MyMaps, your ideas
26th April 2007, Technology, Trends0 Comments
So Google finally released its own front-end to its excellent Map API. Fair play to them, it is their technology afterall, but something feels wrong about the timing of it.
They released the API a long, long time ago and the community has been busy helping them develop it into a brilliant piece of software, almost pushing version 3 now. The wonderful thing about it on release was it being an API for anyone to build on. Cue a zillion mash-ups and small independent businesses based on the mapping capabilities suddenly available to them.
What feels wrong right now is that Google seems to have sat back and soaked up all the best ideas and now release their own interface to the API knowing full well that it will kill off almost an entire generation of mashup interfaces.
Is this the way things are done now at Google now? Release a benevolant API, watch the community rapidly mature it (like no money and time in one company could ever develop an API) then when they feel its matured, enter that very market from an unassailable advantaged position as the API owner and creator.
Let’s hope not.
Money, honey
25th April 2007, Other0 Comments
I loved reading Buckminster Fuller’s “Critical Path”.
A particular favourite of many a reader is the honey-money bees analogy of the bees true purpose of cross-pollination and its making of honey with humans true purpose and our essentially abstract working lives. I recently tried explaining this to someone and ended up searching on Google to find the right words and came across a bunch of flip chart drawings from a seminar.
Tacking “Add Value” on the end doesn’t really convey the original message for me, as I feel the crux was more around bonevolence than value-adding, but the true purpose aspect is something that captures most people’s imagination. I’ve turned those flip chart pages into an animated gif.
Radio Silence
25th April 2007, Technology, Trends0 Comments
So it’s been nearly a month without a post. Pretty poor really. Obviously like others I’ll be citing the heavy workload as the reason but I’ve read quite a few things recently regarding less blogging, dead blogs and the rate at which the blogosphere is doubling - it has slowed from once every six months to once a year.
Apparently blogging could peak this year. Perhaps by the end of the year, once a month posts won’t be so bad.
