DISQUS

I'm somewhat surprised you haven't written about #amazonfail yet, since it's at the intersection of Twitter and Amazon, and I know you're interested in both.

#amazonfail may well have long-lasting repercussions among Amazon’s core constituencies — both readers and writers.
Certainly one suspects Wall Street thinks so. In the three days since #amazonfail broke, AMZN stock is down $5.06/share, underperforming the Dow, the S&P 500, and the NASDAQ. Jeff Bezos is personally down $491 million. Amazon’s market cap is down $2.2 billion. The stock got downgraded today.

It’ll be interesting to see what’s happened to their cash flow.

"I asked Twitter for what services they liked the best that were new."

And then in your analysis, you say absolutely nothing about which services are "the best" or even (with the exception of FriendFeed) you like... No, you just constantly harp on, Did they grow quickly?

Those are two entirely different questions. So much so, it's almost a bait and switch.

The post could probably have made sense if you'd gone on to say, "Look at all these services that people like and admire -- and aren't growing. Shows yet again how quality isn't the main driver in this business!" But, no, there's not even that much self-awareness.

There's all this comparison to Louis Gray when there's no indication the respondents know or care who Louis Gray is, and -- again -- has nothing to do with the question as asked.

I'm not saying there may be interest in the points you raise. But the way you've presented them, it's almost like you lose interest in the answer to any given question before you even finish asking it and then move on, when the people who answered the question you asked in the first place have no idea you're already bored with the question they answered -- and you're now using their answers in a context they had no way of knowing would exist by the time you posted them.

"(W)hat is it they say about marketing? A tax you pay for being unexceptional."

No wonder Apple is the best marketing company in the world.

Pity for their shareholders they have only one client, though.

Probably the thing a President could do with the biggest impact for oil use would be to offer a bonus to Federal employees to live closer to work. This could be done solely by executive order -- no new technology, no new oil field discoveries, nada, zip... But the Federal work force is large enough for it to have a real impact.

The next biggest thing would be to propose to Congress a tax credit for same. The credit would go to both the employer and the employee.

It's worth remembering the 1980s, when a relatively small drop in US demand led to a global oil glut. OPEC remembers it very clearly -- there was a piece in the IHT a few months back where OPEC was asking for guarantees of US oil demand, because they were worried about a falling off just through recession (let alone increased energy efficiency).

But the biggest single waste of oil in this country is getting people between home places and work places that are needlessly far apart. That might have been desirable when manufacturing was king, and local pollution reflected it, but not these days. (And people want to live in dense downtowns, anyway -- which is why downtown is expensive, and suburbia is cheap. As always, price indicates demand.)

We had this discussion on my LJ a while back, and here's what I said:

*^*^*^*

""I don't understand why you are arguing that (Hillary Clinton's) experience somehow doesn't count."

I'm not. I'm saying the nature of her experience is being misrepresented. She already has enough disturbing similarities to Mr. Bush (ed. -- we can now add the Frank Rich article to that) -- she doesn't need to add puffing her record to them (ie, Bush represented his experience as Governor of Texas as being comparable to a typical state. The Governor of Texas is weak enough that, it ain't.)

I maintain there is a substantive, qualitative difference between being the president, and advising the president -- no matter how close one may be personally. She's representing her experience as if it's comparable to having been the president... and she wasn't, not by a long stretch. And if she'd actually learned anything from her experience, she'd know that. That she appears not to is disturbing all on its own.

Look, imagine a couple. Married. They're both astronauts by profession. She's been on the shuttle not just once, but twice. He, while qualified to be on the shuttle, and trained for the job, has never actually launched. Heck, he's even worked in Mission Control, being the main support link for his wife while she was on the shuttle.

Then, one day, he starts saying he should go on the next shuttle flight... because he's already been on two previous flights. His position is that he is so close to his wife, it was if he was really there, so his "experience" should include her two flights.

Not only that, but he starts denigrating other astronauts as being "less qualified," because they haven't been on shuttle flights the way he has -- even though the others in question have remarkably similar backgrounds, training, tenure in positions, drive for advancement, etc.

