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I don’t want to add to the “echo chamber” that some have complained about in tech-blogging circles — which is a real risk given the number of blogs tech.memeorandum.com has commenting on the news — but I think it’s interesting that Amazon seems to have decided to open up its Alexa API for no apparent reason.

In other words, there doesn’t seem to have been any pressure to do so, nor is Amazon.com in financial trouble or under severe competitive threat — although it’s true that the company is no longer growing as quickly as it used to. That means it has decided that “opening the kimono,” as Fred Wilson likes to call it, is worth doing for some other reason (Fred calls Alexa “Amazon’s hidden jewel.”)

In all likelihood, it’s because Amazon has seen the spread of Google’s search, not to mention Google Maps, and Google Earth, and Flickr and so on, and realized that an open API likely creates more value — in the longer term — than a closed one. Let’s hope so. Because if there is one lesson that companies can learn from “Web 2.0,” it is that. Paul Kedrosky wonders why the Amazon announcement is news, and maybe it isn’t really. But it is still important.

Update:

Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web has more. And Cynthia Brumfield of IPDemocracy makes an important point (which others have made as well), which is that it isn’t just the open API, but the quality of the index that counts. And Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch is underwhelmed by the news.

As a newspaper guy — although one who is trying his best to get with the Web 2.0 program — I have a close personal interest in what the industry is going through right now, thanks to a combination of its own inaction and arrogance, combined with a tidal wave of blogs and Craigslist.org and podcasts and so on. Finding intelligent comment about and analysis of what is going on is a real treat, and as always Jeff Jarvis’s Buzzmachine.com is one of the places I often go.

Jeff pointed me to what I thought was an interesting post by Peter Rip, a managing partner at Leapfrog Ventures, who writes a blog about the venture capital business and technology. Peter used to work at Knight-Ridder on the technology side, and in his post he says newspapers are like mainframes used to be in the 1980s when the personal computer was transforming the world.

It makes sense. Newspapers are large and expensive and centralized and dominant (okay, not so dominant), and require specialized tools and skills (okay, not so specialized). And they are being threatened by a phenomenon that consists of “small pieces, loosely joined” – blogs and social bookmarking sites and ad hoc news networks and so on, who are “unbundling” the pieces that make up a newspaper, whether it’s classifieds or stock listings or news stories themselves (or the columnists, for that matter).

An interesting perspective — and a warning. Some, such as the Toronto Star’s David Olive, see this transformation as having a potential upside as well — provided newspapers handle it properly. And Scott Rosenberg at Salon has some thoughts too. And just to come full circle, I’ll let Mr. Jarvis have the last word.

So just a few days after gobbling up del.icio.us, Yahoo has formed a partnership with Six Apart, whose Moveable Type was one of the early leaders in the blog software game — more flexible and sophisticated than Blogger.com. According to the release, Yahoo will be offering Moveable Type to small businesses for running blogs, but Jeremy says anyone can use it.

A nice deal for Six Apart’s Ben and Mena Trott (and Anil Dash), who have expanded MT into hosted solutions such as Typepad and now also own LiveJournal. I moved my blog to Typepad from Blogger a year or so ago and found it easy to set up and use, although I have since moved on to using a version of WordPress that I host myself on a server at home. I like the openness and flexibility of WordPress, and I’ve been trying out the hosted version too, at WordPress.com. Coincidentally enough, Dave says that Yahoo will be offering WordPress too soon.

Anyway, another smart move for Yahoo I think. Maybe it’s difficult to see how the del.icio.us purchase makes sense financially, but I think it and this deal are signs that Yahoo gets it — or is getting it. And more than one person has pointed out that many of the moves it’s making are ones that you would figure Google either could be or should be making.

Linking to IPDemocracy.com items is becoming a habit, but Mitch Shapiro noticed something I did as well in the rather long New York Times piece on Ray Ozzie and re-engineering Microsoft — namely, word that Google is working with Wyse Technologies on a $200 “thin-client”-type PC.

According to someone at Wyse, the search company is looking at a Google-branded machine that would be marketed by telecom companies in places like China and India. Wyse CEO John Kish said that Google is “on a path to developing a stack of software in competition with the Microsoft desktop, and one that is much more network-centric, more an Internet service — and this fits right into that.” Is it any wonder that Microsoft has started talking very publicly about Web-enabled versions of Office and rolling out things like Windows Live?

