Tonight I’m going to be interviewed by a reporter from the Wall Street Journal about the Web.

I’ll post a link up here if anything comes from it.

I’m testing it… Look’s very nice.

Take a look at this post on the “A VC” blog: The Difference Between Wordpress and Facebook.

Interesting stuff. And I think I agree with it.

Fred Wilson says:

But trust me on this one. The blogging revolution is the adult social network whereas Facebook style social networking is for teens and college kids. This gap will narrow.

I like that way of putting it. I can’t see the adults of tomorrow using Facebook. They might not be using Wordpress either of course…

Currently I have my very limited editing suite that I generated to add or edit pages over at http://sam.davyson.com. It was a real feat of my talent at the time. I’m not sure how I managed to make something like that - that actually works. Simple as it is. Since then I’ve made two different CMS’s that were admittedly based around each other but distinctly different (written again so to speak). These were for Hs Chemistry and Andy Kershaw Media.

I like the CMS’s that I make. But they take a lot of time and they are not as rich in features as say something that you can download today from an open source site. I happen to be of the belief though that these is nothing worse than using something too powerful to do a simple job. I don’t want to overload my clients with an interface that is riddled with options that they don’t need to be concerned with.

So for a simple site where people want to be able to edit their text, add images, maybe post some news what is the solution? I’m currently trying to find out. I want to do one of:

• Find a suitable CMS that I can use when I implement further sites.
• Write a CMS that I can deploy (in a click or two) to new sites.

Although the first sounds easier I’m not sure it necessarily is. Is stripping down easier than building up? Maybe it is. But the result of building normally looks a lot better. It’s quite a dilemma. In the running for the first option are:

1. WordPress - I really like this. I just want it to be simple for the users. I’m not sure how to do this.
2. Joomla - I know very little about this.
3. Drupal - Similarly. But I think it looks too complicated.
4. PHP Fusion - I know nothing of this.

In related news Cushy CMS looks nice.

At Le Web 3 Conference Evan Williams, serial entrepreneur and founder of Twitter said that:

Twitter’s a mobile command line.

And he’s right it is. Command lines are brilliant, they make it fast to do things through a simple interface. But to me a useful command line requires two things. It needs to be easy to access which Twitter certainly is. And it needs to have useful commands. I understand that Twitter has caught on because of it’s simplicity but what I want to suggest is with increased extensibility Twitter could be a groundbreaking product.

At the minute you can use Twitter to tell people what you are doing. It is a status machine. And it’s a very fine one. But it could do much more. Twitter’s presence across so many platforms makes it a great way of communicating for other developers to tap into. So imagine if you could text other commands to make Twitter do different things… I’m talking:

• “event” - Adds an event to your Google / Hotmail / Yahoo Calendar
• “email” - Sends the following text as an email
• “loc” - Update your location - This could be shown on a map on your Twitter profile.
• “fbmsg” - Send a Facebook message.
• etc etc.

Lets be clear here… All of these “extra features” could be turned off by default or you could have to start each “command” message with an exclaimation mark or something to mark it out as different. Then Twitter could process it as a command and do whatever is necessary.

My inspiration for this comes from YubNub mainly I think which is a Social Command line that anyone can make commands for. I think Twitter could be great if you could make commands on the fly. I could develop a little app to sit on my site that could get information from me while I’m on the move (using a suitably long command). There could be global commands and ones that only worked from your number that you could make yourself. Twitter could become the defacto protocol of SMS - web interaction. I think it’d be brilliant.

Flickr don’t want to become part of Microsoft. And who blames them! No one wants Flickr to become Windows Live Photo Spaces with Silverlight plugin obligatory with an uploader for Windows only etc etc. Not that any of this would probably actually happen… Flickr is one of the few things on the Internet that I happily pay for. And if that money was going to Microsoft I’m not sure how I’d feel about that. Anyway for the moment just enjoy this image:

By jcrr on Flickr.

If you don’t know what happened then check Techmeme.

I’m not sure about this announcement. First of all everyone who has said that no one is actually committing to anything here is absolutely right. Just because people who work at Google and Facebook are on the committee it doesn’t mean that data is going to be portable from Facebook to NewSocialNetwork.com anytime soon.

I think that the issue is being clouded though. If you could move your information about friends etc (your social graph) right now would you? Where would you move it to? Moving your social graph is not going to be useful unless all of your friends (or at least some of them) move too. In this way making data portable is not really going to change anything about the lock in with social networks. People are going to stay where people they know are. Similar arguments debunk the significance of Open Social. People don’t switch networks for applications or widgets. They move because of their friends.

What is needed instead is to make the rich experience of a social network standardised. I think Google knows this. The real future is ONE social network for everyone. I see social networking as an extension to email. From Gmail I can email people on Hotmail and they can email me back. There is a communication standard there. So what we need is a standard account type (that is OpenID) and then standards for feeds of activity (that’s RSS), and standards for everything else you do on a social network. Once the social networking “scape” is fully open in this way people can use their own bit of the network (essentially their network provider) like Facebook, or Google, or Bebo, or whatever. And it might have slightly different features just like the way that Gmail has different features to Hotmail but it would have all been the same network. So I can switch from Google to Facebook and I’ll see a different interface but can browse my friends on whichever network provider they’ve chosen.

OpenID and a standard social graph is the key. As far as I can tell there is no benefit in the “half-way” solution where I can move my data from Facebook to Orkut. My friends will still be on Facebook. Fingers crossed this can go all the way.

There is a slightly strange advert on British television at the moment. It shows some motors from cars driving down streets with a voice over that points out some interesting points about Climate Change. Nothing odd so far. The advert however finishes not with a phone number or web address but a search query.

It says: “Search for Act On CO2″. And here’s what you get if you do…

It seems that the government has decided that it is not worth buying a domain specifically for the campaign when they are already number one for the campaign name. Oddly though they have paid to have a sponsored link for the term on Google. Biazarre. This behaviour is all very well but if the government site was to fall from the number one spot in Google’s organic listings then someone else could get a lot of traffic. This would be Googlebombing with free advertising…

This week the Crunchies were announced. These seem to me to compete only with Mashable. They are a set of awards from a set of blogs (TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, Giga Om et al) for “startups”. Commenters seemed generally annoyed with the lack of “startups” that were nominated. Voting is now open.

Official Site | TC Post
Mozilla launched Weave which is a new way of maintaining one browser experience across multiple devices. Apparently they just want to make the platform they have no desire to develop products for it themselves. It seems to me that this is just a repeat of Google’s Synchronised Bookmarks feature albeit broader and more open.  I’m not overly impressed.

Official Launch Post