Ryan’s article contains this quote from Nokia developer Oleg Romaxa:

“Nokia will use the best browser for the job,” he said. “Currently, we cannot make a full-featured and integrated browser with WebKit in mobile. But with Mozilla, we do not need to do anything, we can take existing models and API’s which are available. Also, NPAPI support is already in the Gecko web rendering engine. They are also concerned that WebKit is, to some extent, controlled by Apple, who are in competition to Nokia with their iPhone.”

There are a few important things to note here. First, that Mozilla is the complete package. We’ve got everything that you need to implement a browser. Disk cache, integrated (and well tested!) networking, a super-fast JS implementation, an XML UI markup language (XUL) and a brand that regular humans recognize. Those things mean you can get to market faster as a mobile integrator or developer instead of having to create them yourselves again.

Second, our neutral stance. We believe in the web over any particular platform. From Nokia’s standpoint if you’re building on the same technology that one of your major competitors is leading vs. working with someone who absolutely wants a web browser to succeed across all of Nokia’s platforms – which partner would you choose? I’ve often said “pick your partners carefully” and this has to be an important part of any technology decision making process.

There’s also another interesting flip side to this: who is WebKit’s other major competitor? Apple itself. Just like Microsoft’s push to get Silverlight out in the world, Apple wants people to write apps to their native platform. In this case, the iPhone. Given the strategic value of the native platform as part of Apple’s offerings, their investment in WebKit will (or at least should) always lag behind. We’re investing everything we have in the web and our platform and it’s starting to pay dividends.

And since I have your attention here are two other very interesting checkins: GTK+ and directfb (which people are actually building products on) and worker threads (ala Gears.)

Look at our current (and planned) platform support: win32, windows mobile, win32 + qt, mac OSX, linux + gtk2, linux + qt, qt embedded, linux + gtk2-directfb, x86, ppc, arm. We’re bringing the web to everyone and we’re doing it with a single coherent project with regular releases. That’s what I mean when I say “for everyone everwhere.” The web is bigger than any platform and we’re the embodiment of that mantra.

Mozilla is moving. It’s fast and furious now. And I think we’re just getting started.

[ Update: It was pointed out to me that what I wrote above might be misinterpreted as announcing that Nokia had picked a platform or something similar. Just to be clear that wasn't what I was doing, and as far as I know they haven't. I don't have knowledge about that decision inside of Nokia. Only they know. I was just pointing out what a decision making process might look like and the importance of picking well-aligned partners. And the fact that we're running on more and more platforms these days which is cool as hell. ]

I was inspired by one of Gen’s posts and I thought it would be worth it to make a post that contains some links to some great Clay Shirky talks.

Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration at TED in 2005. Even though this was filmed back in 2005 (before everyone knew what flickr was) he’s clearly talking about Mozilla. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is. As Mozilla is an organization that is an open source project, non-profit corporation and volunteer driven organization all the same time I think that we have come to know as instinct what Clay is talking about here.

Clay Shirky on Love, Internet Style. A short but fun video about Love as a building material. It’s great. Watch it.

Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008. Clay talks about the Cognitive Surplus that exists in our modern society. It contains this fantastic one-liner: “Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink – dissipating thinking that otherwise might have built up and caused society to overheat.” I’m not sure if it’s the first mention of what has become a famous fact about the amount of person-time required to build wikipedia, but it’s certainly put into great context and is worth watching for this reason alone.

That perspective made me think about how I spent my time at home and is one of the reasons I stopped watching TV and instead created whoisi. I guess you can thank Clay for it. Or blame him. Up to you.

Clay Shirky talking about his new book: Here comes everybody. He talks about the revolution of the Internet, the building of two-way groups and group action. It’s another great talk.

Clay Shirky talking about brands and keeping things human. Lots of good thoughts here on brand and identity and the right way to think about product design and how people interact with your company.

(Feb 22nd, 2009) Clay Shirky talking about low cost coordination and group action.  Talking about releasing data vs. releasing apps on your own for others to consume, changes in labor patterns, experimentation and a pile of other stuff.