Folks, you have every right to be upset with me this week, my writing simply ceased, I was on vacation, at least in terms of creating longer form posts. However, Signal did not take the week off, and here are the week’s offerings:
Friday Signal: Let’s Do Launch
Thursday Signal: Highest Order Bit
Weds. Signal: What’s our Policy?
Thanks for reading. I promise to be back soon.
Every day I spend an hour or two curating a set of links that I find provocative, useful, or important, adding a few lines of commentary to boot. It’s called Signal, and you can consume it in three ways – as an email newsletter (sign up on the Signal Home Page in the upper right hand corner), in your RSS reader, or on the web.
For those of you who like to click on links, here are the last three Signals for your enjoyment:
Weds Signal: Get Out There And Be Counted!
Tuesday Signal: Control, Alter, Delete
Monday Signal: Summertime, and The Linkin’ Is Easy…
Thanks for reading…and I hope my August semi-break, coming soon, will allow me to write longer pieces here with more frequency. I’ve been hard at work on some Web 2 Summit projects, expect more on that late next month.
For all 186K of you loverly RSS readers, here are the past five Signals:
Friday Signal: Is Apple Evil? Is the Web Over? Is Privacy Dead? Is This Thing On?!
Thursday Signal: Why I Love My Job, Again.
Weds. Signal: The Numbers Tell The Story
Tuesday Signal: I Got Yer Policy Right Here
Monday Signal: Google Buys, Android Flys
If you squint, it almost looks like a weekly newsmagazine!
For all 185K of you RSS readers out there, here are the past week or so of Signals:
Monday Signal: Finally, a Slow Weekend. Sort Of.
Friday Signal: Who Needs Basketball? We Have Signal.
Weds. Signal: More Noise, Same Signal
Tuesday Signal: A Fourth of News
Thanks for reading, all of you. I’m still stunned at the growth of my RSS feed, from 130K or so to 185K in just a few months. I don’t deserve it, given how sparse my postings have been.
As I do every three Signals or so, here are the links for you RSS readers out there. And for all you readers trying to decipher what I’m on about, there are hints all over these roundups. Not that you’re paying attention that closely, but still, the threads are there.
For all you RSS consumers out there wondering what I do late at night:
Thursday Signal: Still About Facebook
Weds. Signal: Facebook Losing Face?
Tuesday Signal: A Walk in the Park
Thanks for reading….
Here’s the link for those of you who like to keep up with my media/marketing reading over the weekend.
From my Friday Signal over at FM’s blog:
….It’s a very big year for Microsoft, in terms of the initiatives the company is launching, in particular in the consumer space (its business/commercial space is already cranking out tons of products, but the company’s focus on consumer products has hit a tipping point). Natal, Bing (updated version is coming soon), Windows Phone 7, Office 2010, the company’s cloud initiative (which has sigificant consumer angles)…it’s quite a lot.
…Recall three of the major trends that I predicted for 2010: One, that someone will create an open gaming platform; two, that Microsoft will take second place in search share (from Yahoo); and three, that we’ll see a major advance in the user interface of the web.
Here’s how Microsoft might address those opportunities, in order: Xbox, Bing, and Natal (not to mention Pivot and stuff like PhotoSynth). Now, imagine how these all might work together. Xbox is more than a gaming platform, it’s a major portal to social networking and engagement in the living room (there are more than 20 million users of Xbox Live, for example). Combined with Natal, you’ve got a new gestural interface to the digital world. And there is no reason why you can’t use Natal to surf the web on your TV (and, in time, your PC), given the right UI and apps. Were Microsoft to decide to open up a web-savvy API and SDK into the Xbox and let its legions of developers innovate on that interface, imagine what might occur. And, of course, Bing would be the search engine of choice for this living room environment, driving share. Sounds like a stretch? All the pieces are there. It’s now about whether the company can take many hands, and make great work. (more)
….is the topic of my Thursday Signal over at the FM blog. From it:
….the architecture of “apps” is broken, and marketers can have a role in fixing it.
Broken? But it’s just getting started, right? Well, yes – and no. Apps are great, but they lack any number of characteristics that we’ve come to expect from a truly “Web 2″ world. First (and certainly foremost), apps are not connected, in the main, to other apps. They are single use-case driven – a fact that often makes them compelling. But however useful a focused app may be, it can only get more useful if it could communicate with other apps, the way that great web services do. After all, a core tenet of the Web 2 movement was APIs and web services. YouTube would never have become a signal service of the web without being embeddable onto blogs. And blogs would never have risen without RSS.
Second, apps, for the most part, live in “AppWorlds” that are closed and vertically integrated (at least for Facebook and Apple). That means they don’t live in an open, market-driven environment, and are taxed by the owners of distribution channels even before they reach the consumer. That’s not an ecosystem that will drive second and third orders of innovation.
Third, apps live in a world of clutter….. (more)
Over at the FM blog…forgive me the light posting here this week. A lot of offline writing and travel keeping me busy. Stay tuned for more regular posting shortly….
