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Everything Rackspace

Cool! RT @arthurnicholls: @rackcloud Here's a pic from the 1985 San Antonio snowfall! ~ http://twitpic.com/s0ywd

December 3 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Byron McCollum liked this

Paul Buchheit

Chrome OS will help kill Silverlight and other non-open tech, preventing msft and others from recapturing the web. (though I expect that it will support Flash by necessity)

July 7 - Comment - Like - Share

ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,, Charles Frith, Vladimir Yashnikov and 149 other people liked this

Good point. - Robert Scoble

123 more comments

I hope it doesn't. After all we need good media delivery platforms. - Swaroop

Including GNASH - the open source alternative - would solve that problem - Bogdan Costea

yeah, nobody really needs flash. kill it. - Zio Bonino

Microsoft will port it. It's all about codecs & DRM. Ogg Theora isn't all that great. - Rodfather

Chrome OS might be a compelling case for SVG/<canvas> + <audio> tag replacements for flash. Dunno what SVG's perf is like on WebKit tho. - Matt Mastracci

Is that Steve Jobs disguised as Zio ? - Swaroop

@Swaroop Yes, we do. Like HTML5. - Benjamin Dobson

@Swaroop eh eh, I've got flash disabled on all my systems :) - Zio Bonino

@Benjamin I'd prefer HTML web apps over native apps anyday. But it'll take time for it to mature - Swaroop

Rodfather, I don't think that will be an option for msft :). If Chrome is built the way I would do it, there is no installation per-se -- everything runs in the browser and the config in stored in the cloud (and cached locally). The computer is a pure appliance. - Paul Buchheit

@Zio You're the real Steve Jobs - Swaroop

Microsoft moves much too slow to force new standards these days. - Louis Gray

@Louis: IE8 flunking ACID test :) - Swaroop

What about more standard codecs like h.264? That isn't open and is in hardware already. - Rodfather

h.264 is established and must be in there, but it's not a platform like Silverlight is. - Paul Buchheit

I know some of the guys behind silverlight. It is some great technology. Too bad it's from Microsoft and is closed. - Joe Beda () from iPhone

A world with no Flash and Silverlight. I can't wait. - Paul Grav

Yeah, it's too bad they didn't open-source it. This stuff with Mono is silly -- if you want to make a real standard you need to make the real implementation be open. - Paul Buchheit

MS are about 10 years too late with Silverlight. And they'll most likely be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting HTML5. - Paul Grav

Zio sez (hopefully humorously): "yeah, nobody really needs flash. kill it" -- have you ever watched a single YouTube video in your life? Like seventeen gazillion other people across the wired world. yeah, you're right, nobody needs Flash. ha! - .LAG liked that

Remember Dave Clark in 1992, "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." - Guy Vander Heyden

.LAG: most YouTube videos are playable without Flash now. My iPhone plays most of them and it doesn't have Flash. Certainly by the time the Google OS came out YouTube would be converted completely to non-Flash capability. - Robert Scoble

Robert: The youtube flash application helps read the flv files on Youtube's servers and provides a UI (decoder too). - Swaroop

Even Google admits they're not sure I'd bit for bit html5 video is less bandwitj consuming than flash. And flash isn't just media delivery, also interesting games and apps like tonepad, splicemusic.com's online sequencer, etc (I'm musically inclined, so most of my examples will be along that line) and please don't suggest we redo it all in java - Ed F from Nambu

Does this mean the next Silverlight release is codename Seppuku? - Jay Cuthrell

Maybe we'll see commercials encoded in movies if everything is open. - Rodfather

Flash is too established to kill off right now, so I'd be surprised if Chrome didn't include flash support. It will take many years to get rid of that thing. First they need to fix the standard browser to not be so broken (lack of video, multi-file upload, etc), then they need everyone to switch to the new html5 solutions. - Paul Buchheit

Scoble ...that may be true, and YouTube plays on my Pre without Flash (yet)...but that doesn't mean that "nobody needs Flash." really? what would replace it? - .LAG liked that

So Google's NaCl http://code.google.com/p... (now integrated within Chrome/Chromium) was just a temporary workaround, right? - Jérôme Flipo

Use HTML 5 instead! - Minh Bui

Is it just me or does Native Client (NaCl) remind you of the Microsoft Active X approach? - Daniel Chow

But who prevents Google from taking over the net? - Andreas

youtube videos play on iPhone/iPod Touch as they are higher res mp4 files NOT flv files. It was a big deal when Steve negotiated that deal with youtube. - vijay

You have Moonlight to run Silverlight applications in Linux. Not perfect, but then an application made on Silverlight is "not perfect" by definition - Marcos Marado

The point here is that Google has no motivation to include Silverlight on these machines, and installing software likely won't be an option (it's a web appliance), so it will be absent from a lot of netbooks, just as it is absent from iPhones. That cuts into market share, which is a bad thing for a platform that is trying to compete with more universal tech like Flash and HTML.... more... - Paul Buchheit

@DanielChow: NaCl has very little overlap with ActiveX, apart from running native code. It runs in a provably safe way, and explicitly does *not* allow it to access arbitrary host APIs. But it can be quite useful when you need to run code that would be too slow in Javascript (even on v8): e.g., heavy encryption/decryption, possibly codecs, definitely game physics, and so forth. - Joel Webber

There is a time and a place for Flash and Silverlight so I hope it will run it. There are simply some things you can do which aren't possible, or practical in html/css/javascript. - Steve Temple

Paul: why wouldn't Chrome OS come with Moonlight? And if not, why wouldn't you be able to just install it? And third, why the hell would people want Moonlight for? I never installed it and not even once felt the need to! - Marcos Marado from fftogo

because of moonlight http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlig... the potential userbase of silverlight is greatly improved, agree that projects which don't consider compatibility are limiting their potential - Mike Chelen

@mindboosternoori Ryanair site uses silverlight: http://www.ryanair.com/site... that's the only website I know that uses it - for this you would need moonlight :) - Ihar Mahaniok

Flash is needed for the google os to be useful in education. Many education based websites are flash based. - Willowdale

@Paul "Google is probably paying OEMs to ship with this OS, so instead of paying $x/machine to include windows XP, they will get paid $y/machine to include Chrome." - paying present tense, already? Isn't it enough for OEMs not to have to pay hefty licenses to Redmond, etc., while being able to ship with a free, stable OS+browser combo; they need to be paid to do that as well? - ianf ⌘

I sure hope so. I think the wide array of JavaScript libraries have been killing Flash for years. Silverlight was never really a player. The only think keeping Flash afloat is video - Scott Radcliff

I don't know what's under the hood of Silverlight (nobody knows), but Flash is basically a sprite engine controlled by Actionscript, which is basically an adapted version of Javascript anyway. It's nicely packaged though, and has an army of developers, so it won't go away that easily, at least not until there are Flash-to-Canvas/ HTML5 porting tools/ translators and the like. - ianf ⌘

to follow that logic...photoshop is needed as well - Chris Hofmann

somebody call me when http://playboyarchive.com is working in Chrome OS (it's currently implemented in Silverlight) - Karim

If it gains any traction at all, MS will just make Silverlight version that will run on Google OS. Sure google could block it, but they haven't done so with the Chrome browser. - Jeff Weber

Interesting. I doubt the Google OS will get that big anytime soon though. - Scott Radcliff from email

Silverlight doesn't have a chance now...I wonder what would Adobe Air do. - Saad Kamal

not really, if google want to be open then they will need a plugin architecture for it and then MS could just port for it. I really don't see this troubling mainstream users any time soon. - Darren Stuart

Though I agree with the view that MS monopoly may erode as alternative devices get adoption over PC/Notebook, and these devices will mostly run on open source OS, but it may take years to create a significant change in every day usage of normal users. In the end, OS choice is mostly done by manufacturers, and they would be happy to get paid by open source vendors for putting their OS on... more... - Kaan Bingol

People want media. Hulu, Netflix, Kindle, iTunes, etc. They need to address that or they are DOA. - Hayes Haugen

Hayes, what makes you think it will lack media support? - Paul Buchheit

I don't think it will lack licensed media support but what deals they are able to make will be crucial. - Hayes Haugen

Hayes, i thought you were going to say that Netflix was using Silverlight. ;-) - Karim

Yes, they are, what is their deal with MSFT? Can they do non Silverlight distribution? - Hayes Haugen

i believe the Netflix non-Silverlight distribution is a format called "DVD" that works over the "Snail Mail" protocol. ;-) but clearly if Google is paying OEMs to install Chrome OS, they can pay Netflix to go back to Flash which Chrome OS will probably support "by necessity" ;-) - Karim

How can Google make money from Chrome OS? Or does it want to make money from it except through advertisement? I still can not imagine that all software and service are free and sponsored by advertisements. - Derek Wei

All Chrome OS questions are answered by today's Fake Steve Jobs ;) - Hayes Haugen

Is there a need to make money? If more and more people eschew desktop offline applications in favor of online web based apps, it means more pageviews, more eyeballs, more advertising inventory, plus has the side effect of undermining a big competitor's cash cow. - Ray Cromwell

That's the key, Google wants everything online. They figure the more people online, the stronger they become, and the more money they make. At least that what was said at the Chrome launch. - Scott Radcliff from email

I'm amused that the "backwards compatibility" argument against alternative operating systems has slowly turned into "does it support flash", and when you unpack that it really means "does it play YouTube". I suspect Google will make sure ChromeOS cna play YouTube and they don't need Flash to make sure of it. - Nick Lothian

Is it possible that Microsoft will write Office for the Web using Volta instead of Silverlight? Could be a showcase announcement for their attack on GWT - Ray Cromwell

I think Microsoft is going to focus less on the front-end of the web and more on the back-end, middle tier and database sides. Azure is a big deal that consumers aren't talking about because it's not flashy but will be pretty important to developers (and especially enterprise-level applications) when it's finally ready because everything becomes an interface to the cloud. Microsoft is... more... - Lindsay is in 20-ten

Azure looks really cool. Hint: so did Blackbird. - Michael R. Bernstein

lol blackbird (scary redmond flashback) - a good example of azure platform utilization can be seen via jon udell's elmcity project - http://blog.jonudell.net/elmcity... - mike "glemak" dunn

Nosense, I want silverlight, flash, html and any other technology in my desktop & mobile phone. Silverlight? yes, there you can develop under Python, Ruby et al, instead of the outdated javascript. - Sebastian Wain

It looks like with Native Client, you should be able to write your Chrome OS app in any language you feel like. So far, they have some examples in C/C++, but one of the things they ported is a Lua interpreter. If Adobe isn't going to invest heavily in fixing the show-stopping bugs on non-Windows versions of Flash, it's inevitably going to die, and there's really nothing either Google or Apple can do even if they wanted to support Flash better. - Victor Ganata

...ActionScript3 is ECMASCript-compliant. I know nothing about standards bodies, and shii like that, but what if Adobe dropped ActionScript and said, "You can now use pure Javascript to build Flash applications..." It wouldn't be a big leap. I'm pretty sure that would shut-up all the Flash haters. And to the folks who say Flash is hanging around just because of video...well, video is... more... - .LAG liked that

Actionscript is just the glue for the more advanced what-iffy graphic functionality of Flash. They can not drop it for Javascript, because it contains additional graphic primitives that JS lacks. But it's not the JS-or-Actionscript that makes it a target for hate, it's other things. Nobody denies that it's pretty capable, but it is also badly written, eats up memory like no other, makes... more... - ianf ⌘

I like this post! - Mohammad Abdurraafay from iPhone

I honestly don't know how necessary Flash is. Apple seems to be doing fine without supporting it. But certainly Gnash and Swfdec should be implementable on Chrome OS. The fact is that without Adobe's full support on a given platform, Flash apps will always be second class citizens on alternate platforms, and so far, there's no indication that Adobe is interested in fully supporting any platform other than Windows. - Victor Ganata

ianf ...you bring up great points about Flash's detriments, as does Victor, but until there's a better way to bring video to the Web, I can't see it disappearing. Adobe seems to keep improving the Flash VM, hopefully they'll address those CPU-hogging issues and make a more efficent runtime. Yeah, I hate hearing the fans kick-in when visiting a Flash-heavy site too. <sigh> - .LAG liked that

alternative to flash video such as ... html5 :) (requires ff3.5) http://www.dailymotion.com/openvid... - Mike Chelen from IM

that only covers video and audio... *sigh* - Ed F from IM

Ed, only??? thats one of the main reasons cited for the continued requirement of flash on popular sites like youtube - Mike Chelen