Dave Farber at ZDNet notes that this idea is just the latest in a long line of “network is the computer” visions, most notably from Sun, which could never seem to make it fly. Oracle also tried it — and Wyse CEO John Kish happens to be an ex-Oracle executive. David Berlind at ZDNet has also speculated that the time has come for a networked PC, and Google is the one to bring it to us. But others remain skeptical. Is a Google PC the way to go?

Cynthia Brumfield over at IPDemocracy.com points to a fascinating opinion piece by AOL founder Steve Case that appears in Sunday’s Washington Post (which obviously appears on the website Saturday night). In the piece, Case argues that the merger between America Online and Time Warner — which was actually a $165-billion acquisition of Time Warner — hasn’t worked, and therefore the two companies should be split apart again.

Cynthia notes that complaining about a lack of integration between Time Warner and AOL is a little disingenuous, considering AOL was the one in the driver’s seat after the deal closed, and Case himself became chairman (although Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin was CEO). In fact, there were reports at the time that Time Warner executives were more than a little peeved at being sidelined by their counterparts at the online company. As the dot-com bubble deflated, of course, it became harder and harder to justify that, and Time Warner reasserted control.

In any case — no pun intended — the AOL founder says that by last July he had come to the conclusion that the company should be split not just in two, but into four: Time Warner Cable, Time Warner Entertainment, Time and AOL. The board disagreed, and Case left. At the end of his piece, it’s clear that he would like to draw a comparison between AOL’s somewhat tattered reputation and another company that was once dismissed as a has-been: Apple.

It’s unlikely AOL would ever be able to pull off a similar rejuvenation, however, since it would likely be bought by Microsoft or Google first.

Update:

Mark Evans says the piece is part of Steve Case’s ongoing attempts at “reputation rehab.” And Om Malik writes a post in which he appears to be comparing Case to Brutus in Julius Caesar. As I mentioned in a comment on Om’s blog, I think he’s being a little hard on Case. I’m not saying he’s a candidate for sainthood, and much of what he did at AOL made things worse instead of better. But he didn’t manufacture the market value that allowed AOL to take over Time Warner, nor did he slip something into Gerald Levin’s coffee that made him or the board accept the deal.

Doug Edwards, an ex-Google employee who runs xooglers.blogspot.com (he thought up the term AdWords), has a funny list of random things he remembers saying during his first month working for the search engine company:

“Wow. That’s a really cool roller coaster. How many sets of K’Nex did you have to use to make that?”

“No. I’ve never made cappuccino before. How does it work?”

“Um, is it okay that all these bikes are blocking the fire exit?”

“Hi Larry. Hi Sergey. What happened to your office? Well, it’s just… uh, nothing. Hey, which one of these remotes works with the VW Beetle? No, that other one. There, under the couch between your hockey jersey and the LEGO Mindstorms…”

“See, you can knock down more of the garbage cans if you bounce the ball instead of just rolling it straight at them.”

“How long does it take the sauna to get hot? You think it’s okay to go in the women’s locker room to get some towels since we’re out in here?”

Well, holy crap — more fodder for the “how much are eyeballs worth” debate that Om so thoughtfully started: Mike Arrington of TechCrunch just reported that Yahoo has bought del.icio.us, my favourite “social bookmark” site, and one of the first in a long line of similar sites that include Furl.net (bought last year by LookSmart), StumbleUpon.com, Simpy.com, Shadows.com and so on. What was the price tag? That remains to be seen (rumours put it anywhere from $15-million to $30-million).

There’s a note on the del.icio.us blog, and it says they’re glad to be joining their “fraternal twin” Flickr as part of the Yahoo family. Union Square Ventures, which funded del.icio.us creator Josh Schachter seems pretty excited about it too. Should users be excited? Depends how Yahoo handles the integration with their own My Web 2.0 feature. I know there was some nonsense with passwords that kind of jammed up the Flickr handover, but they were pretty minor.

Interesting times.

