Facebook's Aggression

Facebook Blog: Making Mobile More Social
Search Engine Land: Big Deal: Facebook Emerges As Major Player In Mobile And Location-Based Services
TechCrunch: Facebook Revamps The Mobile Log-In Process With Single Sign-On
BGR: Facebook has 200 million active mobile users, improves iOS and Android applications
TechCrunch: Facebook Gives All Developers Access To Full Set Of Places APIs (Including Their Venue Database)
Inside Facebook: Facebook Launches Local Deal Service for Places

Image via WikipediaFacebook's out to conquer the web. Facebook is the biggest competitor that Google ever had. It is not Microsoft. To compete with Google, you needed to be online, and Microsoft is not exactly online. And this competition did not come from search, it did not come from the government stepping in with some anti-monopoly lawsuit.

After Party

I have missed three NY Tech MeetUps in a row. That is uncharacteristic of someone who used to show up when the NY Tech MeetUp was half a dozen people at a Lower East Side bar. But I missed. And livestreaming does not work for me, I never really went that route. So I showed up for the after party last night: 218 Sullivan. No presentations, and no beer, I decided, and it was such great fun. I worked the room like a politician.

Paywalls Make No Sense

Image via Wikipedia

TechCrunch: The Times UK Lost 4 Million Readers To Its Paywall Experiment: saw its online readership decline by 4 million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop. Pageviews fell off an even steeper cliff, plummeting 90 percent from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to 4 million in September, 2010. People did what you’d expect them to do when faced with a paywall at a news site. They said, “No, thanks” and clicked away to another site.

Paywalls make no sense at all. The internet is a global medium. People anywhere should be able to come over to your site. Just like net neutrality is so basic to what the internet is all about, the idea of paywalls runs counter.

Intelligent Manufacturing

Factories getting carted away to Mexico was that "huge suction sound" Ross Perot heard way back in 1992. That image still persists. The Great Recession has made those fears much more concrete and real. Those jobs that are gone are gone. That seems to be the thinking.

The Mobile Web, The Audio Medium, The Global South

the human in the loop: The Audio Medium: A Third World Revolution Waiting to Happen Even a cheap feature-phone can be made to play audio content. And cellphones have high penetration in the developing world .... Cellphones will need to support easy phone-to-phone transfer of audio content ..... Podcasts may be a niche medium in the U.S., but there will be enough demand for audio content in the developing world that it will be as ubiquitous as blogs are in the western world. And like blogs and other long tail text content, content publishers will create content without the expectation of revenue; this audio content will be free and/or ad-supported...... All the existing content in text form can automatically be converted into audio form. This is huge, because it makes all existing text content accessible to the developing world...... 5 centuries ago, the written word replaced the spoken word as the dominant means of information transfer. I am rooting for the spoken word to stage a comeback.