Droid Does

I have viscerally stayed away from the iPhone, for all the shaking of the culture that it has done.You could argue this Third World guy simply could not afford it, and that is why. I have admired it but I have not taken the step. My tech startup is to do with the IC - Internet Computer - vision. A key part of it is a laptop like device that competes with both the PC and the smartphone to become the center of gravity in computing. So not going for the iPhone has been to eat one's own dog food, even if that dog food has only existed

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so far in vision. But a browser-centric life and work style can feel like you are already living it. And if you spend as much time online as I do, when you get offline, you want to be offline. I am not much of a phone person as is. I have preferred digital communication: email, blog, Twitter, Facebook. Even digital phones carry analog baggage. Recently I have found a great use for my prepaid mobile phone. I tweet from my phone once in a while these days. You report on the world when out and about. You get a phone because you need a number for others to have.

But Droid has me excited. Android promises to deliver the smartphone for the masses. Steve Jobs is an icon, and I admire him a lot, but my democratic impulse takes me to the likes of Dell. Go where the masses are.

The iPhone has been a smaller desktop. The Android phones promise to be about web applications. Finally we are about to have smartphones for the masses. And that is not coming from the company that built the computer "for the rest of us."

Image via CrunchBase

A Big Week For The Mobile Web
And this past week was a big one for the mobile web. We got three big things we've needed badly:
1) A real competitor to the iPhone - the Droid
2) A scalable business model for mobile apps - in app transactions in free apps
3) A standard for broadcasting video (and audio) to mobile devices

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Content, Microcontent, Blogging, Microblogging

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I was just busy leaving tens of comments at this particular blog post by Fred Wilson, the VC also known as AVC, and it occurred to me that we treat blog comments as almost illegitimate. There is that near universal no follow command that pulls down comments left at most blogs. I appreciate the logic behind it. Spam commenters would skew the Google PageRank mechanism. Links in the comments sections should not carry the same weights as links in the body of articles and blog posts. But to say they should carry no weight

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at all is ridiculous. By that logic, email should be banned. Those Nigerian dictators are reason enough. So far the way we have treated blog comments - with hostility - stems out of ignorance. If you don't fathom it, destroy it. 

[WordPress #336657]: Not Being Able To Leave Comments

By that logic, Twitter is out and out ridiculous. (I Get Twitter) 140 characters? Come on.

There is blogging and there is microblogging. Twitter is microblogging, and has more than earned its rightful place. It has all the buzz. Blog posts are content. Blog post comments are microcontent. Microcontent has not been given its rightful place. And I think that has been a mistake. Good to see Disqus at work to remedy that. But it is not growing fast enough for me. There are too many blog posts that I come across that I want

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to comment on but can't because I got there before Disqus did.

I would be curious to know how Disqus deals with the no follow nonsense.

It is Google that is slow. It has yet to deal with tweets. Google and/or Facebook have still to deal with Facebook updates. Google is nowhere close to even wanting to deal with comments at the bottom of blog posts. How social is that? Not at all.

Tweets And Facebook Updates: The Mumbojumbo

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