Google gets big company disease?

from Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger by Robert Scoble The two guys who started Dodgeball leave in a hissy fit. Google bought Dodgeball in mid-2005. Dodgeball was the pre-cursor to Twitter and Jaiku (albeit a bit more focused on just cell phones than either of those newer services are). Last summer it was the rage with many of the San Francisco cool kids, er, influencers. I remember Irina and Eddie using it almost non stop on our trip to Montana. So, why didn’t Google get it enough to give these two more resources? Easy. Same reason I couldn’t convince Microsoft to buy Flickr before Yahoo did. It’s a small thing. A stupid thing. A lame thing. Big companies have trouble grokking small things like Dodgeball. Heck, how many of you have called Twitter “really lame” in the past two months? Tons! More evidence that Google is having difficulty getting small things? I heard a rumor that Google executive Marissa Mayer almost killed the Google Reader team because she didn’t think it would get popular. Feed readers are still “small things.” Seeing business value in them is difficult. It seems that management is trying to get a handle on the chaos that is Google but in doing so is removing some of what made Google attractive to entrepreneurial developers. What are you hearing from your Google friends?

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HTC subsidiary will sell 3.5G data cards

from Engadget by Evan Blass

Not content with simply making some of the best smartphones on the planet, Taiwanese powerhouse HTC is now looking to get into the data card game, with the company prepping a new HSDPA card through its BandRich subsidiary. The C100, as it's known, will offer download speeds up to 7.2Mbps where available, and is said to be just the first of many mobile modems BandRich is planning. DigiTimes is reporting that the C100 will be priced north of €200 ($269), so although we don't yet know when/where these are gonna drop, it looks like you'll have to part with at least a few C notes if this model lands in your neck of the woods.[Via jkOTR]

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Most sophisticated Flickr/CC mashup yet

from Creative Commons, written by Mike Linksvayer, April 15th, 2007 http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7390.com

FlickrCash uses the Flickr API to search by CC license, build lightboxes, and keep a record of licensed photos you intend to use.

Augustine Fou, creator of FlickrCash, tells us:

I created FlickrCash because I found many really beautiful photos on Flickr but could not use them for “commercial” purposes like design work for clients, because there was no way to document I had a license to use it. FlickrCash is BOTH a search/find interface to more quickly find images on Flickr, and also a way to document that you have a license to use a specific image.

Sample of image search (currently only searches Flickr repository): http://flickrcash.com/?k=flowers

Sample of archived license, available for inspection at any time: http://flickrcash.com/license/27i8d5sf

With this publicly archived license the image buyer can definitively prove they have the right to use a specific image for a specific purpose — so they can use it for client design work. Both image owner and image buyer are named signatories to the agreement, and an official date/time stamp is obtained from the NIST Atomic Clock to document the exact time the license was executed.

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Is Digg the Result of Cumulative Advantage?

April 15, 2007 — 05:13 PM PDT — by Pete Cashmore

The NYTimes has a fascinating piece today about how the “rich get richer”, or popular media gets more popular. In other words, things rise to the top not because they are better quality than the alternatives, but because people copy what their friends do: a tiny rise in popularity an early stage can mean massive popularity further down the line.

This has some really obvious applications in social media. Digg is the premier example: its “network of friends” system inevitably results in users Digging what their friends Digg, often blindly. So while quality stories still have a marginally better chance of rising to the top, this “follow the leader” effect means that users are more likely to amplify the decisions of other users than go against them, even if the stories being Dugg aren’t very good. Digg could prevent that by removing Digg counts and friend networks entirely, but that would counteract its own aims: growing as quickly as possible so it can report huge user numbers. To paraphrase the butterfly effect: one 13 year-old in Illinois can decide whether a news story becomes the most popular item of the day, or falls into obscurity.

But the theory has much deeper consequences when it comes to the success or failure of startups themselves. We love to think that there’s some kind of magic formula for the perfect social site, but the results seem far more random: if you rerun history, it could turn out that a whole different set of startups rise to the top. That’s because the first few users influenced the final outcome of those startups, and as soon as one site hits “critical mass”, everybody gravitates towards that site. So imagine a world in which Reddit had a few thousand more influential users than Digg: it may have won in the long term. This theory also tells us that Digg will never hit the mainstream: it is so heavily seeded with geeks that it will continue to attract that demographic and alienate non-geeks.

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Atari Gets Into the User-Created Online World Game

from GigaOM by Wagner James Au In the future, everyone will be in the virtual world business for fifteen minutes. UK game industry pub MCV reports that Atari, the venerable company that launched the videogame industry, is now developing a user-created online social world of its own. With Atari’s announcement, there are now at least eleven upcoming virtual worlds which emphasize user-developed content, or at least cite Second Life as a role model. For those keeping track: Atari is joining an already overflowing roster that includes Sony’s Home, Viacom’s as-yet-unnamed world, along with start-ups Areae, Croquet, HiPiHi, Kaneva, Multiverse, Ogoglio, Outback Online, and Whirled. (SL blogger Onder Skall just posted a marvelously helpful guide to most of these worlds and more.) With the market so crowded, nearly all of these projects are almost certainly doomed to fail, or just as likely, modestly succeed as niche metaverses. And why are three major multinational media corporations trying their hand in this upstart genre at all? Used to be, the term “user-created” gave game companies hives, terrified as they are with legal liability. And Second Life, while popular, is still far off from having the numbers of paying customers that companies like Sony and Atari (now a division of EU publishing giant Infogrames) are used to dealing with. What we’re seeing, I think, is game publishers slowly learning to apply the logic of Web 2.0 on their own medium. Creating content is expensive, and with the sole exception of World of Warcraft (8 million users and still growing), involves an increasingly futile struggle to retain subscribers. Traditional online worlds require a large team of designers and artists constantly adding new content, for fear that players will quickly churn through the existing experiences, get bored, and leave. (Subsequently, most MMOs spike in growth, then quickly plateau and begin declining.) Going the user-created route means new content on a regular basis, produced by subscribers, with the company only spending money to foster and police it. That aside, the next question is whether these companies will allow their customers to retain IP rights to the content they create. While young and hungry startups can dare to do that, a la Second Life, major corporations are institutionally unwilling to cede any rights. Then again, with the competition already so fierce, they’re likely to start rethinking that assumption soon.

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