I know, and it seems I'm the only one who mentions Flash's other uses... :-/ - Ed F from IM

Ed, those other uses can be accomplished through pure Javascript, video was the last remaining stumbling block - Mike Chelen

Still waiting on non-Flash recreations of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch... or this: http://www.youtube.com/watch... Well aware of how someone mentioned higher up how you can combine javascript and svg to get nifty flash-like effects. I want apps like that though ^ Only real alternatives I've seen are Java-based ones, and those runs even slower than Flash. - Ed F

Pardon me, but the OP is a ridiculous conclusion. For that to be the case, Chrome OS would have to kill Windows, OS X, etc altogether. Paul, I understand your viewpoint as being an ex-Google person, but that's just NOT going to happen. Right now the video specification from HTML5 has been dropped because of an impasse, meaning that we may be transitioning from 1 closed-source boss - Flash - to another - H264. Good luck. - LANjackal

But why do these type of apps have to be written in Flash at all? You can easily do the same thing in C, C++, ObjC, Python, Ruby, etc., with the Native Client API that they're building for Chrome. http://code.google.com/p... - Victor Ganata

write them yourself then. until then, I'll stick with desktop apps or Flash equivalents - Ed F from IM

I'm just saying, it's not like Flash is the end-all/be-all. As Apple well demonstrates, some people can live quite well without it. - Victor Ganata

Victor ...i think the answer to the 'why do these have to be written in Flash at all' question is because Flash is installed on such a significant portion of Web browsers. But I recall that Adobe Flex had a competitor, Laszlo/OpenLaszlo, which compiled apps to SWF or to Javascript. Who's to say that Adobe doesn't have the same capability of making SWF apps into JS ones? On one hand, it... more... - .LAG liked that

Ed, such apps are possible with Javascript and HTML5 multimedia features, the question will be how difficult developers find it, and whether the performance is fast enough - Mike Chelen

LANjackal, there is a question of degree in that Flash + H264 uses proprietary software and codec, while HTML5 + H264 requires only the codec. while OGV is no longer part of the spec, it can certainly still be used to have completely open video formats, and recent comparisons have shown it performs well http://people.xiph.org/~maikme... - Mike Chelen

Silverlight's 3 is looking pretty impressive today but tend to agree - Charlie Anzman

still haven't updated yet. Busy with something on Firefox - LANjackal from IM

What everybody seems to be missing about Flash is that it works because there is one implementation which is mostly backwards-compatible and the same across platforms. It beat Java because, among other reasons, Java just didn't work the same across JVMs and platforms. The problem with HTML5 is that it will have a different implementation for every browser, and that means your app/game... more... - Gabe

Yeah the video spec for HTML5 is currently a disaster - LANjackal from IM

Paul, don't you prefer brutal competition SL vs. Flash vs. standards bring to the table by definition? Or are you more into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - 2020 Google Union - type of ideology? - Kari Honkanen

Kari, I don't understand your question. Competition is good, but with open-source we get that -- no need for flash or SL. - Paul Buchheit

Paul, no, we don't get the same level of competition with open-source only. As long as there's an opportunity for big gains (like in this case to bridge the gap before html 5 era...to satisfy demand), there will be innovations driven by that. I believe we all benefit from a free market economy that includes commercial, closed source, innovations. I am more scared of the possible future... more... - Kari Honkanen

I agree that the future is neither open nor closed, but a mixture of the 2. Been preaching that for a while now, but then again there are the fanatics on either side who can't see anything other than a homogenous future - LANjackal from IM

I wouldn't worry too much amount multimedia. By exposing WebGL, (and hopefully OpenCL), you can offload a lot of compute intensive stuff onto the GPU via GPGPU techniques, and NativeClient is there to take up the rest of the slack, but the for the vast majority of iPhone-like games, I'm willing to bet V8 Javascript on a modern processor is more than enough. That leaves licensing issues... more... - Ray Cromwell

Paul, so are you saying that Google will block both Flash and Silverlight from ChromeOS? That's a new take on 'open.' - Cliff Gerrish

MSFT next smart move: get Chrome OS (it's BSD licensed), inject IE9 and Silverlight into it and go benchmark against Chrome :) - Claudio Cicali ♋

MSFT sucks Claudio :) - Orlando Pozo

@caludio: They've already done that, somewhat. Silverlight 4 Beta supports Chrome. However I'm pretty sure it's probably technically impractical to run another browser atop Chrome OS anyway - LANjackal from IM

Something feels contradictory about a system touted to 'kill' competitors being 'open'. Sounds almost predatory to me. - Karoli

If the concept of open source didn't allow for competitive business plans then quite a few companies that depend on it wouldn't exist. The "happy smiley" image most FOSS zealots promote isn't reflective of reality. There will always be competition, even among the free - LANjackal from IM

I'm not opposed to non-open software, but for OS, browser, etc I prefer that it be open. Cliff, Google isn't going to "block" anything, but they can certainly choose what to include, and my guess is that they won't include SL. As Claudio points out, MSFT can make their own version of ChromeOS that includes SL, which is why open source software is nice (it can't be crippled too much or else someone will fork it). - Paul Buchheit

I have heard somewhere that Fash uses it's own port where Silverlight works over the HTTP port. That's why Netflix works so well. To that, Flash costs more on a sever side because providers can charge more for that port traffic. Could it come down to who is cheaper? (I am fully prepared to be wrong). - Johnny Worthington

Johnny, they both use HTTP -- there's no difference there. - Paul Buchheit

Is Chrome OS BSD-licensed? I thought it was using a Linux kernel. - Victor Ganata

@Paul - well, Flash can do P2P stuff over non-HTTP posts, but that is very new (Flash 10 I think). The cost isn't affected anyway. - Nick Lothian

My understanding is that netbooks would have to be absurdly popular for Chrome OS to make a dent in the popularity of Flash or SL. - Gabe

not rly, the defeat of Flash & SL depends on the rise of HTML5, which will b supported by multiple browsers. Unfortunately spec disagreements r holding that up. That's another advantage of closed systems : fewer cooks often makes the broth get done faster lol - LANjackal from IM

it is possible to have smaller groups for open source software, such as google's own gears api http://code.google.com/apis... - Mike Chelen

How is HTML 5 going to defeat Flash and SL? I haven't used it, but I don't see anything in the spec that looks like it could compare. - Gabe

@Gabe - what do you think HTML5 is missing? It does video, drawing, local storage, "threading" via WebWorkers. The biggest hole I'm aware of is the lack of access to webcams & microphones. What have I missed? - Nick Lothian

HTML 5's not "missing" much in terms of its ambition. What it's missing is a consensus among its contributors. Flash and SL have gone through several iterations while HTML 5's been sitting there - LANjackal from IM

Nick: When you say HTML 5 has "drawing", are you refering to the Canvas element? I would not consider an immediate-mode procedural raster drawing library to be much of a competitor to retained-mode declarative vector libraries like SVG or Silverlight. Programming with the Canvas tag is sort of the equivalent of programming in assembly language for bitmaps. - Gabe

@Gabe: I think you've got it upside-down. A Canvas-style API is the fundamental basis on which you can build a retained mode structure like SVG, et al. If a platform includes a retained-mode library as a convenience, so be it. You can build SVG on Canvas, but not the other way around (hacks like IECanvas notwithstanding -- they have horrible performance characteristics and are a nasty abstraction inversion). - Joel Webber

So, if Moonlight (Mono) runs on linux -- Will google make sure it doesn't work on Chrome OS? - Cliff Gerrish

No they won't, because it Silverlight already runs on Chrome as of Beta 4 - LANjackal from IM

Joel: I don't think you said anything contrary to what I said. I just don't understand why any programmer would want to waste time writing an app using a low-level library when I could use a high-level library that implements everything for me. - Gabe

@Gabe - I agree, and people are implementing those libraries now. See http://raphaeljs.com/ for example. Also, don't underestimate the convenience factor. I don't own any Flash development tools, but my text editor works pretty well for Canvas+JS based stuff. - Nick Lothian

Nick: Didn't the author of raphael have some massive rant about how bad the Canvas element is? And I don't have any Flash dev tools either, but I use a text editor for most of my Silverlight development. It is incredibly convenient to be able to type something like <DataGrid ItemsSource="{Binding tabledata}"/> into a text editor and not have to create the data grid myself. - Gabe

Why is Flash a "necessity" for an OS? I enjoy what flash can do, but it is like putting pimped out leather Oldsmobile seats in a Ferrari. It would definitely be nice, but certainly not a necessity. - Dan Douglass

Early post goof up. To your original point, I agree. I like how Google is approaching the internet space with web apps that can be run with out a bloated browser. - Dan Douglass

Dan Douglass: Flash is necessary because so many web sites rely on it. How many people would want to get a netbook that couldn't play FaceBook games or watch YouTube videos? Of course Google is in the unique position of being able to make YouTube work on ChromeOS without Flash, but they probably can't do anything about Hulu, Vimeo, or any of the other video sites out there that require Flash. - Gabe

Anyone else think Joy is Spam? - Chris Myles

already reported it yesterday :) - Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ from IM

John Resig

2009 jQuery Halloween Pumpkin - http://www.flickr.com/photos...

October 30 from Flickr - Comment - Like - Share

Ankit Ahuja, Manas Tungare, Ozberk Olcer and 5 other people liked this

iTod Pouch

dear Apple, thank u for keeping Flash off my iPhone. plz continue to do so for as long as possible. kthx. #NotSarcasm

October 5 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

JONES Matthew and Byron McCollum liked this

lew

hey feds, please just leave the Internet unregulated. there are already effective incentives in place.

September 25 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

alex @greenkiss, 1001 noisy cameras, Christian Hollingsworth and 7 other people liked this

what we need is just enough regulation to deter the telco/cable bozos from locking out their competitors. for instance, time warner trying to protect their dinosaur video product from IPTV and à la carte offerings by suffocating your bandwidth making them cost prohibitive. - Byron McCollum

4 more comments

...and how their VOIP product is exempt from your monthly bandwidth allocation, but skype and vonage are not. - Byron McCollum

I just feel like competition will make that all work. Truth is if the whole world moved to that, they would just raise prices to keep up. It is not cheap delivering all that. The tech has to catch up. lew - lew from email

whats cheaper, getting video service from twc the old way, or just downloading what you want from itunes and netflix on demand? the way twc sees it, they want their product to be cheaper (more attractive), and the way they do that is by rationing and tiering their bandwidth. at the prices they wanted to charge for their "unlimited" tier and overages, it becomes cost prohibitive to go à... more... - Byron McCollum

How can we sleep soundly at night with the United States so far behind Japan in broadband? - Brandon Smietana

Darn right. - Zachary TG

iTod Pouch

iTod: Google Chrome Frame to IE user: I'm really happy for u, and i'ma let u finish browsing.. but Chrome is one of the BEST BROWSAS EVAR! - http://twitter.com/iTod...

September 22 from Twitter / Favorites from iTod - Comment - Like - Share

Byron McCollum liked this

Rob La Gesse to Rob's feed, RealTime Network, building43

We are pleased to announce that the Gillmor Gang is back - and delivered through the Real Time Network on building43.com. Gillmor Gang (with video!) will air live on Thursdays, at 1PM Pacific time. Rackspace is happy to sponsor Gillmor Gang, and the Real Time Network. This cooperative effort will continue building43's efforts to educate, inform...

