I saw Wilco in St. Louis on Thursday night with Donna. It was the first of three straight nights of shows at the Pageant theater in University City. If you’re in St. Louis and didn’t get to go, they’ve recorded two of the shows and will be posting them shortly. Highly recommended.
Robert Scoble: “I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news.”
This is one of Scoble’s best posts since he left Microsoft. Robert is a student of journalism and trends in the media. What he is describing is the process by which news will be reported in the future. As the “blogosphere” has talked about the death of establishment/traditional media with the rise of the Internet, blogs and podcasts, many have overlooked a very important point. The establishment media will be able to keep up and stay relevant if they are able to put the right tools and people in place to sift through all of the “noise” and find new stories, spot trends, and explain to the masses.
The masses may never be on Twitter. Even if they were many important news stories will pop up in new and interesting places. The people that can find those new places, sift through the noise and find the things that are interesting to the masses will always have an important role to play in delivering the news.
Steve Gillmor ties together a bunch of disconnected thoughts, ideas and trends in a post that snidely refers to Bill Gates getting a gold watch and retiring. Steve is a savant of sorts. He spots patterns and trends that others can’t see but struggles to articulate why they’re there and what they’ll lead to.
But there is a redeeming quote in the piece: “But don’t think that just because Google will prosper that Microsoft won’t. Live Mesh can fit into this like a glove, feeding downstream vertical versions of affinity groups to skinned Silverlight containers. We’re within weeks of offerings already from Twhirl, FriendFeed, Summize, and others we just haven’t been told about yet. All Microsoft needs to do is get Bill his gold watch and get back to work.”
What Steve is missing is that the work hasn’t ever stopped and that the “ship cycles” are very long. We are at a major inflection point but we don’t leave all of our past investments behind. Just as Facebook started nearly 5 years ago as a slick app for college kids to connect with their friends and now represents a “social graph”, the infrastructure that Microsoft has built out for internet presence (Live Messenger, Spaces), collaborative business applications (SharePoint, CRM) and end-user enablement on the desktop (Excel, Word) are now rapidly converging into something new. To Steve’s point, Mesh could be an innovative way to rapidly innovate and distribute more of these scenarios while leveraging the people and tools we’re already tied into. SilverLight could be a big part of how the experience is delivered. Either way, something new and significant is coming together here.
I’m not sure that Steve sees it, but I’d say the future looks very bright here for Microsoft.
UPDATE- Steve sees it.
While posting some links today between Twitter, del.icio.us and creating a few short entries on my blog today, it occurred to me that I’ve been using FriendFeed the wrong way. The short snippets, comments and links aggregated from various services that I use or posted directly to FriendFeed could directly replace my blog. In fact, when I look at my blog, 90% of what I post is really for my personal reference. Things that I found interesting and want to get back to. Others may find it interesting too, but that’s not really what I’m going for. So the only compelling feature that FriendFeed lacks that my blog has is the ability to post long articles and to organize those in the context of my web site so that they are navigable outside of the “blog stream”. But, if I were to use another online document editor, Wiki or simple CMS that provided feeds I could add that to FriendFeed too. Hrmmm. 
Channel 9: “Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect sits down with Jon Udell to talk about Live Mesh, a new technology and platform that enables synchronization and storage “to the cloud.” You’ll hear about the history of Live Mesh, how it has been influenced by Ray’s previous work on products like Groove and Lotus Notes. Ray also discusses the core technology that forms the basis for Live Mesh including REST APIs, XML, and synchronization APIs that enable you sync your Mesh across multiple devices.”
The news came out this week that the FAST acquisition is complete and that we will continue to support the FAST technologies on Linux and UNIX, as a separate product from SharePoint, for the forseeable future. This also means that for the near term If you’re a customer using SharePoint and you’re interested in FAST you should talk to your Microsoft team or any Microsoft partners you work with regularly to get the FAST team engaged. I expect to see more guidance on integration and SharePoint/FAST deployments in the near future.
Jonathan Schwartz has pioneered executive blogging and has done a great job of keeping Sun visible and relevant during a radical transition in many of their businesses. Credit should be given where credit is due. If McNealy were still at the helm no one would be talking about Sun anymore.
Treehugger: “Proponents of modern prefab are always lamenting 1) the strop that manufacturers throw when you ask for a house without old-school traditional charm, and 2) the problem of getting the house from factory to site. Converting standard 20- or 40-foot shipping containers into housing gets round both snags: the containers are already fabricated, and the infrastructure for transporting them (duh—stick ’em on the back of a truck or on a boat, or even a train) already exists.”
Pretty cool Hubble picture (altered a bit) that resembles the Firefox logo.
Mike Gunderloy: “One of the persistent complaints about Twitter is that it doesn’t offer any sort of “group” functionality: messages from everyone you follow come in as a big heap, and anything you say goes to all of your followers. GroupTweet provides a solution for the second half of this complaint, by layering distribution groups on top of Twitter.”
As Mike points out, Twitter is challenging to deal with for group messaging. Most people have opted to set their profiles to private and to keep their followers to a select few in order to make Twitter a more private group chat tool. GroupTweet takes a novel approach to make group functionality work without changing how most users approach Twitter- with open profiles and a desire to tie their Twitter activity (personal, business, etc.) to a single identity.
|
