03/09/2010

A quote about Google’s Android

25/11/2009 By Ralf 4 Comments


android_error_131I recently stumbled across this quote somewhere on the AppleInsider website. I’ve got nothing to add, so here we go:

“Google only wants to give phone makers and providers enough code to allow them to deliver their own customized, distinguished products so that it can continue its core business of selling ads and paid search to mobile users. Those partners actually want to have control over differentiated, compelling features that they can use to sell their Android phones in competition with other Android makers.

So rather than Android being a platform being pushed forward by Google, it will largely be advanced by Motorola, HTC, Sony Ericsson, and other makers who all have a history of making dozens of phones with terrible user interfaces and bizarre bundled apps and hardware features that are poorly implemented. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Opinion Tagged With: Android

Calling Linus Torvalds to build a new social network aka Facebook acquires FriendFeed.

10/08/2009 By Ralf 6 Comments

nlc_kleinToday marks an important day in the short history of social networks or – as you might prefer to call it – the real-time web: Facebook announced the definitive agreement to acquire FriendFeed. As the FriendFeed founders have put it, they’ve accepted Facebook’s friend request.

While the internet is a buzz about these breaking news, it’s sad news for me.

A quick glimpse at FriendFeed right after the announcement it appears to me, that the majority of FriendFeeders seem to dislike the idea of being forced to become Facebook users for what FriendFeed delivered to them, as well; some have even started to cancel their accounts.

It’s very likely only a matter of time until Facebook kills FriendFeed as a product, slightly “adjusts” content ownership policies and starts using the FriendFeed history for behavioral analysis and “targeted” ads. We’ve all seen this before.

To me it reemphasizes the need for a community owned, community driven, non-commercial platform. This might sound stupid, but it has worked before with programming and scripting languages, version control solutions and even entire operating systems. There’s no obvious reason why it shouldn’t work for stuff that forms the real-time web.

Having sold my own company, which did enterprise communication solutions, to Alcatel in 2008, I can very much understand the founders motivation to agree to the deal. But this only strengthens my point: At a certain time any founder will be offered enough money, to agree to the deal of his lifetime. And even if they claim not to, we might see Twitter being acquired in the near future, too.

Ultimately the only solution might be, to ask Linus Torvalds to do us one more favor and kick off a real-time web platform, that let’s us build a social network that can stand commercial interests and ask the Gates Foundation to fund it. If Linda and Bill don’t come to our rescue, we might ask users to voluntarily donate in favor of guaranteed privacy.

I’d love to see how that “business model” would work out.

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Filed Under: Opinion Tagged With: facebook, FriendFeed, linus torvalds

Calling all Twitter tool providers to implement OAuth

01/06/2009 By Ralf 4 Comments

OAuth has rightly gained lots of popularity these days and even given the current session fixation issues, I’m a strong fan of the delegated access control it promotes and helps implementing.

One of the prominent service providers offering OAuth based authentication is… Twitter. As more and more people are using Twitter as a personal and professional communication tool, I’m wondering why many of the additional third party services have not yet implemented OAuth based authentication. I don’t know about you but I’m getting slightly annoyed when an independent (often poorly designed) web site asks me to enter my full Twitter credentials. They all promise to not cache or store my username and password but still, it’s does not feel right. Some don’t even use an SSL encrypted HTTP connection for retrieving my secret user information.

[Read more...]

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Filed Under: Opinion Tagged With: OAuth, Twitter

P2P Interview #10

01/06/2009 By Ralf Leave a Comment

I’ve recently had the pleasure to get interviewed by Laurent Francois (LinkedIn link), Head of 360° Digital Influence Hub at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. The interview has been published in English and French.

Thank you Laurent and keep up the good work!

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Filed Under: Opinion Tagged With: 24100.NET, Interview, Opinion

What I’d like atebits to add to Tweetie

01/05/2009 By Ralf 24 Comments

Tweetie for the iPhone (direct iTunes Link) and for the Mac are by far my two most favorite twitter clients. The Mac version that has been release just two weeks ago has replaced the Adobe AIR powered TweetDeck and besides some version 1.0 quirks I’m pretty happy with it.

As atebits – the maker of both – does not seem to listen nor respond to their two twitter accounts (@atebits and @tweetie), I thought I might start a list of enhancement ideas here. A blog post is also a bit more sticky as compared to the flow of tweets on the @atebits timeline.

I understand that some of these requests might not be ideally suited for the less-than-ideal twitter API but maybe the great folks at atebits find a way to work around it.

Tweetie for the iPhone

  • Grey out the “Direct Message” button if the user is not following me. Letting me type in a message and telling me that it cannot be send afterwards is just not the right way of doing it. Maybe it’s been done this way because of the way the twitter API is structured, but it still needs to be fixed.
     
  • Add a “Resend on reconnect” option if the user tries to send a message but the iPhone lost the data connect.
     
  • Add the typical iPhone “new message badge” to the “Mentions” and “Messages” tabs and maybe also to the Tweetie home screen icon itself. Upcoming Push Notifications might be of great help here and open up a whole new world of possibilities.
     
  • Think about introducing the option to auto-add a language hash tag (#en, #de) to tweets and allow client-side filtering by language.
     
  • You might even go further: Have the client automagically find out the language of tweets and allow filtering. (For as long, as twitter does not introduce language as a first class citizen to their entity model.)
  • Register a custom URL scheme (think tw://…) to allow other iPhone apps to invoke Tweetie and submit tweets. I’d love to see integration in e.g. Byline and other RSS readers that would allow direct tweet of links to articles of interest. 

Tweetie for the Mac

  • Integrate the followers/following list into the native interface instead of launching the twitter.com website. If users run multiple twitter accounts, it currently gets confusing. You might have that on your list anyway but wanted to rush with releasing the initial version. That’s ok. Now simply fix it, please.
     
  • Add an option to have the dock icon indicating activity and unread tweets (take a look at Adium and simply copy the implementation).

That’s it so far. I’ll keep expanding this list as more ideas will come to my mind. Feel free to add yours to the comments.

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Filed Under: Opinion Tagged With: atebits, tweetie