Cloudtop Apps

Anil Dash is certainly onto something with Cloudtop Apps:

Cloudtop apps are delivered as native code on nearly every supported platform, from desktop computers to smart phones, with an interface that scales appropriately.

While the app may have a web interface, that's largely a convenience and is not usually the primary way in which you interact with the app.

Given the arcane techniques required to build interactive web apps, and the puny results, I can certainly see the appeal of writing a bunch of native apps instead.

Support costs should be lower, it's probably easier to charge for native apps than web apps, and heck, even development costs may actually be lower.

Umair Haque firing on all cylinders

101 Let's take a sec to clear up a few misconceptions about my perspective.

Five Reasons I Wouldn't Have Invested in Zynga Selling virtual goods is interesting, right? Wrong. It’s just about as interesting as selling physical “product” – an industrial age revenue stream in disguise

MyGengo and the Power of Markets, Networks, and Communities if you want to be disruptive, here’s the single strategy that will take you the furthest. Pick a zombified, moribund industry, and use a market, network, or community to disrupt it, by altering the structure and intensity of search, monitoring, and transaction costs.

21st Century Capitalism vs FoxMartWorld Like I sometimes say: want fries with that Ponzi zombieconomy?

I ♥ William Gibson

Now, in Zero History, Bigend’s world brushes up against another 21st century growth industry: the private military. And what’s all the fuss about? Pants.

Whole World Wide Web

Brewster Kahle, 2010:

It's amazing to think that the whole Web collection, which is about 2PB compressed and from 4PB to 5PB uncompressed, can live in a 20-foot-by-8-foot-by-8-foot shipping container, which, from our standpoint, is a computer.

Brin and Page, 1998:

If we assume that Moore's law holds for the future, we need only 10 more doublings, or 15 years to reach our goal of indexing everything everyone in the US has written for a year for a price that a small company could afford.

(Unfortunately, that's after 2012, so there's not much point.)

AAOL

Dirk Hohndel:

Yes, it took a while for the Internet to drive AOL into irrelevance. And similarly, it will take time for the mass of the customers to realize just how Apple is taking advantage of them. And there will continue to be some fanboyz.

When it all shakes out

Dave Winer writes:

LinkedIn is for business contacts. Facebook is for connecting with classmates and friends from days gone by. Twitter is for news. What is Foursquare for? And then what is Facebook's checkin service for? I mean, when it all shakes out. It can be hard to forsee.

I find it always interesting that intelligent people like Dave care so much about current incumbents/silos in the social networking game.

For me it's self-evident that sooner than later control of social connections will be where it belongs - with the people.

For me, all these evil silos are just an artefact of a still illiquid market.

It's called MapReduce

Not Map Reduce. Not Map/Reduce. Not map-reduce.

Is that so hard?

deep conceptual hierarchies

By evoking the need for deep conceptual hierarchies, the automatic computer confronts us with a radically new intellectual challenge that has no precedent in our history. — E.W. Dijkstra

The gay science of wikis

In The sad evolution of wikis, apenwarr voices some interesting points wrt wikis.

Regarding Wikipedia vs Ward's Wiki, and painting with the broadest of brushes, I'd say that Ward's Wiki is a wonderful practical joke or hypermedia art project, whereas Wikipedia is a project to create an encyclopedia that only incidentally uses Wiki technology – how many Wikipedia users know how to edit, let alone create, a page? 1%? 1‰? Put differently: Wikipedia has little place in a discussion of wikis in general, it's simply one successful application of Wiki technology.

I think wikis have one important feature: they put naming front and center; the rest (including "everybody can edit everything") is up for horse-trading. And that's where apenwarr's question is interesting:

How do you create a vibrant community, but allow for private topics and discussion, but allow for public topics and discussion, and allow me to work for more than one company at a time with multiple private discussions, and have my WikiWords always end up pointing where they're supposed to?

Having your WikiWords always end up pointing where they're supposed to is of course a general AI problem. But I think there's some scope for principled approaches to naming in Wiki tech. More later, have to hack.

Tim Bray recounts:

“You don’t get it. The central relationship between Oracle and its customers is a business relationship, between an Oracle business expert and a customer business leader. The issues that come up in their conversations are business issues.

“The concerns of developers are just not material at the level of that conversation; in fact, they’re apt to be dangerous distractions. ‘Developer mindshare’... what’s that, and why would Oracle care?”

Also: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New Axis of Evil (Oracle)