7) Thank you; have a nice day!Heh.
Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
Google Apps users cannot use Google+. You have to choose one or the other. I'd say his criticisms ring pretty true.They can, but the problem is that google's braindead policies made people afraid to use both of them at the same time, for fear of getting banned from google services because of G+ and then losing access to their docs. Really stupid policy.
A key thing that Yegge seems to be missing is the business model. For Apple, it makes sense to have iOS as a platform, because they make money from selling the hardware and from iTunes. For Microsoft, they sell the developer tools like Visual Studio and web servers. For Facebook, all the apps other developers make still run on Facebook's site.Where is the bussiness model in Amazon being a platform? I mean there's even less a bussiness model there. There's no walmart API, no target API, other online book stores don't have an API.
If you're using Firefox, there's the Multifox extension. Or you can always just run multiple browsers: I have both Chrome and Safari set up on my home machine, so I can do all my real web browsing from one while logging in to Google+ on the other.Yup, I downloaded chrome mostly just to check it out, but one reason I do use it at all is so I never have to log on to facebook in my main browser (still firefox, for the addons but also I think it's cool that it's made by a non-profit corporation and truly open source).
“The Golden Rule of Platforms, “Eat Your Own Dogfood”, can be rephrased as “Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything.”posted by furtive at 11:45 AM on October 12, 2011 [2 favorites]
If you're using Firefox, there's the Multifox extension.Thanks Mars Saxman. I'll check it out.
In economics and business, a network effect (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale) is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When network effect is present, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it.As Judge Richard Posner has explained (paid subscription to The New Republic required):
The classic example is the telephone. The more people own telephones, the more valuable the telephone is to each owner. This creates a positive externality because a user may purchase a telephone without intending to create value for other users, but does so in any case. Online social networks work in the same way, with sites like Twitter and Facebook being more useful the more users join. . . .
Over time, positive network effects can create a bandwagon effect as the network becomes more valuable and more people join, in a positive feedback loop.
Although almost no one actually wants 500 million online “friends” (well, maybe some advertisers do), the bigger the social network, the more valuable it is to the members. Those Harvard kids had friends at other schools, parents, siblings still in high school, prospective employers, and therefore valued the expansion of Facebook to other colleges and then to high schools and then to everyone. Facebook had to be only a little better than other online social networks to leave them trailing in the dust. For the bigger it grew, the more valuable its service became relative to that of the competing networks. And because joining Facebook is free, the cost of switching to it from another online social network is negligible, especially because the time cost of learning to use Facebook and to move one’s social-network files is minimized by Facebook’s user-friendly design.posted by John Cohen at 12:18 PM on October 12, 2011 [2 favorites]
Zuckerberg was well aware of network effects. His objective, says [author David] Kirkpatrick, “was to overwhelm all other social networks wherever they are—to win their users and become the de facto standard. In his view it was either that or disappear.”
Important: Google Translate API v2 is now available as a paid service. The courtesy limit for existing Translate API v2 projects created prior to August 24, 2011 will be reduced to zero on December 1, 2011. In addition, the number of requests your application can make per day will be limited. Google Translate API v1 will be shut off completely on the same date (December 1, 2011); it was officially deprecated on May 26, 2011. These changes are being made due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse. For website translations, we encourage you to use the Google Website Translator gadget.So what that means to me is that Google had an immensely popular API, and could not, for the life of them, figure out how to make it actually work for developers in terms of a) scaling it, b) monetizing it and b) securing it. That kind of failure is what Yegge is talking about.
Google keeps rolling out their products internally, to Google employees, before opening them up via invites and then to the public at large. This ensures that the first people in the systems will be geeks, and friends of geeks, and that sets the tone for the community when you're building social software. There's nothing wrong with it, but it makes it hard to compete with Facebook, which started life as a way for college students to get laid.This reminds me of another great rant, from JWZ, on why the "Groupware" fad from previous decades perpetually failed. This was published the very same month that thefacebook.com launched and before anyone had really heard of it:
So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?This is the perpetual dog and dogfood problem: who decides what all those cubicle workers are going to get served today? Also, if jwz tells you to address a use case, it's probably pretty ripe time to address that use case.
That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).
...
If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
"Can you use G+ pseudonymously yet? That's the main reason I haven't been over there yet.I understand this argument in that people don't always want to be searchable, don't always want companies in their private lives, etc.
I can't find the thread on metafilter on it (I'm sure there was one) but it was explained that it was due to the translate API being overused. If I'm not mistaken in how it works, it trawls the web looking for examples of translations and uses that to improve its accuracy - however when increasing numbers of people use it, the "example" translations it picks up in the wild will mostly have been generated by itself.You're making my point for me. See, the Amazon Web Services tools are cheap to start, insanely cheap. Like, you can go use an instance of a Linux machine for like 20 cents or something to start, if you just want like an hour of development time. I myself have several GB of storage backed up to S3 for some larger webhosting files, and it used to be I paid about $0.15 a month for less than a GB. Now I'm up to like $1.20.
It's one of of those applications that work with decreasing efficiency the more people use it, another one being a hypothetical traffic map, it will work great for you if you're one of the 1% of people who use it since you have information about a car smash and can use an alternate route to avoid it, however if 90% of people are using it everyone will be clogging up the alternate route.
It's exactly the sort of thing you'd put a price on.
Google decided to shut down its Translate as part of a spring cleaning effort which will shut down over a dozen other APIs as well.And you're quite right, a translation API is absolutely something that has value. Google didn't plan for it to scale, to get popular, then they had to adjust. They figured they could give it away free and then sell ads on it. WRONG.
What does this mean? Well all of those ‘free’ programs that hitchhiked on Google Translate are going to be history. What about SDL Trados Studio, which also provides access to Google Translate via the Translate API? Will that service be shut down too? It sounds like it will. But SDL offers two other MT options anyway (Language Weaver and SDL), so it’s not such a big deal for them.
What does this signal to the software development community? People will think twice in future before developing a service or product around a Google API. Lots of startups and companies are going to get burned.Moreover, the problem of the Translate tools Google has getting worse with overuse - well gosh, that seems like a Google failure too, huh? If I use Google Maps, and it's free, and I go submitting corrections to road names and place names, they sure better have mechanisms in place so that garbage doesn't get on those maps, right? Translation is no different. When Google has hundreds of thousands of people using their tools, they need to be ready for that, no?
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Now I'm convinced!
posted by chavenet at 10:31 AM on October 12, 2011 [5 favorites]