Nels Wadycki

This one not only has it’s own song, but the best parody of the magnitude quote with “140 words per post?” “140 characters.”

(Brought to me to you by TechCrunch, of course)

Nels Memes, Misc Tech, Social web, The New Web, Twitter Twitter

I’m sure this is a situation that’s starting to happen more and more often as Groupon gets bigger and bigger (what up Chicago-based start-ups!) …

Just a bit ago, (okay, it’s actually been over a month now) I went to Tank Sushi with my wife and a friend for dinner. We were going there because we had a Groupon – an expiring Groupon. As in, expiring on the day we went. (Can you see where this is going?)

We got there about 8:30 and were told it would be about midnight before we would be seated. Now, if it were just me, I’d say “funk dat!” and use the 3 hours to make up for the $20 I would have lost by not using the Groupon.

But, since I was with my wife and a friend who I hadn’t seen in a while, we were okay with waiting for 3 hours since there were plenty of things to talk about.

As we waited, the length of wait for people who came in after us was given as anywhere from 11pm to “We’re not going to be able to get you in.” The point is not the variation, though, but rather that the restaurant was staying open an extra two to three hours just to accommodate all the people who’d waited until the last minute to use their Groupons.

Here’s my solution: Give restaurants (and other Groupon offering establishments) a sign (preferably designed by either the person who does the Foursquare badge or the oatmeal [that dude is awesome]) that would basically say “You waited till the last minute and now we have too many people up in here. Let this be a teaching moment for you.”

Of course, they might just be able to turn the old Twitter Fail Whale upside-down and have all the little birds bringing the big guy down.

So, really, I guess the question is: Can something like Groupon be too big for it’s own good? Even with their “diversification” via “personalization”? People are looking to cut costs just as much as businesses in this economy…

Nels Diatribes, The New Web Fail Whale, Groupon

Awesome.

Thanks TechCrunch

Nels Facebook, Google, Misc Tech, Social web, The New Web Awesome, Movies, YouTube

This one is a much better sell than the previous marketing email. Still kind of odd they’re going for the upsell iof adding a line with the 3GS instead of the 4G, but perhaps they did some checking and saw that I’m not actually eligible for the 4G just yet.

Nels Diatribes, Misc Tech AT&T, iPhone, Marketing

Maybe they make more off the BlackBerry since they don’t have to give as much back to the manufacturer of the phone?

Nels Diatribes, Misc Tech AT&T, Blackberry, iPhone

Today, take a moment to celebrate the independence and freedom that makes the United States of America so unique and powerful: Buy a book or music that was published or distributed through a huge company. Or even just buy some beer or wine to bring to a barbecue that was made locally and distributed not because it’s from a huge company that packs supermarket shelves, but because people have discovered it and like it. Help others to discover these hidden gems and help America remain independent and free.

Nels Uncategorized 4th of July, Independence Day, Independent

Scribd is ditching Flash for HTML5, but Tim Bray says HTML5 ain’t all that big a deal.

Nels Misc Tech, The New Web HTML5, Scribd, TechCrunch, Tim Bray

First: I Was A Lala User
Second: Why Do Good Companies Ruin Startups?

I Was A Lala User

I’ll give Apple credit for giving a month of advance notice, but on the other hand (that first part was the first hand), why are they shutting down Lala before they launch iTunes.com? I must conclude that it means they’re going to change the business model and neuter features available on Lala.com and they don’t want to have to deal with migrating current users of the outstanding service. How very Apple of them. Not supporting legacy anything is a good deal if you can swing it. And – unfortunately for me – they can get away with it.

Now, I hadn’t bought all that many web songs on Lala, but it was not exactly a trivial investment – especially for someone like me who used to open up multiple BMG accounts to get 10 CDs for the price of 1 and 4 extra for “referring my friend.” I’m happy to give artists money when I feel they deserve it, and that’s precisely why I loved Lala so much. I could listen to every song on there – the full song – and then decide whether I wanted to buy it. For me at least, I think that probably led to more purchases than I’d made in a long time because I got sick of paying for music that I’d never heard and wasn’t sure if I’d ever want to hear again.

Now, I will get an iTunes store credit for the web songs that I’d purchased on Lala… better than nothing, but it kind of feels like buying stock and then having it exchanged for 1/10th of a share in a new company with the same stock price. I’ll use it, because it’s there and I hate losing money… but… then what? Use the new iTunes.com? Or…?

