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February 28, 2006

Lent 2.0

This year for Lent I'm giving up getting acquired by Google or Yahoo for 40 days.

That's forty whole days and nights that I won't be in talks with anyone about a buyout of any of my properties. That's my promise to you, O Holy Lord.

Posted by 12:10 PM

links for 2006-02-28

Posted by 12:13 AM

February 27, 2006

Myutterconfusionspace

I always secretly hoped I'd never grow old and unhip, but every few months I'm reminded that the world is passing me by.

It all started with the askew hats. Two or three years ago I was walking down the street and saw some guys wearing baseball caps with the bills pointed off at crazy angles, like their hat was making a left turn but their head hadn't caught up. Every time I see a kid with his hat all akimbo I want to grab his arms, smack him in the face, and straighten his hat out. It's irrational, I know, but drives me crazy in a "get the hell off my lawn you crazy kids!" sort of way.

The online equivalent of this is of course, Myspace. Chalk me up as another early adopter design geek that thinks he knows users inside and out. I have almost a decade of experience running my own communities and Myspace baffles me completely.

I know there are millions of young people using it, but I can barely figure out what people use their profile pages for. Sometimes there is a blog, most often it's blank. Most all of them look like 1997 guestbooks filled with pointless me too testimonials from people with equally baffling profiles. When you click from one to another to another, you are transported back to Geocities back before Yahoo bought it, flaming animated gifs and all.

I can see how Myspace looks more attractive than Friendster because you have so much more freedom with your space, but if we give users flexibility, is this really what they want?

Apple has made the iPod the most popular music player on earth, but it's clean as a whistle. How could the same people love their super sleek music player and also love the gaudy oversaturated flashing/pulsating monstrosity of their Myspace profile?

I know I'm not alone in this, but it's good to see people smarter than me are making sense of it because I've been thinking about Myspace for months and I'm still baffled as to its success (I know the social component is the biggest part, but as a designer I'm mostly focused on the membership's design output).

Next time I see Clay Shirky, I want a hug and a story of how it all makes sense somehow.

Posted by 01:45 PM | Comments (19)

links for 2006-02-27

Posted by 12:13 AM

February 25, 2006

links for 2006-02-25

Posted by 12:13 AM

February 24, 2006

links for 2006-02-24

Posted by 12:14 AM

February 23, 2006

Queenstown view


(Queenstown view, originally uploaded by pb)

I've never seen a better view out of a hotel window. Hopefully I'll get to visit that someday.

Posted by 10:06 PM

Googlepages

From Search Engine Watch's 2002 April Fool's page: Google Quits Search, Focuses on Waste Management

Google To Become Portal
GoogleMail is to allow anyone to be myname@google.com. New GoogleStocks and GooglePages web building feature also unveiled. "Yeah, we said we'd never become a portal, but that was all part of our master plan," said cofounder Larry Page. Google's other cofounder Sergey Brin also confirmed that the company was launching a hostile takeover of Yahoo.

Funny how the truth is stranger than fiction.

Posted by 09:52 AM

links for 2006-02-23

Posted by 12:14 AM

February 22, 2006

links for 2006-02-22

Posted by 12:12 AM

February 21, 2006

links for 2006-02-21

Posted by 12:13 AM

February 19, 2006

links for 2006-02-19

Posted by 12:14 AM

February 18, 2006

links for 2006-02-18

Posted by 12:18 AM

February 14, 2006

Measuremap goes to Google


(the signing, originally uploaded by MaggieMason)

I'm happy to see Google did indeed buy Adaptive Path's Measuremap. I joked about the rumor earlier, but it's actually a great time to acquire an app.

I've been using Measuremap since last summer and I could tell from early on the service was going to be hardware intensive. They built a robust statistics package that let you deeply mine your data but they also had all that data to deal with. I know people that devote a separate box to analyzing their log files from a single site, so it was hard to imagine how Measuremap was going to deal with every hit to every blog and offer all kinds of analysis on the data for every user. Google's great at massive hardware-intensive projects, so they'll be a good new parent.

