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Information Week is WRONG about the n810 from Nokia
Here's the original pan of the n810 from InfoWeek
And here's my comment.
I was also at the Web 2.0 summit and also played with this device for about 5 minutes. And I was utterly charmed. The keyboard is fine, and well worth the advantages of an open platform, pocket size computer. Though I will admit that my hands are certainly smaller than Mitch Wagner's.
The value of the open platform can't be underestimated. I was with a more technical colleague who was already figuring out how he could hack it apart to make it do dozens of things the Nokia guys hadn't even dreamed of doing with it. And the Nokia team didn't bat an eye. They WANT people to make new things and share them.
If they can come up with a "docking" station that would let me hook up to a large monitor, full size keyboard, power, and regular USB (the n810 has microUSB), I could probably replace my laptop altogether.
As it is, I'm really looking forward to having an n810 to take with me when I'm visiting client sites without having to haul around my "luggable" laptop.
I'm glad to see that most of the comments on this article are from people who recognize the potential of this device. I'll see you guys in line to buy it when it's available next month.
Twitter and Constraints
I was inspired by Evan Williams talk at Web2Summit yesterday to start twittering again. I even updated my account and added the Facebook application. The thing is... I was really using the "status" bar in Facebook as my Twitter for the last 6 months. So I'm not sure I really need both.
Evan posited the question, what can you take away to create a "new" or "better" product? The argument being that constraints create value. I was reminded of the cartoonist Gary Larson mentioning that he wasn't a good artist when he started drawing the Far Side, but that the constraint of a single panel forced him to learn how to draw in perspective and that constraint was the best drawing teacher he ever had.
In that vein, putting constraints on a product, particularly one that has a significant user generated content component can be highly useful. In the Twitter case, they were constrained in microblogging by the limit of SMS message lengths of 128 to 160 characters. It has forced users to learn how to be extremely concise (and to use TinyURL ).
His other examples of constraints helping a product were:
- Fotolog - photosharing like Flickr, but limited to 1 photo per day. Users value a limited resource more and put up only higher quality photos, they comment on photos more, they are more likely to see a greater proportion of the photos.
- Facebook - before it opened up, you needed to have a college email address to sign up. The constraints forced users to link mostly to people they actually knew and established a beachhead within an existing offline social graph.
- YouTube - had a filesize limit that encouraged short form video that allowed it to be consumed immediately on the site. Podcasts could probably use some of that constraint. Who has time to listen to a 45 min audio file.
It's an interesting exercise. I'm going back through my client list and thinking about which of their products can benefit from constraints.
Web2Summit - Day One
After a slow start, there were some interesting tidbits today from the first day of Web2Summit. Supposedly, the presentations will be available on the Web2Summit site tomorrow. Not sure if they will be openly available, though.
Highlights for me:
* Jonathan Zittrain 's contrarian discussion about the move from generative technology to sterile technology was a breath of fresh air among what seemed like too many self-congratulatory and insular discussions. His argument is that the drive for usability and security is sending us down a path away from the open and generative technologies of PC and IP architecture and towards the sterility of controlled appliances means that we risk losing the innovation that got us here in the first place.
* Meebo is actually pretty cool. I had written it off as yet another chat client (IMVU anyone?), but it's really something else entirely.
* Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) isn't as annoying as I thought he would be.
* Marissa Mayer spent 15 minutes talking about Google managing your health data and didn't mention privacy or HIPAA once. Which was a little scary.
* Nokia announced the N810 launch in 3 weeks. I really want one. I haven't wanted a 'next' gadget in a long time, but this one will probably be something I buy on day one. Portability/Interface/Power of iPhone, open platform with Linux kernal. Cool. Platform for app development - maemo.org
* Revolution Money cuts merchant fees for accepting credit to almost nothing (50 basis points, no minimum). Awesome for micropayments.
* WebEx Connect is going to be a powerful platform for developers to invent and make money without having to market and sell on their own.
* Rupert Murdoch is an expert at sounding overly blunt without actually giving anything away.
Headed to Web2Summit
After about 6 months of spending all my time heads down on a major project for a big client, I'm off to the O'Reilly Web2Summit in SF this week. I'm curious to see how these sessions go. On the one hand, most of the topics seem pretty old hat. Nothing really stuck me from the program as "new". On the other hand, there are some pretty big names speaking, so they must have something interesting to say.
I'm also curious to see if I run into any old colleagues and other folks from my past. Facebook has already proven to be a haven for blasts from the past. Just this month, I've gotten back in touch with people from grade school and high school, many of whom also happen to be in my industry. I have already noticed that the student body president from my grade school is presenting his new company at the conference. :)
WalkJogRun.net my new favorite mashup
My current favorite mashup is WalkJogRun.net . You can make your own running maps and it will calculate distance, time (you put in your average pace), and even calories burned. My only complaint is that you cannot easily print the map. This is not really their fault though. Google will not give API users the rights to allow printing.
You can export the routes to Google Earth or to GPX format. I was hoping that exporting to Google Earth would let me print, but it didn't work as I would expect it to. I don't want to see a satellite image on my map, I want to see the street names more clearly. To be fair, I have not used Google Earth much. In fact, I downloaded it specifically to see if I could use it to print from this mashup. So maybe there is a way I haven't figured out yet.
In the end, I found that my best option was to print a screen capture.
You can save your routes on WalkJogRun, even without an account. But if you want to be able to edit them and have some other features, you need to register (free). Here is their benefit list:
- Control - You have control of your own routes and can delete them or save changes as you refine them
- Recognition - Routes you share are credited to your username
- Simplicity - Claim routes you created prior to membership to make it easier to find them
- Privacy - Create private routes in addition to public routes
The privacy one is nice if you want to create routes that leave and return directly to and from your house. At the moment the simplicity of finding routes by your username is only valuable where this app has penetrated significantly. I'm guessing that it's pretty crowded in SF, but out here in the sticks there are only a handful of routes mapped.
