista) this week at Walt Mossberg's D conference. I knew this was coming but I'm still surprised at how they're presenting the next generation of Windows. It seems they have learned nothing from the Longhorn/Vista launch and are going to make the same mistakes all over again. That's a shame since there are so many new mistakes for them to make.

...

This is a real mess IMHO. I feel like I'm watching the Longhorn story all over again. It need not be this way for MSFT. If there's anyone out there in Redmond reading this, please give me a call? We need to talk. George Santayana said it best. 'Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.'"

Apple "Mobile Me" needs more than over the air syncing

Following on from Deep Apple, John Gruber does some digging and reckons that there's a replacement for the aging .Mac coming soon, and its name is "Mobile Me".

Why Microsoft lose and Apple wins, part two

There are some very interesting facts about the reaction of Microsoft to Spotlight after its first demo revealed in the comments to a post on Joe Wilcox's AppleWatch blog.

"MSFT has worked on WinFS for more than a decade without success in making it fast, reliable, and easy-to-use enough for release. The Longhorn "reset" in 2004 was in large part the realization that WinFS was still not ready for primetime.

At the June 2004 WWDC, Jobs blew away the MSFT engineers in attendance by demonstrating lightning fast Spotlight searches on Tiger (OSX 10.4). The court-released MSFT emails show how flabbergasted they were, and the imperative of getting the Tiger preview DVDs back to Redmond for reverse engineering. Comments by MSFT's Jim Allchin and Lenn Pryor were priceless.

Here's Pryor:

" You will have to take Vic's disk...I am not giving mine up. ;) Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was f*cking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today."

Here's Allchin:

"Yes. I know. It is hard to take. I don't believe we will have search this fast."

And years later, Microsoft still does not have search this fast - and, from the looks of what Joe is saying, probably won't have it for many years.

So why is Apple so good at this stuff, while Microsoft keeps churning out concepts - like it's latest, "table top computing" - that it never implements properly?

If the private sector web industry can't compete with the BBC, it doesn't deserve to be in business

BBC Trust to scrutinise 'distinctiveness' of BBC's digital ambitions | Media | guardian.co.uk

"Emily Bell, the director of digital content at Guardian News & Media - which publishes MediaGuardian.co.uk - also speaking on Today, voiced concerns that the burgeoning digital ambitions of the BBC would mean that these safeguards might not go far enough as commercial competitors battle a potential advertising downturn.

'I think the trust is going to have to keep coming back to this. The safeguards sound fine for now but I don't really see where the growth or innovation is going to come from in the commercial market,' Bell said."

I am utterly sick of the continual whining from the private sector about the BBC. Anyone who's ever worked there will tell you that it's an environment where it's very hard to get anything truly innovative done. Considering the beaurocracy involved in the place, it's a surprise that anything gets done at all.

And yet, over and over again, Bell and her friends pop up, crying foul. Frankly, if a company isn't agile enough to beat the BBC to market and produce better products, they don't deserve to be in business.

YouTube vs Viacom: A missed chance for television

Google Watch - Google Lawsuits - Google Sings the Copyright Infringement Blues

"First, Google last Friday filed a statement in a Manhattan district court challenging Viacom's more than one-year-old, $1 billion copyright infringement suit versus Google's YouTube video-sharing Web site.

The gist: Viacom is tired of its MTV and Comedy Central content running on YouTube. Google claims YouTube fulfills the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's mandate to remove content from the site when content owners complain that it's illegally online"

I think that Viacom is missing a massive opportunity here. Millions of people are watching Viacom content on YouTube, while at present the only people who gain financial benefit are Google, in advertising revenue. Wouldn't it make more sense for Viacom to work with Google to identify its content and, instead of removing it, take a slice of the advertising alongside it?

I can't help but think that would be far more profitable for Viacom than trying to stop people uploading episodes of "The Daily Show".

But Viacom's issue is that it hasn't grasped the fundamental issue of the Internet: it no longer can fully-control how its content is distributed or where it's viewed. The key thing to do in these circumstances is not to try and retain a level of control that's simply no longer possible, but to seek to work out ways of making money from your content, no matter how its distributed or who does the distributing.

YouTube is a great example of this. Viacom (and probably Google) can't pratically stop people uploading its content. So the question is "how can Viacom make money from this lack of control?"

One reason why newspapers shouldn't have open blogs for readers

Because if you do, you end up with the unpleasant spectacle of racists like Richard Barnbrooke starting a blog which looks like a Telegraph editorial page.

Nick Carr and Clay Shirky debating the value of television

Terrific reply from Nicholas Carr to Clay Shirky  on the whole "television as gin" thing:

"What I’m pointing out is that people were every bit as capable of living rich, multidimensional, interesting, creative, and “participative” lives before the web came along as they are today – and a lot of people did live such lives. And they often lived them even while spending considerable portions of their time watching TV or drinking gin or sitting in a lotus position intentionally frittering away their 'cognitive surplus.' (There’s a creepy kind of neo-Puritanism at work in your calculations of how productively we’re 'deploying' our “cognitive surplus,” but that’s a different story.)"

Paul Carr on Mike Arrington and copyright

Paul Carr writes a brilliant response to Mike Arrington's idiotic post on reforming copyright law (by which he means "killing it"):

"But for all the fancy talk about “finding new business models” to “remove friction”, which is the thrust of Arrington’s argument (in the same way as Rohypnol - and try not to wince at this simile too much - removes the friction from sexual assault), these new business models haven’t been found yet. Which current alternative model, if not controlled distribution through enforced copyright law, could support the creation of even a single episode of the Office or thirty seconds of The West Wing?

Merchandising? Give me a break. Does even the most ardent of West Wing fans really want a talking Martin Sheen action figure (”Dammit Toby!” / “‘unfunded mandate’ is two words”) or an Emily Proctor doll with realistic moving arms? 

Product placement? Yeah - but let’s go the whole hog and rename The Office to ‘Staples’ and create a new franchise called ‘CSI: Pizza Hut’.

Tickets to live performances? Two front row tickets to ‘The Wire: The Musical’, please."

Arrington will undoubtedly win lots of credits from the freetards for claiming that watching YouTube is "natural behavior" (like we were doing it in the stone age). But unless he actually has a contribution which shows how the economics works, he's wasting our time.

Mac News on FriendFeed

I've created a FriendFeed room devoted to Mac News, reviews, features, and so on. If you're a FriendFeed user, feel free to join (it's a public room) and post anything and everything you find.