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Why Google Chrome Isn't My Default Browser

engtech — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:56:03 +0000

Google Chrome has been public for all of about 30 minutes now. I am very impressed with how fast it downloads and installs, with almost no need for user prompts (except to close your web browser so it can import bookmarks/passwords). It’s fast as fast can be.

I can’t get over how fast it is. If you type “about:memory” into the address/search bar you’ll see a memory comparison between Chrome and any other web browsers you’re currently running. It uses so much less memory than Firefox.

Lifehacker has a good round-up of what’s “new” in Chrome, as well as ways to tweak Firefox to get the same features. But I can’t switch to Chrome because of my dependency on multiple profiles and my Firefox extensions.

Profiles?

Multiple profiles let me log into Gmail with different user accounts at the same time, and keep my browsing history and bookmarks separate from my girlfriend who shares the computer with me.

Heck, I keep my blogging related bookmarks separated from my Joe Public bookmarks for my day-to-day email, Facebook, and job related stuff so I can be more productive.

Plugins?

I can’t log into my accounts without Password Hasher. Not only do I not use the same password for every account, I don’t even KNOW my password for most accounts.
I don’t want to surf the web without Ad-block.
I’ve written so many custom Greasemonkey scripts that are unavailable on Chrome.
I don’t want to even think about doing any kind of web stuff without Firebug at my beck and call.
I’m missing my Delicious tag button for bookmarking.

RSS?

There doesn’t seem to be any RSS auto-discovery in Chrome. I hate how painful it is to subscribe to feeds in Google Reader using Internet Explorer, it looks like it’ll be even worse in Chrome.

Chrome looks very cool, but I think anyone who has been reading Lifehacker for the past few years is going to find they’re missing too much of what is “essential” to them. It’s really too bad, because I’d love to run some Greasemonkey scripts inside of Chrome with it’s better memory debugging. I’m hoping that one of the big brained Googlers figures out a way to transparently run Greasemonkey userscripts so we don’t have the same Firefox vs Opera vs Internet Explorer vs Safari development sinkhole.

On the other hand, Chrome might be the best thing ever for people who use Internet Explorer and aren’t co-dependent on all of Firefox’s wonderful extensions.

To Jott or Not To Jott

engtech — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:34:02 +0000

In my efforts to actually get off my ass and get things done, the Remember the Milk (RTM) to-do list software has been a life saver. Two weeks ago I decided to try out a bunch of 3rd party extensions to RTM like Jott.

Jott is a speech to text service. You call up a phone number, say something, and what you say will be emailed back to you (along with the voice message), send to a contact, or send to another service like Twitter or Remember the Milk.

My first experience testing the RTM integration blew my mind. I could call the number and say “job interview tomorrow at 9am” and it would show up in my Remember the Milk todo list as “job interview” with the due date set as tomorrow at 9am.

!!!

But all good things must come to an end, and after less than a week of trying out the free service (that admittedly, had been around for over a year before I tried it) Jott switched to a pay service. You can still record 15 second voice mails for free, but to get the Remember the Milk intergration will cost $4 a month (well, $3 a month if you were using the service while it was in beta).

Is it worth $40 to $50 a year worth it to be able to Jott my to-do list to Remember the Milk?

Judging by the way my girlfriend rolls her eyes every time I try to Jott something, the answer is no. When you add to the fact that I’m likely paying airtime fees when I Jott from my cellphone [1], then we’re talking around $150 a year for a service that isn’t even my main to-do list application.

It might be my cellphones fault, but often Jott would have trouble understanding me. Having to prefix my messages with “me” or “remember the milk” gets old fast when I have to say “remember the milk” five times before I can start recording. Why can we set up a speed dial hotkey for services so we can hit a number instead of saying a name?

One of my non-tech friends summed it up well when I tried to explain Jott to him over breakfast: “isn’t that something you can just do with an app running on your cellphone?” Yeah, or with a pen and a piece of paper.

Social Media -- What is it Good For?

engtech — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 03:00:57 +0000

I took a three month break from blogging and social media sites so that I could focus 100% on a critical project at work. Strangely enough I didn’t miss the flow of information; I was still able to find interesting links for coffee break time by browing Hackers News. Here’s a break down of my experience from leaving for so long and rejoining it.

Blog

Blog traffic went down -26% (vs -12% for the previous period).

Feed subscriptions up 9% (vs 12% for the previous period).

My blog email address is inundated with press releases and the very occassional question about an old post or tool.

My blog comments are a horrible nightmare of spam that I still have yet to wade through. WordPress has an annoying bug that when you click “Mark As Spam” it always returns you to the start. There’s been 20 pages of comments. It’s likely that most are spam.

It makes me wonder how much time a day I was spending on blog maintenance. The time sink in blogging isn’t writing posts; it’s all the related activities.

News

Surprisingly, I didn’t miss out on much by not having my lips attached to the news firehouse. Some crazy PM is trying to put me in jail with a new Canadian copyright bill that someone needs to question him about how it benefits his constituents. The iPhone is finally available in Canada, and the data plan is almost-but-not-quite liveable. Facebook has a redesign in the works. Xbox has some cool ideas for release next fall.

I’m sure there were plenty of things happening that I could have gotten worked up about, but nothing happened that directly affects my life that I would have found out about on the Internet.

I’ve had a strict policy of only using LinkedIn for people I’ve actually worked/went to university with, and it’s been a good tool for contacting ex-coworkers years later about new job opportunities. Spam free.

Facebook

I try to keep Facebook to “real life people only”, and that works well for me. I only use it for group emails, and for photo sharing. Spam free once you get rid of those people who invite you to use applications.

Google Reader

I’m oversubscribed still. When you check your RSS feeds once a month, it becomes much more about the people who consistently keep you thinking or providing good information. Of course, information is only useful if it has impact on your life.

We, the information overloaded, collect new information but I wonder how much of it is retained and has lasting impacting on our lives?

Twitter

I didn’t feel any pain of Twitter downtime because I didn’t log into it. I need to cull my friendslist to make it more useful. But I found Kathy Sierra on twitter and if that’s the real thing then it’s a good sign for twitter having the potential for making me think vs phasing it completely out of my life because of the constant self-promotion.

I still like twitter for chatting with other bloggers that I respect.

Friend Feed

Still not sure if I like rooms or not. The Friend Feed hacking community is kicking even harder lately with a ton of new greasemonkey scripts thanks to Hao Chen. It looks like Lou Cypher is getting involved in Friend Feed as well which means even more cool little hacks.

Nothing new has been happening with ffapps or friendfeedwatch though.

Delicious

It might be time for me to abandon delicious for something new to use for bookmarking. The future does not look peachy for delicious with Josh leaving Yahoo. Maybe it’s time to look at Google Reader shares as an alternative.

Last.FM

I’m still using it, still finding great music because of it. I do like The Filter for making lastfm-esque playlists of my own music collection.

Real Life

I’ve been enjoying the summer and having more time for family, friends and non-Internet hobbies like reading, movies, and games. I really appreciate the knowledge I’ve built up with the programming I’ve done. I plan to continue that in that direction: releasing useful free software and delving into creating my own web apps. I want to spend less time participating and more time creating.

Lifestreaming 101 - Don't Cross the Streams

engtech — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:02:40 +0000

History has a tendency to repeat itself, mostly because the inventors weren’t old enough to have been around the first time. Having a blog is the same as having a BBS twenty years earlier; using Twitter is the same as using IRC. Of course there are differences [1], but progress is built on the shoulders of giants.

Like how 2007 was the year of microblogging, 2008 is the year of lifestreaming. People are becoming more comfortable with the idea after learning to swim in Facebook’s pond [2], and they’re ready to start swimming into the raging rivers of the public Internet. But before these neophyte tadpoles start eating flies, there’s one thing they need to learn:

Don’t cross the streams.

What Is Lifestreaming?

As we use the Internet, we’re generating all kinds of information:

Writing blog posts
Listening to music
Talking to friends
Playing video games
Watching/reviewing movies
Reading/reviewing books

Lifestreaming is taking all that information from different sources, and sticking it in one place so that people who find it interesting can see what I’m up to. It’s less stalking, and more “this person has similar tastes to me so I’m interested in what they’re interested in.”

Producers and Consumers

The easiest way to think about lifestreaming is that you have a bunch of websites that act as producers of information. Last.fm is producing what I’m listening to. Twitter is producing who I’m talking to. Delicious is producing what I think is interesting. GoodReads is producing what I’m reading. My blog is producing what I’m writing about.

Then you have the lifestreaming software that consumes these sources and builds a lifestream. Sources/sinks. Sources/destinations.Generators/monitors. Inputs/outputs. You get the idea, no matter what the terminology is.

You use some websites to generate original information, and you use other websites to take that information and combine it into something new.

Don’t Cross the Streams

But here’s the thing: if you want other people to pay attention to your lifestream then don’t cross the streams. The internet is an attention economy [3] and anything you can do to make it easier for people to pay attention to you, the way they want to, the better it will be for your personal brand.

If you share items on Google Reader but also save those items to Delicious then pick one source for your lifestream, not both.
If you StumbleUpon the sites your saving in Delicious then pick one source for your lifestream, not both.
If you use Twitter to talk, and then set up a repeater for Jaiku and Pownce then pick one source for your lifestream, not both.
If you’re using multiple lifestreaming services then don’t feed them back into one another.

