The Innovation of Sharing

Social Network, a disruptive new innovation, is starting to shift people’s online behavior, even to the point that the meaning of "online" has even shifted from web based to mobile based.

The new world wide web will be not only based in mobile, but it will be built with applications and tools that put both people and peoples associations at the center of all activities.

Instead of content, you will have posts, and those posts will be "points of sharing", and that interplay between points of contact, "nodes" will create social network "ties."

Facebook is without doubt not only the market leader as the most used Social networking site, but also is the leader in crafting a platform and set of tools to take advantage of the new opportunities on offer in this new ecosystem.

This has rather large implications for builders of internet tools (previously web sites) and for anyone engaging in commerce on the web. The way people desire to interact with commercial offerings is changing.

Sun Microsystems - Goodbye and thanks for all the UNIX

Sun Microsystems is no more, having been purchased by a company (Oracle) that seems intent on capturing "open" software and hijacking that software for short-term gain. Certain aspects of the Oracle deal just point to Oracles acquisition of first InnoDB (the storage engine that MySQL uses) and then MySQL itself with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, as a method to hijack the MySQL open source project.

But Sun’s founders, were amongst the creators of FreeBSD (through Bill Joy’s work on BSD UNIX), and Sun was always the strongest large Corporate proponent of "Openness" in software directly creating Java, MySQL, and having strongly contributed to the vision that produced Linux (through open UNIX work), and PHP (which owes at least some of its inception to Sun’s java server pages). The whole LAMP stack traces at least some of its roots back to Sun (Apache owning the least to Sun, but you get my meaning).

I think we are not taking account of the large position that Sun had as an intellectual proponent of openness in software. And I for one will lament its passing, especially as Oracle starts using Sun Intellectual Property as a patent-troll to quash innovation in the space.

Computer History Museum - The Facebook Effect with Mark Zuckerberg

An area of the web that has, for me, consistently a very high level of quality of discourse about computer engineering is the Computer History Museum. Its YouTube channel may be found here, http://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory/videos.

I enjoyed this interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, found here http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=_TuFkupUn7k&vq=small. I found it refreshing to hear Mark (I can call him Mark, because he is one of my facebook friends), talking about the Innovation of Sharing. He tried to discuss the potentials of "sharing" over a long time frame. How this would impact the software ecosystem, and how it would create new business opportunities. Of course everyone wanted to talk to him about privacy, which was much less interesting.