Lurch
Wisdom teeth are gone, which restores my health and mind. The PAX video game convention was fun again, with another impressive batch of indie Xbox games and a swell Jonathan Coulton / Paul and Storm concert. Second year of college starts in two weeks. My startup idea is remains ever-present in my mind since the start of 2009, but I have sadly neglected to work on it. I have been watching the web churn this summer, amusing me to no end. Off the top of my head:
- Friendfeed halts.
- Acquired by Facebook. The site remains up for now, but development has all but ended. It breaks my heart and other fans of the service. Friendfeed set a new bar in social networking, one that I hope to see reached again in open source form.
- Developers are swept up in Tornado, a Python web server and framework just released.
- The real time search engine has frequent outages.
- Twitter is uninteresting, underpowered, and over-hyped, but admittedly a great marketing tool.
- Facebook dominates, but still feels closed. Facebook Pages and apps are a poor imitation of the web. Kudos, though, on adding search and tagging.
- OAuth is beating OpenID. I don't have numbers, but Twitter's support is a large factor. Facebook Connect must be stopped.
- Yahoo search did seppuku, losing developer respect. Yahoo can no longer be distinguished from AOL.
- Google is busy as ever.
- Wave looms, threatening email itself and any network that does not integrate it.
- PubSubHubbub nicely hedges the real time strategy. Once it has fully caught on, you could use a feed aggregator to have a real time stream of your dealings across on the web.
- Google Voice and Android picking up users and hardware (more excited about Nokia's Maemo, though).
- Chromium gets online bookmark storage, themes, extensions, a Mac version, and an upcoming OS. If it's good enough, we won't need Android.
- Major comment systems are pulling in remote comments now. Disqus deftly used the BackType API for this feature, while JS-Kit came up with a similar offering.
- CrowdFusion shows potential.
- Posterous gets themes, cementing its main feature set: email input, social output, and now personalization.
So there is no shortage of avenues to communicate. Smartphones and laptops connected to wi-fi and 3G turn the tables. It's now disconnecting that takes effort. I look forward to remaining connected and seeing where this whole internet thing goes. Thank you, Posterous, for the generous hosting. I don't intend on messing with Blogger, Wordpress, nor Tumblr again. Also, major respect to all programmers innovating on the web.
