Neomeme

Forget the privacy-infringing, faux-not-evil Google Beast. The real beast, growing rapidly and devouring everything in its path, is Facebook. Facebook huge right now. Super-huge. Almost Google-huge. CEO-bitch “CEO,bitch” Mark Zuckerberg is hailed as a modern-day DaVinci. Even old fogeys like Robert Scoble are transitioning to Facebook, because it’s as cool as iPhone. A cottage industry, complete with eager VCs has sprung up around Facebook Applications, and startups rise and fall on Facebook apps alone.

And now, Facebook is jumping into the acqusistions game, buying up a startup before it even launches and outbidding Google. When you outbid Google’s billion-dollar cash reserves, you ‘re not fooling around. You mean business. Read more »

Not to toot my own horn, but I’ve discovered an element of eerie prescience in my writing. First, I predicted Yahoo’s(and Dell’s) suggestion tool. And now, looking back through old posts, I’ve predicted Google’s Street View, which came out in May, in a post from January:

Add street-level photographs, contributed by users(like now-defunct A9 maps tried to do), and you have an accurate virtual representation of the world. Realistic virtual tourism certainly seems more plausible.

Now we hear about Google’s Street View fleet setting out to cover all of America. If anyone can pull off the seemingly impossible project of photographing every street in America, and presumably, eventually the world, it’s certainly Google.

And if you haven’t checked out Street View, do it now. It’s more than an incredible panorama of America or Google Maps in 3D- it’s also a source of infinite amusement.

So here’s my next prediction: Google Street View, or something like it, will soon become the next Second Life.

We’re seeing the reversal of a trend. In years past, machine intelligence has been touted as the solution to all of life’s problems. Now, we’re seeing a resurgence of human intelligence- not AI, but HI being used more and more for tasks normally delegated to computers. Amazon has attempted to leverage human intelligence with limited success through its Mechanical Turk, but the service never really took off. But now, a new crowdsourcing, human computing application is poised to capture our collective imagination and demonstrate the true potential of human-powered computing. It looks like this: Read more »

Fox is doing many interesting things in promoting the upcoming Simpsons movie- turning 7/11 stores into Kwik-E-Marts, organizing a vote for the real Springfield, and doing heavy social news marketing. It can be said that the Simpsons movie is perhaps the first movie to be actively marketed on Digg.

They are also innovating when it comes to the flash games that are traditionally associated with movie promo sites. Read more »

The satirical news outlet The Onion has a more-true-than funny video about all of the Internet crashing. Note how all of the sites mentioned- MySpace,Youtube,Flickr are all our Web 2.0 darlings. There is no mention of Web 1.0 classics like Yahoo or CNN. Which leads me to believe that, more and more, non-user generated content is getting left farther and farther behind and relegated to relic status, like a fax machine. And the concept of an entirely user-generated web is even scarier than a return to the old web. Just look at the comments on any Youtube or MySpace page.

Video after the jump. Read more »

Mashable has an interesting and very meta post today about a phenomenon they call Navel Gaze Sunday- that is, on slow news days bloggers like to write about what they know best- blogging about blogging. Clearly, it’s a very slow news day, because I’m blogging about bloggers blogging about blogging. Ech. This, like many things I write about, if of course indicative of a larger phenomenon- there are no news. Read more »

Mere days after its release, the iPhone has already been hacked. This is not a full hack, but getting access into the internals of the iPhone’s OS is a huge step forward. I fully expect the iPhone to be completely hacked, and running Linux in a couple month’s time. Read more »

I read an interesting article today about a loss of trust stemming from greater scrutiny of Google being potentially problematic for the company. Google has changed from two guys in a garage with a Don’t Be Evil philosophy to a massive, corporate behemoth, that plays a larger and larger role in our lives every day. Starting as a humble search engine, Google has muscled its way into every aspect of our digital lives. They have not done this through unfair business practices or sneaky tactics. Google has taken over our digital lives through superior technology and free services. But it has taken over our digital lives nonetheless. Read more »

Question: What do Kevin Rose, Jason Calacanis, Guy Kawasaki, and Steve Jobs have in common? “Easy”, you answer. “They are all well-known tech personalities who have developed a cult of personality around themselves.” True. And, more importantly, they have used the sheer force of their personality to build a following for their product, or at the very least, an incredible surge of initial interest. But is personality all it takes to launch a successful startup? Read more »