Life is grand

The reason I am so critical of Facebook is that just a month ago we were all talking about MySpace. A month before MySpace we were talking about Friendster. Before that there was something else.

And now we have Perfspot.

If you are developing apps. and spending considerable time on a particular social network service then you face the very real problem that it is not going to last, that it will go from darling to destitute in just a few short years. And we keep repeating this problem.

TechCrunch asks:

Facebook may be holding out for a $15 billion valuation. What the hell. Why not?

Because there are better things to spend ten billion US dollars on? Because Facebook isn’t worth that? Because would even 5% of Facebook users pay for the service? Because do even 10% of Facebook users click through on adverts or take notice of brands on Facebook? Because do even 11% of Facebook users provide sustained benefit to the creators and owners of Facebook applications?

And no. Facebook isn’t worth $10 billion. You are worth what people are willing to pay and Microsoft isn’t going to fork over that much for 100%. Instead, 5% at a few hundred million to position Microsoft better and catch a potential Facebook IPO is more like it.

Still. This is silly money. Much of the world is struggling for daily food and water while we Web 2.0 fan boys drum-up noise for, frankly, worthless systems.

Make your million, get your evaluation, enjoy your nice house and fast car, but don’t be greedy. Quit while you still have a heart, folks.

In How To Avoid Sounding Like A Monkey, Dave Winer points out that all this harping about the “social graph” is slightly daft. A graph in that context is identical to a network. It has nodes and edges and operates in the same way we known networks to operate. In other words; call it a social network, as we have been doing all this time.

On the other hand I do understand the situation that makes it desirable to differentiate between a social network and a social graph. Ask people what a social network is and they say Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc. They think of the actual websites. Ask someone what a social graph is, and if they know, they will say it is the network of connections arising out of a social network website.

To many in the field a social graph is what enables portability and interoperability between social network websites.

I still agree more with Dave Winer though. Call the network itself a social network and call the sites what they are; social network sites.

Ye’ar me hearties! Tis talk like a pirate day it is, shiver me dictionaries tha y’ars flyee. I’m but a squab on tha fir’castle o’ loif but thar naught better’n talking like a pirate, y’ar!

(I hope you are happy, Jonathan.)

Got an invite to the Google Analytics AIR beta today and gave it a whirl. It looks good, works well but most importantly makes checking your analytics faster and easier than through the Google Analytics website. One nice feature is that you can open multiple tabs with various analytics on each.

But I do wonder as to the wisdom of a third party building such a feature rich app. All the views in Analytics are reproduced, when Google Analytics changes or release a new feature the change or feature will have to be reproduced. In a better world the views are independent of the delivery mechanism, embeddable in the browser or in AIR.

It seems like a lot of work with a lot of risk and not a whole lot of benefit. Possibly it is a “Look what I can do” app. and Google hire/buy the guy who wrote it. Or maybe Adobe will hire him for his AIR skills.

Still, the app. is slick and if you use Analytics it is worth trying out.

While this may not be a novel feature, other search engines have long had it, it is new to Google as far as I can tell. And because Google is the search engine many of us everyday it is something to note.

Do a search and you now get the option to see results from other Google systems, e.g. books or blogs or video. If your search doesn’t appear in those systems then the option doesn’t appear.

Simple but useful.

On hearing about Colin McRae’s likely death this morning I thought I’d check his Wikipedia page for some history on him. Impressively the Wikipedia page for Colin McRae had already been updated to include details on his likely death.

Just a thought but, even with Wikinews, could one monitor Wikipedia page updates for news trends?

Ian Forrester’s “The Perfect RSS Aggregator On Any Platform” list is quite something. It could quite easily be condensed into a list of TLAs. APML, OPML, WebDAV, RSS, Atom, FTP, Samba, XSL, XML, eRDF, RDFa, CSS, Microformats, XUL, XPath, PDF and finally, WTF.

As Apple surges ahead in usability, as 37Signals succeeds by focusing on simplicity and What You Need the rest of the computing world adds acronyms and puts technology front and center.

The perfect RSS aggregator wouldn’t have RSS in the title and wouldn’t be a list of features. It would be usable, elegant and simple, able to manage the glut of information without revealing a single TLA to the user.

The result would be that I could “express mild interest” in a feed by “subscribing to it” and the system would help me figure out which of the voluminous posts were actually worth reading.

A fascinating idea from Embracing Chaos.

Most feed applications treat a subscription as gold. Every item is delivered to the user, unread item counts are prominently displayed and so on. Users don’t want to miss an item from a subscription, right?

Dirac’s insight though is that not all subscriptions are equal and, more importantly, a subscription is an initial gesture and not a final decision. Many times I have subscribed to a feed and manually monitored it. If it proves to be a strong feed I keep it, if it wanes I unsubscribe, often reluctantly though. Some feeds are intermittently good but unsubscribing means you don’t even get the good items.

So maybe a subscription is treated as an indication of interest. Then, over the next few weeks the system monitors the users interaction with the feed and dials in or dials out items.

An interesting idea from Dirac and quite different from how we currently treat subscriptions.

Georgia deserved to win that Rugby match, lads. I say this as someone who has come to love Ireland in his two years of living there. I took that game hard too, it wasn’t easy to watch. The Namibia game could have been just a result of nerves and media pressure but Georgia made it two tough matches.

The one commentator nailed it when he said Ireland had no game plan. Georgia had a simple one but at least they had something. And they executed on it. In that last quarter they pounded the ball back into Irish 22′ and then tried to roll over the line. Simple plan but only by the luck of the Irish did they fail at it.

Just imagine if the Georgians had a more accurate drop goal kicker. They could regularly get their kicker close enough to the poles and give him enough space to go for it but he just managed to miss each time.

Ball from the back of Irish scrum was dirty and rushed when it should have been calm and collected. Normally in an Irish game you get to watch in awe at Ronan placing a ball a few feet from the opposing line time after time. This game we saw that just once, and then a fumble lost the ball to Georgia. Other times Ireland looked strong in their running but rushed the execution. Less mistakes this time around but all the same they happened at crucial moments.

Ah Ireland. You’ve got it, everyone else thinks you do too. Come on lads.