Here’s a great Blackberry tip from Mobilewhack– saved searches that you can can assign to a hotkey:

MobileWhack: Virtual Inboxes on BlackBerry

Much like Mozilla Thunderbird and the new Mail.app coming to a Mac near you in Tiger, you can perform saved searches on the BlackBerry too, giving you the ability to see a virtual folder that dynamically matches your search criteria.
From Messages click in the wheel and go to Search.

After you fill in your criteria for the search, pick Save from the menu, and assign a hotkey you want to use. Now, when you’re in Messages, you can instantly view a virtual inbox that shows you matching messages.

Scott Haug, a buddy of mine at Jobster, has entered the world of blogging with his first post to mockhaug.

Scott is the consummate developer and software designer. He’s a force to be reckoned with when it comes to open source frameworks and technologies. And he knows how to make funny noises with his hands.

Check out his blog, sure to be worth the read.

I’m proud to note that the Jobster pilot shipped today. I haven’t spoken too frequently about Jobster in this space, but in the list of “things that I care about” it ranks near the top.

At Jobster, I feel we are building a great team and doing work that means something, which (ironically enough) is to help people build great teams and find meaningful work. If you help someone find a better job, you give them a better life.

Intenet technologies can lead to a web of trust, but they can also generate a sea of spam and isolation. Unfortunately, job boards fall in the latter category. The recruiter, or the worthy candidate, has to contend with a flood of resume spam, making it impossible for good people to stand out. The jobs that would meaningful and personally relevant to you are impossible to find, the teams that you would like to work with are invisible.

At Jobster, we want to make the internet and technology a force for good, not evil, in the quest to help individuals and companies connect– to develop a working ecosystem and web of trust that benefits everyone involved.

By the way, when I refer to the internet, I mean the real, open internet, not a walled garden that jealously guards its borders. The combined wealth of interlinked information and communities in the internet will beat a walled garden every time.

I’ll post updates on Jobster’s progress to this space. It’s going to be a fun ride!

Alan Steele, whom we are proud to welcome to Jobster, has a good post on designing a title/level system for a sw org that doesn’t suck.

I think the Microsoft leveling scheme worked out pretty well. (I was a developer at Microsoft from 1994-2000.)

Most developers came in at D10 or D11, it meant something to become a D12, and if you were a D13 you were pretty hot stuff. Other positions like test and program management had a roughly comparable numbering scheme.

The point was, you could remain an individual contributor and visibly rise in experience ranking. There was reasonably good consensus on what each experience level meant.

The day Microsoft really jumped the shark was the day they renumbered their experience levels. The new system started around 62 for some reason and went up from there; there were many more levels so they could give less meaningful promotions more often. I never grew to love or understand the new system, but to this day I can pretty clearly look at someone and say “she’s a D12″ or “he’s a D11″.

Is Google vulnerable in the search platform war? Could they lose the battle because of both technical and business model failings?

Note that I’m not knocking Google as a general purpose search service– it’s great for that. But it’s not a great platform for third parties to use for building extended search services.

There are number of interesting services built on top of the Amazon API, but fairly few significant efforts (except for a9 itself) built on top of Google. I see limitations in both the Google API and their business model that explain these different outcomes.

First, the technical failings: Limitations in the API make it difficult to build a service on top of Google that is either richer or more targeted than Google. Google has already filled the niche for simple, clean UI, so there’s no room to add value there (as Amazon Lite does for Amazon.)

Suppose you have compiled a list of the 20 best sources of reviews on the web, and you want to leverage Google’s full text index to search these. This isn’t possible to do, because Google allows only a single “site:” specified in a query.

Suppose you have structured data about people and their home pages, and you want to build a search joins your data with Google’s unstructured index. Sorry, not possible.

Suppose you want to deliver more targeted advertisements to a specific subset of the Google audience who comes to your site? Again, very difficult.

Second, the business model failings: when you use the Google API to get search results, you strip out all the value of the adwords model– the Google API doesn’t even expose advertisements, or have a meaningful revenue sharing model. This makes the Google API ideal for building toys that get 1000 hits a day, but bad for building meaningful commercial services.

When Amazon returns data about their books, this helps sell books through Amazon. The API supports itself. Because Google doesn’t allow advertisers to pay for search rankings, it needs to figure out an alternate way to extract value from the API.

It’s conceivable that a pay-for-placement search engine (MSN? Yahoo?) might choose to drag race Google in the search engine platform war. Unlike Google, they would have incentives for allowing as many sites as possible to build on top of their API. Given stronger incentives, and the existing weaknesses of the Google API, they just might win.

Microsoft won the PC war by building a platform and getting smart third parties to buy into it. If I were them, I would make that my strategy relative to Google.

If I were Google, I would figure out clever revenue models for a search API and work to develop a commanding lead as a search platform. They could easily do this, assuming they don’t take their off the ball with all their various initiatives.

I’ve found that Wikipedia content works well with the Blackberry, so I’ve added Wikipedia integration to Berry411.

At the top of the Google results page, there is a link to find the search text on Wikipedia. And by typing “wk word” and doing a Google search, you can look up the Wikipedia entry for word directly.