Update:

Not surprisingly, there’s plenty of comment on this one 🙂 Greg Yardley — who knew about it but didn’t say — has some thoughts here. Joho the Blog says it’s good for tagging, and that’s good for the web. Steve Rubel managed to have an IM chat with Josh Schachter, and posted a screenshot of it. And like Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web and ZDNet, I too hope that Yahoo doesn’t put del.icio.us in some “walled garden” but keeps it free and open. Mark Evans also raises a good point in his post: Was the del.icio.us business model just to get bought? Lots of VC-bloggers have criticized that approach, including Brad Feld of Mobius and David Hornik of Ventureblog.

Update 2:

Paul Kedrosky says Yahoo got sno.oker.ed by buying “technology that is freely available elsewhere as open source; a tiny team (and) a largely unmonetizable product.” Any thoughts, Brad?

Bringing up the subject of Research In Motion‘s legal battle with U.S.-based NTP can generate a pretty heated emotional response in some circles, and I’m not just talking about RIM’s Christmas party or one of co-CEO Jim Balsillie‘s poker night get-togethers. What began as little more than a nuisance lawsuit from an unknown company four years ago has become one of the biggest — and potentially most expensive — legal wars in recent memory.

Opinions on the case have quickly become polarized. Those who believe that NTP’s patents on wireless e-mail are invalid and should never have been issued in the first place see the lawsuit (and potential injunction against the sale of RIM’s products in the United States) as a form of legalized extortion. A great Canadian success story is being held to ransom, they argue, based on a mistake by the overworked and ill-informed U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. To this group, the battle between RIM and NTP is about fundamental issues of right and wrong, truth and justice.

Others, meanwhile, see RIM’s refusal to settle with NTP (or its foot-dragging on the terms of a settlement) as a symptom of the Canadian company’s hubris, an attitude that has arguably hurt not just the company but also its shareholders. Instead of agreeing to license the NTP patents early on in the process, they argue, RIM has left itself open to the threat of having to pay billions of dollars more than it otherwise would have, as well as losing customers and partners as a result of its intransigence. To this group, RIM’s battle might be right in principle, but wrong in practice.

To read the rest of this column, please go to globeandmail.com

Not to beat the drum too much, but Skype’s world (or that of its new parent, eBay) seems to get more complicated by the day. First there were the rumblings — mentioned in an item below — about the company losing its cool, about internal friction with eBay managers, and about “power sellers” being cool to the whole Skype revolution. Now, Yahoo has joined the party by adding new VOIP features to its instant messaging software. John Paczkowski at Good Morning Silicon Valley’s headline is great: “Feeling a little buyer’s remorse, eh eBay?”

Yahoo already allows PC users to call other PC users for free — as Microsoft’s MSN and Google Talk do — but now it is adding the ability to call regular phones for as little as 1 cent per minute, and to receive calls from regular phones for as little as $2.99 a month. Both prices are lower than what Skype charges. Susan Mernit notes that this could be just the beginning. And it seems obvious that Microsoft and Google are likely to add features similar to Skype’s for next to nothing — or perhaps (in Google’s case at least) even for free.

This may not be terribly creative, as some critics have noted, but that isn’t really the point. The point is to win market share, and the “first mover” doesn’t always have an advantage (Exhibit A: TiVo). As lawyer and tech blogger Rob Hyndman observed recently, getting displaced in such a way is even easier in a world where technology changes rapidly, is either cheap or even free, and users are constantly looking for the next greatest thing. Is that good or bad? That’s difficult to say. But it does seem to be the new reality.

P.S. At least one reader has pointed out (in response to a previous post) that Skype does have some proprietary differences from other VOIP products, since it uses a “peer-to-peer” model developed by Kazaa founder Niklas Zennstrom. That makes it easier to use in some cases, because it can find its its way through corporate firewalls more easily. That’s also why some companies block the software, however — whereas “open source” solutions such as the Gizmo Project have the benefit of being, well… open. And that can mean a lot.

As noted elsewhere, the always excellent Andy Abramson has a great analysis. He also notes that lost admit the Yahoo buzz was the news that Microsoft is rolling out voice features in Windows Live Messenger.

You might think that what Google does is simple — it indexes Web pages and other content, including news stories from various sources, such as my employer globeandmail.com — and then it lets people search for things. That’s not what European publishers and news agencies think it does, however. As far as they’re concerned, Google steals their content and then — to make things even worse — sells advertising that runs alongside it, thereby depriving them of revenue and stealing food out of their childrens’ mouths (Note: I made up that last part).

