Tech
Early Adoptors and the "Survivor Bias"
Thursday, May 1, 2008 2:04 PM (permalink)
I've written before about the danger of living too much within the "Snow Globe" of social media, and the recent Hitwise figures on Twitter (which neatly match our own data at Edison) have raised the specter of the "early adopter" yet again. As an early adopter myself, I can certainly identify with those who advance the notion that early adopters make the world go 'round; as a demographer/researcher/arbiter of that big ole' middle of the bell curve I also know that often the early adopter is not ahead of the curve, but on an entirely different graph altogether. Sometimes, the late adopter isn't late--they are wise. The great fallacy of painting the late adopters as Robert Scoble does here is that it is far too easy to succumb to patronizing, even pedantic attitudes towards the "luddites" who just don't get Twitter, or FriendFeed.
I love Twitter, so I won't bash it again in this space. I would just point out, as someone who started his professional career back in the days of Usenet, Compuserve, Pointcast and Altavista, that early adopters are wrong much more often than they are right. It is easy to compare fast growing, early-adopter-driven companies like Google with the moribund, middle-America-serving Best Buy, as Scoble does. The fatal flaw with such comparisons is the insidious survivor bias built into this sort of anecdotal analysis. Michael Raynor says this far more eloquently than I can in The Strategy Paradox, but essentially the gist of this flaw is that it is all too easy to compare Amazon.com with poor, struggling Sears and write all kinds of strategy books about vision, taking chances and risk. But these analyses never take into account the fact that for every single visionary company like Amazon, there are dozens of retailers who took similar, big visionary bets that are gone now and are rarely factored into the equation. So it is easy to say that Google beats Best Buy (as a stock) because of its willingness to take risks and innovate if you only make this simple comparison, but both Google and Best Buy have this in common--they are still in business. There are lots of business books about the strategic dominance of Wal-Mart and how Sears has resisted taking risks, but again, Sears is still here, selling products and paying its employees, and a lot of other retailers who may have attempted to out-innovate them are gone.
It may be that some of the greatest successes on the Web were driven and propelled by passionate early adopters--but that's axiomatic, if all you looked at were the Facebooks of the world. It's easy to look at the survivors and overstate the role of the early adopter, but a glance back at the multitudinous corpses along the way might temper one's zeal. Never forget that the safe choice is just that--a choice, and we mustn't assume that the late adopter by definition has their head in the sand. To state that the early adopter drives success misses the fact that the Internet is littered with Flooz's and Beenz's that were driven right off the road. Basing to early adopters is a risk, plain and simple, and nothing irks me more in this space than the assertion that the laggards "just don't get it." Early adopters matter (No, Mr. Scoble, I won't dispute that, and once through business school was enough!) but they are a part of a portfolio of users and not necessarily the gatekeepers to wider success.
Of course, I am still just bitter about the whole Minidisc thing, so feel free to ignore me.
The Thing About Twitter
Friday, April 11, 2008 9:20 AM (permalink)
I have seen a lot of articles crop up recently about the importance/power/necessity of Twitter as a social media tool, communications platform and even "zeitgeist" monitor. As a part of our recent study on media and social networking, I actually threw Twitter in just to get a sense of how big it really was. I am undecided about whether or not to report the actual number, but let's just say it was, in statistical terms, almost nobody. One of the problems with looking at the host of web polls and pages of comments people write about Twitter is that it is easy to think that, because everyone you know uses Twitter, that everyone uses Twitter. But, from my perspective--the big fat middle of the American bell curve--no one does. That doesn't mean it won't grow, obviously, and certainly more Twitter users are added around the globe every day--its current size is not my point.
This is not the "problem" with Twitter. I use Twitter every day, and I wish the folks who make it well. The problem is that I have seen a lot of "prominent" Twitterers devote themselves almost exclusively to the platform as a means of spreading their messages, thoughts, and (I hate this word) memes, and also to digest the same from others as a means of tapping into some greater pool of received insight. The prevailing wisdom is that you can follow lots of people (almost certainly in every case more people than you _actually_ know in real life), "dip into the stream" and get a sense of what is going on in the "twittersphere" at any one time.
