Apple is known for their stellar commercials and amazing design when it comes to advertising products. Google has taken their lead and released a really dang good commercial for their browser Chrome. While it probably won’t get commercialized anytime soon it definitely has potential.
Open Office, Songbird and Identi.ca. All three of these services/applications have something in common. No, it’s not what each of them do… but rather what they represent. A simple clone.
Open Office – Microsoft Office 2003
Songbird – iTunes
Identica – Twitter
I am all about free alternatives, trust me on this fact… I am a poor teenager scrambling for a quarter. This does not mean I am going to sacrifice innovation for re-creation. There are many open source apps that simply clone the functionalism or simply the look of proprietary applications claiming innovation because they are open source. Wrong, quite the opposite.
Just because you opened up some code doesn’t mean anyone CARES. The consumer is all about flash, dazzle and speed. The newer the better… no matter what the price is. The iPhone/iPod are great examples of this.
The current open source applications that I have mentioned above are mimicking old designs and concepts. Open Office is still working with the same old task bars while Office 2007 has moved to the new and innovative ribbon interface. Songbird is the exact same as iTunes the main difference is leveraging a plug-in platform. Identi.ca is …
Hotmail has been the de facto choice for email accounts since… god knows when. While my first email address wasn’t through Hotmail (it was through go.com YEARS ago) many of my friends had an email address through hotmail to use the infamously infused IM client MSN Messenger. It seems as if the goliath of web based email is severely losing traction and losing it fast. With such a strong brand name how could this of possibly happened?
I don’t know a single person outside of the tech world who knows what the hell Windows Live IS, and honestly I had no idea for a while there also. It is basically an umbrella name for multiple products and while this is great in theory (you’re creating constant brand recgonition) the way Microsoft went about this was horrid.
When people signed up for a new account via hotmail.com they thought they were getting a hotmail address, rather they were getting a live address which I have first hand experience confused people beyond belief. Redirecting people to a Live web address and simply stating they were signing up for a Live email instead of …
The internet has… changed people. People on the web expect everything to be free, while the thought of paying for something is near blasphemy. Even I at times have seriously questioned what is the need for me to pay for anything on the web? Then I remember this funny concept, a business needs to make money.
Today labels are in a tough spot. The web is allowing for extreme ease of sharing music content through bit torrents, playlists and even email. Downloading an illegal track of Katy Perry’s can be as simple as a google search. This is effectively loss revenue for labels. In effect your stealing, but that is ok?
Michael Arrington seems to think so, even going as far as to say he should be paid to illegally download and distribute music. Michael suffers from what I like to call the “free” syndrome. For years people have bought music in a hard copy format. But as we become more dependent on the web and our expectation is that everything should be free has spilled over to music. So now labels are expected to make something out of nothing, even though there …
Ars Technica recently did an interview with Gmail’s product manager, Todd Jackson, about Google Labs, the ever-present beta and future of Gmail. Ars Technica just did a fabulous job interviewing Jackson, so it would be redundant to reiterate and re-blog what he said. What I want to discuss right now is something in particular that Jackson said, which could be considered a very valid point about the term “beta”.
If the badge [beta] were dropped, would anything really change? We’ll still launch features at the same rate as we have been, or hopefully even faster. – Todd Jackson
The beauty of applications is their malleable quality: they can be constantly and consistently updated, tweaked or changed at nearly any time. Major updates can be pushed within seconds to a user base of millions and the browsers themselves don’t care about specific website updates, because they blindly display whatever content is presented. Also, the developer doesn’t have to worry about people updating to the latest version or people having to install more files on their computer. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved. Web applications and, in essence, …
Robert Scoble and Louis Gray are all about Friendfeed and how you can actually have a “real” conversation. Dismissing Twitter as a conventional way to make conversation. Now in some ways I agree, but to an extent Twitter is a viable way to communicate with friends. One service though is bridging that gap between “real” conversation and tweets and its called Tiny Chat.
The home page of Tiny Chat is fairly straight forward.. no ads just a simple button that allows you to create a chat room. Once clicking on the button you simply wait a few seconds and you are given a Tiny Chat url to share with your Twitter friends. Once in to the room you are immediatly presented with the option to choose a nickname, with this comes two options.
1. You can simply enter in your Nickname
2. Or enter in your Twitter username/password. WARNING: There is really no valid reason for Tiny Chat to have your username/password. The only reason they ask for this information is to automatically tweet a message from your account asking your …