Dubbed the ‘rewiring of Yahoo,’ Y!OS 1.0 launched this week with the introduction of the social suite. Its strategy focuses on opening up almost everything to developers, including content, traffic, and Yahoo’s user base.
I’ve been thinking the walled garden approach to social media is not very good in the long-term. It comes with the risk that if a compelling enough substitute were to come along, you lose members.
Alternatively, if a service were to use an open way of managing user profiles, it could possibly avoid the risk of be usurped. Giving up user profiles might seem risky in itself, but the service could adapt more quickly to the changing capability of a user’s profile “agents”. Today my profile might be the aggregation of my activity on Twitter+Facebook+Blog+Flickr+Google+LinkedIn+… but tomorrow it will be different, with different kinds of data. Today I manage most of all that activity manually. But just as notification of this new blog post will auto-post to Twitter and Facebook, I see a time coming soon where all of this can be done through a “dashboard” of sorts.
This dashboard would have to be stored online somewhere, in a safe place. But this profile dashboard is not like Gmail ot Wordpress. It should be a kind of API instead, where a whole slew of software products can be developed to interact with your profile and in turn your profile with all the services synced to it. I could then use an iPhone client, or a web application, or a robot; I could have a robot ‘tweeting’ photos and info about my vegetable garden, and over time I could play, mashup, and mix the dataset in all kinds of ways to learn how to get more veggies.
I don’t know if Y!OS is the answer, but it seems there are a growing number of solutions that are getting us closer to when you let your profile do most of the information filtering of the blinding information that will be the web in 10 or 15 years, maybe sooner.
OK, Apple released some nice new laptops a couple days ago. I’ll still be waiting for Macbook Rev.B, as I’ve been burned too many times with first gen hardware from Apple. Although I should say both 1st and 2cd gen iPhones have been great.
My primary work machine is a first gen 2006 17″ iMac 1.83Ghz 2GB RAM with a second 24″ screen set up in portrait mode. While it’s still working great for most of my tasks, I’ve been thinking I’ll be replacing it in the next 3-6 months.
Apple should be refreshing the iMac line sometime within the next 90 days or so. There’s rough ideas out there on what it will offer, from most probable to least:
Boosted CPUs: probably 2.8-3.2Ghz (up from 2.4-3Ghz)
NVIDIA graphics, probably 9800GT derived cards
Dual-Link displayPort
LED backlit screens
64bit chipset (for 8GB+ RAM)
These are all evolutionary upgrades, and the last two are unlikely to happen soon as most consumers won’t need 8GB+ RAM for a while, and large LED backlit screens are still expensive.
My computer will be 3 years old in April, so I’ll be looking for a replacement around that time. I hope Apple can get a LED 24″ into the iMac before then.
It’s drawing surface feels pretty nice to draw on. Not quite paper, but also not like drawing on plastic. It comes with three pen-tips, a very soft one that feels like a brush, one that’s very hard, and one in the middle. When you flip the pen it switches the tool to an eraser, which is a nice natural action. The kit also includes a mouse, with a felt-like bottom. The unit has 4 customizable buttons and a zoom strip. I have one button set for the pan tool, another for the move tool, and one set to change the monitor focus. This is a great feature, clicking it cycles the tablet surface to only work on my 17″ iMac screen, only my 24″ portrait screen, or both.
I still would love to get a big Cintiq version someday. There’s still a bit of a learning curve with drawing on one surface, and looking at another. But my Intuos cost 10x less than a Cintiq, and it’s working out great for me so far.
