Try out new Facebook features before your friends with Prototypes

by John Burke (RSS feed) Sep 16th 2009 at 12:20AM

On the heels of last week’s release of @mentions and the new Facebook Lite, today Facebook announced “Prototypes”.

Prototypes give users a chance to test out cool new applications and functionality “going on inside the walls of Facebook” and to provide feedback to the who built the prototypes, directly.

To begin testing and providing feedback, simply find any application available in the Application Directory that is marked as “Prototype”. Some cool examples that have come out of Facebook prototype apps include Desktop Notifications for Mac, recent comments filters and enhanced event emails.

Think of Prototypes much like the recently released Mozilla Test Pilot; Giving users the chance to opt-in to new features not quite ready for primetime.

via pheedcontent.com

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which “going to college” means packing up, getting a dorm room, and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges can’t survive.

The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit “education” entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology has just hit its stride after years of glitchy videoconferences—and will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree—much like the news business in 1999. And as major universities offer some core courses online, we’ll see a cultural shift toward acceptance of what is still, in some circles, a “Phoenix U” joke.

It is hard to predict the precise pace of change—but it’s possible that within 15 years most college credits will come from classes taken online. In 2007, nearly 4 million students took at least one online course, and the numbers are growing. Within a generation, college will be a mostly virtual experience for the average student. The Ivies will be much less affected than the mid-tier and local schools. But colleges that depend on tuition, and have no special brand, will be hit hard. The recession will accelerate this trend, as students become warier of taking on loans, and state schools experiment after fund cuts. This doesn’t just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy, and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

Having multiple studies for various cross functional activities and responsibilities will be the norm. The standard and near future degree programs don’t reflect this. I say less than 10 years not 15 and we will see this come to pass.

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said headmaster James Tracy. (Mark Wilson for The Boston Globe)

There are rolling hills and ivy-covered brick buildings. There are small classrooms, high-tech labs, and well-manicured fields. There’s even a clock tower with a massive bell that rings for special events.

Cushing Academy has all the hallmarks of a New England prep school, with one exception.

This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks – the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

In this July 9, 2009 photo, Christine Kreamer, Acting Deputy Director of the National Museum of African Art, left, gives a tour to Wayne Clough, the Secretary of the Smithsonian, at the African Art Museum in Washington, A year into his new job as head of the world’s largest museum and research complex, Wayne Clough _ an engineer by training _ is quietly refocusing the sprawling Smithsonian Institution. Where his predecessor sought to maximize the institution’s potential as a visitor attraction and business enterprise, Clough is intent on maximizing its science, research and educational impact through what he calls the issues of the day _ climate change, immigration, biodiversity and sustainability.

“Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.” So wrote Thomas Jefferson to a friend in 1816. Now Michael Moore, whose Fahrenheit 9/11 took on the U.S. Army, and the entire military-executive-industrial establishment, brings his latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, to the Venice Film Festival.

via time.com

Capitalism - A Love Story

His latest film may not be his best but the director of Sicko and Fahrenheit 9/11 has come up with his universal theory of why everything stinks

Fresh on the heels of the news that (yet another) SoCal incubator is launching, I feel like we need to take a stand against what is happening to the world of technology incubators. The cost barrier to launching an online product has fallen so low, that it seems anyone can do it. We are beginning to see something similar in the world of incubators. To launch a technology product is even easier when an incubator takes some of the pressure off and helps you go from whiteboard to alpha release. What we have not done along the way, is wonder what happens when there are so many incubators around, that just about anyone with an idea can get in. Of course, many good ideas are constantly being assisted by incubators, but with the list of incubators is growing, (there are now lists such as “ten good incubators,” to give you an idea of how prolific they are), that in fact we have become saturated.

Saturation

If you will grant me this saturation, I can make my point that in fact we have too many incubators. If not, you might as well stop reading. I remember back in the boom times of web 1.0, we had incubators, for incubators. We are almost to that point again. Given the low cost to open and operate an incubator, everyone is doing it, and that is the problem. Technology companies need two things to succeed, a solid product, and a method of reaching their audience. Usually, for startups, (especially short-funded incubated companies) coverage comes from the technology media (this blog and others). They use this to acquire their initial userbase, and to expand it with later updates. This is not the only way, I am not a wild egoist in the power of blogging, but it helps.

When twelve different incubators are launching seven new “startups” each, what you have is total gridlock from the technology bloggers perspective. You end up covering the ones that zing your fancy. You would like to cover them all, but there is not only a lack of time, but space as well. If you have three posts and nine companies, you are not going to use one slot on the boring database company (although it has an actual business model). No, you will cover myFRIENDspaCe.me, and talk about how it will compete with Twitter. That brings in more pageview, and you know it.

It gets even more complicated, when the incubator demo days become more and more compacted, it leaves you less and less breathing room. Each company wants and needs media attention, but when it is forced to compete from zero against endless fluff (brought on by too many incubators chasing the same four good ideas, and letting in lesser ideas to fill seats), it will be drowned out most of the time. From the new startups perspective, they want to be the only story that day, the only Techmeme headline. Our current system promises that that will not happen.

Good ideas, Bad incubators

Of course, there are a number of good ideas waiting right now to get a jumpstart on life, just what incubators do. But who can tell which incubator is best? Some like YCombinator have great brand recognition, but others might be too new to have a track record. You might pick one due only to its location, etc. The more incubators there are, the more uneven the quality will be. Good ideas will be trapped more and more in lesser and lesser incubators. We all lose out when that happens.

Some Ideas Are Bad

Coming from the other direction, some ideas are not good. Do a search for startups in the deadpool, that only tells a fraction of the story. For every listed company, there are 25 other startups that just died out. They could never find the traction, the audience, the userbase, the spark. Incubators are bringing more and more of this to the market. Some ideas are not good enough to get funding. In the other world of venture capitalists, there seems to be a much higher standard for concepts to fund. But with an investment of just 20,000, why say no? It just might pay off.

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I know that this sounds like an unfair diatribe. Why not fund more ideas, and then feed the best that rise to the top? That is in short, the whole game with investment in early stage technology startups. But as with everything, too much of a good thing is bad. To shortly summarize my perspective, doing so crowds the good ideas and harms them and their market viability. Also having so many incubators helps sort the best ideas into the lesser incubators, and finally we are simply spending money on some bad ideas.  What would I change? Aside from not opening an umpteenth incubator, there is nothing that we can do until an incubator calls it quits.

To put it frankly, simply because you have a few hundred thousand extra dollars, does not mean that you should open an incubator.

Read More About: incubators, Too Long, Didn’t Read

What do you think?