Except this is demonstrably not true. I read with a certain amount of incredulity the accounts of frequent twitterers who follow--and are followed--by thousands of people who really believe that they can read a bunch of tweets and get any kind of sense for what is going on in the world, or even in some subset of it. What I see even in the limited amount of "following" that I do is about 60% personal (what I had for breakfast, what terminal I am sitting at, what cool toy I am unwrapping right now, etc.), 35% shilling/link posting/promoting and 5% "news." Except that news isn't news, it is simply the only news content on Twitter, and a lot of it I can get on other sources (RSS) without having to wade through the dross and read it at my convenience.
Twitter is a fantastic way to connect with people you actually know--to tell them you will be late, or that you just bumped into Kanye West, or you just ate some bad shellfish. To rely on it for more than that--to make something greater of it--is to believe that you can truly follow thousands--even hundreds--of people and really know or understand anything. 140 characters is a fine constraint, and one that precludes the transmission of understanding, insight or even news. The critical fallacy of the frequent Twitterer is that following thousands of people actually teaches you something or provides access to a truth that you didn't already have. But Twitter makes one damn thing at a time into every damn thing at once. If you really believe you can synthesize the onslaught of Tweets in any given hour into some sense of "zeitgiest," truth or fact, you are sadly mistaken. I am a synthesist by trade--it takes time, thoughtfulness, multiple platforms and sources, and a willingness to reserve judgement. No one reserves judgement on Twitter.
The net result of this is that I see a lot of articles out there claiming that Twitter is an essential tool for business, for social media, for customer service, etc. Twitter is at the moment an echo chamber of "a-list" bloggers and "meme spreaders," with a gigantic signal to noise ratio. In order to ingest enough signal to make it worth using as a knowledge tool, you would have to ingest millions of tons of dreck in the process--and that will only get worse as Twitter becomes more widespread, not better. I am in the sampling business, and what you get when you dip into the Twitter stream at any one time is a sample of convenience, one composed of a small subset of a small subset of a small subset, and even then you are only getting a few dozen or possibly a few hundred distinct voices. This is not by any means representative of even Twitter users, let alone the tech world (and certainly not Americans). You would have to aggregate every tweet on a topic for days/weeks and categorize/code them appropriately to get anything more than the viewpoint of who tweeted last, and loudest.
Information transmission is something I study all the time, and the big difference between "learning" in the blogosphere and learning on Twitter is a function of cognitive style and "recency." If I incorporate material from the Internet (blogs, wikis, etc) into some kind of synthesis, I am directing the cognitive flow of the process. I learn something, ascertain what I now need to know next, and go get that thing. I am able to assign importance, relevance and order to the bits of information I am aggregating, and all of this gets factored into a more careful analysis. Twitter makes that sort of cognitive style impossible and instead replaces it with "the river." If you dip into the river, and all of a sudden get 100 tweets in a row that some brand, product or service is bad ("epic fail!") or great ("FTW!") you cannot help but be swayed by this--that is the recency effect, and why two shark attacks in a single summer will prompt a host of "Shark Attacks On The Rise!" headlines. And because of the "convincing" onslaught of tweets, you are led to believe that you have somehow glimpsed a truth.
Those that would disagree with me (and I welcome that--do pop me a note) would say that Twitter is an essential (or at least important) "early warning" tool of what is coming, what is to be in the future. Again, my business is the top of the bell curve. One thing I can tell you about that bell curve is that progression along it is not inevitable, predictable or even desirable, and the people who choose not to adopt are not always "slow" or late--sometimes they are right. Often, the fact that there are "early adopters" does not portend that there will ever be "late adopters." Often, those who are ahead of the curve are actually on a different curve, one that never will lead to mainstream adoption. So it is hard to treat the messages I get from Twitter as any kind of harbinger of what will come in the future, when so much of it never does. Early adopters are in many cases orphaned as the technologies they adopt fail or are replaced or otherwise never cross the chasm into mainstream adoption. So, Twittersphere, don't be fooled into thinking that you are simply at the forefront of an inevitable change. As I frequently remind my (by now exasperated) friends and family, the folks who can't understand why Bon Jovi sells millions of records, are really folks who don't understand millions of people.
