Yiibu: re-inventing microcontent -
Bryan Rieger came by the office yesterday and we caught up on where his new company, Yiibu is at. They just soft launched with an example of one of the first pieces of open microcontent that they're going to be working with.
This companies launch of microcontent has be a bit flumoxed: I don't know if it is a good idea or not. I wholly support the idea of "mixable" open content but I don't see the advantage of how this company is offering it. I don't see how a company can be profitable if after I buy and "remix" the content I no longer #1 have to provide licensing fees or such to the original source. The interesting part is that Creative Commons in its most restrictive form reminds me of normal copyright.
Write once, run anywhere. This was the siren call of Java when it was first launched. Of course, anyone with a little bit of history in the computer biz knows that rapidly fell to : write once, test everywhere. Java simply couldn't be guaranteed to work on every platform. Or did it?
One of the issues that I believe a lot of developers hit was writing software that assumed certain facts about the underlying system: colons are allowed in file names (not on Mac), backslashes separate directories (not in *nix), line endings are \n\r (different on each platform). These were some of the simple problems; if you ventured into graphical or threaded applications the bugs kept roling in!
I just finished checking my RSS feed reader Net News Wire for news. It will update in 30 minutes. I have 30 minutes to get work done before my next interruption. This is a problem of Web 2.0.
There is such a huge volume of "stuff" that happens on the web every day that I use tools such as RSS to notify me of updates. I find that, as an infovore, I must read the news immediately. The new news (eh?) may be completely uninteresting but my urge to know will be satiated; for 30 minutes.
This giant wave of information needs to be managed more intelligently. Net News Wire should give me the ability to individually configure the refresh timeout of "busy" sites, such as Engadget, that don't push information but just news headlines. In fact, as I was typing this sentence I checked if the functionality existed: it does. Someone is a good 6 weeks ahead of me in clear thinking and good looks.
