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August 27, 2005 Introducing Slide: Personal Broadcasting
Now that CNet has broken the story, I can talk about what I've been working on for the last 6 months.
I'm the designer (there will be two of us shortly, which is good because my head is about to expode) at a company called Slide.
Slide is a company focused on the idea of personal broadcasting. With Slide, you subscribe to the people and content that you care about, and publish content for other people to subscribe to. By subscribing to content, it is delivered to you automatically. When someone adds photos or a link to a website, you get it directly, without having to constantly check a website to see if there's anything new.
Those in the blog community are very familiar with this. We use tools like Bloglines and Newsgator to subscribe to the blogs that we read regularly. As I've mentioned before, I believe that this idea of subscriptions is the third big wave in the evolution of the web (hyperlinking was the first, search was the second), which is why I was so excited to jump in.
Those more technical understand that this is all powered by a variety of technologies (many of which I discussed in "The Syndication Mess") and will learn quickly that Slide can build channels using RSS 2.0 feeds as well as content from your local machine. But the nice thing is that if you don't understand what I just said, it doesn't matter. The goal is to try and simplify the entire process so that grandma doesn't have to worry about XML, RSS and a bunch of other acronyms. She can just subscribe to Johnnie's photos and they will stream by, and new ones come through automatically. The details around whether those photos come from a Flickr RSS feed, from my laptop, whether they're pushed using RSS 2.0 or Atom or going over 443 vs. 80 should be completely transparent to her. It should just work.
In addition to the idea of exploring subscriptions and personal publishing, I've also been interested in working on a connected client-application for a while now, especially when reading articles by people much smarter than I am on the subject. Google and Yahoo! are getting more involved in the area of connected client-applications as well, which is, I believe, the right progression (for an over-the-top assessment, read Kottke's take).
Slide is currently in private beta, but will open to the public on Monday. If you can't wait that long, let me know and I will invite you.
Oh, and one last thing: Right now Slide is Windows only (doh!) but we're building out our Mac dev group, so contact me if that is something you'd be interested in working on.
Posted by johnnie at 10:43 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
August 23, 2005 Google's (Changing) Philosophy
Posted: 8/23/2005
Updated: 8/24/2005
Google has changed its philosophy. Their "10 Things About Google" page was recently updated:
Here is Google's explanation (written at the very bottom of the page):
"Full-disclosure update: When we first wrote these '10 things' four years ago, we included the phrase 'Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat.' Over time we've expanded our view of the range of services we can offer –- web search, for instance, isn't the only way for people to access or use information -– and products that then seemed unlikely are now key aspects of our portfolio. This doesn't mean we've changed our core mission; just that the farther we travel toward achieving it, the more those blurry objects on the horizon come into sharper focus (to be replaced, of course, by more blurry objects)."
Conspicuous? Yes. Do I blame them? Hmm... I guess not.
Google has changed. The company that used to preach "Don't be evil" is now blackballing the press because they dug up information on Eric Schmidt. The company that was once a small, quiet place for nerds to code is now a $85B media company. Is Google going to become the new Microsoft? It already is.
Update:
As it turns out the timing of the removal of the "Google doesn't do... chat" was not coincidental. Google has announced a chat client called Talk.
Also, it seems that the New York Times and I are in full agreement. Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain:
An excerpt:
"In the day, you'd hear that Microsoft was the evil empire, especially in Silicon Valley," said Brian Lent, the president of Medio Systems, a start-up in Seattle working on mobile-phone-based search. "Google is the new evil empire, because they're in such a powerful position in terms of control. They have potential monopolistic control over access to information."
Mr. Lent, who worked closely with Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, when all three were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, helped introduce Mr. Brin and Mr. Page to one of the company's earliest investors.
"I like and respect the Google guys," Mr. Lent said, "but let's just say that their ultimate aim seems to me to be, 'One Google under Google, for which it stands.' "
In that article is also the first press mention of my new company, Slide:
"I've definitely been picking up on the resentment," said Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal, the online payment service now owned by eBay. "They're a big company now, doing things people didn't expect them to do."
Mr. Levchin, who last year founded a multimedia company in San Francisco called Slide, said Google "still has a long wick of good will to burn off," but he added, "I'm surprised at how fast the company's reputation is changing."
Posted by johnnie at 09:33 PM | Comments (3)