Steve Rubel posted a really good article on how everyone appears to be drunk on 2.0 Kool Aid. Crazy valuations, unexciting opinions, a diluted market. Steve has a point - everyone’s high on everything that’s happening, but that may or may not be wrong. Granted, there’s companies throwing absurd amounts of money around to get into something they don’t necessarily understand. There’s also a growing amount of VC deals going in reverse (VCs approaching startups instead of the other way around). A lot of startups have played the me-too game for a quick buck.

Part of what’s happening now is overly hyped. New technologies are super exciting, but that doesn’t mean everything on the market today is too. The key ideas these days are those about changing lives and building a platform for more innovation - pretty much what was exciting 7 or 14 years ago. They’re just engulfed in bad products with poor execution (which doesn’t stop them from getting funded, these days).

I would say everyone should get a little bit of Steve’s opinion as well as Fred Wilson’s - that is, to be cautious about the Kool Aid, but to be excited about some of the new opportunities that being built every day. It’s not all bad - it’s just that most of the time people assume that a lot of stuff out there is actually good when it’s not.

Update: Richard over at Read/WriteWeb just posted his own opinion as well.

Update 2: New York Magazine has a great story about whether or not we’re living, breathing and working in a bubble that you should read if you care about this stuff. It features a quote by Michael Moritz that pretty much sums what I’ve been thinking (and writing occasionally on this blog):

The great news for me about these times of enthusiasm is that inevitably there’s a lot of bedlam, undoubtedly there’ll be carnage, there’ll be all sorts of carcasses strewn across the road. But there will also be a handful of companies that will emerge to become very significant. And that’s what working and living and investing in Silicon Valley has always been about.

Oink, the (super-popular) bittorrent music tracker was brought down by authorities a couple of days ago. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people came out in favor of its demise because it was screwing up the music industry, and quite a few others were shocked and saddened by seeing it go. Fact is, a whole lot of people lost their main means of contact with new artists and music.

Although Oink itself didn’t host any illegal or copyrighted material, it did facilitate the trading of music for free between users - which is an illegal activity. Now, why is it that people did prefer Oink to getting out to stores and actually buying CDs? Here’s what I believe are a few reasons:

• Price: there’s really no way $20 CDs can compete with free
• Commodity: not leaving the house is a major selling point
• Choice: a much bigger catalogue than the one you can find on any store, online or otherwise

All three of these points - price, commodity and choice - are huge, but lets focus on the last one of them. Choice is really the key point to the success of legal vs illegal. Would you buy 100 $20 cds in the dark, without knowing the bands putting them out? Right. But you might download 100 releases and see if any of those caught your ear. You might even add a few favorite bands to your collection. You know, those bands which you end up buying the whole catalog from. Oink was the ultimate music library.

People aren’t screwed up, the music industry is. Labels need to understand that without fighting “illegal downloads” and “pirates” in price, commodity and choice, they’ll end up nowhere. Give me an easy and flexible service where I can discover thousands of new artists (like Oink did), and let me pay the right price for what I enjoy and I’ll be all over it - paying for music and all. Wouldn’t that be great?

Note: If you haven’t seen it yet, you should read DJ Rupture’s post about Oink too. Because it wasn’t just “regular people” browsing and using Oink. Artists (whose music was up there for grabs) did too - and they weren’t that few, really.

It’s that time again, and if you’re an Apple user you know how it is. You wait around for a while, a new OS is announced, you wait some more and then when it is finally released, you know (again) how you’ve made the right choice in sticking with the guys from Cupertino.

A lot of ink is going to be spilled about Leopard and just how great it is in the next few days, so I’ll just give you the rundown on some of the tiny bits of Leopard that I’ve enjoyed. This was basically written in the first hour with the operating system, so bare with me when it comes to the excitement.

Spaces, stacks and the new UI

Stacks: Stacks are much more useful than I imagined. And they’re beautiful. Just noticed how stacks react when there are new files on the monitored folder (it just changed the stack icon when I saved this file into my Documents folder/stack).

