Fake Steve Jobs is rather more concise than me:
The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.
For some reason, my request for a face-to-face interview with Larry Page and Sergey Brin was unsuccessful. Apparently, I needed to ask in 1996 to get an appointment any time soon. Nonetheless, the Google people were keen to answer my questions about the business. On the less positive side, I had to do the whole thing by email and the answers need to be attributed to a ‘Google spokesperson’. As I’ve said before, I think email interviews are less than satisfactory. Being a big company, they have to be pretty circumspect and so some of the answers are a bit bland, to say the least. Nonetheless, thought I’d share a portion of what they provided. Thank you, Oliver at Google UK, for co-ordinating this.
How do you define Web 2.0, if indeed you consider it worthy of a definition?
Here at Google we have no single definition of web 2.0. For us, the development of our services rests on keeping creative and innovative, maintaining our focus on improving user experience, and our goal to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
This is the most interesting woman in the world.
I need to clarify that (before the divorce papers are filed). This is the top result for the search term ‘woman’, ranked by interestingness, that I found in a search on flickr this afternoon.
The picture was taken by the very talented Babeffe.
What makes for interestingness on flickr? It’s an aggregation of the number of notes, comments, favouritedness (sorry) and links to a submitted image.
I’ve been doing a lot of interviews over the last couple of weeks about web 2.0. One example of where the web is utterly rubbish is buying train tickets in the UK. Train tickets in the UK are utterly screwed in many ways. Basically, you have to try half a dozen different ways of communicating with the train companies to get a decent price. You will always get a better price by using your own imagination to create an alternative route. It could really do with someone creating a mashup that will actually show you your options in a realistic way.
So, lovely to see farecast, even in a limited beta. Please, UK hackers - find a way to make it easier to buy train tickets! (5% would suit me fine, guys).