Random Thoughts Archive
These posts are all in this one category.
Last Friday I posted a link to download the ringtone from the movie Crank.
By Monday it was the first match on Google for crank ringtone and crank ring tone. The ringtone has is getting over 100 downloads/day since.
How did I manage to beat out the studios, the official movie site, and the thousands of ringtone sites to be the first match on Google, and how did it happen so quickly? I'll post all the fun details in an upcoming blog entry.
Part 1 - Community and Contacts
One of the important concepts of Web 2.0 is community. The problem is that there is no method to integrate all of the Web 2.0 communities we now belong to.
When I meet somebody I want to keep in contact with I need to add their contact info to most of the these systems:
- Outlook Contacts for email.
- MSN Instant Messenger for IM.
- GoogleTalk if they don't MSN IM.
- Skype if they don't use MSN or Gtalk (AIM is for kids!).
- LinkedIn for business contacts.
- Cell phone for calling on the go and knowing who's calling me.
- MySpace if I want to pretend to be hip.
- XBOX Live Friends List if the person is a gamer.
- Subscribe to their blog if they have a blog worth subscribing to.
- And if I wanted to do this right... add this person as a friend on TagWorld, Flappr, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Consumating, Friendster, Orkut, Yahoo 360, Tagworld, and a dozen others I'm forgetting or leaving off on purpose...
Web 2.0 was supposed to make my life better! Now I spend more time managing my friends and contacts than talking to them. Half the people in my Web 2.0 communities I no longer remember who they are or why I added them. The problem is that we have too many collections of contacts to manage and they communities are not working together.
The Web 3.0 Fix:
One community system to rule them all!
I envision a decentralized contact storage network for storing our contacts. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and small companies would all offer this as a free service. Use the one you trust the most, with the best UI, or run your own service, it doesn't matter.
For each contact we describe how we know that person [friend, co-worker, family, customer, school, common interests, met at conference, etc] and who can see them [just friends, just co-workers, everyone, nobody, etc].
You choose which services can see your contacts, and what types of contacts they can see. Maybe you don't want the people you MySpace just because they had a nice photo listed as business contacts on LinkedIn.
Some cool benefits:
- One place to add and store our contacts.
- When we get an email from somebody we don't recognize, our email programs will inform us how we know that person using information from LinkedIn, MySpace, or any of our others services.
- When joining a new service, instantly add contacts instead of manually finding them again.
- Services without communities could use this to add community features without more work for the users. For example, Amazon could show recommended books based on what your friends are buying.
Who is building this?
As far as I know, nobody is. If you know otherwise, let me know!
With all of the hype behind Web 2.0, my hope that people aren't thinking this is the answer, the end game, the best that we can do. This part one of a six-part series. I will describe problems with Web 2.0 and how they can be fixed. Look forward to radical new ideas, insider interviews, and heavy usage of bulleted lists.
- dylan
Wow, in 30 days I'll be 30 - on October 30th. I certainly don't feel that old.
The big party is October 29th. If you didn't get the evite let me know.
Speaking of birthdays - tomorrow is my brother Jared's birthday. He'll be 19. He's a freshman at my alma mater, University of Maryland. He's got a DABU blog too, but not much on it yet.
I haven't posted much lately because I've been doing a lot of working, reading, writing, and a little bit of traveling. I'm going to try to get back to regular posts once again.
I'm trying to help a friend who is a student teacher purchase an affordable computer. We decided to go with Dell because they have some great discounts.
I've built computers for the last 10 years and I'm overwhelmed with all the choices on Dell's "Desktops starting at $299!" web site.
What does it say about a novice trying to pick out a computer when somebody highly technical like me can't figure out what to get?
Some things wrong with their web site:
- Pop-in ads for the page I'm already on.
- Huge ads on the top and side for the page I'm already on and discounts that have nothing to do with what the offers I'm currently looking at.
- Too much fine print about rebates, credit cards, and discounts.
- Too much technical details such as processor FSB speed (800), RAM bus speed (400 MHz), hard drive RPM (7200), and model numbers of monitors (E193FP)
- Too many links to apply for a dell credit card - over 50 links on that one page!
What Dell needs to do to fix it:
- Offer three choices: Cheap, Good, and Powerful.
- Ask the users what's most important to them. Maybe they can only spend $600, and are willing to get smaller hard drive in order to get a larger monitor.
