Work(ing Title)

The other night the Meebo crew through a second birthday party for themselves, mostly to play Guitar Hero and munch, but there was a larger goal: to announce the next iteration of Meebo as an online platform.

Having spent the past few years building one of the best web-based IM clients in town, team Meebo decided to make themselves available to developers with one simple phrase, “I want to _____ with you.“

Scrape together some Flash or JavaScript into a way to watch, shop, frag, (or eat?) all within the Meebo universe. They’ve organized a Lunch 2.0 + all-night dev camp on 27 November to kickstart the ecosystem. The team will even set up a video conference if you’re interested but can’t make it down to Mountain View, CA this month.

Emre Sokullu has rolled up the Office 2.0 space for Read/WriteWeb including Meebo’s entrance. The productivity-on-the-web market would appear highly lucrative from all the companies diving into it. From Yahoo’s purchase of Zimbra, to the current crowd favourite Google Apps, and even Adobe’s Virtual Ubiquity, Meebo’s rocket has taken off for a very desirable planet.

All of this puts Microsoft in a very delicate position. The continued investment in free, online productivity tools certainly represents shots across the bow of the Office Armada. While the Office Live tools are mostly about the storage of data in the cloud, everyone else seems to be banking on the ability to do their work online; We’ll have to wait for Ray Ozzie’s other shoe to drop. Even after all the kimonos have been opened and all the offerings have matured, who knows what humans actually want.

The loudest CEO around is hosting an employee town hall right now, and he’s addressing a handful of areas where Microsoft can make progress. When talking about search he highlighted an interesting principle, “The market leader has no incentive to disrupt.” While Google will obviously continue to throw maximum resources at improving their search abilities and their model of giving away developed software is hard to answer, they truely don’t want to see the game change.

There’s also a difficult lesson to take from the operating system business that can be applied here: Windows being the strong leader has been a good thing, but Mac OS X has been able to grow significantly through being the underdog and changing the game. It’s not hard to imagine Microsoft being in the same position relative to Google, which gives us huge incentive and opportunity to grow.

Amazing shit I’ve found this evening while on lunch from slingin’ Pods:

Big Baby Jesus, aka Old Dirty Bastard, dead at 35. His location of death signals his true love.

The Museum of Media History cira 2014. Very creepy ending, though I do like the Googlezon logo a lot, and I’d like to see them merge.

Build your own HiDef Personal Video Recorder. I think I’m going to have to construct this franken-console just to have an alternative to the broadcast flag mandate.

Kottke tutorials photo time panoramas. This technique makes me want to pick up a proper d’slr in time for snowboarding season.

Senate stock picks outperformed the market by 12 percent over five years. I’m not really concerned about the pointers this study will make towards criminalizing a number of the US Congress, I just want to start following their picks.