Memex 1.1

From TechCrunch…

Photo sharing site Flickr is one of the leading lights of Yahoo - but cofounders (and husband/wife team) Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield won’t be around to keep driving the product forward. They are both joining the mass exodus of executives from the company.

Fake officially left last Friday. Butterfield (who still officially runs Flickr) will leave on July 12. Kakul Srivastava, the director of product management for Flickr, will take over Stewart’s role as general manager of Flickr. Sara Wood will take over Kakul’s previous position.

From what we hear, neither has imminent plans to work on any new projects, but I suspect we haven’t heard the last from either of them.

Butterfield and Fake created Flickr in 2004. It began as a photo-sharing feature of a gaming project, has since blossomed into one of the premier photo sharing sites on the web. Yahoo purchased Flickr for $35 million in March of 2005. In June 2007 Yahoo shutdown Yahoo Photos, making Flickr their exclusive photo sharing website. Today Flickr hosts over 2 billion images.

Wonder what they will do next?

Register report:

The mean size of a web page has more than trebled since 2003 from 97.3KB to more than 312KB, according to a review of available research by WebsiteOptimization.com.

The mean number of objects per page has meanwhile near-doubled from 25.7 to 49.9. The authors blame external objects for the majority of delays experienced by web browsers.

The last calendar year saw sites really pack on the data poundage with widgets, gadgets, web crapps, embedded video and other mashtastic tinsel. The average page swelled by more than 60KB to 312KB by the end of December. Projections put next new year’s weigh-in at 385KB.

While broadband connections have more than kept pace with the rapidly fattening web, those stuck using dial-up are increasingly marginalised, unable to view many sites unless they plan a weekend around it.

What with Amazon S3 and now Google’s App Engine readily available? The Google service is currently free (premium accounts coming later) but even a free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.

Webware 100 Awards 2008

Adobe has launched an online version of PhotoShop Elements. Only available to those with US ISPs at present, though.

From Lifehacker.

Tom Coates is annoyed with Nick Carr. Here’s his summing up:

I think the thing that annoys me most about your piece here is that it’s the same rhetoric that you always take - that there’s something inherently suspicious about all this weird utopian rhetoric of these mad futurist, self-important technologists - that somehow none of it really applies to the rest of the world, because those people are so detached from reality, and that finally they’re all missing what’s really important.

All of which would be rather more convincing if you weren’t recapitulating what we’ve been saying for the last three years.

While I’m sure it helps promote you in the eyes of people with power and money to be suspicious and critical of new technology and set yourself up to be an impartial arbiter of what’s happening, free of hype and applying real-world values (or however it is you sell this warmed over stuff), I’d argue that you’re ultimately doing yourself a disservice. You just look ill-informed!

Ouch! That’s a bit harsh: Nick Carr is a bit of a contrarian, but sometimes he’s very perceptive (e.g. about the sharecropping metaphor as a way of thinking about MySpace and some user-generated content). But Tom Coates is right about the chunk of the intellectual spectrum to which Carr has staked a claim. The title of his first book — Does IT Matter? — says it all. He’s positioned himself as the ‘grown-up’ commentator.

An essential link for every budding Web 2.0 entrepreneur — a TechBubble-friendly Company Name Generator. I’ve already got ‘Blogblab’ out of it. And — yep you guessed it! — it’s taken. Sigh.

MapEcos is very interesting — an application that superimposes location and emission data on Google maps. Go to a location and see where the local polluters are. Click on one of them and up pops date from the EPA database.

It works only for the US at present, but it’s a really neat application of Web 2.0 tools.

Tim O’Reilly has put his finger on it…

If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that’s a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don’t want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.

And data mobility is a key to that. Syndication and mashups have been key elements of Web 2.0 — the ability to take data from one place, and re-use it in another. Heck, even Google’s core business depends on that ability — they take data from every site on the web (except those that ask them not to via robots.txt) and give it new utility by aggregating, indexing, and ranking it.

Imagine what would have happened to Google maps if instead of supporting mashups, they had built a framework that allowed developers to create mapping applications across Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google as a way of competing with MapQuest. Boring! That’s the equivalent of what they’ve announced here.

Would OpenSocial let developers build a personal CRM system, a console where I could manage my social network, exporting friends lists to various social networks? No. Would OpenSocial let developers build a social search application like the one that Mark Cuban was looking for? No.

Set the data free! Allow social data mashups. That’s what will be the trump card in building the winning social networking platform….