Miscellaneous Updates

A few random items of interest:

  • The Polish IT security magazine hakin9 has published an article of mine on the topic of BitCoins. I believe there’s a free download off their website. The magazine is published in English. I don’t speak Polish, sorry!
  • I’m working on several mid-length posts for the blog, but have been very busy with work the past few weeks. Upcoming topics include an update to the “how to make money online” post from 2009, a few thoughts on SEO (yeah, I don’t usually like talking about that), a couple of interesting projects I’ve been working on, and some more business strategy stuff. Feel free to request topics as well.

Open Ecology

I’ve been telling people about the Open Ecology project for a while, but just realized I haven’t plugged them here.

They’ve come up with a list of 50 inventions that form the basis for a comfortable and modern civilization, and are building open source prototypes of all of them.

To get a feel for how serious they are, I suggest looking at this video. Then take a look at their website (which needs some work, but who am I to criticize!) here.

If I didn’t need to work for a living, I’d seriously consider just showing up there and begging them to let me help.

Interesting update regarding Zynga

There’s an interesting update on Business Insider today that reveals the level of control that Facebook has over Zynga, and indeed over its entire development platform.

Indicates the extent to which they recognize the potential threat (as well as opportunity) that their API represented.

What’s interesting is that Google has also been acquiring a stake in Zynga.

This confirms that I was on the right track regarding both Facebook’s and Google’s competitive strategies, although it looks like both companies were way ahead of me!

Strategy for Google

Back in April, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz wrote an article on his blog entitled Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO. He concludes that Google is transitioning from a period where it was a dominant, unchallenged player, to a period of intense competition. This is unique during the existence of the company; Google has famously declared in the past that they have no competitors, and that they seek a collaborative role with other companies. Continue reading

Plus One

Finally got signed up with Google Plus on the weekend.

My reaction so far is mixed.

Its certainly interesting to be able to follow some very influential people, but not going to be feasible to actually strike up a meaningful conversation with them, as far as I can tell. Too many people talking, but few listening.

I’ll probably check in from time to time to see how things are progressing. Google has promised a large number of new features, and they look like they’re integrating it very cleanly into other tools, particularly Gmail.

I always wonder about sites that are focused on Twitter-like feeds though. To my mind, that functionality basically forms the same purpose as RSS feeds. Its just crying out to be aggregated, and then where does that leave the feed sites, or the individual content creators?

Don’t get me wrong: it looks to be a useful tool. I’ve already implemented the +1 tool on this blog. Unless there’s going to be more to it though, there isn’t going to be a pressing need for me to login frequently.

Farewell to the Space Shuttle

I remember reading as a child about NASA’s amazing plans for a reusable space shuttle. My uncle sent me a book with cut-outs that could be used to build a detailed cardboard model of the shuttle. I watched the first test launches on TV at my grandparents, awestruck. And then there were the disasters, Challenger and Columbia, moments captured in time, never to be forgotten. If the weather cooperates, this week is the final launch. End of an era. Amazing how they made space seem – almost – routine. I just wish I had had the opportunity to see a launch.

TweetMUD Beta is Live

TweetMUD is a silly little project that I threw together, just to see if I could.

Its a MUD (multi-user dungeon) game that runs in Twitter. It still runs very slowly, and is missing some functionality, but it appears to be working.

There’s a quick and dirty website here with instructions on how to play.

The way it works is that you post messages to the “bot” (or using its name as a hashtag). The bot listens for mentions, picks up your username, processes the game commands, and sends back a response. I still need to implement inventory and armor.

Twitter’s “you already tweeted this” functionality is getting in the way a bit. I find that it is necessary to put a random number at the end of commands in order to make it work properly.

The game is built using Zend Framework, and particularly Zend’s OAuth module, which makes it fairly simple to integrate into Twitter.

Total development time was about 3 days (with lots of breaks to work in customer’s projects). If nice people sponsor me, I’ll put in more effort to add functionality, make it run faster, and add levels. A polished game of this nature is probably a few week’s worth of work, particularly if it integrates picture posting (i.e. images of the room you are in).

Oh and please excuse the silly humor. I tried to make everything as ridiculous as possible, in order to demonstrate that this is just a feasibility test for building Twitter games.

Stategy for Yahoo!

Lots of press (mostly negative) about Yahoo! at the moment, along with comments on how they can turn things around. Thought I would weigh in with a brief strategic analysis. Continue reading

We live in the age of nostalgia

I once read a rather cynical take on where all the extra-terrestrials are. The author – I can’t remember who it was – said that eventually every civilization invents its own alien version of the internet and massively multiplayer online role-playing games, and that thereafter they pull their heads so far up their fundements, that they never find their way back out. Continue reading

Why Facebook probably shouldn’t pick a fight with Google

I know its old news, but I’ve still been thinking about the Facebook PR misfire from a few weeks back. A few people I’ve spoken to lately have asked me to write some more strategic material, so I’ll take one more hack at it here before writing about something else (I don’t want to bore people!). I can’t take credit for the central idea below though; a fellow by the name of Jay Gould used to do this a lot back in the 1800s, and it probably predates him too.

Continue reading