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Last week, we wrote a post outlining some of the possible curveballs Apple could throw at us during the WWDC event taking place on Monday. That is, announcements besides the 3G iPhone, which is pretty much a given at this point. Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has a history of wowing a crowd with one product, then coming back with another unexpected one out of left field. A new rumor tonight suggests we may have been too conservative in our predictions. Jobs could show off Apple’s next operating system, OS X 10.6, according to TUAW.

If true, this is big news. Apple just launched the last iteration of its operating system, OS X 10.5 “Leopard”, back in October of last year. If OS X 10.6 is shown at WWDC, the report indicates that it could ship by January 2009 — just six months from now, and barely a year after Leopard. When you consider that OS X 10.5 launched two and a half years after OS X 10.4 — and that Windows Vista launched over five years after its last iteration, Windows XP, this is an incredibly fast time between iterations.

While the site is being conservative with the details, it suggests that Apple could seed early builds of OS X 10.6 to developers at the event. Word is also that this would not be a huge upgrade over the current Leopard, but instead would be more of an incremental upgrade focusing on stability and security.

Normally, those types of incremental updates are destined for smaller sub-version iterations such as the recently released OS X 10.5.3, but if Apple is willing to go out and call it OS X 10.6, it would seem to suggest that either:

a) They are trying to make Microsoft look bad as it continues to struggle with consumers’ Windows Vista concerns. Microsoft has been talking about its next iteration of Windows, “Windows 7″, more and more in recent weeks, but the software is unlikely to be released before 2010.

or

b) Apple is closing in on a completely new revolution in its operating systems and is willing to burn through its 10.x iterations quicker to reach the OS 11 (or XI) naming milestone.

The report also indicates that OS X 10.6 will be fully 64-bit and will only work on Intel-based Macs. This means that any Apple computer that is more than a couple years old will be left in the dust.

While there is no word on the cat nickname for this operating system yet (all Apple OS X iterations are named after big cats, hence “Leopard” for 10.5), early reports indicate that OS X 10.6 could be dubbed “Lynx.”

update: A reference to OS X 10.6 was apparently also found in the new iPhone SDK installer.

[photo: flickr/digitalART]

Just released a new version of the Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension, with bug fixes, the addition of the show CC and BCC scripts, and an update to the Redesigned skin. Download Better Gmail 2 0.5 here.

PluggedIn, the music video entertainment site, announced plans today to collaborate with music and pop culture magazine, Rolling Stone. PluggedIn offers over 1,000 free HD broadcast quality music videos and artist profiles, but there is a catch.

It is only accessible in the U.S. or Canada.

Although its media player supports hi-def videos with DVD like controls and without buffering, it’s services cannot be provided overseas because of the same copyright laws that similar sites like Hulu and Pandora ran into.

For those of us who are in the “green zone,” PluggedIn will created a Rolling Stone channel which will feature news and video content from th site as well as exclusive content from the Rolling Stone vaults. Likewise, Rolling Stone will be able to use PluggedIn’s high-definition player technology into its own videos and then distribute it to sites like MySpace.

The new deal means that Rolling Stone will now access PluggedIn’s thousands of music videos from major and independent labels, like Universal Music Group and EMI Music, and then broadcast their content in high-definition on their site. Likewise, PluggedIn will benefit from exposure on a top notch entertainment site.

The Rolling Stone Channel on PluggedIn.com is set to launch summer 2008 and will showcase news, music videos, blogs, exclusive footage from the 40-year history of Rolling Stone, along with an extensive collection of photos and interviews.

All in high-definition quality. Hoorah. And yet, a piece of me is still angered at the “exclusiveness” of it all. There is a whole world of music lovers and Rolling Stone readers beyond the U.S. and Canada. Are we supposed to forget about them?

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

PluggedIn: Hello And Goodbye
Rolling Stone Goes Digital
Rolling Stone Social Network Bound To Be Lame
Yahoo Buzz Introduces Widgets and RSS Feeds to Take On Digg
Foonz, The Hunt Zone, Mail.ru, Crashplan, Flip.com, Quepasa, Sermo, BooMP3, Contextual Links
Music News Toolbox: 50+ Links For Discovering New Music

Adam Penenberg of Fast Company got lots of well-deserved grief for his cover article about Ning last month, the one that focused on the Andreessen and Bianchini duo’s “viral expansion loops”.

The overly simple idea behind those loops is this: members join a service and then invite their friends. Rinse and repeat, and you’ve got exponential growth rates.

Things aren’t quite so simple and straightforward (factors like stickiness come into play), but there is a good deal of truth to the idea that users beget users, especially when a mass of them holds a certain value (the so-called “network effect”). So it would come as no surprise if one of Ning’s competitors decided to claim even stronger viral expansion loops.

