Show them while you can, Internet exhibitionists. Chatroulette is working on image-recognition software that will filter out shots of male genitalia. The website's founder, Andrey Ternovskiy, hopes that blocking the offending members will help clean up Chatroulette's reputation. He's even enlisted the help of Napster founder Shawn Fanning. I wonder if someone has told Andrey how well it went for Napster?
Best thing I've read all day.
Here's one way to get people to stick around for Frappy Hour — Starbucks posted a tweet this morning alerting followers that it'll be rolling out free WiFi in all stores to all customers. No registration, no strings attached. Previously, Starbucks card holders could hook up for two hours, while AT&T hotspot users could suck down all the free Internet they could handle. Now, everyone is getting in on the deal!
Took them long enough.
Looks like I can cancel my Boingo account now.
That is the most bullish signal about investing in the Internet that I have seen this year. If you include audio over the Internet (what radio becomes) and video over the Internet (what TV and cable become) in the Internet line, then I bet Internet will someday be over two-thirds of the ad spend.
I really like reading things by smart people who, quite simply, "get it." Fred Wilson is one of those people, and his comment on the future of ad spending is spot on.
As Internet video explodes the :30 TV spot that costs a fortune is going to become something of a rare commodity. I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now agencies that focus on creating TV spots are considered niche. Web video is about to shoot through the roof. Google TV, Boxee, the [next] Apple TV. The cable box is about to die. Good riddance.
Overall I can't help but think that Chrome is really hitting at the heart of Firefox nowadays. The early adopter and geeky readership of ReadWriteWeb - bless you all - is often a forerunner of future mainstream trends. And our stats clearly show our readers are moving away from Firefox and largely onto Chrome. How long before the mainstream follows?
I tried to stay with Firefox, I really did. I love the extensions. But I just can't. I can't deal with the sluggish performance. To much pinwheel action... and the memory leaks. Oh, the memory leaks. 500MB of resource sucking rendering on a good day.
The difference between Firefox and Chrome is night and day, and the time spent dealing with Firefox just isn't worth it anymore.
Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called "country codes" written in Arabic scripts.
The move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Chinese, Thai and Tamil.
There's a land grab happening right now. Too bad I can't participate.
I'm pretty surprised that ICANN actually agreed to this. As much as we like to pretend like the Internet is nonaligned, the reality is that ICANN still owns the Internet... and the US owns ICANN. Half of the Tier-1 networks run through the US.
It's good to be reminded that the Internet exists outside of the US and Europe. A lot of times we talk about "reach" for a digital idea, and we are always talking about people in the US or Europe (rarely do we even consider both). Large multinationals should start considering that, if a concept is localized appropriately, it can have an impact on business units around the world. It might seem hard to justify expensive projects when only the US market is considered, but if that concept can be applied to just India and China at a low marginal cost (for localization), the reach is now several times larger.
We're planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We'll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.
This is completely incredible and entirely unexpected (at least I think so). First a massive mobile play against Apple and the iPhone with Android and the Nexus One, then a direct assault on Facebook and Twitter with Google Buzz, and now... an offensive against Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon.
With 1Gbps of bandwidth, I expect a lot of people will try to start their own localized ISPs. I wonder if that's at all part of Google's strategy. If they were able to directly service 500,000 people, and even half of those people decided to start sharing their connection with friends and neighbors through WiFi, they'd have millions of subscribers by proxy. With a 1Gbps pipe you could supply an entire office building with high speed Internet. All you really need is a few 802.11n access points.
It seems to me like Google's real goal here isn't to spur innovation, but rather to see if they can increase the number of pageviews per person by providing us a better, faster Internet experience. The idea being that the quicker things loads the more content you'll be able to view in the same amount of time—and the more searches you'll be likely to make. If the Internet suddenly becomes faster for a whole lot more people, Google will be able to serve more ads per person per hour.
Several Australian government websites were slowly recovering Wednesday hours after the online prankster group Anonymous unleashed a massive distributed denial-of-service attack to protest the country’s evolution toward internet censorship.
Is it wrong that I kind of love when Anonymous does this kind of stuff? Maybe. It's still pretty amazing that an amorphous virtual collective can coordinate attacks on government infrastructure... and win. It's also amazing just how many people they can mobilize—often tens of thousands. Most businesses have trouble managing a few dozen people that they know and see every day, and yet Anonymous can someone manage ten thousand people and point them towards a single goal.
Make no doubt about it, Anonymous will win. If Australia manage to actually pass legislation that makes certain kinds of pornography illegal they'll end up getting all the politicians arrested by sending massive amounts of pornography to both their email address and postal box.
I think I also love the mission names. Oh, the mission names.
At the time of writing this, Google has about 20,000 employees and over $30 billion in assets. It's a massive company, but it's hard to wrap your head around what 20,000 people look like or what billions in assets even means. The massiveness of Google is lost on most people, including myself until I started looking into it. I wanted to get a better understanding of how one might use things like Google Code, the Google App Engine, or the Google Web Toolkit.
A few interesting tidbits about Google:
You might have seen a few of their blogs, but they have so many that they have their own blog directory, including regional blogs which provide localized information to people all over the world. There are teams running project that I didn't even know existed, like the O3D API team – which is working on a multi-platform plugin that allows 3D rendering within the browser.
One of the ideas me and a few coworkers had a while back was to create a presentation along the lines, "Everything you ever wanted to know about Google." The thing is, you couldn't fit that into a presentation. You would have trouble fitting it into a 10-part series. I'm starting to think that it may be adventageous for companies, particularly digital companies, to have a person who's job it is to understand Google and everything they offer. Search is massive enough, but they also own YouTube – which is the largest content channel on the Internet. And now they are getting into phones and even operating systems. They offer APIs for almost everything. Understanding all those different points of integration and how they might fit into a site or application would be a huge asset.
Google isn't just a search company. In many ways, Google is the Internet. If tomorrow Google disappeared, the entire world would grind to a hault. Google isn't often ranked with the likes of General Electric, Royal Dutch Shell or HSBC Holdings; but it's just as important—if not more so. It is more intertwined in the lives of everyone than I think most people realize. And as they move into new territory with Google Wave and Google Voice, Google is just going to become a more integral part of our everyday lives.
Today marks the end of an era, as The Pirate Bay team announces that the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker is shutting down for good. Although the site will remain operational for now, millions of BitTorrent users will lose the use of its tracker and will instead have to rely on DHT and alternative trackers to continue downloading.
Today The Pirate Bay tracker went down for good. May it rest in piece.
What's interesting is that in its place is DHT – which is, essentially, a distributed tracker. I believe there is a "Yo dawg" hidden in here somewhere, along the lines of, "Yo dawg, I heard you like to pirate movies. We put a torrent in your torrent so you can download while you download!"
My biggest criticism of the the RIAA and MPAA is that they never try to fight piracy through economics. You've never seen them try to slash prices to get people back into a store buying CDs. Or mandate that labels and publishers drop DRM so that more paying customers can enjoy content without restriction. Instead they try to fight piracy by attempting to filibuster technology and innovation. It's futile.
And while you might want to hate on the RIAA and MPAA, the great irony is that they are the ones essentially pushing people to innovate. Every time their politics result in a "landmark victory", the resistance engineers a better, faster, and more distributed way to share content. Can you imagine if they never touched Napster? People would still be downloading single songs at 100 Kbps. Instead, today people download entire albums and whole discographies at 10 Mbps. So, they killed The Pirate Bay. Big deal. This time next year there will be another solution that will be 10 times faster, have 10 times as much content, and be more difficult to manage from an IP perspective than anything that has come before it.
