Tech analyst, AI & the web
Richard MacManus Blaine Cook joined Odeo, Ev Williams’ startup, in 2005. Along with his fellow developer, Rabble (a.k.a. Evan Henshaw-Plath), Cook was one of the founding engineers of Twitter in 2006. That same year, Twitter was spun off into its own company, led by its original creator Jack Dorsey. But then, in April 2008, Cook — described … Read more
Last week I presented my top internet technologies of the year. This week I’m going to review the top stories of the year. Believe it or not, there isn’t a lot of overlap. A newsworthy story in the tech industry often isn’t about the best technology. It could be hype or controversy that makes it … Read more
Jaz-Michael King is a Welshman who has been living in the US since the 90s when he moved there to run a Dot Com startup. He still works in the US technology sector, but in his spare time he runs a Mastodon instance called Toot Wales (Twt Cymru), which he pitches as “the Mastodon social … Read more
Tipping points that change the course of internet technology are not rare, but they also don’t come around often. I think we’ve seen two massive tipping points in 2022: generative AI, which has leapt to the forefront of internet culture this year, and the beginnings of a movement away from centralized social media and onto … Read more
Evan Prodromou has been working on decentralized social media for nearly 15 years now, having created an open source Twitter alternative called Identi.ca in 2008. That service morphed a couple of times and eventually became pump.io — which was the genesis for ActivityPub, the core fediverse protocol of 2022. In an interview with The New … Read more
As developers begin to shift away from post-Musk Twitter and contemplate building apps on federated social media protocols, many are asking themselves: what can I do with ActivityPub, the key open protocol of the fediverse? ActivityPub enables different applications to federate content between themselves, which both enables and encourages the open web. The specification from … Read more
While Web3 has been overtaken in the tech news flow by the rise of decentralized social media, the long-running effort to strengthen dApp infrastructure continues. Somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft has now joined the Web3 revolution, albeit in a low-profile way. Donovan Brown, a partner program manager on the Azure incubation team at Microsoft, told The New … Read more
“It’s happening,” blogged Evan Prodromou, whose pioneering work inspired the ActivityPub protocol on which Mastodon runs. “I have not been this excited about federated social networks since we published ActivityPub,” he wrote. “The shift has started.” He’s referring, of course, to the migration of hundreds of thousands of users from Twitter, a centralized social media … Read more
Dr. Joe Fitzsimons, a physicist academic turned startup entrepreneur, believes that developing software using quantum computing is equivalent to programming computers in the 1940s or developing for Arpanet in the 60s. In other words, it’s still early. But his company, Horizon Quantum Computing, is about to launch a software development platform that will, he says, … Read more
Do we want to stay on a social network that shows such callous disregard for its own people? That is the question many of us have been asking as news hit this morning that half of Twitter’s employees have been unceremoniously sacked. Twitter, the company, styles itself as a platform for “public conversation.” Even if … Read more
Ever since the $20 billion Figma acquisition in September, there has been increasing interest in the cloud IDE market. The thinking is, if even design tools can become web-native, then surely it is high time for developers to move to fully web-based tooling. After all, even Photoshop — once thought to be incapable of shifting … Read more
Sizzy is pitched as a “browser for web developers,” and its creator, a Macedonian developer, known simply as Kitze, is hoping to turn it into a thriving business. Currently, the product is available on a 14-day free trial, but after that, you’ll need to sign up for a monthly subscription ($15 per month for an … Read more
Headless content management systems have turned the traditionally staid CMS market on its head over the past few years. In a headless CMS, the frontend (aka the head; meaning presentation and publishing) is decoupled from the backend (the content) and managed outside of the core system. WordPress vendors like WP Engine now put headless offerings … Read more
“It reminds me of the feeling when Netscape first added JavaScript to the web.” So says Matthew Hodgson, the creator of the Matrix network and now building a web-based metaverse client called Third Room. He thinks he and his team have cracked the solution to creating user-generated content (UGC) for the metaverse. Last August I … Read more
Aurora is a popular name for tech projects, it seems. Following on from Amazon Aurora and Twitter Aurora, Google’s Aurora project is a collaboration between its Chrome browser team and open source web frameworks such as Next.js, Nuxt and Angular. It was announced last June, and at the recent Infobip Shift developer conference we received … Read more