Finally, what happens if Twitter does cross that chasm? What if tens of millions of Americans start using Twitter? Will that signal-to-noise ratio get better, or worse? I'd like to end with one simple suggestion to make Twitter better, and keep it from imploding if and when it hits that dreaded, noisy threshold of consumer adoption: make it so you have to be approved to follow someone. With that one simple change, the rush to win the followers arms race would end, Twitter circles would be much closer approximations of real social circles, and the center would hold.
So, Twitter: fantastic "keep-in-touch" plaform, poor communication/learning platform. And now I'm going to post a link to this article on Twitter.
Barriers to Innovation
Thursday, February 28, 2008 2:46 PM (permalink)
Is it possibly true that it could take a half a billion dollars to successfully compete with World of Warcraft? If Activision CEO Bobby Kotick is correct in this, it is not only a potentially untraversable strategic moat, it is also a real barrier to innovation. Sure, there will always be quality shareware and MMORPG's published with less grandiose ambitions, but if the price of entry for something truly transcendent is $500 Million, where will the next WoW come from? Will anyone even try with a potentially huge loss, and even many positive scenarios showing marginal return on investment? Not to mention the gamer's investment--with WoW soaking up so much online time (indeed, requiring it for in-game success), how many mainstream gamers will make that investment?
Yet, history indicates that someone will try, and someone will succeed. I can't wait to see what that looks like.
An Unsatisfying Flirtation
Thursday, February 28, 2008 9:37 AM (permalink)
For a lark, I experimented with using creaky old Radio to upstream this blog instead of exporting from Tinderbox and manually uploading the site using FTP. Experiment over. While both options gave me a locally published weblog (which I prefer, cause I'm 'fussy' that way) and I still did a lot of my writing in Tinderbox, Radio's far-too-easy one-click interface between RSS and posting (and merciless, constant upstreaming) actually affected my writing--my blog posts were essentially becoming Twitter posts. I use Twitter for twitter posts, and I don't think I add any real value as a link-blogger, so the past two month's worth of my blogging output were strangely untherapeutic, and God knows I need therapy. I know pretty much any blogging tool can be customized to suit one's particular style, but it is funny how, all things being equal, my 'style' changed immensely from one tool to the other.
Old Radio links still work for now; will redirect them on my next big honkin' flight across the Atlantic.
It was so painless and easy to cancel my T-Mobile Hotspot account that I almost felt bad doing it.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008 8:59 AM (permalink)
Starbucks Drops T-Mobile
Monday, February 11, 2008 8:58 AM (permalink)
Starbucks Drops T-Mobile Hotspots, Brings in AT&T WiFi. On Monday, Starbucks announced that it will be dropping T-Mobile as its exclusive WiFi provider and instead going with AT&T. This was my instant impetus to rid myself of hotspot memberships entirely, and finally switch over to Sprint's EVDO system.
[Wired: Top Stories]Why Does Twitter Go Down?
Friday, February 1, 2008 8:08 AM (permalink)
Why does Twitter go down?. Don't know, but I do know there is no such thing as a free lunch. I would prefer to pay a monthly "twitter" fee than have the system clogged with ads, but I would certainly rather pay for it than not, since I find it useful. It is a shame that the only people who have any of my Twitter coffee money for this are the folks who make Twitterific and not the Twitterers themselves.
[Scripting News]
Zune on the Mac - Update
Monday, July 9, 2007 10:03 PM (permalink)
The latest beta of Parallels now recognizes and syncs with the Zune. So I can actually hook up my iPod AND my Zune to my Mac at the same time. So, knock it off, all you PC vs. Mac folks--let's live together.
