Cloud Computing, Life

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.