I’ve been using JetBrains Omea Reader for a while now. Last year, I tried out Google Reader for a few months, but didn’t like the stream-only view it had. So I went back to Omea Reader. Well, I’m now back to Google Reader. Omea Reader has had some issues and ironically they finally released a fix today, but I decided that I’d still switch to Google Reader (call it a programmers intuition). That and Scoble keeps writing about how fast he hits “J, J, J, J” on his blog. I wonder if his J and K keys are wearing out faster than his other keys.
While I’m on the topic of Scoble, it’s kind of cool that I can just type in “Scoble” into my address bar and it takes me to his homepage.
Sweet. Toward the end of November, Microsoft had an offer to get a free copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Professional and/or Microsoft Windows Visa Business. I registered and signed up for the videos, but it was right after Thanksgiving week and had exams and homework. By time I got around to actually watching the videos, the site said they were all out, unless you already signed up. I crossed my fingers. I got this email yesterday:
Dear Andrew:
Congratulations.You’ve learned how to leverage the 2007 Microsoft Office system to enable to workers to get connected to the information they need. And now your free, full-licensed copy of the Microsoft Office Professional 2007 is on its way.
I’m not crazy about the performancing deal, which doesn’t include the ad network or Firefox add-on, but that’s life when you join a site that someday could be acquired by a different entity. Nick Wilson is calling this “good news” which I guess proves that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Besides, between the raw data collected by Apache and processed through Analog, AWStats, and Webalizer. Plus Google Analytics, it’s not like I needed yet another metrics meter anyway.
I also sent an email to them requesting that my account and data be removed:
To Whom It May Concern:
In light of Performancing’s recent acquisition by PayPerPost, I would like to request that my account be terminated immediately and all associated data be removed.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
I haven’t used SSI for years. I think I can safely say it’s been at least 5 years since I last used SSI. Apparently, it’s still alive and well though. My cousin, Nick, has been learning web design and asking me all sorts of questions. I keep tabs on what he’s doing and point him in various directions to new things he might be interested in.
The latest was SSI. I noticed that he had a few pages, all with the same navigation bar, and thought to myself, Hmm…what’s the easiest way to replace this? Oh, I know SSI!
I then said to myself, Crap, it’s been a while since I wrote, let alone even seen, any SSI directives.
So I did a bit of research, whipped up a quick site to show off how cool SSI is, and then included some links to some decent SSI pages.
I was even able to do some fancy .htaccess and linking to show the workings of the SSI pages I made without having duplicates (in the traditional sense).
I did a cp -l to link the files to a new directory and then placed the follow in the .htaccess file to have them display and not execute as either SSI or HTML:
Meanwhile, it emerged today as a result of SEC filings that Apple is being sued over an alleged monopoly. The allegation is that Apple’s DRM is monopolistic, since it prevents iTunes music from being played on anything apart from an iPod and vice versa (songs bought elsewhere don’t tend to work with iPods).
Well duh. DRM has always been a two fold issue. First, it supports the RIAAs infantile desire requirement to “protect” “their” music. Second, it’s a reasonably good business model: keep people locked into your system.
But there are issues.
First, DRM for the RIAAs sake is one of those things where it really only hurts the honest people. Current DRM systems suck balls because their implemented poorly. Thus, someone like DVD John is able to crack them within hours of release. The honest people don’t know how to unlock their music and the dishonest people do, causing hell for the rest of everyone else.
Locking people into your system may be a good thing. That is, until people jump ship and go to your competitors product. Then what? In a world where everything must, and I do mean MUST, communicate with EVERYTHING else, proprietary formats are doomed to failure. Case in point: Betamax, ATRAC3, UMD. Ok, actually that’s more than one and they are all Sony technologies (which I currently ban). But I think the point is still valid.
So what? Well, I hope the coming year sees the change in companies that I have been seeking for years. Much like the proverbial “Peace on Earth”, I doubt it will happen. But it’s something to consider. For any companies or persons at companies who happen to not only stumble upon this post, but also happen to read this far: I just want to let you know that my purchasing choices do tend to reflect my desire for a level of openness: open source, non-proprietary, APIs, etc.
P.S. I found the original Mashable post via Scoble’s Google Shared RSS, it’s pretty cool and picks up on a lot of things I don’t see in my limited set. Thanks Robert!
In between studying today (and by “today”, I still mean Friday), I called up MSN and canceled my MSN Direct service for my SPOT watch. Why? I wasn’t using like I used to.
One of the main reasons I got the watch was so I could schedule events in Outlook, have them beamed to my watch, and then not forget them. But once I ditched Outlook, it became harder to do this. I ended up using Outlook exclusively for calendaring and Thunderbird for email. Then I started Beta testing Outlook 2007 earlier in the year. The plugin for Outlook wouldn’t work with the Beta. Around the same time, I started using 30 Boxes. I jury rigged a string of programs on my server to get data to my watch. Finally, I switched over to Google Calendars. With GCal, I was able to send the messages straight to my phone. This was easier and more reliable then my jury rigged solution.
