Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category

Twittering to doom?

Friday, April 20th, 2007

Annalee recently posted relating Twitter to an article on how “life pace” increases exponentially with population growth. Most articles on Twitter fail because they attempt to cram it into a known space. Twitter became a roaring success because of its amorphous nature. Even Evan didn’t know what it was in the beginning with most of his posts sounding like “we built this thing, we don’t know what to do with it”.

The big punch was SXSW where it became the Dodgeball replacement (not that DB was being used outside of the bay). Twitter kept its ground through its ease of use; you could post via web, IM, or TXT. It didn’t define itself as a service solely for broadcasting location either. As people left SXSW, they switched to using Twitter for microblogging. Some people embraced Twitter because it lacked the permanence of actual blogging. Annalee’s article is crippled by its geographical awareness. Twitter doesn’t care whether you’re in a city or rural, whether you have internet access or cellphone access, or even if you’re posting your current task or your location. As the world flattens, relating online movements to physical world problems is just going to become even more ridiculous. I don’t think Twitter is taking us to some singularity pace that will eventually cause our demise (i.e. burnout). It’s created a new disposable outlet of expression that will hopefully reduce the number of “I got up and had a piece of toast” entries on regular blogs while increasing the number of people talking in our industry.

Find the content

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

content
Just an example of some of the rampant ugly design out there. I’ve marked the actual content in red. How could anyone think a paragraph in the shape of a backwards L is readable.

MySpace conditioning

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

myspace reward
This is for the people that don’t use MySpace: Every time you send a site mail message on MySpace you’re rewarded with a giant 430×600 True ad featuring a sexy model. I can’t think of a better way to encourage people to send more messages and view more ads.

Apple iPhone

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

iphoneYes, I’m posting about the Apple iPhone just like everyone else today. Engadget has more pictures like the one above. I am excited, but there is at least one thing I want cleared up: They say it runs OSX, but I want to know if it truly is running their BSD based system on an x86 or if it’s just using similar looking applications. Killer app for me would be sharing the EDGE connection over WiFi and other fun *nix stuff like SSH.

I’m on 25 peeps

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

Not really sure what that means but I enjoy stripped down sites like this: 25peeps.com.

Domains OMG!

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

null
I was pitching an IM related web service idea to CK today. The nice thing about web services is that instead of brainstorming and fleshing out details you can jump directly to the stupid entertainment that is picking out a domain name. Since it’s IM, CK jokingly suggested LOLOMGWTF.com. That domain is in use and made me wonder how many other iterations were in use.

  • OMGWTFLOL.com blog or something
  • LOLOMGWTF.com open directory
  • LOLWTFOMG.com Tom Seizmore sex tape
  • WTFOMGLOL.com domain ad page
  • OMGLOLWTF.com points to real sites
  • OMGWTF.com domain ad page
  • OMGLOL.com blog
  • WTFLOL.com server not found
  • WTFOMG.com domain ad page
  • LOLWTF.com domain ad page
  • LOLOMG.com domain ad page

WTFLOLOMG.com wasn’t registered; well it wasn’t before I bought it. (get the order right: first you swear, then you laugh, then you sin) For completeness sake: OMGWTFBBQ.com.

Link blog

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

I’ve wanted to start a link blog for a while now. I’m reading nearly 200 feeds and even when I wrote at Hack-A-Day I almost never used anything I read. I just read to keep us from duplicating someone else… maintaining the freshness. I use Bloglines to read so I was thinking about using their blogging tools to publish a feed I could then use in my sidebar.

First step was widgetizing my sidebar. It’s a simple process (well, if you’re using the default theme like me). Once that’s done you can drag and drop widgets that you want to appear in your sidebar. I tried using the RSS widget only to find my host uses an old version of PHP (we’re talking vulns from 2002, but hey, $36 a year ain’t bad). Doesn’t really matter because I found out the Bloglines blog feeds would not be fun for the user. I found the widget Sideblog which lets you publish categories in the sidebar. I changed the name of the default category to “Links” and published that since none of my normal posts are ever left in that category. Now when reading articles I can use the WordPress bookmarklet to publish directly to the link blog.

The posts show up in the regular site feed with everything else. I may eventually write two separate feeds for the site, depending on how much I want to know about PHP.

Have a look in the sidebar for frequently updated links and enjoy!

Exit plan #1

Thursday, November 23rd, 2006


A friend of mine is thinking about moving to Denver so I was kind of brainstorming a good excuse to move there. Maybe it was the upcoming trip (I’m in San Diego now) that made me think of it, but here’s the plan: open a strip club either near or in Denver International Airport. Denver has horrid weather and is a massive hub. So every time they shutdown you’d have a captive audience. Best of all, the naming is obvious: The Layover.

[Update: AirStrip might be an even better name.]

Screenhead

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

screenhead
Gawker has apparently trashed Screenhead‘s old “cool web shit” format and replaced it with an “online review of movies, TV series, DVDs, commercials” shit format. Seriously, who came up with this crap post about the The Covenant? These shills are excited about a movie who’s trailer’s scariest element is that it makes you want to beat your own skull in with a shovel. I’m sure they’ll get around to changing the masthead once they fix all of the broken internal links.

SIGGRAPH

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006

exhibit hallI wanted to get this story posted because I keep forgetting it: So, the male/female bathrooms at the Boston Convention Center have shared entrances. Whether the male bathroom is on the right or left isn’t consistant throughout the hall (stupid). I didn’t know this at the time though. I was more perplexed that I seemed to have found some magical bathroom that had no urinals…

Check out my SIGGRAPH posts on Netscape. Oh, and I ate supper with Jimmy Wales and Gil Penchina (CEO of Wikia and former eBay VP), which was pretty cool (I’m sure there were some other VIPs there I haven’t realized yet).