Yes, it’s happening, the galactic collapse of social media is happening. No no no, this is a GOOD collapse. All of these cool apps have been out there in the Internet tubes getting lots of peeps but until major parts and minor parts come together in better collections, it’s all a mess and kind of useless. For example, a house is made up of 2X4s sheet rock, shingles, doors, trim, paint, concrete, stone, brick, nails, you get the picture. If they’re spread out all over the place on the ground and around the neighborhood, it’s hard to track, things go missing, it’s not a house. It’s just parts. A lot of social media is that way but it’s starting to coalesce into areas.
Google has done a good job of snapping up properties like youtube, picasa, blogger, talk, docs, gmail etc. And, it all kind of, sort of, fits into iGoogle. I didn’t mention Orkut because, well, no offense but, I know no one who uses it. Hey, it’s probably good. iGoogle, like my.yahoo and other personal dashboards were great when they started but didn’t evolve a whole lot. Here and there widgets popped up but with social media being so hot, so diverse, so rapid in growth, people got caught up in their Twitters, re.dig-u-lose-whatever, mo-blogging, gps-enabled-cu-see-me, facebook stuff, they didnt pay any attention to the fact that they were going to have to track all this stuff and pretty soon invite-fatigue set in.
Invite-fatigue is a chronic disorder of social media participants who are constantly joining sites, inviting friends, setting up profiles and managing invites from other friends. It’s a job in itself to constantly track who might have joined facebook since the last time you let it fondle your Yahoo address book, AIM list, Plaxo and Linked-In accounts. Oh, and Outlook. I’m surprised everyone isnt just passed out at their keyboards with bleeding eyes and swollen fingers. Perhaps you are.
And in the midst of all of this amazing innovation, Netvibes, a dashboard provider or moderate popularity releases Ginger. Ginger hooks into just about all of the major social media apps and I’d be surprised if within 90 days, everything else in the long tail of SM apps are not addresses, wrapped up into widgets and festooning peoples private and public pages.
Now that’s a very cool thing there that almost went under the radar. In essence, you can now make a public “web page” (I hate calling it that) built on SM widgets, RSS feeds, web-page inserts, calendars (I included my own compiled 2008 road racing calendar) and then layer in tabs so you’re essentially making a destination site. How do you like that?
Netvibes is now way out in front of everyone else in this space. If they didn’t do anything for 6 months, they’d still be out in front. They’ve essentially created personal portals for all aspects of social media. The game has changed, I think that now everyone in the space understands what’s at stake and if they want to be a player they’re either owning the SM properties, building SM properties or applying metrics to measure the marketing / sales values of SM properties. Game on.
We got the message, thank you very much. HD-DVD is dead. There is no need to trumpet it over and over again, every single day from every hill-top. We’re clear on the concept, Sony won, there are lots of parties in Tokyo and the Big Machines of Industry are ramping up production. Everyone is calling for the impending price-drops around Blu-ray players and media. Yay. Not quite yet.
In all of the bloodshed we forgot why the formats were different and how Blu-ray is not exactly “friendly”. Blu-ray is about content control. I don’t need to spend too much time on this but it’s a matter of months before it’s cracked and Blu-ray rips are all over the torrents making the Interwebs even more crowded. It’s just a fact, lets not pretend it’s not going to happen.
That’s not what I’m interested in, I dont have any need for downloading 25GB movies, it’s just not worth it, VOD and Netflix are far simpler. What I do care about is the fact that none of the Blu-ray players support xvid / divx / dvd-mp3 etc. Since we all know that a $50 Philips DVD player from Walmart will play just about anything you throw at it, I could wonder why a $500 player doesn’t. But I don’t wonder. I know the reason, it’s control. It’s the same control that’s in play with Apple TV not playing other formats like Divx & WMV, they want to control how you consume media and that’s not good for the consumer. You see, I edit video and like to encode it into XviD for online and DVD distribution. So, I’m going to have to own 3 DVD players now? (XBOX, Philips & Blu-ray)? Thats just stupid.
