12.18.08
Posted in General Rant at 9:10 am by Administrator
NEW FEATURE: Microblog entries. This is when something is just so stupid or insane, I must comment on it IMMEDIATELY. I’ll label them as such, so you don’t have to read them if you’re not interested. Here’s the first one:
12 Second TV! Are you kidding me? Has the whole world just gone to hell in a handbasket? I mean – are we going to all be reduced to a 140 character and 12 SECOND attention span?
According to TechCrunch – the site 12seconds.tv is coming out of beta – AND has a new iPhone application. This app will allow you to put 3 photos and – yep – 12 seconds of audio together and post it on their site. Ouch! I already have twitter feeds, yammer feeds, and social media to deal with – and NOW someone gets the great idea to have Twitter – but with video? Seesh… it’s a sad, sad day, people.
DO SOME WORK! Spend some MONEY! Stimulate the economy! Quit watching 12 second ANYTHING.
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Posted in General Rant at 5:36 am by Administrator
My social media experiment these past couple of months has been… interesting to say the least. Like most social newbies who finally figure out what Twitter is – I was posting about 10 times per day. Yes, I was “that guy” – who told my 4 followers all the inane details of the boring crap I was doing everyday.
I was checking Twitter incessantly – and adding people that I was “following” like it was no tomorrow. I would hit “refresh” multiple times per day – and read all the posts from all the people I subscribed to. I would tweet from my iPhone, from my browser, from a friend’s computer… I sounded like a damnMinah bird – tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet!
Then I got a life.
As I cut down on the number of times per day that I would tweet and would read the posts on Twitter, I noticed something interesting things:
- I actually got more work done
- People don’t really care what I had for lunch
- Some people “spam” Twitter like a 5 year old with 100+ tweets per day (I’ve stopped “following” those people)
- I look forward to the tweets with funny, observant or useful information
- Only about 20 of the 50+ people I “follow” have anything interesting to say
These observations have lead me to be a better Twitter citizen. I now post only stuff that I think other people might be interested in, or might find useful. I’ve pared down my “following” list to just over 50 people that I actually want to hear from (mainly geeks).
I decided that if I wanted to indulge the “eating ham sandwich” side of me – that I should either set up a separate account for “blather” – or just do like everyone else and post that stuff on myFacebook page.
Then, just as I had completed the Twitter 12 step program, my wife suggests that we try using Yammer – a Twitter rip-off that is meant just for people inside of a specific company (people can only join yammer if they have the same email extension – e.g. @mycompany.com).
Well, Hallelujah! Within the first 24 hours most of the company was on Yammer and were… well… Yammering away. This time, though, no one put what they were eating for lunch. They said what they were working on, what projects where coming online, what interesting sales prospects were saying, comments and suggestions from customers… you know, real “work” stuff.
It’s still in the experimental stage, but the results are pretty cool. We have employees in 6 timezones all over the world – and it’s cool to be able to get a sense of what they’re working on. I’m not sure how to explain it… but it’s easier than sending an email, it’s less intrusive thanIM, and it’s fast. The best part is – if no one want to read it (or respond to it), then it’s up to them.
If you don’t respond to an email or IM, then you’re rude and sometimes will cause more than hurt feelings. But if you don’t respond to a tweet or yamm (?) – then it’s no big deal. You’re broadcasting you status – hoping to be helpful, or to give people an idea of what you’re working on. You can also ask for feedback, have people check out a link, spread the word about a new success story. It’s like a living, Internal newsletter.
Well, with all this social media (special thanks here to Brenda Christensen for keeping the social media banner flying for Servoy!) – my wife (the “other” Brenda) came to me with another suggestion for a useful, online tool that would track what people were saying about any topic. It was basically a free service that would search some sites for any keyword you entered, and show you results on what was being blogged, twittered, etc.
