Our favourite web(ish) stories from the week…
Adam:
“This week Amazon released a Visual Studio extension to bring Amazon Web Services account management into the IDE. As a Visual Studio using, .NET programming kind of a guy I’m really excited about this. The extension gives you a series of project templates that will work out-of-the-box on EC2 and a click-to-deploy process that can have you up and running with a load balanced, auto-scaling server farm in just a few minutes. The future is coming!”
Paul:
“I’ve been watching with amusement as the twitterverse and google+ers got indignant over Facebook ripping off Google+’s circles feature, while seemingly oblivious of Google’s copying of Facebook’s “Facebook” feature…”
Dave:
“Following the successful introduction of over the air updates in the iOS5 Betas, Apple is going a step further by rolling out ‘Internet Recovery’ to all new Macs: ‘Lion Internet Recovery lets you start your Mac directly from Apple’s Servers. The system runs a quick test of your memory and hard drive to ensure there are no hardware issues.’ Typical ‘don’t have to do anything for extreme awesomeness’ stuff from Apple…”
Mike:
“The launch of Windows 8 nails it for me as important story of the week. It’s never going to be an area short of discussion and polar opinions. I thought this Gizmodo post titled If You Already Hate Windows Then You Hate Technology piece did well at summing up the fanboy extremism that surrounds this stuff. Ultimately it’s about usability, not brand.”
“The Guardian’s SEO subeditor wrote an ace piece about the problems news websites face with discussion and community. She makes some interesting observations on the pros and cons of anonymity, gamification and automated moderation, and shares solutions the Guardian have used to build their successful reader community.”
The Failing To Do A Post For The Storm Blog Cake StickCarrot Publicly Name And Shame Fine (TM) goes to Liam. Some may say it’s unfair picking on him given he’s away today. Tough. He gets the cake next week.
