Facebook and Microsoft

~ rbonini

I was tempted to tell everyone who thought 15 big b’s for Facebook was excessive to look at Google’s $100 Billion valuation at IPO.

But then, it struck me, rather forcefully I might add, that Google and Facebook are completely unrelated in terms of price. Google, despite being mostly a search page, actually gets stuff done. Look at Google Earth, Product Search, Their Wifi  work both in San Francisco and with the FCC with regards to buying that spectrum, Desktop Search, Google Co-Op, Reader, Analytics, and, much, much more. The GooglePlex is a daily gathering of the brightest dev’s on the planet.

Google, in other words, has  plenty of reasons to justify its price tag.

What, pray, has Facebook done?

The question stands, but Kara Swisher beat me to the observation already (albeit from a slightly different angle):

Facebook is not Google: Although many in the tech sector make the comparison to the search giant, it is simply incorrect.

Is Facebook like Yahoo a bit? Certainly. A newfangled version of AOL? Absolutely! A very well done media play with all sorts of interactive bells and whistles hanging off of it? Yes, ma’am.

Indeed, it is growing its media business nicely, with $30 million in profits on $150 million in revenue.

But in comparative terms to the search giant, Facebook is a lemonade stand. Google brought in $3.9 billion in revenue in just the second quarter alone and, um, is increasing its dominance over the search sector in a mighty scary way.

Facebook, on the other hand, gets half its annual revenue right now from a sweetheart guaranteed revenue deal with, drum roll, Microsoft. No matter what either Facebook or Microsoft says, it is a money-losing deal for Microsoft so far.

How do I know this? According to many sources, Google is struggling to make ends meet in its own sweetheart guaranteed ad deal with Facebook rival MySpace, which is much larger, and Google has the best monetization engine out there.

FeedHub

~ rbonini

I might as well jump in here with the rest of the crowd.

Scoble blogged about it. He says:

TechMeme actually works great. Tracks thousands of news feeds and every few minutes it remeasures which ones are most important. Problem is that TechMeme only covers tech news. Its sister sites cover gossip, or regular news/politics, or baseball.

But what about 800 custom feeds that you hand picked?

Well, that’s what FeedHub is aimed at.

You put your feeds into it and FeedHub will pick the best stuff to show you out of those feeds.

Sounds good. And I do need help with my feeds ( I never manage to read everything). So I’m trying it out.

So far I’ve only revived 5 posts from all my feeds that FeedHub picked. They’ve not been the ones I would jump at, but it is supposed to learn your reading habits.

Read/WriteWeb also seems to be positive about the service, albeit with the following clarification:

My problem with such services in the past has been that the output, a single feed, is not very well integrated into a user’s daily RSS reading experience. Ideally I’d like a service like FeedHub to be integrated into Bloglines or Google Reader itself (or whatever RSS Reader you use). In other words, a user ideally should be able to filter their feeds within their RSS Reader of choice. Perhaps we’ll see that happen in the near future.

I agree with them 100%. In fact I’d go as far as to say that Google should by the company NOW. Although Google Reader is out of preschool  ( 🙂 ) beta, Google need something to blow the competition out of the water, like they’ve done with search.

RWW elaborates on how FeedHub works:

Feedhub is built on mSpoke’s “mPower Adaptive Personalization Engine”, which the company has a patent pending on. The key to training a Feedhub feed is the concept of a ‘meme’ – popularized in the tech blogging world by news aggregator Techmeme. FeedHub will discover new memes for you and learn “meme weights” by noticing which posts you click on and interact with

As usual, there’s more at RRW about FeedHub (I was about to leech the entire post, but thought he better of it)

So I’m trying it out. I’m going to see how it compares with my linkblog over time. naturally, there wont be a perfect match, but I’m looking at how good the personalization engine is.