Now I already have a Goggle Alert set up for some key terms – and that works great. But it’s limited to what the mighty Google indexes – and not the rest of the world. The site that Brenda suggested – yacktrack – will show you the results of your keyword search across several sites (including Friendfeed, Technorati, Twitter, Google blog search, etc.). It’s a pretty interesting service (free for now). The results are interesting – although if you are looking at the blog results, there’s no link provided to the actual blog.
I found that the source of the search Google Blog Search – was much more efficient. But, it’s nice to have a single service where you can enter a term, and get an overall feel for what the talk is on a topic, then if you’re interested, you can always drill down to the actual search engines and get your “hands dirty”.
Whew! Now I can finally Tweet-Facebook-LinkedIn-Plurk-Yammer about this entry!
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12.17.08
Posted in General Rant at 5:25 am by Administrator
So the wife and I were watching a show that was recorded on our DVR (nothing fancy – just the default Motorola default box) – and we ran into a problem. We were about 20 minutes into a 2 hour show – trying to fast forward through the commercials – when the show just jumped to the end.
Well, since she had the remote – my deduction was simple: “You must have pressed the wrong button”, was my immediate diagnosis. So, she tried again with the same result.
Now, everybody KNOWS that men are the superior species when it comes to working a remote control – so I smugly held out my hand for her to “hand it over, woman!” (silently, to myself of course). The remote to men is like having a second skin. My fingers just instinctively knew where to go – and so I restarted the show, forwarded about 20 minutes in, and then expertly hit the fast forward button… and… it did the same damn thing.
“You must have pressed the wrong button” came the smug reply. DOH! I hate when that happens.
After about 15 minutes of monkeying around and neither of us getting it to work – we were forced to, gulp!, watch the show in REAL TIME. Oh, the horror! We had to sit through all the commercials and the 2 hour show actually took 2 hours to watch.
We’ve only had a DVR for about 3 years or so, and my expectation is that the thing would work flawlessly every single time. Our “old” DVR (MOXI – also based on Moto hardware) had a button on the remote that would let you skip 30 seconds forward at a time – a perfect way to “zap” the commercials. It also included a very, very nice GUI that was easy, intuitive and looked nice. However, after about a year that model just “died.” So I went to get a replacement at the cable company.
Our “new, upgraded” model (”Twice the capacity!” and “HD recording!”) – promptly took the single-click commercial-zapper feature away and forced us to fast forward through the commercials (I guess the network advertisers were pissed at the previous functionality).
The new GUI was designed by someone who had obviously never used it to actually try to record something. It was (IS!) an absolute abomination in terms of look and feel andusability . It took us about a month to get adjusted to the new GUI and the new 15,000 button remote (again, designed by someone with absolutely ZERO clue on how people actually USE it to watch TV).
That got me thinking about how my expectations have changed about devices I use everyday – and it raises my expectation on how things “should work.”
Another example is my phone. Now that I have an iPhone 3G – my expectation of what a phone “should” be able to do are forever altered. I can never go back to a non touchscreen device, nor a device that doesn’t have games, music and a full Internet browser on it. I just “can’t” do it.
My expectation when I first bought the phone was that I would occasionally use the browser, and probably listen to a few tunes now and then and maybe, just maybe install a few games or other “useless” applications that came along.
Wrong. I have 4 full screens of crap that I actually use all the time. Stock quotes, weather, movie times, 3 or 4 games, social media updating apps – I use all of them all the time. My expectations of what a phone “should do” are now permanently changed.
Same thing with the software I use. Before I started using Servoy – I was writing browser-based applications in ASP or JSP or ColdFusion or Lasso. That meant code. LOTS of code. Code for database connections. Code for business rules. Code for SQL. Code for parsing data that came back to the database. Code to update data. Code to delete data.
All of this was way before things like AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) – and the Web 2.0 functionality (where the whole browser pages doesn’t reload – just the parts you change or update). If I had to code that stuff now – there would still be all the other legacy stuff to code – plus a whole new layer of other stuff to code (the AJAX stuff).