But all of this could have been prevented. How? API.
If Microsoft had an API for the SPOT so that others could write plugins, I would probably still be using my SPOT watch. But in typical Microsoft fashion, the elected to keep SPOT all to themselves. In doing so, they actually hurt their potential user base.
How? Let’s take a look at three examples. In the first example, Bob uses Outlook for his email and scheduling needs. Bob would like to be alerted to appointments he has, so he signs up for MSN Direct and all is good in Bob’s world.
John currently uses Thunderbird, but he’s used Outlook before and wouldn’t mind going back to Outlook so he can use MSN Direct to receive calendar alerts.
Andrew doesn’t like using Outlook for various reasons, but he like getting alerts. If Microsoft had an API for MSN Direct, Andrew could write a script that would send data to his SPOT watch. Andrew would be happy, Microsoft would gain another customer and earn Andrew’s $60. Since Microsoft doesn’t have an API though, they lose Andrew and his $60. If Andrew happens to be an Alpha buyer, they could also loose more potential customers.
Sending large files to someone can be hard. If the person I’m trying to send the files to is on the same network as I am, I usually just use AIM. If they’re not, I’ll upload the file to my server for them to download.
But what if you don’t have a server?
File uploading businesses are pretty much a dime a dozen, but MediaFire caught my eye with an easy to use upload form that has no size restrictions or mandatory user registration.
It’s easy to get started, especially with the following screen cast I made showing how to upload:
Unless you go to college, you may not have heard about the recent revolt against Facebook this week.
Tuesday morning, after a wonderful three day weekend for most (but not me), Facebook updated their website with the now infamous “News Feeds.” Within hours, people started revolting by the masses. A group called “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)” was created and within hours over 10,000 people had signed up. A large number, but only a fraction of what would happen. By the end of the day, that number had increased nearly ten-fold to over 100,000.
Within a a few rather long days, that number would eventually reach over a quarter-million users. 750,000 out of 8,000,000 doesn’t seem like a whole lot, but it is. The issue at hand was a perceived invasion of privacy. I used “perceived” because while no new data was being collected or mined, users of Facebook did feel like their lives had been taken to a whole new level of openness.
The feature in question appears on the user’s home page and looks like a glitzy laundry list. It chronicles every action a user’s friends have recently taken on Facebook. These include the mundane: Sally befriended Joan, the boring: Tim now likes The Daily Show, and the juicy: John and Beth broke up. And in case it matters, each action is time-stamped to the minute.
What came next was pretty amazing, and not in a good way:
In a post titled “Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You.” Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook, writes, “We’ve been getting a lot of feedback about Mini-Feed and News Feed. We think they are great products, but we know that many of you are not immediate fans, and have found them overwhelming and cluttered.”
Calm down? Why should anyone calm down? Facebook managed to alienate a very significant number of their users with this “upgrade” and they want them to breathe. I can see it now: a group of Facebook students crowded outside Mark Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto office shouting “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Why not just roll back the update until a suitable solution could be found?
As tension between Facebook users and Facebook-the-company grew, a temporary fix emerged:
In addition to having a News Feed on your homepage, each user also has a Mini-feed on their profile page that details just their actions.
Clicking on the “X” would remove that item from both your Mini-feed and the News Feed of your friends. But users would have to click through up to 10 “X”‘s to remove all the items. A spiffy, Javascript-based bookmarklet, Nuke Facebook Feed Items, let users easily remove all items.
Then early Friday morning, Mark posted another article, “An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg:” The first sentence said it all, “We really messed this one up.”
People, and companies, are going to make mistakes. That’s a fact. While fessing up your mistakes should be a requirement, it’s not. Robert Scoble pretty much sums it up: From scobleizer.wordpress.com:
Notice how different this is from how HP is handling things? Where’s the HP’s CEO’s blog?
Scoble is referring, of course, referring to the recent HP Privacy Fiasco.
I digress. Zuckerberg continues, “When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.”
Facebook decided not to roll back the changes, I still think they should have. Instead, they opted to add more privacy features. From blog.facebook.com:
This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about.
This is amazing. Google has a very good crawler and will find anything, just about. Interestingly enough, many of these look like PDFs, with some PowerPoint (PPT) and Word Documents (DOC). And don’t think that just removing the document will take it off the web. Often times the data is cached by Google or other organizations, such as the Internet Archive (aka Wayback Machine).
Sometimes I waste time on the Net by putting in interesting searches into Google. Today’s was quite interesting — Google this: Confidential “do not distribute.”
Ryan Goodwin says, “That’s 59,000 dumb-ass webmasters.”
[tags]google, confidential, do not distribute[/tags]
