There is plenty of innovation left to be done in social networking. First of all, it is kind of bizarre that people let their social relationships be handled by a third party. It should be done in a p2p way, with social clients right on people's computers or mobile phones and directly built on top of their phone numbers or email accounts.
And listen Microsoft: for $10bn you can pay 10 million people $1000 each to move all their friends over to your social network. Most impoverished college students, the core FB audience, would do it in a minute. If you're ready to spend that kind of money, why not give everyone free cellphone plans with built-in social network functions that works equally well on both the computer and the phone.
FB is not the endgame in social networking. In a few years, there will be another king of the hill. Network effects work both ways. So the $10bn valuation is just ridiculous.
One interesting thing about the article was the down-to-earth lack of abstraction in the problems described, such as the teak patio palo alto problem. Other search engines brag about their web-filtered-by-humans approach, as opposed to the "cold" algorithmic approach of Google. But it turns out Google is pretty human too, only with higher ambitions of creating generalizations from the human observations.
Good point. Because parallel programming is so difficult, orthogonality between instructions and data is more important than ever. I don't think it's a coincidence that multicore processors and third-party game engines are going mainstream at the same time. The Unreal 3 engine is being used for 100 games in many different genres. All of whom are able to take advantage of parallelism without inventing it themselves. Unreal gets the instructions right, other developers bring the data = cheaper next-gen games.
Perhaps if Will Wright stopped appearing at every single games/computers/electronics conference, he would have more time to finish the game.
Seriously, though: EA seems to think that Spore is such a unique game that it will sell no matter when it is released. I'm not sure about this. Plenty of companies are working on creating more dynamic and procedural content for games, such as the NaturalMotion software for simulating the human body. If EA/Wright keep postponing it, Spore will not feel like the quantum leap it was supposed to be.
Damn right!
If Microsoft really wanted to kick Sony's ass, they would have introduced a new movie format that used regular double-sided DVD:s with the latest compression technology, and made it playable on the 360.
If it runs OSX, why not make it possible to hook up a monitor and keyboard, making it possible to use it as a regular computer.
Am I the only one to notice this, but it seem this story/.ed/.?
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There is plenty of innovation left to be done in social networking. First of all, it is kind of bizarre that people let their social relationships be handled by a third party. It should be done in a p2p way, with social clients right on people's computers or mobile phones and directly built on top of their phone numbers or email accounts.
And listen Microsoft: for $10bn you can pay 10 million people $1000 each to move all their friends over to your social network. Most impoverished college students, the core FB audience, would do it in a minute. If you're ready to spend that kind of money, why not give everyone free cellphone plans with built-in social network functions that works equally well on both the computer and the phone.
FB is not the endgame in social networking. In a few years, there will be another king of the hill. Network effects work both ways. So the $10bn valuation is just ridiculous.
One interesting thing about the article was the down-to-earth lack of abstraction in the problems described, such as the teak patio palo alto problem. Other search engines brag about their web-filtered-by-humans approach, as opposed to the "cold" algorithmic approach of Google. But it turns out Google is pretty human too, only with higher ambitions of creating generalizations from the human observations.
Good point. Because parallel programming is so difficult, orthogonality between instructions and data is more important than ever. I don't think it's a coincidence that multicore processors and third-party game engines are going mainstream at the same time. The Unreal 3 engine is being used for 100 games in many different genres. All of whom are able to take advantage of parallelism without inventing it themselves. Unreal gets the instructions right, other developers bring the data = cheaper next-gen games.
Perhaps if Will Wright stopped appearing at every single games/computers/electronics conference, he would have more time to finish the game.
Seriously, though: EA seems to think that Spore is such a unique game that it will sell no matter when it is released. I'm not sure about this. Plenty of companies are working on creating more dynamic and procedural content for games, such as the NaturalMotion software for simulating the human body. If EA/Wright keep postponing it, Spore will not feel like the quantum leap it was supposed to be.
Damn right!
If Microsoft really wanted to kick Sony's ass, they would have introduced a new movie format that used regular double-sided DVD:s with the latest compression technology, and made it playable on the 360.
If it runs OSX, why not make it possible to hook up a monitor and keyboard, making it possible to use it as a regular computer. Am I the only one to notice this, but it seem this story /.ed /.?