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

[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.