April 24, 2008
The future of the internet gets smaller, more social
Yahoo chose the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco today to announce its was rewiring its whole network.
Who knows what Microsoft will make of this, given its plans to acquire the company. Microsoft itself has launched its Mesh hybrid computing platform at the conference.
Yahoo’s new chief technology officer, Ari Balogh, told attendees its moves were not to build a new social network, but to “build social into everything we do.”
He showed off some smart retooling ideas such as a Yahoo Mail application that allows you to sort through your Inbox more efficiently - highlighting emails from people that are part of your closest social network. From today, the company is opening up its environment for developers to build applications that users can add to any Yahoo page.
Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, used her keynote to talk about the Firefox browser being worked on for mobile phones. Fennec, named after the small version of a fox found in the Sahara Desert, is much faster than existing cell phone browsers, according to early reports.
Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, spoke by video from London and answered questions in an online chatroom set up by the conference organisers. His argument seems to be that new smaller devices for accessing the internet, such as the iPhone, are more proprietary and closed than the internet accessed through a PC. Increasing use of them will stifle innovation, he says.
I’m not sure I agree, given how open the iPhone is becoming and the forthcoming virtualisation on mobile phones, which would allow them to run any kind of operating system or browsers like Fennec, which is open source and open to every kind of additional features.
You can read Richard Waters’ review of Jonathan’s book here.
1) Yahoo just blocked-out and deleted many at their groups and messages sites, it’s like they don’t want or need anyone’s opinion, how sad!, congratulations to the new CTO, Ari ! i guess he wants to move the whole site to ” liberal ” China ,right?
2) great news from Mozilla - Fennec, the best to them ! but here in the USA, Verizon Wireless, ATT ,Sprint and T-Mobile only offer their choices and closed like a bank vault, so the average consumer is stuck with whatever these Telcos want, amazing ,eh?
3) as you point out about J.Zittrain, our only choice as consumers today is to get a mini laptop and glue a mobile phone to it, its clear that mobile phone companies have no intention of giving their customers any choices and that the FCC in the USA and their friends in Brussels have also no intention of upsetting the Telcos and demand Open Access! …although you seem to be more optimistic, let’s hope so !
4) is there any news about “White Spaces” ? the spectrum between the TV channels that Microsoft,Google,Dell,IBM,Sun, etc. wanted to use with cognitive radios like 802.22 and others?
i guess the TV Networks are even worst then the Telcos with the taxpayers spectrum ,so consumers will have to do with tin cans for now ….
5) here in the USA , Telcos like Verizon are switching from copper and vdsl - xdsl to new fiber optic but with proprietary software and hardware, and then they say that copper is to expensive and they want to take it down, see the trick ? they go from copper which is regulated and defends consumer rights with multiple xdsl and ISP’s choices to proprietary fiber which is their private property exclusively and the consumer has no rights and choices, just like cable TV on coaxial, and the Telcos do that with the huge profits of 100 years of using the heavily subsidized copper, amazing , eh ? and the consumers don’t even complain! take that for a well trained poodle ! is this a sign of cultural collapse or what ?
…at least ATT is leaving the last mile on copper so customers get to control some of it and regulators can stop some of the potential abuse, but in the case of Verizon, small ISP’s are in Court fighting for their lives…
Posted by: blogger | April 28th, 2008 at 7:20 pm | Report this comment