I was so busy doing other stuff so that I completely missed the release of Twisted 2.0. It was a large transition from a monolithic framework to a modular framework (there is a FAQ about this change). I wish I had the time now to test it.
Monthly Archive for April, 2005
Shortly after the acquisition of Flickr by Yahoo! the latter company introduced a multi-feature invite-only blog/photo/whatever-sharing platform called “Yahoo 360“. The invitation-only concept worked well for Gmail – elitism marketing.
Dave Winer has a spot on analysis of Yahoo 360:
Everything about Yahoo 360 is for members only, and in the first few hours of its life in the blogosphere, most people couldn’t get in. Now, after it’s launched, there’s no way to see anything other than a ghost town. Maybe that’s all there is, maybe not. But for a service like this, the appearance of being a ghost town is just as bad as actually being one. [...]
Moral of the story, big companies don’t have mojo, they can’t, and it’s not fair to make that the issue. They can, however, make the trains run on time, and at that Yahoo does quite well. But they should leave the innovation to small, nimble, motivated devteams with nothing to lose and no corporate hierarchy to please.
At the University Twente there is a overview about communication-related theories. Extremely useful and a must read – if not must know – for every designer:
The theories presented here are related to communication. Students can use these theories as a rich source for a better understanding of the theoretical fieldwork of communication. Choosing a theory for an assignment or report is made easier, since you are able to ‘browse’ through the different theories. All theories which are selected are used in the courses of Communication Studies. Stay critical when you use a theory, because theories are subjectively measured. A lot of theories are mentioned below, make your own judgment about which theories are most helpful and think why they are helpful.
After doing a detailed math about energy resources and consumption Dale Allen Pfeiffer casts a dark image of the future if controlling the earth population will not happen anytime soon:
Should we fail to acknowledge this coming crisis and determine to deal with it, we will be faced with a die-off from which civilization may very possibly never revive. We will very likely lose more than the numbers necessary for sustainability. Under a die-off scenario, conditions will deteriorate so badly that the surviving human population would be a negligible fraction of the present population. And those survivors would suffer from the trauma of living through the death of their civilization, their neighbors, their friends and their families. Those survivors will have seen their world crushed into nothing.