Comcast buys Plaxo

Yessir. We knew Plaxo was looking for a buyer. Comcast comes as a bit of a surprise, though. Plaxo says that your Google contacts will continue to sync, and here’s why they think it all makes sense:

Plaxo’s Personal Card: Comcast to Acquire Plaxo; Pulse to Become Central to Creating Unified “Social Media” Experience Across the Web, the TV (and more)

Plaxo and Comcast have been working together for the past year on a number of initiatives. Plaxo is providing the universal address book for Comcast’s SmartZone communications center (slated to launch later this year), and we are also now hosting all of the address book accounts for Comcast webmail users. Our partnership has already more than doubled the reach of the Plaxo network, bringing the total number of accounts to nearly 50 million.

Together, we intend to deliver on a vision of making “social media” a natural part of the lives of regular people, not just early-adopters. For example, you should be able to securely post family photos online in Pulse, and have them viewable by any of your family members, whether they are online, at work, on their mobile device, or in their living room watching TV. And you should be able to discover new shows to watch, based on what your friends and coworkers have recommended.

Social Programming

So its all true. This is how it works. So if this site ever takes off, everyone will be better off and the world will be a better place. Its even possible that Vista SP2 will arrive on time.

stackoverflow.com - Joel on Software

Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers.

Instead, they happily program away, using trial-and-error. When they can’t figure something out, they type a question into Google.

And sometimes, the first result looks like it’s going to have the answer to their exact question, and they are excited, until they click on the link, and discover that it’s a pay site, and the answer is cloaked or hidden or behind a pay-wall, and you have to buy a membership.

OpenID and Google Accounts

It didn’t take long for someone to use App Engine to start providing OpenIDs for Google accounts.

See here

OpenID for Google Accounts

You can use your Google Account to log into any site that supports OpenID! First, log in to your Google account.

Planets begin to align in Yahoo deal

If Yahoo acquires AOL, that would also bring Bebo into play. The resulting search/social combo would have to interest Google, given its OpenSocial plans. Meanwhile, NewsCorp is trotting its MySpace social network Microsoft’s way to help them sweeten their own offer. Either way, Google or Microsoft would round out their social offerings nicely, while increasing their user base and search capacity. Stay tuned.

In Another Surprise Twist, AOL-Yahoo Deal Said to Be Close At Hand

Things are moving fast in the Yahoo-Microsoft drama. All the different forces are aligning for an endgame. The latest twist: The WSJ is reporting that Yahoo is close to signing a deal to combine with AOL.

This at the same time that Yahoo is doing a limited test to place Google ads in its search results. Meanwhile, News Corp, which Yahoo once hoped would be its white knight, is said to be turning on Yahoo and talking to Microsoft about joining its bid. Obviously a lot of balls are up in the air right now, and anything is possible.

Bill of Rights

An oldie, but one that has not really made any noticeable difference that I can see around here, today.

Coding Horror: The Programmer’s Bill of Rights

It’s unbelievable to me that a company would pay a developer $60-$100k in salary, yet cripple him or her with terrible working conditions and crusty hand-me-down hardware. This makes no business sense whatsoever. And yet I see it all the time. It’s shocking how many companies still don’t provide software developers with the essential things they need to succeed.

AOL looking less like a has-been

So you have to wonder if Bob Iger knew that this was in the works when he dissed AOL …

AOL to Acquire Global Social Media Network Bebo

AOL announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Bebo (http://www.bebo.com), a leading global social media network. Together with its AIM and ICQ personal communications network, the acquisition will give AOL a premier position in the fast growing world of social media with a network of approximately 80 million unique users.

How to make IT profitable

This article from the Wall Street Journal has an article with a prescription for turning your corporate IT division from a money pit into a revenue generator. 

