Fred Wilson has a response today to Eric Schmidt’s declaration in Edinburgh that Google+ is an “identity service”. He asks and answers his own question. “whom Google built this service for? You or them. And the answer to why you need to use your real name in the service is because they need you to.” Of course Facebook is also an identity service. Facebook Connect is the means of distributing it. And of course Facebook too is built using real names because “they need you to”. At this level FaceBook and Google have much in common, and both are vying
[read more]...John Borthwick has captured in words what many have been grappling with in a less articulate way for about 18 months. The new paradigm we need to think about the internet has finally emerged. This snippet outlines the broad trend: Start with this constant, real time, flowing stream of data getting published, republished, annotated and co-opt’d across a myriad of sites and tools. The social component is complex — consider where its happening. The facile view is to say its Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or FriendFeed — pick your favorite service. But its much more than that because all these sites
[read more]...I am re-posting this from the edgeio blog. Mainly because I think it has current relevance and will in future have historical value. I’m not certain the edgeio blog will continue to exist, so this is the new home for the post. Since it was originally written we have seen the rise of Adbrite, Glam, Sugar Publishing, Digg and other businesses based on understanding the proliferation of publishing, reading habits, and advertising away from the big portals. I also note that Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame commented on the post, something I failed to notice originally. So, here is
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