→ David Ascher: You knew the old Mozilla, meet the new Mozilla
Mozilla’s David Ascher explains how Mozilla is adapting to take on the new challenges posed by today’s closed platforms, such as Facebook and Apple.
I’m delighted to see that Mozilla is fighting for user freedom again, and has broadened its thinking outside of Firefox, setting its priorities on identity and apps.
★ Fab.com’s amazing pivot story
Fab.com‘s pivot is nothing short of spectacular. Founder and CEO Jason Goldberg tells this fascinating story with a presentation:
In about 3 weeks, they completely changed their strategy — and now they’ve got significant traction and raised $40M more funding. I am amazed.
(thanks to Jean-Christophe Fann for the link)
★ Money, Freedom or Privacy: what do we prefer to give away?
Marco Arment compares claims that Apple, Google, and Facebook keep telling their users, and concludes:
Everyone has their bullshit. You can simply decide whose you’re willing to tolerate.
Each of these companies’ business models takes something from us — we just have to decide what we prefer to give away:
- Money,
- Freedom,
- Privacy.
Personally, I try to balance my “spending” between these companies (and others), to avoid relying too much on one supplier and sacrificing too much of either assets.
→ Mark Suster: The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why
Mark Suster has strong arguments on why the rise of the “App Internet” driven by the current generation of mobile and social products does not mean the end of the web.
From my perspective, unless major breakthroughs are made in cross-platform development, distribution and synchronization between native apps, native/client-side apps will fade again as open web technologies will catch up.
In other words, the web isn’t dead — it’s just taking some time to build the right open tools to match what closed ecosystems have been able to achieve.
→ Harvard study shows Facebook friends don’t influence your taste
A Harvard study just published in PNAS [1]:
[...] the overreaching conclusion was that on Facebook, people befriend others who are similar to them rather than becoming more similar to their friends over time.
In other words, tastes influence who you become friends with, but your friends have limited influence on your tastes.
(via Mike Elgan on Google+)
Notes:- I can’t find a direct link to the study. If you have it please let me know in the comments. [↩]