Four Years Later GMail still in Beta . . .

Albert, you make a good point but is the point of SIlicon Valley really about the weather? I live in San Francisco and my district has unremarkable weather. I've never heard anyone tell me they come out here for the weather. Surely people come here for the opportunities, the chance to do something on a global scale.

About the Quarterly Results Show Plunging Print :
is it god or bad when fell 29.6 percent compared to the period a year earlier ?

I cant believe that they mean it very seriously

"sign of an improving economy and that fourth quarter losses should be lower than in the most recent quarter."

I would it call self-caused
:)

On that point of the weather, you wouldn't have to worry about Hawaii because it is inconvenient to live so far away from everything else, so the weather is overshadowed by that negative. And if you've ever lived in florida, you'd know that the weather there is utter crap -- always humid with no seasons. Silicon Valley weather is so much better.

Laura, often the embargo is determined by the print side. For example, the New York Times newspaper first run is published at midnight or 9pm Pacific time. That's a common embargo time.

I ditto Diane's comment. I think the issue is really surrounding the emergence of real-time and even uber-short lead times of bloggers and websites that can break the story much quicker than a print outlet can. What's the protocol there?

I've never been able to understand the contradiction of being smart and independent, and yet somehow completely (not just partially) smitten by the dreams and fantasies conjured up in branding. The latter appears to cancel the former. But I may be wrong.

Ktyson: Yes, exactly. Between the two of us we could come up with way more interesting trends and issues than the man helming the world's largest and most interesting Internet company. What the heck is going on?

Thanks Meredith, some excellent points...

"There is more to be gained from developing an unique editorial stance than there is from pressing the publish button a few minutes earlier than anyone else."

What about the spread of 3d environments in more normal work and play spaces online?

What about the growing irrelevance (except as annoyance) of operating systems?

What about the replacement of the os with a universally standardized browser functionality?

What about real AI?

What a joke. His predictions makes Bill Gate's "The Road Ahead" look like the book of Nostradamus.

I will bet that in 5 years, nobody is going to be talking about twitter. (for many different reasons. I have a feeling it's going to be a lot sooner than 5 years) Facebook will be around, but far far fewer people will be using it to the extent they use it today.

Mike Arrington is so arrogant. Everyone I talk to doesn't like that guy. Still Arrington walks around like he's a kingmaker. Someone at the web 2.0 conference told me that he treats people like shit and has burned all his bridges.

Kirsten, thanks for the update on the German scene. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't see our digital bohos in McDonalds no matter how good the coffee :)

Yes, compete.com is not an accurate count. I know it is very low when I compare it to my server logs. But I'm assuming the *relative spread* between Mashable and TechCrunch is accurate.

I'm suspect of Compete.com having recently compared their traffic data with what was really going on with a client's server logs. So, I went to Quantcast to double check. When I typed in techcrunch.com it got the curious message that the site owner has hidden the data from Quantcast. Interesting...

Kirsten, thanks for the update on the German scene. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't see our digital bohos in McDonalds no matter how good the coffee :)

Controlling immigration to save domestic jobs hasn't been working for a long while. You can just export the factories. And now the Internet does a great job in tunneling through any border barriers.

Good points you are making here. In fact I used to do the same when I was still living in Berlin. We call this phenomenon the digital bohemia ;).

for some parts of your article i share your opinion but i think the infrastructure needs an optimization since... ever? or not? but realy cool that someone is starting to revive this stuff

The question this surfaces for me is how the onslaught of real-time, narrowcasting (read: one-to-one tweeting) changes the entire embargo paradigm, which is based on the established framework of sequenced broadcasting.

I am quite sure that Google can save newspapers, if they themselves are prepared to save themselves!

Google has created perhaps the largest metaphorical ocean and Facebook et al have created 'Countries' amidst those seas and as sure as Apple and Microsoft dominate operating systems, this landscape is almost certainly irreversible.