August 22 - Comment - Like - Share

Rick Bucich, Nicholas Chase, Rui Pereira and 31 other people liked this

Congratulations, Rob - I know you've been working to make this happen on your end. So, when is that break coming you were talking about taking? :) - Robert J Taylor

8 more comments

Gutsy move to sponsor a show which has a meltdown every 1.2 episodes :) - Mark

Sounds like a great fit. - Mike Doeff from iPhone

sweet and/or awesome - Chris Heath

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that there will be an archive! I can't watch video on my work pc! Can't wait for the Gilmor Gang to happen again! - ursi

WOW, just made my day, Gillmor is my dowsing rods for the attention economy the rest of the world is just figuring out we are living in - David Stratton

How are you guys managing the video feeds from multiple locations for this show? Would love for you to share your secret :-) - Chris Nadeau

Skypesaurus II. - raphaeL from fftogo

not really skypesaurus, but a child or red-headed step-son ... they're using mac minis right? and what for kvm? - Chris Heath

Twitter matters - I wouldn't know the Fiat race successes without it. Could apply to many other things as well. #gillmorgang - Rick Bucich

Troy Toman

Entourage quit talking to our Exchange server on the day Snow Leopard releases. Coincidence or petty jealousy?

August 28 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Byron McCollum liked this

Everything Rackspace

Support IE6 Must Die, add a #twibbon to your avatar now! - http://twibbon.com/join...

August 7 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

eglute and Byron McCollum liked this

Dave Winer

What a 140-char message looks like in RSS - http://www.scripting.com/stories...

July 19 from Scripting News - Comment - Like - Share

(jeff)isageek, Mohamed J, Susan Beebe and 47 other people liked this

One thing. Twitter's value isn't just in the messages, it is in the following/follower graphs. And all the metadata that sits outside the message. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

24 more comments

But I like where this is going. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Very clever. So would the 140-char message itself BE the link? So the mp3 would be accessed by clicking the message rather than a seperate URL taking up some of the 140 chars? - Mark

You've seen the Google Social Graph API though yeah? With XFN and FOAF it's easy to declare and determine relationships in a decentralized way. Right now it only works for public relationships though. - Brett Slatkin from email

Scoble, and the follower/following graph is the hard part - messaging + the format is nothing without a transport / platform that knows where to push those messages. And when like twitter you have users with 1+ million followers - that is a massive technical challenge that nobody has solved in a distributed fashion - Nick Halstead

People with 1-million-plus followers are going to have a hefty Amazon EC2 bill. As they should. (Or they can use Twitter, if they can find a way to pay for everyone who uses it.) - Dave Winer

that will go down well :) - Mark

Scoble the follower graph would be OPML as it always has been. - Dave Winer

Why is there a GIF screenshot of text on this page? - Andy Bakun

I was thinking "What can I do that would really piss off Andy Bakun?" and this is what I came up with. Just curious -- did it work? :-) - Dave Winer

Good way to show code - Mark

Is anyone going to build a tool that I can export who I follow on Twitter as OPML? - Christian Burns from iPhone

Christian - Ironically enough, I did something similar the other day for a diff reason. Completely random, über-beta, but - http://twitteravatar.appspot.com/apps... - Damon Cortesi

Why do you want an OPML for Twitter? Where do you want to import it? - Dave Winer

I think OPML could be good for importing Twitter to Snackr (The latest test version can be synced with Google Reader using OPML) I like using it for the casual glance @ the ticker tape while I work. It's not as immediate (feed refresh is slow) but it would cut down the time suckage if I still wanted to keep a slightly less frenzied eye on twitter. - BairdWilliamson

Really?! A spammer on FF? - Paul Puri

what spammer? ;-) - Chris Heath

Ooooooh.... Maaaagic! - Paul Puri

The first thing I noticed was how the surrounding XML seemed larger than the message itself. :) - Ray Cromwell

I wrote a quick and dirty OPML exporter for Twitter. I'll put a little polish on it in the morning and put it up as a web app. - Dave Winer

I may/must have missed something vital, but there's one thing I don't get. Since the ensuing Twitter-length RSS-item, message + envelope, is well above 140 characters, and thus can not be displayed as-is as an SMS (which, among other things, once was one of Twitter's killer features), why continue with that artificial limit at all? It's not as if the Cloud, be it RssCloud.org's or other, will not support messages where the <description> part is more than that. So what's the justification here? - ianf ⌘

Awesome TYVM Dave! - BairdWilliamson

SMS support for twitter is going to be a dead issue soon enough, glad to see people thinking about metadata and enclosures. I wish all url shortening services would go away, terrible idea which unfortunately got popular despite all the downsides. - Dave Evans

I barely use Twitter, but I always felt that the very audacity of building a SMS-length global instant messaging service was sheer genius. I understand the cellphone push never worked (or not for long) outside USA/ Canada and perhaps the UK. But the possibility of using SMS for input has a lot of merit whether Twitter streams are then delivered to cell phones, or not. - ianf ⌘

I'd like to see Twitter foaf'd out. - barce from iPhone

@Dave Evans. what makes you say that ("SMS support for twitter is going to be a dead issue soon enough")? In contrast to that, here's what one "VC from NYC" has to say about it: "I believe that Twitter's native implementation of sms is an important part of its success. The 140 character limit was driven by the 160 character limit of sms and the initial design of the service put sms... more... - ianf ⌘

Joe McBride

"You're the best! Around! Nothing is ever gonna keep you down!"

July 20 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Byron McCollum liked this

Paul Buchheit

One more thing: All of our iframe embeds (including search) support a css=URL parameter to enable custom style. We haven't documented it yet, but see http://friendfeed.com/buildin... for an example and howto, and http://www.building43.com/ to see it live.

July 2 - Comment - Like - Share

Jesper Lind, Angela E. Taylor, Ahmet Alp Balkan and 108 other people liked this

Amazing - zsafwan 

24 more comments

I was wondering how they did that! Thanks - Frankie Warren

But how do I customize the title so it's not the long search string? - Jesse Stay

We're going to fix that very soon Jesse. - Paul Buchheit

Could that (improper instancing of by louisgray.com) be the cause of http://ff.im/4J6lp ? - ianf ⌘

Thanks Paul - that will make me feel much better about keeping it there. :-) I've got some huge community improvements coming soon that I'm hoping to integrate FriendFeed with. - Jesse Stay

I may be missing the howto, but developed my own way awhile back using object tag, and placed in a drupal block. - LPH™ and his dog P™ from BuddyFeed

Freaking GENIUS. - Jason Huebel

Paul, first tried to embed in the post, but did not work out. Then I embedded the search in a sidebar widget, that worked: http://www.amsterdam20.nl - any tips how to make the embedding working in a regular WP 2.8 post? Or is this not possible b/c it is an iframe? TIA! - Jeroen De Miranda

Ah this was what i was looking for. - Burcu Dogan

Nice - very cool. - Cliff Gerrish

Is there any chance of losing the scroll bar? I know you can manually increase the height but would really like this frame to automatically grow on my site. Or is this technically impossible atm? Either way, a very cool feature. :-) - Kol Tregaskes

Paul.. thanks for the "undocumented update".. it's nice to have such open access to what's happening at FriendFeed. I'm used to the "Wall of Silence" from Google and THAT gets old and extremely frustrating fast. - Chris Myles

Cool. I just discovered the embed flag yesterday. I like loading the feeds in the firefox sidebar. - Peter Warnock

Kol, I think you are a little out of luck.. since an Iframe is just a "window" to another URL, the main page needs to define the size. Without it the browser would need to load every iframe page just to determine how to render the main one. However It would be nice to have an embedded option that allows the "N more comments" concept (more details here http://ff.im/4fGzH), it takes up... more... - Chris Myles

Chris, so the iframe is not the way forward? What alternatives could achieve this? I don't mind putting in some code to embed my FF posts properly (with a frame). - Kol Tregaskes

Kol, I'm not sure where you got the impression I don't think Iframes are the way forward, I was addressing your issue of "losing the scrollbar". An Iframe is the only way to get "real time" updates.. you could always roll your own javascript, ff API , DOM based utility but it would only get you the content at the time of the API call. If the FF team thought http://ff.im/4fGzH was a good... more... - Chris Myles

So there is no other way to get real-time updates without an iframe? Once we can get rid of the scrollbar then I can use it on my site. - Kol Tregaskes

FF can only update pages they own! BTW in its current form I think the benefits of an embedded FF post (or group etc) far outweigh any minor side effects of a scrollbar. I'd love to use friendfeed as my entire blog commenting system, I'm just waiting for a couple of things (http://ff.im/3TfED) to automate the process. - Chris Myles

We would love to embed a private room on internal Deki Wiki. The last time I tried it still had the sidebar. I will try again to see if you have made it possible to do this. - Christian Burns from iPhone

The minute I decided to embed FF into my blog! - Burcu Dogan

Does this also include individual post embeds (via share)?.. I can't seem to get those to work! - Chris Myles

the building43 stuff is great. they did a good job explaining and such. used it for my lifestream on my blog. - (jeff)isageek

Paul baucheit and the rest of the friendfeed team. You are implementing a lot of cool features lately. - alfred westerveld

Using this technique on http://waded.org now, instead of Evan Sims' FriendFeed WordPress widget. I like some things about the css=URL approach better, and some things not so much. (Anyone, is there a technique to control # of entries displayed?) - Wade Dorrell

Wade, use the num= parameter to control the number of entries (e.g. http://friendfeed.com/paul...) - Paul Buchheit

Robert Scoble

I wonder how many people and companies are changing their passwords and policies this morning because of #twittergate and http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... ? I know I am, I was doing a few of the stupid practices that caught Twitter.

July 19 - Comment - Like - Share

carl morris, Robin Whitson, siggimus and 77 other people liked this

Does anyone have a good blog post for how to come up with strong password names and policies? - Robert Scoble

71 more comments

yep, https://www.grc.com/passwor... - Mark

taht's great, I am also willing to change my password. - Madhav Tripathi

1Password on the Mac... - Holger Eilhard

not for corp use but for personal use 1Password is perfect - Mike Bracco

Holger: beat me to it :) - Mike Bracco

Mike: Sometimes I'm faster. Rarely, but happens :-) - Holger Eilhard

I will write a blog post about it. - Madhav Tripathi

Robert on the network side of things there are programs that generate strong passwords. But you can develop a "feel" for it. I have to create them all the time. Just don't use "memory aids" they lead to social hacks - Melanie Reed

You're okay if you don't use 3rd party apps to login to Twitter, right? - Steven E. Streight

I like this one. http://www.pctools.com/guides... - Logan Lindquist

Sorry, should have linked to the TechCrunch article about how the hacker broke into Twitter: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... - Robert Scoble

Steven: this isn't about your Twitter account's security. It's about your security on the Web. - Robert Scoble

Here's some password policies you might find interesting: http://www.nersc.gov/nusers... , http://www.comptechdoc.org/indepen... , http://www.sans.org/resourc... - imabonehead

I have no need because my passwords have always been 12+ characters, include caps, random characters, and numbers. I'm sure most people that use FF are the same way. The engineers I work with bitch about my choice of passwords all the time. - coldbrew

The sad reality is any password can be hacked. It's just a matter of time as in attrition. But you can make it harder for them with strong passwords - Melanie Reed

I use Lastpass.com to generate and save passwords. - mrshl

Yeah, we've always tried to make sure our hosting customers understand how important it is create good passwords, but many still use bad passwords, hopefully all of this recent press will scare them into using better passwords. Most people don't care about their password until something bad happens to them. It's similar to people who ignore making backups and then find out the hard way. - Scott Beale

Just pick a couple good ones that you can use for different things. Practice typing them so you can remember the keystrokes easier. The more you use them the easier it will be to remember. Use keepass or FFox to keep track of them. - Logan Lindquist

1Password hands down for ease of use and strong password creation on OSX and iPhone - Jerry Schuman

I wrote this regarding Twitter, security & the cloud: Here's my thoughts http://www.thetechnewsblog.com/2009... #twittergate - Jim Connolly

Melanie: it's the social hacks that will catch the most people. Not the strength of the passwords. Notice that he didn't need to guess the passwords, he just needed to use the ecosystem against itself. - Robert Scoble

http://esciencenews.com/article... - imabonehead

I agree 100% about 1Password, one of the best Mac apps out there: http://agilewebsolutions.com/product... - Scott Beale