When it comes to their applications, Google could also use some design help and they couldn't get a better deal than taking on Jeff Veen. It'd be great to see Google Analytics stuff get a fancy AJAX facelift from Measuremap, or have Google Analytics and Measuremap combine into some sort of hybrid super stats package. My hope is that hey work Veen like a mule, and he revamps the Google Adsense system, the search engine output, Google News, and makes Google Video look cool. Hey, I can dream can't I?

But a big hearty congrats to AP, Measuremap will be great when everyone can use it.

I just found this in my saved iChats, from the first day I got to try out Measuremap:

me (11:55 AM): holy cow I can already see why this is crack in its pure form
jeff veen (11:55 AM): may I send that quote to the team?

Posted by 03:34 PM

February 13, 2006

Rambling about blogging and TV

I've long wondered when the act of blogging TV would take place. I don't mean writing blog posts about the last episode of Lost, I mean actually snipping segments from TV and posting them for all to see. Basically doing with TV what bloggers were doing in 1999 with the web -- snipping bits here and there to make a full picture of some topic through the use of quotes and links.

YouTube (and to a lesser extent Google Video) have finally reached a tipping point of blogging TV. With 1999 blogs, I knew that anything happening online that was interesting would get picked up by those few dozen blogs and eventually I stopped following primary sources like CNN and the NYT and just followed blogs. With TV, there's no way I can keep up, but I know if something interesting pops up, it'll be all over YouTube the next day.

I'd argue that YouTube is the king of this movement because they have such loose and lax legal guidelines. Of course, everyone that uploads claims they own the copyright and got release forms from everyone involved and cleared anything seen on camera, blah, blah, blah, but in reality, it is totally lawless and people are basically uploading random interesting TV bits they dump right off their computer. It reminds me of Napster in 1999, totally interesting, and totally illegal in the eyes of IP lawyers.

Like Napster, there are positive sides to this kind of loose fair use/infringement. It's only because things are so lax that everyone and their brother saw the Chronicles of Narnia SNL spoof video, and SNL ratings definitely saw a spike in the shows that followed (and I noticed SNL tried to capitalize on this by putting Andy Samberg in more skits and letting cast members do funny little videos for the two following episodes).

I'm really surprised that TVeyes didn't become the tool of choice for this type of activity. If you've never seen their service, it's really incredible. The thing with TVeyes is they already record pretty much all the major networks including cable outlets. Then they digitize it all, index the closed captioning, and provide search tools for the text and automatically crunch out video segments that meet your search criteria. So for instance, if like me you watched the SNL show on your DVR the night it aired, you could say "damn, that was good, I need to get a copy to my friends" you just pop onto TVeyes, do a search on NBC for "narnia" and it would find the segment and prepare a little 3 minute video capture of the show. It's like TiVo for all TV, with searching and quoting features built it, which is exactly what YouTube is doing, but they require that someone, somewhere recorded and digitized it.

TVeyes has been around since at least 2000, back when they'd email you whenever a word popped up anywhere on TV. Unfortunately, TVeyes seemed to focus on the enterprise, acting like a video clip service to corporate giants, but I guarantee if they kept this stuff open to all, everyone could flock to it and share the videos. Overnight, you'd have thousands of people mining the very best bits of TV and revolutionizing that industry.

In a way, I'm already starting to see the effects of YouTube and its many clones. Goofy clips are starting to pop up on more comedy shows like The Colbert Report -- stuff they never did before, but suddenly they have these small chunks of random comedy (click on the charlene video) that seem ripe for viral spread through YouTube, almost like they were trying for it.

Maybe stuff like clips on YouTube vs. regular format TV is kind of like how blogging was first viewed critically in 1999-2000. Everyone was afraid people wouldn't read 3,000 word essays if blogs took over -- that it was shortening our attention span as everything had to become small, easily read chunks with links to more information. It was the death of the long format and it was going to ruin us all. But it didn't, and I don't think sharing TV clips is going to ruin TV anytime soon.

