The beauty of launching an application like Walletproof on the web is its cross-platform interoperability. As long as a user has a web browser, he’s set.

In a recent post titled Facebook is the new AOL, Jason Kottke makes an interesting point about Facebook’s development platform and how its “walled garden” approach might represent a negative trend: If every big player on the web offers their own closed proprietary platform for developers to launch their products on, it becomes inefficient and expensive.

It’s difficult enough to develop for OS X, Windows, and Linux simultaneously … imagine if you had 30 different platforms to develop for.

Erick Schonfeld, editor of the excellent Business 2.0, discusses this in The Race to Become the Next AOL and he links to a story in the Financial Times where one of MySpace’s founders says they’ll probably follow Facebook’s lead and introduce their own development platform.

An example of a more constructive approach is the platform Netvibes launched recently for developing widgets: Netvibes UWA. They emphasise openness and if you write a widget for Netvibes, it will work in iGoogle, the Apple Dashboard and “many more”.

Creating walled gardens like the Facebook development platform may well make sense as a business decision. One thing is certain though, it won’t benefit the consumer.

A recent entry on the SmugMug blog, Amazon S3: Show me the money, (via Steve Eichert) highlights the advantages of outsourcing IT infrastructure needs to Amazon’s S3 services.

In short, using Amazon’s webservices is saving SmugMug $500,000 a year.

Businessweek covered Amazon’s web service strategy recently in Amazon’s Risky Bet.

According to Businessweek, Wall Street wants Amazon to just continue selling stuff and stop spending money on crazy IT ideas. SmugMug probably disagrees.

In the US, the telecoms have been lobbying for congress to pass a bill that would allow them to charge extra fees to guarantee that certain Web sites run faster than others instead of treating all packets of Web information the same regardless of their content.

This bill now seems to have fizzled out according to the Save the Internet Blog: “Huge Victory for Real People as Telco Bill Dies“.

Obviously, the Save the Internet blog is not the most neutral of sources on Net Neutrality, but the demise of this bill seems nevertheless to be fortunate for the web’s future.

At the very least, net neutrality levels the playing field for small Internet start-ups that don’t have big bucks to pay the telco’s to ensure that their data packets are equal to Google’s.

Business Week has some of the most interesting podcasts around. Their cover story podcast is often quite entertaining especially since the host, Business Week’s executive editor John Byrne, has a sceptical and humorous interviewing technique.

Another BW offering is the CEO’s guide to technology which featured a Tim O’Reilly interview earlier this summer. Tim is quite candid regarding the “web 2.0″ buzzword and he makes some interesting points regarding the tech industry.

Moving from business to technology, another podcast I recently discovered is The Linux Action Show. These guys are of the pragmatic school of Linux (as opposed to the more ideological one) and are defectors from OS X.

Other interesting podcasts include the various BBC offerings (most notably Digital Planet, In Business and Melvin Bragg’s In Our Time) and finally IT Conversations.

Some books you have to buy, others you have to have stuffed down your throat by friends. One such friend who is a business student at Reykjavik University recently sent me one of his favorites: The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.

He assured me that even if the cover is ugly, the content is good.

The book’s introduction gives its geographical origins away:

What is branding? From a business point of view, branding in the marketplace is very similar to branding on the ranch.

Branding on the ranch?

All jokes aside, the book is quite interesting. One of its themes is that a brand’s scope effects its impact. A strong brand has a narrow focus. Broadening the base of a brand and widening its appeal may yield a short term increase in sales but on the long term it often undermines the brand and decrease sales.

This theory is interesting in the Rails vs. Java debate. It certainly seems that 37signals and the Rails team have grasped the concept of the power of a narrow focus when it comes to “branding” Ruby on Rails (see: Are you sure you want to be mainstream? and Distinguishing power from versatility).

It seems that the “laws of branding” apply as much in the market for programming languages as they do in retail.

When Apple’s market cap rose above Dell’s on Friday the 13th of January this year, Om Malik commented that what really makes Apple tick is software and the user experience (see: So Long Apple Nay Sayers).

The release of Boot Camp, which will allow Apple users to boot Windows XP, seems to justify Tim Beyer’s article on Motley Fool in June 2005 called Apple’s Real Target: Dell, which contends that Apple still sees itself as a hardware manufacturer.

The next step for Apple might be to provide their Mac OS X operating system as an alternative operating system to Windows on any Intel machine.

Better yet, if they would provide it for free (or just cheap), Windows would have a very serious challenger to its desktop dominance. On the other hand, people would not be forced to buy the premium priced Macs to enjoy the user experience Om Malik talks about.