The #1 reason why I unsubscribe from someone’s lifestream is because they’re repeating themselves too often. This happens most often when they lifestream with Tumblr and then include that Tumblr lifestream into Friend Feed. They’re creating a feedback loop in their lifestream, and that creates noise. [4]

I might not have the most evolved taste in music, but that doesn’t mean I want to listen to noise. [5]

A quick rule of thumb is to get your producers and consumers straight. Am I using this site to produce original information or is it a copy of information I’m producing somewhere else? Don’t merge the copies back into each other. That creates information pollution.

So take a look at your profile page to see how it looks on the outside. Is there a lot of duplication going on? Don’t cross the streams. [6] Do your followers a favor and turn off the noise. Make it easier for them to follow you.

Footnotes

Twitter is a kind of mesh IRC where instead of /ignoring the people you don’t like, you /follow to the people you do like.
It’s a big pond.
More information about the attention economy at Wikipedia, First Monday and ReadWriteWeb.
The #2 reason is because they produce so much information that I can’t keep track of anyone else. #3 is because we don’t have that much in common.
I saw one guy import his tumblr into friendfeed, his friendfeed into tumblr, and then twitter into both of them. Infinite loops.
Unless you have to kill Gozer the Traveller.

Crunching the Friend Feed Stats to Find the Most Popular Web Apps

engtech — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:02:54 +0000

One of the nicest things about the Internet is that if you sit on your ass for long enough, someone will code up whatever little side project you’re thinking about starting. In my case, I was interested in finding out general statistics about Friend Feed as a tape measure of how popular certain social bookmarking sites are. Enter Friend Feed Stats. Thank you, lazyweb.

What Is the Most Popular Web Service?

Ben has even broken up the stats by web service. Twitter leads the pack, account for 50% of the total items on Friend Feed. With the latest changes allowing you to merge the commenting interface with Twitter, I rapidly see Friend Feed as becoming my Twitter web client instead of the twitter.com site. All they have to do is give you a quick way to send tweets, and make the “reply on Twitter” option a default plus include the 140 character counter.

Trend #1: 90% of the Friend Feed participation comes from the top 8 services (Twitter, Blog, Google Reader, del.icio.us, Digg, Tumblr, YouTube, StumbleUpon). 46% of that comes from Twitter. It’s not surprising that Twitter leads the pack, because the nature of the service makes it easy to update many times a day.

The bottom 12 services (not include the ones added this week) can’t even manage to scrape 1% of the total between them (Pandora, Ma.gnolia, Upcoming, Picasa, iLike, Google Shared, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Furl, Yelp, Zooomr, SmugMug).

The blog number might be inflated because people could be using it as “generic RSS”. I was a little shocked to see that Google Reader shares were more popular that Delicious bookmarks, but it is easier to share on Google Reader than del.icio.us.

Tumblr is doing surprisingly well as a blogging platform.

In the instant messenger space, Twitter kills all. I hope Google got whatever mobile phone smarts they needed for Android from Jaiku because Twitter would have been such a better buy.

In the social voting space, Digg is the winner, with StumbleUpon giving a good showing. Reddit is pretty weak.

In the social bookmarking space, Delicious and Google Reader are king. Together they account for 17x the participation of Ma.gnolia, Google Shared Stuff (the Google equiv to delicious that NO ONE uses), and Furl.

In the social music space, Last.FM is kicking ass.

In social video, YouTube all the way.

In social photos, Flickr wins big, with Picasa showing a small but not insignificant number.

Trend #2: the top web service in every category is the first notable major player in that space. The copycats are barely blips on the radar. Of course, the Friend Feed audience is almost entirely early adopters who read blogs, so it isn’t surprising that they’d be early adopters for other services as well.

But it shows that you can’t ignore the Network Effect. People will use the service that the people they want to network with use. Once an incumbent has a critical market share, it is very hard to oust them.

Trend #3: the social bookmarking space is dead, dead, dead. Delicious has always held the lions share of the space, but Google managed to come in sideways and leverage their RSS reader to become as popular as Delicious. Everyone else is burning VC money.

Google vs Yahoo vs Microsoft?

This is a trick question, because Microsoft doesn’t have any web services supported by Friend Feed

Google: Google Reader, YouTube, Jaiku, GTalk, Picasa, Google Shared Stuff
Yahoo: Delicious, Flickr, Upcoming

Google and Yahoo are very competitive with each other, but neither hold a candle to Twitter. Is the huge intersection between the Twitter user base and Friend Feed skewing the stats? I think so.

Trend #4: Friend Feed needs to nurture its Twitter audience without becoming Twitter. With half the traffic on Friend Feed being Twitter messages, it would be easy for them to overwhelm the service and destroy the signal-to-noise ratio to the point where Friend Feed is a glorified Twitter client.

Exit Strategies?

Trend #5: there are some great web services out there that are still in startup mode – (Twitter, Digg, Tumblr, Friend Feed) but is their anyone other than Google/Microsoft to buy them? Yahoo has enough going on now that I don’t see them buying any other companies in the foreseeable future. If Google doesn’t have to compete with Yahoo on web apps, is there the same incentive for purchasing other companies?

Amazon has found a great niche in providing infrastructure for these web apps, but I don’t see them buying web apps and integrating them under the Amazon umbrella. EBay bought StumbleUpon and CBS bought Last.FM but are they really looking to expand their portfolios in this space?

I’ve said before that the average person can only handle up to six social web app sites, and I’m finding that Friend Feed makes it easier for me to consolidate that all to one site (bringing the number up to 10). But it’s still evident that a small number of sites have the majority of users, while people haven’t even heard of the rest of them. Monetization isn’t even an option for many sites because they’re providing wants, not needs.

The Fragmentation of Identity and Discussion

engtech — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:51:17 +0000

I’m a social web app junkie. Where most people use a few on a regular basis as a consumer and only a couple as a producer I am an active user on far too many sites. I’m not a beta junkie to the point where I try out every web service (especially not the ones spamming my blog contact email), but I do try out more than my fair share and manage to get involved before they reach the tipping point (like Friend Feed is reaching now).

The sheer amount of web apps out there leads to fragmentization of our online identities, but that isn’t a bad thing. The people who read my blog aren’t necessarily people I’m interested in talking to on Twitter, and none of us might share the same taste in music on Last.FM. For a while there I was talking about the Ruby programming language like crazy on this blog, but now I’m using a niche tumbleblog so that I can post more often on that specific technical subject without alienating my existing audience.

But it isn’t only our online identities that are fragmenting: it’s also the discussion around content. Once upon a time the way someone would comment on something you wrote would be to write a blog post of their own in response. Then blogs got a comment section and people could write what they had to say directly on the post. Now the discussion around a post has completely fragmented: people are saying stuff about your content on Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook… pretty much anywhere except for the post where you originally wrote it.

Paul asks: Isn’t all that fragmentation bad? Instead of having millions of separate discussions, shouldn’t we have a single, unified discussion, preferably under the control and ownership of the movie studio?

(He’s relating movie studios to content producers in his allegory, and the fragmentation he’s talking about is how Friend Feed lets people create individual comments on their shared items.)

I don’t know how I feel about this.

As a content producer it’s really nice to see discussions happening around the content I’ve created. There’s been times when I’ve been tempted to disable commenting altogether because spam is too annoying. There’s been other times where I let comments languish without responding to them even though I know that’s not the way to build a community around your blog. But at least I know how people are reacting… with the explosion of social media / social networking I have no idea what people are saying unless I’m actively a member of those communities.

As a content consumer it’s much more convenient to respond to content on the community where I found it from. I don’t have to fill out some insane captcha (screw you TypePad), or login to OpenID or any of the other crazy schemes blog software has come up with in an attempt to manage spam. I don’t lose my comment history because it’s all tied to my user account on that community site. Unless I’m trying to communicate with the guy who wrote that comment there is absolutely no value for me to leave a comment on the original blog post rather than the community I am a part of.

The fragmentation of discussion might be bad for the content producer, but it makes things so much easier for the content consumer. I know which way this trend is heading…

(A smart person would build a social network scraper to reimport the comments from there into their blogging engine software — if you know of any plugins like that then leave a comment)

Book Review: Everyware by Adam Greenfield

engtech — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:25:38 +0000

Adam Greenfield is a writer, NYC-based consultant, and professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunication Program. He’s also the guy who coined the term “moblogging” for blogging from your cellphone. He’s got a knack for inventing terms because “everyware” is such a simpler name than unicomp or “ubiquitous computing” that is used more often. This book is about the future, when software will be everywhere in our consumer electronic devices. It also touches on the other side of continuously connected devices and the social networking phenomenon.

The book is set up as a series of short essays (1-3 pages) on different aspects of the emerging future of consumer electronics. I’m a cynic when it comes to the subject — just look at the Yahoo Answers forum for iPods to see the problems real people have with what is arguably one of the best designed devices of modern times — and I found myself violently disagreeing with Greenfield within the first few pages of the book. But that was only because he begins with the promise of everyware before he delves into the harsh reality.

His conclusion is one we can all take to heart: technology doesn’t seem to improve the fundamental things that bring us joy in life. From start to finish he covers what ubicomp could be, to what it will likely be and all of the design issues in between. While I didn’t find myself learning very many new things, the book did a great job of stimulating thought. Everyware won’t give you any answers, but it will lead you to many questions which might be a better gift in the long run.

Footnote: I have to agree with the author that the printing company did a bad job of presenting everywhere. The book is missing a bibliography (that Adam Greenfield has since added to the online website), the cover art is too subtle to express what the book is about and the chosen font seems more appropriate to emails from my mom than a printed book.

Online Survival Guide: 9 Tips for Dealing with Idiots on the Internet

engtech — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:39:28 +0000

My first experience with online communication was bulletin board systems in the early 90s. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The experience of running a blog is almost exactly the same as it was running a BBS 15 years ago. The only difference is the sheer number of channels available for communication.

