A few things that caught my attention this morning. First, an excellent review by Walter Mossberg on the new Google phone called G1. He describes many of its new features, strengths and weaknesses.
My take on it? Competition is a good thing. It will raise the bar yet again and force Apple and others to build better mobile phones and especially better software on mobile phones. One thing that worries me is the lock-in Google has build into this phone. Google is everywhere, but where sites like Facebook are bounded by their own platform (you can stay out of it if you want), Google gets a grip on the entire online world (web and mobile). This would be ok if you weren’t forced to use Google accounts for it. It turns the entire online world into a Google garden. Scary and not the way to go forward. It’s a privacy’s nightmare, just like the stuff Facebook is doing on their platform.
Then a post that made me laugh out loud, a post by Silicon Alley Insider with a presentation from a “venture capitalist” that understands what is going on. It’s meant to be funny, but there is always some truth to be found in such ironic presentations. We all see the crazy web 2.0 fundings, advertisement models, a business plan that doesn;t create value and only aims for a “Google buy me” scenario. It’s happening out there and if anythign this financial crisis should lead to rationalization and get rid of these destructive business models.
I’m sure the Friendfeed fan club will get all exited about it’s latest feature. Friendfeed can now show shared items in real-time instead of a user having to hit the refresh button in his browser. Great feature, but as the underlying issue of irrelevant and unintentional content sharing isn’t really solved it will only provide us a real-time update of fairly useless stuff. No sense in trying to do that too often. If anything, the one strength Friendfeed had, comments on entries, will be lost in this real-time update. Nothing to get exited about for me. It’s like watching tv, you sometimes enjoy staring at things without having to activate your brain. Useless but relaxing nevertheless 😉
@vanelsas 