Venture Geek

A friend of mine was relating the job description of a friend of his. I won’t name names to protect the job of the friend-of-a-friend, but it involved a certain large technology company hiring contractors to post offensive messages on the forums of a certain other large technology company. Ostensibly, the purpose is to time how long it takes the company to take down these offending messages, but it sparked a discussion over lunch about whether it’s ethical and/or legal to consciously post offensive material on a competitor’s forums. I was appalled that this could actually be happening, even if it’s for the stated purpose of gathering competitive intelligence about the response times of the other company. Would make for a perfect case study in a Business Ethics class — mostly exploring whether the worker asked to do these things should be outing her bosses bosses and where competitive “intelligence” crosses the line (not to mention my personal doubts that just gathering intelligence is what this is really about, since it clearly diminishes the value of the competitors forums to have offensive messages showing up).

Nearly two years ago I wrote about the age of the “big-boned” client (which today is apparently called a “fit client”). The basic premise of what I wrote then was to combine the ease of deploying web-based apps with the convenience of a stand-alone app on the desktop — something like what PandoraMan or Pyro let you do, but abstracted. What I wrote then was:

What I’d love to have is an application that lets me spawn these custom applications — a “meta application” if you will. It would basically let me configure a few things about what kinds of information needs to be stored for authentication, let’s me tweak the UI and choose various menu/toolbar options, and then creates a stand-alone application that would be specialized to a specific web-based application.

I then suggested someone with basic OS X skills could easily pull this off using WebKit. Well, today, I finally found just exactly that at Fluid. From their site:

Fluid itself is a very small application. When launched, Fluid displays a little tiny window where you specify the URL of a WebApp you’d like to run in a Site Specific Browser. Provide an application name, specify a Location and an Icon, click ‘Create’ and you’ll be prompted to launch the new native Mac app you’ve just created.

Use Fluid to run YouTube, GTalk, Flickr, Basecamp, Delicious, .Mac webmail, or any other WebApp as a separate Mac desktop application.

Seems I should have been paying attention in the last couple years because Fluid is based on Prism, a similar concept using Mozilla code instead of WebKit.

As I write this, I haven’t actually tried it, though ;)

And this is supposed to make me WANT to use your application?

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