Where there was once up to 100 to 200 local BBSes there are now so many online forums for communication that it might as well be infinite., New forums for communication are being created all the time. Mainstream sites like the New York Times let you comment on articles, and each person has their own discussion forum thanks to sites like Facebook and MySpace.

“When I was involved in the BBS/IRC scene as a teenager I was surrounded by flame wars; one-upmanship was part of the attraction. I thought it was because of the immaturity of the participants, but now I think it is a natural offshoot of digital communication. We lose all the visual and auditory cues that are a normal part of human dialog and instead focus on words that can be easy to misinterpret (especially if looking for a reason to fight).” quoting myself

Winter is one of the worst for flame wars because environmental conditions make people more irritable and more likely to spend more time online. Here are some tips for navigating online discussions from someone who has been participating and managing public forums for over 15 years.

Tips for Administrators

Tip #1: Disemvowel

From Wikipedia: “In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling is the removal of vowels from text either as a method of self-censorship, or as a technique by forum moderators to censor Internet trolling and other unwanted posting. When used by a forum moderator, the net effect of disemvowelling text is to render it illegible or legible only through significant cognitive effort.

Xeni Jardin, co-editor of Boing Boing says of the practice, “the dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized.”

This original sentence:

In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling (also spelled disemvowelling) is the removal of vowels from text.

would be disemvowelled to look like this:

n th flds f ntrnt dscssn nd frm mdrtn, Dsmvwlng (ls splld dsmvwllng) s th rmvl f vwls frm txt.”

You can disemvowel any text using this tool. There is also a Firefox extension that lets you disemvowel comments if you’re a WordPress administrator. The same guy has a Firefox extension for handling religious trolls.

Tip #2: Temporarily disable comments for that post

This works well if you’ve been linked to from another site and it’s bringing a lot of tolls (IE: Digg, Slashdot). You can turn the comments on after a day or two without having to wade through the 100+ comments telling you how much of an idiot you are because they don’t agree with some minor minutiae of your argument.

Tip #3: Take the discussion to email

Nothing kills a flame war like removing the audience.

Quoting myself: “There is a different between scrawling messages on a public site and having a one on one conversation. The flame wars that are routine on some sites rarely exist in personal email. People stop being disembodied words and ideas and you remember that there is a person behind all of that typing.”

Comment Ninja is a handy Firefox extension for WordPress blog administrators that makes it easy to respond to commenters on your blog by email.

Tip #4: Never post personal information

Because you are an administrator, you have access to a commenters email address and their IP address. This information is usually enough to find out anything else you want to about who they are. (IE: put their email address into Facebook to find their real name, use their IP address to find out where they work)

It can be tempting to deal with a troll by removing their anonymity, but making it personal can change a one time nuisance into someone with a grudge that won’t go away.

Tips for Anyone

Tip #5: Let it stew

If something really gets your goat, then sit on it. Come back and re-read what bothered you later on and you may find that you were reading between the lines and interpreting an emotional undertone that isn’t there. The human mind is great at adding missing context, but it can also trick you into reading what you want to believe.

Revisiting something that filled you with rage days latter can leave you scratching your head trying to find what it was that pulled your chain.

Tip #6: Leave it where you found it

As I said earlier, it is ridiculously easy to collect personal identifying information about someone and find other parts of their online identity. Other than bringing a public argument to a private means of communication, you should leave the argument where you found it. Letting it spill over to other websites, or worse, following the person on to other aspects of their online identity makes you look like a stalker or a crazy person.

It doesn’t matter how justified you feel your actions are, the simple act of not being able to let go of things hurts your credibility.

Tip #7: Social proof is important

No matter how well reasoned your argument is, trying to convince someone of something they vehemently disbelieve in is next to impossible when they don’t know you from a hole in the wall.

From Wikipedia: “Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior. Making the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, they will deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed.”

Every online forum is an ambiguous social situation because you don’t know who you are communicating with. The social proof of who you are in that community will play a bigger role than your actual argument.

Tip #8: Always let a fool have the last word

Slant Six Creative covers this in depth: “Healthy argument and debate only work when everyone’s a willing participant, and no amount of reason or good sense is going to convince someone whose only goal is to throw a monkey wrench. At the same time, trying to dismiss that person or shut him up will usually just make him go that much harder. That and it makes you look like a dictator, which you never want to be.

So, give him the last word on the point and move on. Doing so might mean a short-term hit to your pride, but in the long run it helps you build credibility with the people you’re really trying to talk to.”

Tip #9: Walk away

Communicating online has some clear benefits because you can take as much time as you want to develop your arguments and it is easy to re-read past points without falling into a rehashing of who said what. But it can also be time consuming and pointless when there is no resolution in sight. There’s a big difference between debating a subject and a flame war in the emotional response you feel and the benefit you get from the discussion. The only way you can win a flame war is by turning off the computer and getting on with your life.

Online discussion is easily archived and searchable, so who knows if this discussion will be dredged up years later. Is it really worth it?

Distraction Free GTD: 32 Todo List Web Applications

engtech — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:08:32 +0000

The fine folks at LifeHacker have forced me to tip my hand with their post on using Web Runner as a distraction free browser. Web Runner is a tiny site-specific web application that runs using less resources than Firefox or Internet Explorer.

The whole idea behind a site specific web browser is that you want to access a web application without being tempted to access other sites. You want to access a site without being distracted by the rest of the Internet. A good example is an online todo list or GTD application. You want to be able to quickly access your todo list to add or checkoff items without getting caught in an Internet black-hole.

(via Coding Horror)

To make things easier for everyone I’ve created a huge bundle of Web Runner web applications centered around accessing ToDo/GTD web sites. This is a list of the supported sites.

Want more sites added? Leave a comment.

Step #1: Install Web Runner

Go to this page on the Mozilla Wiki
Choose the Windows, Linux, or Mac installer
- Here’s a quick link to Web Runner 0.7 for Windows (latest as of 2007/10/05)
Run the installer

Step #2: Download My “Distraction Free GTD” Web Bundle

Download this zip file (Update 2007/10/10)
Unzip the contents to a folder
Click on a .webapp file to launch the web application you want

Every web app has hotkey history navigation (ALT+LEFT, ALT+RIGHT and ALT+HOME).

Leave a comment if you have any problems.

9 Techniques to Promoting Your Social Web Application

engtech — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 18:34:36 +0000

This is a continuation from The Problem with Social Web Applications.

“web applications are created as social software where you have a friends list, collaborate on a document with multiple people and it is easily to share information and communicate. The downside is these networks consume a lot of attention and too much time is wasted building profiles and adding friends – for some of these sites building a profile and adding friends is the only utility they have.”

Putting the inherent problems of social web apps aside, how do you build a web app that has traction, gain users and hopefully explodes virally? I’ve been paying attention to this space for far too long and this is a round-up of the tricks and techniques successful and not-so-successful social web applications use to promote themselves.

I’m completely excluding any technique that relies on spending money. It’s a given that you can buy traffic and attention through various mean. Instead, I’m focusing on the self-powered techniques companies can use to build organic buzz and word of mouth advertising around their web application.

Technique #1: Beta Invitations

The easiest way to generate buzz for your social web app is to create an artificial scarcity for applications. You can email invitations to people every day and they won’t give you a second glance, but if invitations are hard to come by then the invitation becomes a valuable commodity instead of easily ignored spam. Gray market economies grow around beta invitation trading, even if the accounts themselves are seldom used.

Beta invite success stories: Gmail, Joost, Pownce

Gotcha: “Blog Friendly” Beta Invitations

The gray market beta invitation economy that you want to generate buzz is built off of the back of bloggers. Invitations are an easy way for bloggers to provide value (or the illusion of value) to their readers at no cost other than time. How bloggers feel about your beta invite campaign, and your application, will come from how easy you make it for them to send out invitations.

Medium lets me invite people by posting a URL on my blog. All of my readers who click on that URL can get into the Medium beta and are added as ‘friends’ with no effort on my part. Compare this to Joost invitations require a cut-and-paste of every email address into a desktop application. Sending a single Joost invitation will take me at least a few minutes because I have to load a desktop application. It could potentially take much longer if the desktop application needs to be updated.

Gotcha: Scarcity of Beta Invitations

One way sites screw up is by giving away too many beta invitations up front. If you are using manipulation to create buzz around your product then you need to create artificial value by implying that the people who have access to your service are more privileged. If anyone and their lolcat can get in then how do you create the false sense of hype that comes from people talking about a product you don’t have access to? It’s like the false economy around diamonds.

Technique #2: Social Engineering Trickery

A social engineering technique that works very well for getting people to accept their user account is to say “your friend created a profile for you!” It’s cheesy but it gets the invited user to sign-up. The easiest way to engage someone’s curiosity is to make it about them. People are always interested in themselves, and in what other people may have said about them.

Examples: Spock and Yahoo Mash

Technique #3: The Video Demo

A very effective technique for creating interest in your product before the doors are wide open is creating a video to promote the service and show how people can use it. The iScrybe calendar is a great example of a video that went viral and created a lot of buzz around a product that still hasn’t materialized (disclaimer: I’m a beta tester).

CommonCraft has created a business behind making videos that explain product in simple no-frill terms that somehow work better and remain more interesting than the flashiest demos.

Gotcha: Leaking Features to Early

The only problem with giving a video demo of a product doesn’t exist is you give your competitors that much more time to copy your features. By the time you release you’re competitive advantage might no longer exist.

Technique #4: The Press Release

I’ll let this video CommonCraft developed for PRWeb discuss the value of press release kits for generating buzz.

