Laurent’s blog

Around the web last week (and the two previous)

It has been a crazy few weeks. During that time I failed to read the mountain of posts in my reader and declared RSS bankruptcy. Even so, I’ve tried to summarize here what I was able to glimpse from the threads, the tweets and the few email newsletters I still get:

• VIRTUAL WORLD - In the mist of Second Life’s 5th anniversary, and while SL new CEO expect the company to hit 70 000 simultaneous users online, Goole launched its own virtual world called Lively.
• VIRTUAL WORLD - For the first time in history teleportation between two virtual worlds happened. IBM and Linded Labs announced on Tuesday the 8th that an avatar traveled from Second Life Preview Grid to OpenSim. They made a video of the event.

• SEARCH - Did you know that Microsoft & Yahoo are going at it again? Microsoft has leagued itself with Carl Icahn, a major yahoo shareholder to making a new bid to buy over the search giant at (at least) one condition, that it removes its board before engaging into negotiation. The result was the same, it was rejected.
• SEARCH - Another quite important news is that Yahoo is opening up its search platform. Exactly has they announced during Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco back in April.
• SEARCH - In french this time and why France thinks the next google can be made here.

• MOBILE - Nokia made two acquisitions: Symbian the number one mobile OS - they wants to opensource it, and Plazes a location based social network.
• MOBILE - Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The iPhone 3G has been released (at least in the states and in a few other countries - including Canada) - and jailbreaked. The iTunes App Store has been officially launched too. There is now a ton of App reviews. Including an early list of Top Downloads.

• BLOGGING - As for the twitter front, it has been more and more difficult to use twitter in the last few weeks and I caught myself ignoring much of the noise there. I did try Idendi.ca (@laurent), the open-source copy of twitter. Pretty good copy if you tell me. Only thing missing is an integration with twhirl and a “find my friends” option.
• BLOGGING - Two bloggers announced they will stop publishing. Daniel Lyons, also known as Fake Steve Job and once mysterious writer behind The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs has posted his last entry on Wednesday. Jason Calacanis joined him announcing that he has quit blogging.

• ENTERPRISE 2.0 - In the mist of all the buzz around Enterprise 2.0, TechCrunch has launched TechCrunchIT targeted at covering the enterprise web.