Vista Desktop Manager

~ rbonini

Seriously, you have to ask yourself why Microsoft didn’t think of this:

[via Scott Hanselman]

I think its a testament to the legions of Windows developers the world over who wont take Redmond lack of design inspiration for an answer (compared to an unnamed Computer Company).

Get it here. I am so downloading it.

It also shows how much Microsoft left out of Vista (presumably under pressure to RTM it before it was ready).

Earth to WinFS. Where are you????????? 

iPhone Price Cut – Economics at Work

~ rbonini

I just stumbled upon this article in Reason Magazine ( be sure to read the rest of the article):

Sure, it’s good economics—even if it’s bad PR, Apple did manage to sell 1 million iPhones in 74 days-but is it fair? Is it just? To find out, we need look no farther than question posed by rubber bracelets everywhere: WWJD? Not What Would Jobs Do?, of course, since we already know: he’d give in to the whiners and offer $100 credits good for Apple products in the future.

The parable of the workers in the vineyard is the Bible’s final word on this point, and takes a much harder line than Steve Jobs. Jesus tells the story of a group of workers looking for employment. A few are hired in the morning for one denarius. As the day drags on, more and more workers were hired, with the last batch brought to the field only at the eleventh hour. Then it comes time to cash out:

The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These men who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’

“But he answered one of them, ‘Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money?”

As one writer put it: “if you’re still upset about ‘paying too much’ for your iPhone, take it up with the man upstairs.”

Or maybe this is all just an extraordinarily elaborate PR strategy after all. Consider a customer we’ll call “Katherine.” She would never wait in line for a gadget. She’s just not quite geeky/status-seeky enough. And she doesn’t track consumer electronics prices, nor does she browse in Best Buy or the Apple store for fun. But thanks to the hullabaloo about the price drop, she now knows that Apple phones are “cheap.” Hard to imagine the fact would have penetrated her consciousness so quickly or so thoroughly as it has without a controversy to reinforce the message.

Perhaps Steve Jobs did have the parable of the workers in the vineyard in mind after all. After all, the tale wraps up with that famous phrase, certainly applicable to iPhone prices today: “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

Windows Home Server UK Retail (Updated)

~ rbonini ~ 3 Comments

Well. I was about to go on buy the WHS OEM and lo and behold Novatech had sold out. 43 are expected in on 25 September.

I’m not in the mood to wait that long so I headed over to amazon.co.uk ( everyone’s favorite online retailer) and still nothing there.  Annoying. Very, very Annoying.  I figure amazon has more clout than Novatech and could get its hands on a nice pile of packs. There is not even a place holder page. So Amazon had better gets its act together.

I headed over to ebuyer.com. As of this writing 18 are on hand. For £40 more. I wont relate the invective now streaming through my mind. Well…

Anyone know where else I can get this without giving an arm and a leg?

Update: Blue Solutions have 16 coming in this week. I’ve already ordered. Thanks Philip for the tip.

Update 2 (27/09/07): Blue Solutions have already sold all their stock. I’m told they’ll be shipping at the beginning of next week. Which means I’ll finally have my hands on the WHS RTM next week.

Dell Laptop

~ rbonini ~ 3 Comments

Here’s what I got:

Inspiron 6400 Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core T2080 Processor (1.73GHz,533MHz,1MB L2 cache)

Wide Sreen 15.4″ WXGA (1280×800) TFT Display

Memory Dual-Channel 1024MB (2×512) 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Hard Drive 120GB Serial ATA (5400 RPM)

Fixed Internal 8X DVD+/-RW Drive including software, for Vista only

Battery Primary 9 cell 85W/HR LI-ION

Integrated Intel Media Accelerator 950

Dell Wireless 1390 802.11b/g 54Mbps Mini-PCI Wireless Card, for Dual Core Processors

English – Vista Business

English Microsoft Works 8.0 (Word Processor, Database) with Recovery CD

Not entirely sure about the memory. Last time I played with Vista it took 800Mb sitting idle – no programs running.  But hey, operating an a shoestring budget is never pretty. And I can always use Ready Boost if I need to.