Gotcha: Spamming Bloggers with Press Releases

As a blogger, one of the dangerous of having your email address on your About Me page is the number of press releases you receive. I’ll reluctantly admit that I do occasionally write a blog post about a service that catches my eye. However, the method of contact has also made me ignore sites like CrossLoop.com that I later realized was very awesome and solves a problem I often have about how to fix someone else’s computer remotely. Why is your application different than any other of the many emails I have received?

Technique #5: The Address Book Import

Always make it as easy as possible for people to invite their friends to use your social web app. The email address book is the only existing workaround to the “social graph problem.” Make it as easy as possible for users to invite or connect with their friends using address book import and supporting the major webmail sites (Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail) as well as instructions on how to upload from Outlook or Outlook Express. Plaxo even offers a free javascript widget so ANY social website can offer address book import with little effort.

Gotcha: Giving Out Your Email Password

Jeff very correctly points out that giving out your email password is ridiculously stupid, since a malicious site can hijack your login information for any website and potentially gain access to your credit card or banking information depending if you use the same email address for everything. There has also been more than one case of startups sending emails to your contacts without your permission (see SixDegrees.com, Quechup and RapLeaf).

Gotcha: Address Book Import with Custom Invite

If you are going to brave the address book import (admittedly I do it often) then it is imperative that the invite sender can customize the message to the invitees. Thanks to the wonder of “automatically add anyone you’ve ever had an email conversation with to your address book” technology, if you do full address book spamming you might be contacting people who have a very loose connection to you. LinkedIn does it right by giving the sender several precanned invitation messages that can be customized at will. Another technique is to limit the number of invitations someone can send at once to prevent spamming.

I had a shock this weekend when I sent Yahoo Mash invitations out and my custom email invitation was never sent — instead they were given that spammy ‘engtech created a profile’ message. I went to the trouble to explain why I was sending the invite, what Yahoo Mash was about, and linked to a TechCrunch article about the service. This is what they saw instead:

Success stories: LinkedIn, Plaxo

Failures: Yahoo Mash, Quechup, RapLeaf, sms.ac…

Technique #6: Leverage Existing Success

In all aspects of life success can breed success. Would Paris Hilton have been in the limelight if she wasn’t the heiress to a ridiculous fortune? When larger companies launch a new web application they need to leverage the success of their existing sites. A common complaint when Google or Yahoo launches something new is that it doesn’t integrate well with their existing portfolio of web applications. Use the success and lessons learned from existing applications to slingshot your new web application into stardom. This is much easier to do when it is the same small team developing the application.

Success stories: 37signals

Technique #7: Corporate Superstar

One of the easiest ways to get buzz about your web app is to hire someone who is well known in the industry. This can be a detrimental factor because their involvement can overshadow the product itself or bring too much attention to a product before it has had a chance to mature. However, I think there is always more of a positive factor because it is easier to improve a product than it is to build the kind of buzz these people bring to anything they are involved with.

Examples: Jason Calcanis, Guy Kawasaki, Kevin Rose, Marc Andreessen, Joel Spolsky, Aaron Swartz

Technique #8: Send Out the Bacn

Social sites try to keep you interested by sending ‘tickler’ emails whenever any little action happens related to your account on their site. These emails are functionally useless, but they drive you back to the site. It’s not spam, it’s bacn — useless emails from a website that you’ve given permission to contact you. It’s the worst form of permission marketing and smart sites will set a sane default where they only contact the person once a day at the very most. Stupid sites will quickly see their emails detected as spam since clicking the ‘Report Spam’ button is often much easier than creating an email filter or finding out how to unsubscribe or change notifications.

Very few sites get that if you’re going to email someone that they have a message, you might as well include the message with the email. Even fewer sites understand that people should be able to respond to the message directly from email. Improving the customer experience always trumps increasing page views or any other metric.

Sites that get it: Twitter, StumbleUpon

Sites that don’t get it: Facebook, Yahoo Mash

Technique: Don’t Require an Account to Try It

(update because I forgot it the first time around)

One of the absolutely best ways to promote your app is to let people use it without requiring an account to sign in. OpenID hopes to provide a universal account that you can use anywhere, but other sites like Geni and JottIt bring you directly to the application and only prompt you to create a user account when you want to store your information.

Technique #9: Solve a Problem

The easiest way to build buzz around your web app is to solve a real problem. Many “web 2.0″ sites are repeating what has been available in desktop software for decades. For the ones that do something original, it often serves no real purpose. Messaging friends? I have email and instant messenger programs. Writing documents, spreadsheets, calendars? I have office suite applications. Translating desktop software gives decreased performance with the ability to easily collaborate and access documents from any location that has Internet access.

There are very few web applications that solve a problem that desktop software never did well. They add real value to a user’s life in a way that is new and innovative. Desktop software never handled music discovery (last.fm) or photo sharing (flickr and now Facebook) as well as their web counterparts. Too many web applications are social for no reason or offer solutions without a problem to solve. As my blog friend Steven says:

Adding value to one’s personal pool of knowledge or giving to another’s doesn’t depend on vast numbers of useless contacts. Value comes from one to one communication and then following whatever paths that come from that conversation.

Bonus: The Yahoo Mash Report Card

Last weekend I had a chance to check out Yahoo’s “we were too cheap to buy Facebook, let’s get that egg off of our face” entry into the social platform war with Yahoo Mash. The experience inspired this post. How did Yahoo Mash rate?

+1 point for creating approximately 2 hours of ‘I want a beta invite!’ buzz
+2 points for convincing me that Mash invites had some value and I could earn some social capital by sending invites to everyone on my address book
-10 points for refusing to send my handcrafted invitation that explained what Mash is and why I was sending out invitations
-20 points for sending that ‘engtech created a profile for you!’ spam instead of my custom invitation
-3 points for being ugly
-2 points for not having any utility beyond creating a profile
+2 points for the ability to edit other people’s profiles — something different
-4 points for not leveraging all the other Yahoo services I use
+5 points for introducing me to Yahoo Avatars — much cooler than Mash

Links You Can Use

The Problem With Social Web Applications

engtech — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:45:40 +0000

This is an exciting time because unlike traditional software that runs on your computer [1], web applications are created as social software where you have a friends list, collaborate on a document with multiple people and it is easily to share information and communicate. The downside is these networks consume a lot of attention and too much time is wasted building profiles and adding friends — for some of these sites building a profile and adding friends is the only utility they have.

Brad Fitzpatrick touches on this with his social graph problem — we need a way of moving our social network around with us as exportable and importable data. Read/Write Web has an overview of the issues behind the social graph problem. Companies like Facebook and MySpace capitalize on the network effect — the more of your friends who utilize the site, the more useful the site is to you — while Plaxo is one of the companies who are targeting the problem of creating a portable social network you can use on any web site.

There are two fundamental problems with using social web apps. The first is the lack of a unique identifier on the web — you know who you are but there is no way for two websites to know that you are the same person. Email addresses are one way to solve this problem. OpenID is another way to solve the problem of identity on the Internet, but it is fraught with it’s own issues such as too many providers / not enough consumers, who owns your OpenID and how trivial it is for someone to steal your OpenID authentication through phishing. OpenID is better than captcha for leaving web comments, but I wouldn’t trust it with my credit card information.

The second problem with social web apps is social network fatigue. The average person has the time to actively use 2 to 5 social web sites and become part of a community on them. No one has the time to be part of more sites than that, and we get burn out from having to create accounts and add friends on sites after site. This is called social network fatigue and has spawned spoofs like BugrOff and Social Networking Rehab, as well as applications like Delicious Stumbles and Social Poster to make it easier to maintain profiles on multiple sites.

If you’re a new social software company then it’s hard to attract users because of all the incumbent sites who already have their attention; if you’re an old social software then it’s hard to keep users because so much of the initial addiction comes from adding friends. (Not that they’re really your friends, but you know what I mean)

Tomorrow I’ll explain the techniques used to promote a social web applications [2].

[1] Of course, having a dedicated application on your computer is usually a million times more efficient than running an application in a web browser.

[2] aka Why Yahoo Mash Sucks

Universal identity and single sign on using openID? No thanks

engtech — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:05:55 +0000

Universal standards and open data formats are the holy grail of modern information technology. With different vendors creating competing products they always try to lock users into walled gardens where they use their product and only their product. Or you get hybrids like Facebook applications where you can use other products provided they play by our rules. Companies have no incentive to work well together. After all, it’s only the consumers who suffer.

Photo by doctorow

In an ideal world the consumer would be able to use whatever application they want to and move our data from one app to another with minimal hassle. We want to be able to use the email application of our choice in any context. We want a single synchronized calendar of our choice and still be able to share events with other people. We want to maintain one list of contacts and use them in every “social” web application. Consumers want to maintain control over our information, not spend all of our time maintaining applications and trying to get them to talk to each other.

One of the holy grails of web technology is single sign-on: the ability to use different web applications from one user account. Instead of having to remember 20 (or more like 30-50 in this web2.0 social app environment) login credentials, you’ll only have to remember one.

Every few years it seems like there’s another attempt at creating a universal login. Microsoft had Passport (now Windows Live ID). Google has unified its services to all use a single Google Account for authentication. Yahoo has never been great at integrating all of its services under one umbrella, but they certainly try (Flickr and Pipes use the Yahoo account, but del.icio.us and MyBlogLog don’t). People are saying that Facebook may be the future “universal account” since so many people use it. But the problem with all of these choices is that each of them is run by a centralized company. Do you trust them? Will you always trust them?

