Writes Code, Fiction
And I’m willing to bet most people don’t even realize it.
Since Facebook added comments to just about everything that passes through the News Feed, it’s created a microblog for every member of the network.
I now feel justified laughing at people (at least, behind their backs) who thought I was weird for having 3+ blogs (and a Twitter, and Jaiku, and Tumblr, and Soup.io). Suckas! You’re bloggers now too!
Ramit Sethi says on I Will Teach You To Be Rich: Set smaller goals: impress friends, get girls, lose weight. This basically means, take incremental steps towards attaining a goal. I guess you could also call it Iterative Development since it relates to the world of software/webware development, but since I read that article on IWTYTBR just before setting off on a search to figure out why Jaiku wasn’t letting me import/add feeds, I felt it was one of those The Secret moments where something happens for a reason.
Image via Wikipedia
In looking through comments on the Jaiku support channelt, I found this post from Jyri Engstrom where he mentions other posts including this one about Google addition of default Contact Groups, and this one from the Google Reader blog about using groups to manage your shared items.
And just now Google is letting you share updated contact information with the groups you’ve created in addition to those shared items. Does anyone else see a social network slowly emerging from the Magic Eye Puzzle? Of course you do – I know I’m not the only one.
Of course, the most interesting part will be to see what the actual unification strategy will be – or if there will be one at all. What I mean is: Will there be a defined “home page” / “starting point” for the Google social network like there is for MySpace and Facebook? Or will they just make your friends activities accessible wherever you use whatever Google Apps you use? If I’m in my Gmail, will my friends activities show up there? If I use iGoogle as my home page, will the activity stream be there? What if I only use Google Reader? (Not a truly likely scenario, since I think anyone using Reader would also be using Gmail) Will I get more than just my friends’ Shared Items?
In a similar vein, it looks like Yahoo is starting to some slow churn development on their social network as well, and they may also be pursuing the distributed activity stream home page idea, since you can now import your activity into your Yahoo Profile, but if you’re a member of MyBlogLog, you can do it there as well. The thing is, the two of those are separate (even though it seems like they could sync the settings fairly easily), which means you’ll have a harder time managing those activity streams that you will if the Google activity is all managed from one place and pushed from there.
Image via Wikipedia
Today is the day Oprah started giving away Suze Orman’s new book 2009 Action Plan, and the site has been unreachable since just after the show aired on the East Coast. The book will be available on the site for a week, but I think it’s a sign of the times when everyone is rushing to get free advice from Suze as soon as it’s available.
I was looking to acquire a game that I played some over the holidays at my brother-in-law’s house (I won’t reveal the name since, as you can see, the rating is pretty low – which is actually why I held off on getting the game until I played it), and noticed that Amazon has partnered with 1up.com to provide editorial ratings on their video game product pages.
I’m not going to go looking or anything, but I’ll be interested to see if I come across any other partners incorporated into Amazon’s product pages.
After nearly 2 months of silence, I am made aware of Howie’s latest project via the magic of RSS. I’m going to reserve comment on said latest project, but just wanted to promote the old RSS since I still feel guilty about missing RSS Awarenesss Day.
As a bit of a follow-on to my last post, Dare provides his take (and some blockquotes from others) on OpenID here. Because of the picture I used in my post, I find his last sentence incredibly rewarding:
Only time will tell if by the time all is said and done, it won’t seem like we’ve been trying to shove a square peg in a round hole all these years.
As he mentions, OpenID was originally intended for people to put in a URL as their identifier, and honestly, I’m surprised that no one thought that maybe it would be nice to have a way to let people use their email address. If you are claiming to own a URL through OpenID verification, shouldn’t you also be able to claim ownership of an email address? Especially since a lot more people have email addresses than URLs (at least, that they know of).
In a link from Dare to the Google Code Blog, another of my unspoken (or hinted at) questions is answered:
One other question that a lot of people asked yesterday is when a large provider like Google will become a relying party. There is one big problem that stands in the way of doing that, but fortunately it is more of a technology problem than a usability issue. That problem is that rich-client apps (desktop apps and mobile apps) are hard-coded to ask a user for their username and password. As an example, all Google rich-client apps would break if we supported federated login for our consumer users, and in fact they do break for the large number of our enterprise E-mail outsourcing customers who run their own identity provider, and for which Google is a relying party today. This problem with rich-client apps also affects other sites like Plaxo who are already relying parties.
As someone simply reading the above paragraph, this seems like a fairly small problem of altering the backend to accept a URL as a username with a blank password and going to the OpenID verification from there. But as someone who writes code for a living, I know that just making a first decision about how to go forward with trying to fix this issue can be almost paralyzing.
So, I’ve got a Yahoo OpenID, a Google OpenId, a WordPress OpenID, soon a MySpace OpenID, and apparently the only place I can use them is Plaxo. Sweet.
When one of the kids on Gossip Girl is bathing poolside with their T-Mobile G1, then you will know that it’s hit the big time. Honestly, I’m surprised that none of them have an iPhone.
ReadWriteWeb has news about Weird Al’s new music release plan, which entails:
releasing songs on iTunes right after he finishes them, bypassing the standard album model for a faster and more flexible approach.
I only mention it because I’ve been waiting for this moment for probably close to 10 years. Ever since Ben said it would happen.
And thus, the death knell sounds for The Album as we know it. Sure, it’s not going to go away any time soon because the major lables will probably take another 10-20 years to realize that most artists are better off selling singles as they produce them. I realize this may be hard for some artists who are used to going on tour and then holing up to write and record a whole album, but it’s a concept that’s been around for a long time, albeit in a slightly different form known as the EP. The Smashing Pumpkins released their American Gothic EP exclusively as a download on iTunes and then followed it up with a CD vesrion that is only available in the US as an Import. (Yes, I know there are probably many other more recent and pertinent examples, but that’s the one I picked, because the Smashing Pumpkins were one of the first bands to release a full album [two in fact] on the internet for free, and they deserve a lot more credit for that than I feel they received)
Anyway, the point is: I am excited to see that the Single is one step closer to replacing the Album.
So I went to catch up on some TVonTheInternet earlier this week and was offered the option of either watching a long ad and then the show straight through with no ads, or to watch with shorter ads interspersed as usual.
Of course I went with the long ad at the beginning. I think I saved myself 30 seconds that way, and it worked just as advertised. Pun intended. If that’s even a pun.
Nels Wadycki 