Posted by 11:26 PM | Comments (2)

links for 2006-02-13

Posted by 12:14 AM

February 12, 2006

Olympics, Schmolympics

Two days into the Olympics and I can barely stand NBC's entertainment-as-news style of reporting. NBC seems to approach the games like it's a snapshot of Hollywood, elevating a few people to superstar status and covering their every move (Kwan, Bode Miller, etc). It quickly reaches a saturation point while at the same time piling on the pressure for these select athletes to win. It seems like NBC engineers its coverage to bring people up and then tear them down. Does it make for interesting TV when the stars don't get gold, because it seems to be the kiss of death. Or is NBC just so used to reporting on broken Hollywood marriages and crazy pop music stars that they don't know of any other way? Or do they do it so they can have their big cinderella story when someone they cover in exhausting detail actually wins?

I wish you could just get raw satellite feeds of each event online, or even buy them at the iTunes Music Store. I would pay for unedited coverage sans NBC announcers.

Posted by 07:50 PM

links for 2006-02-12

Posted by 12:16 AM

February 11, 2006

links for 2006-02-11

Posted by 12:20 AM

February 10, 2006

links for 2006-02-10

Posted by 12:14 AM

February 09, 2006

So *that's* how it works

When Jason posted the plane on a conveyer belt riddle earlier today, I was convinced that take-off was impossible if the belt could go infinitely fast and negate any forward movement. So no movement, no air passes over the wing, and then no lift.

But Michael 's explanation makes perfect sense to me, and now I see why the plane would take off.

I think the original riddle works because I don't have a day-to-day familiarity with jet engines and watching planes take off, or giant conveyer belts for that matter, so I couldn't really wrap my head around air speed vs. ground speed. But I know how a skateboard works, and a treadmill, and a rope and it makes perfect sense.

Posted by 11:46 PM

bubble 2.0

I hate to sound cynical, because it is a cool app but....

2000: Make a really kickass powerpoint deck, get the Stevester down in marketing to shop it along Sand Hill Rd, make $15 million in the first seed round before you reach the end of the street.

2006: Create an ajaxy alpha app, sell to Google before you even get to slap a BETA sticker on it.

Posted by 02:26 PM

links for 2006-02-09

Posted by 12:14 AM

February 08, 2006

links for 2006-02-08

Posted by 12:14 AM

February 07, 2006

SXSW Preview


(SXSWpreview, originally uploaded by kathryn)

If you asked me three years ago what the likelihood was of someday seeing Neil Young immediately followed by Dooce.com, I would have answered "not in a million years."

Posted by 07:42 PM

Mavericks is going off

Mavericks is going off at the moment and I have to admit seeing it live is worth the ten bucks and the windows-only video requirement.

Posted by 11:15 AM

links for 2006-02-07

Posted by 12:16 AM

February 06, 2006

links for 2006-02-06

Posted by 12:14 AM

February 05, 2006

links for 2006-02-05

Posted by 12:17 AM

February 04, 2006

links for 2006-02-04

Posted by 12:18 AM

February 03, 2006

It's the user experience, stupid

MailScreenSnapz001.pngI've often heard prominent computer scientists lament the low uptake of email encryption -- that in the age of many gigahertz machines we still send plain text to each other (usually) over non-secure connections. Every couple years, just for the sake of my personal freedom and curiosity, I make an attempt to try and use encryption for a few days. Every time I do this, I am disappointed.

This shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that has tried to enable email encryption. Encryption seems to lie somewhere between privacy, security, and a mountain of engineering acronyms and standards. Unfortunately for regular people, most of these systems are overbuilt and the process is so painful that I would argue it barely even functions.

Take for example this tutorial on using encryption and digital signatures in Mail. It looks simple and straightforward, but interacting with the Thawte site is a long, painful process. I eventually got a working signature, but only after the following steps were taken:

- Sign up for an account at thawte, which requires an email, strong password, and the use of web server level password logins, instead of in-page logins (in-page login forms can give you good feedback, remind you that usernames are email addresses and how they should be formatted, etc).

- Once the forms were filled out, I had to validate my address to finish the account creation, which required copying/pasting two long hashed character strings. Now my account worked.