Okay--I'm a Mac guy, and I bought a Zune
Monday, December 11, 2006 11:37 AM (permalink)
I wanted to get a portable video player for my frequent flying, so I did a considerable amount of research and finally settled on Microsoft's Zune, despite all the rabid anti-Microsoft fervor with all the Digg-y kids out there. Now, I am as dyed-in-the-wool a Mac user as they come, as evidenced by the fact that I am writing this in Tinderbox, which (for now!) is as Mac-centric as they come. In fact, I am an outright inconvenience to the rest of my office back in NJ, who are all on a PC network and require the PC for some of our more esoteric research apps. Still, I 'cope' and do quite nicely with my MacBook Pro, Parallels, and (where necessary) Boot Camp.
But. I bought a Zune. I have a first generation iPod, so I am no luddite. Guess what, Mac fanboys, the Zune is actually pretty good. True, I have to use Boot Camp to get my Mac to recognize it (Parallels won't--yet) but in my case this is not a hardship since I already had to use Bootcamp for a couple of work apps. Frankly, despite the '5.5' appellation given to the latest iteration of iPod Video players, the '1.0' Zune has a number of compelling features that simply beat out the iPod. Here are my top 5:
1. The Screen--the "iPod Video" is no video player. It's the same screen the music iPod uses--but the tiny size is no "feature," it is an inconvenience. I ripped the complete Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Widescreen) to my Zune yesterday--try even watching a widescreen-aspect video on the current iPod video. Ow, my eyes.
2. The Radio. Why doesn't the iPod have a radio? I know I can pay even more money and get the Radio Remote, but the Zune ships with a pretty great FM radio interface, complete with RDS.
3. Zune Pass. iTunes music store has no subscription music option. Zune does. Pretty big benefit, as far as i am concerned.
4. Interface. This one, I grant, is a matter of opinion, but the Zune Interface is nice and clean, easy to use, and makes great use of the increased vertical real estate on the Zune. Besides, that scroll wheel on the iPod felt like cracking a safe with my massive music collection. I don't miss the scroll wheel at all.
5. The casing. Why, at version 5.5, does the iPod still scratch with a sneeze? This is one that much-maligned market researchers like myself could have helped to fix at version 2. You NEED cases and screen protectors with iPods, because they scratch so easily. Can't scratch the Zune, which tells me that they read all the iPod users' feedback, even if Apple didn't.
Apples to apples (no pun intended), the Zune is just a better value. Priced exactly the same as the iPod video with the same amount of hard drive space (30 Gigs), it just has more to offer. Note that I didn't even mention the Wireless functionality yet--which, admittedly, holds little use for me now, but perhaps in the future (even with a hack) I could grab my tunes off my wireless network. Doesn't exist now, but could, at least. Couldn't, with the iPod.
The biggest complaints I have heard about the Zune could easily be applied to the iPod--the draconian DRM, for one. How is the Zune's any worse than the iTunes "7-strikes" model? And the wireless feature is getting slammed by lots of pro-mac press. At least they tried! C'mon, Apple--respond with something cooler, and I will buy it.
Again, I am as big an Apple fanboy as they come. The Zune, however, is a welcome entrant--Apple has let the iPod stagnate over the years, as far as I am concered. Maybe the increased functionality of the Zune will convince Apple's product engineers that the public is ready for more robust .MP3 players.
The Future of VoIP
Monday, October 23, 2006 8:23 PM (permalink)
...is only limited by our imagination. Services like this one make it painfully clear that Vonage is not a telecommunications company, Vonage is a marketing company--just like Coca-Cola. Except Coke's formula is still a secret.
Now, if they could just do something about my mobile phone bill...
The Almost Perfect Feed Reader
Wednesday, July 19, 2006 12:00 AM (permalink)
I have experimented with at least 10 different feed readers so far, and the one I generally keep coming back to is NewsGator, primarily because I like to use NetNewsWire on my Mac, but still use a web reader from time to time. I suppose I could sync Bloglines with a desktop client, but I do like NetNewsWire a lot, and it is especially easy to blog with (NewsFire has an even better interface, and if it had easy one-click options to blog and send to de.licio.us, I would love it even more--but I am soooo lazy that I can't be bothered to go up to the menu bar to select these things.
