February 2009
An Open Letter On Best Practices And Principles
Over the past weeks, Eric Blantz, Khris Loux, Chris Saad and I have been discussing the ethics and best practices around social media and social tools, specifically with regard to the needs of a social tools vendor like JS-Kit. All of us are working with JS-Kit in some way or another, but the recent Facebook flap about their Terms of Service led us to consider addressing these issues in a...
Word Of The Moment: Plug Computing
Marvell: Plug Computing.
A plug computer is a small, powerful computer that connects to an existing network using Gigabit Ethernet.
Greasemonkey Script Nests Threaded Discussions In...
Pratham Kumar genned up a greasemonkey script, Nested Twitter Replies, that tries to nest Twitter discussions, and does so right in Twitter pages.
Twitter, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
I tried using Tweetree for this functionality (see Tweetree: A Better UX For Twitter(, but it is annoying to have to use a completely different site for just one feature.
This script is so good that...
SpeakerRate
Just learned about SpeakerRate, a new tool from the folks at Viget Labs/Pointless Corp.
[from the website]
SpeakerRate is a community site for event organizers, attendees, and speakers.
Event organizers can find speakers, learn about talks they’ve given in the past, and determine who would be a good match for the event they’re organizing.
Event attendees can provide...
Twiphlo: Small Is Beautiful For Geolocation
Geolocation tools fall into two broad categories:
Predictive location, generally oriented toward arranging to meet with other people when traveling to other places (like Dopplr and TripIt), or in your own town (like Mixin)
Location streaming, generally oriented to keeping others informed of location (like Google Latitude, DodgeBall, Plazes, or Brightkite), either for arranging meetings,...
Word Of The Moment: Mojo
Mojo isn’t a new word, but this is a new homonym:
[via How I want to redefine my role, and the reader’s role, in the newspaper by Daniel Victor]
Once the equipment arrives, I’ll be starting in a new position at [central Pennsylvania’s] The Patriot-News as a mobile journalist, or mojo.
What that means is, correctly, still to be determined. We do know it’ll involve video, still...
Is Yelp Committing Extortion?
Brian Solis got involved in a controversy about Yelp possibly strong-arming small businesses to have bad reviews moved down in their ratings, but he backs off from the basic extortion and focuses on the marketing aspects too much.
The initial impetus was a story in the East Bay Express by Kathleen Richards:
[via Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0]
[…]
John [a restaurant owner...
The Architecture Of Flow: Canonical Features Of...
Last week I spent a few days in New York, meeting with a diverse group of startups, and one of the themes that kept reappearing was the nature of what I have been calling flow applications for the last few years. One sharp colleague asked me to define a flow app in a simple way.
I tried, and I think I came up with the key features of stream or flow applications. I also came up with a few...
Real-Time Bit.ly Statistics
Bit.ly, the URL shortener, has released real-time stats for URL access:
/Message: Fred Wilson Wants A Streamroll - bit.ly Statistics, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
I think it’s fascinating that posting a bit.ly into the Twitter stream can lead to a cascade of retweets and clicks, leading back to a blog post.
[disclosure: I am an advisor to bit.ly.]
Fred Wilson Wants A Streamroll
Fred Wilson once upon a time read a certain list of blogs religiously, and had a blogroll. When he stopped using RSS readers his blogroll got ‘stale’ — meaning that there were blogs in the roll that were not ones that he really read consistently. So he dropped the blogroll from his blog. Recently someone asked him to provide a list of what he’s reading — a...
Apple Store Told Me Wrong
I had my old, worn-out Macbook Pro die on me the other morning, in NYC. I wasn’t really that surprised: it’s had a hard life.
I had replaced the keyboard in late 2008 after the Berlin beer incident, but otherwise it seemed ok. A few weeks ago I noticed the ethernet port wasn’t working. Then the screen started to show some flutter, and the DVD drive wouldn’t accept...
Walter Isaacson Is Dead Wrong About The Future Of...
Walter Isaacson is the former managing editor of Time, so I am unsurprised that his conjectures about the future viability of newspapers get so many things wrong.
He starts by pointing out that there is a crisis of ‘meltdown proportions’ but then makes the most bizarre assertion, that young people read newspapers.
[from How to Save Your Newspaper — Printout —...
Gmail Plural "Inboxes" Are A Real Pane
I am not a hyperorganized person. I am more of a ‘scruffy’, as defined by Abramson and Friedman in “A Perfect Mess” (a wonderful book about the impulse to organize ourselves).
However, I live and work in the real world, and I need to accomplish things, and to do so I need to keep track of what I need to do.
Although I dream of a world without email, it is a cental...
Another Good Reason To Abandon Facebook
Some of the terms of the Facebook agreement are ridiculous:
[via Facebook Isn’t Private, and 7 Other Things You Should Know « Legal Andrew]
By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with...
Staction: Starting To Knock Down My Objections
A few weeks ago, I reviewed Staction, a new workstreaming application (see Staction: Another Run At Workstreaming), stating that the application had a few limitations that made it impossible for me to adopt as my core collaboration tool:
[from Staction: Another Run At Workstreaming]
Personally, I don’t want to get so minimal that I can’t format messages, and Staction...
Google Latitude
Google Latitude, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Vimeo Queue
Vimeo has a simple value proposition for signing up to its Plus video hosting service: getting to the front of the line.
Vimeo Queue, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Journos As Noobs, Playacting As Pundits
Newbies posing as pundits, and spreading do’s and don’t’s about how we should conduct ourselves, should stop. They have arrived at a superficial appreciation of what is going on, but they don’t understand the deeper truths that motivate our actions online.
The social web is a fairly open place: the confusing term ‘democratic’ is often used to denote this....
TypePad Calendar Tweak
I recently bitched about Typepda’s new blog editor ‘upgrade’ which seemed to me to be a step backwards at the best (see /Message: TypePad’s Big Improvements To User Experience: Ha!). The one niddling little example I used to characterize the true dumbness of Typepad’s UX was the calendar dating dialog:
As just one tiny example of absolute UI stupidity that...
Hunkering Down, Pushing Ahead
The econolypse is rippling through the world, a shock wave moving across countries, industries, and nations, and right into our lives.
I have spoken with dozens of friends directly impacted: losing jobs, laying colleagues off, cutting back on plans for business expansion.
My business is just me: I am a soloist. My work continues pretty much as it has in recent years. I am working with ...