Gender is not the variable here, nor is training, nor is ability. It's the chutzpah.

So, having watched the first video, here's one problem I see:

No one ever really knows all the smartest people.

What that means is, if you're going to rely on searches vetted by one's trust network, you're going to miss out on huge amounts of the net. The net -- and search -- is inherently a long tail phenomenon.

Contrast this to Mahalo's own statement at the bottom of their page: "Mahalo's goal is to hand-write the top 20,000 search terms."

20,000? That's it? And they're not even there yet?

One estimate I've seen is that Google handles about 200 million searches per day. Even if one is generous and says the top 20,000 search terms account for half of the searches entered, that still leaves a huge number of terms unentered (since, long tail wise, the remaining search term could easily run in to the tens of millions).

So I guess my question would be, can trust-based searching ever scale to a level of comprehensiveness that spidered, automated searches do?

Because if not, then one runs into Joel Spolsky's observation about 80/20 rules and program features -- my useful 20% probably doesn't match your 20%, which is why programs with more features (covering more potential uses) win. If my "top 20,000" doesn't equal Mahalo's -- or yours -- then no matter how good those 20,000 they do have may be, the service is useless to me.

As, in fact, it's always been whenever I run test searches on it.

{shrug}

"I thought I had reverse engineered Techmeme enough to know that it wouldn’t put up short posts that had no real content in them."

One person's "no real content" is another person's evocative haiku. :)

For that matter, if one Googles the string, scoble "upend the search industry", this post shows up, both as being on your home page, and as an individual post.

So I'm not sure if you were exaggerating, or if your understanding of SEO is incomplete, or if the SEO for TechMeme and Google works in ways that's contrary to documentation you've read... Or all of the above. :)

"...I’m tired of typing and I didn’t want to get into TechMeme."

If so, that didn't work -- As I got here through TechMeme listing this post.

Editor@5:
"over-efficient bureaucracy"

True. But "efficient bureaucracy" gets 25,900 hits.

Probably a framing problem. Microsoft is an over-efficient bureaucracy, or else they wouldn't have faced an anti-trust lawsuit. Google might be an over-efficient bureaucracy, if some people's reactions to Google Street Views is any indication.

The difference between public sector and private sector bureaucracies is merely one of funding -- their behaviors are much the same.

Simon: "I want the freedom to use image formats wherever and whenever I want. I don’t think that’s too much to ask."

I don't either. However, the way you get to set your own rules like that is by writing *your own* image format. Feel free. Until then, you'll have to be a grownup and live with compromises, no matter how much of a tantrum you make.

I mean... Take this quote from the post you point to:

"See, when I instruct lawyers to draft licenses for our software, I typically give them a brief to “make it simple, and less than two pages”. Of course, what I get back from them is usually a fifty page license. However, my response to this isn’t, “Thanks, guys, that looks really great!” - which is what it looks like the Microsoft teams do. My response is, “What part of ‘less than two pages’ didn’t you understand? Please do it again.”

That's nothing but a childish tantrum, given today's litigation prone society. One might as well say, "What part of 'fitting a locally cached copy of the entire textual contents of the Internet into 32K of HDD space' do you not understand?"

If your lawyers are so desperate for your business they're willing to knowingly re-write your licenses leaving out contingencies, so you're exposed to classes of litigation, just to quiet you down... Well, you'll get what you paid for, eventually.

"Notice how the format is royalty-free to all users and businesses except those who want to use the format on Mac, Linux, etc. machines."

That makes sense. If you've paid for Windows (either standalone or OEM), you've paid for the R&D. If you haven't, you haven't. Why should you get a free ride?

Like the banner said, "Free as in lunch."

Besides... surely the army of Open Source porgrammers could reverse engineer the format before Microsoft even releases it, right? I mean, The Collective being so smart, and all. Just like they've done with every previous file format, by every previous publisher, not to mention universal driver support on the entire installed base of all hardware. Boy, that Open Source army really can code the bejeezus out of everyone else.

Or, um, not.