Performance isn’t really an issue. I’ve got all the power I need.

And why on earth do OEM’s insist on putting Works on every damned machine they build. I’ve got  Works installed on the Compaq I got 2 years ago and have never ONCE used it.

And I figured that I might as well get Vista since the service Pack is out soon. And I never really got playing around with the beta beyond admiring the eyecandy.

Delivery date says on or before the 26th. We’ll see.

A Word about Link Blogs

~ rbonini

Scoble, in his latest post, reflects on what a resource his link blog has become as a database of all things technological.

It has almost no noise, just much of the best blogging that’s been done over the past year in the technology field. But, whenever I think about moving feeds to a new reader I start thinking of that database and start thinking about the value it has to me as a way to search back on what caught my eye over the past year.

 

Then it struck me that since I’ve subscribed to said link blog over the past year, and since I use Google Reader, I can access that same database as well. The addition of search by the Reader team just makes it better. It has some invaluable stuff in it. I share stuff in it more than in all my other feeds. I find plenty of bloggable materiel in there as well.

Which brings me to the question: What is a link blog?

I know, it sounds idiotic, like something web 1.0 guys would ask.  But think of it. Do you a use a link blog to share posts with others? Do you use a link blog as reference for yourself, to point to things that catch your eye? Do you use it a reference, but don’t mind if others share it?

The way we see the utility of a link blog determines what we will use a link blog for, which in turn determines the quality of our link blogs.

On the one hand if we take it seriously and only add stuff that is truly worthy of being shared, not just stuff loosely related to what we blog about. In other words:Are you in the business of simply observing the world go by, or is the welfare of your blog and link blog taken seriously? Do we/you intend for our/your link blog to be a resource – personal or public?

On the other hand, Scoble can be easy on his link blog – he’s posted cat photo’s there more than once. Do we fill it with stuff that’s not really useful ( and I am definitely a cat person)? Do we linkblog just for the sake of it.

Lets take a look at the old school link blogers I have in my reading list.

Larkware News: They put their links in blog posts. They’re up to 1227 posts today. lets see what yesterdays post post looks like:

Software

Information

Community

 

Simple. Clean and neat. The three categories are particularly useful allowing you to skip right to the meat of the post. The RSS Feed is here.

Christopher Steen. Same deal. His latest Link Listing:

  • LINQ to SQL (Part 9 – Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the control) [Via: ScottGu ]
  • Obscure ASP.NET Problem – AJAX Control Toolkit, CollapsiblePanelExtender, Image controls pages loading more than once…….

    • RSS feed here.

    Kent Newsome posts “Evening Reading”. its not so much a link listing as a running commentary of the stuff he’s read. An excerpt from his latest:

    Larry Borsato talks about a recent focus group in which college students said MySpace is over, Facebook might not last much longer, and their best source for information is word of mouth.  Paul Stamatiou is one college guy who has chilled on Facebook.  Thank goodness there’s all those grown-up bloggers to keep the hype going.

    He posts this in the middle of his other stuff in stead of a completely separate feed. I tend to give it is quick scan and see if there is anything interesting, or else ignore it completely.

    RSS feed here.

    Sam Gentile often posts his “New and Notable”. He’s up to number 180.

    SOA/ESB

    WF

    The great thing here is that they’re grouped by subject matter. You can skip right to what you’re interested in. RSS feed here.

    After that review, I still much prefer Google Reader’s Shared items. All they need next is a taging for your shared items. ( I think someone’s already suggested that somewhere in Scoble’s link blog 🙂 ).

    But one thing is sure – link blogs are invaluable tools to finding information because  the information has already been used and promoted as useful.

    There ain’t nothing like an oft used piece of information.

    So. My link blog has a new lease on life. (RSS feed here)

    PS Scoble says TechCrunch aren’t happy about linkblogs. I think this a first for a content producer to complain about link blogs.