Mood

: I have to agree with Josh Kopelman. The sheer delay in getting patents issued means that Internet start-ups generally have no real IP protection during their first few years, the critical period when they really need the protection most. Instead, it becomes available (or, of course, gets denied) at a time when the company has already acheived de facto market barriers through a dominant position or it has collapsed for one of the many reasons start-ups die. Another key consideration is this: biomed start-ups can certainly take advantage of patent protection, because generally speaking a patentable biologically active molecule won't have changed by the time the patent gets issued; but in Internet and some other areas of high-tech, what you started designing a couple of years ago has already changed beyond recognition, thanks among other things to the way your users respond and provide feedback. In my own start-up, the patent pending we applied for four years ago is already close to irrelevant, because a more sophisticated understanding of the business requirements in our domain, as well as simple brainstorming and the influence of technological changes in various things we need to integrate into our system, have made the original business process nearly obsolescent.

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Mood

: But Facebook keeps my data locked up, you might say. FriendFeed gives me an RSS feed of my activity stream, Twitter does the same thing, and both sites have an API. Those are good points, but not for the average web user, who will more often than not respond with, "Who cares?" or "I don't know what the words you just said mean..."

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: But Facebook keeps my data locked up, you might say. FriendFeed gives me an RSS feed of my activity stream, Twitter does the same thing, and both sites have an API. Those are good points, but not for the average web user, who will more often than not respond with, "Who cares?" or "I don't know what the words you just said mean..."

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: I do regard myself as an early adopter, and not merely because I'm an alpha user here. But I think it's important for us, too, to understand the average user of these products after we've helped iron out the bugs. Most average users want a reasonable level of integration and functionality (Facebook provides this well) with high reliability (ditto, whereas Twitter is still flakey) and a GUI that it at least decent and preferably very good (FB is somewhere between these two, IMHO; Twitter's GUI is still for the birds, if you'll pardon the pun). Average users, on the other hand, don't want to learn lots of jargon, or how to create their own mashups at any level more complex than that of Yahoo News, and they don't want to feel anxiety that personal data they have put into one service for the information of people they choose suddenly end up in a different service, exposed to all and sundry.

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Mood

: I always wonder.. how do bloggers find out about such rumors?

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: Thanks to Maren!

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: All the rumours and hype about LinkedIn's possible acquisition are ver interesting, but mainly serve the interests of the founders and VCs who are able to exploit them to create a quiet bidding war. However, as someone who has used LinkedIn very actively since it was in beta, I should also say that the company's quality of service, and in particular its respect for its heavy users, have not increased either in proportion to the number of users or to the number of competing social/business networks, most of which are in my humble opinion me-too services that don't deserve much attention. The truth is that Facebook has developed from a purely social network for college kids into a very good mixed social-business service that, at least for my purposes, provides about 30% of LinkedIn's added value, but with many functions and applications that LinkedIn just doesn't provide. LinkedIn's big mistake is in trying to control the platform to closely; but the power users such as myself are just rebelling. A service that doesn't respect its users doesn't deserve to survive, and unfortunately LinkedIn is sailing pretty close to the wind. I'm not going to jump ship, to continue the nautical metaphor, because it is definitely useful to me, but if LinkedIn doesn't allow users to build new content and applications on top of the generic platform, it will haemorrhage users to Facebook and other services that have a strategy based on greater flexibility and responsiveness. The premium services and advertising are not doub bringing in some revenue; but if LinkedIn is bought out by some mega-corporation tomorrow, the buyers are likely, given the overall quality of the service, to find themselves facing the same problem as eBay after purchasing Skype -- writing off a big chunk of money.

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Mood

: Great read.

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: Very interesting article, and not only because it challenges what has become the accepted wisdom about social networking/recommendation models for music discovery, and by implication how this can be turned into yet another Web 2.0 service. It also discusses another thing that really matters to anyne who loves music, and that's the sound quality. It's not true, by the way, that downloads are inherently better quality than streaming media, as Marc wrote: I've just joined a start-up that has already developed technology that allows streaming radio, or downloaded MP3/WMA/whatever, at hi-fi quality, and that has been running a classical music webradio station for months with great success using this technology. I'm probably biased, but I think that from the piont of view of the music industry, this is much bigger than any kind of music discovery. After all, taste in music is a very individual matter; but the difference between crappy compressed digital music and high fidelity is something that everyone (almost) can hear and enjoy, and that can be measured scientifically.

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Mood

: OK, interesting news, but it would be more innteresting to know how this will affect the next release of Outlook, and whether MS could have tried to scoop up other e-mail organisers, such as Nelson.

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: test

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Mood

: This is a must read.

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: A concise list of some of the better Twitter tools.

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: there's more here if you need it http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps

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Mood

Mood

: I disagree with the statement that Facebook is for kids. Although the majority of the users probably are under 25 or even 22, I see an ever-increasing number of 'adults' like myself who are using it not only for social connections but also for business networking. For me, LinkedIn is still the premier business network, but Facebook is a very good add-on.

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: Penny for my thought I agree with David and don’t forget it was the b strategy of Face book to go after the segment of user class of people I see a huge spike but then loss of interest like many so far outside Linked In (hResume Micro format) ~ well time will tell if the innovation will continue or be shelved for software companies distribution interest. Well and looking at that…I can see why FB is valued at the value….NOW switching companies. I have a hard time with the slide.com valuation…thoughts?

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: Blogging the grown-up version of social networking - Yes, and No...

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