Peter › Comments

Dave, urlborg.com has been doing this for more than a year now. Nobody seems to be interested in it... http://www.urlborg.com/a... - Panayotis Vryonis

I read the docs for urlborg but I don't understand what it's doing. Maybe that's why no one seems to be interested. - Dave Winer

You may be right (english is not my native language :-). It "uses your own domain name in place of ub0.cc". Ex.: try shortening http://vrypan.info/test... and you will get a pv0.info short URL (my short domain) instead of the default ub0.cc/... link. May I send you an email with more details? - Panayotis Vryonis

Of course. dave dot winer at gmail dot com - Dave Winer

Using the iPhone OS to power a locked-in and friendly netbook/tablet is Apple at its best. I will line up to buy one - Stephen Foskett

I just don't see Apple releasing a full Mac OS X netbook or tablet. It would have to be either too expensive, too slow, or too big. I think the Air will remain Apple's official small notebook and they'll expand the iPhone platform since it'll run on less. Brings in PA Semi, OpenCL, all that flash... - Stephen Foskett

Apple would never sell a $300 netbook. If they were going to move downmarket, the new Mini would cost $300, too. But they chose to stick with the premium pricing (if not specs) and rake in the money. Truly, the cheapest current OS X capable machine is the Dell Mini 9 with upgraded RAM and storage at about $500. Apple would charge at least $600, and I think they'll go for the iTablet/giant iPod touch for the same $$. And maybe rope Verizon in for go-anywhere wireless and let all hell break loose! - Stephen Foskett

Apple wants a new platform they can own, and they see it in the iPhone/App Store combo. Forget OS X versus Windows - soon it'll be iPhone OS versus everyone else (including OS X!) and consumers will willingly let Apple rule them if it works! - Stephen Foskett

I agree with you Jason as far as my own needs/wants. But most people don't actually want a computer at all. They want a browser, an email device, some games, a calendar, etc. They're the ones who bought 10 million iPhones already, and I think they might just buy 100 million iTablets. Or not. I have a 3COM Audrey sitting on my bookshelf! :-) - Stephen Foskett

I'd rather sell $20 software to 10000 customers - Igor Sereda

I'd rather sell $1 billion software to 1 customer - Ken Norton

i'd rather give software away and spread as widely as possible, but charged for service :) - 9000

I'd rather go with @9000... :-) - AJ Batac

and we do sell HW but technically have no pricetag for SW bundled with - Nokia Tablets :) - A.T.

Is there another service that makes it easy and convenient to store, back up, and share high-quality videos, play them in the browser, download them, tag them, and discuss them? I mean *really* high quality - not like YouTube. If so, I'd love to hear about it. I for one would welcome Flickr Video. - Avi Flax

@Avi Flax: Vimeo? - Urbansheep

I think some of the commenters in the article said it best, it's because you can shoot video with some point and shoots, and when you upload just the photos to Flickr and have to view the video seperately it makes for a broken experience. iPhoto recently added video (presumably for this reason) and it's been nice, but really I am much better at organizing with flickr versus iPhoto. - Dave Dash

To me, it make sense to keep my photos and video together, because they both came off the same camera and often have similar or related content. I wish photo tools such as Picasa had better video support for basic operations such as cropping or color adjusting the video, just as they do for photos. - Paul Buchheit

+1 to everything Paul said. I take my lil' camera to events and take both pics and videos and want to share both with my friends. I currently use and like Picasa, but also quite like Flickr. - Adam Lasnik

I think what Flickr does best in a broad sense is help people share...for now it's sharing photos, but their UI probably wouldn't have to change much to share videos too - Adam Kazwell

There's really smart machine intelligence that makes my Flickr photos geo-aware and if that same utility follows video clips up onto Flickr, viewers can have instant video footage appearing all over a mapped environment. The Yahoo Research lab has done a decent job with Zonetag for still images and that code base is stable enough to use it alongside video tagging. - Bernie Goldbach

Why? Babyvideos, that's why (not a joke). My only question is: why has it taken so long? - Peter

@urbansheep: Thanks for the suggestion! I'd seen Vimeo before but always assumed it was just a YouTube clone. Now I've actually posted a video, I see that's not right. I *really* like that they make the original file available for download. That feature, plus tagging, the clean design, the social aspects, the feeds, the API, etc - does make it seem very much like a Flickr for video. I like! Thanks! - Avi Flax

