Hi, everyone. The lack of updates on the site lately has been apparent to anyone who’s followed it from the beginning. There are several reasons for it.
First, I’ve devoted most of my energy to writing on Mashable. This blog, FranticIndustries, has become a vehicle for some web and technology related issues that are either very niche, or somewhat personal. Unfortunately, my Twitter and FriendFeed accounts are often good enough for these purposes, and thus this blog rarely gets updated.
All in all, I don’t think that anyone who follows and likes my writing has lost anything; it’s just not concentrated on this blog alone. I’ll see where I will take it from here when I get back from my summer vacation, which is the most important time of year for me: time when I go dark (very little internet and technology), time when I charge my battery and read some good sci-fi from real, paper books for a couple of weeks.
I hope you all have a nice summer; I won’t be posting anything until September, except perhaps an occasional tweet. Till then, bye.
If the standard way of watching Google Maps is boring you to death, a game in which you can drive several different vehicles all around the map might be a welcome refreshment.
Don’t expect hours of gameplay with this one, though: it’s just a simple display of what can be done with an API. You can choose between 4 vehicles and control them with the mouse or the arrow keys, but the fact that you don’t have to stick to the road and can drive over buildings somewhat kills the joy.
Usually, mashups and innovative, alternative GUIs for popular websites are slow and mostly unusable, but Tag Galaxy breaks that habit with being really functional, as well as being really, really cool.
Type in a tag - any word, really - into Tag Galaxy, and you’ll get a small solar system of related tags, with more relevant tags being the inner planets, their orbit decreasing with relevance. It’s a cute little 3D tag world, but what makes it so cool is how responsive and fast it is; for example, you can click and drag for rotation, or use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Click a tag, then click another tag, and you’ll get results for both tags combined.
Half of the fun is in discovering what this tool can do, so I’ll leave the rest of the exploration to you. Be warned, though: it’s addictive.
Twitter, the US-based microblogging service that lets you share your heart and mind with the world in 140 characters or less, is not down. I repeat, Twitter is actually working as originally intended.
For the uninitiated, who are used to Twitter in its regular mode, which is a big sign saying that something is wrong, here’s what it means: the form you see at the very top of your page is for posting messages, while the messages below are from your friends. We know, we know; it’s not as fun as the big sign, but life’s a bitch. For those adventurous enough to try it out, be fast, for we all know that this will not last very long.
I’m just kidding, it’s not fully up yet. Seriously, Twitter, take those servers apart and rebuild them from scratch if needed. This can’t go on forever.
This is also a wake-up call for anyone that thinks that getting a wildly positive review on Techcrunch is enough to reach stardom. Spotplex, simply, had done many things wrong, and they definitely weren’t the next Digg; they had a chance and the spotlight for a while, but it wasn’t enough to catch on. Better luck next time, folks.
Ultraedit, Notepad, Joe, Textpad: all those editors are created for people who can’t handle Vi. Give it to a normal user, and you can bet that there’s absolutely no way they’re going to find its functions by simply using trial and error. A diehard Vi fan, however, will rather die than admit that Vi is not the best text editor ever created.
I don’t plan to take sides here, since I don’t want to be abducted and interrogated in an old warehouse by a bunch of Vi fanatics; instead, I’ll merely point to jsvi, an online, Javascript version of Vi.
jsvi is actually rather old, but DownloadSquad just dug it out from somewhere; I haven’t seen it before, and hopefully you haven’t either, so there you go.
The debate on whether printed newspapers and magazines are going to die out or not comes up fairly often. I’m not going to into pro or con mode right now, but I will share a thought that comes to me every time I write an article for a paper mag (I do, now less than before, write for Croatia’s leading IT magazine Bug).
I’ve written thousands of articles (most not in English, mind you) for paper media in the 6 years I’m in this business, and frankly, it feels like wasted time. Unless you’re an avid collector of these magazines, which most people aren’t these days, you can’t read these articles anymore. They’re lost in dusty basements, and forgotten archives, and most of them are - for all practical purposes - non existant.
By contrast, the stuff I’ve written on this blog, however casual, is available for everyone to read, indexed by search engines, saved on social media sites such as Digg and Delicious, linked to by other blogs - in short, it’s there.
And I won’t even go into the financial implications; the articles that went out in print, well, I got paid for them once, and that was it. With the small amount of advertising I have on this blog, my old thoughts are still making me money. We’re not talking huge amounts of money here, but it’s enough for all my monthly coffee needs. Whenever I drink coffee, from now to forever, it’s been paid by this blog.
It’s funny that many of my colleagues and business associates still value the stuff I’ve done for print mags more than the stuff I’ve written online. Many of them don’t even know I have a blog. Little do they know that in fact, if I had started, 6 years ago, to spend my energy entirely on my online endeavors, I’d probably have done better for myself.
I still love print magazines, I always did. I love having that shiny copy of Wired in my hands, even though it’s 90% ads and 10% articles. Today, most printed publications also archive most, if not all, of their stuff online. But let’s face it; today, if it’s not online, it’s dead. Print is just an afterthought, and - unless we see some real breakthroughs in e-paper soon - I expect most of it to fall into the same category as vinyl records and wrist watches; a bit of cool, a dash of retro, a pinch of exclusivity, but not really a necessity.
