The Curate’s Web

Jason Kottke points to an excellent review by Alexander Bohn of Ffffound, a newer visual bookmarking site based upon the same principal as Wists, but with a supremely visually literate, design focused, community rather than a craftster one.

Social Media

When we developed the idea of visual bookmarking in 2005, it was fashionable to look at publishing as being purely democratic - all readers were publishers and everything was ’social’. We created the term Social Shopping (hip word meets $$$) as a joke, and people took it seriously. Two companies did versions of it, and one sold for $40M. And the very best of luck to them, too. But there is something fundamentally wrong with sites that are driven by a passion for the business model at the expense of the content. In the long term these don’t work as businesses.

Digital Curation

Something different and much more interesting is now happening, social media sites are cropping up with a focus on a narrow but expert community of contributors. The buzzword for this is ‘curation’ and is what we are doing with sites like Oobject and Cribcandy which are collections of ‘picks’.

The Myth of Social Media

Within 2 weeks Digg will release their visual bookmaking tool. I have heard people suggest that that this will become the platform for the filtering of visual content of the web, just as I heard people say that Digg would become the platform for filtered links in all the major verticals.

This is wrong. For all the focus on ‘everyone as a contributor’, social media sites like Digg or Epinions before it are highly asymmetric, and gravitate towards the subjective taste of a specific community. A tiny number of users (a fraction of a percent) determine the content, and the user base tends to be like minded.

The Curated Web

There will be very few ‘platforms’ and very few startups that will play out the way that their investment justifies. At the moment Facebook looks like the only one, everything else is probably irrelevant.

What there will be is a natural distribution of communities, rather like (in fact, mathematically, exactly like) the distribution of animal species.

These communities will not be like social networks or they will be interminably bland. They will be highly stratified, driven by the obsessive pickers, the collector types - or to give them the fancy name that makes people write about them - the curators.

In a nutshell, today’s FCC ruling means that you will be able to use a Google version of Skype on your cellphone.

F.C.C. Hands Google a Partial Victory - New York Times

I eventually got my iPhone activated, yet 2 days later the number hasn’t processed, and ATT won’t accept anything other than a ‘fax’ (yup no sms or email can be sent to a sodding phone company), to get my international plan up and running because I have had less than 3 addresses in the US. Then I had to get a replacement iPhone because the speaker was broken. As Dave Winer would say - Oy!

– And you know what? Despite the fact that ATT continue to behave like the kind of company that has a 200 yard wide dinosaur-extinction-type asteroid thingy headed for it. Its actually worth it, The iPhone is the kind of superior intelligence that can only emerge as the dinosaur’s fade. A truly innovative and disruptive piece of technology. The kind of product that will aid the fall of companies like ATT as iTunes did to the music companies with a tight butted little tango of bait and switch.

As an example, the fact that iChat is missing from the iPhone cannot possibly be an oversight. I suspect its temporary absence is due to Apple wanting chat to be treated as a standard data service like on the Sidekick, and ATT wanting it to be treated as an SMS message (or more accurately and scandalously for each individual sentence of an IM message to be treated as a separate SMS message) like on the Blackberry. Clearly the latter case is both stupid and greedy, and pushing to hard against natural changes in an industry is not a good idea, if the music industry is any precedent to learn from.

If this is the real reason for no iChat on iPhone, (and I’d love someone to confirm this), then telcos fighting for 10c a sentence IM will only increase the provocation of the computer co’s and make a battle for 0c mobile Internet calls, more likely and worth fighting for.

Here here! Jason has an excellent post about Facebook as the new AOL.

Its a comparison that people don’t want to admit to being accurate, because AOL is everything that is considered unfashionable amongst the web’s key influencers, whilst Facebook is quite the thing.

I must admit this short lived enthusiasm mirrors my own feelings. A couple of months ago I was breathless about it, largely because of its minimalist design. And now I find it pretty amateur and useless, despite its slick appearance.

In short, there is something about Facebook that doesn’t feel like its a step forward in the development of the web.

Facebook is the new AOL (kottke.org)

Microsoft’s Live Search Is No Longer Live

ResearchBuzz has found this hilarious gem. Apparently Microsoft couldn’t create a way (huh, as RB suggests - what about captchas after repeated queries?) to stop data mining of their advanced live search - so they killed it.

Live Search’s Statement

If I were a VC this is a startup I would back.

If the money in a gold rush is made from selling picks and shovels, then Openfount are selling stainless steel Web 2.0 tools for the price of plastic ones.

They have built value-added products upon Amazon’s excellent S3 storage and EC2 pay as you go grid computing.

The most interesting is the distributed file system product. They give you a disk image to load onto S3. From that you can instantiate as many clustered machines as you want and have them share the same disk, with infinite capacity.

Simple and elegant. Stuff that used to cost six figures for a grand or so.

Enabling web 2.0 where the metal hits the meat | openfount

The Day Web 2.0 Died.

Google release a completely obvious but great new product - saveable personal maps.

On the same day, Techcrunch review an enterpise mashup service, Rearden Commerce, with $100M of funding. This wouldn’t appear so ironic, (since they currently and sensibly have their feet firmly in the ’stupid money’ enterprise camp), if it weren’t for the fact that they are announcing a move into the consumer space.

Talk about a day to pick for that announcement. To add insult to injury, Rearden have an hilariously meaningless ‘long tail’ graph and are apparently going after the services market: “services are roughly 60% of the worldwide economy.”

Oh yeah, are Rearden gonna run the Bosnian police force (like Computer Sciences Corporation) and hook up tourists with Bangkok Ladymen?

Going after the ’services market’ with a mashups startup is like going after the global arms trade market with a paintball gun and smacks of the heady days of 1998 when Internet Startup plans used to quote the Forrester numbers for the entire ‘eCommerce’ market.

Meanwhile, OM Malik points out that Google’s very predictable move blows away a raft of maps mashup startups.

Plazes is in the list, and somewhat unfairly, since its not really a ’saveable map’. In fact, if anything, it scloser to the current darling of the digeratti, Twitter.

But you know things a screwy when the current investment climate requires people to describe their product in incomprehensible jargon. See the description of the company from Plazes’ Felix Petersen.

Apple TV at one tenth of the cost and 90% of the functionality:

A long cable.

A Mac user switches to Vista - MSNBC.com

The kicker comes right at the end - he switches back .

The Wow Starts Now? How about: The Yawn Dawns.

Alexa currently shows a 90,000 % increase for Macrumorslive. Taking its rank from 1,264,571 to 3,023.

That kind of fluctuation makes a halloween costume store look like a year round business. It also shows quite how big the cult of Jobs has become.

Related Info for: macrumorslive.com/