According to the Associated Press, Francisco Pinto Balsemao of the European Publishers Council said (or planned to say) at a conference in Brussels that “The new models of Google and others reverse the traditional permission-based copyright model of content trading that we have built up over the years.” Such companies, he said, “help themselves to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenue off the back of other people’s content,” which is “unlikely to be sustainable for publishers in the longer term.”

Just one question springs to mind: What planet is Mr. Balsemao from? Google and Yahoo don’t “help themselves” to copyright-protected content — they index it so that people can find it, and then they show them where to go to get more of it. That’s why searches return a bunch of links, rather than just a pile of other people’s content. Google News, which is the subject of a similarly narrow-minded lawsuit by Agence France-Presse, shows small portions of news stories and then links to the original site. If people don’t want to follow the link, that’s not Google’s fault.

Maybe Mr. Balsemao and his group will take their fight to the libraries and bookstores next — after all, they display copyrighted content and sell services related to it. How dare they?

The idea behind FON (which I heard about via gigaom.com) is a simple — and fairly seductive — one: Get as many people as possible to open up their Wi-Fi networks and share their bandwidth, and thereby create oceans of wireless hotspots for free. The venture, which was started by entrepeneur Martin Varsavsky (who founded and sold Ya.com and Jazztel), involves downloading some software that turns your wireless router into an access point and then shares it with other FON members. But will it work?

As Om mentioned, there’s more than a little bit of hippie-style, “bandwidth wants to be free” feel to FON. It’s not clear how the system would be organized, or by whom — not to mention how it would allocate your wireless bandwidth so that it didn’t get sucked up by freeloaders. Even the few details that are given have a wonky feel to them, since free users and sharers are categorized as “Linuses” (after Linux developer Linus Torvalds, no doubt), those who want to be compensated for sharing are “Bills”, and a third tier of users are known as “Aliens.”

Skeptics include Glenn Fleishman of WiFiNetNews.com, who posted a long response on Om’s blog, arguing that such a network would have limited use — since it would have large gaps — and would likely get swamped by freeloaders. He and others have also mentioned what is likely to be one of the main stumbling blocks, which is that sharing bandwidth the way FON wants to is forbidden by the terms of service of almost every Internet service provider in North America, with the exception of Speakeasy.

Update:

I should point out that not everyone thinks FON is a wacky, Quixotic venture. The new company’s board of advisors includes such Web luminaries as Dan Gillmor of Bayosphere.com, Joi Ito of SixApart and David Weinberger of Joho the Blog , as well as Rebecca MacKinnon, who is a fellow at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Even a few months later, the sheer size of the eBay-Skype deal still boggles the mind: $2.6-billion (U.S.) at a minimum, and as much as $4.1-billion if certain goals are met. All this for a company that hopes to have revenue of about $60-million this year, and (possibly) as much as $200-million next year.

The on-line auction site and its defenders say the price they have agreed to pay is justified because Skype is growing at triple-digit rates, both in terms of users and revenue. And they say the acquisition makes sense for eBay in two ways: Because Skype is a great brand, and because the company’s free voice-over-Internet service can be integrated with the auction provider’s existing business.

Those two pillars supporting the deal are not carved in stone, however. The first — the power of the Skype brand — is a very fickle thing, since it rests on a service that is not only free but one that can be duplicated relatively easily. Obviously, free services in a highly competitive market can succeed (Google is an obvious example, although it has proprietary search algorithms) but the risks are high, particularly in the on-line world, where the consumer’s allegiance can shift almost overnight.

And what about the second pillar — the idea that Skype could be integrated with eBay’s auctions to allow a “click to call” feature that would connect buyer and seller? That is still a question mark, and one which recently grew larger, after the head of a leading eBay “power sellers” group said that he and his members didn’t see any benefit to using Skype. Combine that with speculation about how eBay is taking over the VOIP company’s management, and that $4.1-billion bet the auction company made looks even larger.

for the rest of this column, please visit globeandmail.com

Update:

Rob Hyndman uses Skype’s travails to make a great point about some of the risks of starting new ventures when technology is so cheap and users are so fickle: he calls it “the best of times and the worst of times.”

A lot has been made of the dramatic growth of digg.com, a “social bookmarking” site that combines elements of Slashdot.org and del.icio.us. There are charts of its rise compared with Slashdot — the uber-geek site that is (or was) able to shut down websites simply by linking to them — and even a website devoted to the comparison. And now, digg.com says it plans to branch out from technology into other areas, such as news and sports. Is this the future of online news?

