David Emery Online

Friday Links XII

4 May 2007

Yes, yet again I’ve managed to miss posting on Thursday.

Sorry.

I’ll try harder next week – promise. Anyway, on to Friday links…

A Greener Apple – After this and the “Thoughts on Music”, all they have to do is turn on comments and Steve will be a bona-fide blogger!

Pandora To Shut Out Non-U.S. Users Thursday Evening – Pandora have hit upon one of the main issues facing the music industry at the moment: the internet has no real concept of territories, but the music industry certainly does – almost everything is negotiated on a per-territory basis.

Yahoo To Announce Closure of Yahoo Photos Tomorrow – good for them; Flickr – while being far from perfect – is obviously a superior service. I would have been very tempted, though, to re-launch Yahoo Photos based on the Flickr codebase, with some simple changes aimed at their audience – the two sites serve different demographics, with different needs.

Thinking About The Strategy Behind Microsoft Silverlight – I’ll honest, I’m completely unimpressed with Silverlight. Sure, the mini-CLR is interesting, but I’m simply not prepared to develop for a Microsoft platform – they have a proven record of screwing people over; this is just another technology that clueless IT folk with big budgets will get suckered into.

A look at personal music-streaming service MediaMaster – what I’d really like is a service like this from Apple – imagine a web based, ajax-fied iTunes, all linked in to a much expanded iDisk that holds your entire library so you can access it where ever you go (including wirelessly on your iPhone)...

Thomson in takeover talks with Reuters – it seems to be the takeover season…

Microsoft Looking To Acquire Yahoo In $50 Billion Deal – see?

Microsoft and Yahoo Merger Talks Dead – of course, something being written on the internet doesn’t make it true. I don’t see Microsoft buying Yahoo that great a move anyway; they are – to be brutally honest – both lame ducks in any case.