Musings over Google

Information overload: too many emails to read, too many junk mails, too many web sites to visit, too many blogs to keep track, too many trends to analyze. No wonder web clippings company like WiseSearch can charge a premium for their virtual news clippings service.

We don't need organizer for information as Google claims to be, but conceptual simplifier that can give us a bird's eye view of what we are interested in. Kinda like President Bush's CIA briefing every morning, ha?

Dig this: the code of Digg was done in 2 months!

According to Wikipedia, the code of Digg was done from October 2004 to Dec.5, 2004.

2 months! It's now worth about $200million according to BusinessWeek.

Complexity of MySpace

According to startup-review.com, myspace took only 3 months to code!

Complexity is inversely proportional to success?

Why did Webvan fail?
Why did AI fail?

Why was Google successful? And Ebay, paypal, etc.

Is complexity the killer?

More to that later...

Web business analysis

It is fun to analyze what businesses can be done on the web.

At this moment, I have the following classification:
1. moving offline activities online (auctions: Ebay; payment: Paypal)
2. removing the middleman (travel: Southwest.com)
3. removing centralization (phone: Skype)
4. simplify (information access: Google)
5. organize (portal: Yahoo)
6. changing standalone to shared (photo: Flickr; video: YouTube).

Debut

People can call you "aspi". But according to Hans Asperger, it includes "a lack of empathy, little ability to form friendships, one-sided conversation, intense absorption in a special interest, and clumsy movements."

"Asperger called children with AS "little professors" because of their ability to talk about their favourite subject in great detail. " (From Wikipedia). And this is what I intend to do.