Its full of interesting tidbits, but since the Scotsman has an interest in IT governance:

How to Tap IT’s Hidden Potential - WSJ.com

IT governance is another factor. IT decisions are often made by the wrong people with insufficient input, and the resulting failures drive a wedge between senior managers and their IT colleagues. There is some irony here in the fact that outsourcing often appears to improve IT management, in part because a governance committee is needed to manage the relationship with the outside providers. If a similar committee had previously been in place, outsourcing could probably have been avoided in many cases.

Sync your address book with Google Contacts

We’ve mentioned GCalDaemon and ABGMerge before but this API should enable the real deal.

Google Releases Contacts API - ReadWriteWeb

That day has come. The Google Contacts API went live tonight and it enables far more than just contact transfer.

According to the Contacts API site, the new API allows application developers to enable their users to:

* Synchronize Google contacts with contacts on a mobile device

* Maintain relationships between people in social applications

* Give users the ability to communicate directly with their friends from external applications using phone, email, and IM

No more ReadBurner

This one had real promise.  He points you to the clone site RSSmeme.

ReadBurner

I’m sorry to announce that ReadBurner is no longer availiable.

Google Apps: not the next Sharepoint (please).

There is a very good article over at ReadWriteWeb.  While a lot of it is a familiar rehash of why Enterprise IT departments have a good reason to be circumspect about consumer technologies being adopted for enterprise use, it also summarizes Google’s strategy for marketing its Google Apps to the Enterprise pretty well … see the quote:

Google Sites the Next Sharepoint? Maybe Not….Why Google Apps Could Lose the Enterprise Market - ReadWriteWeb

Google is actually going about marketing to the enterprise market in a pretty ingenious way - they’re not. Instead, they’re bypassing the IT department (who would, in all honesty, probably laugh at the thought) and marketing their suite on the sly directly to the employees themselves: “Are the tools provided by your IT department too unwieldy to use? Is IT to slow to respond to your needs? Then forget IT and use Google Apps instead!” This is definitely a good plan for Google in the short term, but it’s not one that is going to be good for them in the long run…especially when IT catches on to what their users are doing.

It goes on to draw an interesting conclusion: that this is a marketing strategy so ingenious as to be evil:

There’s “power to the people,” (tech populism) and then there’s a total coup-d’etat. Google’s opting for the latter.

And this:

“No longer will IT departments be the enforcers of policy”.

The conclusion is that in the short term, this coup may succeed.  But in the long run, it will crumble as IT lowers the boom and enforces the use of  the sort of Enterprise software that requires its self-justifying intervention in a way that Enterprise 2.0 technologies do not.

The Scotsman disagrees.  That coming backlash is inevitable, but it is not the long term.  Over the long term … lets say 8 years ( about the length of the next administration in Washington … or a couple of graduating classes ) … there will be an ever-growing population of retirees at home struggling to get their Windows Vista Home Edition machines to run Sharepoint on their own.  They will not have the help of their benevolent IT overlords from their workdays.  They will not want to have their grand kids re-train them to use free-form consumer services. Have you noticed that about old folks?

By contrast, the Enterprise will be increasing reliant on fresh faces that can’t comprehend the notion that they are not allowed to access an office spreadsheet on their iPhone, and cut-and-paste into it from a spreadsheet they got from a friend on Facebook.  They will not accept re-training from their parents’ IT overlords.  Have you noticed that about kids today? 

These increasingly rare kids (whose smaller numbers will be paying the social security of their more numerous IT-staff-bereft elders at home) will be in demand, and have the luxury of working for a company innovative enough to let them use the tools which lets them be as efficient as possible. 

At some critical tipping point, HR will realize that hiring expensive IT staff to enforce an obsolete policy that drives away the most efficient employees is a terribly bad way to run a business.  Enterprise software companies have just that long to re-engineer their products to leverage the skills of the new workforce.

Google didn’t engineer this generation gap.  It didn’t plan the baby boom after WWII.  If anything it is guilty of being one of the first major players to recognize and prepare for the consequences.  That doesn’t make Google evil. Unless of course they actually do give us the next Sharepoint.