Nels Wadycki

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

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

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

But none of the recently announced innovations are making my eyes light up like a kid first gazing on his Easter basket.

First, from the Gmail Blog: Nested Labels and Message Preview. The Nested Labels thing actually did have me excited as though it were a chocolate egg or perhaps a Peep. But then I read this:

Please note that this lab doesn’t play nicely with the “Hide Read Labels” lab. You might not get exactly what you expect if you have both labs enabled; for example, the collapse/expand icons won’t always appear when they should.

and all the twinkle in my eyes was snuffed out. I tried it out and found it to be true. It didn’t work.

Honestly, the “Hide Read Labels” lab experiment is more important to me than sub-labels ever could be. Since I make extensive use of the keyboard shortcuts, I can navigate to any label I want with a simple “g + l” or “/” and the name of the label. I use the “Hide Read Labels” so that I only see labels with unread messages, which gives me a visual indicator of what has been filtered out of my Inbox and placed under another label for later viewing. Thus instead of viewing 44 labels, I can collapse my chatterbox (which I don’t use anyway since I have Trillian) and see my Calendar Gadget. Viewing Unread Messages and Upcoming Events is easily of more value than being able to have labels under other labels. Of course, the whole labeling system was designed so that you don’t really need nested labels at all. I know there are people who have not given up the folder hierarchy mindset, but it’s too bad that they’ll have to give up their hidden read labels in order to get it.
Read more…

Nels Diatribes, Gmail, Google, Misc Tech android, Droid, Gmail, iPhone, Nexus One

…but I may never know.

Part 1: Shock and Awe

I made a decision to try to just focus on positive things with this blog, but given my previous obsession with Lifestreaming, I can’t help but comment on this.

I read about AOL’s Lifestream earlier today on TechCrunch who, rightfully, said that it might be what Google Buzz should have been. From what Michael Arrington says, it may be all that and more.

The problem is, when I tried to sign in using Facebook Connect (which I would normally say is a great use of social network integration by AOL), I get this:

Whawhawhat? Really? No, really?

I’ve never seen that permission asked for before, and I hope I never see it again. While Facebook may be the Walled Garden with Reinforced Steel and Concrete Walls, I kind of like it that way. I can post stuff that I know only people I’ve friended will see.
Read more…

Nels Diatribes, Facebook, Lifestreaming, Twitter AOL, Facebook, Facebook Connect, Fail, Lifestreaming, Twitter

While it wasn’t one of the major factors I talked about in my previous post, the following is a quick and easy example of another reason that webapps kick ass: No Upgrade Cycle

Google launched Buzz 2 days ago, and already their making changes based on user feedback. But the best part is not that they’re making changes and responding so quickly, rather it’s that the update gets automatically pushed to everyone. No download. No install. Just, roll out, and boom, it’s there.

Nels Diatribes, Gmail, Google, Misc Tech, Social web Buzz, Gmail, Google, Web Development

I declare that emphatically because I want it to be so. I’m sure I’m not the only code monkey out there praying that “write once, run anywhere” doesn’t leave us like ###… Even now web developers have to test across at least 3 different browsers,* but at least things are trending towards standardization and it’s becoming easier to create a web app that will behave the same independent of a user’s choice of browser.

Smartphones pose a serious threat to that ubiquity in the same way that the differences between Windows, Mac OS, and Linux made developing desktop apps an elephant-sized pain in the ass. Web developers have long wished and advocated for browsers that run everything the same way. While that is probably never going to happen, the difference between developing for IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera is much (much much) smaller than the difference between developing for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

if (Portability > Usability) then ?

There is a reason that desktop-style web apps are popular. Yes, people still use Outlook, Thunderbird, and many other fat desktop clients for email, but there’s a reason that there’s 300 million people using Yahoo Webmail, Gmail, Hotmail, and AOL Webmail (I extrapolated that number from these percentages of market share), and that given the choice, 49% of people choose Gmail as the best email client. There’s also a reason that Google has basically given a big fat middle finger to native iPhone apps with their Gmail client in HTML5 (and now Google Voice web app, also in HTML5). There a reason that there’s a lot more “mobile touch” web sites than there are iPhone and Android apps. There’s a reason that I get practically all of my links from Read/Write Web and not Read/Write Native Smartphone App.

That reason is Portability. That is: I can run a web app from anywhere on anyone’s computer (or phone) as long as I’ve got internet access. So, while a client like Outlook or Thunderbird offers a slightly faster response time and some extra features, if you use one of those and don’t use a web-app version in addition to the desktop client, you suddenly sound like someone who doesn’t really know how the internet even works (do you really want to be the person who says: “I have to check my email on my home computer”?)

And for the second part of the equation: Usability – the gap between web app and desktop app is getting smaller every day. Web developers continue to push the limits of what web-based applications can do with respect to speed and user interfaces. Sure, web apps (even the good ones) are slow compared to native apps when they’re running on a (relatively) slow phone with a (relatively) slow 3G internet connection. But the speed of the phones and the connections is improving even faster than the speed of the apps themselves.

So, now take the difference in Portability (we’ll say this difference is a fairly large positive in favor of web apps) and add the difference in Usability (we’ll say this is slightly negative with respect to web apps) and then add in the fact that you can write a web app in one language and have it run on every single phone and computer with internet access and see if you don’t come out with a conclusion that says: HTML is the Future.

And, if you want some awesome tips for developing in HTML5, check out Alex Bosworth’s post.

* Yes, all you Opera and Safari heads, I said at least.

Nels Diatribes, Misc Tech, The New Web, Web Development Alex Bosworth, HTML5, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, Web Apps, Web Development

Two hits from Lifehacker today: Hustle When You Want to Learn New Things and Ira Glass on Getting Creative Work Done.

The first is the key to the door, and it’s easy to insert and unlock: Hustle. Simple as that.

If you want to do something: do something. If want want to make progress towards a goal: do something. If you want to learn something (like Matt Nowack in the post): do something. Just keep doing something (hustling) and you will get things done.

So that pretty much covers that. Except, it also leads into the second post, which is: the reason you have to keep hustling.
Read more…

Nels Diatribes, Getting Things Done, Personal Improvement Fail, Getting Things Done, Hustle, Ira Glass, Lifehacker

From a (sort of) recent Facebook status update:

While I agree for the most part with the “Tumblr > Twitter” sentiment, well, that’s kind of obvious. Twitter is definitely good for some things (mostly sharing short fleeting thoughts, but also sometimes for sharing links, and conversing with people who use Twitter as their main form of communication). I did not see “being a blog” in that list, though. And as Commenter #1 points out, you can view Twitter updates on your Tumblr dashboard while posting slightly longer commentaries on Tumblr. Of course, Commenter #1 also makes the fatal mistake of saying that he (or she) wishes they knew HTML.
Read more…

Nels Blogging, Diatribes, RSS, Social web, The New Web, Twitter Blogging, Diatribes, RSS, Social web, Tumblr, Twitter