David Emery OnlinePlatforms
Ok, I just plain don’t get this:
Photobucket Acquired By MySpace
Sure, there’s a huge amount of synergy between the two audiences, with most of Photobucket’s users using it to post stuff on MySpace, but I really don’t get why MySpace didn’t just clone their features; photo and image uploading and sharing really isn’t that hard, other then from a bandwidth/storage perspective, and MySpace surely have enough experience in that department…
My best guess is that this is an acquisition to prevent someone else getting their hands on Photobucket, and if you think about it like that, it starts to make a little more sense. Photobucket sourced and hosted images are almost completely pervasive throughout MySpace, and you can be sure that they didn’t want someone else (like Facebook, for example) getting control over such a large amount of MySpace page real estate.
What it boils down to is that MySpace needed to jump on this feature years ago; if they had opened up their photo posting functionality to make posting images and the like more flexible before Photobucket really took hold they wouldn’t have had to fork out $250 million dollars now.
This throws an interesting slant on what I was writing...
Read more ➔Friday Links XII
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...
Read more ➔Revolting
As you may have heard, yesterday the denizens of Digg revolted on mass. This is – to my knowledge – the first major social network that has faced a full scale uprising from its users.
I think this a pretty interesting cross-roads for social networks in general. It’s quite obvious now that once your userbase reaches a certain level, you almost completely loose control of your site. It’s exactly the same problem that is troubling YouTube at the moment, with regards to copyrighted content.
Currently, the way it stands is that YouTube can’t detect and take down copyrighted videos as quickly as they get posted. If for some reason you want a piece of video taken down from YouTube, and your video is popular enough, it’s practically impossible – every time one gets taken down, 3 more spring up in its place. Now, for YouTube this problem may well be surmountable; they claim they have detection software in the works that will be able to detect copyrighted videos at the upload stage, so they’ll never make it to the site.
Sadly for Digg, this kind of filtering technique will never work.
The whole focus of Digg is popularity, combined...
Read more ➔Dumb Blood
Dumb blood.
Shit poor.
Always making excuses.
Never blaming you.
Writing no sense. Copying apologetically. Watching time.
Tiredness overcomes thoughtfulness.
Tomorrow maybe better.
Or not.
Maybe.
Read more ➔Web Application Development
On Friday we launched a new site for the wonderful Emma Pollock. We’re still using Textpattern to base most of our sites on, and this one is no exception. We’ve taken a good look into most of the rivals recently, and none of them seem to offer the same combination of flexibility and ease of use.
We’ve tried Wordpress for a couple of sites and to be perfectly honest I’ve not been impressed. Sure, the admin skin looks slightly nicer then Textpattern’s yellow tabs, but it doesn’t seem to be as flexible, and scatters options for things all over the place. The hype in this case doesn’t seem to be justified.
We’ve also been looking at Drupal, more for community-based sites like what we’ve created for iLiKETRAiNS. In the end though – for the time being at least – Drupal is just too complicated. I have no doubt that Drupal could do everything we’d ever want it to do and more, but we simply don’t have the time right now to invest in getting up to speed with the way it works – for iLiKETRAiNS we ended up writing a custom solution using PHP instead, as that turned...
Read more ➔Friday Links XI
Scobleizer: Facebook added 1,000,000 users last week alone. 3.3% growth every week. Whew! – it seems like almost the entirety of my friends have joined Facebook this month.
Cringely: We need a search engine for hate. – I think Cringely has finally lost the plot.
The end of “desktop vs. web apps” – good points from Brent.
Most press I ever got for not doing an interview… – I simply can’t see news-based media – magazines specifically – lasting too much longer.
AOL One Step Behind Again: New Home Page Identical To Yahoo – um, what on earth is going on here? It’s identical!
Bjork album leaked . . . On iTunes – whoops!
Apple Notifies Partners: DRM-free Music and DRM-free Music Videos Soon – no surprise there, but it’s good to see that DRM video is very much part of the plan.
Apple VP: iTunes films in Europe – it would be really great if by the time we got TV shows and films they came without DRM…
The Devil’s Dictionary: Usability – “The quality of being easy, usually championed by the difficult.”
Read more ➔Gameshows and Niches
Every market is a niche market, but some niches are smaller then others.
Take, for example, someone like McDonalds. At first glance you’d probably think “don’t be silly, McDonalds are flipping huge – they aren’t in a niche, natch” (read with a strong Brooklyn accent). They are, though: they’re not trying to compete with – for example – Pizza Express (a slightly more upmarket pizza restaurant chain in the UK); they don’t do waiter service, serve alcohol or pride themselves in serving the best food.
All those things are outside of their niche.
The next step is to remember that their are an unlimited amount of niches, if you make your niche small enough. For our second example, lets look at game show software. Firstly, I bet you didn’t even think that there was specific software for game shows, but there is. From what I can tell, there seem to be 2 companies that make it.
Two.
Game show software is a very small niche.
And yet, there it is; while it is a small niche there is still demand for game show software, and that’s not going to go away until we get sick of inane entertainment on TV (which is probably never). The demand...
Read more ➔Maps, MTV and iTunes
Today I’ve noticed a few interesting things I’d like to bring to your attention, so rather then string them out over a couple of days or save them for Friday Links I thought I’d just talk about them today.
There’s nothing quite like the here and now.
So, first up is the new MultiMap site (you might need to click “Visit our new site” on the top left if you still see the old site). I’d always been a MultiMap user up until Google Maps came to the UK; I – like everyone else I suppose – was completely sucked in by the Google Maps interface, even though their maps were of a lower quality.
Now MultiMap have hit back with a completely redesigned site which is really, really nice. First off, they’ve half-inched the basic UI from Google whole-sale, including the drag-able maps, zoom bar, mini-map, map/aerial/hybrid views etc. On top of that, they’ve brought their far superior (in the UK at least) maps, a better looking site aesthetic, much better location search (oddly enough – you would have thought that Google would be able to do search, but it seems to trip up on full address searches) and a whole...
Read more ➔Robots and Space Ships
I was thinking today about “the future”.
A little background first; I – as you may be able to guess, even if you haven’t met me – was a pretty geeky child. I liked the traditional things that a small boy likes: cars, space ships, gadgets and robots. At one time I thought I was a robot, due to the lack of ever breaking a bone.
I still remain to be completely convinced otherwise.
One of the things I distinctly remember being fascinated by was Dick Tracy, the great retro-futuristic detective who – sadly – I probably only know about because of the film starring Warren Beatty. I do however, remember it in halftone, even though I probably never owned it in comic form – the wonders and tricks memory can play are really quite wonderful when you think about it.
The thing above all else that really captivated me was Dick Tracy’s watch, which functioned as a walky-talky. I used to run about shouting frantically at my watch, solving crimes with reckless abandon.
Thinking back, this may have seemed a little odd to an onlooker.
Fast forward 15 and a bit years and it’s really staggering how many things have changed, and how daily life...
Read more ➔Transcend
This evening I saw the rather wonderful Ratatat at London's ever-damp Astoria.They were amazing.
Like, properly good.
Ratatat are the only instrumental band I like, or have ever liked. They simply do what they do so well that they transcend their limitations and become something even better.
