Entries Tagged 'Startup' ↓

who according to Multiply is an “Online Buddy” (and is in fact a very longtime web acquaintance of mine, at least 8 years now) has decided to leave Multiply, and presumably the other services as well. Jon followed with a modest proposition: “several folks I talked to had the right idea… let’s stop going to artificial social network sites and make use of the opend, stable, useful tools we already have for networking over the Internet, witout going to a one-size-fits-all website. Portal strategies keep coming, and keep failing. People like to roll their own.”

Sharing multiple digests could be kinja’s killer app. “…it’s not the fact that I can create my own little version of Haddock Blogs [digests] that’s interesting, it’s the fact that I can chuck it around to all my friends. I can link to it like this and - if I wanted to - I could stick it at the end of my blogroll so that other people could play with it too. I could e-mail it to someone, or IM it or even just tell someone my user name and have them go and find it.”

It’s too bad that so far Kinja has not very well communicated just what it is. Their communication to date has been based primarily around an issue that they have not in any way proven - that weblogs pose some sort of technical problem for non-technical users. But as Coates suggests, that whole issue is secondary and not particularly interesting.

What’s interesting about Kinja is not having a digest you can read yourself; it’s having a digest - and hopefully many digests - you can share with others. This is why its non-aggregator status is critical - to successfully share content in digest form, the applicatation can’t discriminate between sites that do or do not use any particular flavour of syndication.

Other things flow from this as well, in particular in terms of copyright. If I don’t syndicate my site (implicitly giving permission to copy that text for reading in another context), anyone scraping my site is guilty of a breach of my copyright. By providing excerpts and links to the original in the context of a digest, however, Kinja is likely in the clear in that the choice of digest items is itself a critique or commentary, and so the excerpts clearly become fair use.

In terms of the communications/marketing around Kinja - which has been vague and seems to miss the point - it looks like Kinja might have fallen into a classic trap of web development. It seems that the interesting and difficult technical problem they solved in building the site was mistaken or substituted for its raison d’être.

Will you be my friend? Trying to tease something out of the void that the social networking sites have become. So far it seems that the folks at Flickr are the only ones who have a clue. The rest of them - Tribe, LinkedIn, Friendster, Orkut - seem to have a classic case of high-ego startup syndrome, suggesting that they actually believe they’re smarter than everyone else and can actually do it all themselves with limited if any interoperability. I hope to be proven wrong.

from Ludicorp: Flickr!. The demon spawn of social software and filepile. Or something like that. Very compelling, for sure, though still in its early stages.

A Montreal company, Zero Knowledge Systems is working on it. Several friends of mine work there, and their head office is just around the corner. From everything I hear they do great work. But what about peer-review as it pertains to crypto? Have academics and cypherpunks been free to review the code underlying Freedom, at will? Or are they relying on the good name of their chief scientist, Ian Goldberg? What about the concerns raised by Declan McCullagh in Wired News?