There's a panicky voice inside me that wonders, whenever the power is knocked out for more than a minute or so, if this is it: the failure of the grid, the fall of civilization, the end of all things. And then the lights come back on, and it's all fine again.
The weekend's six-hour Amazon S3 outage caught a lot of people by surprise, including more than a few blogs and web apps who rely on it. Sure, it was just a momentary glitch. But whenever something big and supposedly rock-solid has a hiccup, it chips away just a little of your confidence...
Google just opened up Knol, its Wikipedia competitor, to the public after announcing a private beta of the service last December. Unlike Wikipedia, Knol puts a stronger emphasis on authorship and even encourages users to start different 'knols' for the same subject. Google is also serving up AdSense advertising on the site, whereas Wikipedia stays away from any advertising on its site.
New startup Pixily lets small businesses and individuals send paper documents by mail in a Netflix style envelope, then scans, uploads to Amazon S3 and lets you search them in 3 to 5 days. It's the kind of service that big companies spend a lot of money on, now made affordable enough for anyone.
Boston Globe writer Scott Kirsner tested the service last week and saw even faster turn around - his documents were available on the Pixily website in one day and returned to him in paper form in two days after sending them. That's pretty awesome.
According to the latest data from Hitwise, Facebook, which is kicking off its developer conference today, grew 40% over the last year, while its biggest competitor, MySpace, saw a 6% drop in visits since June 2007. The numbers for average time spent on these two sites almost directly mirror the numbers for visits, with MySpace being down 4% and Facebook up 41%.
Even though Facebook is slowly catching up to MySpace, the gap between the two is still large, with Facebook having a 17% market share and MySpace 72%.
PlayCrafter is a new web application that lets anyone create custom games by dragging and dropping elements around the screen. Built with Flex, Adobe's Ryan Stewart calls PlayCrafter part of "a whole new world of Flex!" It's really easy to use and a whole lot of fun.
If you read our coverage of the awesome drag and drop widget building tool SproutBuilder, think of PlayCrafter as the same kind of tool but for game creation. Read on for one example game and a demo video.
Casual gaming on the web must look like quite an attractive market to VCs right now. Jeff Bezos already invested in two casual gaming companies this year, Kongregate and SGN, after SGN had already raised a $15 million Series A round in January. Now, Mark Pincus' Zynga, another online gaming site, announced that it raised $29 million in a Series B round led by Kleiner Perkins. Zynga also announced the acquisition of YooVille, a virtual world application for Facebook.
On July 15th, the Information Overload Research Group (IORG) held their inaugural conference in New York City. The group, whose founders include IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and a dozen other companies and academic institutions, is on a mission to find solutions to today's information overload problems. In attendance at this first conference were both representatives from from the above companies as well as others from all over the world. Now that this event has ended, lets see what we've learned.
Is this the future for the Firefox UI?
You may remember a project called Enso, a software program developed by Humanized - the same folks who brought you Songza. The program is an application launcher which provides you with a different way to navigate and interact with your computer through the use of keyboard shortcuts and typed commands. As we noted before, Enso appears to have been abandoned by the developers who created it since they were snatched up to work at Mozilla. However, the software itself was open-sourced. But now, those same developers are using the concepts brought forth by Enso to create a whole new UI for Firefox called Ubiquity.
The future of software development
is about good craftsmen. With infrastructure like Amazon Web Services and
an abundance of basic libraries, it no longer takes a village
to build a good piece of software.
These days, a couple of engineers who know what they are doing can deliver complete systems. In this post, we discuss the top 10 concepts software engineers should know to achieve that.
Mixtapes just 'aint what they used to be. One of the most democratic forms of art collecting is being made even easier by a handful of fun new websites.
Is it legal? Will it last? We don't know and we don't know if we care. These services are such a joy to use that they reinvigorate our appreciation for what the social web can do.
