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Kinja Launches (No Fooling, I think….)

Meg and Nick's creation launched today. It's a "blog of blogs." A "blog portal." AN "RSS reader (of sorts) for people who don't know what RSS is…" The Times has a piece here. Nick blogs the background here. Congrats to them both!…


Meg and Nick’s creation launched today. It’s a “blog of blogs.” A “blog portal.” AN “RSS reader (of sorts) for people who don’t know what RSS is…”
The Times has a piece here.
Nick blogs the background here.
Congrats to them both!

4 Comments on Kinja Launches (No Fooling, I think….)

Gmail: Elaborate Fraud, Or…

Google announced GMail late yesterday, and the media, Wired News and CNet and the New York Times, bought it. So did The Register, which said that the company is using April Fools to launch the service for real. The Times' John Markoff – no slouch he – wrote up the…

gmail_logoGoogle announced GMail late yesterday, and the media, Wired News and CNet and the New York Times, bought it. So did The Register, which said that the company is using April Fools to launch the service for real. The Times’ John Markoff – no slouch he – wrote up the story totally straight citing unnamed sources “familiar with the service.” AP and Reuters moved wire stories….

But one can seriously debate whether this is a joke, folks (this is, of course, as is this Google job posting). Sure, there may be seeds of truth, like the patent application the company filed to serve email ads, or the fact that such a service makes a lot of sense for Google, and has been widely rumored. Or even the one gigabyte storage approach – never have to delete an email again – (sounds like Mirror Worlds…).Slashdotters are having a field day debating this one…turning up the fact that Gmail.com is registered to Google, for example…(this has been known for a while…)

But this has got to be an April Fool’s Joke. A very believable one, one that in the long run may come true, but a joke. Note an employee’s posting on his blog, under the subject “haha” and noting “I love this time of year.” And the release itself is simply too sophomoric to be anything but a joke. If indeed this is an elaborate ruse (including fake quotes and interviews from Wayne Rosing) I imagine the press will be most unhappy with the folks at the Googleplex. Journalists these days tend to have no sense of humor when it comes to their own gullibility. Unless, of course, they were all in on it…which has its own set of issues. Fun, no matter how you slice it…

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The Other Shoe Finally Drops: Google Files S-1

If Google published its S-1 in book form, it'd be #1 on Amazon for weeks. But you can read it for free here, because today, Google filed for the IPO of the decade. The details: – Big News: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and VCs Sequoia and KPCB together own 95%…

IPOIf Google published its S-1 in book form, it’d be #1 on Amazon for weeks. But you can read it for free here, because today, Google filed for the IPO of the decade. The details:

– Big News: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and VCs Sequoia and KPCB together own 95% of the company. The remaining 5% is split between early angels and a lava lamp wholesaler who “management admits got a pretty good barter deal back in 1998.”

– The employee stock option plan, long believed to be the impetus to a public filing, has been dumped in favor of a private shadow equity plan modeled after the Economist magazine. “It’s the only magazine we read that hasn’t put us on the cover,” Page explained. “We kind of hoped this hat tip might change that.”

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