Charles Hope and the Luminous Top

I had lunch with Rachel Clarke and Hugh MacLeod today.

Expect a limited-edition series of blip shirts.

Ning & Stealth mode

(originally posted here on 20 Jan 2006)

Last Friday, Mike and I were chatting about how no compelling applications came out of Ning. We agreed that it was because of their silly committment to stealth mode during their gestation. You don’t publicly reveal your early development because it’s “so web 2.0″. You do so to get an early reality check on whether or not your project sucks.

Knowledge is good, but better than knowledge is a good epistemology that allows the rapid and timely acquisition of knowledge! You can teach a man to fish and he can feed his family, but if you teach him how to teach himself to fish…

Anyway, TechCrunch mentioned Ning today, listing four problems why the service isn’t taking off.

But the reality of Ning is that it’s lost whatever coolness it had, no one uses it and Ning is going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when they finally do roll out better functionality. Here’s are the problems….

And in other Stealth Mode news, Ookles just closed its Angel round in Om Malik’s bathroom. Ookles? That’s for them to know, and us to buzz, buzz, buzz, about! Let’s get all excited and see what clues we can scrape up from google searches and reverse DNS lookups! Or not.

So the other problem with stealth mode, closely related to the first, is that operations that grow organically are stronger than ones designed in one afternoon around a table. This is the insight behind Agile software development, and ultimately is the lesson of the Vietnam War as well. A few days ago I noticed that blogger’s search stinks, and I’d like a tiny tag cloud in the sidebar of my blog. I could write a scraper but where would I host it? I realized there was a need for a new type of service, where I could upload some little script somewhere, tell the service to run it nightly, and point a sidebar of my blog to its output. I should put up a J2EE app server somewhere, maybe at toys.pokkari.tv. I could write a little administration app that allows uploading and deployment of ear files. And then, to accomodate those who wanted to write in other languages, I could drop in the Bean Scripting Framework and many language libraries. And some other page parsing and manipulation libraries to make work on web pages less like DOM and more like Chickenfoot. Eventually it would grow into something very easy to use, under the guidance of real users and real usage.

Update 15:13 ET:

I’ve never written an app on Ning because PHP is not my bag. Check out I Am Alpha, and Zoho Creator.

Conglomerate Yourself

(originally posted here on 9 Dec 2005)

Yahoo! buys delicious.

Yey, now my personal linkfarm will be analysed in order to make money with social network engineering. And I can’t even export my bookmarks to avoid an google/yahoo/generic-other-global-we-track-all-of-your-community-steps-actor service. shit!

Yahoo! makes the Flickr signup page look more Yahoo!ish.

I’m sure Yahoo told our Flickr buddies: “We love Flickr as it is and promise not to change it … much.” The Flickr folk were probably too busy counting the zeros on the check in front of them, and missed that little disclaimer. Sellouts.

Economies of scale. Is there any room in the future for small businesses in any industry? Chain stores are clearly outcompeting other businesses, reformating Manhattan into a copy of everywhere else. It’s a more advanced ecosystem, crowding out and dooming the others to obsolescence.

Is the condition for this bloom (its eutrophication) natural or artificial? In other words, is it a natural evolution of advanced economies, or are the game rules being skewed by Big Business to favor Big Business? Murray Rothbard observed

In short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations of smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market. Both left and right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and antibusiness. Hence the mythology of the New-Fair Deal-as-Red that is endemic on the right. Both the big businessmen, led by the Morgan interests, and Professor Kolko, almost uniquely in the academic world, have realized that monopoly privilege can only be created by the State and not as a result of free-market operations.

What is the fewest number of entities the Earth can contain? If everyone decided to throw all the planet’s capital into the pot of a single corporation, would that be a stable state? I can hear the argument now: democracies may or may not war against each other, but corporations certainly don’t war against themselves.