Data Circle

On the company’s blog today, Twitter announced that they would be ceasing all SMS updates in the UK. As usual, TechCrunch UK was hot off the mark with a report, and I’m sure that plenty of other opinions will fly around the Web over the next few days.

Quite frankly though, I’m amazed that the service has lasted this long. Twitter appears to lack a viable business model, and each time you update your status it could be sending that out, via SMS, to tens, hundreds or even thousands of recipients. Even if Twitter received a small amount for each incoming SMS, this would be dwarfed by the number of outgoing messages. The more popular Twitter gets, the more they will lose. The sensible option would be to charge users for receiving texts—which is fairly simple to do—but it looks like the site is run by a bunch of techies who have been blinded into thinking that providing a service which costs money to run without a long-term source of revenue is somehow a good idea. Then again, they’re running a Web 2.0 site, where having basic accountancy skills on your CV will ensure that you never get hired.

From a personal perspective, I’m actually quite pleased to see this happening. Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen companies pour millions of dollars into these web 2.0 companies, which have produced virtually no returns and are an appalling waste of capital which could be put to far better use elsewhere. Perhaps now investors will look again at opportunities to “invest” in companies like Twitter, Facebook et al and see them for what they really are—a highly speculative bet on the success of a company with no assets, no business model and virtually no revenue.

Phishing, the art of obtaining information from users by pretending to be from a reputable known source, is surprisingly effective, despite attempts by numerous organisations (particularly banks) to educate users about this issue. Recently, the University of Manchester, where I’ve been a student for nearly five years, was hit by a barrage of emails pretending to be from IT Services (the department which runs most of the University’s email, amongst other things) which encouraged students and staff to reply with their username and password. Unbelievably for an organisation which supposedly consists of intelligent people who are working towards obtaining one of the highest qualifications in the country, more than seventy people replied with their login details. As a result, millions of spam messages were sent from University accounts, causing some major mail providers, including Hotmail, to block all incoming mail from manchester.ac.uk addresses and their subdomains.

Phishing relies upon the fact that it doesn’t matter if only one in ten thousand people are completely lacking in common sense (given the University’s size, it’s probably actually more like one in five thousand)—spam enough of them and you’ll eventually get some hits. It amazes me that people still fall for this trick, because to me it seems so painstakingly obvious that a bank would never ask for information such as your PIN, but it would appear that the message has still not got through to everyone.

Following on from its first survey in 2007, well-known web magazine A List Apart is launching a 2008 survey for those of us in the web business (design, programming, development etc.) . An analysis will be published in a later edition of the magazine, and the anonymised raw data will also be made available so that anyone can run their own analysis too. I’m not sure how useful the end result will be, but as a freelance web development myself I’m certainly interested in seeing the final analysis and statistics.

As some of you may already have heard, the Netscape web browser software will cease to be supported as of February 2008. For those of us who can remember a time before the dominance of Internet Explorer (yes, such a time did exist, and I’m not entirely sure if things have improved since then in many ways), Netscape Navigator was probably our first introduction to the Web in all its glory—well, text with a few animated GIFs anyway. I can remember first surfing the Web using Netscape Navigator Gold at the University of Bolton (or Bolton Institute of Higher Education as it was back then), mostly looking for information about the Games Workshop universe. I also built my first web site using the Composer software which came bundled with the browser, and I don’t think it’s pushing the point too far to say that without Netscape I might not have got involved with the Internet as early as I did, or as deeply as I have now.

However, the only surprise in the announcement is that it has taken so long for AOL to realise that Netscape is no longer a viable commodity on the Web. With traffic to Netscape.com dropping like a stone and the rise and rise of Firefox making Navigator somewhat obsolete, it was only a matter of time before Netscape was quietly taken out the back and put down for its own good. Netscape pioneered something which nowadays we all take for granted (web browsing), developed and implemented core technologies such as the Secure Sockets Layer (used in most online transactions) and stood its ground against the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft for many years. It’s a shame to see it finally fall, but all good things must come to an end one day.

