Normally I am really excited about everything going on on the web. We are moving so fast- its exhilarating.  This week though- things are kind of gloomy.  The brands/tools I love are acting like assholes and its hard to avoid feeling negative about it.  I want to boycott them, but hell, my business is built on these things- that’s why they know they can do it.

My thinking has changed recently, as Google’s moves with Buzz have surfaced, and Apple’s moves to control sexual imagery in the the app store, as they embark on an ugly and dishonest campaign against Flash. Patents are nothing new. Last year, Google patented some very basic technology we created in the first wave of RSS apps. Another company was granted a patent on podcasting. It goes on all the time. What is different is that tech companies are taking a more active interest in the content that flows over their networks, and are doing less to protect their users. Sometimes they’re the ones attacking users. Just like other industries.

Think about how you’re treated by airlines. By insurance companies. If you have to go to a hospital. That’s the kind of relationship you have with Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc. Sooner or later there will be a massive oil spill or a massive network-wide security breach. Expect these companies to be every bit as bad as the ones in other industries. Probably worse because they’ve come so far without much oversight or scrutiny. Recently Google was given permission to trade energy. Who are these companies? We have no idea.

via Big change in the tech world. (Scripting News).

“Facebook is working on Facebooksense, their version of Adsense. These ads will be available on sites that also have facebook connect. When they build their own ad network they will have behavioral and page content and be able to use the two to build ads.

Google commoditized social networking using Buzz to undermine this launch.”

Paraphrased from Jason Calacanis TWiST #41

I was surprised to read this on the Register.  If Vijay Gill is right, Microsoft’s cloud solution seems quaint.  Google’s approach to IT issues is design thinking in action- the sort of scalable dynamic solutions that are enabling their applications to have as flexible a foundation as possible.

As an example, he said, Microsoft is working to juice the performance of its Virtual Earth mapping service using so-called “edge technologies” – a combination of Akamai-like CDN (content delivery network) tools and actual code that runs at the edge of the network. “We’re looking at a mixture of approaches and trying to solve problems for specific applications and types of applications,” he said.

At which point, Gill piped up to explain – in his matter-of-fact monotone – why Microsoft’s philosophy is fundamentally flawed. He pointed his audience to a blog post where an online real estate outfit called Redfin says it recently ditched Microsoft Virtual Earth for Google Maps. Yes, Redfin believes that Google gives better performance.

“Our approach is a little more absolute than [Microsoft's],” Gill said. “Not only does getting to the end user have to be fast, but the back-end has to be extremely fast too…[We are] virtualizing the entire fabric so you get maximum utilization and speed on a global basis as opposed to local fixes – putting one service in a data center, for example, in Denver.

“You want to figure out how you want to distribute that across the entire system so you get it as horizontal as needed, which is essentially the definition of cloud computing.”

via Google mocks Bing and the stuff behind it • The Register.