Exactly. The whole piece is < 900 words, mentions about 4 meaningful pieces of info (current Slack stats, names of 3 OSS competitors and a line or three about their rationales, history, 1-2 added features). Hardly "must-read" territory.
For those ~15 lines of unwrapped text, the whole page is 1900 lines in total.
Ah--love Ben's blog and podcast (listen to it several times a week during my commute).
His point is a good one. In terms of feeds of potential branding interest, beyond Youtube, Google's big (and mostly untapped) opportunity is in Gmail.
They made a stride to first assert control and doing users a favor by moving things to the Promotions tab. Now they have their ads in the email "feed" in that tab. The Inbox product, IMHO, was their attempt at redefining email into an fully algorithmically-curated feed ala FB, Twitter and Reddit.
My personal bet is that Inbox was a proof of concept and they will force Gmail to shift to that approach in the not too distant future. If users don't leave en masse, I would not be surprised at all to see Google forcing advertisers to pay to get into the inboxes of Gmail users--even users who have explicitly asked for promotional emails. That was FB's brilliant gambit (that somewhat blew up in their face). They convinced advertisers to invest in building an audience on the FB platform (so FB owned the audience), let them see revenue from it, and then switched from a "communicate all you like to everyone who Likes you for free!" model to a "pay us on an auction model if you want to reach anyone" model. Many advertisers consider it a huge bait-and-switch play, but I can't deny that it seems to have been successful. And that is why I won't be surprised to see Google follow suit there.
From everything I've seen/read during the security research phase for my project, trusting in the computational/security integrity of endless P2P nodes is not a road I want to go down.
There really is nothing _a priori_ wrong with the centralized system, PROVIDED said system/operator makes strong Privacy / Data Sovereignity guarantees from the word go.
Fair point. It's not necesarily the case that you'd see extensively P2P nodes. But again, a distributed protocol based system would allow for local supernodes, competently administered, to exist.
There's also the issue that client nodes, under any model, also require security updates and practices. The universal P2P model really isn't far from that, and certain auto-updating models seem arguably preferable to present offerings.
The piece and ars technica video show both the good and the bad of this new MSFT attempt:
Some good ideas, but let's be real - ultimately a total niche product at $1500. Compare that the surface pro 3 has been selling about 3-4 million units in the last year ( q3/2014 - q2/2015 revenue was estimated around $3b, on devices costing about $800 + $130 keyboard), while Apple sells about 20m Mac units in the same timeframe, which is in itself STILL a niche!
www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-mac-computers-since-first-quarter-2006/
I just don't see how this is going to make any sort of real dent.
I've been saying the same thing for ages... there even was a hashtag around at the time in 2012 if I recall... #waronwords
Google could never decide if they wanted to G+ to basically be Instagram (not surprising given Horowitz' Yahoo/flickr background), or if there was something to be done along the Interest Graph angle a la Reader / HN / Reddit / asf. The info density for the latter has always been terrible on G+, not to speak of various other iniquities that text-heavy posts (or post shares) had to endure for years, like much smaller images in the stream for the longest time.
Really they should have just split these two use cases into either two separate apps (maybe to prescient for 2011), or at least provided alternative UI views. Of course, a solid API including Write could have solved it as well as you alluded to.
Blanket #surveillance, a domestic enemy to the Constitution? Discuss...
"I, [name], do solemnly swear that I will support & defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign & domestic...that I will bear true faith & allegiance to... same [constitution]; that I take this obligation freely, without any... purpose of evasion..."
4th Amendment to said U.S. Constitution: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, & effects, ... against unreasonable searches & seizures, shall not be violated, & no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, & ... particularly describing the place to be searched, & the persons or things to be seized."
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If the NSA's ability to spy is a critical piece of national security -- then that which opposes it is a national security threat. It isn't the Greenwalds or the Applebaums who are the targets, it is the people who are elected President, run for Congress, or run big technology companies. The only people who have come close to spelling this out are Senator Ron Wyden and Bill Binney. That was before Snowden's leaks.
I'm not impressed by tech's leadership on this. Their fear today will mean a new generation will see secret pervasive surveillance as a feature to be added to; and perhaps that generation already does.
For those ~15 lines of unwrapped text, the whole page is 1900 lines in total.