Recently in Internet Category

Wes Felter (who's been blogging longer than I have) has some interesting thoughts on the future of the web.

Hack the Planet: We can imagine that Google Chrome (and later, Safari and Firefox) will reach feature and performance parity with Flash Player/Silverlight. (It will be interesting to see what codecs Google chooses, since there's a tension between openness and performance.) At that point, installed bases and developer ecosystems will become deciding factors between the platforms. Flash Player and Silverlight each have an official framework (Flex and .NET) and IDE (Flex Builder and Visual Studio), but "the open Web" doesn't. While the combined ecosystems of the AJAX frameworks are probably larger than Flex, each individual framework is a much smaller community. Will Google endorse one or embrace chaos?

Felter's insights are spot on, imo.

Some links of note...

• What I Learned at (Mashup) Camp: There was one common denominator, however: JavaScript. Nearly everyone was using it in some capacity, and one or two applications were nearly 100% JavaScript.

• Apple pushing Safari downloads on Windows users: It now appears that the Cupertino-based company aspires to use the advantage presented by the Software Update mechanism to muscle its way further up the browser charts at the expense Microsoft's Internet Explorer and other third-party Windows browsers.

• Where By “Interesting”, I Mean “Annoying”: This is disgraceful. It fails the user in favor of serving Apple. It is, in fact, malware-level tactics.

• More Kotoeri (Japanese input) tips: Note that in OS X 10.5, there is a fair amount of (Japanese) Koeteri input method help in English accessible by choosing 'Koeteri Help' in the Input menu.

I don't write about my work at Mozilla on this blog as I have another blog (with comments that work) where I post all of my Mozilla-related information. However, this recent article with Mozila CEO, John Lilly, Forget Facebook. The Web's platform is Firefox by Matt Asay is a great overview of why I love working at Mozilla and why it's such an exciting time to be working on the web.

Wretch.cc now #1 site (by traffic) in Taiwan. If the reported purchase price is true, it was a very good purchase.

Wretch.cc was ranked the top Web site in Taiwan in a top-100 list tabulated by Business Next, a local magazine, and Taiwan's Access Rating Online (ARO). ... But despite Yahoo's best attempts to keep up with new features such as blogs, Wretch.cc continued to grow and gain popularity. It proved such a difficult battle that Yahoo Taiwan finally used cash to end the battle, buying Wretch.cc for an undisclosed sum. Local newspaper reports valued the deal at NT$700 million (US$22.7 million).

Yahoo Taiwan came in second in the ranking overall, but it remained number one against other Internet portals.

Rounding out the top five overall Web sites in Taiwan, PChome Online came in third, Yam.com ranked fourth, and Gamer.com took fifth place in the Business Next/ARO list.

The U.S. version of Google ranked first among search engines, and 14th overall, while Google Taiwan came in second, China's Baidu ranked third and video search engine Flurl came in fourth.

Yahoo Dethroned in Taiwan

Mark Pesce (Wikipedia) has moved to Australia and is running a consultancy called Future Street Consulting. Pesce has a great blog post on his site, That Business Conversation, talking about stuff we know and use every day, Craig's List, Trip Advisor, and all of the social network software and services we use. I think this essay is a great read for people who are not on the Internet all day (like some of us) and gives a good overview of how the Internet has impacted communication between people. It's obvious to most of us who work on the Internet but for those who don't, it's not obvious.

I have a long screed in me about the power of inertia in Japan (well inertia is powerful everywhere I suppose) and how the status quo doesn't seem to change in various parts of Japan that I seem to stare at, be it politics, or the advertising industry, etc. Of course there are exceptions to the rule, like Nintendo coming back from the brink as evidenced in this cute video graphic from Kotaku.

Ken Auletta reports in The New Yorker on Google's increasing lobbying operations in Washington DC: The Search Party. The last quote by Eric Schmidt was fascinating.

“When you have a technology that is as engrossing as the Internet, you’re going to have winners and losers. I’m not trying to sound arrogant. I’m trying to sound rational about it. The Internet allows people to consume media in a different way.” He believes that because Google is “run by three computer scientists we’re going to make all the mistakes computer scientists running a company would make. But one of the mistakes we’re not going to make is the mistake that non-scientists make. We’re going to make mistakes based on facts and data and analysis.” He paused. Then he said, “What kills a company is not competition but arrogance. We control our fate.”

Comments on my blog are still broken.

I saw this earlier in the Japanese press but Asiajin covers the fact that Digital Garage has invested in Twitter and will be bringing a Japanese interface to Twitter in the Spring. One of the market differences Twitter faces in Japan is that Japan does not use SMS on mobile phones. There is no SMS in Japan. Email is used. However, mobile phone email is a complex mess where each carrier has different settings on encoding of both the subject and body text. If Twitter is to succeed in Japan, it has to be successful on the phone. Whether it will break out into the mainstream of Japanese users is really dependent on whether young kids, young girls actually, get into it. I could see that happening virally.

I have a longer discussion about whether the iPhone will do well in Japan planned for when I have more than a moment to blog, but I wanted to point folks to an article on alternative interfaces to computers which Jeff Yang recently wrote in SFGate: ASIAN POP / Off key
My quote is:

"To a certain extent, Asia is a slave to the alpha keyboard,"

I'm pretty sure I said qwerty keyboard, but I'll let Jeff slide ;)

"Many input methods for languages like Chinese and Japanese require knowledge of the Roman alphabet to use, which is crazy when you think of it. Imagine if the PC was developed in China and everyone in the rest of the world needed to know Chinese before inputting their own alphabet. Well, that's the case for a lot of PC users in China and Japan."

My blog's comments are still broken and I haven't had time to fix them, so I'll close comments. Once I have time to fix the comments, I'll re-open comments and inform you here. Apologies!