Recently, though, I have come across three different "next gen" web-based feed readers that are all worth mentioning for various reasons:
1. The Humanized Reader (still in beta, and not yet ready for prime-time) attempts to do away with the familiar motif of Google's "pages" (i.e., click on the next page to get more search results) and instead simply give you more news if you want it--in other words, as long as you keep scrolling down, it will keep populating the page. I think that is a great idea if you have a manageable number of feeds (I don't, sadly)--a very user-friendly experience. The link I gave you, however, returns all feeds. I fear that just giving you that link might set me up for a lawsuit--when your relatives find you, after eight days of starvation, still scrolling down until you consume the entire internet, don't say I didn't warn you...
2. I love NewsHutch, (also in beta) which is drop-dead gorgeous. It strips away a lot of the excess "features" of most web-based news readers, and presents possibly the most attractive, simple and easy-to-use interface for reading feeds I have used to date. It hasn't replaced NetNewsWire for me, because a lot of my feed reading is tied to updating various blogs and content for my company, but if all you want to do is kick back and read, NewsHutch is just stellar.
3. Finally, Flock's time has arrived. After playing around with its slower, buggier predecessors, I can now report that the Flock browser is extremely usable and useful, especially if you are a blogger. The built-in feed reader, blogging interface and Flickr integration mean that you can grab an article or link, wrap it around a picture, and get it on your blog all within the browser, and all without a hitch. Is it perfect? No, but what is? I wish the feed reader behaved slightly better, and that I had an interface to my previous blog posts that worked like MarsEdit, but if you only had a copy of Flock on a USB drive, you are a lean, mean blogging machine from any computer in the world.
What would I love to see in a web-based feedreader? My biggest gripe right now is that none of these readers sync with my desktop client, but that is a small issue. I want my feed reader to be as simple and pleasurable to read as NewsFire (NewsHutch is pretty much there) but have integrated clipping/blogging functionality like Flock. The Lektora/Qumana combination are close, since they provide the web-based experience but cache everything locally, so I can use my browser like an off-line client, but right now the integration between Lektora (the feedreader) and Qumana (the blogging client) is broken and Lektora feels like it isn't getting enough love to me.
My perfect reader--Newshutch, running on localhost (like Lektora) with one-button clip/publish functionality. Plus a pony.
I Want to Give Six Apart My Money
Saturday, June 3, 2006 10:08 PM (permalink)
A few days ago, Mike Rundle wrote an interesting comparison of Movable Type vs. Wordpress over on the Business Logs site. Since there are many users of both, Mike's post generated a lot of passionate comments, many of them anti-Six Apart. I'm no designer, and little more than a hobby-ish developer--my day job keeps me busy enough. But I am a licensee of Movable Type, and I have used Wordpress for various little projects, so the technical aspects of Mike's piece don't fly completely over my head. There is, however, another decidedly non-technical aspect to Mike's comparison that bears amplification.
About a year and a half ago, soon after I joined Edison, I pushed very hard to get our website (a hideous, out-of-the-box Frontpage special) redesigned to make publishing content easier. Edison has grown into a thriving and profitable business, in no small part due to an aggressive thought-leadership strategy of continually putting new studies and analyses into the market. When I took on the task of turning our website into a more effective platform for these purposes, I turned to Movable Type to handle all of the static and dynamic pages of our site. If you visit the site now, the design may be a little kludgy (which is not the fault of the person who did the original stylesheet--anything that looks bad I probably did), but the site works like a charm, is well-optimized for search engines, and is dead easy for the folks back in the office to add columns and studies to.
The success of this modest redesign in 2004 has given me a bit more leeway (and budget) in 2006 to really spruce it up, and we have engaged the aforementioned Mr. Rundle to do the job (and I can tell you, it is going to look fantastic.) We had the option of moving to a new platform, and I am very cognizant of the increased traction Wordpress has with developers and designers. I am sure there are more Kubrick-themed websites out there than people who even know who Stanley Kubrick was. We chose to stick with Movable Type, however.