- Stop trying to up sell so hard. The $299 Dell Desktop has thousands of dollars in extra up sell, from high end monitors to software, services, and even USB thumb drives. Is somebody buying a $299 computer going to add a monitor that costs more than the machine? Are they going to add a $150 printer when there isn't even a picture of the printer to help them decide?
The offending page: http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/odg_special49?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
A friend from college and Microsoft is working for Microsoft Research at their Beijing Research facility.
He posted this the other day:
Things I should mention
In my neck of the woods...
- Taxi to work (25 min) $3
- Metro $0.60
- Meal for 2, mid-low restaurant: $4
- DVD $0.75
- Drink at nice lounge/bar/club: $3.75
- Local paper ~$0.06
Since my only source of income right now is about $15/day from the Google text ads, it makes me think....
Sorry, no link to his site - his blog isn't public.
Update:
Maybe this is why his blog is private (from Slashdot):
The Inquirer has the story that individual owners of websites and blogs must register with the government or face a shut-down. Apparently they will begin monitoring of all sites, both commercial and personal, beginning this month. Site owners have until the end of the month to register. The BBC has the story as well."
May 5th, 2005 is 05/05/05. There's probably a word for that.
Shouldn't something special happen today at 5:05?
I've gone a while without blogging. Part of it is that blogging has finally become mainstream. Blogging is in the news. It's joked about on the Daily Show. And my dad complains about my lack of new entries. All this means that blogging is no longer cutting edge, and therefore I'm not as interested in it anymore.
My next project?
I haven't decided yet. I've played around hacking some .net code on the Smartphone. It seems to have great untapped potential. And there's more money to be made than just selling ring tones.
I also have some ideas how to improve blogging. Just because I don't write doesn't mean I'm not reading. I'm reading 157 blogs now, via their RSS feeds, using intraVnews. I add a feed about once a week, and remove a stale one about once a month. I read about 1000 entries a day. Tonight it took me an hour, from midnight till 1am. It doesn't scale. The idea I have fixes this problem. I've submitted the concept to Microsoft Research in the hopes I will be able to share it at the Social Computing Symposium 2005.
Oh, and I'll still be blogging. Just maybe not every day.
Man time goes by too fast...
Tomorrow I'll be 29.
Chris and I will be hosting a Halloween/Birthday/Housewarming party. I've hosted these parties for the last couple years but this one is special since this time we actually own the house. In fact, we've spent most of this week fixing things up, buying new fixtures, installing Chris's projector and surround sound, and installed a chrome Fisher Patel Dishdrawer, which is a dishwasher but in much easier to use drawer form.
When you're a first-time homeowner, simple things like chrome dishwashers suddenly become exciting and cool. Or maybe I'm just refusing to be old.
I also need to give a shout out Scott Roth and Jessica Krenzel, both good friend who are also celebrating their birthdays tomorrow. Yup, a popular day for birthdays.
Item one:
Last year there was a recall of exploding frying pans. For some reason I found this funny.
"The pans can explode or separate when preheated, used on high heat or used for frying," the safety commission said in a statement.It explodes when you fry something in it.
Apparently "frying stuff" was not in the test plan for the frying pans.
Item two:
During the run-up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 Beta in December of last year, there was a list of five bugs that the release management team decided were so critical that they were going to slip the beta until those bugs got fixed.
The third bug on the list: Deer Hunter 4 won't run.
Deer Hunter has the power to stop a beta.
Source: Exploding frying pans and Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter.
Both of these I read on Raymond Chen's blog The Old New Thing. His blog is often fascinating and humorous as he explains the history behind seemingly strange and awkward decisions Microsoft (and others) has made that we now live with. Here are some classics:
- Why do you have to click the Start button to shut down?
- Why is the default 8-bit codepage called "ANSI"?
- Why is the line terminator CR+LF?
- Why isn't Fast User Switching enabled on domains?
- Why does the taskbar default to the bottom of the screen?
- The martial arts logon picture
- An insight into the Windows 95 startup sound
- What did the letters "NT" originally stand for?
- Why Daylight Savings Time is nonintuitive
- Why doesn't Windows have an "expert mode"?
"Scientists have performed successful teleportation on atoms for the first time," writes BBC News.
They can only do one atom at a time for now.
Hopefully they've seen The Fly and know the potential issues involved when simultaneously transporting multiple entities.
According to the article they are not doing this to forever change our gas-dependent transportation methods. They are doing this to make faster computers, probably so they can have a sweet machine for playing Half Life, which takes place at Black Mesa, the secret government research facility that specializes in teleporatation technologies.
