Facebook as your news filter
Murdoch and Cuban, get over it – we’re all getting our news through filters these days. And now Facebook is joining Twitter, Viewsflow, Google, blogs or just friends’ emails as a source of trusted recommendations of what to read. Few people loyally subscribe to a single news source in the way our parents started and finished with the Times, Telegraph or whatever.
Facebook is already the leading source of human-filtered news, but such sources are still tiny (5%) compared to the general search engines and portals (95%). Facebook’s extraordinary reach (400m users) and comprehensiveness (young users live in it) could change that.
Try it in Facebook
- search for a news outlet such as NY Times or Guardian, or bloggers such as Guido Fawkes
- click ‘Become a fan’ for them
- go to your Home page
- under the left-hand news feed links, click ‘More’ then ‘Create new list’
- call it ‘News’ and add the news sources you’re a fan of
- to add more sources later, click the edit pencil by your News feed’s link and repeat
It’s not that fluid a process yet – but Facebook only suggested this use last week.
Don Dodge homage to the MacBook
Don Dodge, ex-Microsoft, writes a homage to the MacBook. Having also moved to the same machine, I can wholeheartedly agree - the superb design really does make a difference in everyday use.
ARM boss forecasts mass migration to netbooks
Will netbooks replace laptops and desktops? The boss of ARM, the UK company that dominates the design of chips for mobile devices, reckons netbooks will shoot from 10% to 90% of the PC market in a few years.
Even if he means 90% of the mobile computer market, I don’t think so… At Conosco we saw laptop sales outstrip desktops in summer 2008 – we now sell 50% more laptops than desktops – but netbook keyboards and screens are too small for serious use.
I’m watching Apple’s bet on the iPad with more interest – Apple thinks there is room for small computers, but ones that live alongside larger ones and don’t try to do everything.
Spotify adds ‘Related artists’
The intermittently* wonderful streaming music service Spotify has added a tab showing artists related to the artist you’re currently viewing. The relationship is based on other users’ tastes – ‘users who listen to x also listen to’ – which is effective but not always the whole story… For instance, Brian Eno isn’t ‘related’ to his erstwhile band Roxy Music, nor to famous collaborators such as Robert Fripp, David Bowie, Talking Heads, David Byrne or U2.
*Many users have had trouble with streamed music dropping out for a few seconds. The workaround is to pay for the premium service and make your playlists available offline, which downloads them to your computer or iPhone.
2009 in a Google Wave
All great tech gets misused, the misuse often surpassing the original concept of the tech. So with Google Wave, which is the Schleswig-Holstein question of our day – only three people have ever really understood it, one is in Australia, another has gone mad and the last has forgotten all about it…
Meanwhile some creatives have put Wave to good use -
More at TechCrunch
Why tax loss-making businesses?
Loss-making companies don’t pay corporation tax but they do pay payroll taxes (national insurance). Why tax loss-making businesses at all? Helping them recover to profitability should be the government’s first priority – who else is going to drag the country back to financial health?
All these taxes end up in the same pot, so it’s illogical and short-sighted, but such is our government.
Chrome OS: building a cathedral on a bazaar
Chrome OS is a triumph: from the chaos of the open-source bazaar its champion, Google, is building a tightly-controlled cathedral – one that will shield people from computing horrors such as viruses and crashes by allowing in only the filtered sunlight of web applications.
Chrome OS is made out of open-source software – Linux, WebKit, etc. From these publicly-owned pieces Google is building a very privately-owned computing system. Chrome OS will run only on hardware that Google allows. It will run only the Chrome browser that Google controls. You will access Chrome OS using your Google login details. Other companies and their services can offer users only web-based applications and can’t save any data on Chrome OS machines.
In return for this almost complete control of hardware and software, Chrome OS will avoid incompatibilities between them and allow Google to vet all software for malicious intent.
Microsoft has never had this level of control. Nor has Apple, whose OS X is a more closely controlled system than Windows. The iPhone’s App Store constraints have parallels with Chrome OS and have raised howls from frustrated developers.
But from the point of view of Conosco’s IT support services I like Chrome OS: increasingly you can get anything you want from Alice’s Restaurant web services. If the price of reliability is sticking to the web, let’s keep things simple and get more done.
You can go Google gradually
Don Dodge, Microsoft Google evangelist, sums up Google’s pitch to businesses -
Google has a two pronged approach for enterprises moving to the Cloud. Google Apps has packaged applications like Gmail, calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, Video, and other commonly used applications. Enterprises can get immediate cost savings by moving these routine every day applications to the cloud, and free up IT resources to focus on more strategic issues.
Google AppEngine provides a custom development environment and scalable deployment infrastructure. Enterprise developers can build custom applications using the same systems that power Google applications, with built-in scalability leveraging things like BigTable and GFS.
At Conosco, we steer our small & mid-sized IT support customers away from any form of custom development – it rarely makes any sense for them. But the Apps suite is increasingly attractive, especially for startups, and it’s easy to move over to it gradually as Don says.
Video: Chrome OS For Dummies
Why Google is building an operating system. For many users, even today, this could be sufficient – a simple computer that is just an access point for web-based services
Microsoft Office vs Google Apps – differing strategies
A useful summary from Tim Anderson of the differing strategies of Microsoft and Google in the email/document space. If I knew the winner, I’d place my bet in the stock market… but the collaborative power of Google Apps and the functional maturity of MS Office mean that both are compelling and neither is likely to beat out the other for some years.
Microsoft is pursuing its “software plus services” strategy, which means desktop applications still play an important role. The email is Exchange-based, so you can use other email clients, but only Outlook on Windows will deliver full features. Document collaboration is based primarily on cloud storage rather then editing, though when Office Web Apps appear next year users will have some lightweight editing tools.
Google on the other hand is primarily web based, with desktop support as an add-on. Google has the lead when it comes to online document editing, since it has had Google Docs for some time, whereas Office Web Apps are still in beta. Google has no bias towards Windows and Office. With Google, a document’s primary existence is in the cloud, although you can export and import with possible loss of data or formatting.
Something else I noticed is that Google has big plans for integration with mobile devices, whereas Microsoft seems mainly concerned with Exchange synchronisation.
Microsoft’s pitch is that if you live in Windows anyway, with Exchange and SharePoint on the server, and Windows and Office on the client, then its cloud service integrates nicely. Google on the other hand is more revolutionary, not caring about what you run as long as you can connect to its services.
Although the software plus services idea has attractions, it sounds more like a transitional strategy than one for the long term. Over time, as the web platform gets more powerful, and as rich internet applications take over from pure desktop applications, the services part will grow absolutely dominant.