CEO compensation visually
Freedom of the Press
I can't bear to watch. I've been following this dance between News Corp and Dow Jones for weeks now, and I can't take it anymore. It makes me sad that the Wall Street Journal will be subject to the same heavy-handed management that we see in Fox News (among others), which is little more than a mouthpiece for the political opinions of Rupert Murdoch.
As these trends continue, it's going to be more and more important to support listener-supported radio (e.g. NPR) and television and other "small media" including blogs, but also independent newspapers, cable access programming, etc.
Government ownership is only one way of killing freedom of the press. Corporate ownership and influence is fast becoming another dagger in the heart of the independent journalist.
While technology has given us another option and made it possible to self-publish far more easily, distribution is still key. Many people just don't know about independent blogs. And the sheer proliferation makes it almost impossible to know which ones to watch. Moreover, consumers have become so accustomed to using brand names as a proxy for accuracy, that their ability to read an independent article and assess its value has become atrophied. The consumer is dependent on media not colluding to keep a story out of the mainstream.
If the brand names are no longer accurate, and none of them report on each other, no one would ever know.
Facebook IPO
As always TechDirt has the best perspective on Web company hyping :
Facebook Keeping Its High-Priced Exit Options Open
from the piles-o'-cash dept
There's been some speculation lately that Facebook is gearing up for an IPO, based on a recent job listing at the company, but it would appear that the Skype billion-dollar buyout plan is still a possibility. New rumors spread by everybody's favorite dot-com analyst, Henry Blodget, say that Microsoft will buy Facebook as a desperate Steve Ballmer looks to get the company some real traction in the social networking and web space. Blodget calls the rumored price of $6 billion a "fly in the ointment." Of course it is: after Yahoo's $1.62 billion offer for Facebook was rejected last year, a Facebook board member quickly said that the site wasn't for sale -- but was worth $8 billion. So going by the Skype plan, since about seven months have passed since that comment, and Facebook's gotten tons of hype since it announced its platform offering (even though page views are off a bit), the going price should be roughly, say, a nice round $20 billion by now. Remember, you heard it here first.
While I think an IPO is somewhat unrealistic, I'd rather see that than a major acquisition by MSFT. It's all about who I want to give my information to, and really, I think I might delete my profile if Microsoft bought Facebook.
Facebook addiction and client overload
How many blog entries start out with "I have been really busy so I haven't had time to post lately..."? Well, add me to the cliched lot of them.
Besides being extremely busy with work, the other distraction that has kept me from posting is, of all things, Facebook. I joined Facebook about 15 months ago when I was doing some work for a client about social networks. At the time, it was a bit of a wasteland if you were over the age of 23. None of my friends were on, and since at the time, they required a school email address, anyone who went to a college that doesn't give out alumni forwarding addresses was SOL.
Facebook has made a couple of major changes that I think will make them significantly more successful than their rivals.
1) Anyone can join without a network. This allows non-college grads as well as college grads from schools without alumni addresses to join. It also removes the requirement to join your alma mater's network. I'm a member of my undergrad university's network, but I don't find the network page all that useful. It's not like I'm interested in this weekend's party schedule out there.
2) They have opened up their API to third party developers. And wow. There are some really creative applications. There are also some crappy ones, but for the most part, my experience has been good. Facebook is exactly the kind of platform you need to make these mini-products work. The trick will be to see if any of these people actually make $ from their applications either directly or indirectly (i.e. funneling users back to their own sites).
They've also kept a feature that will (I hope) continue keep users from being bombarded with Spam.
There is still no open searching. One thing that drives me nuts about MySpace is that anyone can do a search for all members and bulk spam them with "friendship" requests. It's a little trickier to do in Facebook. That said, someone may figure it out, but I think the fact that there is no "search" for people will make it harder. On Facebook, if you want to connect to someone you have to find them by going to a group page and finding a post from them, going to a friend's list of friends, or knowing their email address.
Moreover, you can set your privacy settings so that no one can view you unless they are a friend, which means to find you on Facebook someone would have to 1) know your email address 2) request to be your friend and 3) have you accept the request before they could see your profile.
Social Network Addiction
The other thing I have discovered is that the better run a social network service is, the more addicting it is. To be well run, a social network service must:
1. Make it's users feel that they are in control of their own data (i.e. privacy policies, granular control of privacy settings)
2. Keep it fresh... there's always something new. Either new applications (i.e. opening up the framework with an open API) and/or making those applications have their own freshness factor. Games are particularly good for this. I'm currently playing Scrabble against my sister on Facebook. We end up taking turns every couple of days or so, but it's a fun way to keep in touch.
3. Alerts and notifications... remind the user you are there. Send notifications to their email address whenever changes that they would care about happen (someone becomes a friend, sends a message, writes on their wall, etc.). Extra credit: make this have granular control as well.
Gas Prices Turn Rental Cars Upsidedown
Remember when Economy class for a rental car meant a cheap import with plastic doors? Now that gas prices have soared out of control ($3.19/gal in SLC this week), it seems that car rental companies are having a harder time convincing people to take the luxury cars with lower gas mileage. Check out the "economy" car assigned to me this morning:
Not that a Chrystler Crossfire is anything great. Just that it's clearly a sports car that is being assigned in the lowest rate class because everyone wants the cars that get high gas mileage. Not something that would have happened 10 or 15 years ago.
Speaking of Crossfire... I can't hear that word now without thinking of the Jon Stewart appearance that sounded the death knell for Crossfire on CNN. "You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?" (for the full transcript see political humor at about.com. And for the video (which I watch at least once a month)