So, here’s what needs to change:
1. Apple TV, allow more codecs (the ones people use)
2. MS, same deal, you opened it up half way but now you need to do it for the Extenders too
3. Blu-ray player makers, don’t alienate the consumer when there is a real legitimate need here
How legitimate is it? With all of the video recorders moving to MPEG4, many of which encode directly to divx, that’s how people edit and record their home movies. Video editing is making its way into the home at a rapid pace and people are sharing a lot of video. The players that work with the most formats will win over the ones that have the best Faroudja processors.
So, when I see a player that plays nice with my formats, I’ll upgrade my Netflix account, get that Mitsubishi Diamond 64″ 1080p DLP rear-projection screen and figure out which receiver I’ll be getting (probably the new Pioneer Elite).
I like WordPress but I’m having issues… A bunch of the plugins are just not working and it’s making me completely insane. I can post and do the important stuff but little things like the social media bookmarking is wonky. The kicker is that these plugins are “supported” through the developers comment sections on their own WP blogs. If we needed proof that comments are just about useless for anything other than “commenting”, this confirms it. Have they not heard of VBulletin?
Perhaps I read the news on this stuff more than most so I knew as soon as WB broke up with HD-DVD there was another disk in their life. I’d like to see a WB – HD-DVD facebook defriending parody of that…
I guess some people didn’t get the memo. Those people probably don’t get most memos…
If only all my predictions would come true so quickly. Ginger, a new version of Netvibes is picking up where Plaxo was going before they decided it was time to put their company up for sale. They might have to take the sign out of the window since I think Ginger might beat them senseless right out of the gate.
With Plaxo and now Ginger, we’re seeing the first of what will be called “the great aggregation” and all of my far-flung social apps will come carpet-bagging to one central hub.
Will the existing, super-sites get right into a street fight to buy these new focal points? Only time will tell. One thing is certain, the universe of social sites is still expanding but the opposing forces are in play and we’ll soon see needed contraction. Now all I need is a private-beta password for Ginger
I’ve been hearing about Dell losing marketshare to HP for a while but I’ve always been a Dell guy. But when I started to play with the new HP dv6000 series laptops, I had a change of heart. It also coincided with a new Dell laptop that was too hot to use on my lap and had serious performance issues for a Core 2 Duo.
I was changing sides. I went on-line just before the holidays and started to look at the DV6000 HPs and was able to build a serious system for about 1400. Alas, the wait would be 3 weeks and I wanted something sooner, like that day. I went over to Fry’s and experienced their abysmal customer service which sent me back to Best Buy where they had a fresh-off-the-boat Special Edition, the DV6780se. The case is a cool bronze metallic which makes this much more interesting looking than your everyday thick black shingle.
The se comes with 3GB of RAM, a good video card, Altec Lansing speakers, 12 cell battery for about 4 hours of solid use, webcam, 220GB HD, gold tone keyboard, HDMI out, firewire, B/G/N networking, lightscribe and a 1.67 Socket P Intel Dual Core CPU.
First, it’s fast in spite of what seems like a small CPU. I’ve had no issues and I demand a lot from these systems. The 3GB of ram and 220GB hard drive are a nice departure from the standard 1GB and 80GB you see in so many systems. The touch sensitive bar below the speakers is great if I only use it for volume control. Before I continue to gush, I have a few small issues:
- The gold tone keyboard is impossible to use in low light. I use this in bed witha small night stand light. The keyboard made it very hard to type.
- No Bluetooth. This is a silly thing not to include but this in NOT HP’s fault, Best Buy does not like to sell laptops with Bluetooth when they can sell you Bluetooth as a nice $40 extra. Adding factory bluetooth after the fact is very complex.