- Login to thawte using new account, hit the "request an email certificate" button

- System offers the following options for a X.509 Format Certificate (sidenote: wtf does X.509 mean and why should I care?):

For an X.509 certificate, please choose your software from the list below:
Netscape Communicator or Messenger
Microsoft Internet Explorer, Outlook and Outlook Express
Lotus Notes R5
OperaSoftware Browser
C2Net SafePassage Web Proxy

I run none of those, but just went with the Netscape one, assuming it would be universal (I later tried outlook, which blocked me, saying I need to use IE/windows to get one).

- Complete the request according to the tutorial (oh, and guess on either 1024 or 2084 bit security of the cert), wait about 15 minutes watching my certificate status sit at "pending"

- Remember to opt out of all marketing spam from thawte, in case they want to make some dough off my email address.

- When the certificate is complete and ready, the only way to download it is to click "Navigator" the name of the certificate type, in my accepted certificates list. It's totally non-obvious.

- On the certificate detail page, there is a button to fetch it. I click it in Firefox 1.5, and nothing seems to happen. I click again, and I see something gets loaded, but there is no download prompt.

- Since the tutorial is written for safari, I try that instead, and the fetch button asks me to download a windows EXE file, and for kicks, I do, which launches the mac's keychain access app. The keychain app only lists one certificate in my general list of email certs fetched from other people. There is no sign that I have my own, and Apple's Mail app doesn't show that it knows about it.

- I go back to Firefox, and read the special instructions for fetching downloaded certificates that your browser didn't tell you about.

- To "backup" your certificate from the browser to a desktop file, you have to enter a very high security password. Firefox won't let you copy the file until your password contains enough capital/lowercase/numbers/symbols to pass muster. My password is a combination of four of my highest security passwords because three of them munged together wasn't enough. I have to enter it twice to get the download. My bank doesn't require this level of security and even thawte gave me the certificate with a simpler password.

- I double-click the downloaded file, am asked for my insane high security backup password (which isn't my thawte login for the certificate itself) and I now successfully have my own certificates listed in the proper places according to the tutorial.

- I open Mail, and send a few emails to friends, the ones that also have a thawte certificate can get encrypted email from me by clicking a button. Only three friends of hundreds of people I interact with have a certificate that isn't expired. The keychain app lists about 50 expired certificates.

I can recall trying to get standard PGP going with Eudora on windows several times in the past, and having similar issues. There are problems on several levels here. It's a pain to get a certificate, it's a pain to incorporate that into your clients, and then finally it's a pain to actually send encrypted email to friends before asking first if they can receive it ok.

On the positive side, Apple's Mail client has built in signing/encrypting functions which let me skip a painful step of adding various PGP or GPGP hacks to Mail. The interface to signing and encrypting is a nice friendly couple buttons, and the encryption one remains greyed out for most recipients, but for some reason the option is presented to me on all replies, even if they don't have a cert and I'll get an error.

The tutorial is pretty good if a bit outdated with regards to the current thawte site (redesigned since the tutorial's screenshots were taken) and Mail in 10.4.4, and I would have never remotely figured out how to do this without it. Still, even with a nice friendly step-by-step tutorial, it was a bumpy road.

There are several places this process could have been streamlined. The Thawte site could deal with better explainations, support more email clients/browsers, and overall not make the process resemble pulling teeth. It would be nice if Firefox told you when it was downloading certificates, and it would be doubly nice if exporting them was a bit easier. The Mac OS level integration is good, but it would be nice if other OSes and email clients could work so smoothly once you finally get a certificate, and it would be nice if email clients were smart enough to only offer encryption options to people that can accept them.

Finally, I must admit that I don't have an absolute need for email encryption, but it'd be nice to have in a "citizens of a free republic should be able to use it for everyday communication" sort of way. I don't see the adoption of email encryption going up anytime soon, given the tedious process requried and I expect the same sort of users to continue using encrypted email (mostly CS geeks that can figure all this crap out and know what various levels of encryption mean and what the standards are). Still, it would be nice to someday see this being quite a bit easier to use. until that happens, there's no way the general public will ever touch this.