There are other, similar social-bookmarking sites, including Furl.net and reddit.com. But as Slashdot regulars know, a system like digg’s is open to abuse, and can lead to any useful information (i.e. “signal”) getting drowned out by all the noise, which is why Slashdot posts can be “modded” or modified by the rest of the community so that they don’t appear as high up, or disappear altogether. Some of the most interesting experiments out there are the ones that have tried to blend the “crowd voting” approach with news, such as Common Times.

Is that the kind of thing digg.com has in mind? If so, it should be pretty interesting to watch. Thomas Hawk has some thoughts along the same lines on his blog, and Don Grossman of A Venture Forth notes that sites like del.ico.us and digg.com can actually influence the news as well as helping to create it.

Another arrow got fired at wikipedia.org recently in USA Today, with an op-ed piece by John Siegenthaler Sr.., who writes about his outrage on finding an entry in the collaborative encyclopedia that described him as playing a role in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy — claims that remained uncorrected for four months and were repeated on other sites such as Answer.com. The New York Times writes about it here.

This is only the latest barrage of criticism aimed at the Wikipedia. Nicholas Carr made a splash a couple of months ago with an entry on his blog about the online encyclopedia and how incompetent and inaccurate many of the entries were. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales replied here and in this Register story. The former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica also took some shots at the Wikipedia in a piece written for on Tech Central Station (don’t even get me started on the whole “Adam Curry-taking-too-much-credit-for-podcasting” brouhaha).

Despite the criticisms, Steve Rubel remains convinced that the Wikipedia is “the next Google” (ironically, Steve’s post appeared the day before Mr. Siegenthaler’s piece appeared in USA Today). Rex Hammock has useful advice: “Use Wikipedia as a gateway to facts, not a source of them.” James Robertson, meanwhile, points out that “real-world” sources of information such as the New York Times, have their problems too, a point also made by Andrew Hargadon.

So is the Wikipedia fatally flawed, or does the self-correcting model of collaborative information eventually produce the best results? Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine says it may be flawed, but it’s also an opportunity. And Kevin Marks — who coincidentally enough is also a major player in the Adam Curry affair — has some worthwhile thoughts as well, including a quote from Douglas Adams in which he says that “what should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust… but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV.”

Update:

CNet News has a nice roundup on the Wikipedia’s week from hell, including comments from Jimmy Wales and Adam Curry. And Steve Rubel suggests that we should be able to “claim” Wikipedia entries that are about us.

Update 2 — December 11:

An enterprising Wikipedia critic tracked down the author of the Siegenthaler entry, who turned out to be just a guy working at a courier company who was playing a prank on a friend, and chose Mr. Siegenthaler because the family was well known in his area (Nashville). Interestingly enough, the guy said he thought Wikipedia was a gag site.

Is the Web a platform, or is it just something you should use to build a platform? That’s not a Zen koan, it’s an attempt to categorize one of the discussions going on in Web 2.0-land. You might think it’s an easy one to solve, since Tim O’Reilly — one of the guys who came up with the term — says that the idea of Web 2.0 involves “the Web as platform.” In other words, the Web is an integral part of a service like Google Maps or Flickr.

Others seem to disagree, as Fred Wilson notes in a recent post. Jeremy Zawodny seems to feel that the Web is what you use to build a platform. And how do you build one? Greg Linden says Web 2.0 consists so far of “mashups” that simply throw together something like Google Maps with classified listings, his point being that if that’s all there is to your service, you are likely to get overtaken. Don Park says all the fuss over Web 2.0 is like “a party inside MacGyver’s shoebox.”

In a way, Don Park and Greg Linden have a point — if this new revolution (or evolution) is just about cool Ajax sites and neat mashups using Google Maps and [fill in the blank], it’s hard to see it having any lasting effect. What makes things like Flickr.com different? Not the platform, and not the Ajax, but the interaction — the community. And finding ways to enhance it, like RSS and open APIs and so on.

Fred points to a perceptive essay by Paul Graham, and says the main point is “the Web is a platform and you must build on top of it and you must be open and you must not try to lock people in. If you do, you are eventually going to regret it.” Words to live by.