I heard there was a new JSON validator, so I decided to try to validate a well known JSON. Turns out Calacanis is not valid… hope he won’t hold this against me. (Click for full size view)
..is what I want now that Eric Schmidt is off the Apple board of directors.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s co-founder and CEO, and also member of Apple’s board of directors until very recently, has just stepped down from Apple’s board. There are all kinds of investigations being talked about, and news is coming out about a tit-for-tat agreement between Google and Apple not to directly poach each others’ employees (which would be, by the way, a violation of all kinds of legal thingamajiggers).
And while that’s all well and good, I’m hoping to get a little bit more out of this break-up. Google is the king of entering other people’s markets, especially when they’re getting stagnant and lazy and not opening up properly. Google Docs, Gmail, etc. So, there’s a little piece of my brain, way in the back of my head somewhere, that is hoping that now that Apple and Google are splittsville we may be looking forward to a Google Media Player.
iTunes is fine, but it’s not the end all, be all that some people think. It just happens to be the best thing available right now. Unfortunately it’s tied to the iPod. Sure, I own an iPod, but if someone could come along and make something even close to as good that’s more open than the iPod, I’d jump on it in a second.
There’s a wave of announcements and denouncements recently of high profile people like Jason Calacanis and Mike Arrington giving up their Apple addictions because of the closed nature of the platform. A Google media player that allowed any portable media device to sync would be awesome. Oooh… and maybe they’d have a default offer to buy tunes through the Amazon mp3 store or other non-iTunes services…
And a solid media player offering that meshed well and optimized with Android wouldn’t hurt either.
I may be dreaming, but it sure would be nice.
If anyone was unsure of the echo chamber capabilities of Twitter, today was a great example. In the wake of reports of Michael Jackson’s death, a very smart and relatively unscrupulous person posted two fake articles about George Clooney and Jeff Goldblum having died in New Zealand in completely separate and unrelated circumstances.
Twitter bought in, and the messages started (and still are) flying around like hotcakes in a lumberjack food fight. I even bought in for a few minutes, but you’ll notice that the pages were fakes. If you rolled over, or clicked on any of the other links in the pages that looked very much like news sites with tabs like “Business” and “World News,” etc., you would see that all navigation links on the page link back to the page you are already reading. That is, there is no navigation. There is no rest of the site. There is just what looks like a navigation bar to give the illusion of a site.
Furthermore, if you took the time to scroll to the bottom of the site you would see this: read more »
Ignite Bend 2 is coming down the way as the single track starts to dry up ’round these parts.
Yours truly has submitted an entry. Eggs. Check it out. Talk it up. Live it. Love it. Tell the organizers to drop it like it’s hot. Or something. read more »
There has been much debate about Twitter revolving around opinions that it lacks a reason for being, revenue, business model, and ultimate fiscal viability. And yet some really really smart, really really rich VC investors not only dumped an additional $35 million into it, but then proceeded to laugh at the lack of a business model. But things are about to change, there’s a whole new PPC marketplace coming down the road, and there’s a long long tail of Twitter revenue out there for the taking. read more »
Twitter is a Real Time Capable Social Search Engine.
Here’s a little piece that was part of another Twitter related blog post of mine, but it’s important, and I think it was getting lost behind the rest of the post. read more »
Guess what? Facebook is the new Twitter (kind of). And I don’t mean in the “French 60’s musicals is the new black” sort of way (though it’s totally true).
Earlier today Facebook had a little anouncement get together to call attention to some changes that they were about to make, and that have now gone into effect. Here’s the liveblog coverage from TechCrunch and here’s a good summary of the changes put together by Mashable.
Others have a done a good job with the dissection already, so I’m going to try to keep from rambling too badly, and pick out a couple of important points… read more »
There’s a great post in The Economist about Social Networks that has a nice little review of the Dunbar Number. The Dunbar Number is a number that social network theorists have been tossing around for a long time that refers to the maximum number of people that an individual can maintain (meaning: interact with at a regular enough interval to maintain a stable relationship) at a given time in his or her social network. It is commonly believed to around 150. It appears over and over again in social network research. read more »
Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) posted a new blog post (not a tweet, mind you) this morning about how he’s going to be returning to blogging more. The post is in response to the idea being circulated out there that the death of A-list blogging is imminent. Scoble credits his own personal upcoming return to long-form blogging in no small part to his waning obsession with Twitter (read: 18,007 updates at time of post); in his own words, he says “I am starting to have longer thoughts again.” I think we can all celebrate Scoble’s emergence from his bout with Twitter Onset Addiction. read more »
“I’m finding that social media is so much easier to ‘do’ than to explain.”
- Twitter: @ittybitties
This is a quote from a college student in one of Brad King’s (@brad_king) Media Informatics courses at Northern Kentucky University (just outside of Cincinnati - my own home town). And this is the first thing I thought about when I started working on a post about the conversation I’m sick of having: “Why should I use Twitter, and how would using Twitter help me?” I have three problems in trying to engage in this conversation effectively…