DISQUS

Call me a sycophantic Apple freak but surely Blackberry doesn't have shit on the iPhone! The main reason being that (at least from my experience) they have refused to properly support any kind of open standards when it comes to their browser.

Point in case: The fuss that was made about the blackberry facebook application was an absolute joke since if they had a decent browser on their in the first place then you'd just be able to surf the website instead of using the crappy installable app (have you tried it?). Because the iphone has a web browser that works, you are able to surf [almost] any website on it without any trouble.

As a conclusion: IMHO Web-apps and open-standards are the future. Proprietary mobile applications are most certainly not.

Disclaimer: I've not actually used the new blackberry BOLD so maybe they've turned the corner and it's really good. Somehow I doubt it though.

Marcus

How much RAM do you have? That sounds potentially painful.

I use a Quad MacPro running Vista with Bootcamp - I know, I know this is probably the highest form of sacrilege but we NEED Visual Studio for C# which is a really really nice (dare I say the best by miles?) dev environment.

At home obviously I'm mac mac mac all the way - that's an easy choice!

There is an excellent article on Baselinemag that really goes into depth about how deep the technological issues with myspace go:
http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2082...

In short: IMHO to keep up with the Joneses (facebook) they have to re-engineer the whole thing. This is going to be an absolutely mammoth task and goes against the whole business philosophy of aquiring as many users as they can. The more they do things like the dodgy localisation into other languages, the more of a nightmare re-engineering becomes. Then, once they've finished the re-engineering there's the task of migrating the existing user-base over to the new system. Probably one of the greatest issues that they will face is that the legacy of user "stylesheets" is completely linked and dependent upon their borderline-criminal HTML. Of course most of their users neither know nor care about this. But what they will care about is all of their pages reverting to the default style when the switchover happens.

As far as I can tell, the redesign will definitely happen sometime soon - with the caveat that they'll make the profile pages changeover optional - they can't NOT do this. The re-engineering will take a lot longer but this will HAVE to happen sooner or later because their current infastructure will not work well enough for them to compete.

Marcus

lol. In the UK we'd even consider the Democrats to be fairly conservative!

Surely the link between most tech companies having a 'liberal' bias is hardly shocking due to the fact that probably 90% of them are based in Democrat states. And the link between techy people and being an aethiest: Tech people are by definition geeks - and therefore science-leaning - and therefore much less likely to believe in god - and i suppose therefore less likely to be Republican.

Marcus
(champagne-socialist/libertarian/part-time-hypocrite/web2.0geek)

lol. i pity the developers who'll have to 'implement' the white label versions!

uhuh uhuh uhuh... you said ...

no but seriously, that's a bad name in english speaking countries, *especially* the UK.

hahahah, that is some funny shit. i can't wait for the first court case.

judging by the current figures, 12% of myspace users being under 18 (and that seems pretty conservative), and having 150m reg users, it would mean they're potentially liable for.... wait for it .....

$90,000,000,000
that's some serious dr evil style demands! brilliant!

but putting things in perspective, that doesn't even come close to the $1.65 trillion that AllofMp3.com owe the RIAA:
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/8175/RIAA+sues+All...

You know you want to use Webjam, Roger ;)

Obviously we're not yet as mature a blogging platform as any of the sites you mention but you'll be part of something that will be really great in a few months time! And all the gripes or features that you are talking about are either there already (ajaxy features, slick interface) or will soon be on the horizon (podcasting built into the blog engine). Plus we're a whole lot more too (social networking, community features, photos, media etc) - but you already know that ;)

Make sure you check out the updates we've been making over the past few months.

cheers
Marcus

http://www.webjam.com
http://www.chickerino.com

Tom... so fickle!

I can't believe fakeyourspace seriously has 2 employees. He must be having us on! Teens clearly have too much money these days. I remember saving up all month for a single Magic the Gathering booster pack!

You're both right. I skimmed over the post a bit too quickly. However the general point still stands: Things are looking good for Facebook.

ughhhg. Seriously I'm gonna cry if this kills ComicVine or ComicSpace or any other site whose creators actually have a genunine interest in the subject area - rather than just trying to add another vertical to the sprawling goldmine/mess that is myspace!

I'm guessing we're going to see countless soulless mini-sites like this pop up over the next few months. Great!

Marcus (sick)

doesn't work in Firefox 2.0. a joke in this day and age! quite an amusing error message: "Msn has no properties" !!
the homepage is 718k !!!!! 650k of which is javascript ...... and that's even compressed! arghhhhh! wtf!!!

and then with that much javascript, what's with the quite simple interface on the left being done in flash! ughhh, and the ugly large verdana font - there's even recommendations *by* microsoft not to use verdana at high font sizes like that because it looks crap! arhhhhhhggggghhhh!!!

that's really really a poor effort. i think microsoft have serious issues when it comes to their web products. they are seriously lagging behind all of the other big internet companies such as yahoo and google. this issue is especially bad considering they've got such a big headstart by putting msn/live.com/start.com/microsoft.com/whatever their current default homepage of the month currently is as the default for sodding internet explorer!!!

sorry for the rant there ;)
Marcus

Good for them! Lucky bastards! ;)

Marcus

Really interesting article about the crazy underlying systems that power myspace here and how they scaled them to the current ~100 million userbase.
http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2082...

Having read this I really fail to see how they could ever re-vamp the system or even correct many of the bugs that still remain.

Where do you get this news from? As far as I can tell there doesn't seem to be anywhere that the myspace team use to get this kind of information out. Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough...

Happy new year... and congrats on being the best (IMHO ;)) web2.0 blog!

cheers
Marcus

Facebook not for sale!!! hahah - that coming from Peter Thiel, Facebook board member, and also let's not forget - Clarium Capital Hedge Fund Manager - who no doubt has a sizeable amount of money - and exit strategy buried in there somewhere ;) Bet he can't wait to get that cash out and invest in the next paypal/whatever.... [Kerrrrrchingggggggg!!!!!!]

yep, prices are still going crazy! I think however the weak $$$ certainly skews the comparison between London and New York.

Marcus

i don't really think this is the fault of myspace. any site which allows users to modify the HTML is suceptible to this kind of phishing attack. not sure quite what they'd be able to get out of taking control of someone's myspace account??

it may be possible for them to filter out code which allows a form to be created which posts to another site and i'd be suprised if they don't do something like this soon.

from first impressions having used it for 5 mins, this looks like a very nice product. easy to use and with all the usual AJAX nicities.

am however like you, confused by yahoo's overall strategy here. seems like they don't know their arse from their elbow!

not bullish on yahoo. go google! 480.5 up, up and up!

blah blah. at least the one positive thing that comes out of more TLD extensions being made available is that every new TLD de-values that pointless trade in domain names. business.com - barf!!!

imho, a website is a website, whether it be on a mobile phone, a tv, or a pc. we need convergence, not divergence.

oh well, 90,000 x £100 = a sweet £9 mil in 10 days for what is really just a small modification to the types of domain names allowed to be queried by a DNS. good luck to them!