Niall Kennedy

Let's take a small step back here; just like the anti-Google sentiment that was about a few months back it seems is Facebooks turn to face the fire (mostly their fault).

A lot of what they are doing is, at best, ethically unsound or, at worst, privacy invading. In this case I'd say (from initial reading) it sits on the scale slap bang in the middle of "a douchebag thing to do".

But. It doesn't feel hypocritical because their argument is that their ToS attempt to deny users the right to access their accounts this way. The Email services, as far as I am aware, that FB scrape either explicitly allow or do not disallow such action. It seems "axe grinding" to bring that into the discussion.

Notably this article does not appear to discuss or link to articles about the suit Facebook has filed [meta point: I hate that, it feels sneaky]. It appears (from research) that it is an long running dispute between Power and Facebook. They have also filed Trademark infringements and other stuff against them at the same time (no comment on the general legitimacy of such claims for the moment).

I haven't fully digested all the information to have a complete opinion on this but... I think that this is part of Facebook trying to win the wider battle with Power.com, I'm not sure it reflects a deliberate move by them to try and turn ToS violations into criminal violations. However I am definitely in agreement with the EFF that if a potential side effect of any eventual ruling will bring in such…

Go for San Francisco:

1. Space The rents are actually in many cases less here than in other parts of the valley. (My office is $1 per s.f. per month!) A huge building boom is finishing up in the SOMA area of the City with hundreds (maybe 1000+) new apartments entering the market. This is good news for downward pressure on rental prices.

2. Convenience: Within walking distance of both my office and my apartment are countless restaurants, markets, office supplies, banks, etc etc. You can simply walk to what you need saving so much time over driving around on errands in rush hour traffic in the South Bay. There are countless take-out food restaurants open until late at night to keep you coding with a reasonable diet, with many delivering to your door. (Chinese takeout costs about $7 for a main item - roughly $10 for a meal)

3. Coolness: There are a lot of web companies in the city because it is such a great place to live. Attracting hackers to work for you may be easier here.
Even the Large Corporate Web companies are setting up major operations in the City:

http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2007/01/15/story22.html
http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2005/08/yahoo_leasing_san_francisco_of.html

4. Life Style: For those moments when you're not all-nightering on a problem, you have many options here:
a. Sailing in the Bay
b. Biking - across the Golden Gate and you are into nature in no time.
c. Beach - Many beaches in the area
d.…

Chrome team wasn't actually that big when they launched; IIRC they got their Founder's Award soon after I started at Google and all the team member names fit on 2 PowerPoint (well, actually Google Presentation) slides. This was almost 2 years after they had launched for internal dogfooding, so the initial team was likely quite a bit smaller.

I would chalk it up to the massive amount of experience among the early team members. Chrome was started by ex-Firefox people. The initial tech lead for Chrome, Ben Goodger, was the former tech lead for Firefox. Chrome Extensions were developed by the guy who invented GreaseMonkey. V8 was designed & led by Lars Bak, a veteran of Beta, Self, StrongTalk, and eventually tech lead of Java HotSpot. Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser.

Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do.

Edit: I found a full list of team members and description of their background from a blog post at launch:

https://s.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome-team.html

https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html

It really was about 20 people, and they all have extensive resumes working on products like Firefox, HotSpot, GMail, Google Gears, or other Google products.

Some more bits on MOO:

A mention by Niall Kennedy: http://www.niallkennedy.com/podcast/2007/03/moo-cards.html

Suw Charman's notes on Richard Moross and Stefan Magdalinski's presentation at FOWA 07: http://strange.corante.com/archives/2007/02/22/fowa_07_richard_moross_stefan_magdalinski_how_we_turn_virtual_stuff_on_the_web_into_beautiful_things_in_the_real_world.php

FOWA's own page on Moross's appearance: http://www.futureofwebapps.com/pastevents.html, giving http://media.libsyn.com/media/carsonsystems/Richard_Moross_and_Stefan_Magdalinski.mp3 or http://www.futureofwebapps.com/presentations/richard_moross.pdf

I'm a gnu/eff booster most of the time. However, it's worth looking at more of the details here: http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2009/01/facebook-vs-power-ventures.html

"Collecting Facebook usernames and passwords is at the heart of the dispute. Power.com impersonates a Facebook user after collecting their username and password."

I would still side with power BUT a TOS that says "you can't give your password to third parties" is a bit different from "you can't use any automated processes at all".