Ben Barren - Confessions of a Mad Man » Web

Category Archives: Web_O/S

The web based operating system that started with gmail, then google docs and now all these cloud services like drop.io - the list goes on.

The Notificator : it’s all realtime + video search

Posted by Ben Barren on February 6, 2009 – 1:40 am

Filed under Web_O/S

The Aries Project Life on Mars ep 9 not 1 like on Aussie TV. Click2Watch.

So it’s past my bedtime, but damn Damages, Lost, new Life on Mars, and Lie to Me were all good viewing. But I had to link to a great post by someone in the business, not someone on the sidelines rehashing techmeme, from Betaworks founder. My butchered extract below, it’s all great - go read it, the more stream of consciousness replaying of AOL/Google 1.0 meetings the beta Also hearing Cam’s take on luck and timing is always a good read…

Rose wants to cap yer ass, so says her speech coach Damages S2E5

John Borthwick : “Search is fragmenting into verticals. In the past year two meaningful verticals have emerged — one is video — the other is real time search. Let me play out what happened in video since its indicative of what is happening in the now web. YouTube.com is now the second largest search site online — YouTube generates domestically close to 3BN searches per month — it’s a bigger search destination than Yahoo.. Google.com has suddenly become the source for pages — not conversations, not the real time web. What comes next? I think context is the next hurdle. Social context and page based context. Gerry Campbell talks about the importance of what happens before the query in a far more articulate way than I can and in general Abdur, Greg, EJ, Gerry, Jeff Jonas and others have thought a lot more about this than I have. But the question of how much you can squeeze out of a context less pixel and how context can to be wrapped around data seems to be the beginning of the next chapter.. 71 years later the Notificator is finally reaching scale. “

Also : Neville Hobson playing with Google Latitude seems a big part of the context equation!

Its Danielle Rousseau watch latest Lost S5E4

androids live amongst us bostonians

Posted by Ben Barren on January 3, 2009 – 1:28 pm

Filed under Web_O/S

VentureBeat’s posts around Google’s Android Operating System run Netbooks are fascinating. Their latest Q+A : “How far away is Android from mass adoption as an OS for laptops and PCs? Will we see a Google OS in the short time? We don’t know. To our best knowledge we all can only speculate as eWeek recently did when they reported that a third of traffic streaming out of Google’s Mountain View headquarters is stripped of the usual identifying information that accompanies such traffic. Android needs substantial additional effort to be ready for mass adoption as an OS for PCs and laptops — but who knows what Google is planning. Chrome and Android itself were in development for many years before they were revealed to the public. Our experience with Android is that news leaks to the public do not occur. Google has separated most of the Android team. Its core is in Boston and does Android employees do not have much contact with non-Android Google employees.”

If You Like Androids + Chuck then Check out The Middle Man. Click4 Torrents

“Well Miss Tarrant, dont you think you’d be better on the platform ?” - Henry James, The Bostonians, Google Books, pg 342.

billionaire boys club does that live software thang

Posted by Ben Barren on December 28, 2008 – 12:48 am

Filed under Consumer_Internet, Web_O/S

I like Tim O’Reilly’s “Live Software” capabilities of Web 2.0. UGC only goes so far : “Again, consider MyBarackObama.com. It definitely harnessed explicit contribution, providing a platform for volunteers to organize and host local calling parties, to blog, or perform other campaign activities. But ultimately, Obama’s ground game–old fashioned precinct-level organizing, amped up to a new level by an army of distributed volunteers armed with mobile phones and coordinated via a web application–was the key to his victory. The “explicit” social media elements of MyBarackObama.com paled in impact compared to the development of a next generation electronic nervous system, in which volunteers were trained, deployed, and managed by a web application who used them, in John McMullen’s memorable phrase, as “souls in the great machine.”"