Monday, June 25, 2007

Marc Andreessen blog

I recently came across Marc Andreessen's new blog and think it is really excellent, especially if you have any interest in startup businesses (some good stuff on turning around large companies too). Marc is best known as a cofounder of Netscape and co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser. He is currently working on Ning, a social networking platform, and has an interesting post on the Facebook application platform, and lots of good stuff on doing startups, including why not to! Social networking (which is what Facebook is all about) is currently a pretty hot area, and there is plenty of scope for geospatial technology to be applied in this space. I signed up to Facebook recently and have found it to be fun in general and interesting from a potential new business point of view.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

agreed, there is definitely room for geospatial integration on facebook but the points marc makes about scale should not be overlooked. Here's a simple travel map widget's story:

I have 400,000 users of my widget - Now what?

Peter Batty said...

Brian, nice story, thanks for the link. I agree that there are challenges in terms of the business model for this, though the article discusses several ideas. It will be interesting to see if Facebook steps up to help solve the scaling problem by offering some sort of hosting service, as these issues will be a big inhibitor to having a lot of people developing interesting plugins, which is what they want presumably.