Now only if they'd make the combined mail social too, that'd be dominance alright. Somehow don't see them pulling it off though. Unless Google starts to stumble. - Peter

Is email not social by design? - Jeremy Zawodny

Jeremy - yes, email is kinda social the way forums are kinda social and blogs are kinda social. But we're figuring out now how to make things much *more* social, that's what I meant :) - Peter

I'm with Jeremy. Email is 100% social. While blogs are often about publishing and forums are about community, email is about direct communication, which is pretty social. Adding a synthetic 'social network' substrate on top of it seems like putting the cart before the plane. - Kevin Fox

Kevin - email isn't that social. My inbox these days has some work related stuff, loads of social network invites and stuff, and an occasional message from a friend, but that's like 1 a week or something, compared to say 50 emails a day that are not from friends. So at least for me, email's not social. Maybe that's just me though. Mail isn't very social either, my (physical) mailbox looks about the same. Bills and spam, and a few times a year some letters or cards. - Peter

Also, compare what we do here, with email. This is more "social" (I always think social just means "like in a bar"), in a way.. no? - Peter

I can't believe Jeremy wrote this non-sense and false point of view ! :o| .oO(local IPs own most number of webmail users) - Olivier ze kat

Peter: Would you agree that email used to be social and has become less so? If so, is grafting a new social layer on top of email a good long term strategy? Granted, that's what's happening as IM is being integrated into email clients, but as IM becomes similarly polluted, how many layers do we go through? Is the root issue that email is less social because it's polluted or because it's inherently unsuitable for the task? - Kevin Fox

It's not obvious to me why it matters whether ymail and hotmail are part of the same company or separate companies. It will change the visual appearance of bar graphs such as this one, but what else? - Paul Buchheit

Well, one thing is that engineers and managers and designers would spend a long time in integration stragedy meetings. If they actually got a major part of the *email* market, not just webmail, they could start with the embrace-and-extend, but I don't think they'd be close to that. - ⓞnor

I agree. The 'strategic benefits' of having a dominant market share in email come when you apply features that become much more useful when both parties of the conversation are using your product (most 'social' features fall in to this category). Unfortunately, this kind of synergy usually means making your product more of a walled garden, which kind of sucks. - Kevin Fox

Come on Jeremy. Bigger does not mean better; unless you are talking about more eyeballs to sell advertisers to. But even then, as Google AdSense shown, context beats number of eyeballs as well. (update): ok, mea culpa here as well. - Nick Dynice

Not to mention the fact that both Yahoo mail and hotmail are slow and crappy compared to gmail. Thanks for improving e-mail as we know it Paul! - Robert Felty

This is going to be very interesting to watch as Yahoo gets absorbed into Microsoft. - Robert Scoble

Holy crap... lots of responses. I never said that bigger was better. Nor do I think this really means anything... but I did find it interesting. As for the "false point of view", I don't get that at all. - Jeremy Zawodny

"I'm just pointing out something that I found interesting." - I'll agree with that Jeremy, I'll take a mea culpa for proposing that it was ""value pipeline creation" !! - Peter Dawson

I'm against it because it goes away when I stop subscribing. For me, the music in my collection is a record of myself. Listening to my old songs evokes memories from my recent or distant past. A subscription service would mean that I stop building my own library, and stop planting the seeds of my own future nostalgia. That and, you know, not wanting my catalog's availability and price to be at the whim of future executives. Also, I don't buy much but I listen to it a lot, so my way's cost effective for me. - Kevin Fox

I think if they could let you choose maybe 5 or 10 songs a month to keep regardless of subscription then I would be willing to pay. I don't need to keep more than one album a month. Usually I get tired of songs a year or 2 after (and let's face it, I don't think iTunes or the iPod are going away in a year or two). - Brandon Titus

@Kevin, what about old movies and TV shows? Is the nostalgia for them lessened because you don't have them on VHS/DVD? I personally find the process of selecting the music I want to own tedious and limiting. I much prefer something like Pandora where I can select things I like and it plays other things that are similar. I would totally subscribe to a music service that just let me play whatever, whenever. A nice recommendation system would be ideal. And it has to work on my SONOS. In Canada. - Dylan Parker

yay for music subscriptions. it's so convenient. - Huy Zing

@Dylan, Yep. I listen to 10-year-old music every day, but I almost never watch 10-year-old TV. Music is far, far, far more replayable than movies. There are some movies I'll watch more than once, and a very few that I'll watch many times, but if I buy a CD It's with the expectation of listening to it at least 40 times or so in my lifetime, if not more. - Kevin Fox

