Global Nerdy

Google today retired the Writely name and look and feel, replacing it with the cumbersome "Google Docs & Spreadsheets."

Writely users won't notice much in the way of new functionality; Google's main focus has been combining users' lists of their documents and spreadsheets into one view and keying them off their Google account (which also means a single method for sharing documents and spreadsheets with collaborators). The top left corner of your Google pages is starting to get crowded with all the services Google offers: Google, Gmail, Calendar, Photos, Docs & Spreadsheets…

Google bought Writely in March of this year, so this integration took eight months. Pretty speedy. Yahoo!, by comparison, bought Oddpost in July 2004 but it took them until September 2006—over two years—to roll the new Ajax-ified Yahoo! Mail out to the general public. Similarly, other Yahoo! acquisitions like Flickr and del.icio.us still live in splendid isolation from Yahoo!'s other services.

An unfair comparison? Perhaps. Nevertheless, these kinds of comparisons are a big reason why people are saying Yahoo! is quickly losing its edge to Google.

Link.

Tags: Google, Writely, office 2.0, web 2.0, spreadsheets, Yahoo!

New USA BFFL, Libya, is joining Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, and Thailand in the One Laptop Per Child program.

The government of Libya reached an agreement on Tuesday with One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit United States group developing an inexpensive, educational laptop computer, with the goal of supplying machines to all 1.2 million Libyan schoolchildren by June 2008.

Discussions between the One Laptop project and the Libyan government began as part of work being done by the Monitor Group, an international consulting firm co-founded by the economist Michael E. Porter. It is now helping the Libyans develop a national economic plan.

A million Libyan kids will soon be disappointed to find out they can't play Half-Life 2: Episode One.

Link.

Tags: OLPC, Libya, globalization

WidSets: Microcontent for your mobile phone, delivered via widget-type…uh…widgets. The project comes out of Nokia, but is compatible with any Java MIDP 2.0 phone. Widgets—tiny targeted portals for content—seem ideal for mobile form factors. [via O'Reilly Radar]

Tags: widgets, microcontent, mobile, Nokia

“If you believe it’s the future of television, it’s clearly worth $1.6 billion,” Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said of YouTube. “If you believe something else, you could write down maybe it’s not worth much at all.”

So says Uncle Fester, and he's right.

I suppose everyone's got a take on Google's purchase of YouTube, so here's mine: $1.6 billion is an insane amount of money for Google to spend on YouTube, the stand-alone business model, but it's a pretty cheap way to buy yourself into the future of entertainment.

Google's core business is putting an audience in touch with the information they want, and slathering the whole experience with ads that are somehow tuned to the individual reader's interests. They're quickly dominating that business with regards to text, but the web sure isn't limited to alphanumeric characters. Since YouTube is beginning to dominate the way people search for, discover, watch, and share video on the internet, it makes sense for Google to bring that network into the fold. As I've said before, the new network looks more like Google than it does ABC, CBS, or NBC.

And while the existing dominant players in video entertainment (the broadcast and cable networks, and their production partners) slowly adopt digital distribution strategies, I suspect smaller independent producers will start to see the large reach, digital word-of-mouth, searchability, and potential for revenue presented by a Google/YouTube-mediated network as an increasingly interesting option.

Link.

Tags: Google, YouTube, media

SiteKreator: A nifty tool deserving of a spot at DEMO, but with one (to me) flaw: the fact that SiteKreator hosts your site (if you want, you can point your DNS records at their IP addresses). I'd like to see something like SK help me design and manage sites on my own hosts.

Tags: SiteKreator, web design, blogging, Web 2.0

In another bamboozling move, MySpace has now blocked Stickam webcam codes. At the end of last week, the team reported that newly-created Stickam widgets wouldn’t work on MySpace, and yesterday I was forwarded an email (thanks James) from Stickam that claimed the widgets had been “blocked” by MySpace. I assumed that they were being affected by some kind of glitch that prevents Flash embeds working properly – something along the lines of the MySpace update that broke many Flash widgets (it was supposedly a reaction to the MySpace hack). As it turns out, there’s something more sinister afoot: today I logged in to MySpace and realized that all links to Stickam are being blocked. If you try to link to Stickam.com anywhere on your profile – either inserting a widget or using a plain old link, it will be removed. Apparently it’s been this way for a few days. Since only links to Stickam.com are affected, it seems that MySpace is intentionally blocking the service.

Never underestimate the potential for greed to cloud the vision: MySpace could indeed be wondering why they should let some third party build a business on the back of their popularity. Of course, the response would be that MySpace's popularity is, at least in part, due to how these widgets add to the MySpace user's experience, allowing them to truly customize their MySpace pages.

On the other hand, never underestimate the potential for fear to cloud the vision, either: MySpace may not actually care about Stickam's widgets from a competitive perspective—they may very well want to play an open game here. They may, however, care very much about what images may be broadcast through these widgets; imagine the headlines when a parent finds out their teenage kid has been flashing their friends. Whose name do you think the media will sieze on: Stickam or MySpace?

Link.

Tags: Stickam, widgets, MySpace

Speaking with reporters on the opening day of the CEATEC exhibition in Chiba, Japan, Eric Kim, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Home Group, today praised Apple Computer Inc. for successfully integrating computers and consumer electronics with its iPod digital music player and iTunes online store, which use proprietary standards.

However, at the same time, he also called on Japanese consumer electronics makers to adopt open standards centered on Intel's own Viiv platform for PCs running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.

Intel's going to have a lot of these "Lost in Translation" moments, where they attempt to serve (and praise) one small customer (Apple) who has been pummelling a lot of their larger customers in the converging consumer electronics business (Everybody Else).

Take, for example, this business of "open standards." If Viiv was really an open standard, then I could mix and match chip suppliers (swapping out Intel for AMD) and operating systems (Ubuntu Linux rather than Windows XP Media Center or Vista). Sure, Viiv is more open than the iPod/iTunes/iTunes Store system, but not so open as to release a company like Sony or Dell from vendor lock-in with Intel and Microsoft.

Link.

Tags: Intel, Apple, iPod, consumer electronics, open standards, Viiv