Brandon Live!

If you have installed WDS on Windows XP / 2003 and wish to uninstall it, read the instructions below.  Also, please post a comment with your reason for uninstalling - user feedback is very important to all of us.

Standard answer:

1. Click on the Start button
2. Click “Control Panel”
3. Click “Add / Remove Programs”
4. Check the “Show Updates” box
5. Look for “Windows Desktop Search” in the list.

If that doesn’t work:

Try looking for the uninstaller, it normally resides in:

C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB917013$\spuninst\spuninst.exe

If it’s not there

Then you probably deleted it, or some ill-conceived ”tweak” or “disk cleaner” did.  Unfortunately, this puts you in a tough spot, since it’s really not a supported scenario or something we can design for (”I deleted the uninstaller - now I can’t uninstall!  Help!”).

Your best bet in this case might be to look and see if you have a System Restore point that you can revert back to, from before WDS was installed.  That should remove everything it added to the registry. 

Kottke said that Facebook is the new AOL.  It’s possible they could end up being like AOL (largely if they mess things up), but so far they haven’t really doing anything AOL-ish. 

McClure disagreed, and said that Facebook is actually the new Visual Basic.  This is a better comparison, as Facebook’s platform initiative does include a decent facility for “quick and dirty” app development.  But really, that’s not what makes Facebook so special.

So who else is Facebook like?  I see lots of viable analogs, but I’m going to focus on two of them.  The first one is Google.

Obvious, you might say.  But is it?  Think back to what Google did.  And I mean before Adsense/Adwords, Gmail, and so on.  They built search.

More than that, they built a search engine that contained the right content - in other words, all the pages you were looking for.  In the same way, Facebook “contains” all your friends.  As Google does to web pages, Facebook indexes your friends.  It creates your own personal social database.

What else is Facebook like?  Windows.  For one, it’s an open platform with good documentation and tools.  But the real kicker?  Everybody is already using it, and that actually drives more people to use it.  Just like application developers target Windows because it’s so pervasive - so too do web developers now target Facebook.  It has reached sufficient market saturation that people and companies will write for its platform because it really is the only platform that has reached that critical mass.  And just like on Windows, even a B-list application on the Facebook platform will attract more users than the very best application on any competing platform.

Also just like Windows, it is now trying to cyclically capitalize on both its existing mass of users, and its status as the preferred social web platform.  Each side feeds the other.  Some people might call it “lock in,” others… ”shrewdness.”  Either way, I find it impressive.  I wonder how long they can keep it up.

Amazing…

Now they’ve gone and lowered the price… a good move only because the original price was so absurd.  But coming barely half a year after its release, this $100 price drop reeks of desperation.  The 360 still hasn’t had a price drop because it’s selling so well, and it’s coming on up its two year birthday in a few months.  Oh, and it still costs less.