Roboform on Windows. Otherwise 1Password. - Herb Hernandez

Very few. People and companies generally don't make policy changes until they're bitten themselves. - Darren

Good point about social engineering, Scoble. - coldbrew

I ended up writing this http://blog.siliconverse.com/2009... - Ruchit Garg

Robert: yes. its the easiest hack to employ - Melanie Reed

Or there's a business requirement . e.g. Customers inquire about policies based on what they've read in the news and impose requirements on their partners. - Darren

If you need cross-platform then I'd look at http://www.keepassx.org - Jerry Schuman

1 - Mark

Unfortunately most companies don't change passwords until they have too, the IT department doesn't want to deal with the calls when someone can't remember there password. - Kim Landwehr

my 14 character alphanumeric pass for my gmail account was hacked about 2mo ago. After fixing, Ive gone and changed all passes; & none of them are of the same ilk. my twitter account is the simplest; cause i care less if its hacked. - clarke thomas

The best thing to happen to corporate security was the public insecurity of Microsoft software int the late part of the 90s and earlier in the decade. - Darren

I use Roboform Password Manager to navigate and automatically login to websites using complex passwords: http://www.eenmanierom.nl/wachtwo... (Dutch post but Google Translate is nearby). - Patrick Mackaaij

a lot, I hope..... - Alex Griffiths

FTR, I use Keepass (hosted on sourceforge). - coldbrew

I had to this week my XBL account was hacked. - Dylan Richardson

I had to change everything and cancel 2 cards. - Dylan Richardson

I use GRC to gen and never use anything less than 20 chars unless the site doesn't support that length. Sometimes I use the first 20 in a 64 bit key, sometimes I use the last 20, sometimes I pick the middle 20. Sometimes I use 21, 22, 23, 19 char length. I also lie on all reminder questions. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

I use a hosted version of clipperz (http://clipperz.com/), totally random passwords, web accessible from anywhere and hosted on my own server. - Justin Yost

same here, Justin. I use lastpass which generates random passwords, and has one master password, which is a very secure one. - Tim Hoeck

A couple of months ago, my gmail was hacked. They then quickly went and changed my Itunes account over to another email and started buying iphone apps. In the about an hour and a half, that they had control over my email they spent almost $1000. Luckily they made the mistake of changing the name and language on my account. I don't use the email much anymore but g reader so I spotted it.... more... - Rasmus Lauridsen

for years, private corporate systems have had security measures like password strength policies for a domain, password age policies, secure connection requirements, logon policies that deny multiple logons, locking out user accounts after multiple password failures, etc. etc. etc. this incident with Twitter is a huge wake-up call. - Karim

What first caught my eye was this article was written by Nik Cubrilovic. I had wondered what had happened to him, and hoped everything was well with him. - Lloyd Budd

Yeah, Nik was in the TechCrunch office when I was there the other day. I figured a big story was underway cause Arrington told me to stop wasting Nik's time and to go bug the interns. :-) - Robert Scoble

Making an awesomely strong password wouldn't have prevented this attack. It was using the same awesomely strong password that made the attack possible. And who hasn't done that? There's just too many apps that require passwords out there. - marziah

I typically use KeePass to generate as strong a password as I can. I try to keep passwords to a minimum of 20 characters and use letters, numbers and symbols...some sites allow this some do not. If there is a password character max I will use that max (within reason). The problem I have is with some of the accounts I want to be able to access from my Blackberry. Having a 50 character... more... - Sean Brady

I use RoboForm to create all my passwords. I have them backed up and honestly couldn't type one out if I tried, they all are 14-16 chars long - George Handlin

+1 George. A good pw generator like RoboForm or 1password can save you a lot of grief later on. - Bill Sodeman

interesting experiment, make accounts at free websites and have really awful passwords and see how long it takes to get hacked! - Mark

I agree with Sean Brady, makes it tough entering on the blackberry. Especially how sometimes it will cap the first character and when it's masked, makes it even tougher. Wish there was something I could host on my own server that would work with all my machines (Win/Mac) and my phones. I don't like the idea of storing on some hosted service. Thinking of trying RoboForms hosted service since they are trusted and I've gained personal trust for the application. - George Handlin

It makes me anxious not knowing my password is for a particular site... so I've always been wary of things like 1password or roboform. I also need something that I can pull up from any computer, which rules out 1password. I've heard good things about supergenpass - Mark Philpot

Take a look at Clipperz then, if you can get to the internet you can get to Clipperz (http://www.clipperz.com/) - Justin Yost

Justin - @jtyost2 - I just checked out www.clipperz.com for the password mgmt, looks promising, but wish there were better integration w/ Firefox somehow. It's pretty cumbersome to get started. - Alex Schleber

Yeah that is a drawback. - Justin Yost

thanks 4 reminder should do it now arrgh!! as we speak!! - polou/indigo_bow

Robert due to all the virus issues we went to a more secured password format 3 months ago. We use a minimum of 8 characters numbers letter and mixed case password plus you can not use your name. We force our users to change their passwords every 3 months. - Rob Cairns

I think for a security policy to be effective it has to be secret... - Alexandros Georgiadis

KeePass (Win) and KeePassX (cross platform) is excellennt! Strong public encryption and publicly available source code. I would love to go with LastPass, they have a beautiful cross platform syncing solution, but since they are closed source (for now) I'm holding off switching to their product. - Daniel Chow

I stopped using the same password years ago. To help me keep up with the various passwords, I have been using KeePass on Windows, Windows Mobile and OS X for several years; I'm waiting for iKeePass to become available. - MiniMage - HLtW

http://www.yubico.com/home... for hardware PW protection, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US... FireFox addon LastPass is for software app, https://www.grc.com/passwor... for GRC's ultra High Security (put it on a usb flash and copy paste), http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2008... geeks know everything! - Rich Weaver

Yep the 'ecosystem' is undoubtedly insecure. I believe this type of hacking also has elements of social engineering to it. I dislike the "secret questions" as today when most people's personal information is transparent online what purpose do those questions serve, except to weaken security? Can we please opt out of dumb security questions... someone start a petition or something! - ASKJDOG

Great Post, I learned more about improving my security in 15 minutes than I would have at a 2 day seminar. :) - Robert Higgins

I hope the lasting legacy of twittergate is better security thanks to articles like this one. - Stephen Mack

I use http://passwordmaker.org/ for most of my password, it means I only need to remember a single password and it generates a unique password for each site I use (by hashing my password with the url). For the remaining sites, I use http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/ and dropbox to sync my password database across machines. - Wilka Hudson

I see many people using/recommending password generator sites. I also recommend these, but one day I thought - what if the password generators are hacked? --> http://robotterror.com/site... - Robert J Taylor

Password Maker (the first link) isn't just a password generator site - I use it as a FireFox plugin. It's also open source, so if you're really unsure about the safety of it you can have a look at the code yourself. I realise that's not a very good answer for an non-coders, but it does mean that if it was hacked *somebody* would notice and it would be all over blogs like Bruce Schneier http://www.schneier.com/blog/ - Wilka Hudson

Also, for you those of using Firefox - you should look at this: http://cubicledenizen.blogspot.com/2008... - Wilka Hudson

I think unless we develop somethig better than passwords we will never fix the problem. Using different strong passwords is good but it's no better than locking a cycle up outside a store, they just ensure that only dedicated people hack your acount/steal your cycle, which in general are the worst people to hack your account. - Darren Rollett

Some people on here have informed the world what their password policy is and what tool they use to generate passwords. If this had been a conversation down the pub then probably not a problem but if I want information on high value passwords FriendFeed would probably be the place to go due to the people who use the system. - Darren Rollett

Nobody has mentioned https://mashedlife.com - it uses a bookmarklet to log you into your sites. That way you can use anything for the password. Cliperz looks like a similar system. - Daniel Siva

Robert Scoble

Europe no longer matters to lead position in mobile - http://scobleizer.com/2009...

July 9 from Scobleizer - Comment - Like - Share

Matteo Scotuzzi, CantorJF, Gordon Saunders and 27 other people liked this

Interesting write up. This is news to me. - David Damore

42 more comments

very interesting writeup - perhaps it's the same issue as with twitter - bloggers/writers/journalists only flock to palm and iphone and ignore the rest - same with twitter. is nokia in the same bag as microsoft currently? - Allen Stern

Allen: I think Microsoft is in a better position and has more time. Why? Because people will continue to buy Windows and Office for the forseeable future and Microsoft can continue to fund cell phone development until they get it right. Nokia does not have that advantage. - Robert Scoble

well nokia will continue to have the cheap phone segment until (or if) apple/palm etc get into that space - what about motorola? i use a samsung phone on sprint btw - Allen Stern

What about Asia, Robert ? How is the Asia mobile tech developers compared to European ones ? - Clarence Chiang

Allen: yes, but that space is going to be unprofitable and uninteresting and will soon disappear around the world as people realize what they are missing with more full featured phones. - Robert Scoble

Clarence: Android and Microsoft are keeping Asia in the game. Nokia is too stuck on Symbian. - Robert Scoble

Or, more accurately, Nokia is too stuck on the current Symbian. If I were at Nokia and Symbian, I'd be starting over, or at least starting with Android, forking it, and doing something remarkable with it. - Robert Scoble

So basically Nokia needs to "Pull a Pre" - Clarence Chiang

Clarence: yes. - Robert Scoble

Clarence: the problem is that Palm already pulled a Pre which took the leadership position away from Europe and got Nokia kicked off the mobile leader's table. Nokia now must fight its way back onto that table and that's not going to be easy. - Robert Scoble

part of the issue is that whatever nokia does now, it's going to be compared to the iphone. similar with bing and google. i've said all along that if you are going up against the big players, you need to be much better, not just a little better. changing perception and behavior is very hard. i faced this for a decade with toilet paper :) - Allen Stern

Robert: You would have more of an understanding on how long it would take for Nokia to turn things around (i.e. take Android and do something remarkable with it). Can we expect to see Nokia fight its way back to the round table in 1 or 2, even as long as 5 years? - Jim Halligan @jim

The interesting news from Nokia that's gotten my attention lately is their agreement with Intel to start using Medfield chips in their next gen mobile devices (see: http://money.cnn.com/2009.... That's projecting out quite a long way though - at least into the latter part of 2011. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Jim: the question then is does Nokia have five years? I don't think so. They are already three years behind. It will be interesting to see what I learn later today at Nokia Research in Cambridge. - Robert Scoble

Nokia cornering the low cost phone market == Microsoft cornering the OS/Office suite market. Having a big cash cow can slowdown innovation in other areas. - Clarence Chiang

Clarence: yup, true. It's sad to watch, though. I actually liked coming to Europe to see innovative devices. Now I just say "meh" when I see the latest devices and go back to talking to the developers building cool stuff for iPhones and Twitter. - Robert Scoble

I think it will be interesting to see what MS will do to get developers excited in the next few years. No one is building anything on Symbian, and it's laughable to see what's in the Ovi store. I saw a "recommended" app today for 'Sunset Cheetah Wallpaper'. I'd consider that a huge FAIL. The developers are an enormous part of this market, and I think Nokia missed that from the beginning. - Jim Halligan @jim

But we are missing the point. Nokia is just a dialling&sms'ing-machine; iPhone is a personal mobile web services kit, or something better. : ) - Erhan Erdoğan

I'm thinking India at first, but mostly sparsly parts of Asia would be 2 watch 4 mobile. Russia would be an interesting 1 2 watch 4 mobile. I could go into the whole blog entry into that, but don't have the brain juice at this owly hour! - polou/indigo_bow

It's going to be an interesting temptation for Nokia to just focus on the low end in the developing markets (Asia, Africa esp) where the smartphone just won't penetrate. There's still a ton of money to be made in those markets. My guess is that it would take 18 months to get a Pre-like refresh for Nokia done, but within the corporate bureaucracy of Nokia (the same bureaucracy the felt the N97 could compete at the top levels) there still may not be the realization of how screwed they are. - Beau Giles

