But it ain’t necessarily so. What if everybody had two inboxes – email for essential communications, the must-reads; and something else, the inbox for non-essential information, for dipping into and serendipitously discovering something useful or entertaining.

I can think of multiple ways to implement this. I think, ultimately it will have to be built in a backwards compatible manner, on top of email (maybe Raindrop can lead here?). But since everybody’s on Twitter these days I thought I should poke them in the right direction.

From my Twitter bug report:

What I want to be able to do is to send a tweet that will only be seen by one user but which doesn’t cause them to receive an invasive notification. For example, imagine if my bank tweeted me every day about any credit card transactions on my account. That would give me the chance to spot fraudulent transactions but it wouldn’t overload my email inbox.

To me, it seems like one of the biggest hurdles for most people in terms of social search or networking tools is the cost of building up their networks, so this would provide a quick and easy way around that.

from The Rise of GoogVark

Hmm. Really? Aardvark already had Facebook Connect and Gmail contact importing. Is clicking one button and maybe typing your password too much for most people?

If so then XFN and things like the Google Social Graph API are the way to go.

I think a bigger hurdle for companies trying to get into the search game is the extra cognitive effort it takes people to decide if they want to do a Google search or an Aardvark Search (or hey, a MrTaggy search). One assumes the acquisition will at least address that issue for Aardvark. We still don’t have a good answer for companies that don’t get acquired by Google though.

PS: look at that, I’m blogging again!

Given this tip, you can guess what search engine optimizers will do. If you want to increase your chances of being indexed right by Powerset, you’d better work out what grammar it likes best and conform to it. At last, prescriptive linguistics will find its true purpose. Imagine the written comment of a future English teacher, amid the red marks, “Incorrect grammar. Will not be well indexed”.

In Fernando Pereira’s latest take on Powerset, he eludes to a similar nonmonotonic function for natural language search. Conversing efficiently in natural language requires that you can predict, to some degree of accuracy, what will be understood by your conversation partner. Systems that get uncannily close to human understanding yet fail in cases that are only predictable to the system designers may be frustrating to use. How will the tradeoff between increasing utility and increasing inscrutability pan out? Where is Powerset going to be on this hypothetical graph?

As Fernando says, only testing on the final system will tell.

It doesn’t quite show you how PARC is right on the edge of “civilization” with horses grazing in fields out the back. Here is the view out my window right now:

Come mid-summer, all this will be brown.

Photo by ybboey

If you don’t have a good idea, no problem, he’ll give you one – as long as you’re awesome. Oh to be Paul Graham. To have teams of shit hot coders fighting to be accepted by you so that they can work on your idea all summer, for minimum wage. He has created the world’s first ultra-high-level compiler. I’m being disingenuous of course. This compiler has (at least two) minds of it’s own, and Paul doesn’t really mind if it doesn’t do what he asks just as long as there’s a fair chance it will make him some money.

Here’s his full pres:

Before watching that the phrase “global warming propaganda” would have smacked of blinkered Republican rhetoric. As is pointed out in the film, there is a great global warming juggernaut brimming with funding for scientists that is very hard to slow down now. Even Bush conceded! (Wouldn’t it be funny if his stance on man-made global warming redeemed him in the end.) I think this is a very important film to legitimize the other side of the debate. I wonder is it having much effect?

I don’t know about you, but having a previously certain belief shattered by what looks like good science gives me a really good feeling. This science stuff is pretty awesome.

After more reading around, it seems the documentary was a bit misleading, including theories which have been discussed in the literature and found to have problems, and not including some theories that have been put forward to explain the data presented. Check out this detailed response. Nevertheless it’s good to have some counterpoint to Al Gore. Now maybe we can meet in the middle?

Adobe’s first big Apollo app is an Internet video application codenamed Philo. The pervasiveness of Flash Player created multi-billion dollar Internet video startups powered by the Flash video format. The Philo team hopes to expand the display size and quality of distributed videos and get publishers encoding using the latest Flash video encoders. Publishers can brand the entire video player, delivering MTV content in what looks like a MTV video player, or a Rocketboom-themed player…

Great!! thats just what I want – an MTV branded video player to play MTV videos and a Rocketboom branded video player to play Rocketboom videos. Awesome!

This is not the future of the web people, and it certainly isn’t the future of the desktop. Please try to resist.