Thoughts on Microsoft-Yahoo

I’ve been thinking about the proposed Yahoo-Microsoft merger since the news broke on Friday. As a closeted economist and enterprise apologist, the offer’s value really jumped off the page. Microsoft is offering $44.5 billion in cash and stock for a business that generated just under $7 billion in revenue in its fiscal 2007. Microsoft’s Office… Read More

FriendFeed Crosses the Streams

Recently, I blogged about FriendFeed, a new app that aggregates all your friend’s 2.0 activity into a single river of goodness, a la the Connect Activity Log or the Facebook News Feed. In typical new web fashion, FriendFeed is in invite only beta now, and earlier in the week, I got my beta invite. The… Read More

Review Recap

Will you be in the San Francisco Bay Area next week, namely Monday between 11 and 2? If so, stop by Lunch 2.0, which will be at Oracle for the first time, to mingle with AppsLab and other new web interested people. You can find details here. This should be a great chance to network,… Read More

A River of Information Runs Through It

Recent coverage (NYT, Mashable) of FriendFeed reminded me of discussions we’ve had about Connect features. Basically, FriendFeed applies the Facebook News Feed feature to the entire Interwebs, or at the 23 services they integrate with today. You have a(nother) network of friends. Everyone posts stuff to the FriendFeed, which aggregates the posts into a river… Read More

On Social Apps, Trying Again

So, Billy and I had a whimsical dust–up over the differences (or lack thereof) between our approaches to the enterprise-ification of New Web. A few other voices chimed in too. Right, wrong, indifferent, it’s been a slow week. Mr. Long Tail, Chris Anderson, posted an entry yesterday that hits the core of the differences between… Read More

You’re So Money.

I’ve been shaking my head since reading yesterday that Microsoft is in talks with Facebook to take a stake in the “social utility” darling, not because it doesn’t make sense for both parties (albeit in much different measures), but because the valuation is ludicrous. Microsoft is reported to be seeking a 5% stake in Facebook,… Read More

Faceforce = Creepiness + Spam

I’ll start by saying what I like about Faceforce, the unofficial mashup between Salesforce.com and Facebook. It’s a great example of ad hoc collaboration between two companies in what seems to be an unofficial way. Clara Shih, an AppExchange Product Manager at Salesforce.com and Todd Perry, a software engineer at Facebook, built this integration. It’s… Read More

Trust No/Every One

A couple recent nuggets reminded me of Paul’s post on trust and underlined the reasons why Web 2.0 can never be Enterprise 2.0. With Connect, we’ve come upon a new (at least to us) dimension of the social network, i.e. the explicit trust created by working together. Paul says: When we inject trust into the… Read More

Yahoo! The Sleeping Giant

Last week, screenshots of Kickstart, Yahoo’s lastest foray into social networks surfaced. Not surprisingly, Kickstart is targeted at recruiting, helping college student find an “in” at companies where they want to work and helping companies recruit students. I like this approach, as long as they can keep it clean by ensuring the students are really… Read More

Why Bans Don’t Work

Effectively immediately, nothing will be banned. The Summer of Facebook has brought a new list of social network (sorry Mark, social utility) bans, as well as some fuzzy research on the cost of social networking. Some interesting points: Does anyone really believe that Facebook alone costs the Australian economy $5 billion? The Sophos study says… Read More

Cage Match: Google vs. Facebook

While Yahoo has spent time and energy over the past year and a half trying several times to talk Facebook into a merger, Google has been curiously silent. Until, they recently snagged Brad Fitzpatrick from Six Apart. Fitzpatrick, known for founding LiveJournal and selling it to Six Apart, wasted no time laying down the gauntlet… Read More

No iPhone, No Service

More iPhone goodness lately as the cool kids (namely me) get to have a sweet version of Facebook (iphone.facebook.com), which is way better than the generic mobile version, and Meebo (point your iPhone at meebo.com) for chat. Mashable has both Facebook and Meebo pictures. I would have taken my own, but that seems like work.… Read More

Death of an Inbox

In a comment on my first post about the slow death of email as a communication medium, Julie asked: I guess you are talking about email in the context of personal communication rather than business? What are your thoughts on IM for business use, as a replacement for email? My position is that email is… Read More

Jake is Blogging about Facebook.

Yes, this is also my current Facebook status. By way of Nick O’Neill at All Facebook, I read a blog by Megan Berry today about the collision of her personal and professional lives on Facebook. It’s an interesting read. Aside from the irony of blogging about things she did not want her co-workers to see… Read More

Good Old Email in its Twilight Years

I’m sure most of you will not agree, or you’ll convince yourself otherwise. News.com has an interesting article with the catching headline, “Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead”. This got me to thinking about dead letters, for some odd reason. Like it or not, email is dying. Just like face-time gave way to phone… Read More

More High-Powered Friends?

First, it was Steve Ballmer. Now, Eric Schmidt? What is going on here? I’m surprised Eric would want to befriend me, since I called him coy in this space not once, but twice. Maybe he wants to hire me and doesn’t know I have no PhD, or even masters. D’oh. Seriously, can anyone shed some… Read More