Interface: A unified interface, finally. The new drop shadows are heavy, but I like them. I have mixed feelings about the new dock - it’s good to have a change every once in a while, but things like the new running application marks are somewhat annoying and not easily seen. Also, I personally don’t care much about it being like a shelf now - but it’s a minor change, I’ll cope.

One other thing I have mixed feelings about is the fact that they brought down the opacity of the top bar. It doesn’t look that bad, but I kinda liked the consistency it had across wallpapers (right now mine is a shade of purple because of the default Leopard wallpaper).

Spaces: Finally, proper virtual desktops on a Mac. I had been waiting for this one for a very long time after battling with releases of Virtue Desktops and earlier applications. If you run several things at once (applications that you might easily group together in different “spaces”), you’ll love it too. Each project in its own space, IM and email on another - it’s productivity bliss.

System preferences: I love the redesigns on some of the preference panes - particularly the new Bluetooth and Network panes, that were in dire need of a change. These actually make sense now - which is great.

Terminal, Utilities: The terminal being tabbed is sweet because it saves me from having to install iTerm. But more important than tabs and the terminal itself is how ruby, rails and quite a lot of ruby gems are installed by default. I knew rails was going to be one of the additions already, but some of the gems (capistrano, mongrel, redcloth, hpricot, ruby-openid, etc) they packed were a surprise. And the new Terminal has themes, too - What?

Finder: The new finder - wow, have we longed for this one. I love the new sidebar and I like how they integrate some smart searches by default to give you a sense of the possibilities. Honestly, I couldn’t care much about coverflow everywhere (in fact, it does sound a little bit like bloat), but it may be useful in a couple of cases, so we’ll see how often I use it. I guess it doesn’t really hurt to have an extra bit of eye candy if it doesn’t get in the way of work.

One small detail, not really about the Finder but Leopard itself is how there are now icons for Front Row, Exposé, the Dashboard and Spaces in your Applications folder. Makes it much easier to script interface behavior when there’s actually an icon that can be clicked.

iCal, Address Book: Took a bit of a revamp, good ol’ iCal, and it looks pretty good. I like how it packs some of the interface details we’ve seen on recent iPods and the iPhone - Apple is going for consistency and there’s definitely nothing wrong with that. Address Book looks the same, but I’m still to restore my contacts from my Tiger installation so I have nothing to look at there at this point.

Conclusions, if there are any

As with a lot of what Apple does these days, Leopard looks (and feels) great. I had almost forgotten the feeling of how snappy a fresh installation of an Apple OS is, but now I have been reminded. These guys aren’t playing around, and I definitely agree with the Wall Street Journal when they say that this thing kicks Vista in the butt. Still a fan. Sign me up for OSX 10.6 “LOLCAT”, Steve.

For those of you looking for larger screenshots of Leopard, I uploaded a few to this Flickr set. Have fun!

A couple of hours ago Jeff Barr (senior evangelist over at Amazon) posted about Amazon S3’s new Service Level Agreement - which if you happen to run services on the platform (like we do here at Webreakstuff) is a pretty good piece of news. Ever since Amazon S3 (or Simple Storage Service) officially launched developers have been asking for an SLA in order to formally guarantee the service’s reliability and Amazon’s commitment to keeping it going.

Some of the developers building applications with Amazon S3 have been asking us about an SLA, or Service Level Agreement. An SLA defines the minimum acceptable level of performance from a service along with some sort of penalty for not meeting expectations. A typical SLA actually defines a performance or reliability boundary which is somewhat lower than what the system is actually designed, built, and expected to deliver.

We know that many of our customers, including a multitude of teams within Amazon, are using S3 in mission-critical ways and need a formal commitment from us in order to make commitments to their own users and customers.

And the agreement looks good, too. Amazon will give you 10% service credit if uptime goes below 99.9% and 25% credit if it goes below 99% in a given month. Which tells you a lot about how reliable they believe their platform really is.

The agreement is in effect since October 1st, which means those of you who’ve wondered (for so long now) whether it would be a safe bet to host something on S3 can finally exhale. Now, and although I do trust Amazon’s reliability - I mean, it’s Amazon -, it’d be great to have an SLA for EC2 as well, but I assume that’ll be up when it officially launches.