Now, I can give you a few technical reasons why. We are going to launch two auxiliary blogs to accompany the Edison site redesign, and Movable Type makes administration of multiple sites under one interface dead easy. The interface itself is very professional and just "feels" more robust than many of the other options I have tried. And, frankly, I know how it works, and inertia plays a role here, too. The biggest reason we are staying with Movable Type, however, remains the same as the reason we started with Movable Type in the first place. There is a there there, as one of my colleagues at work might say.
We have had three or four reasonably serious problems with the site in the past couple of years, and whether they were due to Movable Type or not, the support staff at Six Apart solved every one of them, generally within an hour of our initial ticket. We pay for that support within the terms of our commercial license, and the fact that there is a company there with a tech support function is 100% why we will continue to use Movable Type for our site. I am no Luddite, and am not afraid of getting my hands all code-y while I monkey around with my little hobby. But, again, I am but a dilettante when it comes to web design and development. I am not arrogant enough to think that the tiny bit of knowledge I have that enables me to get this article published on the web will save Edison from some kind of MySQL disaster. But Six Apart once saved me from a MySQL disaster, and got us back online in an hour. That's money to us.
Look, I know there is a huge community of developers out there who are more than happy to help out with Wordpress. If I am building a website for personal reasons, I might use Wordpress (have done), Tinderbox (this site) or even iWeb, for crying out loud, as I have done for my personal site (ugly URLS and bloated code be damned--there is currently no easier way to get my family photos out of iPhoto and onto the Web, and I am all about easy.) I really like Wordpress, for many of the reasons Mike mentioned. I also know that there are hundreds of folks out there who are available on a contract basis to fix Wordpress problems for a fee. What you have to realize, though, is that to a small business such as ours, retainers and hourly developer fees are "variable costs." A Movable Type license is a fixed cost. Fixed costs can be capitalized, predicted and budgeted for.
I have met some of the folks from Six Apart; I have even asked Six Apart's Anil Dash to be a speaker on a technology panel I moderated last year at the National Association of Broadcasters' Radio Show. They are smart people, and seem to have a business there. That is important to us. Again, NO disrespect to the Wordpress folks--and if we wanted a hosted solution, wordpress.com might have been a real option for us. But to me, there aren't really a lot of options for small companies like ours who don't have a full-time web development staff but want the stability of a license and paid support. So, for us, Movable Type vs. Wordpress is currently a non-starter (though Movable Type vs. Expression Engine is a more interesting comparison for our purposes.)
Wordpress is great--the more I play around with it, the better I like it. But unlike many of the folks who deserted Movable Type for Wordpress, I need to pay for it. If our site goes fakakta, we can't wait a day--we can't wait an hour.
My Life in 30 Boxes Or Less
Sunday, May 28, 2006 8:46 PM (permalink)
I spent some time on Sunday playing around with the latest in an interminable slew of calendar applications, called 30 Boxes. I have been looking for a good calendar app for a while, and while there are lots of purty Ajax-whiz-bangy ones coming out, they have all failed on one or more of my three criteria:
- Ability to share calendars with friends/family without requiring them to sign up/join something
- Ability to post to/read from my calendar from my mobile phone
- Doesn't look like it was beat with a ugly stick
Most of the apps I have seen that pass #3 will fail #2. If the goal of a calendar app is merely to use the latest Ajax/Ruby/Yada technology, then that app will most likely not be looked kindly upon by my Blackberry. Sure, there are lots of apps out there that will produce an iCal feed, which I could then subscribe to and sync using something like Pocketmac, but I don't want to sync anything. I don't think I have ever had two flawless syncs in a row--there are scores of days on my Blackberry calendar with duplicate events, prematurely deleted to-do items, etc. No, I don't want to sync anything--I want to write once, read anywhere. As I mentioned in a previous post, I wish Apple would enable this by enabling true two-way communication between iCal and any calendars iCal publishes to the web, but that doesn't look like it is happening anytime soon.
Until Google makes those Wi-Fi hotspot boxers I suggested to them, my mobile is the most reliable means I have of interacting with the various tools I use to stay sane on the road. There are some tools I use (like Alex King's TasksPro and the awesome mobile edition of NewsGator) that both work great and look great on my Mac and my phone. I haven't yet found a calendar app that fits the bill, but 30 Boxes is very promising.
