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FactoryCity

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Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 at the height of cynicismJune 17

I shat on Opera yesterday, and I did the same thing to Mozilla a couple years ago, and while I’m not about to go headlong into another tirade on Microsoft, I do have to point out why this contest out of Microsoft Australia is, actually, as stupid as it sounds (contrary to what they’d have you believe).

First, my memory isn’t so short as to have forgotten that it was Microsoft and their browser (Internet Explorer 6) that held back the web for so many years.

Second, promoting a contest that is based on the very same problem that lead to IE6 stifling innovation on the web is not just in poor taste, but surpasses the height of cynicism — just as Microsoft is trying to be perceived as an increasingly productive “web citizen”.

To reiterate my point, making entry to the contest contingent upon using Internet Explorer 8 not only limits participation to Windows users, but suggests that designing pages to favor IE8 over other browsers is somehow okay, or condoned by Microsoft — completely antagonistic to their

Thoughts on Opera UniteJune 16

I met today’s news about Opera’s new initiative — called Unite — with a mix of shock and awe.

On the one hand, I was sickened by the lack of analysis from the echolalic blogger news corps. It appeared that Opera PR had successfully reached out to all of them, shoved a news release down their throats and waited to give them the go-ahead to regurgitate it on their blogs, using the same screenshots, same content, and differing only in the pithiness of their post titles.

Of course, I could have gotten the same depth of analysis from half a dozen tweets.

Maybe they long ago wrote off Opera and aren’t interested in providing any kind of depth of insight but whatever, who knows — the nouveau press corps blew it. Social media proves its vapidity once again.

But, I digress. I’ll tell you what I think, since there’s a lot in the details of Opera’s announcement that bear inspection, even if I’m the only one to do it.

I’m going to talk about six topics:

Let’s get to it.

What is Unite?

Like Flock before it (Disclaimer: okay, I’m just stroking my own ego here. Note to self: get over yourself), Opera is attempting to take advantage of the rise of social networking (the verb) and bake it into the browser, as a personal extension to one’s computing experience.

They accomplish this by embedding what amounts to a web server in the browser, and making it possible to share files, music and photos and to post notes or chat directly with your friends (or anyone who knows the URL to your account and in some cases, has the right password).

You can download an Opera Unite alpha build to try it yourself.

The Marketing Pitch

The marketing hype for Unite started recently, with a bright red page (above) hosted at opera.com/freedom. Of course this inspired a bit of buzz, and Kas Thomas from CMS Watch even guessed correctly what it was all about:

Folks, let me tell you what’s going to happen. I have a pretty strong hunch (but no inside info, I assure you) on this one. This is something I’ve thought about for years — it has needed to happen for years — and I’ll be thrilled if Opera pulls it off, although whether people will flock to adopt it is another question.

The answer is that Opera is going to embed a web server in itself.

When you fire up Opera, you’ll be operating a secure server and you will be able to serve all kinds of content (whatever you want, basically: bookmarks, contacts, cached content, arbitrary files from a roped-off area of your local storage, web pages of your own) to other Opera users, at the very least, and maybe all browser users, at the very most.

The mystery seems to have paid off, as Unite is topping Techmeme today.

They released a stylized video explaining Unite, remniscent of the Data Portability promotional video from several months ago:

Facebook usernames and the battle over your digital identityJune 9

Techmeme is buzzing with the news that Facebook is finally going to provide custom usernames — and hence web addresses — for its 200 million users. The land grab begins in just over three days at facebook.com/username/.

If Dustin Moskovitz were dead, he’d be rolling over in his grave.

For those of you who don’t know who Dustin Moskovitz is, he’s one of those infrequently mentioned co-founders of Facebook that prevented Facebook from offering usernames or friendly web addresses (so-called “vanity URLs” in the industry) from the beginning. It was his insistence that people should go by their real names on Facebook — and should thus perform under their true identities — that I posit has accounted

In defense of microformatsJune 7

I’d never received an Open Letter until Alan Morrison posted one earlier today in response to an interview I gave to Straight.com about microformats and the (lowercase) semantic web. For the sake of completeness, here’s what he wrote:

Chris, judging from your interview in Straight.com, you seem like a thoughtful guy. But you don’t seem to understand that the Microformat and Semantic Web folks aren’t that far apart. You cite the prevalence of non-standard HTML to support your contention that we’ll never use ontologies. But in the same article, you say the comic book store you frequent has its own iPhone app. So people can write their own iPhone apps (or at least have friends write apps for them), but they can’t put together their own ontologies?

Simple tagging has obvious benefits–just look at popula

The Fall of VidoopJune 5

When I left Flock in 2006, I blogged the occasion, having helped start the company by contributing a vision for what I thought the web needed: a social browser.

When I was laid off from Vidoop last month, I didn’t so much as tweet about it. The circumstances were different this time. But because the lack of information coming from the company is disappointing (if not frankly irresponsible) it seemed time that I wrote down my recollection of what went down.

Joining Vidoop

I joined Vidoop just over a year ago, in May of 2008.

To be honest, my initial impressions of the company weren’t exactly positive, having first seen Luke Sontag (Vidoop’s co-founder and president, or ” Chief Kool