Photo by thelastminute

OpenID is the most popular decentralized system for single sign-on and maintaining a universal digital identity. It’s a very cool concept. Instead of having to worry about maintaining multiple user accounts and passwords (which should be different on different sites), openID lets you maintain one account and one online identity – without having that identity dependent on one company. At least that’s what the purple koolaid wants you to believe. If you stop to thing about it, you’re still dependent on whatever company you are using as your openID server.

The decentralization that is openID’s strength is also it’s biggest weakness. If your openID server goes down then you’re locked out of *all* of your other web accounts that used that login. WordPress.com supports openID but I’ve had problems with it [1] that have prevented me from using it to login to other accounts. It’s never a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket, but it’s much better to have one basket that works well than to have multiple baskets that have to work together properly or they won’t work at all.

It reminds me of those stupid wireless headphones for iPods. You can replace the small, portable earbud headphones that come with the iPod with larger headphones in order to be free from wires. But you greatly increase the dependencies needed to listen to music. Not only does your iPod have to be charged, but your wireless headphones and wireless transmitter ALSO have to be charged. The chances that they’re all going to be charged at the same time is much less than the chance that your iPod will be charged. The end goal of being free from wires isn’t worth the complexity the solution adds to the system – the solution introduces more things that can break and go wrong.

This is the problem with openID. In order to login to a web app with openID the web app needs to be working AND my openID server needs be working. The greater number of interconnecting parts decreases my chances of getting everything to work together much more than the benefit of not having to manage multiple user accounts. OpenID is easy enough when it works, but if your server is having issues then it can be frustrating to know that you could login just fine if only the stupid server was up and working.

It works ok if you’re openID account is your own domain name because you can use delegation to point it to another server, but if you use someone else’s openID server then you’re screwed. It’s a very cool hack to use your web url as your login ID, but I’d only do it if you own your own domain name and plan to own it for as long as you’ll be using it to access those accounts.

The sad truth is that we already have an open identity that works — our email addresses. Smart web applications use our email address as our login identity. Almost all web apps allow us to recover our password using that email address [2]. Email is the only login identity we really need to remember; every other identity can be found by searching our email or using the password recovery feature.

Photo by jblndl

Updates and clarifications:

The scenario I’m talking about is when you don’t have full control over your openID URL. It doesn’t matter who your openID provider is as long as you can redirect your URL to another provider if it goes down. Many sites have been advertising that they support being an openID provider, telling you to use their URL as your openID. They make no mention that you should use them as a provider, not as your URL. You should *always* have full control over your openID URL.

Neomeme hits openID from the point of view of how it can be used to easily stalk someone over the Internet.

Jan Miksovsky notes that openID is too confusing for first time users.

When I try to use my WordPress.com openID it says that I’m not logged in even though I can access my dashboard. I’m not sure if this is a cookie issue, custom domain names, or if it’s related to peak usage times (always seems to happen at noon or 5pm), but it’s been hard to get to the bottom of.
How do you recover your from your openID server going down if you don’t own the domain name? I couldn’t find any information on how to do it. Your openID should not be an account. You should be able to keep your account but change your openID login credentials, much like how you can change the email address your account is registered to.

The Solution to Social Network Site Fatigue

engtech — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:18:50 +0000

Social network site fatigue is when you’re sick and tired of trying to find your friends when everyone jumps ship to the Next Big Thing (Friendster to MySpace to Facebook, Twitter to Pownce, etc). The biggest problem with the web 2.0 revolution of “social network apps” is that there is no universal identifier. In real life, governments use social insurance numbers to tell the different between two people with the same name. If you look at the web as a big database, we’re missing a universal key that lets us know that engtech on Digg is also ninetimessix on StumbleUpon who is also Eric on Facebook and Internet Duct Tape on WordPress.com.This is an epidemic problem with all web services. Even in cases where there *IS* a universal common identifier there is no guarantee that every site will support it. Companies either lack the technical know-how, or they fear sending their customers to their competitors if they make it too easier to move data around.

The Universal Identifier for Movies

Everyone can agree that IMDB is the #1 database for information about movies. They also provide an ID number for each movie and TV show. For example, Six Feet Under has an ID of 0248654 and you can access a lot of information on IMDB directly if you know that number corresponds to Six Feet Under the tv show. Rotten Tomatoes understands that IMDB is the #1 database for information about movies, and you can link to any movie on their site using only the IMDB number.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/alias?type=imdbid&s=0248654

brings you to

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/six_feet_under_the_complete_first_season/

Any web site about movies that doesn’t understand that the IMDB number is the universal identifier is shooting themselves in the foot because they are making it harder for users to mash their new site up with existing sites about movies. IE: If I had a blog about movies where I always linked to IMDB, I could trivially change those links to Rotten Tomatoes for all of my old posts because RT understands the IMDB number.

What is really surprising is that even though Amazon has owned IMDB since 1998, you cannot browse Amazon results using the IMDB number. Sure, there are nice hacks like the Movie Dude script for Firefox that will crosslink the movie sites for you… but it would be so much easier with universal IDs. The same would go for social network sites.

Facebook As a Universal ID?

Facebook hype has been through the roof, with many pundits wondering if the closed garden of Facebook is going to become the official storehouse for online identity (at least for the next few years). Their ingenious apps platform lets other websites piggyback off of the Facebook social web, giving us a hint of social site nirvana: being able to maintain one set of friends on Facebook and use that same set on every other social site. But that is contingent to how well Facebook plays with other sites.

NetVibes has already shot the first volley against Facebook’s bow with their new application that exports Facebook data into NetVibes. It would be nice to see Facebook becoming a social network hub. ClaimID, the bright future of open identity, even has a Facebook application. My hope is that the ClaimID app will let me find the claimed identities of my online friends and act as a hub for my social network activities. One friendlists to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

But There Already Is a Universal Friendslist!

The silly thing about all this time we waste with friendslist management is that we already have a universal friendslist: our address book. Any social site worth it’s salt will let you batch import all of your existing friends by uploading a file or logging in to your web-based email account. Plaxo has been fighting to become the universal address book, it gives you the ability to automatically push out contact information updates to anyone who has you in their address book. They’ve even gone so far as to implement some killer developer tools like Javascript and REST widgets – I’ve seen a few startups add address book friendslist import to their web app in literally minutes by using the Plaxo tools.

There are definitely some smart eggs at Plaxo, as they’ve been repositioning themselves with Pulse as an open social network where users can share contact information and their web presence easily.

But who will win the battle of the social networks? Will it continue the same cycle of a new network being popular every two years? One thing is certain, as long as there isn’t an easy way to migrate data and contacts between these network, it will be the users who lose.

Be My Friend (on social network sites)

engtech — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:43:09 +0000

Unless you’ve had your head in the sand (or *gasp* you aren’t obsessed with Internet culture), then you’ve noticed that we’re seeing more and more web service startups over the past few years. Last year I flamed the Bubble 2.0 soundly in “Web Too.Many.” Earlier this year I tried to get an idea of what websites people actually use by starting the What’s Your Web 2.0? meme.I think I’m past breaking when it comes to my attention span and the number of services that I use. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some I heartily recommend. If you use some of these services as well, then please go ahead and “friend” me. And yes, there is a Facebook account in the list.

Active

Facebook – I have separate profiles for blog friends and real friends
Del.icio.us – bookmarking, blogging
Last.fm – music discovery, sharing music with friends
StumbleUpon – voting/sharing
Digg – voting/sharing
Reddit – voting/sharing
WordPress – blogging
Gmail – email

Software Hosting

Google Code Hosting – hosting software projects
Yahoo Pipes – creating RSS feed filters
Userscripts.org – all of my greasemonkey scripts

Autopilot

Twitter – sharing, republishing
Tumblr – aggregating my online presence
Jaiku – sharing, republishing

Deadpool

These are sites that I used to use often, but I’ve given up on:

MyBlogLog – too much spam
Flickr – it’s easier to share photos with friends on Facebook
RottenTomatoes – it’s easier to share movie reviews with friends on Facebook
Technorati – never indexes me properly
Blogcritics – got some books, but they aren’t a very good source of traffic
LinkedIn – until the next time I’m looking for work
… more than I can possibly remember.

What got me thinking about this is trying out Pownce for the first time and seeing how horrible it is at re-discovering my friends.

I just sent out some invites to Kevin Rose’s Pownce to my FeedBurner subscribers. (Thanks for hooking me up, Adam)

Pownce First Impression

I’ve seen other complaints that the biggest problem of Pownce is “what do I do with it?” It’s probably the most powerful web-based instant messaging client out there.

I was very surprised that they Pownce doesn’t have an “import contacts from address book” feature. That is rapidly becoming the only way to easily import the list of your friends from one web app to another. I was trying out Blue Swarm the other day and they are using a very slick widget from Plaxo that does easy address book imports. All web startups should use this, since email address contacts are the only universal data format for identifying your friends on the web.

This is a perfect example of why the Facebook application experience is so powerful… signing up and maintaining a user account is the major barrier that prevents most web startups from gaining a massive user base. “Social” web sites have an even bigger barrier in that you have to move or re-find your network. Facebook apps allow for any application to have the same user account and social network.

Obviously I think it would be pretty awesome if that Plaxo contact importer also supported Facebook as well as Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, and Yahoo.

What Others Have to Say

Scoble: “I see many of the same people in my friends list on Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, and now Pownce. Pownce is growing faster than the other ones right now, though. 728 people have already added me on Pownce. I can’t take many more social networks.“

Memoirs of a Bystander: “My question is this: Is there any value actually garnered from adding an obscenely large amount of random people as your friend on various social sites? Honestly, if a social networking site it meant to enhance you life through discovery of new interests, music, recommendations, etc…, is that easily done by wading through thousands of people?”

