My friend Om Malik says that he has it on good authority that Joost — the much-hyped P2P online video startup run by the founders of Skype and Kazaa — is planning to kill its desktop client. This news was likely met in many quarters by a resounding cry of “What took so long?” Although the first few iterations of Joost’s client showed some promise, the app soon became (in my view at least) a bloated front-end to a lacklustre service. There were hints of some interesting features, such as the semi-transparent live chat window that you could bring up while watching a show, but too few of them were realized.
Inside R.E.M.’s Web strategy
There’s a great series of guest posts over at Hypebot by my friend — and mesh 2008 keynote interview subject — Ethan Kaplan, the vice-president of technology at Warner Brothers Records, who provides a detailed breakdown of the online strategy behind the release of R.E.M.’s latest album, Accelerate. The band was apparently underwhelmed with the response to its previous albums, and decided that a gangbuster online push was one way to help reverse that tide, and Ethan was the natural architect for such a strategy, given his technology background — but also his intimate relationship with the band, which began over a decade ago when he created a fansite at the age of 16.
The strategy eventually included six different websites and sub-sites set up before and after the release of the album. And that’s in addition to the use of existing sites such as Murmur, the band’s community website and forum (which evolved out of Ethan’s original fan site), where bootleg audio of the songs started appearing months before the official release, taken from live rehearsals and promotional events. There was also REMDublin.com, which was set up as a central place for fans who attended the band’s Dublin 5-night series of shows to congregate and share their experiences. As Ethan notes: “Michael Stipe encouraged people to photograph and videotape the shows from the stage.”
Comments more like slander than libel
Shane Richmond at the Telegraph has news of an interesting ruling from a British High Court judge, in a case that involved allegedly defamatory comments posted to an online discussion group about investing. In his decision, Mr. Justice Eady said that even though some of the comments on the investment forum amounted to “vulgar abuse,” they were much more like slander — in other words, much more like nasty remarks that are made to someone in person — than they were like libel (which usually involves writing or publication). As he put it:
“[Such comments] are rather like contributions to a casual conversation (the analogy sometimes being drawn with people chatting in a bar) which people simply note before moving on; they are often uninhibited, casual and ill thought out. Those who participate know this and expect a certain amount of repartee or ‘give and take’.”
Google’s Chrome is great, but…
If you’re looking for more than the typical “Chrome is great” response to Google’s new browser, here are some of the ones I’ve come across that I think make good points and/or go into some depth. For whatever it’s worth, I think it’s pretty good — and it seems pretty damn fast as well. Will I make it my default? Not just yet.
— Walt Mossberg has a review of Chrome up at All Things D and seems to like it, but isn’t blown away (his speed tests don’t jibe with mine though, and CNET says Chrome beats every other browser).
— SEO 2.0 thinks that a Google browser could actually be a bad thing, for a number of reasons (some of them good).
— Jack Schofield at The Guardian notes that almost all of Chrome’s features (and even its name) are already available in other browsers, and in some cases have been for years.
— Matt Cutts, the Google blogger, has an excellent post up in which he responds to some of the criticisms (Google’s going to track me! Google’s going to know everything!) and questions about Chrome.
— Eric at Internet Duct Tape says he likes Chrome a lot, and it really is fast, but it’s missing some crucial things (ad blocker, etc.).
— Wired has a great in-depth look at the Chrome project.
Virtual newspaper has 6.7 million readers
From the Los Angeles Times (via a post at Wired) comes the news that a little-known “newspaper” called the Club Penguin Times apparently has almost 7 million subscribers, many of whom read the paper at least once a week. And where is this newspaper published? Inside Club Penguin, the virtual world for kids that was developed by a trio of parents from the tiny town of Kelowna, B.C. and bought by Disney last year in a deal worth as much as $750-million. As the L.A. Times notes, that readership makes the Club Penguin paper bigger than either the New York Daily News or the Chicago Tribune, among others.
Obviously, there are differences between an online journal published for kids between 6 and 14 and traditional newspapers in the real world, but that’s still a huge number. The Club Penguin “paper” gets about 30,000 submissions a day from readers for its poetry contests, its “Aunt Arctic” advice column and other features (much of the content in the newspaper is created by users). And best of all, the Penguin Times doesn’t have to worry about advertising — it doesn’t carry any.