- The touchpad management allows you to do everything except change acceleration. Very weird. I have to move my finger across the pad 3 times to get across the screen.
Other than the gold keyboard, this is a DV6000 / Best Buy complaint in general.
Since I don’t use Bluetooth very much it’s not a deal breaker but I would have paid more for one with that included, just in case I ever wanted to use it. The keyboard is another thing. I bought a factory black keyboard for $20 on ebay and replaced the gold one. I use this in low-light all the time, the black one is a HUGE difference.
If I could change one thing, backlit keyboards. We take these things everywhere, it’s time this was standard on most systems or at least an option that’s easy to replace.
All things considered, I think I paid about $1100 for it and that’s a screaming deal. It’s pretty, fast, reliable and an all-around all-star. It’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned.
I can’t stop talking about how many invitations I’m getting from people on new social networks here and there. It’s just insane and I know I’m part of the majority of internet users who are experiencing the same thing.
The problem is, most of these sites are useful, have innovative features and add value to some degree. The frustration is, they’re all still disconnected and just managing them is a nightmare.
I found yet another one today, Dopplr.com which lets you publish your travel dates and locations so you and your friends / contacts can meet up on the road. Well, dammit, I like that. I think it’s useful. Crap. Now I have ANOTHER social networking site that I need to:
1. Make a whole new account
2. Populate a profile
3. Upload my address book
4. Invite a few hundred people
5. Manage ad infinitum…
But, it’s cool! Ugh. I’m reaching critical mass here. I didn’t sign up yet due to my ongoing social-network-participation-agony.
In 2007 we saw some very cool evolutions in social networking. That was the trickle, 2008 is the flood. I predict we’ll have about 16 months of merging, launching, crashing, hacking, mass-opt-ins, mass-opt-outs and general mayhem as some new kids come out of the blocks with Facebook-killers, new all-tie-in platforms (where it connects all networks together) and some old-timers either evolve or die.
Summer 2009, the landscape of social networks will be completely different than it is now. We’ll have seen more of the underbelly (bad people doing bad things to good people and it gets on the news), the mergers, the acquisitions, the IPOs, the busts and what is left standing will be likely about 3 major players that have sucked in all of the cool widgets, add-ons, functions and combined into social megaliths (Imagine Linked-In, Evite, ofoto, Dopplr, twitter, youtube, facebook and blogger in one. Then add some other junk in there and swirl it around).
The question was, how will they monetize? Funny thing is, these sites and where they will ultimately end up are the reverse evolutions of the ancient gated communities that made up the ‘net back in the early days. It’s just that the content is going to be more user generated. But the money, where does that come from? I know that having all these eyeballs in one place is important but I fail to see the revenue model beyond ad sales. If Facebook is worth $1B, I’d like to see the plan that shows how it’s going to support that value.
Comcast simply cut off a number of big bandwidth users a while back without notice. While I expect that sort of behavior from companies that don’t care about this things called “customer service” it does come back to bite them. The issue was a small number of people were hogging up all the pipes. I know a bit about networks and know that a few chatty systems can make the network suck for everyone else. So what they did might not have been all that bad had they simply had a policy in place that people would actually read, charge for tiers of service, and give notice if someone is maxing out their pipe thereby degrading the experience for everyone else. But, they marketed their service as unlimited and therefore, in effect, lied.
Time Warner seems to have learned a lesson from Comcast in that they are aware that certain people are jamming the pipes and that small group should have to pay for their usage. They may actually go about it in a smart way by changing their service to a tiered system where if you’re downloading 40GB a month, you pay for it. I see that as reasonable, hosting providers have done that since day one, you use X amount, you pay per GB at a certain level. It’s simple and I don’t see an issue there, you just have to be above board about it.
We all know exactly what traffic type is clogging up the pipes, its Torrents. People are downloading movies which is another thing altogether. When Comcast tried to play it down as “traffic shaping” they essentially used QoS to put Torrents at the bottom of the IP priority list which is effective but deceptive.
