John Bell: Blog
It's like Twitter on Ritalin
Passing Through: Less Than Free Software
Nov 18th
Image by Federico Fieni
I then asked my friend, “so why would they ever use the Google (non open source) license version.” (EDIT: One of the commenters below pointed out that all Android is open source, and the Google apps pack, including the GPS, is licensed on top. Doesn’t change the argument, but wanted the correct data included here.) Here was the big punch line – because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version! That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the “less than free” business model. This is a remarkable card to play. Because of its dominance in search, Google has ad rates that blow away the competition. To compete at an equally “less than free” price point, Symbian or windows mobile would need to subsidize. Double ouch!!
From the “Google is the new Microsoft” department: Bill Gurley writes about Google’s bundling offer of free turn-by-turn navigation with their Android mobile OS, and how it’s a case of Google using their dominance as leverage to pay people to adopt their product. Hmm…where have I heard this before? Though the practice isn’t quite as new as Gurley makes it sound, the article is interesting because it goes into the relationships Google established and broke off as it’s Maps service developed. Again, there’s a familiar template: Buy data and expertise until you can ramp up your own service that competes with the people you were just partnered with at a level that ensures you will win.
I do have to wonder, though, if building critical data applications on a framework that is dependent upon advertising dollars is a good idea. Look at what has happened to journalism, a socially-critical industry that became tied to advertising money–the almost inevitable response to increased competition has been the development of outlets like Fox and MSNBC. Google’s less than free model may be tying people to their version of Android for the moment, but that will only last as long as it takes for somebody to figure out how to make more money using the true open source version of Android than they can get from Google’s kickbacks. When the competition inevitably increases, what happens then? Can Google continue to make money without coloring their data to make whatever constituents give them the most cash happy? With other mapping companies having been put out of business in the interim, it could well turn into another case of money-generated reality.
via Google Redefines Disruption: The “Less Than Free” Business Model « abovethecrowd.com.
Passing Through: Bus-Tops
Nov 11th
Bus.tops – a city wide canvas for sharing the art of our streets, our communities, our London, our experience.
Bus.tops – if you can’t tell from the slide above that I’m sure made much more sense with people talking over it – is a series of LED panels that are going to be attached to the top of bus stops around London for people to view from the second floor of the famous double-decker buses. The content will come from a number of artists and programmers, and will presumably be made interactive using the interfaces shown in the slide. It seems like an interesting way to make a piece that is unique to London by utilizing a resource that wouldn’t be available anywhere else in the world (or at least, not as famously available.) I might question how much interaction would be possible during a quick stop of the bus, but that’s a challenge for the artists to work out, not me. I’m just glad it wasn’t turned into ad space.
via a project to transform London’s Bus journeys | Bus-Tops.
Passing Through: Radioactivity is the Path to Power
Oct 30th
Researching the history of criticality accidents made me wonder how accidental exposure to massive levels of radiation became the de rigueur method of achieving superhero-dom. And, while I suppose comic book writers would have a well-formed opinion or two on this, I decided to ask a group of people whose point of view I’d never seen–actual nuclear scientists.
via The Blue Flash: Nuclear Accidents and the Origins of Superhero Origins — Boing Boing.
Passing Through: Hat for the Insufficiently Happy
Oct 29th
[Lauren] has created a facial conditioning device dubbed the Happiness Hat. The hat measures a sensor at the wearer’s cheek to determine if the wearer is smiling. When the hat does detects the wearer is not smiling, it activates a servo that prods the wearer.
Ok. I’m disturbed. Maybe it’s just because I read too much Sluggy.
Passing Through: Portable Data in the Cloud
Oct 20th
[…] many web-based services make it difficult for you to export your data. Worse, they’ll charge you a fee for the privilege. Some offer APIs — a bonus if you’re technically astute, but a solution that leaves the average user short on options.