Lane Merrifield, the CEO of Club Penguin and an extremely nice guy, was one of our keynote speakers at mesh 2008 last May. There’s some video of his talk with Stuart MacDonald at mDialog.
Chrome may be great, but will it matter?
As I said in my post yesterday about Google’s new Chrome browser (and as a number of others have also noted, including Kara Swisher and Mike Arrington) Google’s real target isn’t Microsoft’s Internet Exploder, or even Mozilla’s Firefox, but the desktop operating system market. As Fred Wilson points out in his blog post on the topic, Google’s focus is the “cloud” — i.e., Web-based applications such as GMail and Google Docs and so on — and for an increasing number of people (including me), the browser is just a window through which they can use a variety of Web-based services.
So the point of Chrome is to turn the browser into a better interface for those Web services and apps, by using a faster, custom-made version of Javascript, by isolating each site in its own tab so that it can’t crash the whole browser, and so on. Although some of these features appear in IE 8 as well (including the separate sandbox-for-apps approach) Nick Carr is right when he says that Google is the only company for whom the cloud is a priority, and the only one with the resources to totally remake the browser into a Web operating system — continuing a trend that Netscape started back in the first bubble.
Hey kids, let’s drive into the hurricane!
I’m really hoping this is some kind of sick joke, but it looks to be a video of a couple and their three young sons, who have apparently driven their car straight into the path of Hurricane Gustav. What’s next for the Heene family — exploring a bomb-testing area for unexploded ordinance? (hat tip for the link goes to Rex Hammock on Twitter)
Chrome: Do we need a Google browser?
Update:
The Google blog now has the news about Chrome, which will be launched tomorrow. Kara Swisher says Google has ignited a new browser war with Microsoft, and Om Malik thinks that the mobile world will be one of Google’s main attack points. Harry McCracken, meanwhile, has a great list of 10 questions that the Google browser raises.
Update 2:
Om has a post with a response from Mozilla CEO John Lilly to the potential competitive threat from Google, which has been working closely with Mozilla. And Mike Arrington has some screenshots of Chrome that he got from the website (which was briefly up but is now down).
Psystar wants to force Apple to open up
According to an article in Information Week, the Apple clone-maker known as Psystar Systems is counter-suing Apple, claiming that the computer company uses illegal tactics to protect its market share in personal computers, including anti-competitive measures that are prohibited by the Sherman Act, a key piece of U.S. anti-trust legislation. Among other things, the clone-maker argues that Apple employs technology that effectively “bricks” Apple clones when the software detects non-standard hardware, and also that the company is able to charge more for its computers because of such tactics.
As the Information Week article notes, in order for Psystar’s case to have any chance of succeeding, the company has to prove that Apple computers are a separate and distinct market of their own. If they are part of the much larger market known as personal computers, then Apple’s behaviour arguably doesn’t matter, because the company only has about 10 per cent market share (depending on whose numbers you look at). But Psystar claims that Apple computers are actually a separate market, thanks in part to the company’s marketing campaigns, which are aimed at creating a mystique and a feeling of superiority around its products.
Anderson: Would you like to play a game?
I’m with Mike Arrington on this one: I think the news that Tom Anderson was a teenaged “War Games” hacker is pretty darn cool. According to old news stories that TechCrunch came across, as well as reports from a source close to the MySpace co-founder, he was a hacker known as Lord Flathead when he was just 14, and was part of a huge FBI sting operation after he hacked his way into a large mainframe computer used by Chase Manhattan Bank, where he changed passwords and reconfigured accounts to block access by bank officials. Although Anderson wasn’t charged because he was under-age, his computer equipment was apparently seized by the government.
To fully appreciate this news, of course, you have to be a fan of the movie War Games, which is about 20 years old now but is still one of the finest early tech movies. It features Matthew Broderick as a young hacker who breaks into the Pentagon’s war-games system and unknowingly gets the central computer to start a real-life war scenario with the Soviet Union, and it’s a great look at what hacking was like before the Internet, with online text-based chat rooms and modems with rubber couplings that attached to either end of an old rotary phone handset (I remember using a similar one at my first real journalism job).