With Servoy, I can simply drag fields to forms, write simple scripts (called “methods” in Servoy) to change field color, or perform a calculation or whatever, and then I can simply open a browser and all that stuff “just works” for me – exactly the way I designed it.
If there is a bug (and there will be – for 100% sure!) – rather than getting a cryptic “Error at line 33″ browser message that isn’t helpful at all – I can now even fully debug the browser based application – complete with breakpoints, variable watching, etc. All the stuff I would expect only when writing and debugging code for a native (non browser-based) application.
Just for grins – I downloaded a sample AJAX application from the Internet – a simple app that included basic CRUD functionality (CReate Update Delete). It had 4 HTML pages and had about 550 lines of code. I was able to re-create BETTER functionality in Servoy with 6 lines of code and ZERO HTML pages. It took me about 9 minutes to complete.
Not only will I never go back to the “old” way of creating browser-based applications – who knows where the technology will go from here. What’s the next new thing? What else will poor application programmers have to learn in order to get rich, full-featured applications out the door? AND, more importantly, what will that do to all the applications they’ve already built the “hard” way?
*Shutter*
At least I’ll never have to worry about it…
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12.15.08
Posted in General Rant at 2:19 pm by Administrator
It used to be that I subscribed to and (mainly) read about 15 monthly periodicals – mainly business and computer stuff – but some others as well. While I still get some “hard copy” magazines – I find that I get most of my news from online sources.
I won’t wax nostalgic about how I love the feel of the magazine rather than a cold screen, or the fact that I like to keep 1,000 old copies of all these magazines in the bathroom, etc.
Both types of media have their benefits. The paper ones are good to take on the road, or curl up with on a rainy day. The digital versions contain more details, are more up-to-date and can contain links to other relevant data.
There are downsides to both types of media as well. On the printed media side: Wastes paper, there are increasingly more ads than editorial pages, it’scostiler for the publisher to produce and mail, it’s outdated the minute it’s printed because of the long lead times required for the production process.
On the digital media side… well, there’s not many. Now that I have an iPhone, I can browse almost anything almost anywhere – and a lot of sites now have content that’s specifically formatted for mobile devices. The one thing that is really, really, really annoying about these digital versions of the pubs I surf on a regular basis is that they’ve become nothing more than an advertising delivery vehicle.
Every site from eWEEK to Inc to FastCompany to ComputerWorld to MacWorld… all of ‘em are so choked full of ads that it’s nearly impossible to read the content. Almost all the sites will take really a really nice piece of editorial and chop it up into 12 bite-sized pieces that force you to click through page after page – for the sole purpose of refreshing the ads on the page in hopes you’ll click and they’ll get $0.15. Or, if they are getting paid per impressions – they serve up the most ad impressions possible – to the extent that 75% of the entire space is dedicated to flashing,whirrling, popping up ads.
I, for one am just sick to death of it.
But, I have a secret weapon. It’s a little, tiny link that’s usually tucked away at the bottom of the page – or for braver sites – right under the headline. It’s called “Print”.
Yep – print. That’s my secret weapon.
Now before I get a load of email from the tree-hugging-Prius-driving-Berkenstock-hemp-wearing of you out there – I don’t actually print the stuff on paper. You see, when you hit the “print” button - each site will re-format the article you’re looking at into a “basic” format that doesn’t have 1,000 ads on it. It will usually have one ad at the top – but other than that – the article appears the way it would in a “normal” magazine.
You can then easily read it, see the illustrations, click on links, etc. in a much more readable form.
I get the fact that these “old school” media companies are making money the only way they know how (advertising) – but I wonder if they actually even read their own sites?
First there were news “portal” sites. Yahoo especially comes to mind – where you would go to get an update on what was happening in the world. Then the newspapers and magazines came online – and they also had their own spin on the world and dozens of “new” stories every day.