Grouply, a broad social network divided into groups that are built on top of those found at Yahoo, is making such a claim. Assuming the concepts of groups and networks are tantamount, Grouply claims to have passed Ning, last reported to have 230,000+ networks, with its 300,000+ groups (see chart below). And Grouply is owing its success to the symbiotic (or parasitic?) relationship it has established with Yahoo.

When Grouply started off, it was mainly a tool for members of multiple Yahoo groups to keep track of their activities. It then evolved into a more distinct social networking platform by expanding the ways in which members could interact onsite, thereby bringing it into closer competition with Ning. But while networks on Ning are built from scratch, groups on Grouply must be identified from the start with groups on Yahoo.

This is a double-edged sword to growth. On the one hand, non-Yahoo users will fail to find Grouply as an appealing place to start their niche networks. But Yahoo groups users will find it exceedingly appealing to do so, and it’s that special appeal that boosts Grouply’s adoption rate.

During the Grouply setup process, members of a particular Yahoo group are sent invites to the new Grouply group (a practice that has led many to accuse Grouply of spamming). Regardless of how enthusiastically Grouply users actually push their new creations, they benefit from the previously formed communities on Yahoo because they can invite members over to the new and improved party. Such well-targeted invitations are why Grouply can assert that it possesses superior viral expansion loops.

So great, Grouply claims to have one-uped Ning. But there’s still a concern over the actual quality of these networks and groups. How many people belong to them on average? How active are their users? How long do those users actually stick around? And what are they up to? No one really knows, outside of the companies themselves. What I’d like to see are companies divulging great levels of detail regarding their usage statistics. That way we can truly gauge the relative success of these social platforms, the proliferation of which continues every day.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

A coalition of advocacy groups sent a letter to Google expressing their concern over the company’s failure to post a link to its privacy policy on its home page.

The open-source search engine will begin letting anyone participate in building its index by adding, deleting and rating Web pages.

PC makers can now include Windows XP in low-cost desktop and laptop computers until 2010, the company announced at the Computex trade show on Tuesday.

For whatever you think of either Amazon.com or Google, one thing that's worth giving both companies kudos for is their ability to ignore the short term questions raised by Wall Street in favor of much more strategic long term thinking. It's been less clear with Google, who has consistently done well. But Amazon has, for years, faced numerous questions from Wall St. analysts who consistently seem to get upset by the company's willingness to invest in big long-term projects. Other companies, unfortunately, get swayed too easily. For example, last year, Sprint gave in to short-term thinking from investors who got upset that the company was spending so much on its next generation wireless strategy -- despite it being an absolute necessity.

The latest place where that may be happening is with Netflix, which has been investing heavily in its digital download strategy -- causing some Wall Street folks to complain that the company is spending too much, and it won't make sense until the majority of users switch over. However, as Greg Sandoval points out, if Netflix follows this path, it'll be dead. That's because these projects take time. If you wait until the majority of your customers will switch over, they've already switched over... to your competitors who didn't wait around for Wall Street's short-term thinking to catch up.

This same issue comes up all too often, by the way, in discussing the various business models that the entertainment industry can adopt -- with people insisting that the record labels and movie studios should wait until the model is proven and everyone else is doing it. The problem, at that point, is that the laggards have lost all relevance, and their brand and reputation are worthless at that point. Betting on the long-term means not being a follower -- because in waiting for others to create the new market, you'll be left too far behind.

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For whatever you think of either Amazon.com or Google, one thing that's worth giving both companies kudos for is their ability to ignore the short term questions raised by Wall Street in favor of much more strategic long term thinking. It's been less clear with Google, who has consistently done well. But Amazon has, for years, faced numerous questions from Wall St. analysts who consistently seem to get upset by the company's willingness to invest in big long-term projects. Other companies, unfortunately, get swayed too easily. For example, last year, Sprint gave in to short-term thinking from investors who got upset that the company was spending so much on its next generation wireless strategy -- despite it being an absolute necessity.

The latest place where that may be happening is with Netflix, which has been investing heavily in its digital download strategy -- causing some Wall Street folks to complain that the company is spending too much, and it won't make sense until the majority of users switch over. However, as Greg Sandoval points out, if Netflix follows this path, it'll be dead. That's because these projects take time. If you wait until the majority of your customers will switch over, they've already switched over... to your competitors who didn't wait around for Wall Street's short-term thinking to catch up.

This same issue comes up all too often, by the way, in discussing the various business models that the entertainment industry can adopt -- with people insisting that the record labels and movie studios should wait until the model is proven and everyone else is doing it. The problem, at that point, is that the laggards have lost all relevance, and their brand and reputation are worthless at that point. Betting on the long-term means not being a follower -- because in waiting for others to create the new market, you'll be left too far behind.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

PC World - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will uncage its Puma laptop chip platform at events in Taipei and Paris on Wednesday.