I believe that there should be QoS with voice and network services (ICMP, DHCP, DNS etc) at the top, then HTTP, chat, and everything else at the bottom. But picking one particular protocol or packet type is not the solution because Torrents will evolve and possibly pretend to be HTTP or even voice traffic and we’ll be in a world of hurt.
I’m willing to pay for specific services from my ISP like a dedicated IP, guaranteed bandwidth and more than anything else, consistent connectivity. If I’m subjected to rational QoS, fine. But playing with the network and lying about it is not ok.
I expect to see TW use this as a marketing tool to sell more bandwidth. If the demand goes up, someone has to pay for it and if a few hundred / thousand torrent pigs make my service suck, they need to pay more to subsidize infrastructure upgrades.
(Warning, nerdy content. If you don’t care about hawt Cisco action, move along)
I give up. I’ve gone through 4 wireless routers in 4 years all for the same reason. I have to reboot them constantly. I don’t get it, how can a few laptops jumping on and off the WLAN cause a router to lock up so quick? It’s not the computers, I’ve changed laptops a number of times and even bought a 10/100/1000 Netgear blue metal “prosumer” model to run the LAN traffic. Still, I get on, do work, put the computer to sleep and when it wakes up, poof, no WLAN. It’s not just my network, I see this everywhere. People are used to having to reboot their wireless access points. How is this acceptable? We’ve had WLAN for years and we’re still kicking out routers once a day?
Since my home network is a critical part of my work and play, I have to nip this in the bud. Since consumer grade hardware seems to be garbage at any price, it’s time to go pro. Cisco so the rescue.
I’m looking at the Cisco 851W and 871W SOHO wifi routers. They are kind of a one-stop-shop for remote offices when you actually care if the office stays on-line and don’t want to rouse the noght security guy to reboot your router…grrr…
These are not rebranded Linksys units, these are full-on IOS executing routers with stateful firewalls. Hot geek manna. I have a call in to my fav Cisco dealer, Mandy, to see if she can hook me up with a unit. I hear that Cisco will even remote-configure it for you. I can’t ask for much more. Well, a quick refresher on IOS might help…
I’ve always wanted to learn to use a milling machine but getting your hands on one is a bit of challenge. You pretty much have to go to Community College if you’re an adult and want to learn. Even then, you only make what they say you can and might offer some off-class time for your own limited projects. Tech Shop now gives everyone access to all the cool tools you see on Discovery and you can make your own crap!
This is a boon to the American inventor where even if you have a great idea, the biggest hurdle is making a prototype. I suspect a lot of people will be seeking out cheap / easy CAD / CAM tools…
I’ve liven in a few communities with and without homeowners associations. I think people don’t take the “severity” of their prospective HOA into account when buying a home and they should. If you’re a whiny old person who likes to call the police if you hear the neighbors talking outside at 10:01PM, then you might like where I used to live in Shady Hollow. If you left your trash can out more than a few hours after the pickup, a woman in a minivan will be patrolling the neighborhood, taking photos of “offenders” which then get sent to you. It happened to me a few times. I used language that made them stop. It was not nice language.
I’ve also lived in places where you can do just about anything and no one can say a word unless it’s a federal crime. That has downsides too. A neighbor across the street never mowed her lawn and piled up logs, bikes, bricks and other detritus in her yard. It was terrible to look at. Some neighbors got together and waited for her to go out of town and completely leveled her yard so it looked somewhat presentable. She got home and completely lost her mind in the street, sheriking at the top of her lungh acusing the neighborhood of being against her. The cops came. It was a scene.
So, there is a balance if you want one. You have to figure out where you want to live based on what the HOA will restrict and if that meets your needs. If you want to live like a slob and never mow, then live where that’s normal. Or, Arizona where there is no grass.
