Torrents are everywhere!

… in Athens, Greece :-)

Torrents in Athens

welcome safari to the “browser is the platform war”

So… Apple anounced yesterday the availability of Safari 3 (beta) for Windows. Why?

Step back for a moment. We are in the begining of a “browser is the platform” war. Adobe has Apollo. Microsoft is pushing Silverlight. Mozilla has not been strong on this, but XUL is a great platform to develop applications on (see Songbird and, correct me if I’m wrong, Joost).

An now Apple with Safari. You may think that Safari is “just a browser”, but I have the impression that Safari will soon be able to control the environment outside the browser. Did you see that “web2.0 addressbook-in-safari demo”? In iPhone, you can call the number you see in the browser just by clicking on it…

IF iPhone does well, then Safari 3 will be a desirable platform to develop upon. Being able to use Safari as a cross-platform (OS X, Windows, mobile) development platform :-) will be a great asset and considering that iPhone will be closed to third party developers it may have a strong advantage.

unicode fonts for ancient scripts!

George Douros created a set of Unicode fonts that cover the part of the Unicode standard for ancient scripts and symbols.

[via Mi blog lah!]

linearb.jpg

blogging platforms + OpenID

I like the fact you can log in to LiveJournal.com using OpenID but most of all I love that you can leave comments using OpenID. OpenID is so far the best way to “sign” your comments, to prove that a comment is yours and does no belong to someone else using your name or nickname.

This is important for everyone, but in some cases it may be crucial -politicians for example. It makes the platform a safe place to be active (fake identities is a major non-starter for well known people that rely on their fame).

Using OpenID may be a bit geeky now, but services like WordPress.com are starting to provide users with OpenID accounts for free -I know AOL is doing the same thing, Microsoft’s InfoCards will make OpenID even more friendlier for Windows users (it is based on OpenID as far as I know).

Google buys FeedBurner

I was waiting for someone to buy FeeBurner for a long time, but since it looked one of the last really valuable web2.0 properties I expected this someone to be other than Google -Yahoo! to be honest.

But it happened: Google bought Feedburner. Wow!

Expect to see new features in Google Analytics, AdWords, and AdSense some time in the near future.

mahalo.com: wikipedia for search

Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. fame anounced yesterday his latest startup Mahalo.

It’s a search engine with editor-picked results. It’s still in aplha and it may take a couple of years to get to a beta stage. (TechCrunch has all the details).

To me it looks like a wikipedia of search. It could work if Jason manages to attract a critical mass of editors. I’ll wait and see. I have the impression that Jason is betting on something else to make this thing work. A browser plugin, integration with some popular service, I don’t know. But there must be something.

(And to think that I emailed Jason a couple of days ago saying “I know how to make a better search”! -totaly different approach.)

Google Analytics v2.0 (?)

Looks like Google Analytics is rolling out a new version…

Google Analytics Beta

Google Analytics

post-MIX07: how “open” is MS?

I spent last week at MIX07 (my photos).

The thing that impressed me most is the number of times I heard the word “open” at a Microsoft event. WTF? Is Microsoft embrassing open-* ? And if so, what? Open standards? Open Source?

I have the impression that as their “platform” evolves from the OS to Web Services (providing SLAs for Windows Live is a nice move), they realize that 1) they *can* be more open and 2) they have a lot to win by being more open.

So openness is in the Microsoft agenda. The real question is how high? I mean compared to other attributes, qualities, priorities, like “profitability”, “usabilitty”, “backwards compatibility”, etc, how high is “openness”? This is the real question.

what could a Web2.0 virus look like?

What could a web2.0 virul look like? Here is my guess:
- it will be written in Javascript
- it will live inside Google Documents
- when you open the infected document, the js will look up your Google contacts, create an infected document and invite all your contacts to collaborate on it.
- when one of the persons invited opens the infected document, the virus will replicate, and so on.

How could a virus like this be damaging?
- it could delete your mails, your documents, contacts, etc.
- it could do some URL rewriting to add a specific associate id to links to amazon and other on-line stores.
- it could launch a distributed DoS attack agains a site…

Replace Google with Microsoft Live above to get a more destructive effect.

I’m pretty sure this will happen sooner or later. And then we will start looking for the Open Web2.0 platform that has fewer virusses, etc… :-)

JotSpot is Google now.

Google has acquired Jotspot!

I don’t know if they really “needed” JotSpot (which is a great company btw), or they wanted their people, or they just wanted eliminate someone else bought a great “web office app”, but this is *very* interesting!