Next, came the bloggers. The good, bad and just plain bitchy ones. Pretty soon you needed to get an RSS reader just to keep up on all the articles, news items and new blog entries that came out 24/7. As the number of content sites kept increasing – it has come to the place where it’s almost too much content.
Now you have the Social Media revolution. In the world of Social Media – people you know (or at least people you follow) alert you in 140-character bytes, write on your “wall” or “poke” you to alert you to what they are reading and finding interesting.
The large-player media companies are starting to get “lost”. All their content is also content that is picked up, chewed, further analyzed and regurgitated bybloggers all over the world – sometimes with much better results than some of the clap trap coming from “big media.”
Then there’s the issue of physical newspapers and magazines shutting down completely. There have been a number just this year. All of those “real” reporters who have years of experience and have established a “name” for themselves – have, for the most part, quit or been fired.
What do you do if you’re an out-of-work reporter? Yep – you start a blog – and keep on reporting. That means that now these big media companies are competing with the people that used to work for them. The people that don’t have a lot (or any) advertising on their site – and who focus on just one thing: a good, informative, timely story on stuff people want to read.
And that, at the end of the day is all that matters.
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12.11.08
Posted in General Rant at 10:59 am by Administrator
In the “true spirit of Christmas” – I just wanted to take a couple of minutes and sincerely THANK (yes, thank) Microsoft for all it’s done for me this year:
THANK YOU for making an operating system with more holes in it than Swiss Cheese;
THANK YOU for installing numerous patches without my permission and then force-quitting all my running applications while you performed a restart without asking – and then greet me with a “Updated!” bubble once I finally get signed back on;
THANK YOU for doing the above forced restart overnight – while I was backing up to an external drive;
THANK YOU for hosing my presentation during said restart – about 1 hour before I was scheduled to give it to a worldwide audience;
THANK YOU for not having a single iota of creative, innovative thought in your entire company – but rather just copying whatever everyone else is doing (i.e.Silverlight = Flash, Aero look and feel = Mac, Excel = Lotus 123, etc. etc.);
THANK YOU for coming out with an even MORE bloated and completely useless operating system that requires users to upgrade HARDWARE to even run it;
THANK YOU for popping up 1,000 dialogs asking me if “I’m sure” I want to launch a program, send an email or anything else that might, possibly involve anything a real person would do during the day;
THANK YOU for .NET 3.x – it truly is 100% incompatible with 1.1 and 2.x;
THANK YOU for trying to get into every sector of every marketplace ever conceived of – and mucking it up so badly – that other companies can actually compete in the space (i.e.MSNBC, Zune, etc.);
THANK YOU for the promise of even more bloatware in the coming Windows 7 – and for the complete breaking of the naming conventions you’ve used for all other OS releases -that’ll make it even MORE confusing for my family and in-laws when they all ask if they should upgrade;
THANK YOU for increasing the stock price of 3M making sure that older people and non-technical folks cram their monitors with stickies on it with step-by-step instructions for changing the audio or monitor settings (or any other settings for that matter);
THANK YOU for waging battle against open source and for making sure all your software only works well on Windows – it’s helped me to learn other software and operating systems that I would have never tried on my own;
THANK YOU, Microsoft for all you do to make life (between restarts and patch upgrades) marginally tolerable.
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12.04.08
Posted in General Rant at 6:04 am by Administrator
My entry into the social media realm has been very interesting – to say the least. I’ve stayed mainly with the mainstream services: FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pownce (shutting down Dec 15th), Jabber, etc.
I’ve even been able to amass some “friends” on each of the services. I’ve been pretty careful about who I will add as a connection in each of them – but I was reading an article by Mike Elgan from ComputerWorld the other day that really gave me pause.
He was talking about the fact that it’s possible for scammers, theives and other miscreants to “hijack” the identities of people you may really know – and pose as them – in order to gain your confidence for an a scam attack at some point in the future.