I couldn't have said it any better than Kevin did. My music library is a reflection of who I am, and who I was. I don't listen to new music much anymore and virtually all of the music I buy is used CDs from the 60's - 90's. As for movies, I buy lots of $5 DVDs of movies I have seen before and want to see again. And above all, I insist that my entertainment work in an offline setting. I don't want to rely on the Internet in order to play a song or watch a movie. - Brian Johns

Music subscription augments the purchase model. It's a cost effective way to try music before buying it. Imagine how much money you'd save by not buying stuff you wish wasn't cluttering up your library. It's a good value for people who like to sample a lot of music. 30-second clips just don't cut it. - Amir Gharaat

I would never (I think) pay to rent music.. but I would JUMP to be able to get any music I want for a fixed price, but be able to *keep* the music. Subscription is renting a house, I want to buy my house. - Peter

FWIW, I never really got comfortable with the concept of "buying" music online anyway. I'm not sure why (future format incompatibility, other technical reasons, aversion to new licensing models, etc.) but I never felt comfortable enough with it to actually spend real money that way. I buy most of my stuff used which ends up being cheaper and feels more "secure" to me. And I have no shortage of storage space for 12 cm plastic discs... - Brian Johns

It took forever for stodgy old companies to switch from Lotus to Exchange... will it be any different switching to Google? Maybe even slower since Google isn't thought of as a typical software developer... - Chrimmus Tad

Terry: it will take a very long time, but Google can totally limit the growth that Microsoft is hoping to see. Remember, there are six billion people and only one has been on a computer. The next five are what matters to these tech companies. What's the likelihood that they'll get onto a Microsoft Exchange server? - Robert Scoble

My bets are on a leotard-clad flying Google man that flies into your office window and does an Irish jig. - Dimitri Glazkov

Ummmm... Hello? Zimbra? - Stephen Foskett

But aren't many companies (or some already) working to get rid of email and replace it with collaboration sites/wikis/etc? - Bill Bittner

I doubt the other 5 billion will ever own what we think of as a PC. I guess they'll still probably use email on their iPhone v3 or whatever. ;) - Chrimmus Tad

I totally agree, This change is everything but easy. But it is what people is asking for since years ago. So, no matter how difficult it'd may be, companies, at least, will consider it, and that's what MS should be afraid of. - Hernan Garcia

Whatever it does, I'll be happy to see someone turn the heat on Microsoft. - Yuvi

As bleeding edge tech geeks I think we all presume that everyone likes Gmail. However, this is totally not true. I've been trying to get my wife off Yahoo Mail to Gmail (and she prefers the old vrs too), but she just doesn't like it. "It's OK," she says, but Yahoo mail just works the way she's used to. I think this will be the same for Exchange/Outlook. - Daniel Shaw

@Daniel, yeah that was the case with LotusNotes too. It finally started looking REALLY dated and started smelling... - Chrimmus Tad

I think it's not about likes or dislikes, it's about who will be the next real threat to MS exchange. And I do not see anyone else on the horizont but Gmail. - Hernan Garcia

I tend to agree with Bill Bittner. I think Email, as it exists today, will be replaced with collaboration ... thingies. - Richard

Many of my big clients are still using Notes... I don't think they will switch for a long time. For small business that already uses it, this would allow them to grow and keep using GMail. - Jean-Francois Noel

Any gossip on them hitting the VAR channels? Most my Exchange servers I manage for my clients are 3-5 years old and I'm trying to get them to hold out on upgrading a little longer. I see Email being a totally hosted service in the SMB. The hosted service model is becoming as sophisticated as local software. - Christopher Dickens

What, nobody's biting on the flying-Google-man gossip? - Dimitri Glazkov

Been hearing the same rumblings. - Mike Reynolds

Bill - check out Xobni...threads together Outlook and features even more inbox organization (I've got one more invite, if you're interested) - Martha Shaughnessy

Xobni does look cool. And I did get an invite a while back. But I haven't installed it yet. However, I question IT approving it for use for our whole company. But who knows. - Bill Bittner