Dalton Caldwell, an Internet entrepreneur, made a splash recently by announcing a paid alternative to Twitter and Facebook. His argument is that, because they are beholden to advertisers, these social feed platforms inevitably adopt policies that are hostile to users and third-party developers. By charging a direct fee instead, a…
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News & Insights
Wonder How Chrome is Growing Market Share? Ask Adobe
Yesterday one of my colleagues started grumbling and swearing even more vociferously than usual. He had installed Adobe Flash in Firefox in order to test some changes to our website and claimed that Google Chrome had been installed as well. "Impossible," I said. "Remember Google's motto is…
In Defense of Netflix
According to investment blog Seeking Alpha, Netflix is going to lower fourth quarter guidance because, among other things, "Everybody hates the split of the brand into Netflix and Qwikster." A couple of web comics, Oatmeal and The Joy of Tech, rip into the company even more mercilessly. Press…
Social Squatting and the Case for Decentralized Identity
Listening to TWiT yesterday, I started wondering again whether domain names are really the best way to identity resources on the web. Just as I griped that salsita.com is unavailable but totally empty, Leo Laporte complained that leo.com is parked and yet he can't get his hands on…
Firefox's Version Controversy isn't Just About Marketing. It's About the Strategic Direction of the Company.
For those who tuned in late, Mozilla announced after the release of Firefox 4 in March that they would be instituting a rapid release schedule like that of Google Chrome, involving a new browser release every six weeks. Resistance to the plan has been widespread. To some degree this reaction…
Chrome Drops H.264: Good, Bad or Indifferent?
The announcement by Google that they will be dropping support for the H.264 video codec from their Chrome browser pivots nicely off my (fairly) recent posts about the problems with web standards. There has been much discussion in the wake of the announcement about the merits of open versus…