Ben Werdmuller

Category: Data control

  • The Facebook Timeline is the nearest thing I’ve seen to a digital identity (and it’s creepy as hell)

    As an application developer, I have advance access to the Facebook Timeline that Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday. Here it is: At first glance, it’s a rather beautiful replacement for the social media profiles we’ve been using since forever. Rather than simply listing your latest content, the timeline allows any visitor to browse your life, literally […]

  • Open data in the arts

    I’m in New York this week for a whirlwind series of meetings with Team Latakoo, but I wanted to draw a little attention to the introduction to open data in the arts I wrote over on the festivalslab blog before I got here: Open data sounds like a much more techie concept than it really […]

  • Public IT project hell: let’s make government work for us

    Why does it cost $235 million to integrate a few IT systems? Johannes Ernst contrasts the Yahoo/Facebook deep integration announcement with the US government’s announcement that they will spend $235 million on integrating incompatible healthcare IT systems, and asks some pertinent questions: I assume we all agree that an environment in which leading-edge companies innovate […]

  • Charging for software in the age of web apps

    Google was an advertising company. Back in 2005, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber described Google’s business as follows: Judged by their profits, Google is an advertising company. They don’t profit from search, they don’t profit from software. They profit by selling ads. This isn’t to belittle them — I think Google is a terrific company, and […]