Global Nerdy

I met Bubbleshare CEO Albert Lai in Toronto in 1995, back when he was still a high school kid. I was at my first job fresh out of Crazy Go Nuts University (that's where I met George) and Albert was there doing an internship, seeing what it was like working a new media company that was in the newfangled business of developing interactive media applications. We got along, probably because we were the two guys at the company who came from a technical, let's-make-some-cool-tech-and-money mindset rather than the prevailing arts-degree “my art above all else” vibe. There seemed to be general unease about doing projects for “big business”. Hippies.

I remember later reading about Internet.com's acquisition of the MyDesktop network of sites; he was one of the three teens who made the sale.

A few years later, I ran into him again, this time in a location thousands of miles away: in San Jose, at a gathering of P2P software developers, just prior to the first O'Reilly P2P conference (which would later morph to become the Emerging Tech conference). It turns out that we ended up living in the same condo complex in San Francisco.

A few years after that, I bumped into him again as he was promoting Bubbleshare, an online photo-sharing web application. Bubbleshare is pretty simple to use and could teach Flickr a thing or two. I kept running into him at various TorCamp/BarCamp/DemoCamp-related events, and then…nothing.

Albert usually makes his presence known, so any silence coming from him usually means that he's hard at work on his latest project. That turned out to be the case: the news that Bubbleshare has been acquired has been reported by local tech writers Mathew Ingram and Mark Evans. The acquisition has been made by Toronto-based Kaboose, which runs a network of family-oriented sites.

Mark Evans aptly points out that Bubbleshare always seemed more like a feature than a business; their fit with Kaboose seems like a natural one — family-oriented site and very user friendly online photo album.

My congratulations to Albert and the rest of the Bubbleshare crew. You'll have to tell me all about it at the next DemoCamp!

Links

• Bubbleshare finally gets acquired (Mathew Ingram)
• Kaboose Picks Up Bubbleshare (Mark Evans)
• Speaking of Family Photo Fun, Kaboose Just Acquired BubbleShare (Jeneane Sessum)

If you've been following the blog shooting war between the boosters of XML and JSON and have been scratching your head as to which one to use, Dare “Carnage4Life” Obasanjo has written a great article with an excellent executive summary:

If you're too busy to read them, here's the executive summary. JSON is a better fit for Web services that power Web mashups and AJAX widgets due to the fact…that it is essentially serialized Javascript objects which makes it fit better client side scripting which is primarily done in Javascript. That's it. XML will never fit the bill as well for these scenarios without changes to the existing browser ecosystem which I doubt are forthcoming anytime soon.

Link

Does anyone remember the Simpsons episode in which Doctor Hibbert says ruefully “We've given the word 'mob' a bad name”?

There's a reason that the phrase “design by committee” is an insult, and Kathy Sierra does a good job covering why in her latest posting to Creating Passionate Users titled The Dumbness of Crowds.

Kathy's prowess at explaining concepts and then making them stick in your head is second to none. She's in fine form with this article, which she closes with a memorable catchphrase that's sure to end up on a Successories poster someday:

No matter what, I believe that in our quest to exploit the “We” in Web, we must not sacrifice the “I” in Internet.

Link

In his blog, The Intuitive Life Business Blog, Dave Taylor writes that the ethical non-issue over the Microsoft laptop giveaway is a red herring. By giving away laptops with Vista pre-installed, they do an end-run around two major issues:

• Installation problems
• Hardware requirements problems

“That's the only conclusion I can draw,” he writes, “because if it were a breeze to upgrade from WinXP to Windows Vista, with all your apps backwards compatible, all your data intact, and all your files untouched, you'd be happy to install Vista on your existing PC and enjoy the new OS.”

In fact, I had exactly those problems with Release Candidate 1: it took three separate attempts to upgrade my office desktop from XP to Vista, and my upgrade became a full install (complete with the loss of the data on my XP system) since the installer crashed in mid-process. As for performance issues, I've decided to take that desktop back to XP because it feels rather sluggish under Vista. I don't think that the desktop's processor is an issue — it's a 3.2 GHz P4 — but rather than RAM, which is at a half-gig versus the full gig in the Ferrari laptop they sent me.

I think Dave's hit the nail right on the head with his observations.

Link

You're probably aware — by way of my personal blog — that I am a rock and pop accordion player. It's more than just a muscial instrument to me: it's proven to be a great conversation-starter in all sorts of situations, including tech conferences. One of my favourite memories of those heady days of the Bubble was when I ended up leading a parade of geeks with my accordion up Broadway to the Slashdot/VA Linux funding party, singing The Clash's Should I Stay or Should I Go all along the way. I've come to refer to it as “social hardware”.

It looks as though I can try a new accordion party trick at the next Microsoft event (assuming I ever get invited to them again): playing Windows XP alerts on the accordion. MusicThing has an article with a video of a guy named “TheCanCollector123” who shows how to play XP's musical alerts on a piano keyboard. You'll hear your favourite hits, such as:

• Chime
• MSN message received
• AIM message received
• GoogleTalk message received
• Tada

I suppose I could one-up him by demonstrating how to play Vista sounds on a piano keyboard…

Link

Yesterday, I did an interview with CityNews' Amber MacArthur at the Tucows offices about the Microsoft/Acer/Edleman laptop giveaway, and it was shown on the 6:00 news in Toronto last night. This marks Global Nerdy's first mention on television:

In case you missed last night's news or don't live within the area served by CityTV, you can still catch the piece. The entire segment was posted on the CityNews International site, and as of this morning, it's still the top story.

It's always interesting to see the interview get shaved down. Amber and CityNews camera guy Dave were at the office for over an hour, they probably shot about 15 minutes' worth of material (10 of which was the interview) and the final news segment is just under 80 seconds.

The interview includes some shots of me at my desk, which gives the curious a chance to see the environment in which I work every day. It's a setup that I imagine is typical for a startup veteran: a warehouse converted into an office, a fair bit of desk space with computers, tech books and zines (note the copy of Make magazine) and trinkets galore, especially Squishy Cows:

If the name CityNews sounds familiar, it's probably because of its association with CityTV, a pioneering independent television station that got its start in Toronto. CityTV got covered in Wired during its more relevant period, way back in 1993.

My thanks to Amber for the interview — you know how much I love doing these things!

Link

I'd like to take a moment to thank Rich "Topix" Skrenta for his recent post about Google, and how they've come to rule the web era of computing. Thanks to Rich, I no longer have to fumble my way through my own posts, clumsily attempting to explain why I believe Google will always whip Yahoo!, and all other pretenders. Rich has done it with considerably more clarity and force than I've been able to muster:

Google has won both the online search and advertising markets. They hold a considerable technological lead, both with algorithms as well as their astonishing web-scale computing platform. Beyond this, however, network effects around their industry position and brand will prevent any competitor from capturing market share from them — even if it were possible to match their technology platform.

To paraphrase an old comment about IBM, made during its 30 year dominance of the enterprise mainframe market, Google is not your competition, Google is the environment. Online businesses which struggle against this new reality will pay opportunity costs both in online advertising revenue as well as product success.

Competitors such as Yahoo should quickly move to align themselves with this inevitability. Yahoo could add an extra $1.5B to their revenue overnight by conceding monetization to Google and becoming a distribution partner for Adwords, as Ask Jeeves did.

So, if you find yourself, as I have, temped to explain Google's dominance using phrases like "a broker between users and resources," or "new advertising platform," then do yourself a favor: stop. Just point people to this post and move on.

Tags: Google, Rich Skrenta