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Archives for October 2007

YASN? Not really (whew)

October 31, 2007 by Michael Boyle

Michael Arrington (in TechCrunch) has posted a piece about a new social network (-ish) site coming from Google: OpenSocial To Launch Thursday. He has posted a fair amount of detail:

What they haven’t done is launch yet another social network platform. As more and more of these platforms launch, developers have difficult choices to make. There are costs associated with writing and maintaining applications for these social networks. Most developers will choose one or two platforms and ignore the rest, based on a simple cost/benefit analysis. Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks.

From what I’ve read, this seems like a big bet on Google’s part, but a bet that’s very much worth making. And one that I hope they can win. The trick, it seems to me, will be to make the system sophisticated (and non-grabby) enough for big developers with lots of existing users to join in the fun, but also make it accessible for very small developers and hobbyists. There’s still a large long tail out there beyond who Facebook has signed up, and if Google can grab that as well as the existing users of large sites like Linked In, they might just have something worthwhile – and game-changing.

Update: Here’s Marc Andreessen’s take on OpenSocial from his perspective as the founder of Ning, a site that allows anyone to create their own social network.

Tags: Arrington, Google, Social Networks

New Digital Information Strategy released

October 30, 2007 by Michael Boyle

Library and Archives Canada has released their new Canadian Digital Information Strategy. This release is a draft – comments are welcome from “any interested person or organization” by Nov 23, 2007. I haven’t looked at it yet, but given the current climate in Canada, it’s certain to be an interesting document. (Via Michael Geist)

Tags: Canada, Canadian Politics, Geist, Public Policy

Leopard’s here tonight

October 26, 2007 by Michael Boyle

I have to admit I’m a little excited about the arrival of Leopard (aka Mac OS X 10.5) tonight – though I’m not sure at this point when I’m going to pick up my copy. The Guided Tour gives a good overview of what’s in store during the upgrade. Most interesting for me might be Time Machine, because I’ve become particularly obsessed with having good backups at all times, and Time Machine looks like a great addition to the effort.

I say might be for two reasons. First, I’m disappointed that it won’t work via connected Airport Disks. I have two external drives at the moment. One I keep connected via USB because it’s my backup drive (via Super Duper!) and I never got the backup-to-a-network-drive thing working properly. The other (much larger) disk hangs of my Airport Network. I’d love to use it for one or the other backup, but alas it isn’t suitable for that purpose. So at this stage, I’m not sure how to set things up for convenience, tidiness, AND a super-effective backup scheme. One idea I have had is to split the large drive into partitions – one for Super Duper and one for Time Machine – and use the smaller drive as the network file server.

Tags: Macintosh

Facebook goes (more) mobile

October 24, 2007 by Michael Boyle

Facebook has announced their platform for mobile devices: Introducing Facebook Platform for Mobile. Developers will have the ability to target content directly to the mobile site and to access Facebook’s SMS platform. This is important for a few reasons, but chief among them is that outside of North America, the mobile internet is a primary means of access for many. In many countries, no mobile literally means drastically reduced access to users.

Tags: Facebook, Mobile, Platform, Wireless

Interesting blog on Data Mining

October 23, 2007 by Michael Boyle

I’ve recently been taking an interest in how to compile and analyze unstructured data and text to learn interesting things about the world around us. This blog looks like an interesting resource: Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media.

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