Here’s a new, painfully simple way to create mixtapes - well, not real mixtapes, but lists of MP3s which can be played directly in a web browser. Which is pretty much the next best thing. The service is called Muxtape and it has literally no options, which is sometimes a good thing.
Here’s an example of a Muxtape. I don’t have one near, but I bet it’s optimized for the iPhone.
I’ve noticed recently that I simply cannot keep up with all the e-mail I receive, both here and on Mashable where I’m the features editor. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to all of you who wrote to me and I didn’t reply, but unfortunately my e-mail overload is getting bigger and bigger and I doubt this situation will get better.
I have, however, become a lot more active on social sites like Twitter and Pownce. Since I’m blogging when the USA is asleep, I’m quite a lonely blogger, and it feels good to have this stream of info from other bloggers, readers, developers, designers and tech aficionados. Furthermore, if you send me something over these networks, I’m actually more likely to notice than if you send me an e-mail - especially since Gmail’s spam filters have become somewhat less effective. Therefore, I’d like to call everyone to join me on various social networks I’m actively using. Here’s the list:
Franticindustries.com got hacked over the weekend with the usual result of nasty keywords appearing in the posts. After a couple hours of tinkering, hopefully I’ve now patched most of Wordpress’ many security holes; but the blame is ultimately on me for not keeping Wordpress up to date.
In short: lame wannabe hackers: not cool. Not keeping your Wordpress up to date: dumb. Spending half of the weekend hardening Wordpress’ feeble security: priceless.
There’s a blogger fight going on this weekend, with a little lifestreaming application by the name of FriendFeed at its centre. FriendFeed lets you see your and your friends’ activity across various web services in a simple feed, and it also adds the ability to comment and tag any individual item. For some reason, several prominent bloggers decided that FriendFeed is the next Twitter; while I agree that connecting and organizing all of your web activity in one place might be the next big thing, I don’t see FriendFeed being exceptionally good at it.
I’ve tried out FriendFeed briefly before, and let’s just say I wasn’t overwhelmed with what it can do (you can see my feed here.) Similar services abound: see Profilactic (my coverage here, my profile here), SocialThing, or Correlate.us as examples.
All of these services do more or less the same thing. Louis Gray seems to think that the big difference between FriendFeed and everything else is the fact that you can comment on items or “love” them, but I don’t see what, exactly, are the benefits of these options. I can barely find time to comment on blog posts; why the hell would I comment on bits and pieces of my (or someone else’s) online activity? The fact that the option is there doesn’t exactly hurt, but at best I consider it a very minor advantage.
To be honest, I’m a little bit biased about the entire concept of lifestreaming. I have on my hard drive the outline of a project that would - in my opinion - do much more with this idea, but I haven’t had the time or the manpower to start it. In brief, I think that all the apps I’ve mentioned above, as well as others like them, don’t really help you organize your online life well enough; they’re just spewing it all out in a long, hard-to-follow string of events which are only interesting as a “what’s this guy up to right now” kind of thing, but quite pointless in the long run. Thus, no, I don’t think that FriendFeed is in any way revolutionary: it’s a nice application and it’s popular because it’s a little bit better than most of its competition, but I don’t see any disruptive capacity in it just yet.
Guy Kawasaki (of Truemors fame) launched a new cheapass (10000 bucks) startup: Alltop. The only problem is: it’s not a startup. It’s nothing more than an extended version of Popurls (they admit it in the upper right corner where it says “Inspired by Popurls), which is in turn a nice enough RSS aggregator simply because it came early, but let’s face it, it’s a static version of Netvibes.
So, where does that leave Alltop? Nowhere, really. Absolutely no one would report on this one if Guy Kawasaki wasn’t behind it, and next time, they probably won’t.
Now, the interesting thing about this story is not the site itself, but the fact that this is one of those situations where you think to yourself: what the hell were they thinking? What was Guy thinking when he announced Alltop? What is he hoping for; how does he hope to gain readership for this thing, how does he plan to make money off it, and the like?
Luckily, you actually can learn what Guy was thinking in Kristen’s video interview with Guy, embedded below.
My interpretation is that Guy is thinking that RSS is a concept that the majority of internet users don’t understand (which is correct,) that folks who are new to RSS don’t want to bother to find all the feeds that they might be interested in (also correct,) however, everyone wants to be able to read a lot of information from various sources in a very simple way (partly true), and this is what Alltop provides. Another very positive thing about this project is that it was very, very cheap, and therefore, even if it fails, who cares? You got to congratulate Guy on that one.
There are also problems. One problem is that you cannot just copy a site (Popurls), add some non-essential improvements (more feeds) and think that you’ll achieve the same level of success as the original. It just doesn’t work that way, and it’s hard to explain why, but it just doesn’t.
And even if it did, a company like Netvibes can simply publish a customized page which would show the exact same feeds, only with all the benefits that Netvibes have. In other words, Alltop is replaceable. Easily.
BTW, if you’re interested in something like Alltop, only much better and with much nicer options, check out DailyRotation. They’ve been doing it for years, although the site is focused only on technology.
Secondly, he’s understimating his users. People do care about customization. MySpace users, which are for the most part kids that don’t know much about computers, customize their pages to an extreme extent. Alltop doesn’t even let you see more stories for a particular feed, and that’s the first thing people are gonna miss. Popurls is better with that regard - it gives you some basic customization options.
All in all, I think I know what Guy was thinking when he created Alltop; the idea isn’t all that bad, but the actualization of it is just not good enough.
