Cloud Computing, Life

So apparently there are lots of users on Seesmic that just watch, but don't post. For some reason that creeps out a lot of people who think these "watchers" are doing something sinister. Here is my "video" response. For those that don't know, with Seesmic, you work it like a blog, except your posts are video clips. Imagine all the comments that form under a popular blog entry, instead of each person typing in an entry, they just record a video clip and post it. There are still conversations just like Twitter, they are just video messages. Some are really clever, some are really boring. Just like any other service, you get a mixed bag. I'll do a full overview on Seesmic sometime soon, I definitely see why it is so popular. In the social networking realm, this is about as personal as it gets. Everyone gets to see the "real you", and of course every little word you say and how you say it is what everyone else sees. Seesmic Post

Twitter Down. They have a big banner up saying "down for maintenance" with promise of some new features being put into production. This was the first time I was totally locked out of Twitter when I wanted to be on, so it made me think of what Twitter is all about, and why I like it. When you first try Twitter, it is confusing in that it isn't structured like so many other Internet destinations we visit. At first it is like listening to the thoughts of 1000's of people. It is all mixed together with no way to sort it out. Then as you figure out how to be a "follower" and also be "followed", you find that you can tap into a more personal understanding of the people that interest you. Instead of a carefully thought out statement, you get the real-moment-in-time happenings of the other participants. And those "real time" statements is what makes it fun. It is different than a traditional chat application in that your statements are added to w

The virtual world and game interface will eventually become our default user interface to the internet. Second Life offers a way to "get away from it all" in a virtual sense, but it is interesting just how much the real world mirrors itself in second life. Second Life is no Utopia, and has its share of cultural and societal problems as well as positive opportunities. 1) Pick Pockets It was recently discovered that it is possible to steal someone's SL money which is called "Linden Dollars". Infected objects like videos that begin to play when a user is near can trigger the theft. So from the real world we have "CRIME" 2) Real Estate Speculation It is possible to buy raw "land" in second life which is just space that has not been populated with any virtual content. It is just "empty space". You can then create content and improve that space and then resell it to other players. It is a basic free market economy which makes up a big par

Update: ====================================== After creating this original post I discovered the explanation of what is happening. Look here Apparently it is a Windows problem. The same results can be obtained with other strings like "Matrix can not lie". No conspiracy after all! ====================================== In Windows XP try this: 1) Open notepad.exe and create a new file 2) With no quotes type "bush hid the facts" (no quotes) 3) Save the file 4) Exit notepad 5) Re-Open notepad and open the file with the line from #2 above What is up with that? Regardless of your political beliefs, if this was done intentionally, it has got to be one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen in the technology world. Are we so divided as a country that individuals now resort to injecting their political beliefs into the most atomic actions they perform in their professional lives? What if I'm wearing something that is colored Red or Blue? Am I now a Crip or a Blo

Fightdump.com specializes in video of clips of people of all types fighting. On MySpace you have endless pictures and videos of young people who are probably under age, drinking and partying. On YouTube people are engaging in all kinds of activities in order to create their "internet reputation". The internet never forgets, and those pictures of you looking like a fool will probably be around "forever". Hopefully those impressions won't impede your ability to get into college, or get that job you really want. "Internet Background Check", everyone will be doing it. The downside of these and other social sites is that in order to attract attention you have to do something unique. And for kids that might not have any real world skills built up yet, unique means "dumb". Of course these dumb actions seem great to the others listed as "friends" on your social profile. And of course, people doing these things don't realize that the pic

I took the Small Wonder with me this last week end and took some videos. Included are the YouTube links. After watching the uploaded videos on my Mac, I have these comments: 1) The video looks best when there is some contrast. Taking a shot from a very long distance away is not where this device is strong. Up close shots from 3-10 feet, or shots where there is lots of color and light yields the best results. 2) The Zoom feature works well for up close shots, but far away shots that are zoomed seem to give up some clarity in the image. 3) It seems to do pretty well in low light, which is nice for such a low end device. One of the example clips is taken in my office where only a desktop lamp is turned on. As a pan across the room, you can see how well it adjusts for the low light condition. If you watch the video closely, you can see the device adjusting the light as I go from the dark objects on the desk to viewing my computer monitor. Like I said in my earlier post, this isn't a re

P4P = Paid For Participation Is a new breed of P4P social network on the horizon? P4P seems to be the theme for the new social network called "Yuwie". With Facebook on the PR ropes, an opening has been created for a social network platform that cuts the user in on the financial action. Users get paid for different types of visits to their profiles. If someone looks at your video, picture, or any of your "stuff" you build up visit points that eventually translates into dollars that you get paid. Advertising is of course the core of the financial model and your profile is sprinkled with ads. There is also a pyramid scheme where the people that you "invite" to join become part of your "network" and you also get paid for clicks that happen for all the profiles that make up your referral network. There are up to 10 levels of referrals that can build up underneath you. You get paid "per 1000 impressions", this chart of the pay-out potential w

