Lookout, the search plug-in which I wrote about announced today that they have been this week was acquired by Microsoft.
I’m hoping that this turns out to be a good thing but the fact that it appears to have been rolled into the MSN Search team instead of into the Office team is somewhat worrisome.
Or, “Why Furl, Lookout, and Google put the smackdown on Backflip, Outlook, and Yahoo”
In a comment to my recent post on Furl, Scott Leslie of Ed Tech Post responded:
“FURL is cool enough, I guess, but I’ve been a bit surprised by the hype surrounding it, given that web-based bookmark managers have been around for a while now”
Scott’s right of course, and I’ve used a gazillion bookmark managers in my day. They all had the same problem: they’re bookmark managers. Managing bookmarks sucks. I don’t want to manage bookmarks; I want to manage information that interests me.
Bookmark managers almost all suffer from the same conceptual flaw . . . which also happens to be the same conceptual flaw that has plagued organization of other information as well, such as emails.
So for many years (as my old buds on the FutureCulture mailing list will attest) I’ve moaned about the problems I have with bookmarks (aka “favorites” if you prefer Microsoft branding). Most importantly, I hated the fact that my bookmarks on my work machine were separate from my bookmarks on my home machine. Why isn’t this information hosted online so I can access it from anyplace.
I’ve tried various solutions over the years. Recently, a glimmer of hope came from a Mozilla Firefox extension, Bookmark Synchronizer which let me keep the bookmarks in sync between multiple machines.
But now I’m hooked on Furl, a free service. You stick a “Furl It!” bookmark in your browser toolbar, and click that when you want to archive a page. It pops up a window that lets you add the link, an excerpt you’ve highlighted, comments, and keywords to your Furl account. Links can be categorized (in multiple categories). Plus, Furl caches a copy of the page and indexes it, so the page and metadata are searchable. You can import/export your links in various browser bookmark formats or raw XML.
If that’s not enough, you can rate the pages you save & they’ve just built in a recommendation engine to suggest new pages, based on your ratings — found a gazillion neat pages and tools through that today. Also, Furl links are share-able. See mine. And you can subscribe via RSS to someone’s public Furl bookmarks.
Whew. That’s a lot of features.
The Furl It! bookmarklet has been giving Mozilla Firefox 0.8 some trouble, though. So far that’s been the only hiccup. Long term? We’ll see. Furl has no revenue model right now (though I expect Google Ads could generate them some money). In any event, if we’re lucky we’ll see a spate of Furl-like services arise.
Now pardon me while I go kick myself in the ass for not finding a way to implement this idea when I had it six or seven years ago.
300 Images From 1800 Sites: a beautiful little compendium of common website interface elements (e.g. arrows, mail icons, bullets, etc.). Link via boing boing.
Social Networking Services Meta List. It’s like portals or online stores in 1999. Looks like it’s time for a shakeout.
First, good old search, then a heirarchical directory, then shopping via Froogle, then email, and now Google is allowing the creation of groups/mailing lists: Google Groups 2 Beta.
The old Google Groups was just an interface to Usenet. This extends it by allowing people to create their own, non-Usenet online discussion groups that can also double as an email listserve.
Reports are beginning to leak in that Skype, the free peer-to-peer voice-over-IP (VoIP) slash instant-messaging service, will launch a pay service connecting Skype VoIP to the plain old telephone system.
Didn’t someone write about this back in the fall? Oh wait — that was me! To wit:
At some point, to gain market, Skype needs to open a gateway between the IP network and the telephone network (which is apparently in the plans). At that point, I would lay bets that Skype ceases to be free and falls into pretty much the same realm as Net2Phone and DialPad.
That’s from the Skype Hype is Tripe entry, that, incidentally, is consistently one of the top ten entry points for this site. I think a lot of people find their way here via searches that land them on that link. It’s on page 5 of Google search for “skype,” but the third for “skype hype.”
AOL is moving away from their proprietary markup language.
AOL’s online service has always been a walled garden. At one point even, AOL users could only send email to other AOL users and were unable to view any content on the Interent — just content that lived inside AOL’s proprietary network. Since the late 90’s there’s been a hole in the wall that lets AOL users get out to the Web (and lets email come in), but all the content in the AOL garden was still authored in their own proprietary markup language.
That’s changing. AOL has started buiding their content in and migrating their services to HTML (though it will be interesting to see how standards-compliant they are).
Why now? Here’s the real kicker from the Post article:
“subscribers will soon be able to sign onto AOL.com from any computer without installing AOL’s special software and get most of the company’s content.”
That’s a big deal (and not only because it means no more CDs in the mail), but because it means their business model is shifting to be more directly competitive with Yahoo and MSN (advertising-funded services with premium content subscriptions). I’m sure there’ll still be a client-side app, if for no other reason than it’s a great ease-of-use benefit to newbies. But there are fewer and fewer online newbies in America these days, so that market advantage is shrinking.
A walled garden works great as a business model as long as what’s inside the garden is more attractive than what’s outside. For years, though, pretty much anything you could get inside AOL was available for free or cheaper on the Internet. When the flowers in the walled garden cease to be unique, it’s time for the walls to come down.
Jason Kottke posts an interesting entry called GooOS, the Google Operating System which extends on these three paragraphs from the Topix.net weblog:
Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It’s running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It’s looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.
While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.
This computer is running the world’s top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world’s biggest computer and most advanced operating system?
Kottke’s right — that’s a brilliant summary of Google’s business model.
Stephen Downes has posted an interesting essay, The Semantic Social Network, which I haven’t read as thoroughly as I should have, but it looks pretty well thought out.
Stephen says, “It is perhaps a bit of an oversimplification to say this, but the problem could be summarized with the following observation: the blogging network and RSS link content, but not identities, while the social software network links identities, but not content.”
I think his proposal is getting close to my dream social network, which is really an unbounded recommendation network.