You've got to remember that the majority of people, anywhere in the world, just aren't tech savvy. Sure SF might be full of people that use high-end smartphones, and they're slowly gaining traction here (mainly due to the iPhone and Blackberry), but I text my friends, I Twitter to engage with readers and techie people. Twitter has, what, 20 million or so users worldwide(?)m and there's like a billion mobile users. - Steve Farnworth

I appreciate it all connects together, but the truth is people need simplicity in their devices and feel their cost effective. The Savvies want everything, but the majority want cheap services. If operators didn't lock up their markets and lock-down phones things would be better I suppose. But in Europe it's hard to get fair priced Euro roaming, data or contracts that don't emphasize... more... - Justin Howard

All game changing brands you mentioned developed a completely new mobile OS. For an existing vendor like Nokia or MS such a change needs far more time. I agree that Nokia and MS should jump on the web platform and specially on the user experience and usability train. Nokia did a start with Nokia WRT - did you know that new Nokia devices are using WebKIT? A sign on the horizon? Dont know. Maybe your statement is a bit too early - but yes, they definitely need to catch up. - bishoph

Very interesting analysis, however you've missed an important part of why Europeans have hit the texting hard :- Price! Texting has all but become costless for most european mobile users. Most of the operators have moved to a model where you either have unlimited texting or a very large number for cheap. The arrival of the iPhone has changed things though, as more and more operators are... more... - Thomas V. Fischer

Very interesting post on a very important subject; there is much to say about this. The main point, Robert, is that you are right, but only from an early adopter's perspective. The iPhone is like the Macintosh of smart phones, but the "early majority" value a variety of other characteristics to which Apple have never attached enough importance for that market, notably "interoperability". - John W Lewis

John: over and over in my career I have heard this argument and it almost always turns out to be wrong. Why? Early adopters usually do a good job of dragging others into their worlds. - Robert Scoble from iPhone

Of course, I'd like to point out that pretty much every smart phone including the iphone relies upon a very important bit of European tech... ARM ;) Also, I have to raise a good point that texting will not go away and it's useful to have in addition to web access. Why should I have to waste time jumping thru authentication hoops to submit a message to a site or an email that a person... more... - alphaxion

you are missing several significant pieces of picture on helicopter level, most probably due to american hype after fruitty-phone industry :) and that's good - it will give us precious time to finalize both plan B and plan C, while you think europeans are self-confident idiots who stuck in *texting* :) please continue your "Iphone and Palm über alles" song - you are doing right... I mean right as we need it ;) - A.T.

Yes, early adopters develop patterns of usage and behaviour which diffuse to the (early and late) majority and everyone moves forward. But, the products which appeal to each group differ. Each successive group requires the technology to be buried deeper, more concerns to be removed and more support to be available. When I buy products from my local Apple Store, as a business customer,... more... - John W Lewis

A.T. I hope you being inside Nokia, can change it for the better. Remember, I told you Nokia browser is #!!$ about a year ago. It still is. It is also one of the reasons, why "flagship N97" was first giggled at, and now is openly laughed at. Having said that, I just bought Symbian device from Samsung. :) cause I care less about visual effects, and more about multitasking and huge... more... - Павел Романовский

Robert the problem here in Italy is that you have no flat internet at an affordable price (like ATT in the US); so using the web is too expensive (ant thus we are keeping the old texting habits) - Mevio

@ Steve Farnworth I believe we need 2 distinguish more categories of tech savviness. Why because in developed countries or even between countries tech savviness are defined differently too. I actually have friends and relatives living in different corners of the world 2 know how technologies r being utilized. Texting in Africa and India (there r other countries too) r popular. In Japan, using texting, video viewing, Internet browsing, purchasing r popular. In Canada, texting r a way to communicate. - polou/indigo_bow

In the grand scheme of things 'mobile phone' Europe and the US are small markets. Manufacturers are looking to ship millions of devices, but if those devices don't work or have features that don't work in the majority of markets there will be no market for them. Look at the UAE, and most of Africa. No point in having an iPhone there, you can't use it to it's full potential, and mobile... more... - Gilbert Harding

You are right - on the hardware/software front. The market is dominated by US, Canadian and Far eastern manufacturers and equipment designers and Nokia is stuck in the low cost and 'boring' standard business phone market (non-smartphone).However Europe is now leading in the operator market, with low tariffs for Internet data particularly in the UK - how about £7 ($10)a month for near unlimited phone data, or £15($25) per month for 3G tethering, or PAYG deals of £2 ($3) per day unlimited? - Ian D. Nock

And with regards to the devices... I see a lot of iPhones, but I see a lot more 'Blackberry' like smartphones, although this is spread between all the manufacturers, with Blackberry themselves at the top, followed by a smattering of Windows Mobile based devices and some (but not a lot) of the E63/E71 devices. Europe is dead from hardware, but has now moved on to deep penetration of services. - Ian D. Nock

Finally people start noticing - the tech media world (and that includes the social media circle) is so focused in it's little closed bubble it doesn't realize that most of the world does not care about the effects, bells and whistles that gets the insiders so excited. Most people buy mobiles like I do - especially in the developing world which is where mobile growth and innovation is... more... - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

Also re text on the Tube, the Tube does not offer underground service and what you get is intermittent services or low signal, conditions under which SMS works better than voice and data... have a look at what people use above ground :-) - Ian D. Nock

Are you saying that Europe is behind because the "cool new phones" (palm, apple, RIM) are from non-European countries? Or because we use SMS and MMS while you never had the network to do so? Now there are the devices to explore data networks on mobiles, but those devices are available both in USA and in Europe, with the advantage to Europe that have lots of HDSPA coverage, and in average better coverage than USA. Remember that it was we, Europeans, who frowned upon an iphone that had no 3G? - Marcos Marado from fftogo

The loss of leadership in web & better application enabled phones is mostly not due to device manufacturers of Europe but mobile operators. Mobile operators see web as a threat rather than an opportunity. They keep their mobile network as a closed garden and do not want to let free web services leak thru these walls, since they want to charge for everything. Web is much different than... more... - Kaan Bingol

From my observations Nokia is not only making market share with low end phones, but a large amount of business people are buying the E71 and Nokia has put the price up since I got mine in late 08. As for Apple until China Unicom actually launch (the new launch date is Feb 2010) the iPhone is too late there are numerous 3rd party copies and HTC has brought out numerous touch phones before and after the iPhone was launched. - Damian Holmes

Robert: The early adopters and techies pull the non-techies through when prices drop. We've not seen a smartphone that is cheap enough to buy and put on a SIM-only £15pcm contract or pay as you go over here, so they're just not needed. Also, we are all involved in open-social-networking on here. The majority of people I know and text only have a Facebook which they only let their friends see. Even people I know with iPhones use texting more than social networking apps. - Steve Farnworth

Kaan: I don't see that much on "Operators liking walled gardens", what I see is "texting does it and is almost free", against the "a data plan costs 7.50€/month for 100Mb on my mobile". Most tech savvies I know of, with exception of those who get their phone bills payed by their employees, don't don't use data on mobile because it is "too expensive". Actually, I think Samsung's idea of... more... - Marcos Marado from fftogo

@Marcos I'd also point out that it wasn't until the 3g iPhone finally came out that europeans started to buy the iPhone, before that it was just the apple faithful and a few that didn't care too much about net speed that queued for it. I distinctly remember seeing the footage of the launch and there was a total paucity of lines. The original iPhone had a bigger impact in the us. - alphaxion from iPhone

Everything Rackspace

We have updated our blog with a message from our CEO, Lanham Napier to the Rackspace community: http://www.rackspace.com/blog...

July 9 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Byron McCollum liked this

Everything Rackspace

The @Rackspace blog has been updated with a message from our CEO, Lanham Napier to the Rackspace community: http://www.rackspace.com/blog...

July 9 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

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Everything Rackspace

The @Rackspace blog has been updated with a message from our CEO, Lanham Napier to the Rackspace community: http://www.rackspace.com/blog...

July 9 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

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Robert Scoble

Rackspace competitor ServInt on Rackspace: http://blog.servint.net/2009... Wow.

July 8 - Comment - Like - Share

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Yeah wow. What an incredibly classy article. - Chris Foley

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Yeah, every Rackspace employee I've talked with around the world today feels punched in the gut because of the downtime we've had. Not a good two weeks. - Robert Scoble

It's an amazing group of people working here, though, and watching them go through a tough time makes me realize just how good they are. - Robert Scoble

I"m sure. Nothing you can do but move on. - Mike White

It puts in focus how one should run a business. I am also a Rackspace customer. - Sean Powell

No, and I'm sure that's a terrible situation for both Rackspace and their customers, resellers, et al. One point made well by Reed Caldwell in that ServInt article is that any negativity-based sales pitch/promos are inconsistent with keeping the customers' best interests in mind. This goes double for political campaigns. - Chris Foley

Mike and Sean: yup, it's a real time for us to look in the mirror and question everything we're doing. I'd hate to be the team running the datacenter because so many people's businesses and careers are on their shoulders. Real responsibility isn't easy to bear. - Robert Scoble

Chris: I know I'll never even consider doing such a campaign in the future and if ServInt ever has troubles I'll be the first one on the phone offering help. - Robert Scoble

Robert, that's pretty brutal, but what can you do? Keep your nose down and keep moving forward. If I remember correctly it was caused by a fire, no? It's not your fault. - Mike White

Mike: nah, the fire was in one of our competitors (we weren't the only one with downtime the past two weeks) but our two incidents were power related. - Robert Scoble

Incidentally, if it makes you feel any better Robert, I've learned a lot from your feed, comments, and likes here on FriendFeed. You've been instrumental in my web tech awareness. Peanuts, i know. But I appreciate you. - Mike White

Robert - as much as these outages hurt us, we know what it means to our customers (many of whom have become our friends). It is painful. But we getter better by experiencing it, and working through it. It gives us an even greater sense of urgency to not let it happen again. People don't work at Rackspace - they make it an avocation! :) We will continue to get better, and will always put customers before Rackers, and Rackers before selves. THAT is what makes us a great company. - Rob La Gesse

Very classy and good use of social media. - Jeff Haynie

Big thumbs up for ServInt for writing that piece. I'm sure many others tried to kick you while you were down. - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

Thanks for the kind words everyone. It's nice to see camaraderie in our industry! - ServInt

Robert Scoble

Why did Google announce Chrome OS this week? Well, of course, Microsoft has a big announcement coming on Monday (I'm embargoed).

