UPDATE (Jul 15, 5:30pm): Facebook is rumored to be in talks with news sources for a news-related feature of their own. Looks like I may have been a little early in saying that social news wasn't something Facebook could copy, but this just confirms my predictions of competition-fueled innovation.
Today, Google has announced - and released - a new Google News feature for US readers: Google Badges. Put simply, as we read Google News articles, we will earn achievement-like "badges" based on the subjects we read about, which can be shared with other users. It's not terribly exciting on its own, I'll admit that much. It might be an amusing side feature for those who still use Google News, though I get most of my news via RSS and Twitter these days. What's important here are the implications of this move, and what it suggests for future Google plans.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Google+: The Facebook Killer? Or Just A Monopoly Killer?
Ahh, Google Plus. Currently populated mostly by the earliest adopters, the people that Google prioritized when they handed out invites: tech journalists, then social media gurus, then (by crowdsourcing the invite system) anyone else who was the slightest bit interested in the field. With an initial userbase like that, it's not surprising that the internet was abuzz with detailed analysis of the Google Plus system and features from the very beginning. What is surprising, though, is that most people didn't really seem interested in Google+ itself. Rather, they just wanted to argue back and forth about whether it was a "Facebook killer". Its virtues, its flaws, its unique features - none of them escaped being compared to other social media offerings.
Of course, it's a widespread practice in tech reporting to declare that one company or another has "killed" all competitors and crowned itself absolutely supreme. The laptop has been declared dead, the netbook has been declared dead, and just about everything else from fax machines to the Web have had their obituaries prematurely posted over the years. Yet even the humble telegraph remains in use in this era of widespread wireless, and portable cassette players were in production as late as last year despite the existence of the MP3 player. Old tech may no longer overwhelmingly dominate the way it did when it was new, but it still commands a respectable marketshare, and even ancient tech still thrives in its various niches.
Of course, it's a widespread practice in tech reporting to declare that one company or another has "killed" all competitors and crowned itself absolutely supreme. The laptop has been declared dead, the netbook has been declared dead, and just about everything else from fax machines to the Web have had their obituaries prematurely posted over the years. Yet even the humble telegraph remains in use in this era of widespread wireless, and portable cassette players were in production as late as last year despite the existence of the MP3 player. Old tech may no longer overwhelmingly dominate the way it did when it was new, but it still commands a respectable marketshare, and even ancient tech still thrives in its various niches.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Space Shuttle: The End of a Mediocre Era
Soon after the end of the Space Shuttle program, space lovers all over the world are reacting quite strongly to the end of the a program that has been flying since before I was born. Massive crowds intended to go see the last launch of Atlantis, and I'm sure STS-135 will become a a famous occasion commemorated by parties among space geeks. I'd like to throw a party as well - an "it's finally over" party. Though the future of US manned spaceflight is certainly bleak, the shuttle program represented pretty much everything that's been wrong with NASA since the Apollo program ended, and the long break between now and Orion might very well give us a chance to clear off the weight of the last few decades and fix the deep institutional problems in their manned spaceflight division once and for all.
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