Nels Wadycki

Nels W

Writes Code, Fiction

  • 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

  • Big and Small Changes at Hulu

    Nels W

    The Big Story is obviously that Disney has bought into Hulu meaning that by the time I get around to watching this season of LOST, it may be on Hulu! (ABC’s streaming video player is very good, but I am really hoping to one day have all the TV shows I want to watch on one queue)

    But a smaller change that I’d like to mention just to point out how awesome Hulu is: You now have to click a link that says “View Description” to see the description of the episode. Usually when it comes to UI, extra clicks are something you want to avoid, but with this change, the plot of the episode isn’t given away, which, for most shows, I believe, makes for a better end user experience. And it’s those little details that really tell me that Hulu is being led in the right direction.

  • Mcrblggng Vds

    Nels W

    Mzng hw y cn ndrstnd ths wth n vwls rght?

    Anyway, haven’t posted in 10 days, so what better way to rectify that than by posting videos?

  • B.O.

    Nels W

    nelswadycki was here before oprah

  • Today’s Mobile Office

    Nels W

    Set up WordPress on my iPhone. Probably won’t use it that much, I’ve always wanted to have the option for some moblogging.

  • Thank God Google! Suggest comes to Image Search

    Nels W

    cat-saying-hooray

    In searching for the image for my Aardvark post, I just discovered that Google has added the drop-down suggestion list to Image Search!

    I just used it to find the images for this post! As someone who writes 3 (or maybe more 😉 ) blogs, and likes to use relevant images in his posts, I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. But this guy can:

    hooray

  • Aardvark is Aawesome

    Nels W

    aardvarklogo

    I wrote about Aardvark when I first read about it on Read/WriteWeb. I recently received an invitation to join, and it’s pretty much the best thing ever. I still am questioning the use of vark.com, and I’m not even really sure why it’s called Aardvark instead of something they could have gotten the full URL for. But, that matters very little in the face of having questions answered in minutes (if not seconds).

    Example: I just got an iPhone (I know, I couldn’t bring myself to take a risk with an Android phone even though it sounded really nice), and I accidentally hit the mute button which I didn’t realize existed. I pinged Aardvark real quick and asked what the problem could be and got two replies very quickly that informed me of the mute button and therefore solved my problem. No more bothering my brother-in-law for tech support on my new toy.

    If you’d like an invite to Aardvark, I’ve got 10. You’ll have to leave your email address (so Facebook Connect probably won’t work), and at least 3 things that you want to get questions about.

  • More Google Voice

    Nels W

    Gina “Lifehacker” Trapani wrote a post about Google Voice on SmarterWare in which she says:

    Now that Google Voice supports SMS, you can send and receive text messages from your GV number as well, which is the last piece I needed to finally tell all my friends and family, “Here’s my new phone number.”

    She’s been using GrandCentral since it came out, and only decided to switch completely with the addition of SMS. I’m pretty sure that when I get my iPhone (cross your fingers – any day now) I’ll just tell all my friends to send their text messages to my email address. Of course, then I’ll have to make sure to keep it less than 140 characters when I write them back, but at least I won’t have to give AT&T my wife’s arm and leg to pay for a text messaging plan.

  • The Hulu Takeover

    Nels W

    hulu_logo According to TechCrunch, Hulu gained 10 million viewers in Feburary, which is an impressive number, but if you look at their chart, what I think is more impressive is the 64.5 minutes per viewer which is second in the top 10 behind only Google Sites (aka YouTube) which had 134 minutes, and 3.6 times more than the next highest average minutes per viewer in the top 10.

    Maybe it’s because Hulu rocks the house. I wish CBS and ABC would take note. I would give them more advertising revenue that they are otherwise losing because I’d be all over the past 4 seasons of How I Met Your Mother and the last few episodes of LOST that I haven’t been able to watch yet (and I might even watch Wipeout if I could add it to my Hulu queue).

  • One Inbox To Rule Them All

    Nels W

    or: All Your Inbox Are Belong To Us

    So, there’s a thing called Google Voice (via TechCrunch). And to quote TechCrunch:

    Google also says that full integration with Gmail is coming, but won’t say when. Personally, having all my email, SMS and transcribed voicemails in a single inbox could be life-changing.

    Yes indeed. Of course, this post has been skulking around in the background for almost a week, and so I’ve developed a counter-point as well, but let’s start with the positive.

    Google Voice is a Google Product, so it has a pretty good chance of being awesome. Being a Google Product, it also has a pretty good chance of sucking, and pretty much no chance of being in between. But since TechCrunch says it’s Very Very Good, then I think the chances of being awesome are pretty good.

    As someone who does not have a “smartphone” I would like a phone number that could direct my calls to my home number if I didn’t really want to deal with them, and deliver them to my cell phone if they were important. Of course, since it usually takes 24 hours or more for me to remember to set my cell phone back to Loud after I have to put it on Silent (like for a movie), the announcement of voicemails and SMS in my Gmail seems like a brilliant idea. I also like the idea of getting transcriptions of my voicemails and perhaps even moreso, the ability to save my text messages forever. Storing them in a place where I keep emails that I want to save forever is like getting fouled on a monster dunk.

    Of course, if it could also tell me if a SMS message went to anyone else (like, say, and email does), then I would be 100% happy (as opposed to, you know, 99.999%), like getting fouled on a dunk from the three-point line, NBA Jam-style.

    I already saw that at least one of my Facebook friends has upgraded from GrandCentral to Google Voice. Lucky b-tard. I don’t even remember hearing of GrandCentral before, but I wish I was part of the in crowd now. If you’re like me, you can find a link here that will give you a form to sign up to be notified when Google Voice is available to everyone.

    Here’s the official Google Blog post which doesn’t have much besides a link to the Google Voice About Page. The About Page has a video for every feature (I believe) in the product, though, so that’s pretty awesome.