July 7 - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Bill Romanos, Charanjit and 215 other people liked this

It'll be interesting to discuss both announcements too, and what they mean for each other. - Robert Scoble

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Is this that internet clipboard that Ray Ozzie demoed a few years ago? Maybe they've completed it! - Diego Barros 

I hope to see something good come out of this. Are they saying free or paid for the Chrome OS? - Anthony Timberlake

That's my Scoble - seeing things behind the things! - Alex 'BuckyBit' Covic

*raises eyebrow* Interesting. I applaud more competition - Mo Kargas

I'm intrigued! - Daynah

Diego, no, it's one of Microsoft's primary businesses. Did you know Microsoft has 14 billion dollar businesses? - Robert Scoble

Related to Microsoft's Gazelle browser? http://news.cnet.com/8301-13... - Kiran Patchigolla

Windows 7 GPL 3.0 ?? Brouahahaa:-) - Alex 'BuckyBit' Covic

cool, im thinking its a special version of windows 7 for netbooks? - sean percival

Microsoft isn't doing too bad lately. - Eric Florenzano

Anthony: I'm sure it will be free. - Robert Scoble

Robert: I'm sure they do. As I'm sure IBM does. But I don't care about IBM. :) - Diego Barros 

BingOS? - imabonehead

imabonehead :D - Alex 'BuckyBit' Covic

imabonehead: no. :-) Microsoft isn't that disruptive. - Robert Scoble

And that means Google Is doing well once again, doesn't it? - Markingegno - Donato from Android

The Chrome OS will be for netbooks and such for now. And is Microsoft announcing the Free One Care? - Dylan Richardson

haha BingOS! I like it - Diego Barros 

Bingo yes :) - Kiran Patchigolla

*chuckles at imabonehead* - Daynah

LOL BingOS! The startup sound will be Ballmer saying "BING!" like he did at AllThingsD conference. - Paul Salzman

Bing-OS was his name-o! - Daynah

Bingos <--- that was his name-o - Micah Wittman

GoogleOS is already out - "It's the browser" - the GNU/Linux/Ubuntu skin is just marketing... - Alex 'BuckyBit' Covic

*high fives Daynah* - Micah Wittman

An open source OS - how much stable will it be?? - Palak Mathur

Question is Robert, if you are not allowed to say, how on earth did Google find out? - Sandra Large

Bingo-sssss - Alex 'BuckyBit' Covic

Micah, we're on the same google brain wave tonight. :) - Daynah

Palak - you troll - Alex 'BuckyBit' Covic

Ride the wave :D - Micah Wittman

Sandra: it might just be coincidence. Or maybe they have great spies. Depends on your view of the world, huh? - Robert Scoble

Microsoft is open-sourcing their code too??? Yeah, didn't think so. :) - Josh Fraser

Josh: part of the Microsoft announcement on Monday runs on Google Chrome (and Firefox for that matter). - Robert Scoble

Not all "open-sourcing" is created equal. - Micah Wittman

Maybe Microsoft is making it's secret announcement this week cause they knew Google was about to announce? - Alan W Silberberg

Robert - say no more, don't get into trouble, Duder. - Alex 'BuckyBit' Covic

Thats real funny Josh .. Its like pulling teeth to get them to give a discount on anything. - Dylan Richardson

Alan: maybe! It all depends on how you look at the world, doesn't it? - Robert Scoble

Nice Cant Wait! - James Hunter

It just seems to coincidental. Like President of Iran making big speech during MJ's funeral! - Alan W Silberberg

Scoble the only MS announcement they could make that would blow me away is Windows 7 Early release. - Dylan Richardson

Dylan: Microsoft has a few other impressive things up its sleeve. - Robert Scoble

So the question is now that Google's making an OS, will Eric Schmidt resign from Apple's Board? - Paul Salzman

It's all just ones and zeros. ;) - Victor Panlilio

So, do we give Calacanis credit for calling a Google OS back in 2006? http://calacanis.com/2006... - Mike Doeff

Sanat: insightful. Paul: Google makes a smart phone OS, and he hasn't resigned, so why would he now? - Robert Scoble

Zune HD. Looks nice for the first time ever I'm thinking about it. - Dylan Richardson

Google is talking about it's goals at this point. Isn't Intel trying a netbook OS too that boots fast? It'll be interesting to see which OS features win out here with different implementations. Is instant on to the browser the key or will some other feature shine? Fun times ahead, though really need to see things in action. - Loren Heiny from iPhone

Dylan: sorry, that is dead on arrival. They should have combined Zune with a cell phone. - Robert Scoble

I got a screen photo here: http://ff.im/4WoVE, I don't have much comments yet due 2 that I am using it now, its not much of an announcement. - polou/indigo_bow

Robert, Zune with a phone hmmm??? I hope ur rite as u said ur embargoed! - polou/indigo_bow

Gazelle? - carrotmadman6

MS does not have the Balls to take on the iPhone. - Dylan Richardson

Wait for Monday. Nothing else to say. - Frédéric Sidler from iPhone

Robert, because they claim to excuse him from the part of the meetings related to iPhone...computer OS is arguably the biggest segment of Apple. I guess he can stick around for the hardware discussions. I know my argument is elementary, but maybe walking a line here? - Paul Salzman

What was the last big hit new MS product? - James Watters

But if they did that would be cool competition is always better for the consumer. - Dylan Richardson

James: Xbox? Dynamics? Bing? - Robert Scoble

Apple is not really what I will be looking at Android is the big boy here - polou/indigo_bow

MS Office on the browser would also explain why GMail and Google Apps are finally out of Beta today too. - Ron Schott

Xbox - polou/indigo_bow

OH OH Project Natal is coming out!! lol j/k - Dylan Richardson

Robert: Thanks, wasn't hating, just looking for organic momentum from products. Bungie was def a godsend to 360. Bing proved Seth Godin wrong which I greatly enjoyed. - James Watters

@Robert Scoble: So I looked up Microsoft's last quater's financial report, Microsoft does indeed have a $14 billion business :) - Long Zheng

Bing is nice I have to say. Here is how I use it .. If I want to Buy or shop a price I use Bing. If I need info its Google. - Dylan Richardson

MS better fix the %$^#%@^ Gumblar hole first, it's apparently worse than Conficker -- http://rixstep.com/2... - Victor Panlilio

MS also has ~6+ B in R&D, is it efficient? - James Watters

Not new news, but it could be the launch of Silverlight 3.0? Offline mode and all the other nice bits, runs on Chrome and Firefox. - Travis Koger from iPhone

Oh, really? When I get something on embargo...I don't write about getting it under embargo. Come on, Robert. You're better than that. Or at least I hope you are. - Andrew Feinberg

I agree @travis, but google make it like a news - polou/indigo_bow

James: it doesn't matter, a company like Microsoft needs a product pipeline to remain relevant. Research lets Microsoft remain relevant and on Monday you'll see a bit of how it does that. - Robert Scoble

OK. Google Chrome OS. Netbook makers say Linux based Netbooks have high return rates. How will people react to a Netbook that only runs a browser? Linux has remained niche. - Dileepa Prabhakar

Andrew: sometimes you have to take a risk. This is one of those times. - Robert Scoble

Robert: I will look forward to it. We ALL win when great software comes to the market. Almost nothing better in the world. - James Watters

14 billion, maybe Office that runs on Silverlight, therefore in the browser properly. - Travis Koger from iPhone

Do you all think GoogleOS will just boot up right into the browser? Browser will be in firmware? - Paul Salzman

BTW, Robert, will Microsoft finally dump IE and develop a Webkit based browser? (Forget Gazelle. Yet another stupid Microsoft research project that will never successfully make it mainstream.) - Dileepa Prabhakar

Paul: no highly unlikely. - James Watters

Dileepa: I don't know the answer to that. But the demos on Monday (I have a bunch of video coming) were shown to me in Firefox. So maybe that's our answer right there. - Robert Scoble

James: so you think it will sit on top of Linux or something? Or just be a new flavor of Linux? - Paul Salzman

Linux flavor of Chrome, thus far not arrived yet - polou/indigo_bow

Paul: I'd look at Android as a precursor and say yes its going to use a google refined linux kernel, and I believe the post even says a windowing system. I'll check TC again to be sure brb. - James Watters

Paul: I bet there will be some customization of Linux underneath Google's Chrome OS. I'm intrigued and can't wait to see what they will do with it. - Robert Scoble

Google says the software architecture will basically be the current Chrome browser running inside “a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.” (quoting TC) - James Watters

I can almost bet that its web based Microsoft Office with some nifty real-time collaboration features. - sameer

Sameer - I agree. Explains cross-browser compatability - Daniel Lazarides from iPhone

"a new windowing system" leaves the door open for a greater level of abstraction away from the kernel for sure. Probably still with some access to files, devices, etc on the local hardware though which a browser alone would be a clumsy solution too. - James Watters

If Microsoft's BIG announcements are Web based Office (already demo'ed and announced), Windows Azure RTW (nothing unexpected) or Windows 7 RTM (already announced to be announced!), there is nothing that's going to surprise people on Monday then. - Dileepa Prabhakar

I think Wave might be integrated into the OS. - Jayasimhan Masilamani

Dileepa: Windows7i -- the Cloud OS from MS - Paul Salzman

Jaya: Like as a built in extension to the windowing system? Like IE and explorer? - James Watters

@Alex Will they be able to match Open Source strategies as followed by Ubuntu,etc?? - Palak Mathur

just another rehashed disaster of windows in another marketing created packing - Zac Bowling

Dileepa - They haven't talked much about collaboration using Office web. There was one OneNote demo that showed some realtime synchronization. I'm thinking more Wave-like realtime features. - sameer

Zac: I'm going to believe Robert, but lets give him hell if this is marketing glossy! :) - James Watters

Paul Salzman: Windows 7i with WGA! -- works only when accessed through IE when running on a WGA validated copy of Windows. - Dileepa Prabhakar

Dileepa: that's it, we've called it! ;) - Paul Salzman

Robert you managed to convert a complete google night into a complete MS night :) - Kiran Patchigolla

James: it's been a while since I've felt compelled to do more than five videos at a Microsoft press conference. See ya on Monday. - Robert Scoble

sameer: That will be mimicking existing Google Docs feature. Google Wave is at a completely different level and I am not sure if Microsoft is up to doing something like that. - Dileepa Prabhakar

Till Monday it is, I'm thinking I'll even blog it. - James Watters

Wave might act as the collaboration platform on the OS. But that leads to another question. Will the OS be tied to Google accounts for login? - Jayasimhan Masilamani

Dileepa: Let's see, I think there's potential for implementation of realtime collaboration across the web based and desktop offerings of Office that could be of big mainstream impact. It's got to be something related to Office, Robert talks about the "$14 billion business" - The only other Microsoft business I know of that's that big is Windows. - sameer

sameer: I said that Microsoft has 14 billion dollar businesses. Plural, not singular, but I also said it was one of Microsoft's primary businesses. That narrows it down a bit, yes. - Robert Scoble

My guess is a MS hardware that will shake the netbook market!! - Krishnan Subramanian

So that's a Win7 RTM announcement, combined with Web Office. If Web Office will be free to use, the combination of W7 Starter with Web Office will be a huge notebook hit. - Kirill Petrovsky

If ChromeOS was meant to counter MS, then the logical MS announcement would be some kind of OS project, like maybe a combination of Microsoft Singularity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... ) combined with Silverlight for NetBooks or mobiles. - Ray Cromwell

MS Web Office for sure: Scoble said it runs on Chrome and Firefox and it's a multi billion business. Actually, MS Office accounted for 18-19B $ in 2008. - Jérôme Flipo

I fear that if the tech side of their release if good (but whatever the pricing), Google Apps isn't ready for the fight. - Jérôme Flipo

Microsoft announces the cloud OS? I'm still not sure about a Google OS though. - Burcu Dogan

Web Office in Silverlight, together with a mobile version that means we get Silverlight on WinMo and maybe even IPhone would be a win for me - Ian Blackburn

I cannot wait...:-) but I DO have a clue... - Eric Denekamp

Lots of people suggesting Office-in-browser but if that were it why would Robert be under embargo given they've already announced it and demo'd it? I'm not saying it ISN'T Office-in-browser but if it is then something doesn't add up! - Jamie

Good point Jamie - the two primary business in MS are Office and Windows (in terms of revenue anyway), so perhaps this is more to do with a Windows OS in the cloud? How would that look? - Ian Blackburn

Midori perhaps? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Jamie

Initially, Google VS Live, Then Chrome Vs IE & Google Vs Bing, finally its Windows VS Chrome OS - Michael_techie

Ummm... are they announcing an online version of MS Office like Google Docs? - prolificdyslexic

that's why I do not subscribe to Scoble - too many comments on his articles, too much noise - Павел Романовский

I don't see any noise in here. Interesting conversation! - Robert Scoble

The MS guy at Portland Cloud Camp said Azure was going to be released very, very <wink, wink> soon. #cloudcampPDX - Gary Walter (gwalter)

All google apps platform out of beta yesterday, now Chrome Os.. Is definitely the answer to Seven + Silverlight/OfficeOnLine Monday ;) - CantorJF from iPhone

@gwalter You’re maybe right. The front end would be MS Gazelle, and the back end would be Azure. - Bram Pitoyo

Microsoft is finally putting the Zune out of it's (and out) misery and killing it? :) - Diego Barros 

