Tim O'Reilly Research team just published a book about facebook application.
The truth for me is: if facebook has no such big inventory of interesting app, i will never use facebook. Marc Anderson's comparison of 1994 Geocities and facebook list of function (and Ning of cause) give us a clear pictures about the importance of the app. Without those app or functionality, facebook or Ning will be like Geocities, only personal homepage and photo uploading.
Let's back to the economy: who makes money? First is the platform itself, like Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, second life... Secondly, the most popular app on the platform. But how about the app on the tail? Check the curve again. Its only top 50 of facebook app and decline so fast. Remember they have more than 5000 app? The tail is really very very looooong!
Last week I attended the techcrucnch40 in San Francisco. the big guy of the event is a young guy... Marc Zukerberg, founer of facebook.
During his conversation with Michael Arrington on conference, Marc Zukerberg announced a grant program called fbFund to award the most brilliant development teams on facebook. according to him this project is "to support the ecosystem and help it grow". the growth rate of facebook widgets has already incredible high -- the platform idea launched in May with 85 app, now in 4 months, number of the app increased to 3000! the sum of the fbFund cash award ranges from $25000 to $250000.(we remember that facebook first round founding was $500000). the allocation of that will decided by a panel including Zukerberg himself, Linkedin's Reid Hoffman, and two of the board members of facebook like first investor Peter Thiel.
After the 45 mins chats with Michael, no media had the chance to interview young Mr. Zukerberg -- by the company of several bodyguards, he left the conference room right away. no one can stop him actually. amazing indeed.
Days after the event, WSJ released the news that Microsoft was interested in acquiring 5% of facebook's share by $500M. the facebook phenomena is there in front of our eyes. as i know, there will be 5 conferences focus on facebook as platform for application development: graphing social patterns, community next: platform, SNAP summit, App-Camp2007 and web community forum: facebook, all held in San Francisco or Seattle in the coming 2or 3 months. check them out and see who will give keynote there. facebook as platform is a real thing. but i haven't notice there are active developer on facebook platform from Asia.
saw a very interesting artcile posted in CrunchGear, futurist.
the point is simple, human nature is lazy. and that will destroy the web 2.0 which based on top of the User Generated Content. even to me. how many accounts we have for the different blogging platforms? and how many still active? that is true. we change the interests, blog host, social networking profiles, restart many times the same profiles and frineds, and in the end, give up again after post the initial 4 or 5 items or photos.
but we stall spend a lot of time browser the web, check email, our friends and network or connection. when we feel tired or confused about the maintaining of the site we opened, some new posts from friends may stimulate our interests again to check the status.
that's why the purely publishing platform will encounter the problem in the end but the so-called social networking site will see the booming for a while. we are lazy by nature. so we couldn't produce or post stuff endlessly. but the friends will keep us in alerted. new friends, new shared link from friends will be the final savor of our nature.
TechCrunch有一個服務是整理所有評論過的公司，將公司的基本資料整理出來，成為 CrunchBase。
the best thing of CrunchBase is we can get the official info from this page, like the founding, the names of people who started this ventures.
but the innovative part of CB is this page connects to news or articles which saved in bookmark website and techcrunch. basically u can search related article by sphere it, but it is still very cool that the TC done for the company.
so we got a small introduction of the web 2.0 companies. we don't know yet if this page will be updated frequently. but it is a good start.
but in some cases the data seems not very complete. for example, in the the item of "del.icio.us" from ChrunchBase we only know that the serious A is founded by union square ventures and it is later acquired by yahoo, but without the info about its angel investor. It happened to be Tim O'Reilly, one of the most influential person in web 2.0 business. I didn't check all the famous website list in CrunchBase at the moment, but I believe sometimes the angel could explain thing more clearly than others.
今天參加在台北101三十六樓Google介紹台灣工程師的記者會。台灣本地hire的工程師共有十位。都是高材生，不是台大博士班就是碩士班，或是已經在美國念到博士的台大畢業生。作為台大的老校友，當然也是與有榮焉。但總是覺得這真是一個超級貴族公司，只有成績最優秀、理科或數學最好的學生，或者是得到世界程式大賽等殊榮的傑出學生，才有機會進去。從總公司來的工程師不忘強調，不是只有台大畢業生才能進google。不過，事實可惜就是如此。李開復說，在google要做什麼題目，不是由上而下決定，而是由工程師自己決定。我想，googel真是一個工程師樂園。
老實講，要做世界一流的公司，這是無可厚非的。如果能利用google的資源，研究發展好的產品，改善至今尚未令人滿意的中文搜索，或是改進其他的產品。則真是善莫大焉。記者會裡宣佈一個新的中文服務－－相關搜尋，鍵入王建民，會在結果頁的下端出現王健民公仔、王健民桌布等。其實就是把這些很多人感興趣的搜索，直接帶進關鍵字框。我問李開復，買了youtube後，google有沒有想出更好的廣告方式來作video，李說目前並無定論。
很多人大概對Google新近推出的domain name 服務，感到非常失望。可見有一流的工程師，還是不見得每件事都成功。
這張照片是從flickr download下來的。其實不能叫download，因為是從一個網站移到另一個網站。在vox裡，default的照片網站有三個。
看起來，要在web 2.0的時代裡成功，非得要很多應用喜歡連接到你才行。否則就要多費很多工夫。
猜猜韓國三星先進技術實驗室在全世界哪裡設研發辦公室或實驗室？
除了聖荷西外﹐他們選了上海、北京、大連。還有莫斯科、聖彼得堡等等。
東京大學的二十一世紀卓越中心計畫（The 21st Century COE (Centers of Excellence) Program）是日本整個計畫的一環，全日本有274個這樣的中心，東大就占了28個。校長KOMIYAMA, Hiroshi 說，過去的研究太細了，無法應付未來社會的需要。 非得要整合起數學、物理學、社會學、機械等等不同的學科才行﹐這個計畫從2002年開始。東大已有四千個教職員投入。細看裡面的28個項目﹐相當有趣﹐值得台灣的研發單位參考。
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lazywong said:
Interesting stuff you have there. I think you have the casual contributing and somebody else who is passionate about something... read more
on the end of web 2.0
Hi, lazywongi am too lazy to keep my blogs on schedule, although recently i decide to write more (again!). an... read more
on the end of web 2.0