ReadWriteWeb evaluates a few alternatives including MP3tunes, MOG, Napster, and Rhapsody. I’m also going to check out eMusic since I supposedly have 35 free MP3s there… but, in terms of how I use Lala, I think that a combination of Pandora and Amazon will have to fill the gap… With Pandora, I can listen to unlimited full songs for free, and then when I find something I like, I can go over to Amazon and get the MP3. (I could do buy the songs from iTunes as well, since they do sell DRM free MP3s now, but I can’t help but want to avoid Apple since they are the ones who interrupted my music consumption system in the first place) The only issue with my new system is that I can’t just scan new releases, add them to my queue, and then buy the web song for any songs that I want to hear again.

Why Do Good Companies Ruin Startups

I never used Dodgeball so their acquisition and subsequent shuttering by Google didn’t really affect me. But then they took over Jaiku (My posts tagged: Jaiku) and basically shut that down (yeah, it’s still there, but there’s no real support for it any more). Now Apple has bought Lala and is shutting it down. Why?

The obvious answer is: talent grab. Everyone knows that these big companies are basically rewarding the talented developers who started the companies by purchasing their whole company for a significant sum of money. I can’t blame the developers for taking it. And I guess I can’t blame the companies for doing it. That’s just the way the business works. It just sucks for consumers who end up with a crappier end product (eg: Jaiku vs. Google Buzz) because the big company seems to restrict and/or slow the development of the new imitation products. As I mentioned above, the fact that Apple is giving people iTunes store credit for the web songs that they’d purchased on Lala is almost a guarantee that the web songs will not exist on whatever web version of iTunes Apple launches.

Another example: One of my favorite features of Jaiku was the ability to unsubscribe from specific feeds from specific people. So, if I follow someone on Twitter and don’t want to see their imported Twitter feed duplicated in my stream, I could unsubscribe from that and only get their other updates. I have not yet seen that in Google Buzz, and if it’s there, I haven’t seen a place to do it.

It’s tough because, on the one hand, I am very happy for the developers and I do think that they deserve to be rewarded for their hard work. I just don’t understand why, if a site is so successful that it warrants being bought out, it doesn’t continue to be run in that successful manner. Okay, I actually do understand why. I already said it in the second paragraph of this section. The big companies want to pull the talented developers off the successful site to recreate the site for them. So really, what I don’t understand is why the big companies don’t continue to run the successful site and do a better job of integrating it and turning it into what they want instead of just shutting it down and rebuilding.

Nels Diatribes, Misc Tech, Music Apple, iTunes, iTunes.com, Lala.com, Music, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch

As Chris Messina points out in this post, the new Facebook global Like button and the Open Graph Protocol benefit Facebook more than anyone. But if you get to Page 3 of ReadWriteWeb’s Definitive Guide for Publishers, Users, and Competitors, Alex Iskold talks about the Semantic Web becoming a reality. I believe that this enhancement of the metadata made available by web site developers hoping to take advantage of the “Facebook Juice” is where developers can start to really open up the Open Graph Protocol and use it for a business/financial advantage.

I’m looking, here, at the kinds of things people have built on top of Twitter, and I have to think that as more sites embed metadata in their pages, there will be a great opportunity for new services to use that data. I haven’t come up with anything yet, but it’s only been, what, a week? The slow, wooden wheels of my mind are creaking as they attempt to churn out ideas.

Nels Facebook Facebook, Open Graph Protocol, Semantic Web

Zen Habits has a very good list of things that will help you simplify your work day.

Most of these I’ve seen before, but here’s a new one (which is sort of similar to other things I’ve seen, but different enough I thought it was worth quoting):

# Practice a focus ritual. Every hour or two, do a refocus ritual. This only takes a minute or two. You might start it by closing down your browser and maybe other open applications, and maybe even take a walk for a couple of minutes to clear your head and get your blood circulating. Then return to your list of Most Important Tasks and figure out what you need to accomplish next. Before you check email again or go back online, work on that important task for as long as you can. Repeat this refocus ritual throughout the day, to bring yourself back. It’s also nice to take some nice deep breaths to focus yourself back on the present.

Nels Getting Things Done, Personal Improvement, Productivity Getting Things Done, Personal Improvement, Productivity, Zen Habits