Stuart Robinson’s Weblog

Good post from mashable that helps explain why my instinct on new projects is to push for feature removal:

Twitter belongs to a new breed of services, perhaps accidentally discovered, that win by doing less, not more. It’s a foundation upon which hundreds of new applications were built, yet, in itself, it is little more than an API for a simple one-to-many short message broadcast system. I, myself, have thrown my hands up in frustration and tried to find an alternative I can stick with - Pownce, Plurk, and countless others. Unfortunately, it seems, all these services are too good to be a viable alternative.

Seems like Worse is Better is infecting the web.

Smartening up the default user avatar icon in social apps is not only a waste of time but in fact
counterproductive. The uglier the default the more likely it will be changed, usually the desired behavior.

Fred Wilson has an example of how one site (any ideas which?) takes it that one step further.

Brilliant.

in Manhattan, a group of slightly older editors cleaned out their desks in a more conventional fashion at the offices of The New York Times Company. Most of them walked around in a state of shock: The Times’ board of directors had just voted to shut down the newspaper’s foundering Web division, after a loss of $30 million in less than a year

I guess that helps to explain the pay-wall madness to follow.

“We learned a thing or two,” said Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin, only half-jokingly, at a recent raucous shareholder meeting. “Gangsta rap-yes. World Wide Web-no.”

That really doesn’t help explain the AOL-TW madness to follow.

The year? 1996

What Viacom were thinking of paying for last.fm: $450 million

Yahoo CEO Semel’s compensation for the last 5 years: $550 million

Widgets are the explosive charges laid under the walled gardens

The beauty of widgets is not in their technology, which is - at best - a hack, a hole through the browser security model. The beauty is in their ability to subvert central control. They are, essentially, the decentralisation of features. Meaning: identity becomes key, whoever hosts identity can easily allow their users to add the widgets they desire to expose their digital self.

• OpenID - getting us closer to fixing one of the biggest usability issues remaining (sign-up)
• Mobile web - predicted every year for at least the last 7 or 8, but now with flat-rate access and high-res devices, all we need are killer-apps (and they are starting to emerge)
• Widgets - not so big for the over 30s, but massive with the kids
• Offline web apps - just hacks for now, but with Firefox 3 support things should pick up quickly

I have at least 3 dead yahoo accounts and no motivation to sign up for a new one. Why?

1. When signing up for yahoo you have to give a ton of personal info. To protect my privacy, I lie.
2. If you forget your password, you have to answer your personal question and give your date of birth. I forget what my false date of birth was.

Sure, I could make a note of the date of birth somewhere. By why bother? Well, now that flickr is starting to suck I may have to.

Update [8th Feb]: looks like I spoke a little too soon