What more to say? Happy New Year, everyone. Blogging will resume in a couple of days, until then, have a great time and see you all in 2008.
Archive for December, 2007
By blunder, I don’t think it was a mistake to have discontinued support for Netscape Navigator. It was a dead product with no perspective whatsoever and one too many change in strategies. But, it was definitely a blunder when you consider that AOL bought Netscape for $4.2 billion. What have they done with the browser? Nothing.
It’s another one in the long line of AOL’s bad business decisions; they’re cashing out big money for companies only to let them die out a couple of years later. Remember SingingFish, another AOL acquisition? Dead and buried. And don’t get me started on poor Netscape portal; just like with Netscape the browser, it was painfully obvious that they have no idea what to do with it. The decision to change it to a Digg clone and then change it back (spinning off the Digg clone into Propeller.com) will likely alienate what little supporters the site has had. And My.Netscape, a poor copy of Netvibes, iGoogle, Pageflakes and other personalized start pages, won’t help matters there. While I’m at it, I might as well mention wow.com - a domain AOL has been sitting on for years, and decided to turn it into a World of Warcraft social network two years too late. Sadly, they changed their mind even on that, as the domain wow.com today redirects to wowinsider.com, a solid but hardly revolutionary WoW news portal.
By the laws of market and nature, a company that makes this many mistakes should go bankrupt.
Nothing much to say today, tech-wise, except that I wish you all a merry Christmas, and a happy New Year. Hopefully, we’ll be talking about the wild world of web startups (blogs are conversations, right?) a lot in 2008. Oh yeah, and if you’re reading this, you should probably go offline for a change and spend some time with the people you love (;.
Did I sleep longer than usual and wake up in a weird world where everyone makes silly songs about Digg? Should I feel guilty about liking them? Should I stop taking those meds? So many questions, so little answers.
First, there was Digg the Song, dug up (no pun intended) by Techcrunch.
And now, another one, found by Howard on Pownce.
Oh, and there’s this old favorite! Nice vocoder effects, although the lyrics aren’t as cool as on the other two (;.
If anyone knows about any more Digg songs, send ‘em in so we can make this a full featured festive roundup.
Yeah, many web startups get a lot of attention with initial coverage, and then fall into oblivion after a couple months. But, it ain’t over till it’s over, right?
Still, the folks over at TechCrunch have the habit of taking some random company they don’t particularly like and pronounce it dead, even when there’s no other indication (except an Alexa graph, and we all know how reliable those are) that the company is actually doing bad. Case in point: Pownce.
I’ve invented a new word for this practice: deadpoolbaiting! So, which company should we deadpoolbait next? I’m open to suggestions. Please form an orderly line with your declining Alexa graphs.
I’ve been following online photo editors since they first appeared. I’ve even created an in-depth review of 6 most promising such products. After that, many new products appeared - I reckon there’s over 15 free online photo editors out there. And at least 5 of them have lots of features, good usability and speed - in short, they’re all around solid products.
But I will never use any of them in my daily work.
It’s simple: they lack one feature that might seem too abstract or too complex or not necessary to the developers, but it’s essential to me (and, I guess, thousands of other users): crop & resize at the same time. You know, it’s that thing in Photoshop where you set your crop area to some predefined size, and whichever portion of the image you select with the crop tool, it will get cropped and resized (up or down) to the exact size you’ve selected in the toolbar. I need this feature because I work for the web; on most web sites, you have some predefined image size that you use, and you want to fit as much visual information in it as possible. I reckon most online journalist can’t do without this feature; if they don’t use it, they should; it’s a life saver.
The reason why I remembered this is because I’ve just found about yet another online photo editor, perhaps the most full-featured of them all, called Cellsea. The first thing I tried to do, of course, is crop a portion of the image to a predefined size. And, of course, it doesn’t work. It crops, but it doesn’t resize.
Once again, no crop&resize.
So, all in all, I’ve tried over a dozen free online photo editors, and should they all amount to nothing in the end, I will consider it to be due to the lack of this one simple feature. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks this way. Or, maybe all those developers that created all these photo editors were all wrong to omit this one feature. It happens sometimes, you know.
Once again, it’s back to Photoshop for me.
Sometime in 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term weblog, which was a collection of links to various stuff on the web that he somehow found interesting. Now, he gives to Wired 10 tips he thinks all bloggers should know.
Here’s the first one.
“A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)”
Erm, this is 2008. and we’re not doing it like that anymore, Jorn. Not that there’s anything wrong with a linkblog, but blogs are something else. Sometimes, when you coin a term, it takes a meaning of its own over the years.
Needless to say, all his other points are completely irrelevant to bloggers, but are quite cool if you have a linkblog.
I guess I’ve been out of the loop lately, or I’m simply getting old, but I had no idea that the Facebook situation has gotten so bad.