To prevent such headaches, Google recently launched the Data Liberation Front, an initiative within the company to ensure every one of its products has a clear, easy option for users to export their data in bulk and take their business elsewhere.
Very encouraging interview up on Webmonkey with Brian Fitzpatrick, a Google engineering manager who’s leading a team that’s making sure all the data you give to Google can actually be retrieved and ported to another service. (Ok, not all the data…I suspect things like discovering your AdSense will be curiously absent since Google probably doesn’t consider it your data. Though they do at least let you opt out now.) The ability to download all of your data is great, and I hope that other online services follow suit. Of course, there are leaks in the system (the interview mentions that metadata isn’t quite as easy to export as actual data) but it’s a start.
via Pack Up Your Data and Leave Whenever You Want It s the New Rule of the Cloud — Webmonkey.
Passing Through: Unbreak Your Site on the iPhone
Oct 7th
Photo by magic_quote
The site asks for the URL of your RSS feed, a name for the site, and an optional icon. In return, it offers an iPhone-ized URL and a snippet of HTML you can put in your website’s code to redirect iPhones automatically. The optimized version of the site is complete with large links, buttons and scrolling lists suitable for thumbs and index fingers instead of mouse pointers.
This is a useful little feed-transform tool that takes any RSS feed and reformats it for use on an iPhone. The difference between using Intersquash and just loading the feed into an RSS reader on the iPhone is that Intersquash is a developer tool; the “snippet of HTML” they give you is actually a Javascript that detects the iPhone’s user-agent string and redirects any visitors using an iPhone to Intersquash’s HTMLized version of your RSS. It’s not necessarily the best way to handle iPhone visitors (much less other mobile users) but it is at least a fast way to handle them. You didn’t have anything important on your site that’s not going in the RSS feed anyway, right?
via Autoformat Your Website for iPhones With Intersquash — Webmonkey.
Passing Through: 1stfans at the Brooklyn Museum
Sep 30th
The Brooklyn Museum has a program running where they’re trying to use social media to expand the scope of their supporters:
The big change we’ve made is taking something that is all marketing (membership) and turned it into something that is about personal interactions and growing the community. We’ve gone from a one-directional membership experience—we send you stuff again and again, and then you show up–to a triangular relationship where Shelley and I get to know the 1stfans, they get to know us, and they get to know each other.
The idea here is that they have a certain number of people who are willing to pay for a traditional membership and a certain number of people who use their free services, but they want to create a middle tier that’s based on exclusive content. In this case, the exclusive content is partially being distributed via social media: a private Facebook group, private Twitter feed, etc. They chose a price point of $20 and launched from there.
This program shows how hard it is to draw an audience to exclusive content. It launched in Dec. 2008 and was targeted at 10,000 people who participate in the museum’s free First Saturday events. As of February, when the linked article was written, the paid program had 272 members. I’m not sure what the total number is now, but since the exclusive 1stfans Twitter account only has 218 followers as of this morning, it seems like it’s remained a very small percentage of the total audience the museum was targeting. It seems to be a reminder that having an online audience by no means implies that you have a monetizable audience.
via Museum 2.0: 1stfans: An Audience-Specific Membership Program at the Brooklyn Museum.
EDIT: Will (from the linked interview) responds to this post in the comments with some interesting thoughts and points out a bad assumption on my part, you should take a look at those for a closer perspective on this.
Passing Through: Changing blog platforms without losing PageRank
Sep 30th
How to Switch from Blogger to WordPress Without Losing Google Traffic — Step by Step Guide.
Saw this post a little while ago on moving from Blogger to a custom WordPress install. It has a neat little misuse of Blogger’s template system to create a custom 301 redirect template on Blogspot. Kind of a nice idea since it’s not just redirecting every page of the old blog to the front page of that new one the way that Blogger’s default migration tool does. I’m not quite as confident that it will maintain PageRank seamlessly, but it’s certainly a better solution than the default tools.
