DeWitt Clinton

Still alive, just hard at work.

The Flock browser alpha was released last night. Flock is based on the Mozilla codebase and runs on all the popular operating systems (Linux, Mac OSX, Windows). I tried out the OSX build and I absolutely love what they are trying to do. Flock is integrating some of my favorite Web 2.0 concepts directly into the browsing experience. Social bookmarks, social image sharing, blogging, tagging, etc. It is absolutely worth a download just to take a look at what people can do when they are exploring the community browsing space. Someday Flock may be an excellent day-to-day browser of choice for the subset of people that care about these things. Now that Firefox is mainstream, it is nice to have a place to go to stay ahead of the curve.

Do search engines need ombudsmen? The rationale is that search engines, like newspapers, have a tremendous amount of responsibility. However, unlike newspapers, search engines are not necessarily cognizant of their role as a public service. When a search engine makes editorial or technical decisions that impact what the public can find, shouldn’t the be a voice within the company that is there to represent the public interest? The public interest is not always going to be 100% aligned with the corporate interest. I’m not sure this need has been as pressing in any other non-media outlet, ever. But then again, perhaps search is media. Just as Barry Diller or Rupert Murdoch.

Speaking of corporate interests, congrats to our friends at Google on their fantastic earnings announcement. They continue to grow this space through innovation and providing a product that people want to use. For an area in which it is very difficult to create artifical barriers to entry, their explosive quarter-after-quarter growth is something to be admired and respected.

And on the subject of ombudsmen, (I’m looking at you, Daniel Okrent), I find it impossible to even read the New York Times any more. No, not because they now place their best content behind a subscription wall (way to revive flagging readership there, guys!), but because of their absolute head-in-the-sand denial of their culpability regarding Judith Miller and the run-up to the war. Admitting that you messed up big time, asking for forgiveness, then making it clear that you are going to prevent it in the future would go a long way in restoring faith in your reporting. Sticking up for Judith Miller over and over again? Yeah, not so much. (Until then, just read Arianna Huffington’s “raw feed” in your blog reader…)

I wrote a long review of the Yahoo! Music Unlimited download service a few weeks back. I gave them high marks for their pricing structure. Since then they raised the fee for downloading music to a portable device by roughly 100%. Still a reasonable price, but that could definitely impact the decision to choose Yahoo! over another service. Not that it impacted me personally, as I didn’t have a compatible device anyway.

And in other Yahoo! product news, my Yahoo! Mail Beta experiment is petering out with mixed opinions. While I still like the AJAX-ian goodness of the UI, I found myself missing the conversation threading and labels of Gmail too much. That and the overall responsiveness and handful drag-and-drop bugs of the new mail beta just mean it is a little too immature for full-time use at this point. That’s not to knock the product — it has great potential. But you get what you pay for when you use a beta. I have high hopes for this in the future, and you should absolutely check it out when you have the chance. Though personally, I just want just one of them to implement IMAP so I can go back to using mutt.

Oh, and screw email. I vow that, if I ever get the resources to spend a significant amount of time on the problem, I will try to improve personal communication technology. (That’s foreshadowing, by the way.)

I just heard that there was a fire at the W 4th St Station back in New York. I can’t think of any of my friends or family that would be at that station for their morning commute, but let me know you’re okay anyway. I miss you all terribly. I miss subways, too. Hell, I miss subway fires.

The new project is still alive and well. I haven’t written much about it in a while, but the next week or two should see a release of a new demo application involving enhancing social bookmarks. After that I have a relatively interesting long-term roadmap for the project as a whole. Up next will be the Orchard core to help manage user subscriptions, and a back-end for the storing of wiki-like data. Then I’ll need to make a choice — either write a blwog application to replace WordPress on unto.net, or just skip that and just jump into the big idea. But the big idea is potentially really, really big, and it will be hard to do as a part-time project. (If someone wants to be an angel, shoot me an email.)

We are gearing up for the release of OpenSearch 1.1 in the near future, Expect a second draft of the spec to be posted sometime soon on the A9.com website, to be followed by a final release after a short request for any last comments. OpenSearch is taking off all over the place, and I imagine that it will be sticking around for a good long while. On that note, I’ll be speaking on a panel with Yahoo’s David Mandelbrot and Google’s Peter Norvig at the IL2005 conference in Monterey next week.

There’s much more, but I’ll save some for later. But before I go, a huge congratulations to M. on passing the NASD Series 7 exam on her first try. She studied her butt off for the past two months — and that’s not much time to prepare for a comprehensive 6-hour exam. And to nail it with a better-than-average score after such intense cramming is no small feat… Nicely done.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2005 by DeWitt Clinton and is filed under meta, work. You can bookmark this post at del.icio.us. You can digg this post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.