Gray Dudek

“The amount a user shares today is twice the amount they shared a year ago.” – Zuckerberg

From simple experience this is something I have definitely seen to be true for Twitter. From a little over a year ago until today, my sharing has steadily increased and still does.

An interesting detail here is that at first sight his statement  doesn’t actually seem to be worth mentioning. If I share 1 item a day  this year and I share 2 next year. So what?

Fortunately, to illustrate, Mark explains that as humans we have trouble imagining exponential growth.

“If you took a piece of paper and folded it on itself 50 times, how  tall would it be?”, to answer it, “Most people would say a few feet.

Turns out it goes to the moon and back 10 times…

That is way more exciting. Of course, it depends on for how long this  can be said to be true.

But to Mark he sees this as the way forward and the way to think.

The Cabinet Office has published an open source procurement toolkit for the public sector on its website.

It said the purpose is to ensure that there is a level playing field for open source and proprietary software and that some of the myths associated with open source are dispelled.

The options document contains details of different IT functions such as servers, databases, application development, networks and business applications.

The document on cost of ownership advises taking into account issues around acquisition – such as purchase price, licences and integration – operation and management – including migration, upgrades, support services, training and software scaling – and end of life management.

It also advises that the total cost of ownership is only concerned with the financial cost of any solution, and does not involve any other benefits.

The government has had an open source policy dating back to the Labour administration in 2004, although it was reiterated in 2009 and 2010. Before coming to government, the Conservative party called for an increased use of open source technology in government IT systems.

The Government ICT Strategy, published in March, says that open source solutions should be considered alongside proprietary ones in procurement, and that when there is no significant cost difference open source should be chosen on the basis of its flexibility.

• All about Open Source v1 (pdf, 490kb)
• All about Open Source v1 0 (odf, 121kb)
• ICT Advice Note – Procurement of Open Source (pdf, 169kb)
• ICT Advice Note – Procurement of Open Source (odf, 37kb)
• Open Source Options v1.0 (pdf, 581kb)
• Open Source Options v1.0 (odf, 125kb)
• Total Cost of Ownership – things to consider v1.0 (pdf, 124kb)
• Total Cost of Ownership – things to consider v1.0 (odf, 198kb)

You know how it goes:

• I like Facebook as it is, tidy
• Oh, they’ve changed it again
• Where the f#ck has that gone?
• Why is that there now?
• How do I [insert task] like I used to?
• For god sake why the hell do they keep messing around with it

A few weeks later…

• Suppose it sort of makes sense
• I quite like the new [insert thing]
• It’s so much easier now
• I hated that old [insert old thing that is now apparently a sh#t way of doing things]
• God I love Facebook…

And round we all go again…until the next update…

The cat is out of the bag that Facebook is going to launch something big at its developer conference f8 this week. We’ve heard about the social music services that could be debuting in a few days, but as the New York Times conveyed this past weekend, Facebook is planning for ways to surface personal content better. And we’ve heard from a source that Facebook will introduce new buttons on the wall that will begin introducing some granularity to the “Like” concept. We’re told these new buttons are “Read,” “Listened,” “Watched.” The network will also soon launch new social commerce buttons like “Want” following the introductions of the aforementioned buttons.

It’s important to qualify that this is from a source (and not from Facebook) but from what we hear, Facebook users will be able to click Read, Listened, Watched on content in their news feed. And soon, “Want” as well.

And it’s unclear what will happen to the Like button and how these new buttons will affect the Like button. And we don’t know what Facebook will do with this data, but there is so much the network could do with the data from these buttons.  It seems pretty obvious that ad targeting would be a huge opportunity as well as the capability of delivering a more personalized experience for users. Not to mention that brands, retailers, entertainment companies and other businesses will be able to gain segmented data around the Like.

If all of this is starting to sound a bit like Facebook’s infamous Beacon project, it shouldn’t be too surprising — from what we’ve heard a key part of these new Facebook features is to provide Beacon-like functionality in terms of auto-populating News Feed stories based around intent and actions. But they’ll do so without the advertising and privacy ramifications. At least for now…

The introduction of these new, granular buttons would certainly add more depth to content surfaced by media sharing apps as well as from retailers, which is in line with previous reports of what’s being launched. We’ll keep you updated on what else we hear is in the pipeline for f8 (and we know what’s not being announced: Project Spartan).

Update: Liz Gannes is reporting that the motto for f8 will be “Read. Watch. Listen.” — that sounds exactly in line with the buttons we’ve heard about.

Via @ TNW