First of all, the 30 Boxes calendar itself looks and works great--presentation is very clear, and the natural language input box to add events and appointments (something Spongecell has also sussed out) works very well. The "full-screen" version of the calendar (essentially the regular version, minus browser toolbar) is also particularly well-implemented--if you didn't know better, you could almost mistake it for a desktop client (here's mine).
More importantly, they have a mobile interface that, while not quite as slick as the one on TaskPro, is functional and neat. I can add appointments and check dates pretty quickly (as fast as my superhuman T9-enhanced thumbs can go, anyway) and more improvements are promised. If I can access and edit my contacts, tasks, dates, feeds and email on my mobile phone without having to sync anything, I am a happy camper.
Where 30 Boxes falls short, for now, is in the sharing department (see my #1 criteria, above). While I can sign up a "buddy" and give them access to my calendar, currently there is no way to simply publish my calendar for the general public (though the folks behind 30 Boxes say this is coming.). In fact, the only "public" page that buddy and non-buddy alike can access is this aggregator page that appears to track everything but my calendar. I admit to still being fuzzy about the nebulous benefits of this whole social networking thing--while I am sure my wife could be talked into signing up as "my buddy" so she can liberally sprinkle Rake Leaves throughout my calendar, I don't need to "social network" with my parents; I just want them to have access to my schedule without signing up for anything (something Trumba has figured out pretty well.) Time will also tell if the calendar is the appropriate water cooler around which to "collect" my buddies, Flickr photos and feeds. Dunno about that. For now, however, I will continue to give 30 Boxes a spin, and I look forward to seeing how this app develops over the next few months.
What Google Gave Up to Break Into China
Sunday, May 28, 2006 8:45 PM (permalink)
All credit here to Iain Rowan, on whose blog I found the following:
- Google image search for "tiananmen"
- Google image search for "tiananmen" on China's spiffy new version of Google
I am sure that there are plenty of blaugueristas out there who view this as a soul-less, evil act by Google, but it is vastly more complicated than that. Still, it does go to show one thing--one definition of 'genius' is an infinite capacity to take pains. The Chinese government has shown some real genius when it comes to censorship.
Calendar Apps and why .Mac is particularly unsatisfying
Sunday, May 28, 2006 8:44 PM (permalink)
I have been trying to find a good online calendar so I can sync my schedule with my wife's, and also keep my folks in the loop. I am also hoping to find one with to-do lists, and possibly even contacts. Remember The Milk is far and away the best to-do list app I have found, but no calendar. And I really like Trumba as a calendar, but no tasks. I suppose I could cobble something together with both (and keep my contacts synched with .Mac) but what I really want is all the nifty .Mac/iLife apps I have to come with corresponding, all-nifty-Web 2.0-like online counterparts. In other words, it's nice that I can sync my iCal to-do lists with .Mac, but why can't I check them off as complete online? Someday, I hope, either some enterprising programmers will crack into .Mac and make it really useful, or Apple will let go of the whole client paradigm and realize that I don't want my data to be shackled, just secure.
TextDrive
Sunday, May 28, 2006 8:11 PM (permalink)
You won't see a lot of shilling for products on this blog; I don't really need the .05 microcents or whatever I might get from running ads here. I do feel compelled, however, to share what I see as a great deal from time to time when I see 'em. If you have ever tinkered with starting your own business (or want to significantly upgrade your existing Internet presence) you have to take a look at my webhost, TextDrive, and their latest offer, The Mixed Grill. I get no kickbacks for this--I am just a big fan of these guys and wish them all the best (mild disclaimer--I was one of the original "VC 200" microinvestors a few years back, so I have lifetime hosting anyway). For $499, their lifetime offer of webhosting, secure storage, and online collaboration / messaging / scheduling tools simply cannot be beat. You could easily run your whole business off that package for less than you might pay a month for a dedicated Microsoft box that did all the same stuff (plus a bunch of other stuff a small business probably doesn't need.)
No-brainer.