Office Web Apps release to public beta is well overdue - first promised for end of 2008. If this is embargoed then it must involve something new. ScottGu hinted that Silverlight 4 was already in development. SL3 is released this Friday. So maybe SL4 will be released,in beta with a beta of Office Web Apps showing some SL4 features (like more AIR like features).. - Joe Wood

It seems like "too late" and illogical for Microsoft to come-up with another vendor-lock-in type innovation and expect positive results. Microsoft is not run by daredevils nor wimps. The announcement Robert talking about might be about a web based productivity application suite, which is standards compliant and offers a familiar interface and workflow for people, thus easily adoptable and steal competitors' (G, Y!, Zoho, 37S, Adobe?, etc.) user base. - Berk D. Demir

The thing thats got me shitting my pants over all this is Games. I need Windows to play all the latest Direct X 10 and 11 games. Linux is hopeless in that regard. - Mark

Audience in here is mainly composed of technically inclined, early adopters. We feel comfortable with online apps and mainly ready to ditch (or already ditched) many offline applications in favor of our new toys. OTOH, that's a huge paradigm shift for the other majority of less technically inclined and incomparably bigger masses. Microsoft still have the power to lead masses, create... more... - Berk D. Demir

Interesting discussion! I vote for MS Office online ! - Krishnamoorthy

I commented in istartedsomething on Long Zheng theories with this list. so why not here after having read all of Scoble responses?: Safe Guesses (not crazy): 1.- Office Ensemble (Office Web Apps + Office Live Update) and a Office 2010 public CTP (the most likely one) 2.-Microsoft Online Services gets full release along with a full release of Windows Azure while one of the new Data... more... - Avatar X from FriendFoo

i crammed a lot of guesses that may not have to do with the announcement so maybe robert could say warm or hot to the whole list without having to specify. :P - Avatar X

I vaguely recollect listening to the GIllmor Gang in June/July 2008 where Robert said he'd just visited Microsoft Research and seen "an amazing new browser". If memory serves me correctly it was said in the context of mobile devices but who knows.....this may be another contender for Monday's announcement! - Jamie

Anything related to Midori ? http://technologizer.com/2008... - Krishnamoorthy

Microsoft has already made their counter-move to a Google OS. It's called Windows Azure. It'll serve apps to the Google OS with ease and MS will make money in the process. Yeah, I know today the money be nowhere near what the Windows OS makes, but while the Google OS is gaining traction as a desktop OS, Azure will be gaining traction as an app hosting platform for that very same Google OS and others. - Jeff Weber

More spam news will come in. Azure, Mirot ha ha ha - Michael_techie

just another social network (where the IE users might hang out) - Dobromir Hadzhiev

Another huge innovation like renaming Bing? - Burcu Dogan

Google is initially going after netbooks via a new OpenSource OS. If Microsoft's Next Big Thing is Azure then they are betting that a locked-in cloud-based OS will trump Google's move. It's gonna be VEHLEY INTELESTING to see this play out. - J.D. Deutschendorf

launching online enabled MS Office, free and beta - Павел Романовский

I really hope it's not anything Silverlight related, some one is on crack if they think the end game is everything running in a plugin in a browser. - Scott Kahler

Tease. Tease. :) - Charlie Anzman

Robert, they'd better have more than a few "14 billion dollar" businesses. Their market cap is 200 billion for heaven's sake. - Stephen Pickering

sorry, have to ask. did it make you cry? :) - dannysullivan

does this mean google=novell? - Eran Even-Kesef

Made the news onto electricpig your announcement! - Giraffes Up In The AIr

Dr. Schmidt HAS to resign from the Apple board... too many conflicts of interest (iPhone v Android, Chrome OS v OS X, Chrome v Safari). What could he possibly be adding that can't be obtained through someone else? - Gerald Buckley

You are in Palo Alto? I am in Mendocino. :) - Joe

pricing of Azure will definitily be one of the announcements; not the BIG one. Office online perhaps... - Jeroen De Miranda

Very interesting indeed. Chrome OS sounds like a great companion to Windows on a netbook+ device, for those times when you do need instant web/email. Looking forward to your videos! - Will Johnson

Since the event on monday is WPC I'm guessing that Steve Balmer will present MS view on future of the Enterprise and showing off some of what Ray Ozzie has been working on. Coming full circle with Azure (computing infrastructure), Mesh (powering collaboration), SilverLight (future of runtime enviroments on all platforms) and of course all of this software+services has to be powered by Windows Enterprise Servers on the back end. - Daniel Chow

Also the new Office is the first application to launch under the above stack. Scoble, did I get anywhere close to any of the embargoed announcements? :) - Daniel Chow

Robert - Was GLADoS based on you? ;) - Matthew DeVries

What do you think? How long will the Apple-Google Friendship last? http://friendfeed.com/applero... - Hans Kainz

They are going to announce the release of IE 9 - the even worse with net standards addition. - Bobby Griffith

Windows 7 Home/Business/Ultimate Netbook Edition. Each with different capabilities and things disabled for no reason other than to confuse users and make more money. - Scott Koon

heh - i know now what the announcement is and i am not embargoed - i should make a post :) - Allen Stern

Go for it, Allen! Inquiring minds want to know! - Rudy Amid

Well if you do know, you owe it to your readers to report the news, - Mark

Mark - That's if you see tech journalists (which I don't think Robert even classifies himself as) as true hard hitting journalists (think woodward and burnstein, ed Murrow) or if you think of them in the vein of Sports writers. Sports writers, like tech writers, need to foster relationships and have their names known and have to cross closer into the friendzone to get us the day to day... more... - Matthew DeVries

Mark: sorry, I signed an embargo. That's the way these things go and I'm not willing to burn this relationship, sorry. You'll know on Monday. Matthew is exactly right. And even with Woodward and Burnstein, they played this game. You didn't know who Deep Throat was, even though that was news too. - Robert Scoble

what announcement? - kang

I didn't mean Robert should report it. I meant Allen Stern who commented he was not under an embargo. He knows it, he has no NDA, he should report it. - Mark

RT Allen Stern "heh - i know now what the announcement is and i am not embargoed - i should make a post :)" - Mark

I hope its not Gazelle. If it is I respect Robert for abiding by the embargo. It seems as though no one in tech abides by embargoes any more. If it is Gazelle, might as well discuss since it is all over the tech blogs already. - Keith Beucler

As they keep it under the blanket till now! It should be software only thingy! speculations about xbox, zune phone etc are free to leave! - Amir

It's not Gazelle. At least I don't think so, because I have no clue what Gazelle is. I'm off to find out. - Robert Scoble

Ahh, nope, what I was thinking of is not Gazelle. But now that I see the rumors I wonder if Microsoft has more than one major announcement on Monday? - Robert Scoble

My Guess: They enabled Live Mesh Web Desktop to run applications, So in future all applications are going to be hosted in Live Mesh - Amir

maybe i want use chrome all day,,just for internet surfing - qian

Hey Robert, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being an announcement that version 8.1 of IE includes a better spell-checker, and 10 being that Windows 8 is coming out in 2010 and is free, how many out of 10 is the announcement going to be in terms of having an impact? - Mark

btw I have had this single chrome window open for about a week, and because each tab has its own process I don't get memory leaks like with firefox. - Mark

Does unmodded, unaddon'd firefox leak? - Matthew DeVries

Not sure to be honest - Mark

So there could be your difference. - Matthew DeVries

Mark: that's hard to judge. I'd say 6.9 based on how you framed it. - Robert Scoble

Is this something that will go over well on Wall Street? - Michael Fidler

Well, today Microsoft announced the promotion of Steven Sinofsky to president of the Windows Division. - imabonehead

Robert ur (face) a hit today in the news outlets: http://lifehacker.com/5310444... - polou/indigo_bow

I hope Google comes up with a great OS. I have tried any different Linux versions on my netbook but have never found the perfect one. Looks like they have connected the right partners as well so I am very excited. 9 0ut 10 for me. This could change everything - Asgeir

TechCrunch on Scoblelizer's drumroll: "Office In Cloud Comes Monday" http://bit.ly/18sKUe - JimmyJet

it will be a sigh of release for people come to fear those massive, massive office purchase/downloads. still a pain for when you travel and have no access online though... - Terry O'Fee

While Google's forays in the OS and office productivity arenas are great for consumer choice, are they playing w/ fire? Google's core revenue stream is search, which has a much lower switching cost than any of MS's multiple revenue streams: Client, Office, Server. It seems like the two are pitching for a protracted fight that could be costly to both. But in a battle of attrition, it seems to me that Google could lose $ faster than MS. - lingb

Windows ME Ultimate? - Michael Funk

Well, it's Monday, what is the announcement about? - SuezanneC Baskerville

MS is making Office apps online. Ala google apps. Boring. - Rudy Amid

Ed Leafe

RT @jtauber: people in US who missed 12:34:56 07/08/09 just have to wait a month for when the rest of the world celebrates it :-)

July 8 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

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Robert J Taylor

While waiting for The Rackspace Cloud API to be completed look what a customer made: http://bustedloop.com/rackspa... ~ by @DanBachelder #ingenuity

July 7 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

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Philipp Lenssen

Friendfeed's design evolution: what happened so far

July 4 - Comment - Like - Share

i80and, oliver gassner, Ninh Nguyen and 75 other people liked this

Interesting how people have gone back to using something very similar to the very first design! ( helvetica theme ) - vijay

8 more comments

And we whine every time... - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

that's just our way of giving "feedback" =P - vijay

Apparently I wasn't here for that first iteration because I don't remember it. - Aaron Hood

Philipp, add discrete dates to that visual timeline, that's another dimension in the progression. - ianf ⌘

From the first screenshot, it seems that you couldn't add entry manually in the first version of FF. I'm surprised that the commenting feature hasn't change: same formatting, same icon, same text color. - Jérôme Flipo

V1 was my favourite :-) - Alex Gawley

I still think V2 was the best - service icons and full sentences - Scott of Two Countries

V49 will be the best. - Jérôme Flipo

V2 was amazing (tabs aside). And yes, I'm very grateful for Helveica theme. Maybe a V2 theme someday? :) - Christopher Galtenberg from iPhone

Everything Rackspace: Tony Campbell

Kong's Burgers and Wings on Vimeo - pwd is rackkong - http://www.vimeo.com/5435196

July 3 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

jonstovall and Byron McCollum liked this

Chicken Sandwich was excellent. Bread was especially delicious. - Byron McCollum

John Engates

Article today in SA paper about hot dogs w/ good photo of Jerry of Jerry's Chicago Style Hot Dogs. http://yfrog.com/0384100120j

July 3 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

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LANjackal to LANjackal's feed, Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, TheNextWeb Forum, RWW: The Future of Tech, building43

Modernizr: start implementing CSS 3 and HTML5 features now - http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009...

July 3 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Noah White, ianf ⌘, Brandon Ball and 3 other people liked this

"Modernizr is a JavaScript library by Faruk Ates that detects which functionality a browser can support, and allows you to use if-statements to fine-tune your fallbacks for browsers that don't support the new hotness. Modernizr can't fix old browsers, but it can make it more practical to support newer ones. On top of all the CSS 3 styles it can detect support for, it also allows you to use and style HTML5 elements without breaking your site for IE users." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

bwtaylor

Wondering why I didn't dump Vmware for VirtualBox long ago. VBox Rocks.

July 3 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Byron McCollum liked this

Haven't touched Parallels in a long time. - Byron McCollum

John Resig

IE 6 is now the least popular version of IE: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa... With the current rate it'll be gone by 2012. Yay?

July 3 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

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We can live in hope! - Edd Dumbill from Nambu

FriendFeed Feedback: Tamar Weinberg

FF: please add gdgt to the list of services you support.

July 2 - Comment - Like - Share

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gdgt doesn't offer any RSS feeds yet, so this'd have to be done with some sort of private API, which I doubt gdgt has the ability for at this stage having just launched yesterday. - Jon Ursenbach

Let me see if I can find out. - Tamar Weinberg

Bret Taylor to Bret's feed, FriendFeed News

FriendFeed now 6x more awesomer with themes - FriendFeed Blog - http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009...

