Outside the Lines

Dave McClure is becoming the Web version of a streetwise ghetto talker. In his latest post, Dave makes some good points, amid the street talk, in his attempt to define Web 3.0 and identify the winners in the race to colonize the Web.

In his day job, Dave is an investor and adviser to Web start-ups, and the more mild-mannered conference chair for Graphing Social Patterns, and a co-chair of the Web 2.0 Expo, which takes place April 22 through 25 in San Francisco.

I agree with Dave that the entities managing personal profile infrastructure, such as user … Read more

The echo chamber of the blogosphere is concerned about too much refactored content and a lack of original thought in the raging river of blog posts flowing into feed readers and Web crawlers (see Techmeme). There are many worse problems in the world than what is sometimes unpleasantly called blogorrhea. You could be a blogger in China dancing around government censorship.

Internet and Web 2.0 technologies have allowed anyone to be a writer, publisher, and pundit just by clicking the publish button. Along with the flood of interesting and insightful content comes the boring and feckless.

It's up … Read more

The Microsoft-Yahoo mating dance or proposed shotgun wedding continues to drag out. Microsoft persists in saying nice things about Yahoo and outlining the reasons why the acquisition of $45 billion to $50 billion still makes sense (going after the high-profit-margin money with search and ads).

Yahoo recently outlined the reasons why Microsoft should pay more than $31 per share, citing a projected doubling of operating cash flow from $1.9 billion to $3.7 by 2010.

At the same time, as Mike Arrington reports, Yahoo is making efforts to ensure that the most valuable talent at the company doesn't … Read more

In this Super Techies interview, I talk with Marc Benioff about his career in the software industry. Benioff is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Salesforce.com, which has led the business software-as-a-service revolution with its CRM-based platform. Salesforce.com is expecting to reach the $1 billion revenue threshold in its 2009 fiscal year, ending January 31, 2009.

In the interview, Benioff discusses his early work developing games for the TRS 80, Apple II, and Commodore 64, and his turn as a summer intern at Apple in 1984, coding in assembly language for the Macintosh.

Benioff also shares what he … Read more

In this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss current events--Comcast and BitTorrent teaming up, Oracle's latest earnings, recent moves at Facebook, and Adobe Systems' introduction of Photoshop for the cloud.

For reference, here are links to some of the coverage:

BitTorrent president: Comcast agreement is a 'win'

Comcast and BitTorrent bury the hatchet

Oracle new license revenue triggers IT spending worries

Facebook goes hyper-viral with 'People You May Know'

Facebook ignores OpenSocial, embraces Windows Live Contacts API

Review: Photoshop Express beta

Facebook has about 67 million members. With the new "People You May Know" feature, the number of connections per member will skyrocket, extending the reach and stickiness of Facebook's social graph.

People You May Know finds people within six degrees or so of separation and suggests them as potential friends. It appears that the threshold is set at four, meaning you are connected to four of the same people as the suggested "friend." FriendFeed has taken a somewhat similar approach for recommending new people to "follow."

This type of recommendation engine, which taps … Read more

Sorting out the overload of e-mail is one of the mostly unsolved problems of computing. The first step is analyzing your in-box, which is what Google developer Mihai Parparita has done with Mail Trends, a program that lets users analyze and visualize their inbox.

Mail Trends, which is similar to Google Reader Trends, extracts data from IMAP servers and displays statistics such as distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week, and time of day; distribution by message size; a breakdown of top senders, recipients, and mailing lists; distribution of senders, recipients, and mailing lists over time; and … Read more

Now that Yahoo has finally and officially signed on to the OpenSocial API bandwagon (see Techmeme), the company that Microsoft might buy has joined with MySpace.com and Google to create the OpenSocial Foundation. Facebook is still missing in action, considering whether joining the OpenSocial Foundation is in the best interests of its membership--or its own platform.

OpenSocial provides a useful piece of functionality, solving a developer problem by allowing applications developed with the APIs to run on different services without modification--write once, play many. A photo-sharing application could tap into the social graphs of Orkut, Bebo, MySpace, Ning, or … Read more

Stock photography houses have been under siege from the millions of amateurs shooting quality photos and making them available for free under Creative Commons licenses on sites like Flickr. PicApp hopes to give the stock photo houses a way to monetize their copyrighted photos across the Web.

Developed by an Israeli company, PicScout, PicApp embeds images like a video into a page, using Flash, and includes an advertisement. The revenue is shared with the stock photo houses, such as Corbis or Getty Images, representing the photographers. PicApp options include embedding photos on Web pages as well as bookmarking and e-mailing … Read more