Nels Wadycki » Diatribes

Irony is Ironic

Nels — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 20:28:57 +0000

Copycheating Myself

Apple Revamping Notifications: Best News I’ve Heard All Day

Nels — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 22:21:24 +0000

Knock knock. Who’s there? An interrupting notification. An interrupting notif… TWEET!

Apparently Apple is going to buy a company to redo their notifications for them. I’m not sure why they don’t just have the devs who did the original system fix it, but then again, I don’t really care. As long as they care of the ugly interrupting boxes it’s all good.

Give me the drawer!

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Hamstrung Hulu

Nels — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 23:09:50 +0000

On TechCrunch Mark Suster compares Hulu to the oil cartel OPEC. I’m not sure what this point number 2 has to do with the cartel comparison, but I think it’s one of the more interesting points of the post:

2. Limited “Targeting” of Advertisements: The great promise of the Internet for advertisers was that they were finally going to be able to deliver targeted advertisements to users because they could finally know who you were. This has become a reality with banner ads, search ads, contextual ads and Facebook ads. But not Hulu ads.

Why? They know who we are, don’t they? Yes, they do. But they generally don’t even allow advertisers to purchase ads for a single show let alone ads targeting YOU by reading your cookies on your computer. So we have ads that are even less targeted than those on television. The reason lies in protecting the high price of broadcast & cable advertising rates. They are nervous about “trading analog dollars for digital pennies.” So advertisers have to buy “run of site” ads rather than show specific ones.

It was over a year ago now when I wondered why Hulu wasn’t targeting ads to it’s users. I haven’t run the numbers on targeted ads with lower volume vs. sitewide untargeted ads, but I’d have to think there’s a price point at which you can at least break even. I mean, Facebook’s advertising platform specializes in making it easy to target people based on tons of different criteria. Again, I haven’t run the numbers, but I think Facebook is making a lot of money.

Of course, even running the numbers won’t get to the heart of the reason that Hulu is basically having it’s hand tied when it comes to being able to innovate like other technology companies. For as long as the cable and satellite providers control that major distribution channels, the networks have no choice but to hamstring the efforts of other methods of distributions (even, obviously, ones that they support). Unfortunately (for me and other Hulu users), since the user base of people watching TV via the Internet using Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, etc. is still tiny compared to the number of people who pay companies to provide them with TV (while most of the time also paying them to provide Internet access), the networks have to tread lightly when it comes to the user experience provided through these alternate services.

Cable companies (and satellite and other pay-TV providers) are certainly scared pantless when they realize(d?) that something like Hulu could easily make networks more money by showing targeted ads for higher rates (not to mention charging people $9.99 per month without having to hand any of that over to the cable company). But they still have the market share, and therefore, the power, to make sure that networks don’t get too excited about prospects of nearly infinite riches. Netflix has run into the same problem (over and over) in dealing with movie studios who still see DVDs as their major distribution channel (although that point of view is even more short-sighted than the view that cable companies will continue to maintain their dominance in the television distribution market).

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So close

Nels — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 23:04:36 +0000

I’ve been about 10 seconds late for the train home at least 4 out of 5 days this week. I always think back to when I was daydreaming and walking a bit slower, or when I slowed down to use my phone/minicomp for a sec. Not like I’ve been in any hurry, but it’s frustrating, especially when it happens so frequently and especially when I worked hard today and I just want to get home and crash.

Copycheating Myself

Quit the Twit

Nels — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:33:01 +0000

There is a reason that people who blog are quitting Twitter. Those people include John Mayer, Paul Carr, and (sort of) Leo Laporte. In case you didn’t hit the links (and who has time for that with all the Information Overload and whatnot?) the reason is: Length of Life. Not the life of the people who author the tweets or blog posts, but the length of life of the tweet versus the blog post. Most tweets are retweeted or replied to within an hour. After that? Good luck. (Unless you’re famous enough for people to write blog posts about your tweets, which, when taken together, are about as long as a blog post would be anyway.) Blog posts, though? When well written they can draw comments for days (for a news blog) or continue to garner hits for months or years if the content is truly high quality (or if they have pictures of Kim Kardashian).

Think about books compared to tweets. People still read books that are hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of years old. Is anyone going to read even the most retweeted of all tweets in 100 years. My money’s on No.*

And so, I’m going to do what Leo did and rededicate myself to the blog that bears my name. As Laporte said:

I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more. I’m sorry for having neglected you Leoville. From now on when I post a picture of a particularly delicious sandwich I’m posting it here. When I complain that Sookie is back with Bill, you’ll hear it here first. And the show notes for my shows will go here, too.

* Full disclosure: my money is actually mostly in mutual funds. I avoid making investments, let alone bets, with a 100 year payout time since I probably won’t be around to collect.

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Groupon Fail Whale

Nels — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:11:59 +0000

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…

Copycheating Myself

Evidently AT&T Does Know What Kind of Phone I Have

Nels — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:35:17 +0000

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.

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Doesn’t AT&T Know What Kind of Phone I Have?

Nels — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:40:21 +0000

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

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Apple Shutting Down Lala, Another Great Startup Obliterated

Nels — Sat, 08 May 2010 00:07:16 +0000

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.

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As the iPhone evolves, so does Gmail

Nels — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:10:13 +0000

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.

Another thing it’s too bad people have to give up in exchange for something else: Flash. We all know Steve Jobs hates Flash, and since Apple can do whatever they want, they’re free to disallow the use of Flash on the iPhone and iPad until a court of law says otherwise. It just seems kind of mean and pointless. I mean, even if Flash goes the way of Cobol, Adobe isn’t going to die. They have a suite of graphic design and image editing tools that is basically unparalleled. Photoshop : Graphic Design :: iPhone : Smartphones.

It really just seems like another iPhone “because we can” move. Much like the we don’t want a porn store excuse for not allowing unsigned apps on the iPhone. At least with that one they have a reason, but really it’s just another “because we can” move. It’s not about porn on the iPhone, it’s about apps which provide no revenue for Apple.

It’s certainly not a dumb move by Apple, and in this case (as opposed to the Flash case), they at least have a legitimate excuse to hide behind. I’m sure Google is betting that once they hit a tipping point in terms of number of apps, normal people (i.e., the non-geeks) will get outside of the default “must buy iPhone” mentality and at least consider that there are other possibilities.

The other iPhone point I wanted to make was more related to the point I was making about addition of new Gmail features and concerns iPhone OS 4. Honestly, Multitasking isn’t something I think I actually need. It seems great in theory, but I’m not sure what I would actually use it for. Since I can already listen to the iPod through the native app and then go do other things, I’m not sure what else I would want running in the background that doesn’t already provide push notifications (e.g., email, phone, etc). I would consider streaming internet music if there were a Lala app available, but since Apple bought Lala, I think that multitasking use case has all but died.

The folders thing will be nice, but again, not something I’m jumping up and down about. I have a pretty stable set of apps on my phone now, and while grouping them will probably make life a little easier, I’ve gotten pretty used to things as they are so I’m not singing out for joy at the thought of being able to reconfigure them a little bit more now… It’s a nice feature, but it’s also something that I would have already had if I’d gotten an Android phone. And if the Motorola Droid or the Nexus One had been around at this time last year, I probably would have.