A buddy at work that we'll call "Hays" had an interesting question:
An iPod cost about $300. It does music.
A Pocket PC cost about $300. It does music, movies, games, the web, instant messenger, email, and note taking, calendar, and almost anything else a basic PC can do.
Why buy a iPod when the Pocket PC is all that and more?
Obviously the Pocket PC can't store thousands of songs like the iPod, but many Pocket PC models have a memory card slot, or support bluetooth or WiFi. Transferring music is simple because it acts like an external hard drive in Windows. Windows Media Player 9 will also do music syncing.
Unlike the iPod, the playlist on a Pocket PC can be easily modified, songs can be erased, it has the ability to do recording, and voice commands. Plus there's no DRM to worry about when using a Pocket PC.
Hays had another question:
Why don't they put compact flash hard drives in Pocket PC's?
Hmm.... Anybody wanna help us out? I'm guessing most people don't use their Pocket PC's as MP3 players because they aren't marketed as such, so that much space over the 32 to 64 MB they already come with would be overkill.
Related links:
- MP3 Player Best Prices - from PlayerBlog.com
- Pocket PC Best Prices - from PocketPCThoughts.com
- PocketPC MP3 Player Roundup - Reviews of MP3 players for the Pocket PC.
- PocketMovies.net - movies re-sized for viewing on the Pocket PC.
- PocketGamer.org - Web site dedicated to games for the Pocket PC.
It seems to Hays that the Pocket PC is the MP3 Player of the future, today. Is it just a lack of good marketing preventing the Pocket PC from becoming a mainstream gadget like the iPod?
Jon Stewart (of Daily Show fame) returned to his alma mater, William & Mary, this past Sunday to deliver the commencement address for the class of 2004.
His commencement address is pretty funny. (Link goes to the full transcript.)
Here's quote:
I know there were some parents that were concerned about my speech here tonight, and I want to assure you that you will not hear any language that is not common at, say, a dock workers union meeting, or Tourrett’s convention, or profanity seminar. Rest assured.
I am honored to be here and to receive this honorary doctorate. When I think back to the people that have been in this position before me from Benjamin Franklin to Queen Noor of Jordan, I can’t help but wonder what has happened to this place. Seriously, it saddens me. As a person, I am honored to get it; as an alumnus, I have to say I believe we can do better. And I believe we should. But it has always been a dream of mine to receive a doctorate and to know that today, without putting in any effort, I will. It’s incredibly gratifying. Thank you. That’s very nice of you, I appreciate it.
I found this on NewYorkish.com.
I just got back from a flashlight hike in my backyard, which backs to an Arlington county park/forest. At first I didn't see anything particular. Just your normal spiders, inch worms, and other woodland insects. Then I bent down and looked under the leaves. And I saw them.... they were everywhere!
My backyard (and yours maybe too) in less than a few hours has become heavily populated with tenerals, the cicada form when they first come out of the ground after 17 wonderful years of digging tunnels and sucking on tree root sap. In their current form they are brown, wingless, and kinda ugly. After they have molted, they'll have wings, big red eyes, and are really ugly. Males become incredibly annoying horny noise makers and females become super-selective egg layers. They don't eat and they don't sleep. All they do is look for that special cicada to come their way. Then they do the nasty, lay a bazillion eggs, and die.
National Public Radio has a recipe for cicada tacos that looks great. I'm definitely going to fry up some of these things. Think about fine wine, cheese, rum, and other fine foods - anything that takes 17 years to mature must be good!
Saw this complaint sent to the FCC on foO's site:
The Oprah show described with graphic detail a sexual term known as "tossing salad." It was so offensive that my child's head literally exploded. Please ban free speech so this never happens again.
FoO also linked to an interesting article about the repercussions from the craziness at the FCC: Some CBS Affils Could Drop Live News, and the drastic changes that they've had to make "for fear of government penalty."
For instance, stations have deleted language from "Prime Suspect" on Masterpiece Theater (and been criticized for the deletions by viewers) and even had to consider whether to edit our a nude lithograph from Antiques Roadshow, even though the show had aired months before with no complaint
Ultra-violent movies like Braveheart can be shown practically unedited on broadcast television (only the two love scenes were cut down), but art of a nude woman is questionable.
Welcome to America, where violence makes big bucks and nudity is repulsive.