Mashable: “And it is this: on Pownce, you can send a message, or a file, or a song, or an event, to one person; or three of your friends; or only your family; or everyone.”

SocialHam: “Now more than ever Email seems to becoming a dead medium so can micro blogging sites fill in the gaps?”

JetPacked: “Can’t decide between pownce and twitter? This should help. Here’s how to post your pownces to twitter.”

Daily Grumble: “Social networking is a very difficult area for a new service to break into. How on earth are you going to persuade users of other, more established social networks to come to your service?”

Greg Verdino: “Are social media mavens living inside a bubble of our own making, artificially inflating the impact that most of these nascent technologies are having on the population in general, and ultimately getting our companies and our clients riled up over something that will, over time, turn out to be, well um, nothing?”

What's Your Web 2.0? (meme/survey)

engtech — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:51:13 +0000

Web2.0 is all about web-based communities and services that make it easy for people to share and collaborate. There’s an old post from around a year ago by Think Vitamin where he reasons that social web apps are great and all, but casual users don’t have the time to use them. He then goes on to interview the founders of several social software startups and finds out that most of them don’t use more than five either.

Does that still hold true? I’m going to bug a bunch of people and try to find out. At the very least this should give some ideas about which apps are popular and help me discover some new ones.

What is Web 2.0?

Web-based software
You can create and modify your own data
Some social-networking aspects (friends list, etc)

The Rules

Link to this post and the post of whoever tagged you.
Create a list of the web2.0 sites you use and categorize them from “daily use” to “weekly use” to “monthly use”. Include links to your accounts if you want so people can friend you.
Tag a bunch of people you want to join in.

Even if you haven’t been tagged yet, feel free to participate in the comments or to join in on the meme with your own blog.

My Web 2.0

Daily Use

WordPress.com multi-user blog
Del.icio.us for creating my linkblog
Google Reader for tracking other blogs

Weekly Use

Facebook for real life friends
Wikipedia for looking stuff up quickly
Digg for submitting/voting on sites
Reddit for submitting/voting on sites
StumbleUpon for submitting/voting on sites
Twitter for creating my linkblog

Monthly Use

LinkedIn for keep in touch with business contacts
Flickr for photos, and friends’ photos
RottenTomatoes for ranking movies
Amazon.com for ranking books
Yahoo Pipes for creating RSS feed filters
Tumblr for aggregating my online presence
MyBlogLog … admittedly I don’t do much with it anymore

I think I use way more than the average person, mostly because I’m a blogger.

Tag, You’re It!

I’m starting the list with some tech-savvy bloggers, with the hopes that it spans out to a wider demographic with time.

What’s a URL to do? – How to Save URLs

engtech — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 23:46:36 +0000

The World Wide Web is an apt analogy. We’re all spiders spinning threads of links. Some people spin their threads with blogs, while others do it with social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Digg, reddit or Netscape (see them all at popurls).

One thing that bothers me about these social bookmarking sites is that they don’t do a good job of knowing when two links point to the same document. Ignoring the malicious users who purposely try to resubmit something using slightly different links, there are the flaws in the social bookmarking sites themselves.

As an example I’m going to look at one of my blog posts that has been saved to del.icio.us several 10 different ways. It’s crazy all of the ways a link URL [wiki] can be saved.

1682 people saved it using the trailing slash
132 people saved it with no trailing slash and the named anchor “holygrail”
36 people saved it with a bad URL
25 people saved it without the trailing slash
5 people saved it with the named anchor “comments”
4 people saved it with a different bad URL
4 people saved it with the trailing slash and the named anchor “holygrail”
2 people saved it with a trailing query string
… and several other saved of cached copies of the document or through an anonymizer/translator proxy.

There are several reasons why the same document could be referenced by different URLs.

Easy to Fix Mistakes

Trailing slash – Remove the trailing slash from the end of the URL.

Query string – Remove it if it isn’t taking any arguments.

Named anchors – Remove completely before storing. The named anchor can be used with or without the trailing slash.

Hard to Fix Mistakes

For these mistakes with URLs it comes down to the website in question should provide a redirect to the canonical URL and/or not create duplicate methods of accessing content.

Index file – different web server software uses different names for the index, but if you specify the directory it will grab the index file automatically.

WWW prefix – there is a movement to get rid of using www. at the start of domain names [wiki].

Useless query string – you can add any kind of query to the end of a URL and it is ignored.

http://internetducttape.com?cheese=good

Duplicate Pages – through poor planning the web developer can create multiple links to the same content.

The moral of the story is when developing websites always try to use semantic URLs [wiki] that are cruft free, not too long, and readable by humans. When writing an application that uses URLs as keys to store data, make sure you clean them first.

Who knows where they’ve been?

Why Posting Your Email Address in Plain Text is Never a Good Idea

engtech — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:26:33 +0000

The popular blog TechCrunch was trying to give away 100 free accounts to a web service called Spinvox and was surprised/astounded when a competitor named SimulScribe spammed everyone who participated. What did TechCrunch do wrong? They asked participants to write their email address in the publicly viewable comments.

That begs the question: How fast could a spammer spam if a spammer could find your email address?

In early September of 2006 I wrote a how to post on Setting Up Multiple Gmail Accounts from One Account (also see: How to Access Gmail When It’s Blocked at Work). I created a throw-away Gmail account at 2:36pm on September 10^th, 2006 to use as an example in this post.

The first spam in that account was received at 11:12 AM on September 11^th, 2006. By the 13^th there was 16 spam messages. It has been averaging 160 spam messages a month.

This is not a lot until you consider that this is an email address that appeared on the Internet only once, on one blog post on one web page of a blog that wasn’t that popular at the time. It is not a common word/name and I’ve never used that email address anywhere other than in that post. It takes less than a day for an email address that appears in a web page to start receiving spam.

The TechCrunch commenters should expect a lot more spam than just the note from SimulScribe as a result of their posting their email address online.

What TechCrunch Should Have Done

If you want to collect email addresses for a contest, create an email account specifically for that contest or have a contest email account and filter by subject line. The email will be sent privately between TechCrunch and the contest holder and that will remove any chance of spammers getting the contact information.

Posting Your Email Address On Your Blog

There are complicated CSS / Javascript hacks to display your email address in a way that is human readable but is unlikely to be interpreted by a spambot (since they ignore CSS / Javascript), but the easiest solution I’ve ever found for posting your email address on the web is to create an image file that displays your email address.

(I’m not blasting the guys at TechCrunch, this is a common mistake that everyone makes. Most people don’t think twice about posting their email address and they really should.)

ScheduleWorld now has AJAX offline contact editing

engtech — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:42:53 +0000

If you aren’t familiar with ScheduleWorld they are a web startup that I first posted about last August. ScheduleWorld allows you to easily synchronize your calendar/schedule and contacts/address book using your Internet connection. What set them apart is that you can use their service to synchronize your Google Calendar to Microsoft Outlook.

They updated their Contact Manager today with several useful features:

Works offline — essential for anyone who organizes their contacts on a laptop while traveling.
Extremely fast and efficient synchronization.
Works like a desktop application but in your web browser (thanks to CSS, DHTML and AJAX).
Google Maps integration.
No network slowdown for most operations.

The interface is simple (a good thing). There is a toolbar on the top with the minimum necessary operations. All of the contacts are listed down the left pane and as a big information cloud in the center (not shown in a preview because I can’t be bothered to censor all those names). This is an intuitive layout that let’s you quickly browse all your contact info with minimal scrolling and clicking.

Clicking on a name shows an edit button that brings up the contact editor. I have 300 contacts in the system, and I found it very fast. It will take over as my contact editor (before I was editing in Outlook and then synching to ScheduleWorld).

Good job, Mark.

(note to other bloggers: you are free to use these screenshots provided you link back to this post)

Tech and Blogging Predictions for 2007

engtech — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 15:33:59 +0000

Technorati tags: mypredictions2007

I got tagged by the 2007 Predictions meme by Software Abstractions (and wp.com), so here are my completely unresearched predictions. I did sacrifice a chicken, however. If any of them have *already* happened — well, I’m just that good. I’m not tagging anyone with the meme, but if this inspires you to write something then please link back.

(photo by jurvetson)

Predictions about My Website

I’ll do two CSS redesigns in 2007. They’ll both make the site look worse than it ever has before.
I’ll almost quit blogging a couple of times, but never stop for more than 10 days.
At some point I will disable comments because I am sick and tired of dealing with spam, but I’ll eventually reinstate them.
I’ll start a web comic that no one else “gets”. It will become hugely popular. People will ask me to quit blogging and focus my attention on the comic. Other people will ask me to quit the comic and focus my attention on blogging. There will be huge battles in the comments. This will appease the dark side of the force and my ego.
I’ll release a WordPress Theme that I’ve never used myself — purely for site promotion.
//engtech will be featured on Cute Overload. This will be remembered as the moment when my site jumped the shark.
I will form a blog network of sites that didn’t make it into 9 Rules. This will last for approximately three weeks before people realize it was a massive link bait campaign.
I will fake a Post Secret postcard to advertise my blog. It becomes a huge controversy. People say “it was only a matter of time” after the entire Cute Overload thing.
I’ll end 2007 in the Technorati top 100, but there will be insinuations that I only got to that spot because of mob connections. Unknown to readers, getting there have left me single, penniless, jobless and homeless — but at least I’ll have an original point of view as I blog from the public library.

