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Looking back at Wired 1.1

February 13, 2008 by Michael Boyle

In his blog Fimoculous, Rex Sorgatz takes a look back at Wired 1.1, which came out 15 years ago this month.

I caught up with Wired at # 1.2, the Crypto Rebels issue, which I bought at a newsstand on Rideau Street in Ottawa. I was already familiar with both Mondo 2000 and the original bOING bOING zine, but that’s not to say that seeing the same kind of material in a clearly more mainstream magazine wasn’t pretty cool.

I wouldn’t say that Wired changed my life – as far back as 1.2 people who were involved in the culture Wired covered were (often rightly) critical of the magazine. But within a year I was in the world that Wired was all about – I had moved to Montreal and was working at CTHEORY, immersed in some of the earliest online publishing and (elsewhere) web community activity.

It’s kind of hard to believe it has been 15 years.

Excellent mashup for Super Tuesday

February 5, 2008 by Michael Boyle

I’ve seen a lot of mashups in the past couple of years, but the Google Maps, Twitter, and Twittervision thing is one of the greatest I’ve seen. Not only does it seem to work very well – but the mix of live results and individual reactions is simply wonderful. And the presentation of the results (on the left of the screen) is a model of simple, clean, effective design. Not super-pretty, but more effective than all the bells and whistles generally seen at the Networks’ sites.

Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo

February 1, 2008 by Michael Boyle

The big news this morning is that Microsoft has offered $44.6B to buy Yahoo, the figure representing a 62% premium on the share price at yesterday’s market close. It’s very unclear at this point what will come of this, but as a user I find it hard to see how such a tie-up could be beneficial to me. From my perspective, although MS has done some interesting things on the net, none of their initiatives have been focused on delivering the best quality of user experience or even innovation – their plays have seemed to by cynically based on scaling up so-so experiences and hoping that the brute force of that scale can make them important. What we learn from Google, however, is that though scale is important, it is deeply related to quality and innovation in a way that consumer software never was.

Update: Techcrunch has looked at some of the numbers.

Shel Israel on Twitter

January 30, 2008 by Michael Boyle

Late last week Shel Israel wrote an An Open Letter to the Twitter Guys. He’s right on, and his post stands in stark contrast to the chatter a couple of weeks ago that Twitter proves that the only important thing is to aggregate users – leaving aside a biz plan for later.

No one seems to care about mobile Twitter (which seems insane to me), but my 250/week limit was reached in the early evening today – Tuesday. The limit is simply a cost-cutting measure by a company bleeding money on every tweet. The problem for Twitter is that I can easily defect – everyone I get messages from (more or less) is on Facebook, and I can subscribe to their status updates on my mobile – half the time they come from Twitter anyhow.

Part of the problem may be that US companies are backed by US VC – and so they focus primarily on US adoption and usage. The social networking world in general makes that a very dangerous position to take – social network adoption rates are generally lower in the US than most other “rich” countries. A company that is primarily concerned with US results for a US exit will throw the rest of us under the bus pretty quickly.

Standout Jobs has launched

January 28, 2008 by Michael Boyle

Montreal’s own Standout Jobs has launched Reception this morning. Founders Ben Yoskovitz, Fred Ngo, and Austin Hill are in California for DEMO 2008, where they’re presenting on Wednesday morning.

Standout Jobs is all about providing companies with advanced tools to use for recruiting. Companies can use Standout Jobs to easily build customized recruiting micro-sites to publicize their openings and provide a rich experience for prospective employees, enhancing their ability to land the best candidates. As well, their backend gives companies enhanced tools to get their job postings out to a variety of different job sites. (More information at Mashable).

I think Standout Jobs is going to do very well both at DEMO and with customers. It addresses a real pain point for small and medium size businesses and I am sure it will pay for itself after one or two good hires. Congratulations to the whole team!