Category: internet

The Dilemma of API

I had an interesting conversation on Twitter earlier this week that indirectly helped me realize something very important. We all know what API is and we all know lots of examples of successful services that were made possible by someone else’s API. We also could recall several examples when API...

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Following on Twitter Using RSS

When I am trying to decide whether to follow a given account on Twitter or not, I usually look at the following three criteria: whether I am interested in this account's tweets whether this account's tweets include at least some degree of real-time relevance whether this account can participate in...

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Two Weeks on Twitter Without Reading My Timeline

TL;DR Twitter reading experience is extremely inflexible and not scalable, and the company discourages third-party developers from innovating in general-client niche. Twitter must significantly improve reading experience, or allow third-party developers more freedom. In the first half of this month, I decided to perform an experiment. For at least two...

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Corporate Open Sourcing

The idea of open source could by now be familiar to most folks in the industry. When a new technology is open sourced by an individual, the situation seems to be well understood. But when a corporation opens source code for one of its products, it looks to me like...

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Ecosystems and Platforms

Here are the links to four very interesting and important posts about Internet software ecosystems and platforms, from four very influential people, in chronological order. Chris Dixon – http://cdixon.org/2009/12/30/whats-strategic-for-google/ Fred Wilson – http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/04/the-twitter-platform.html Mark Cuban – http://blogmaverick.com/2010/09/30/product-vs-feature-the-lesson-of-xmarks/ Seth Godin – http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/10/the-business-of-software.html Make sure to read between the lines as well....

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Activity Streams, Cross-Posting and Pareto Efficiency

I once logged in to LinkedIn to reply to an inMail, and on their front page noticed several tweets from people with whom I am both connected on LinkedIn and whom I follow on Twitter. These were the same tweets that I just read in Tweetdeck - and I ended...

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New Era in Internet Search - Google vs Bing

This week marks the beginning of a new era in Internet search. For the first time in modern Internet history, there is a number 2 with sizable market share. This is going to become interesting once Bing and Yahoo! finish integration. I switched to Google Search many years ago because...

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