(photo by pankajsharma)

Tech Predictions – Web 2.1

More people will abandon traditional media for aggregators and non-traditional sources. Traditional media companies that “get it” will respond by buying aggregators. Some traditional media companies will try to develop aggregators of their own. The blogosphere will hopelessly mock them.
My dad will continue trying to be his own news aggregator by emailing articles to everyone he knows. I wish I was retired too.
Google Video will stagnate beside YouTube. People will wonder why Google keeps it around.
Google Chat’s market share will be even more embarrassing. Google buys Meebo.
Most “Google Custom Search” projects are abandoned. The rest are run by spammers.
Google will acquire hardware start-ups and start giving IBM/HP/Sun competition. They’re already one of the largest system producers in the world (for all the machines used to power their services).
Microsoft and Amazon will enjoy the positive press they get now that Google starts getting flack from being in the top position.
Digg will get worse before it gets better. Someone will write a Firefox extension for disabling Digg comments and the world will be a better place.
Del.icio.us still won’t fix simple bugs like thinking “http://url” and “http://url/” are different websites. They will not implement an advanced search that has such simple features as exclusions of tags. Del.icio.us will still remain the number one social bookmarking site despite the fact that there are so many other alternatives. More and more of the other alternatives will fall to the way-side as they can’t get any penetration. Del.icio.us founders will continue their coke-fuelled tour of Thailand as Yahoo engineers try hopelessly to understand the code base.
StumbleUpon video will be very popular, but they’ll have trouble monetizing it because they can’t use the same referral trick to get sponsors. They’ll finally get bought when investors realize they have more users than Del.icio.us. They won’t implement an improved dashboard for site owners to manage StumbleUpon campaigns even though it could net them a lot of money. They won’t even develop something as simple/useful as site search that could tell you all the pages on a site that have been stumbled in order of most popular.
Reddit will stagnate under their new overlords. Users will move somewhere else. It won’t be to Netscape.
Much like weeds, genital warts, and herpes, MySpace cannot be cured.
Popular web start-ups will hold out for more money and not get bought. Friendster enjoys a resurgence of popularity from the “blah is the new Friendster” meme.
Amazon will continue to release services that Google should have thought of.
TechCrunch will keep losing writers until someone hires their nephew to pre-screen the comments and delete the most offensive ones.
2007 won’t be the “year of RSS“. At the end of 2007 most people still won’t understand what RSS is or how it could improve their lives. But RSS becomes even more ubiquitous from a publishing standpoint and almost all sites will offer feeds of some sorts — until they realize how few people read feeds.
Technorati will get worse before it gets better. They will finally hire a larger support staff in the second half of the year after several A-Listers publicly complain about support wait times. It still won’t be large enough for response times sooner than one week.
The Wisdom of Crowds is finally debunked as the most misunderstood meme ever. Mobs are dumb and bring about the lowest common denominator. Yet people continue using snappy titles that occlude their point in droves.
All of the faults with the wisdom of crowds are applied in an argument against the open source movement. It gets linked to by Slashdot and Digg. Surprisingly, it wasn’t written by Nicolas Carr.
Niche news aggregators really take over, but they never reach the traffic levels of the early sites like Digg. This keeps them relatively spam-free and useful to their communities.
Nerdcore goes mainstream.

(photo by jumpcom)

Tech Predictions – Gaming and Gadgets

2007 will be a massive year for HD-TV sales, driven by console gaming (mostly) and HD-DVD/Bluray (some).
Low-end HD-TVs will become affordable, and challenge the LCD monitor market.
Bluray will go the way of UMD. HD-DVD will be declared the market winner in late 2008.
Sony will continual its downward spiral. Remember when Betamax was the exception, not the Sony way of life?
Microsoft XNA homebrew development for the Xbox 360 won’t take off because of the ridiculous price tag and lack of a central community, but XNA will grow a community for free PC game development — which may give XNA a second life in the future.
Apple releases iTV. Xbox-360 owners don’t understand what the big deal is, but people still love it.
The IRS gets a list of Second Life user accounts and starts auditing them for revenue.
AllOfMP3 will overthrow the Russian government and causes massive repercussions with the WTO. They form a political data haven with The Pirate’s Bay.
RIAA and MPAA continue their slow whimpering death.
More and more countries start implementing Cleanfeed-like filters. The general populace does not notice.
A cell phone company will develop a phone that focuses on making telephone calls (while still competing on rich features). They make a killing.
Cell phone service providers create a service package that includes YouTube videos and streaming Internet radio. Satellite radio shows a corresponding decline in uptake.
A North American cell phone service provider will have deep market penetration by finally offering affordable data rate plans. The cartels will kill them.
Some company will develop a toaster with an iPod dock that plays a song when your toast is done.
Fewer and fewer devices have podcasting support out of the box when a research study shows the real numbers behind podcasting and videocasting.

(photo by nj dodge)

Blogging Predictions

Blogger will strip the meta-redirect tag because it is abused by spammers.
A spammer will be murdered in his home once his identity is published on the Internet.
Someone will start a *hugely* popular vlog that focuses on teenagers doing things that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. The commenters will be rabid flamers and quite often post the identities of the people in the videos. This will hit mainstream media once someone commits suicide and/or goes on a killing spree over it.
More people will get fired for blogging, but even more people will get hired for blogging.
The disconnect in audience size between A-Listers and B-Listers grows and grows.
Typepad bloggers wonder why they stop receiving comments after Typepad finally removes the last barrier to their captcha scheme being completely unreadable. In an act of irony, someone writes a browser extension for decoding Typepad captcha.
There will still be no one in the Technorati top 5000 who uses Vox as a blogging platform; however it will have taken a huge market share of the strictly “personal” bloggers. Blogger will still have huge market share because of the Google influence. Livejournal will be even further on the decline.
A new start-up will become prominent whose sole focus is developing a better metric for comparing blog readership so that the various blogging revenue networks can more accurately determine pay rates.
Someone will do a very in-depth analysis of the correlation between Technorati ranking and actual readership numbers. It will show that it doesn’t scale well as a metric of readership beyond the top 100. People will still obsess about their Technorati ranking.
The majority of bloggers still won’t know (or care) about what Technorati is.
There will be a controversial story about (real, Entertainment Tonight) celebrity bloggers getting into an online flame war. It will be revealed later to have been a publicity stunt.
There will be even more controversy surrounding Edelmen PR firm (that make the Wal-Mart / Vista laptop stories seem tame). There will be a coalition of bloggers who think they should be tarred and feathered. It won’t merit more than a one paragraph blurb in any major news source, because the non-blogging world doesn’t care.
Someone will release a research paper about how blogging affects personal relationships. It will become very popular in the blogsphere, but few people will pay it heed.
Someone will write a WordPress plug-in to automatically disable comments if the referrer is Digg or Slashdot.
A massively popular WordPress plug-in will be revealed to have a backdoor for installing spammer links.
One of the blogging search engines will close up shop.
Akismet will incorporate some kind of JavaScript detection to further avoid spammers.
Two more people will join Mark and Lloyd in doing WordPress.com support.
WordPress.com will eventually make the CSS customization upgrade $5 or less when they realize that it is *impossible* to deal with all of the bugs in the provided themes. They will then focus on installing more Sandbox-like themes that have good bones.
Pure theme designers will embrace CSS skinning while those who create themes purely for SEO will continue making themes just so they can embed links in the footer.
WordPress.com will offer a paid upgrade where you can keep your wordpress.com domain name but move to your own host. These sites won’t show up on the WordPress.com dashboard.
WordPress.com will offer a cheaper VIP hosting package where you have your own domain name, you can install your own theme, and they take a cut of the ad revenue. But these sites won’t show up on the WordPress.com dashboard, or have an associated *.wordpress.com domain.
WordPress.com will temporary allow AdSense and affiliates, but then turn it off because of the deluge of spammers.

The Internet is for Trolls

engtech — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 21:13:46 +0000

Meek, normally polite people can turn into the biggest assholes when they don’t have to look each other in the eyes.

When I was involved in the BBS/IRC scene as a teenager I was surrounded by flame wars; one-upmanship was part of the attraction. I thought it was because of the immaturity of the participants, but now I think it is a natural offshoot of digital communication. We lose all the visual and auditory cues that are a normal part of human dialog and instead focus on words that can be easy to misinterpret (especially if looking for a reason to fight).

Throw anonymity into the mix and it becomes a recipe for disaster. Becoming popular on Slashdot or Digg is equal parts excitement at the exposure and annoyance at the new commenters. To be fair this isn’t restricted to these two communities; for a large number of people getting into arguments on the Internet is a major source of entertainment. Two weeks ago I put a comment policy on my blog – I have no problem with disagreement but keep things civil.

Recently Dave Pogue of the NY Times wrote a post about ‘what ever happened to online etiquette?‘ that asked the question when did the Internet become a bunch of immature 15 year old boys? Michael Moncur correctly responds that this isn’t a new phenomena: people are jerks, maturity matters, anonymity isn’t the problem and content inspires community (and Darren agrees).

TechCrunch Bleeds Writers

(photo by natalidelconte)

There is a lot of news coverage at the moment about tech writer Natali del Conte quitting the popular blog TechCrunch over inappropriate comments by the audience. What surprised me is that given her views on commenters, Michael Arrlington wrote on December 10th when reviewing a site that allows users to easily create humorous doctored photos:

I’d make one of these for TechCrunch writer Natali Del Conte, but she’d probably resign (readers are encouraged to do so, however, and link to them in the comments).

Within five days she did resign. I have no idea if these events were related; it was likely one straw of many on the camel’s back.

Mr. Arrlington himself is no stranger to the pressure that comes from being a public figure. When his readers aren’t lambasting him, it’s websites like Valleywag roasting him. It isn’t a pleasant experience; I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. There’s been several posts on his personal blog that indicate that it is starting to get to him, some of which have been deleted.