Posted by 12:34 PM

links for 2006-02-03

Posted by 12:15 AM

February 02, 2006

Mighty fast drumming

Testing out google video's "put this on your site" functionality:


Posted by 10:24 AM

links for 2006-02-02

Posted by 12:20 AM

February 01, 2006

ebay scams going international

Every once in a while I hear someone raving about a new gadget and my first instinct is to check amazon first for a price, then check ebay to see what kinds of discounts are available. I've been doing this for the past couple years.

What I've noticed lately though is my search results are filled with results from sellers in China, often selling something for 80% off or more. But if you dig into profiles of the sellers, they've either never sold anything (just bought 4 or 5 small things) or their only feedback is from unregistered users. It's like an ebay scam from 1998 being repeated, only this time the scammers are based in China instead of the US or EU.

Here are some examples: a search for "garmin nuvi", a ~$900 in-car GPS unit. If you look down the listings, the prices range from $650-900 but my results show a bunch of Chinese sellers offering it for about $150. Here is one. The feedback profile on the seller shows +12, with no negatives, but notice that none are from buyers. This account has never sold anything. The username looks like a random text string, and many of the names of people leaving comments have similar names. If you look at someone that left feedback, you'll notice another account with around 10-12 positive feedback points, left by others with about 10-12 feedback points and similar bot-like names.

I didn't know ebay was selling from China, but it seems like someone is creating vast quantities of zombie users that give each other good feedback on small items only to use the resulting users to sell big ticket items at 20% of the retail price, which I assume is when the scam is over and they just keep the money, ditch that user account, and move on.

What baffles me is why the past ten years of ebay's fraud detection hasn't prevented something like this from happening.

Posted by 10:02 AM

Two things you should build because I don't have the time to do it but would like to use them anyway

1. Sippey talked about the loss of the water cooler effect when watching a TV show on DVD, years after it aired. This week I finally broke down and started watching Lost. The first night I made it to episode 5 and after viewing it, I wondered if there was some way I could combine the wayback machine, technorati, and the google cache to give me a view of the web soon after that episode aired, so I could read about it without knowing what comes next.

Then I realized, someone could build a forum system dedicated to this kind of thing. Think about it: somewhere right now someone is watching the first season Entourage DVD and laughing their asses off. Or maybe they're finishing up season two of Buffy. Or maybe there's someone somewhere that never viewed the Simpsons until today. And where can they go to exchange stories and guesses about the plot of the next show? Nowhere, really.

So it goes like this: a big forum site that breaks down every TV series you can get on DVD, then further breaks each one down to seasons and episodes. Let's say the goal for a user is watch season 1 of Lost, episode 16, then enter the site and leave it without ever hearing spoilers, and during their stay, they can talk to other people that recently viewed that episode (which had a lame story arc, possibly the weakest episode of the season so far and hey, what ever happened to the buried mystery hatch from like four episodes ago, huh? And when on earth is that woman going to have her baby? And are the whispers real or what?).

The rub is keeping the future out -- have a system where users are rewarded when someone successfully rats out a troublemaker from the future, popping into the episode 16 thread to mention that in episode 23, that one guy gets killed, and remove those comments to keep the threads clean and clear for the rest of the viewers to enjoy gabbing about.

So someone build The TV Time Capsule for me, I could use it.

update: oh sweet, someone sent me the Lost forum's episode-specific threads. Now I can see what that whole boar thing was supposed to represent.

2. You know how small towns have little league baseball teams every spring and the teams are sponsored by local merchants that get a bit of advertising out of it in exchange for donating a couple hundred bucks to buy uniforms? Why not build a site that helps match up teams and sponsors from local towns, or sponsors from out of town, or sponsors with business that don't even have a town. Post scores and results from games so sponsors can monitor the progress of their far off team.

Why build something like this? There are lots of web communities, mailing lists, and bulletin boards with users that like to pitch into various charities. If there is a shortage of funding for little league baseball, let the web fill the gap. I'd love to someday see the Slashdot Penguins of Peoria, IL take on the Craigslist Reds.

Posted by 12:43 AM