I just got a RCA "Small Wonder", which is billed as a one-button video camera. There are actually a few more buttons (Play & Delete), but the setup if pretty fool proof. The video is a test video that I took with the RCA device. The video shows one of my pets, "Buddy" who is a Coatimundi. He just woke up from a nap. It takes the best video when you have at least a foot or more of distance from the subject. A pre-teen will love this thing because it is really easy to use and when you plug it in via USB, you can just copy the files directly from the device to your desktop. It makes avi files, so on a Mac you need a plugin, but it was simple to deal with. The video quality might not win any awards, but for simple web video, or to have something just to throw in your pocket, this works. And it is cheap. You should be able to get one from eBay for less than $100. I'm taking it with me this week-end to the Oregon Coast, I'll capture a variety of shots and post

Let's say I buy a book on a "highly personal matter". Who knows what, it isn't hard to image what a few topics could be. And during that purchase process I miss the one-time "opt out" of Facebook Beacon tracking for this purchase. Lo-and-behold on my FB profile a message appears: "Tony bought a book on XXXXXXX" posted for all to see. In most cases it would be harmless, but maybe just one instance could also totally wreck someone's life. This is why Beacon is critically flawed. Yes I like and use FB, cool concept, but what is happening behind the scenes makes me feel like FB is a honey pot just to attract users so their data can be farmed. Is FB really providing value to their users? A business model based on covert confiscation of your personal information doesn't seem like a long term winner to me. It seems like FB has completely opened the door for another competitor to come in and create "Facebook done right" where the "un

With all the recent announcements by Facebook on its new advertising model. I was thinking about how to establish a monetary value for a Facebook profile. Right now there are several calculations based on the number of FB users and the valuation based on the recent MS equity purchase. This all equates to a fixed cost-per-user, but I was thinking about something different. I was thinking that the value should be variable based on the influence that a user has. The FB "influence factor" would be based on the number of friends I have, the number of apps I subscribe to, my groups, number of interactions, etc. My "influence factor" is a ranking of how involved I am in FB and hence a reflection of how FB "sticky" I am. The more sticky the better because the more time I spend in FB means that there are more opportunities to show me ads. Also a large number of friends means that my profile home page is prime real estate for product placement messages that my frien

Seems like this will be a problem, down on Friday night, still "early" around 1:00 AM PST. FB will have to take some of their cash and build an infrastructure that has higher up time. Maybe doing maint at 3:00AM on Sunday is ok, but 1:00 AM (PST) on Friday, is no good.

Trying to navigate to http://silverlight.net on Saturday, October 20th after 11PM PST gave me this: Oh well, I guess even with bazillions of dollars, not everyone can always be perfect.

Mark Cuban wrote the original "The Internet is Dead and Boring" . I just have a few more things to add in addition to what he said. The internet, including the mobile web, is boring, it has been and always will be. The reason that technologies like Flash, Ajax, Javascript, and Silverlight were invented is to combat boredom. When people are bored they turn things off, the put things down, they look for something else to do. That isn't a great model for the internet, because boredom means you'll look for some other content, or you'll turn off your computer all together and do something out in the real world. How are you going to view and click on ads if your computer is turned off? Boredom is one of the biggest threats to the current internet model which is dependant on capturing "eye-balls". In many ways it seems like an arms-race defined as: "a competitive building up of armaments by actors in a conflict". A lot of the current internet seems to

As of "now" try this: 1) navigate to http://m.yahoo.com 2) click "Yahoo! International" 3) click "Korea" My BB8800 doesn't display Korean correctly. I get a string of about 20 characters and the rest of the page is blank. Seems like they should be able to detect the device type and if it can't display that character set, put up a message saying so. Give it a try and let me know what you get. I'll post when it works again. This is a similar situation to what I discovered with Yahoo and the link to Japan a while back. It was broken for a long time before they fixed it. Yahoo needs some type of automated link crawling tool to verify the top level links on their portal. Maybe they should run it every day to make sure everything is connected.

I attended this years Mobile Web Americas in Orlando. There are a couple of people that have written reviews , here is one. They had a good set of speakers but the execution of the whole event could be improved. Of course on the positive side, because the conference was small, you could approach any of the speakers afterward. That wouldn't be possible at a big show like CTIA. One of the sessions was called "Meet the Browsers" where representatives from Nokia, Opera, Microsoft, and Novarra spoke. In general theme of the browser makers seemed to be: "just send us the desktop content and we will make it look OK on your mobile". In a lot of ways it seemed like they were saying "the mobile web is dead, just browse the web desktop page with your phone". Of course that has to be their stance based on the products they sell. I don't subscribe to that line of thought because I believe in "context". When I'm mobile I don't necessarily want

It looks like after several weeks of being broken you can now navigate to the Yahoo Japan site. I'll try another link crawler to see what else we can find.

