The most amazing part about this (outside of being completely awesome) is that we'll look at this in five years and laugh about how bad it looks. We'll ponder how we could ever enjoy something at such a low resolution, with such grainy textures and detail. We'll look at this the same way we look at old video games. When EverQuest first came out the graphics were amazing. Now I look at them and laugh, at myself, for having thought that.

HTML5 is launching us into a new era of in-browser video and graphics. Look at a video game from 10 years ago, like Half-Life, and then look at a video game from today, like Crysis. Now imagine that same kind of evolution taking place for graphics in the browser. Yeah, shit just got real.

On the surface, Google Places and Facebook Places would seem to have a lot in common.

Both services are out to create a landing page for every local business in the world.

Both services allow local merchants to “claim” their pages, giving the merchant some editorial control over content on the page.

And both services no doubt expect to grab a chunk of what is projected to be a $32B digital, local advertising market by 2013 by claiming the middleman position between the merchant and the end user.

But where the two services break from each other – and in a non-trivial way – is in their respective distribution strategies.

Google Places are useful. They all show up in Google Maps.

Facebook Places, by contrast, are useless. They just add spam to the newsfeed.

I don't even know why Facebook thought "check ins" would be a good idea. Because Foursquare did it? Foursquare is interesting because of its game elements, not because you "check in" to places. The whole idea of a checking in is kind of silly if you aren't playing a game. You could just as easily, you know, do exactly what you did before: Say where you are.

If they wanted to be ahead of the game they could have created a services that automatically updates your location and shares that only with people who might find that information relevant (i.e. very close friends and family). Oh wait, Google already did that with Latitude. No worry, I'm sure Facebook will copy that too. That's what all that funding is for.

A most excellent bit (pun intended) of geek humor. I highly recommend you check it out yourself. I like MySQL and MS Access the best. :)

I don't talk much about politics on this blog, but I saw this on Salon and thought it was pretty funny. Honestly, I can't believe this is really an issue. It kind of amazes me.

Oh snap! I'm one step closer to being able to cancel my cell phone subscription all together.

What I'm really wondering is this: At what point will this become a viable alternative to office based VoIP systems? How good does the audio have to be? At what point can you just tell everyone to leave Gmail open in a tab instead of buying an expensive SIP phone system? And what happens if Google goes the extra mile to make sure that Google Voice integrates with SIP-based phones when they add this feature to Google Apps?

Why all this failure?

It’s actually simple. Most new products fail because they’re the ‘wrong’ product, not because of project or executional risk. This ‘wrong product risk’ accounts for up to 80% of the total risk according to agile experts Energized Work who were in to do some training last week (the graph above is also from their deck).

So if building the ‘wrong’ product is the biggest risk (by far), then it is foolhardy to leave this risk unmitigated until the end of the process. And yet this is exactly what most people and companies tend to do.

You probably recognise this argument as it’s very much the basis of the excellent thinking being espoused by Steve Blank in his Customer Development Manifesto and more recently Eric Ries with his convincing Lean Startup philosophy. A brilliant albeit lengthy articulation of all this thinking is in Ries’ Stanford talk.

It makes complete sense. It’s about testing and iterating every part of your business model and product, and about getting frequent and fast customer guidance as much and as early as possible. And it’s not simply about asking customers, ‘what do you want?’ – we know they won’t be able to provide a clear or correct response to such a naive question – it’s about testing responses to concepts, prototypes and early product iterations.

This concept seems to be anathema to many entrepreneurs; well, at least to those who want to deliver *their* vision as opposed to solving a customer’s problem.

I love this blog post by the good people in the UK at Made by Many. Really spot on example of a group of people trying to solve problems and create things that people actually want to use instead of just trying to close as many deals as possible. I'd like to work with these people one day.