It hosts tumbleblogs for free. What is a tumbleblog? At http://www.tumblr.com/faqs they say: "If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks [or] slightly more structured blogs that make it easier, faster, and more fun to post and share stuff you find or create.
In exchange for inferring anything they want enticing you with a low cost. In this case free. Owning and controlling your own data is going to be a big theme as the markets mature. Taking control of your own data makes it possible to control who can infer, how you license it.
Sure it's not free, it is inconvenient. But it means you have the ultimate say on who gets access. Your friends? acquaintances? even anonymous cowards? Probably the biggest advantage is the grubby marketers who ultimately sell by inference from your data can be held at bay.
Are you saying that tumbleblogs takes copyright over the content that people publish there? I thought that all the hosted blogging platforms let people own their own data.
"... Are you saying that tumbleblogs takes copyright over the content that people publish there? ..."
Hey rms, no. Not copyright but control of content and through that the ability to infer. As you know I have this thing with letting third party sites have control of your data. For example by control I mean release this bit of information with "all rights reserved", another "creative commons, Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs".
I know these sites are easy to use, cheap and share. There is a cost. Maybe I'm arguing a point others don't care about. There is a better way to share.
"... I thought that all the hosted blogging platforms let people own their own data. ..."
What about meta-data? What about the logs. Depends what you mean by "their own data". I may seem to be arguing the extreme case but there are other ways you can share your data without third party social sites. It's just they haven't been invented yet. To put the third party out of business and take control of your own data is an interesting idea ... at least to me.
Looks great. Any plans to provide a history of successful contracts for a specific area, to give potential users an idea of what the going market price is?
That's a very interesting idea - have to think about how we could pull that off. It definitely would be informative...but tough since there is going to be huge variance in who people are going to want to talk to.
Spot on. It would seem Tools are critical to a software factory, Languages to software innovators.
Noting the the reference to Lazlo: http://www.openlaszlo.org/
"OpenLaszlo is "write once, run everywhere." An OpenLaszlo application developed on one machine will run on all leading Web browsers on all leading desktop operating systems."
Heard this before?
Joel is a rarity: brilliant, successful programmer, entrepreneur and writer. But when writing about how to develop successful software, it tends to be things that would resonate with frustrated enterprise software programmers, like he used to be, or guys like Scoble perhaps. But his theme is similar to PG's, concentrating on making it possible to develop software using programmers with average talent will not result in exceptionally useful software programs.
Yes that would be better. But then a lot of software falls under that. That which doesn't can also be described in belittling terms. Pick any software you like, mostly it will be trivial (or possible to describe it in trivial terms).