You only have to take a cursory look at sites like Go Fug Yourself and the Superficial to see that extent that mass culture as a whole has embraced celebrity bashing. Some people take it to the next level where they actively devote themselves to starting flame wars and virtually stalk people.

Paying the Toll to Cross the Bridge

In early October I had a conversation with Mark of ScheduleWorld about comments that were appearing on my blog stating that he was censoring user complaints and deleting posts. I have no affiliation with his company other than writing a very popular how-to guide about his website. He responded:

“I believe it’s the same person. They both signed up and started trashing the service. The first guy did all of his trashing anonymously. Since I couldn’t contact the person I didn’t know what else to do – so I deleted the posts. A real person with a real concern wouldn’t post like this (I don’t believe). It’s too coincidental that they both posted to my site, then right away to your site.”

My response at the time was:

“I’ve just been on the Internet for about 13-14 years so I’ve see a lot of trolls. The key thing to remember is treat them as you would any other customer (except don’t fall into the rat hole of putting their demands ahead of normal people), even when they’re frustrating the crap out of you.

Every product has their fair share of people complaining bitterly about it, mine those comments for what they’re worth and how they can help you improve your product, but don’t let them get to you. If people see you deal with your detractors in a sane and calm matter then you’ve taken their negative comments and made it into a positive — see how professional these guys are even in the face of these idiots.”

Mark from ScheduleWorld recently contacted me with a follow-up:

It’s interesting that some folks do this. I think the ability to remain anonymous and post whatever you like with no repercussions makes some folks incredibly bold and do things they would never risk (for legal and other reasons) in “the real world”.

What’s fascinating is that I’ve noticed such a troll has absolutely no effect. I received emails from two bloggers, who cared enough about the integrity of their sites to contact me. But that’s it. The subscription and service usage rate increases weekly. I think that
says a lot. It could be a lot of things, but I suspect that it’s because:

Folks are aware of anonymous cowards and treat their comments accordingly. Or perhaps they quickly disregarded the more obvious hate-speak. Or maybe folks are willing to try something out for themselves and easily discount the bad or potentially biased
experiences of someone else. We all like to learn on our own.

All one has to do is search the [ScheduleWorld] forums for ‘great’, or ‘thanks’ or ‘love’ to see what folks really think of ScheduleWorld.”

(his quotes were edited for this post)

Being flamed says more about the person flaming you than anything else. That’s why you should never say something negative about a former employer in an interview. It’s important to remember when ranting that you are writing about real people and that thanks to the wonders of the Internet your words will probably reach the people you are talking about. Arrogance is not a virtue.

Scrybe Beta Update

engtech — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 22:36:38 +0000

I’m a bad person. I’m in the Scrybe online calendar beta program and I haven’t given it more than a cursory look, much less an insightful blog post full of juicy details and impressions that would probably generate a ton of traffic for me as everyone is interested in Scrybe after it got hyped by Scoble, Arlington et al.

All I can say at this point is that I’m very impressed with the professionalism of Faizan, the CEO and Co-Founder of Scrybe. When I asked him questions on Reddit before the hype wave hit he was very quick to respond. His latest response to the people clamoring for invites only increases my belief that this is a man who is committed to delivering a well-engineered product.

“We think that both the product and its users will be best served if we exercise a little self discipline right now and stick to our original plan. At this critical stage, a solid approach to engineering the product has to take precedence over gathering users. The important point is to get feedback, analyze it, incorporate some of it, test it and roll it out AND add a few thousand new people to get their fresh perspective. The product will benefit greatly from a few such iterations.”

“Too much growth too fast” kills a lot of startups. You don’t want too many customers to see your product before it is ready for mass consumption. Scrybe’s organic approach of letting a few beta users in through the gate at a time is the correct approach for numerous reasons, one of which is scaling. If you get too big too fast then all of your natural bugs and growing pains become instant bad press.

>>� Official Scrybe Blog: About the Beta invites
Scrybe demo video

Google Custom Search Engines

engtech — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 15:34:27 +0000

Google has rolled out a new “custom search engine” feature that is going to knock some start-ups like Rollyo dead in the water. It’s simple to set up a custom search for a list of sites. I’ve already created a life hack search engine (example search: how to stop drinking coffee) for searching about common life improving tasks. Creating engines is simple, but what is nice is that they’ve added features so that you can brand the engine, collaboratively develop it with other people, as well as collect AdSense revenues. There is a real incentive to use your expertise to build a top-notch engine.

I predict the rapid development of 356,724 custom search engines that aren’t refined after the first week. After around a few months there should some clear domain specific engines with real expertise behind them.

UPDATE: Fellow wp.com-er Vik Singh made a pretty sweet tech search engine and posted the instructions (via Scoble).

UPDATE 2006/11/15: Google Blogoscoped gives a tutorial on advanced custom search engine tweaking

(FT, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch Blog, TechCrunch, Matthew Ingram, Google OS, Blogoscope, Problogger, Slashdot)

Internet bought the video star (Google buys YouTube)

engtech — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 21:38:29 +0000

This story has been leaked six-ways to Sunday already, but now it’s finally official. Google is buying YouTube, and Mark Cuban thinks they’re crazy.

There’s an amazing amount of blog coverage for this, but when it comes down to it, I don’t really care who owns YouTube. I want a website where I can get video feeds (especially music videos, wacky advertisements, and weird shit) to post in my blog. I want it to be simple, I want it to be interoperable, and I don’t care about the rest.

Sure, there are legal complications involved because of all the copyright infringing material available on YouTube. I can’t wait until the real world catches up with the virtual world and realizes that when someone is showing a 3 minute clip of a song, a movie or a TV skit they are advertising for you for free. This is the same load of malarkey (hello, I am from the 1920s) that raised the ire of content publishers with Google Book Search.

Is this surprising? Yes and no, Google has their own product that does the exact same thing but they missed the market completely (much like Google Talk). The ability to easily share videos via embedding on blogs and MySpace gave YouTube a much greater audience than Google Video. Google spent far too long having the useless Froogle on the homepage instead of Video.

Like Scobelizer said, this looks like mind-shift for Google where they are making real business decisions instead of listening to the engineers who say “that’s easy, give me a week and I’ll build it”.[1]

Will Google prove to content providers that the interwebnetwork medium is an exciting new opportunity for renewed profits? No, dinosaurs are old and stupid. They didn’t understand that Google Book Search was a huge opportunity to bring content to an audience that was actively searching for it, they won’t “get” GooTube either[3].

Will other video sharing companies start showing up for sale on E-Bay like Kiko? Yes, video is notoriously hard to add advertisements for because no one wants to wait through a 20 seconds pre-roll ad[4]. Google has an existing advertising base and history in the advertisement business that they will tie it all together. There may be a spot for one or two other companies to get acquired by Microsoft or Yahoo, but in general internet video is a crowded market that doesn’t scale well[5] and making money off of it is hard.

Is the ridiculously high evaluation of YouTube further proof of Bubble 2.0? Yes and no. ValleyWag calls YouTube the Hotmail of Bubble 2.0. But since the announcement Google stock as risen enough that this deal was a freebie.

What does this mean for the end user? Nothing. They’re keeping the YouTube brand so all back-links should stay in place. If anything it YouTube should improve.

I feel kind of dirty for posting about this “just because everyone else is”.

[1] <brash arrogance>I could have done it in two weeks.[2] </brash arrogance>

[2] Ok, maybe four[6].

[3] Someone has bought the GooTube domain. If they build it into a YouTube for hentai tentacle porn I will personally send them $5 Canadian dollars ($4.41 USD).

[4] Yes, I’m the kind of crazy geek who prefers DVD back-ups because I can rip out the locked-in trailers.

[5] The more video you push, the more it costs to push video.

[6] Six?

>> Official Press Release
>> Mark Cuban on YouTube acquisition
>> Sobles: This is huge because companies that actually spend advertising money will pay attention to Google.
>> ValleyWag: who can leave YouTube a millionaire.
>> Techcrunch has a transcript of the press release

Disorganized? Scrybe it down

engtech — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 18:17:31 +0000

My most popular post is a guide I wrote for synchronizing various programs and devices so that they all share the same contact and calendar information — which is surprising because I’m really quite disorganized. Today I came across a videocast demo of a new calendar application called Scrybe that has me pretty excited. They have some innovative approaches to natural views of data. I especially like the ability to quickly do organized web clippings when researching a subject and to print information out in a format that is convenient for wallets or pockets. They also get the concept that people need to be able to interact with their calendar/organizer offline and do periodic syncs.

It looks like they are missing the ability to sync to Microsoft Outlook (so firmly entrenched in the office that there’s no way to get away from it). But once they have that, then they’ll be able to sync with portable devices.

They’re accepting applications for beta.

>> Scrybe video demo

How to be a successful Web2.0 company

engtech — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 18:14:48 +0000

In “Web Too.Many” I lambasted and flamed the Web 2.0 bubble of start-ups that are receiving far too much attention. One of the criticisms readers had was that it’s easy to flame, but harder to suggest improvements (very true). AU Interactive has a much better post on the subject than I could ever write where he covers 10 rules of what’s needed to be successful as Web 2.0.

Make it easy
Professional visual design and copy text
Open data formats (plus RSS everywhere)
Test it
Rapid prototype (release early and often)
Do something special
Use open frameworks (corollary to #3)
Plan for scalability
Keep abreast of developing trends
A list of what does and doesn’t work in social software

Looks good to me. It still suffers from the assumption that “popular == successful” and leaves out the so-basic-yet-so-crucial:

Make money

>> 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website