June 30 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

raphaeL, roamin, HealingBrush and 340 other people liked this

Choose your theme at http://friendfeed.com/setting... - Bret Taylor from Bookmarklet

87 more comments

I'm a Blue Wave man myself. - Bret Taylor

Nice, but I think I like the Classic style the best. :) When can designers submit more themes, or users upload their own? - Pistos

That wouldn't have anything to do with Google Wave, now would it? - Daniel Sims

Who would believe that *I* would be using the "Flowers" theme? :) - Ana

Helvetica - Christopher Chung

Pistos: user submitted themes are coming soon. - Bret Taylor

Pistos: It's in the blog post. ;-) - Kevin Fox

I prefer to keep things Fresh - Dan Hsiao

oooooh boy!! - Micah Wittman

Nice! how much control over theming when user submitted comes out? Twitter-like? more? Sharable? - Justin Hart

Helvetica for now. - Jimminy Fuller

Whoops, didn't even see that there's a blog post. Sorry. :) - Pistos

Justin: most of that (user submitted, shareable, etc) is coming, this is just a first step. - Bret Taylor

Awesome. - Justin Hart

thank you jesus - Sarah Perez

This is awesommeee!! - Burcu Dogan

Thanks :) - Tracy Benham

Nice - Kreg Steppe

*awesome* I <3 Helvetica! - Sparky

Helvetica for sure! - Burcu Dogan

This was all due to Kevin's (http://friendfeed.com/kfury) hard work in case it wasn't obvious. Great job, Kevin! - Bret Taylor

Looks like I signed on just in time today. - Yolanda

Thanks guys. Rockin Helvetica for now. Needs the FF logo though. - Andrew Smith

Helvetica for now. - Darryl

This post came when I was thinking how FF logo is a Twitter look-like. Dont change the Helvetica version! - Burcu Dogan

Thanks.. but I'm not a big "theme" guy... I'd rather see updates to the API... I guess I should be hammering Ben for that :) - Tim Hoeck

ohhhhh snap! - Nathan Chase

Niiiiceeeee. - Simon Wicks

I chose Fresh! - David Schmidt

It became clear as soon as the FriendFeed Themes room was taken over. - Andrew Trinh

Awesome! - Frankie Warren

thank you! - Alfredo

Do any of the feeds have the highlight options of AJ's theme? Or the Service Favicons from Micah? - Matthew DeVries

Very nice. Like the Helvetica myself for the moment, but that will probably change in a week or two. - Alex Hellstrom

Helvetica! awesome. BTW, pause button is clipped by a couple of pixels on WebKit browsers. - Kelly Norton

Nice one, though we need more themes... - Kaan Ertürk

+1 to Helvetica! - Joel Webber

Helvetica is loveable but I wish it was white, black and red instead of being just 1-bit. - Berk D. Demir

sorry guys. my helvetica edition more beauty :) http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Burak Dönertaş

haha :) thanx for that. - Ahmet Alp Balkan

helvetica ;) - Faruk Kaymak

@Burak, yup, more beauty ♥ - Zulema ◕ ◡ ◕

Yeah, great job bro. i like the Helvetica edition - Simto Alev

"Bamboo" suggests there's a picture, but all I see is brownish colours, at that don't match the friendfeed logo. - Peter

I like "fresh" - Peter

I like Blue Wave. Fresh should be the default theme and the Classic should be dumped. ;-) - Kol Tregaskes

MIcah says his scripts still work with the themes btw: http://ff.im/4DlX9 - Kol Tregaskes

OMG LOVE!!! - BEX

Perhaps post your favourite theme and whether you like or dislike the themes in the new *official* FF-Themes group here: http://ff.im/4DluG :-) - Kol Tregaskes

Peter, there should be an image inthe lower right corner. What browser/OS are you using? Thanks! - Kevin Fox

this is great! - Joe Pestro

Be Gone Grey! - Eric @ CSTechcast.com

Blue Wave for me :) - Great work FF! - Roy Herrod

You guys flippin ROCK - BEX

Why are they all so girly? - Gabe

@Kevin Fox: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6 - Peter

I'm with Gabe: after considering BlueWave, I went with Helvetica, everything else is just girly. I might just stick with my 'stylish' hacks. - Joel Bennett

Yea, flowers and stuff are annoying. Helvetica version should be improved for better spacing. - Burcu Dogan

Thanks, Kol, that's what I was going to ask - if themes conflict with scripts. Sounds like it's cool - heading off to choose one now. I have one stylish userrstyle script and two greasemonkey scripts applied to friendfeed. We'll see if they can all play nice. - Laura Norvig

Laura, how'd it go? - Rochelle

works great - I'm trying helvetica now. It's super clean because I have avatars removed. Me likey. - Laura Norvig

cool... when is that nasty orange "ParisLemon" theme comin? :P - Susan Beebe

This'll make it prettier when I'm using Chrome anyway. :) I think I'll stick with the Stylish scripts and hacks on Firefox, though - I like the typography modifications they provide. When user-generated themes come in, will they be able to modify the typography/spacing, or just the background and colors? Thanks for the options, guys! - Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF

Thanks Bret. Hel-vet a lot better. - E-Advocate Network

Thanks Bret, I love the Helvetica theme, btw, your new avatar is awesome:))) - K.D.

Helvetica. WIN - Jamie

Tres cool. - Jason Toney

It's good that ugliness is no more reason #1 to stop connecting. Next I would like to have is d&d to sort out friends in categories - Michele Costabile

Helvetica... Minimalism. Thank you! :D - Brandon

Thanks, FF team! - Anne Bouey

Good stuff! Thanks! - Rick Cogley

Great! - Shun Fukuzawa from twhirl

Helvetica! Clean:) - Dave

Try this Helvetica - http://userstyles.org/styles... - ThenWang

Bret, BIG MAHALO for the themes! I'm going Hawaiian! Check me out! http://friendfeed.com/AlohaAr... - Arleen Boyd

Helvetica definitely :) - Ahsan Ali aka. Slick

Flowers & Butterfly Corner are good,but a little bit girl stuff.Any good theme for a guy? - Steve Chou

YAY! - Alli Worthington

Coolness! - Ron Bailey

I like the Helvetica, who created it? - Juvenn Woo

Sorry, but were there no "real" designers to push out some mindblowing themes? It´s just a change of color and background? - Hans Kainz

Like those themes. Would be nice though, if they also show up if someone visits my page. Or does it? - Sven

When I click your name, Sven, I get the bamboo theme, which is what I chose. If you have chosen a different theme from that, we know it just remembers yours. It seems to work differently from twitter. - Rick Cogley

It's Helvetica for me! - Rui Pires

I think i'm going bamboo... - diego morelli

Helvetica all the way! I feel like the nytimes.com - Liviu Barbat

@Rick: Thanks. I get the idea. The twitter concept would be nice though. Like personalized version of the FF page. Now, if there were archive links now..... - Sven

Finally! I'll go with freeeeesh!:) - Patrik Johansson

LANjackal to LANjackal's feed, All Things Google, TheNextWeb Forum, Coming Up NOW

Google won't run all the Wave servers | Webware - CNET - http://news.cnet.com/8301-17...

May 29 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

metalerik, Daniel Mietchen, immaterial and 51 other people liked this

"Google has said it will "federate" Wave. That means it will make it possible for anyone to operate their own Wave server and have it communicate with other Wave servers. This is just how e-mail works today: Anyone can run an e-mail server that can send messages to and receive messages from any other e-mail system. The Internet routes messages from server to server." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

19 more comments

But note how many people moved to centralized web based email like yahoo, gmail, etc. - Todd Hoff

I'm just curious as to how identities will be managed across different Wave servers, as well as spam (Spave, or Wam lol?) prevention - LANjackal

The key with federation is that it enables private, public and third party servers that can communicate using wave protocol. Apps on those servers may not be all-wave, but it creates autonomy that corporations and business partners will need. It's a deep, deep rethink of the Web that's been sorely needed. Email is a travesty. - John Blossom

A) Identities will be managed by OpenID identity providers. You'll store your ID with someone, potentially even your own company, but more likely with a Google, or Facebook or Yahoo -most likely someone we "all" trust to ensure that you are your own unique individual. B) John & LANJackal are correct. The wave federation principal makes it such that any and all entities can run their own... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

@guruvan: Isn't all email centralized? :P I'm just saying. And yeah being the first to debut a technology is likely to get you most of the users. However, the article does point out that Wave is likely to be tough to develop for. That will need to change for widespread adoption to be the case. - LANjackal

I think it will be hard for people and companies to get to the point where they can have a client that's equal or better than Google's version of it. We do need more clients than just the Google one. - Peter Stuifzand

I'm not sure that I agree. I think there's plenty of potential client developers that could do an equal or better job. But, what I really think is that where client developers are going to succeed is in the niche products that support Wave. Google's product is likely to be good enough for nearly everyone for personal use, so I don't know that there's a big win for developers in that area, but specialized corporate wave applications and servers are likely to be a big hit. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

@guruvan: +1 on the corporate wave apps. That is, if you have a forward looking IT department. Those are vanishingly rare - LANjackal

Still struggling to get my head around just where this can go. The possibilities are endless. - Jamie

@Jamie: I'm sure you're not the only one, lol. I'm cautiously optimistic, though I'd be really excited if Facebook deployed it atop their messaging/chat system, which is currently horribly limited. I'm from the engineering field where IT departments still use IE6, so I'm not holding my breath to see it in any office I sit in anytime soon :( - LANjackal

Jamie: unless you're a developer or running a company that's in a space that's deeply affected by this, you have plenty of time to get your head around it. Realistically it's going to be at least 18mos before we really see any of this note into corporate environments. Remember, they're still at the point of blocking social media sites, so it's going to take a fundamental shift in attitudes before they'll want to adopt all of the technologies that a wave can encompass. - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from f2p

LANJackal I don't think that this is something that facebook can deploy wave on top of their chat. What they SHOULD do is rip that crap chat out and replace it with wave - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from f2p

@guruvan: Yeah I know. It seems to me though that Facebook deliberately avoids adding advanced capabilities to some of its features to prevent users from being scared off by a steep - for non-tech people - learning curve. As a result, chat is *really* dumbed down, and so is Notes, which has glaringly lacked a WYSIWYG editor since its inception. It's rather saddening :( - LANjackal

Having just watched the wave demo video, and now more intimately understanding the full implications of the idea (and the product) - I stand by my above statements, and my blog post. Facebook needs to catch the wave or get trounced in the marketplace. In my blog I mentioned that FriendFeed is the only one of the social networks that's supremely poised to take advantage of the wave.... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

@guruvan: "Facebook needs to catch the wave" ... Facebook has succeeded *despite* lacking advanced features such as WYSIWYG or proper chat formatting that other services have. Twitter has boomed despite having a featureset that could fit on the back of a business card. Don't get me wrong, Wave is great, but clearly as far as widespread adoption of a technology goes, it's not all about... more... - LANjackal

when can i get Google wave!!! - Joe Azzara

@Joe: Go to Mountain View, CA. Buy bottle of water. Douse self with said bottle ... - LANjackal

LANJackal, you're absolutely right. And I did point out somewhere, that a) Facebook has time, and B) Facebook just raised $200million. That buys them a lot, IMO. But, The fact is, that wave IS going to be easy to develop for, and it IS going to see rapid widespread adoption. (but that IS on the timeframe of 18months or so, so the above points still stand...there is time, but only if... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

this article is a good clarifier. just because it's google, it doesn't mean we should expect them to do all the work and hand it down to us on a silver platter. this requires cooperation of third parties for it to happen well. they're facilitating a change across services by introducing a new protocol, api, and federation based on existing technologies. to help others grasp an... more... - sɹǝɥʇɐǝɟʞɔɐןq

I just hope Wave is going to be simple and user friendly unlike Google Friend Connect. Well, to me anyway. Most of you probably are not having the same troubles but I am having a hard time uploading those two files after downloading them to my computer. It's just giving me a blank screen. Anyone knows why that is? Please message me on Twitter: RONJeremiah thanks a lot! - RON08

Byron McCollum › Likes