I feel as if I’ve just written an obituary. Perhaps I have. Here lies Netscape, October 1994 – December 2007.

Further reading

• The end of an era as AOL officially retires Netscape
• Web icon set to be discontinued

Queen launches YouTube channel

As well as being broadcast on BBC as tradition dictates, this year the Queen’s Christmas Day message will be available on the Royal Family YouTube channel, with the aim of reaching younger people and those in other countries. I’m impressed that such an old and traditional institution as the Royal Family has finally grasped modern technology and used it in a simple but effective way.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, the Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day is a national tradition – at 3pm the message (which is recorded earlier) is broadcast to millions of people around the UK who all sit down after their Christmas dinner to listen to the monarch deliver a short address to the nation. It’s one of those peculiar traditions which makes us British.

This will be my last post on Data Circle before the day itself, so I’d like to take the opportunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas 2.0.

Found via Digg:

Wubuntu is supposedly a web version of the popular operating system Ubuntu (which, by the way, I highly recommend as a Linux distribution). It’s actually just some very clever JavaScript, but it’s done so well that I thought it deserved a mention. Also, if such a polished result can be achieved by a lone coder working in their spare time, just think what a team of professionals could do if they worked really hard on creating a great web application that was sufficiently similar to a real desktop that most users couldn’t tell the difference. I think such a situation is still some way off, but things do seem to be moving in that direction.

As we can’t cover every possible technology story on this site, we’ve setup Planet Data Circle (PDC), which aggregates news stories from a collection of websites and allows you to always get the latest technology news from a variety of sources. If there are any sites which you think should be on the list, please let us know and we’ll add their feed to PDC.

Found via Digg:

myIPneighbors is a useful little site which allows you to see which domains are hosted on a particular IP address. There are several sites out there which already offer this functionality, but many of them charge for access or limit you to a very small number of queries. The data on the site seems to be a little bit out of date and doesn’t always match up (e.g. if you search for rixort.com you’ll get the correct IP address, but do a reverse lookup on that IP and you won’t get any results), but it’s an interesting tool to play around with.

Boo.com may be revving up to make a return to our screens, if the latest message on its website is to be believed. Previously an Internet shopping site that burnt through an unbelievable amount of funding in just a few months (the exact amount is uncertain, but the lowest estimate I’ve seen is £50 million and most sources put it more in the £100+ million area), it was a symbol of the dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s/early 2000.

Personally, I am somewhat sceptical about Boo.com’s relaunch because I think that the generic online shopping market (clothes, books, DVDs etc) is more or less sewn up and that any new business will have to look for a niche market in order to be successful (unless it already has an established brand name behind it, but I wouldn’t place Boo.com in that category). I don’t know what its unique selling point is or why I should buy from Boo.com instead of another company, although to be fair I imagine those details won’t come out until the site is launched properly.

For the full story about the original collapse of Boo.com, check out Boo Hoo: A Dot Com Story, a book detailing the rise and fall of the Internet company.

Further reading

• Boo shuts down
• Boo.com to relaunch
• Old Bad Ideas 2.0

Every since the once proud browser fell by the wayside, Netscape.com has seemed to lack a sense of direction. Even after Netscape was bought by AOL, the home page still seemed to be just a generic news site containing stories from other sources. However, there’s now a new site, Netscape beta, which appears to be a clone of Digg, the popular technology news site.

I’m not sure what Netscape has to offer beyond what is already provided by the likes of Digg, especially given the number of ads they’re showing on each page (the ones in the middle of a block of comments are particularly annoying in my opinion). However, they do employ several full and part time editors to pick the best stories for each section, so perhaps it won’t be as vulnerable to mob rule as Digg sometimes seems to be.

I also find it ironic that the current top story on the site is AOL copies Digg.

Further coverage

• AOL Relaunch Netscape as Social Bookmarking Site
• Netscape.com Reborn as Digg Rival
• AOL-Netscape Launches Massive “Digg Killer”
• New Netscape.com focuses on news
• AOL to Turn Netscape Site Into a Newspaper of Sorts