Vistatorrent.com (which apparently is where Huw got his copy of Beta 2) has been ordered by Microsoft to take down the torrent for Windows Vista Beta 2. From the official email sent to the site:

Dear Sir or Madam,

Microsoft has received information that the domain listed above [www.vistatorrent.com], which appears to be on servers under your control, is offering unlicensed copies of, or is engaged in other unauthorized activities relating to copyrighted works published by Microsoft.

1. Identification of copyrighted works:

Copyrighted work(s):
Windows Vista Beta Build 5384

It’s interesting that Microsoft have only taken down the torrent now, after some of the rush for Beta 2 that was swamping its servers has now died down. Of course, this may be just legal processes taking a long time. So, the tracker for the torrent has been pulled from the site, so if you’re still looking to download the beta, Microsoft’s official download links look like the best bet.

Thanks to the Windows Vista Weblog for the original story.

It’s quite old, but it’s still very relevant. It’s a presentation from Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign (now visual design lead at Google) that he gave a couple of years ago at some conference. Its all about the advantages of a tableless design, and the ways to achieve it. It’s quite a long presentation, but it really is worth a look.

No More Tables

There’s an interesting post on GigaOm by Robert Young (apparently a serial entrepreneur) about a recent MySpace decision to allow advertisers who are concerned about ‘less strict content controls’ on user profile pages to restrict their advertising to the ‘well-lit’ sections such as Books and Games. From the post (my emphasis):

As most now realize, the fundamental problem that social networks face when trying to monetize through an advertising-driven business model is the lack of trust.

In many ways, social networks today, at their current stage of evolution, are much like the currencies of underdeveloped nations… or countries that are politically unstable. In such circumstances, governments must do all they can to create and engender trust among its nation’s constituents and institutions. After all, what is money without the people’s trust… it’s just a devalued piece of worthless paper.

MySpace, and thus other social networks, are in a similar predicament. MySpace in particular, needs to be a catalyst for trust among its users and advertisers. What MySpace needs to do is to tackle the problem head-on by launching programs that ultimately create new levels of trust between its constituents where none existed before.

He goes on to suggest a possible way that advertisers could engender trust by making use of ‘microcelebrities’ - well known people within a small social circle.

The article does make lots of sense. A significant advantage of social networks is that they allow advertisers direct access to people expressing themselves, an idea inherent to the social network model. If advertisers can gain access to this expression they will instantly become trusted, able to serve highly targeted ads which then have a great effect. This will not be achieved by being wary of user-generated content, but by embracing it, understanding it and using it. Once advertisers achieve this, they will make megabucks, and whilst decisions like this made by MySpace might work in the short term, in the long term they are unsustainable.

I just had to uninstall Windows Vista from my Dell Latitude D410 laptop because it simply ran far too slowly. XP in all its glory is now back up and running. For those of you still pondering over installing Vista, if you have a computer with specs:

• 512mb ram
• 1.72ghz Pentium M processor
• Onboard graphics

then don’t bother, because it won’t work! It installed fine but then ran so slowly. If it matters for you, then Vista also seems to be incapable of supporting WiFi at the moment. I tried with both the inbuilt Intel Centrino chip and also an external wifi card. Both didn’t work, and the external card produced a blue screen error.

Since I’m not prepared to install it on my main machine at the moment, it looks like I’ll be waiting for the final release to come out before I can properly use Vista.

BBC Radio 4’s ‘In Business’ programme recently covered Web 2.0, and what it means for the ‘old media’. From the site:

Six years after the dot-com bubble burst companies are falling over themselves to get involved with the next big thing on the internet. They call it Web 2.0.

It’s transforming the internet into a powerful new communications medium and it’s leaching power away from the old information providers in the press and broadcasting and handing it to a new democracy of bloggers and communicators now numbered in millions.

Peter Day asks where it’s all leading to and how established businesses will cope with this vital change in the media landscape.

The contributors to the program are a mixture of the traditional media who are having to innovate and the people who are pushing for change. I was a little disappointed that they didn’t have the people driving the change from the coal face, like Robert Scoble and Kevin Rose, but the next generation of people seeing what the trend was and then reacting to it fairly early on. Its worth a listen, and its obviously great that programmes like In Business are covering Web 2.0 given their distinctly middle-England audience. The spread of Web 2.0 evangelism from tech circles into ‘normal’ circles suggests that we might not be in a bubble this time round.

Grab the podcast and listen to the programme here.

