Damien Mulley

Distributed Denial of Service Attack.

I have about 9 invites for Jaiku and 3 for Jango if anyone wants one. Jaiku is the Google owned much better competitor to Twitter while Jango is a bit like Pandora I suppose. (Social Internet Radio they call it) Social is the new buzzword afterall. An Internet radio station catered to your tastes and the tastes of others. Review here. If you want access to either leave a comment and I’ll send invites to the address you leave the comment with.

Technorati rank of 1!!!!!!

Nice one Donncha.

So Aidan Doran from Ace Internet Marketing was on to me again saying I’ll get an apology and said he got legal advice about my “copywrite” claims from his legal team and they are at odds with what I say. Perhaps they are confused about copyright and copywrite. Hint: They are not the same. I wonder is the legal team outsourced too and I wonder was their opinion actually their own or did they lift that from a blog? The same way my content was lifted and stolen and put on the Ace Internet Marketing blog. Aidan said I can’t republish the email he sent me so I won’t because I’ll honour that, not because I’m legally obliged. Instead I’ll summarise it.

Aidan also in this latest email goes on to suggest that people who work for Ace (his words) are gunning for me now because when Ace stole my content and I wrote about it, it hurt their livelihoods and they are pissed over it. Apparently all of these people now are going to get me. This is my reading of the email.

Aidan, dear child, telling me that your employees/associates are out to get me and it is an issue between me and them, is a threat from Ace Internet Marketing in my books. One I will of course pass on to the correct people to deal with this. You’d have been better off keeping your mouth shut but as has been shown from your numerous childish anonymous comments as “Paul” and your constant harassing emails, this is something that you just don’t seem to be able to do. (I’ll now expect another rebuke via the emailternet)

History repeats and repeats and repeats.

Write once, run anywhere. I’ve heard this before right? I’m not too impressed that Google has built a framework to do this. Wowwee, they must have used half the brains in the company to do that or maybe half a brain. So now application developers can write an application and it can run anywhere. That’ll revitalise Orkut so will it? How exactly will an app that runs on Orkut benefit someone on mySpace or Bebo? Will it not mean that mySpace could actually take Bebo users now? All this does is make it easier to deploy Facebook/Social Network apps somewhere else but these app developers wanted to do that anyway and could not because the other companies didn’t have APIs or free ones (Bebo has a hefty charge to plug into it). And since when did programming for Facebook become difficult? How many days will the Super Adult Poke developer save now because of this?

All of these apps are run off a third-party server so most of the work programming the apps is done on your own server not Facebook, not mySpace, not Bebo. If these guys each brought out their own APIs, you’d just get a smart kid that would create an “Export to” app to allow your app to run on these sites. So Google’s allowed a smart 15 year old to spend more time on his Olsen Twins fake porn collection instead. Billion dollar companies are nice like that.

Also, OpenSocial won’t actually mean write once, run anywhere as each site can make their own proprietary calls too so an application writer could very well have to write an app that will only work on one site and have to change it for each additional site as Marc Andreessen explains:

nothing will prevent containers from implementing additional Javascript or web services APIs to provide additional functionality to developers. Open Social app developers can therefore choose to stay “onroad” and have their apps run in any Open Social container, or go “offroad” for one or more specific containers to do special things. Open Social standardizes common functionality but doesn’t prohibit innovation.

Think about it. Every site will have their own wants as will Google. Are they all given equal say as to what the “standard” API will cater for and what the future changes will be? It’ll be like the bloody United Nations as politics and agendas come out to play.

And why exactly if the Funwall App is now available on Bebo and mySpace, will I go back to them? It’s not about the apps, they might increase usage of the sites but Facebook is more than the mostly unused apps that are available for install.

A universal framework is just Esperanto. All these social networking countries still have their own culture, giving them apps that are on other sites might entertain some users but will it keep them from being dragged into Facebook? Facebook existed before their app platform, the opening of which got 1000s of geeks to make crappy things for Facebook which no doubt helped the hype. If Google helps all these other sites create their “Social Graphs” fantastic too. Maybe it’ll increase the time existing people spend on Bebo and mySpace and Vox. Or maybe they’ll be so overloaded with each one that’ll give up on all but one and hey they can now afford to leave Bebo as they can move their data to Orkut and all their apps. Thanks Google!

Nice quote from Russell Beattie too:

Would people be jumping on this bandwagon so readily if it was Microsoft unilaterally coming up with an API, holding secret meetings geared towards undercutting the market leader, and then making sure that only those anointed partners get a head start on launch day by making sure a key part of the API isn’t released – even in alpha. (It obviously exists already, all the partners have that spec and even sample code, I’m sure. The rest of us don’t get access yet, until the GOOG says otherwise).

One thing would have impressed me and maybe this is coming. Make OpenSocial a level 3 platform. This is what I’d expect Google to do. Google will be the runtime environment for all Open Social apps meaning the app creator doesn’t even need to have a backend for their application. Have they got their datacentres ready for that? Update:(While this was still in the timed queue) Sam Sethi is reporting that Google will in fact host your apps. Ooooh.

You know how Facebook should counter? Open up access to their new social advertising platform which competes against adsense.