What you see on the left side of this post is taken from my girlfriend’s actual profile. Now, it may not look as ugly as your standard MySpace profile, but content-wise it’s probably much worse. I mean, hot damn, there must be a hundred applications in there (this is just a fraction of it, you should see the full profile)!
Being my old stubborn self I’ve refused most of those zombie/vampire/sandwich/etc useless apps and thus my profile still looks quite clean. But, your average Facebook user will take anything thrown at him/her. Thus, my girlfriend can use her Facebook profile to learn how sexy she is, how sexy Santa Claus is; she can have her name analyzed, she can send and receive gifts, food and other shenanigans, she has a graveyard, she can hug, poke, kick, bump, kiss, greet, twist and snowball fight her friends…and absolutely none of this is in any way useful.
Luckily for us, in Facebook you don’t see most of this unless you yourself are subscribed to it. But still, my hopes that somehow Facebook will be a better, more serious social network than MySpace have vanished the second I saw that profile. You may laugh at MySpace’s ugliness, Facebookers, but your own social network ain’t much better. In fact, my girlfriend has mostly switched to MySpace because “it makes more sense.” Go figure.
The question remains: is there such a thing as a useful social network? I’m looking at you, LinkedIn. If you guys and girls reading this, please don’t let your upcoming API turn LinkedIn into something like this, ok?
All this said, has someone tried subscribing to all possible applications on Facebook just to see what’ll happen? If anyone has such aspirations (and the required patience), I’d like to know.
Before I go on topic, there’s this little news nugget which says that Pownce is pitching some VC firms and hopefully they’ll secure some funding soon.
Now, about Pownce and Twitter. The thing is, in my eyes, Pownce is Twitter done better. Replies are better organized; the ability to send and embed links, images and videos is great, as is the ability to organize your friends into groups. I’m not saying that Twitter is bad; I’m saying that Pownce upped the ante and improved on Twiter’s concept, while Twitter did relatively little to respond.
But, don’t take my word for it. Here’s what some Pownce users responded when I asked them about Pownce’s features which make it better than Twitter:
- more features
- looks better
- has been more reliable
- lack of character limit
- less clutter
- better friend management
- better when you actually expect a response
On the other side of the equasion, these same folks seem to prefer Twitter for:
- quick little updates on professional/personal things
- it’s like thinking out loud
- full API
- mobile Twittering
- more people are using it
So, it seems that people see these two applications as two very different things, although they’re very similar in nature. In a way, Twitter relates to Pownce like iPod Shuffle relates to iPod - its simplicity might be an advantage to some, while others will jump on iPod’s features and never look back. What do you think?
There’s been an interesting debate over whether, in a recent court case, RIAA is now finally (they’ve been borderline on this issue for quite some time now) saying that merely converting music from a CD you legally own to MP3s on your hard disk is illegal.
The important thing (as I’ve briefly commented over at RWW) to note here is, no matter how you stand on the issue, while we’re debating the finer points of some legal paper, the RIAA is winning by confusing us all. They’re constantly pushing the limits of what is legal in the world of music sharing and blurring them at the same time, systematically creating a world in which absolutely no kind of sharing is ever legal.
The problem is that the internet is not only about sharing. It IS sharing. I should be able to rip my music from a CD, convert it to any format I like, put it in any folder I want, share it with whomever I like, using software of my choosing. They’re the ones who need to figure out how to sell me their stuff despite all the above, without messing with the way I use my computer and the internet.
Now, if we even have to debate whether copying CDs I legally own to my hard drive is legal or illegal, then they’ve won. It’s standard Orwellian tactics: take some utterly impossible notion and convince the people it’s the truth. Your “common sense” line of defense is broken, and they can then make some other stupid idea illegal much more easily - for example the one that says you can’t share music with other people. No one in their right mind would ever condemn you for copying a tape cassette or creating a mix tape and giving it out back in the day; now, they’re suing you for doing the same thing.
Oh, and if you’re thinking about writing a comment about how musicians will vanish from the face of the planet if we all keep on sharing files, then they’ve got to you, too.
AGLOCO was a stupid idea. You get paid to surf the web, and you get money for everyone who signs up with you as referral. Sure. Money gets created out of thin air, and everyone gets rich (especially the folks who got there early)? Well, according to John Chow, one of their biggest supporters, now they’re dead, and I won’t shed any tears over it.
In any case, I’m sorry for the people who had spent time pitching AGLOCO to their friends. For future reference, note the difference between affiliate marketing and a pyramid scheme (source: Wikipedia): the first is “a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts” while the latter is ” a non-sustainable business model that involves the exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, usually without any product or service being delivered” The key word here? Product.
Read a solid analysis of AGLOCO here.
Twitter is now banned in the United Arab Emirates because its content is “incosistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates“. I guess the fact that Twitter has no content per se doesn’t play a big part here; they’ve basically banned a tool for communication. Twitter now joins the army of other sites banned by the Emirates, most notably Flickr and Facebook.