[via English Cut]

Well, there’s obviously something about July 19th that makes companies want to get out of beta stage, because Windows Live Messenger is leaving beta today, Techcrunch reports. Again, its been in public beta for a while (six weeks), and I got on the private beta quite early on. Its a great product, equally significant for its new features and the fact that it is the first example of a rebranding of an MSN product out of beta. About a year since the Ray Ozzie memo saying that Google was a major challenger and had to be stopped, and the start of the Live initiative, this is the start of the rollout. Ray Ozzie has just taken over from Gates as Chief Software architect, so we can only expect his brainchild to go from strength to strength, possibly becoming a major revenue source for Microsoft in the future. The success or failure of the Live initiative will probably become clear in 2007, and with the release of Vista and Office 07, 2007 will be a crucial year. Again, read more in the press release.

Opera 9 is out of beta today. It was a public beta, so most people have already tried it, including me. Its a very competent browser, with some great new features, including built in bittorrent and the big one -widgets. There are some interesting widgets available, like a Pandora widget which will allow you to play your pandora music from your desktop without using your browser. I imagine the widgets are easier to develop than other platforms, since making widgets for Opera is no different from developing web pages.

I’m not sure why I don’t use Opera - for some reason I prefer Firefox, even though Opera has some enticing features. I do use the excellent Opera Mini (a java browser for mobiles), and through all their products Opera Software really seems to be expanding their reputation. Read more in the press release.

Well, Google has been mobile for some time, but only in a serious way in the US. Potentially great services and features such as Maps for mobile and the calendar notification features are only available in the US. Apparently thats about to change (The Times reports), with a greater focus both on mobile services and making those services available to the whole world.

Deep Nishar, the guy in charge of Wireless Products, said:

“You only have to look at the global trends for mobile use and PC use to see where our business is going,” said Mr Nishar. “In India, mobile-phone ownership outweighs PC ownership by a ratio of two to one. And there are five million more mobile-phone users coming online every month. By the end of this year there will be more mobile phones in India than in America.”
This is obviously great news. I often get irritated when I see a great new Google service only to discover it won’t work in the UK. It also makes sense for Google, particularly if they are hoping to expand into developing countries, where Gates’ dream of a computer in every home hasn’t happened yet and won’t happen for some time. All over Africa mobiles are seen as an important source of information, and at the moment the mobile search and other internet services market is relatively empty (apart from Google itself) and so a real opportunity exists for Google to build itself a monopoly before anyone else gets there act together.

I read an article somewhere else a while ago (I can’t remember where) with another Google employee talking about how mobile search is different. He or she said that if you search for films on a computer, you’ll want results such as the IMDB (International Movie Database) website returned, but if you search for films on a mobile, you probably want listings for films at local cinemas. This is important because people simply won’t use mobile search unless it is able to work out the context of the search and returns the right result in the top three. I certainly have less patience when searching on my mobile than when I search on the computer, probably because of the small screen and the fact that I am almost certainly multitasking (I actually gave Peter access rights to Gizbuzz from my mobile browser as I negotiated the London Underground - I was going away for a week and had forgotten to ask anyone to look after the blog).

If Google gets this right, then they will make megabucks, but there are many obstacles they’ve got to overcome first, like optimised algorithms and ad placement. They managed it with computers, so there’s a good chance they’ll pull the same trick off again.

I just got subjected to an experiment by Google with their SERP (search engine results page). I was searching for atom (meaning the XML format), and I say subjected because in the middle of my results page, Google stuck an inline mini results page for ‘atom cars’. Screenshot below (click to expand):

The ‘atom’ (rather than ‘atom car’) results continue after the bottom line. They keep trying new UI ideas out (Google Blogoscoped reports them regularly), and sometimes they look and work well, other times they do not. This time they don’t. This is not because it is necessarily a bad idea, but because their algorithm is rubbish. Atom is a hard one, but their algorithm should be able to work that out, and thus decide not to present the inline results because there is a good chance it will get the refinement wrong.

I sometimes feel when I’m writing posts for Gizbuzz that I have to stop what I’m writing and explain it, just in case there are some readers who don’t fully understand what’s going on. I don’t really want to have to do this as it can sometimes get in the way, so over the coming weeks I’ll write some explainer posts of various concepts (eg AJAX) which hopefully will be interesting in themselves for some readers, and then then they can be linked to from any posts which are talking about related uses of these technologies. So if you already know what things like AJAX are (which I imagine most of you do) then just glaze over. Otherwise, happy reading!