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Nels Wadycki

Month: May 2009

  • Hulu What Now?

    Nels W

    So, I know the thing on everyone’s mind is the whole Twitter Replies scandal, but really, that’s already been overdone, and it’ll be over and gone in a day anyway. But it does sort of relate to to this post in the whole K.I.S.S. #FAIL way… you see…

    Not too long ago, I was watching the “Web Exclusives” (aka Deleted and Behind-The Scenes) of The Office on Hulu and I see this:

    Availability Notes:
    The last 14 episodes of Season 5 are available until August 8, 2009. At that time, Season 5 episodes will revert to a ‘five rolling’ schedule with five episodes available at a given time and a newer episode added weekly as an older one expires.

    I’m sorry… whosinawhatnow? That Don’t Make No Sense.

    buddha banana

    As opposed to the Twitter reply scheme, which I actually understood the first time I read it and – while kind of dumb – is actually comprehensible…

    Maybe it’s just the date thing that’s throwing me off. I’m assuming that new episodes don’t start until some time in September, and so the August 8th date seems sort of arbitrary. Why not August 29th, 1997 at 2:14 am?

    Here I thought Hulu was going to neatly take care of the fact that I don’t have cable or a satellite dish or AT&T’s Uverse (whatever that is). But instead of being my online TiVo, it appears they’re going to be all Big Media about it and force me to watch on their schedule (at least somewhat). Maybe if, instead of “limited commercials” they went to 2 commercials per break… or 3, or even 4, like on broadcast TV? Would the users revolt? Sure… but would they get used to it if they didn’t have any other choice? I know I would.

  • Dollhouse: Unlucky 13

    Nels W

    dollhouse_cast

    So, I’m catching up on Dollhouse tonight (thankfully/mercifully, someone had the bright idea to extend the expiration dates so I could actually keep up), and I notice this:

    Availability Notes: The 13th Episode of Dollhouse will not be available for online streaming.

    Back To The Stone Age

    I can almost guarantee you that the person who decided not to have the season finale available on Hulu is not the same person who decided to extend the deadlines… because one was a good decision and the other, a terrible one.

    Guess what FOX (or Hulu, but I’m guessing it was FOX that made the decision)? My wife and I are chaperoning her school’s prom on Friday night. So, I won’t be able to watch your Dollhouse season finale… which means I have about 3 options…

    1. Never get to see it – this is the extreme option, and is clearly superseded by the next two
    2. I can download it illegally
    3. I can wait until the DVDs are on Netflix and get the last one in order to watch a single freaking episode

    I wonder if any of those 3 options is going to make FOX more money than they’d get by putting it on Hulu…

    A fourth option would just be to follow Eliza Dushku’s Twitter. It doesn’t really actually accomplish viewing of the episode, but it supports an actress that I like…

    eliza-dushku-94

  • Does FriendFeed Know Kim Kardashian? (Not In The Biblical Sense)

    Nels W

    Kim KardashianHere’s Kim Kardashian’s alleged FriendFeed page. It would be easy enough for a simple name squatter to do something like that, especially since FriendFeed allows you to import not just a Twitter feed, but Twitter followers without a password.

    I’m leaning towards about 75% that it’s not really her. I’d give her about a 25% chance that her crew is smart enough to realize how popular the Ashton/CNN and Oprah things were with Twitter, and they did this to get the jump on the Next Big Thing.

    The other 75% I’d split pretty evenly between a) Squatter and b) Friendfeed. That’s right, I’m giving equal odds to the idea that FriendFeed did this themselves to try to attract some additional publicity to their service. And as I mentioned, with their setup, it wouldn’t be too hard to just pretend you had no idea. I mean, I could go to the nearest public library and in 5 minutes, have a completely anonymous Oprah FriendFeed that looks just like the Kim Kardashian one except probably with more followers (or “subscribers”). They probably figured that doing someone as high profile as Oprah or Ashton would have made it obvious what they were doing. But Kardashian is a pretty good mark: her reputation is a little questionable (furthering the speculation that it might actually be her), and she has a lot of crazy people who are obsessed with her (furthering the squatting idea).

