I’ve been developing some twitter apps for the last couple of months. Which is a lousy excuse for letting this blog gain spider webs.
I’ve managed to get access to the public timeline via jabber and was delighted to work with so many skilled developers and build some quite successful apps.

But for the last weeks Twitter started to fail consistently. Downtime became a major factor and to avoid downtime Twitter decided to cut down some services.

One of the services that are now on hold are IM updates. This is the core of third party twitter apps, and all of them are out in the dark. Sure they could resort to scraping the public timeline RSS feed, but that will only cover around 85% of the updates, which for some may be enough to keep their sites running.

Some people are starting to turn to jaiku. Which in turn is being “invaded” by Brazilians, much like to what happened in earlier orkut years.

Right now the social microblogging market is ripe for a new major player to appear and steal the show. I’m sure both Microsoft and Yahoo have been watching this market. Both have IM clients that could easily integrate to a web microblogging platform.
Yahoo also has flickr which already works well with mobile tech and mobile picture uploading.

One thing is for sure, I wont be “wasting” so much time coding twitter apps soon.

According to The Wall Street Journal Yahoo’s board will reject the bid made by Microsoft earlier this week in an attempt to buy some time and get a better deal out of the whole process.

Most analysts like this stalling move, but I think it will just make Microsoft more committed to the acquisition. The ball is now on Microsoft’s court.

We should expect some kind of formal statement from Yahoo tomorrow and I don’t see MS waiting too long to strike back.

The biggest thing since Youtube’s acquisition by Google last year has just hit the intertubes like a storm. The hostile move by Microsoft to acquire Yahoo.

Everybody is talking about the consequences that this 44.6 billion dollar deal will have on the web. The obvious concerned party by this bid is Google who already made a very aggressive statement about the monopolistic nature of Microsoft and how they would potentially use Yahoo web assets to threaten Google’s in several business niches that Google leads undisputed, like the web advertising market.

But Google went beyond issuing a public statement, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo Inc. CEO Jerry Yang to offer his company’s help in any effort to thwart Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, say people familiar with the matter.

Google can’t contemplate the idea of fighting a bidding war for Yahoo against Microsoft, not only because Microsoft would probably outbid them in the end, but also because anti-monopoly laws would make Google’s bid a legal mess.

But a corporation as large as Google has a few cards in the sleeves, and according to the New York Times:

Google’s lobbyists in Washington have also begun plotting how it might present a case against the transaction to lawmakers, people briefed on the company’s plans said. Google could benefit by simply prolonging a regulatory review until after the next president takes office.

In addition, several Google executives made “back-channel” calls over the weekend to allies at companies like Time Warner, which owns AOL, to inquire whether they planned to pursue a rival offer and how they could assist, these people said. Google owns 5 percent of AOL.

It seems that this will be a long and hard war to be No. 2 on the web. Yahoo employees seem to be worried about losing their corporate identity and be engulfed by Redmond’s money making machine.

The timing for the bid seems to be perfect, just when everyone had their eyes set on the Super Bowl and Super Tuesday election for the President of the United States.

As a user of web services from both companies (Hotmail and Flickr) I find all this quite amusing and concerning at the same time. Anyway this seems to be a Borg takeover where resistance is indeed futile.

I’ve debated over this issue many times. Does the average user needs a server at home?
Microsoft thinks so, and it’s pushing it’s Windows Home Server to answer that question once and for all.

Some power users already have servers at home, usually a older pc that is now running some flavor of linux in the shadows.
I personally felt the need for a home server several time already and i’m really thinking of using a laptop as my workstation and housing all my files at a server. But i’m yet to take this leap of faith.

The explosion on the usage of laptops and other mobile gadgets able to play rich media makes this option very appealing. Watching a movie that sits in the server while you’re in bed watching it on your laptop is a huge selling point.
Besides I expect to see this product integrating perfectly with the Xbox 360 which already sits in many living rooms across the world.

I’m in no way a Microsoft zealot but this is a great move at the right time. And the campaign serves a double purpose. First it educates the masses to the possible uses of home servers and most importantly it’s very catchy and simple.

Via (Laughing Squid)

It’s at times like this that I wonder what’s the effect of too much eggnog during the holidays.

The guys at Mozilla Foundation decided that it was time to stab a wooden stake at Microsoft Internet Explorer’s cold dark heart. They released a video on Youtube which apparently is part of a larger viral video campaign set to increase the usage of Firefox in Windows powered computers.
It directly targets Internet Explorer in several ways. Firefox adoption number have been constantly rising and this campaign comes as a surprise.

The video is done in a “We are the world” style with several internet memes singing a Firefox themed song.
You’ll find Chocolate Rain’s Tay Zonday and the Ninja from Ask a Ninja. Some other guys that i don’t recognize make singing appearances as well.

But the video doesn’t stop there, besides praising Firefox goodness it uses obviously fake statistics reporting that Internet Explorer users are more likely to suffer from high cholesterol or breast cancer.

I think this is a shot on the foot buy Mozilla. Microsoft will certainly file a suite against them, and will probably win. This will probably rally more support for Firefox, but in the end I can’t see anything positive coming to Mozilla Foundation from this open attack at IE.

Via Techcrunch