Freshbooks: 7 Ways It Almost Died
I’m a little late on this one because I’m on vacation this week, and my blogging and Twittering metabolism has slowed down, but I wanted to take note of a great post that my friend and fellow mesh organizer Mike McDerment wrote the other day, entitled “7 ways I’ve almost killed FreshBooks.” It’s a list of lessons that Mike has learned during his time as CEO and co-founder of the online invoicing company, and there are some definite pearls of wisdom in there. Among my favourites:
1. Thinking we had to move faster than we did
I remember back in 2005 feeling that if we did not blow our lights out and spend every penny we had on marketing “right now!†someone would obliterate us. I had this impending sense of doom for *years* based on our speed.
Mozilla: The browser as operating system
Way back in the mists of time, the rise of Netscape and the Web was seen as putting pressure on Microsoft and its Windows monopoly because of what some called the “browser as operating system.” Much of that early promise — or fear — has yet to be realized, but looking at something like Ubiquity, the alpha software from Mozilla Labs, it looks as though it is coming closer. In effect, Ubiquity wants to tie together all of the Web-based software and services like Google Maps, Wikipedia and Twitter by using the browser, so that users can integrate them into things like email, instant messages and Web pages.
In the video below, Aza Raskin of Mozilla — who happens to be the son of legendary Apple designer Jef Raskin and is also the developer of the excellent music app Songza.com — demonstrates some of the ways in which users could tie together different services with Ubiquity, by inserting a Google map and reviews of a restaurant quickly into an email to a friend. The app recognizes simple terms like “map these” (after a number of listings are selected), and different services can be added by simply subscribing to scripts that use Ubiquity’s code.
Embargoes: Thanks but no thanks
There’s been a bit of a conversation going on lately — both out in the open, on blogs like Louis Gray’s and Profy and others, as well as behind the scenes on FriendFeed — about the value of embargoes. For anyone who doesn’t know, an embargo is when a PR or marketing company asks a journalist to sit on a press release and not write about it until a certain date. Companies (or their PR firms) ask me for them all the time, and I say no in almost every case. Why? Because I think that embargoes do a lot more for the companies that ask for them than they do for the journalist (or blogger) who agrees to abide by them.
The classic argument in favour of embargoes — as described by Rick Turoczy in a guest post on Centernetworks a while back — is that they “give journalists and bloggers time to research a story” before they write about it. In most cases, to be honest, that is complete crap. In other words, that might be a nice justification for the embargo, but in practice I would argue that it rarely happens. What happens is that everyone who abides by the embargo comes out with a nicely-packaged story that hits all the points from the press release, and they all come out at the same time. How does that really help anyone?
Blatchford pines for the monologue
At the risk of causing an inter-office brouhaha, I can’t resist commenting on the piece that my Globe and Mail colleague Christie Blatchford wrote for the paper today, about her dislike of this whole “blogging” phenomenon, and how it is ruining journalism (at least I think that’s her point). Ms. Blatchford has carved out a reputation at both of Canada’s national newspapers for being a crusty, “things were better back in my day” kind of columnist, so this is very much in that spirit — but it’s more than that. You can tell by reading it that Blatch really believes that something special about journalism is dying.
It’s more than just not having time to blog after writing newspaper stories, although that’s part of her complaint, and it’s more than just the fact that blogs are filled (she believes) with meanderings and ephemera of little value. There are two key portions of her rant, as far as I’m concerned. The first is where says that:
Video: The “gridlock economy”
I don’t like to delve too deeply into economic theory and that sort of thing on this blog — I leave that to my friend Paul Kedrosky and his gang — but this video, which Paul wrote a post on recently, was so fascinating that I watched the whole thing, and it’s over an hour long. Michael Heller, a lawyer and professor at Columbia who used to work at the World Bank, isn’t exactly the world’s most thrilling speaker, but his talk about what he calls the “tragedy of the anti-commons” and how it has led to a “gridlock economy” in many specific markets — including pharmaceuticals, the cellular telecom business and the airline industry — is really thought-provoking. My favourite part is when he talks about going to Moscow after the fall of communism to advise the Russian government on how to create a market economy as quickly as possible.