some links

[charmian]

http://www.tightwind.net/2011/01/android-isnt-about-building-a-mobile-platform/

Article on Google's possible reasons for creating Android.

http://freelish.us/

Open-source bookmarking service (a la Delicious.com). You can also host it on your own server.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-unique-creative-dropbox-accounts/

Uses for dropbox accounts.

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1279 (from Sabina)

"Market maturity is also driving toward an increased focus on experiences and design. As markets mature, overall experience becomes more important than new capabilities and features."

It strikes me that blogging platforms have hit this point: design and user experience have become more interesting to people than features. The high emphasis Tumblr places on design is one of the reasons it's become so popular.

http://denise.dreamwidth.org/57248.html

On technical debt, and how Dreamwidth is paying it down.

Comments

[feathertail]

Holy crud, there's finally an open-source social bookmarking app. o.o

I think that "features vs. experience" thing is important ... LJ got an early lead in the features race, and stuff like friends lists and privacy filters were revolutionary. But they incurred a huge technical debt in the process, and then kept trying to add on more features in order to stay afloat.

I guess it's just as well that DW is focusing on paying that off. I just wouldn't mind a "5 years from now" picture that had a bigger emphasis on interoperability.

Sorry about the commotion I caused. >.>

[charmian]

Eh? Don't feel any need to apologize. You didn't do anything wrong.

The problem with features is that really, anyone can just implement the same feature. So if your competitors have friends lists also, what does that matter? I don't think LJ is that desperate, however; the Russian side is their main business, and all internet businesses always need to be improving to keep up with the competition.

[ursamajor]

I joined freelish.us yesterday and I am IN LOVE. It's like Delicious and Twitter joined in holy matrimony and made a hippie idealistic open source Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution federated baby. I already have federated subscribers from identi.ca! There are a couple of minor tweaks I'd make (most notably, privacy levels). But given the CC license, it sounds like if freelish.us itself were ever to go away, any one of us with the resources could take THE ENTIRE DATABASE and upload it to their own freelishus-based site and all of our crowdsourced bookmark evaluation and curation *remains preserved.*

(I'll have a post up about it shortly.)

[charmian]

Oh, that's good.

However, it is really well... ok to just upload the entire database and publicize it, in terms of ethics? I mean, in a way you could say that links and annotations are a form of intellectual copyright of the member who posted them. If that's part of the user agreement, maybe, but I'm not sure what the TOS says.

[ursamajor]

Yep. It's in their privacy policy:

Almost all the text and files that users upload to this site is available under the site license (see the license block at the bottom of this page). Users agree to the license when they register to use the site for the first time. Typically that means that the data can be copied far and wide, for commercial and non-commercial purposes, and in modified or unmodified form. If you're not OK with that, don't use the service.

In addition, the following statement is at the bottom of every freelish.us page:

"All freelish.us content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license."

(I think they should change that to specify "public" data, as the privacy policy details specifically what sort of content they consider private.)

They don't have private or friends-only bookmarks; Azz and I were speculating on what a freelish.us specifically implemented into Dreamwidth would look like, and we both agreed that adding privacy controls would probably be the first modification request.

[charmian]

Ah, I see. So it looks like that's covered. I am personally, though, not sure whether I'd want to contribute to a site which is okay with using my stuff for commercial purposes, however.

[ursamajor]

Totally fair! I'm not 100% sure how I feel about that yet, but I'm not sure I'll develop clarity of feelings until I see that aspect in action.

[charmian]

The other thing is, where are they getting the money to pay for this? If the service becomes popular, it's going to cost serious money to host it.

[matgb]

Google's possible reasons for creating Android.

See, reactions to this here and elsewhere bother me a bit. I read the whole article thinking "this is a bit statement-of-obvious, where's the meat" only to find it's just well written "stuff I already know".

Maybe it's just the way I think, always looking at market position and niche opportunities, but to me it's obvious that Google needs to stop Apple et al from dominating the mobile market in a walled garden style.

That their fist casualty appears to be Nokia's Symbian, a different open platform, is regrettable :-(

[charmian]

This article was written in January, but I think the current reactions are about something different (in other words, what isn't discussed in the article because it hadn't occurred yet): namely, Google putting in restrictions on how Android can be used and modified, making them less-open.

I can't really blame people for feeling there's been a bait-n-switch now, IMHO.