Evolving the Social Network

arantius writes "An article on BottomQuark points to a new development: Here's a story about a new start-up Huminity, referred to as the technology of the year. The software they produce combines instant messaging, chat, and social networking. After burning through over $30k of personal funds, the team has now raised millions for their company. We've heard about Friendster recently, but somehow this seems more interesting." Jamie adds: Social networking was in the news recently because this patent apparently covers much of it. It was bought for $700K by the two underdogs and may be used to beat up on Friendster. Don't worry, the guy who wrote Slashdot's friend-of-friend code doesn't think we're affected :)

Comments

FP

[Anonymous Coward]

FP After loooong time :)

Re:FP

[Anonymous Coward]

so you sat there for how long wasting bandwidth refreshing constantly, only to fail it?!?!

wow, how humiliating

What?

[eurleif]

And exactly what is Social Networking? Nothing linked to from here seems to explain, at least without paying Business 2.0 for a subscription.

Love Trek

[Anonymous Coward]

Naughty Vulcans Need Love Too

http://www.lunaticlounge.com/treklove/

Re:More interesting than Trendster?

[Penguinoflight]

si20 won't solve the problem of spam, it will just keep people who weren't going to buy junk from spam from reading the solicitations for junk. Yet, you still come up with a non-solution that flat doesn't work. If you want to provide a real service, gimme a reply, I'll explain it, but not if you don't wanna hear.

$4 million? That's nothing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Palestinians have raised billions to build better suicide bombs.

Damn Patents

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that they don't get patent happy about something trivial, like this company.

Re:Some network

[Anonymous Coward]

The State Of KDE

We have seen a lot of important news regarding the KDE project over recent week, so it is worth pausing to consider the ramifications.

Let us start with the recent acquisition of SUSE by Novell. SUSE was the biggest Linux distributor (though still dwarfed by Red Hat) to use KDE as its default desktop. SUSE has, for many years, neglected to package the GNOME desktop properly or even do basic Q&A... much to the delight of KDE fanatics. Now, however, Novell has purchased the SUSE linux distribution and Ximian, a company best known for the producing the most polished and professional desktop available for Linux (GNOME-based). The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this is that KDE is about to lose its main commercial support.

Let us take a look at some of the reasons why this is so:

• GNOME has always been the commerical desktop of choice. It has long been focussed on getting the basics right and building from there... as opposed to the KDE Project, which is entirely aimed at pleasing the slashdot peanut gallery with pointless eye-candy. KDE features are thrown into the mix with little or no regard for usability, or even good taste. The end result is disasterous, as can be seen by anyone unforunate enough to be forced into using it.
• KDE is extremely expensive to develop for, unless you intend to produce GPL software. TrollTech, the owners of KDE and Qt, license the X11 version of their Qt toolkit under the GPL. This forces anyone wanting to develop software built on top of it (including KDE), to be (L)GPL licensed -- or pay TrollTech $3000 for every developer you have working on the application to purchase a commercial license.
• TrollTech is also vulnerable to takeover by companies hostile to Free software and good corporate lawyers who can blow holes in the laughable FreeQt agreements.
• Qt's/KDE lack of accessiblity. Accessiblity is vital feature for a modern desktop. A desktop cannot be sold to the U.S. government unless it supports the features necessary for disabled users to make full use of it. The lack of said feature effectively cuts it off from the biggest software purchaser of all. GNOME has spent the last 18 months and more doing the ground-work and developing/polishing the accessiblity of the GNOME desktop (thanks to the fine work of Sun engineers). KDE has spent the time making *fake* translucent menus to help make impressive screenshots. Over the next few months you can expect increasing numbers of near-orgasmic announcements of weak accessiblity support from the KDE project, as the full extent of their folly and just how far they are behind GNOME finally becomes obvious to them. The end result will be, as with all KDE features, half-assed and broken -- designed only to function as a marketing feature tick-box filler.
• Novell is already engaged in training its engineers in development using GTK/GNOME -- not Qt/KDE.
• Nat Friedman (co-founder of Ximian), recently made a post to slashdot explaining the take-over and future directions. Much has been made of Novell's claims that it will continue to "support" KDE, but this is merely as legacy software. As Nat's post makes clear, the future of Novell is GNOME and the push for a single dominant desktop.
• Many desperate and ignorant (ie. most of them) KDE advocates are clinging to the idea that Novell will run KDE with Ximian/GNOME's superior software like Evolution. Little do they realise that running Evolution is running GNOME without the panel apps. Evolution is deeply integrated into GNOME... running a KDE desktop with Evolution is the height of stupidity and only adds to the extraordinary bloat and sloth assocated with KDE. Why would a company maintain, develop and test two different code bases? They wouldn't... hence the reason why KDE is dead at SUSE.
• Finally, and most damning of all, TrollTech is par

I have another suggestion.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shove it up your ass.

Re:Something else

[protoshoggoth]

Whatdaya mean, "slowly"?