internet services

I received an email the other day from Hilary McCarthy promoting Platformic.  Platformic is an online Web CMS or what her company likes to call an Online Web Develop Environment.  As usual, I'll let the email do most of the talking in this post.

Hi, I wanted to make sure that you saw that Platformic is announcing version 3.0 of its enterprise web development software, an end-to-end online web development environment and content management platform that allows businesses to quickly and easily build/update websites in real-time without sacrificing creativity or writing code (http://www.prweb.com/releases/platformic... ).

The only content management system (CMS) on the market with a built-in point-and-click mechanism for building layouts visually, Platformic removes the need to hard-code websites or use Adobe Dreamweaver or any other third-party web authoring tools, enabling even individuals in the organization without technical expertise to make changes. The new version capitalizes on Platformic's ability to simplify web development and management with its browser-based building capability and cascading style sheet (CSS) template generation tool that automatically and visually writes fully validated, nested CSS Div structures through a point-and-click architecture. More info, including a link to a demo, follows...

It looks as if Laura Scott, pingVision, had some free time on her hands. There are reasons free servcies on the Internet are free. Laura wants you to start asking yourself, "why?".

Is the future really free?

It seems we've entered an age where there's a land-grab happening for personal data and attention time. Look at all the web start-ups backed by venture capital. They aren't investing out of philanthropy. There's value there. YouTube is "free" but Google paid over a billion dollars for it. Why?

Here's a hint: It's not about the Tube. [Read more at Laura Scott's Blog]

Personally, I'll need to read her post a few times and soak in on the information from her excerpts. Some things to think about...

Last December, I mentioned my excitement about Drupal's project lead, Dries Buytaert, along with Jay Batson starting a company called Acquia. While it was known that the $7 million startup would focus on Drupal for the enterprise, what was not known was the products and services that would be offered by the company. In a press release today, Acquia finally unveiled its roadmap to commercially support Drupal.

The company announced the two initial products and services it will be offering, Carbon and Spokes. Carbon is Acquia's commercial supported version of Drupal which will focus on social publishing applications. Spokes is an update will be an enhanced update notification sercice that provides "site owners personalized alerts with actionable recommendations". At this time I'm, not clear as to whether Spokes will be available for just Carbon or for all Drupal distributions. Both services will be available through a subscription offering.

Matt Mullenweg announced this morning that Wordpress.com users will now have 3 GB of free drive space for their blogs. Previously, Wordpress.com only offered 50 MB of free space to those that signed up for the free service. Why are they doing this? Looks like Wordpress.com has no longer decided to play nice guy against their biggest competitors, TypePad and Blogger.

The following is an excerpt from Mullenweg's announcement at Wordpress.com:

Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.

Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.

I can almost guess how Google-owned Blogger will respond (add more GB), but TypePad may be another story.  It seems to me, if TypePad still wants to charge for its Basic service...they now have to work a lot harder at it.

"WordPress.com appears to have grown by 523% with 24,393,457 visits. WordPress doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon and thats some positive news."

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