    Kim Kardashian in a Halloween Costume?Plus, by choosing Kardashian, you get not only someone whose Google Trends indicate she’s actually competitive with Oprah terms of search, but you also get bloggers like me (and TechCrunch) posting pictures of her, which is probably what most people are searching for when they look for her anyway, which will attract attention from people outside of the technocrats.

    Finally, let me add the possibility that FriendFeed contacted celebrities to import their Twitter accounts to FF for a little bit of spending money or Cristal. I’m sure they know that links are the currency of the internet and nothing brings links like geeks and hot (or at least supposedly hot) women.

    And so as not to disappoint the people who are inevitably going to end up here looking for Kardashian booty… there’s a couple more pictures are the jump.

    (more…)

  • So, is it Opposite Day at Google?

    Nels W

    From the Official Google Reader blog, a post about sharing with friends and making new friends. Now, I don’t have a lot of “Google Reader Friends” and I use my Shared Items to feed into a sidebar widget over here, so maybe I’m just not into the whole “sharing” thing enough, but this part seems really overly complicated to me:

    By hovering over the name of an unfamiliar commenter you can see their profile picture and the links they’ve added to their Google Profile. Furthermore, you can click the “Start sharing” link to start sharing your shared items with that person!

    This is a great way to add new people to your friends list. When that person next logs in, they’ll see an option to view your shared items as well as the option to start sharing with you. If they reciprocate, you’ll have a new friend in your Reader.

    I mean, I guess they’re erring on the side of privacy but really, is a thing called Shared Items supposed to be all that private? It seems to me that it would make a lot more sense to do the Twitter-style follow for this one, and send The Sharer an email when The Follower starts viewing their shared items. Then The Sharer can reciprocate if they want by following The Follower, and if they don’t want to follow The Follower back, they don’t have to do anything (as opposed to having to make a decision in Google’s model). Yes, this means that The Sharer has to be willing to share their items publicly to start with, but that seems to have worked out pretty well for Twitter. And I’d argue that sharing and commenting on items via Google Reader is orders of magnitude less personal than the kind of things people put on Twitter. All this “privacy” thing means is that Google has to add this kind of disclaimer to make sure people can understand how it is going to work:

    Note: You can stop sharing your items with someone at any time by visiting the Sharing settings link in your left sidebar. Also, if someone chooses to share with you, your shared items are not visible to that person unless you consent. Finally, the “start sharing” link in profile cards will also only appear to those users sharing with friends, and not those sharing only with chat buddies.

    It just seems like a real backwards way of doing it.

  • A Triptych of Facebook Links

    Nels W

    First up: ReadWriteWeb calls out Facebook’s Twitter envy. I’m with them… Why does Facebook want to be Twitter? There is already Twitter. Twitter has a totally different core competency than Facebook. Why is Facebook trying to change their own core competency to compete with something that has such an unproven revenue model?

    On the other hand, competing with Twitter has forced Facebook to open up it’s Stream with an API. Now, can I start liking my friends posts in the iPhone app? Okay, I know, really this move was made so that 3rd parties can develop (or add onto) their own apps to help Facebook be as cool as Twitter is with their API.

    But beyond the arms race with Twitter, the stream API will open up the possibility for many new applications both within Facebook and outside its walls. An obvious one would be better filtering options for your activity stream. It would be simple to create an app that shows you the most liked or most commented on items in your stream, for example. Or now that stream can be plugged into various social search engines to give you socialized real-time results. Hell, if I could just search my own activity stream, I’d consider that a giant leap forward. But Facebook still only allows developers to cache data for 24 hours, so you wouldn’t be able to build a very powerful search engine or return results from more than a day ago.

    Facebook has also become not just an OpenID provider (issuing party), but also a relying party. I believe they’re the first big site out there to do that. I’m not sure why all the others haven’t, because honestly, it’s kind of annoying to have 20 different sites that provide OpenIDs but if no one accepts anyone elses OpenID then it’s pretty much useless.

    I’m glad that Facebook is opening up, but here’s a couple more things they can do to compete with Twitter (and/or make me happy):

    • Allow tagging of friends in status updates
    • Allow users to view a feed with ALL updates from ALL friends
    • Try to make more content viewable on a single screen of the iPhone app
    • Start rolling out vanity URLs to users in order of when they joined Facebook