It’s been amusing listening to the FaceBook fan club telling us how it will conquer all.
Of course this is never going to happen, Open systems always triumph over walled gardens and FaceBook is a walled garden.
So I was shocked when Microsoft paid $240m for a 1.7% share of FaceBook, valuing the company at $15bn.
The day after Microsoft purchased their FaceBook shares, Google announced their OpenSocial initiative.
OpenSocial is an attempt to break down the walls around the social networking sites (and to eliminate FaceBook as a serious threat).
Microsoft probably wasn’t worried, after all they had beaten Google out of a FaceBook share (at great cost) and the sites who were partnering with the OpenSocial initiative were considered underdogs to FaceBooks alpha.
That Changed today.
MySpace to join Google OpenSocial
MySpace, the number one social networking site (yes, it is still bigger) has jumped on board the OpenSocial band wagon, Apparently Google and MySpace have been in negotiations for over a year. Talk about having an ace up your sleeve.
This is a massive coup for Google,
With OpenSocial it will be possible to have a distributed social network across each of the hosts (partners) ending the walled garden syndrome that has plagued social networking.
Given the list of OpenSocial Partners MySpace, Six Apart, Beebo, Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle who will now be part of the same social network I think FaceBook is now on the defensive, they really have no choice but to join OpenSocial. After all, Who’s going to join a social networking site where you cannot network with people on other sites?
Apparently the Peoples Republic of Cork website has been identified as a site that may harm your computer.
This is a great site I visit regularly with no negative side effects, I think the site admin needs to contact Google and resolve this issue as it will reduce traffic to the site.
StopBadWare.org provides the abilities to see reports on sites marked as harmful and for site administrators to ask for a review on the sites inclusion in the clearing house.
The same site also appears as a paid link, Should Google advertise sites it has identified as dangerous ?
Clicking on the top search result which includes the warning brings you to a warning page which gives you another chance to change your mind before continuing on to the site, Interestingly when clicking on the sponsored link you are immediately sent to the PeoplesRepublicOfCork.com site with no warning.
Every Administrator should be making sure that their site has not been included in this blacklist.
The Coming of Gmail
When Google released GMail they eroded the two primary advantages of the desktop email client, Storage capacity and POP access.
Before GMail, web based email restricted users storage capacity to a couple of megabytes, users could access their POP accounts but only if they paid a premium for this service, Gmail allocates a couple of gigabytes and are continually increasing it, and Gmail allows users to access a number of POP accounts free of charge.
How long will it be before GMail uses GEARS to enable it’s use off line?
Add this to all the other advantages inherent in web based email clients, why would anyone still want to use a desktop email client?
Not everyone has broadband
Not everyone has a fast internet connection and using web based email on a slow connection is painful.
What they need is the solution which requires the lowest possible bandwidth.
Enter the desktop email client.
An email client such as Thunder Bird can be configured to only download the headers while leaving the rest of the message on the server, the user can then decided what important enough to download in full. This is an extremely efficient use of bandwidth.
The Future
I don’t think desktop email clients have much of a future, as high speed internet connections become even more common the need for desktop email clients will decrease and they will become a niche product.
Maybe this is an indication of what will happen to other types of desktop applications in future, Just look at Google Apps for a hint of what is possible.
Conclusive proof of my theory that the Google search engine is intelligent, as defined by the Turing test 
The results of the query just need to be re-formatted.
What is the answer to life the universe and everything ?
Look at the top result.
This looks like a good idea for a mashup, some kind of service that can use Google results to generate a conversation with a person.