Based on early reports, I was a little worried that I would have a problem updating my iPhone to 1.1.1. You see, I have a little confession to make. I did what you might call a "mini-unlock". When I got my iPhone, I used this program: http://www.dvdtoiphone.net/unlock-iphone.html to "unlock" it. It does not do a "SIM unlock" but instead allows you to get access to the iPhone UI even though the handset has not been activated. I used it to play around with the iPhone for a few days before I finally activated it. Luckily I was spared the "new reality" imposed by Apple. I was able to do the 1.1.1 update and so far so good. I will be interesting to see the ripple effects of the crack-down, especially in Europe where locked phones are not the norm. Most of my friends report that their 3rd party native apps have been wiped. These types of decisions by Apple, which I understand from a pure profit motive, will undoubtedly cause some of the Apple luster t

I solved my iPhone-Facebook photo upload problem. In my Facebook account I added a flickr application. Then from my iPhone I can directly email my photos from the iPhone to the flickr account. The images then show up in Facebook.

Here is the sequence I mentioned before when trying to browse to Yahoo Japan from my Blackberry 8800. The error is "excessive number of re-directs". If anyone else can duplicate the problem on other BB devices, I would like to know.

You would think the big portal/content companies would be able to put some effort into testing out access of their services over some of the most popular devices, but it doesn't appear that way. You don't have to look to hard in order to find a problem. For instance, I have a Blackberry 8800. When I do these steps I get an error: 1) Navigate to the Yahoo mobile home page (http://mobile.yahoo.com) 2) Hit "Yahoo! International" 3) Hit "Y! Japan" I get a 400 error saying an excessive number of redirects have occurred. You would think someone from Yahoo or RIM would be able to catch these types of problems. All they need is a link crawler running over a mobile emulator. This problem has existed for over a month, I tried it a while back, but thought it was a short term thing that would have been corrected by now. I'll take a picture of the error over the week-end and post it. If anyone else has a BB device, give it a try and let me know if you get the same e

All I want to do is take a picture on my iPhone and email it to the Facebook email uploader. Sounds simple right? Wrong. Apparently the email upload service for Facebook only works using MMS and not as an email attachment. I tried it and in my email account I get a message saying something like: "You have uploaded from an unrecognized or unsupported address. If you are sending from a phone, your carrier may not be recognized by Facebook. Please try again in 24 hours." So I sent an email to Facebook tech support and got this replay: "Unfortunately, we currently only accept mobile photo uploads as MMS. We will consider other methods in the future. Sorry for the inconvenience." I just wanted to upload a picture of my face into Facebook so it appears like the pictures of my friends faces, but I guess I have to face the facts that it appears on face value that it can't be done.

I'm staying at a hotel for a few days and after a late night jog I needed a bottle of water. The vending machine on my floor has one listed for $1.75. I open my wallet, pull out one dollar stick it in. I pull out the second dollar put it in. The machine spits it back out. A small corner of the dollar is missing so the machine doesn't accept it. I look in my wallet, no more dollars. I hit the coin return which gives me 4 quarters. I go back to my room find 3 more quarters. Now I have seven quarters and one dollar bill with a missing corner. Back to the machine I go. I put in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 quarters, everything good so far. I put in the seventh. It falls through the coin return. I try again, same result. Thinking this quarter has a physical defect that the coin mechanism in the vending machine is picking up, I return to my room again looking for another quarter. Back to the machine: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6....7 " plink ", it falls through the coin return. Aaarrrggg ! I hit t

I thought about calling the title something like "Lazy" but I'll be nice. One of the things that bugs me is when a company like Yahoo that should have gobs of money and resources can't seem to fix a small but annoying problem in a service they offer. I use Yahoo Mail and just about once a day when I try to log into mail, the page seems to grind on a URL that starts off as http://us.f431.mail.yahoo.com/ - it is always the same f431 that has the problem. I immediately think of the Seinfeld episode "It's not you, it's me", but a quick search reveals that a lot of other people have the same problem, and many have tried to report it. There is an IT concept called "monitoring" where you use automated technology to ping all your web portal entry points in order to see that they return a valid web page. Yahoo must have some type of technology like this, and why they don't fix this problem that has been exposed by so many is hard to understand.

When the latest Google Reader came out I was unhappy because the new default layout is different than before. Instead of your subscription list being in a frame on the left, it now "floats" above the article text that now takes up the full width of your browser window. In this new view I also could not find the "Add subscription" button. Of course, as always there is a solution: If you don't know this about Google Reader, hit SHIFT-? to get a pop up window of commands. If you don't like the new look-and-feel hit "u".