He points out some really interesting points: in the social media world we will trust another person who we (think) we know as a “friend.” Now that person can see all of our other friends and their profiles. But what I never really stopped to think about was just how easy it would be to steal someone’s identity and pose as that person.
Mr. Elgan calls it “How to steal friends and influence people”:
Step 1: Request to be “friends” with a dozen strangers on MySpace. Let’s say half of them accept. Collect a list of all their friends.
Step 2: Go to Facebook and search for those six people. Let’s say you find four of them also on Facebook. Request to be their friends on Facebook. All accept because you’re already an established friend.
Step 3: Now compare the MySpace friends against the Facebook friends. Generate a list of people that are on MySpace but are not on Facebook. Grab the photos and profile data on those people from MySpace and use it to create false but convincing profiles on Facebook. Send “friend” requests to your victims on Facebook.
As a bonus, others who are friends of both your victims and your fake self will contact you to be friends and, of course, you’ll accept. In fact, Facebook itself will suggest you as a friend to those people.
Yikes! Just think about that for a minute. Someone out there could be on another social media site right now using your name, your photo and your profile to lure people into a scam, or worse. Now, the bad news is – the damage may already be done.
As a precaution, I would suggest that people who are “into” the social media scene (and who isn’t these days?) – check out some of the other social media sites by searching for yourself. If you find a fake that’s on there – you owe it to yourself to report it to the appropriate service and get the “bad” profile removed.
I’ve never had to deal with this personally (thank goodness) – so I’m not sure what the policy would be. Do you get to keep the profile up there – but you just take over the username/password? What happens when you want to join that same network after the offending profile as been removed? Can you even keep your same name (your real name) – or will it be blacklisted?
GREAT! Just one more thing to be paranoid about…
If any of you out there have experience with this – or know of someone who does – be sure to leave a comment.
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12.03.08
Posted in General Rant at 5:04 pm by Administrator
“Things always seem to get worse before they get better.” If that quote holds any truth – then we’re about to see things get worse.
The early indications – besides the Wall Street seesaw, the housing meltdown, weak “Black Friday” and the credit crunch – are starting to make themselves known. In the tech world – when social networking sites start closing (and/or get acquired) it’s sort of the canary in the coal mine biting the dust.
This week a couple of sites announced that they were going into the deadpool – Pownce (co-founded by Digg’s Kevin Rose) and Twing announced they were shutting down. This comes on heels of the death of other sites over the past 4 months – sites that were fairly well funded and had some “good press.” Some of them were even founded by very successful entrepreneurs. Here’s a small sampling:
- Eyespot ($3.7 million in Oct 06)
- Uber ($7.6 million in funding – May 2008 – cofounded by former Friendster CEO and NBC West Coast president Scott Sassa)
- Wallop (from Microsoft’s Research Team)
- Fleck (€225k – based in Netherlands)
- Social.FM ($5 million in funding)
- TripHub ($15 million, founded by Josh Herst, an early member of the Microsoft Expedia team)
- MatchMine ($10.5 million, founded by Mike Troiano, CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Interactive and Brandscape)
- Akimbo ($56 million, investors including AT&T and Cisco)
- Capazoo ($12 million)
- etc, etc, etc.
My prediction is that we’ll see a lot more of these bubble-2.0-social-media-with-no-business-plan company hitting the skids this month and on into the middle of 2009. I mean, didn’t ANY of these people learn ANYTHING from the first bubble?
TIP #1: Eyeballs do not necessarily equal money.
TIP #2: You need money to stay in business.
TIP #3: Just by having a screwed up name that no one can pronounce doesn’t mean you’ll get money.
TIP #4: See tip #2
Speaking of folks that may have had too much Turkey – the good folks over at Twitter have turned down a $500 million (mostly stock) offer fromFacebook.
Um…. yeah. Half a billion dollars for a site with zero business model – and a huge cost structure. Good plan! I know, I know you’re “…working on amonetization plan for the middle of 2009…”. Good luck with that.
Again, see tip #2…
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