Early thoughts

I need to think more about that

Nov 23

Social n'est pas communautaire

Fred a raison : social et communautaire, c’est différent — mais je suis tellement en désaccord avec tout ce qu’ils disent, leurs préjugés sont tellement étanches aux théories actuelles que je n’ai plus le courage de commenter.


Nov 17

A way to improve password UI

Believe it or not, I just found a service that had a great : let you enter your mail adresse, use the service as a logged-in user (with no password, I’m assuming, or a randomly long hash) — and when you are ready to commit, you can click on “Password” to enter the password you want to use. Isn’t that great?


Nov 10

Fair outcome

Generation O is not strictly democratic, nor in favor if aristocratic decisions making: like on Wikipedia, decisions are based on considerate consideration of people’s opinion — not calls to Yay or Nay, but argumented stance, where the majority does not rule, but the most intelligent and comprehensive takes are given the priority. With no obvious sides, opponents are harder to define, and much better referred to as people sharpening your judgement then enemies that need be defeated.


Nov 9

A SDK and an App Store for Android

Android is a great platform, with tons fo promisses, and a fierce first-came competition. Android is open, but iPhone is great to make Apps for — and to get the best of both worlds, Google should use all it’s authority to make an SDK and an App Store as simple, feature rich and easy to use as iPhone’s. More importantly, all the great apps should be available from that store, and all the cool critics, and bundle makers should also be featured there — otherwise it won’t be central and the dilution will kill the message.

There is so much to be done that, while massive copying between the two will be likely, significant innovations from the new found Eden of combined location, calendar, social details and communication platform will let both focus on more shinny stuff then the other player.

The only question: what will Shmidt’s role, as one’s CEO and the other’s Board member, look like in that environment?


Paying for Facebook

Last week, I talked with an internet entrepreneur, and he was very happy, as a user of Facebook, to be part of certain groups. However, groups larger then a thousand members could not use the mailing feature, by fear of spam control, I’m assuming — and it was hard for the manager he knew to keep below that threshold to avoid having his communication plan wronged.

Some blogger have mentionned freemium models for Facebook: having users pay to have more then 200 friends — I’m not sure it’s a great thing to do, to tax the dynamic; although Flickr does it fine, with the profile-boosting Pro account. More importantly, now that many have more friends then they can dream of, that sounds unlikely to have.

I had thoughs of using the most popular Facebook feature leverage, and suggest making paying groups available for community leaders: one dollar to be part of ‘Fire Sales’ or ‘John Does’ most excellent blogging newsletter’, 30% of it to Zuckerberg, and the rest to pay for the service. Boasting could be part of it, as users tend to feature memberships as identity markers.

A better idea is always to regroup payer: big checks know what value to add; smaller contributors always underestimate your role — and another, more concentrated model could be to have group-managers pay to send messages to more then a thousand users. With payment details and the well understood posibility to leave a group, spam wouldn’t be an issue. Start very small to avoid pressuring the leaders between, and let them think about monetization while they group is growing.

Or maybe implement both paying groups and paying messages for leaders — netting those out for the group-manager for simplicity’s sake. Maybe ad a banner large group, unless a certain fee is not collected, and let members and leaders decide how to contribute.


Everything is moving

And you feel like there is motion when two things move in the same direction.


Nov 8

Assets and differentiation

Many technologies allow bloggers to add relevant images and structure with little more effort. I use Zemanta, and have not heard of any other widely used solution, but I’d be interested in understanding those and test-driving them. Pages are larger, but feel more professionally made — but not better; exactly like the DailyShow and the Colbert Report mocks sounds and animation effects harbouring empty news bulletin, we need a blog to mix PR copy/paste with optimised meta-tagging. And pray for people not to take it seriously, because that appears to be the most likely outcome.

Why self-caricature appears to lack in writing; is embeded reference less a part of print culture? — I write “appears” because I can’t know how this is true.

Zemanta suggestions for this post: a bouncing red ball (?), pictures of Colbert… The tool is great (I’m glad I didn’t have to search for that link, and could embed it in one click) but the temptation to do crap for linkbait is greater with the recession looming and many people looking for self-served jobs. I’d bet the winner will be someone with authority that doesn’t try to abide by the obvious rules of link-shepperding, and try to have great insights. I know I’m sticking to Carr, Cringely and O’Reilly.


Presight?

A blog post I kept re-writing for literaly years, and finally put here yesterday apparently sounds a lot like a recent blog-wave; I knew nothing about it.

Plus, other bloggers don’t understand a word I say. Need to work on that writing if I have presight — plus the bloggosphere seems to need a non-commercialy optimised saviour.


Nov 7
My desk

My desk


Study the Middle Ages to understand Internet competition

Why would I care about an academic paper on England Medieval commercial law?

Because principles in economics remain the same: experienced kwowledge, invested assets, externalities — what made a market a monopoly centuries ago on the high seas is the same as what would make a digital behemoth now. There were risks to cover, implicit information and signaling to attrack entrepreneurs then — all stong factors of scale effects, and those are still here now. If Englang manage to overturn Ottoman’s domination though acceptable regualations, Continental Europe can expect to jodu-out US-based companies.


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