In Stack Exchange 1.0 you could pay them a monthly fee to setup your own Stack Exchange site, on your own domain, and you were free to use it for whatever you liked.

In Stack Exchange 2.0 you no longer have to pay them a monthly fee (hurrah!) but you can’t use it for whatever you like (doh!). SE 2.0 will follow the StackOverflow.com, ServerFault.com and SuperUser.com path of being owned, maintained and monetized by the Stack Overflow crew. Oh sure, all of the content is licensed under Creative Commons, but the actual platform will no longer be licensed to or administered by third parties.

So, what’s free about this? Well, the content is free I suppose — in that, it’s licensed under Creative Commons, and the Stack Overflow team will not claim ownership of it. And you’re free to suggest new Stack Exchange sites, but you’ll need to go through a rigorous and drawn out vetting process — at the end of which, even if you’re successful, you won’t own anything.

So in short: Stack Exchange 2.0 is not free. Sure, you have the freedom to participate in sites that use the platform, and you have the freedom to suggest new ideas for sites, but you do not have the freedom to create your own site and determine its direction, like you did in Stack Exchange 1.0.

In a coordinated series of blog postings Google announced its intention to scuttle a number of its poor performing products, let go of some staff and close some of its offices — showing that in 2009 it intends to focus on keeping costs down and make money. A wise decision in the current economic climate.

Some of the announcements from Google:

• Turning Down Uploads at Google Video
• Stopping development on Google Notebook
• Changes for Jaiku and Farewell to Dodgeball and Mashup Editor
• Farewell, Google Catalog Search
• Changes to engineering
• Changes to recruiting

Danny Sullivan has a more detailed round-up of today’s changes at Google.

Who knows what 2009 will hold for tech companies, but it goes without saying that whatever happens will be closely tied to what happens in the general economy.

There is (was?) a bubble in Silicon Valley — a bubble of innocence — and unfortunately 2009 looks like the year that will pop it.

As Stilgherrian explains in today’s Crikey, Telstra has the means to provide faster and cheaper broadband, but unless someone tries to compete with them, they won’t increase speeds or lower prices — without real competition, they have no incentive to.

How does Telstra do it quicker? By quietly stashing away its secret weapons, ready to be unleashed when a competitor tried to deploy their own big guns. Remember how Telstra didn’t sell ADSL2+ broadband, even from exchanges where equipment was already installed, until ISPs like iiNet started selling their own ADSL2+?

Confused about Australia’s broadband infrastructure? From the Telstra entry Wikipedia:

Due to Telstra’s position as Australia’s incumbent telecommunications provider, Telstra Wholesale is the incumbent and dominant wholesaler of ADSL services to other Internet Service Providers. Telstra installed the first DSLAMs in exchanges prior to 2000, and began wholesaling access in late 2000.^[21] Telstra Wholesale has a comprehensive network of ADSL DSLAMs (the largest in Australia) and allows competitors access to each Telstra DSLAM at ADSL1 speeds.

So because Telstra owns the broadband infrastructure they can wholesale sell access to it to other companies — other companies which then sell the broadband connections to retail customers — but, not content with simple wholesale sales, Telstra has another division which sells these same broadband connections directly to the same retail customers. Which raises the question, how do you compete in a market where the biggest player owns all of the pieces on the board?

As Duncan Riley suggests, Telstra’s retail and wholesale arms must be separated for the common good.

Structural separation, as I’ve always argued is the only solution. Telstra retail and wholesale must be split for the common good. If we have the capacity to provide 100mbps connections in capital cities now, it SHOULD BE PROVIDED NOW, not in a year or two when Telstra decides to use it to undermine the competition.

They should absolutely be completely separate companies. The current setup is completely anti-competitive and is a disservice to the Australia public. Broadband is a utility and the Government should make sure that it is managed like one.

Can we stop living in the dark ages now?

I’d give it up completely if it weren’t for the fact that a lot of people seem to find it really useful – or maybe it’s only the Silicon Valley types that find it useful and everyone else just finds it fun. But either way, it’s getting a lot of attention.

So what’s the magic formula that makes it useful/fun? Only follow people you know? Only follow a small number of people so that you don’t get snowed under? Spend all day doing nothing but twittering?

What I’m looking for is the tipping point of Twitter – note that I’m not talking in terms of when Twitter hits a critical mass of users and breaks out and becomes a raging world-wide success overnight – but rather what is the tipping point for when Twitter actually becomes useful to you. When you get the balance right – so that you’re following the right number of people, have found a balance between getting work done and twittering – and find Twitter more useful than, you know, not useful.

So, the Twitter becomes useful tipping point, where is it?

My biggest issues with Cuil at this stage are:

• Search results page layout: it’s horrible. There is way too much text shown for each entry, the images don’t match the entries (i.e. Microsoft entry; Sun Microsystems image) and they’ve decided to be different by showing the search results in three columns, instead of top to bottom like every other search engine (it would be OK if it was an improvement, but it’s not — it’s really not).
• Search results text: largely nonsensical. They’ve just cobbled together various bits of text from the website they’re indexing — what, do they think that their algorithm can describe the websites content better than the websites editor? It doesn’t flow; it doesn’t make sense; it doesn’t make me want to click on the link.

I have been a registered user of Omndrive for around three years, although I haven’t actively used it in about two years. Their demise raises a very important question about storing your files with startups and in the cloud.

The question is this: should we trust startups with our personal documents? Or more importantly, can we trust startups and the cloud at all? When you have startups that are running on nothing but the few million dollars they received from early investors, with no revenue to speak of, which will rely on a second round of investment in the future to keep them going — can we trust these companies with our personal files (which we may or may not have backups of) or personal information? As the Omnidrive saga illustrates, no we can’t.

Despite being a registered user of Omnidrive for a number of years I did not receive any communication from them by email that they were going under and that my personal files would no longer be accessible from their servers. If that was the only place I kept my personal files then I would be screwed.

So how many more Omnidrive’s are out there? How many more cloud startups will go out of business without first warning it’s users that they have x number of days to remove/backup their files? I bet quite a few.

The core problem with the cloud from the average users perspective is that you just can’t trust it. Just like a real fluffy cloud in the sky, it’s easy on the eye, but it can dissipate without warning.

My hope is that Google isn’t serious about this and that it’s simply a shot across the bows of various human powered search engines like Wikia Search and Mahalo. Warning them that God Google has its own human powered search engine ready to go if they ever gain too much attention. Or maybe people will be so scarred by their experience with Google SearchWiki that they will forever be turned off the idea of a human powered search engine.

Now how about an opt-out option?

Derived from the BASIC programming language, and based on the .Net platform, Small Basic has been simplified — it has just 15 keywords and uses minimal concepts — so no prior programming experience is necessary. It’s a perfect starter for youngsters and even some adults might find it useful if they’re just starting out.

I hope elementary schools are paying attention. Everyone should have a basic idea of how computer programs are written — sort of like a lot of people have a basic idea of how cars work.