Month: June 2003

All your business belongs to us

It’s hard to believe Google – which is now the world’s largest single online marketplace – came on the scene only a little more than 8 years ago, back in the days when Amazon and Ebay reigned supreme. So how did Google become the world’s single largest marketplace?

from the most excellent ftrain.com in retrospect, i wish we had picked paul over some other speakers for oscom 3.

acts of god

this is from a contract i recently saw. i’m not making this up.

16.Acts of God. In the event that performance by Consultant of any of its obligations under the terms of this agreement shall be interrupted or delayed by an act of God, by acts of war, riot, or civil commotion, by failure of computer equipment or software, including loss of data, or by an act of State, by strikes, fire, flood, or by the occurrence of any other event beyond the control of the parties hereto, Consultant shall be excused from such performance for the same amount of time as such occurrence shall have lasted or such period of time as is reasonably necessary after such occurrence abates for the effect thereof to have dissipated.

java.net

sun is waking up to communities.

java.net is a place to meet and work. “This site was designed from scratch to set a new standard for what’s possible in online collaborative software development”. It has been primed to thrive as a dynamic, live, international, 24×7, real-time community for hands-on Java software development.

with considerable luck they may be able to attract enough interest in the widely dispersed java blog / open source community. i went ahead and registered apache lenya, although the project will of course not move there. the site will point to its official home. maybe it will help to attract some more attention from the general, java-using population. we shall see.
they even let mr. gosling out to play with the other kids, although what good is a blog without rss.

help im being friendstered

Suzanne has suggested a match between you and Bonnie.
Jen has suggested a match between you and Alexis.
April: Hi, you are very cute
Lea: i wish my father still lived in zurich, so that i might have actually had a chance at a real glance of you.
Jane: you sound like you’re a pretty cool guy.

quite some setup over at friendster for a slow sunday.. too much fun. maybe this sudden stream of nice-o-grams is by virtue of the personal network being at 134190 people. very unreal for a “personal” network, but maybe testament to reed’s law?

Bye practical obscurity

jon udell, bernhard seefeld mention how the notion of practical obscurity is going away.
switzerland’s core competence is discretion very much stands at odds with search engines and blogs. i wonder if blogs will become popular here when i see so many people assuming that they can put something online somewhere “obscure” and not be found. one friend was horrified to find her land ownership records online, another was less than thrilled when his mother entered his name into google and drunken pics of him showed up. when i met someone online recently, i hesitated to tell even my first name, since that would have been enough to give me away.
too much fun, and it will get much worse.

Westbound

depending on detailed plans, it looks like i will head back to the east coast for 1 or 2 months in 3 weeks time. my travel plans:

  • july – august cambridge
  • august 22ish affero, san francisco
  • august 25-september 1 burning man, nevada
  • early september oscom sprint, cupertino
  • early september kyla, atlanta
  • september 11 seybold conference, san francisco