This guy, well, I assume the cops nor the HOA must care much because although I live in a pretty permissive ‘hood, this would NOT fly. Yes, I’d love to own one buy I’d truly feel bad for the neighbors if I fired this thing up at dinner time. I mean, it’s not a fly-in community…
I think I’ve beat this drum more than a few times but someone else articulated it quite well. The fact is, we have too many things that do their own thing and thats not good.
The wish list?
(From Gizmodo – Jason Chen)
• HD DVR Functinality. For example, a TiVo or a Windows Media Center box’s video recording capabilities.
• DVD, HD DVD, Blu-ray playback. All in one.
• Gaming. Throw an Xbox 360/PS3/Wii in there and we’ve got ourselves a date. Oh, and we’ll want PC gaming as well.
• Slingbox-style broadcasting. Have this box stream to every device you own, be it PSP, iPhone, Windows Mobile or a laptop.
• On Demand. Make it friendly with your cable provider’s content.
• Format Agnostic. Want Apple’s movies? Done. Want Amazon’s movies? Done. Want Netflix’s movies? Done. Make it play back content from every digital online store.
• Friendly interface. Everyone loves the TiVo interface, but let’s take that an expand it to encompass every sort of media you could want to play back on this miracle box.
• Plug and Play with other devices. Got a Zune that you want to play back music from? Just dock it into the box. Got a camera you shot an hour of footage with and want to watch? Plug it in.
–
I dont have a lot to add to that other than the ability to stream between rooms with similar devices or even better, a single aggregation box that acts as a home head-end for media and smaller “client” boxes (could be built into the tv too…) that can push that to a monitor.
I watched a documentary once where they talked about how much cheaper it is for manufacturers to use blisterpacking over other types of packaging. While I understand that, the lack of a secret key to get into them (like a perforation or zip-wire) is just dumb. I am sure (without any actual data) that Dec 25 is the #1 day of the year for hand lacerations due in total to cheap and infuriating blister packs.
I have a good selection of tools so I don’t have much of a problem, the tin-snips laugh at blisterpacks but are a little unweildy and smell of motor oil. Still, between those and my sheet metal shears, I’m good.
The buzz is office 2.0 which I take as “all that stuff you used to do is old 1.0 stuff”. All these new on-line applications we’re used to having on out desktop are now broken down into basic components, by different developers in different UIs. I get that someone looked at Word 2007 and said “Wow, that’s a bit complex, we can do something a little more slick”. And people around the world saw these monolithic office suites and thought they’d take a stab at a better solution that’s also web-based. And, for the most part they have proven that little shops CAN take the old stodgy apps and make them more useful. But there is a bit of an issue with personal bandwidth when it comes to how many apps can you manage on-line (more in a sec).
I might argue that this new trend is actually Office 6.0. My logic is time line and technology based:
1.0 Paper ledgers, binders, books, notes
2.0 Filing systems and typewriters
3.0 TTY terminals and word processing machines
4.0 Personal computers with floppy disks, basic spreadsheets & databases
5.0 Modern PCs with office suites, email and file sharing
6.0 Virtualized office applications.
But “Office 6.0″ is just not sexy, it sounds more like a simple version number and that’s not exciting for people. The fact is, the technology IS exciting. The problem is, we’re completely swamped in on-line accounts for blogs, feeds, ebay, google, banks, credit cards, airline miles, social networking and their little apps and the list goes on. So people are going to be hesitant to take on yet another username and password for yet another website that has a percentage of their intellectual property sitting on it. Again, we’re becoming more dispersed in an effort to be more productive and I think that while it’s all very cool and innovative, it’s counterintuitive.
I’ve worked very hard to break the stereotype of IT in the workplace. It’s sometimes hard to escape the desire to scold people for being dense, not looking past their own noses for answers or just being overly needy. Sometimes you have to bite your tongue. Helpdesk is about customer service, not shaming people who don’t know the ins and outs of computers. Then again, some people can drive you over the edge.
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