Nels Wadycki

Nels W

Writes Code, Fiction

  • Are you an expert in Blue Chips?

    Nels W

    I’ve gotten a couple of these now… first was this generic, obviously spam one:

    Dear Professional:

    I would like to tell you about BlueChipExpert.com. It is a worldwide job site for high-end professionals and consultants, such as yourself. The basic idea is that networking can do a better job than traditional
    job search methods if the right platform and financial incentives are in place. With Blue Chip Expert, you can opportunistically get exposure to quality jobs, help a friend find a good position, help a hiring manager
    find a great candidate, and earn referral fees in the process for your favorite Non-Profit or yourself.

    Then I got this one from a fellow blogger, and it makes more sense now (see the emphasis I’ve added.

    I just joined Blue Chip Expert and wanted to invite you to join as well.

    Blue Chip Expert is an invitation-only career site focused on professionals with excellent qualifications. It’s confidential, completely free to join and use, and only takes a few minutes to join.

    Also, every time a person you invite is hired you earn a referral fee which you can either keep or direct to your favorite non-profit. Referral fees can really add up as they are paid on three levels of referral for ten years.

    Now, I’m not about to join something so obviously spammy, but it might be worth looking into if you’re trying to find a job. It just seems like a shady way to get people to sign up for your service. I much prefer the LinkedIn approach where you network with people you actually know (even though you could just import everyone from your address book if you wanted), and you can see recommendations from real people for other real people.

  • My Kingdom For A Map

    Nels W

    I can’t imagine it’s that hard to make an interactive map where you pick a city (or town, if you have to go to the Pella Showroom in Morton Grove and want to find somewhere to go for dinner around there) and then it just shows you the restaurants in that city (or town).

    Both Google and Yahoo maps (even Yahoo Local Maps, which you think would be a little more “local” oriented) only let you search for something specific. If I search for “restaurant” in Morton Grove, I get restaurants, all right. But only restaurants with “restaurant” in the name. Like McDonald’s Restaurant and Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers Restaurant. I’m sure they both include that keyword in the name just for that reason. (I tried “food” too which seemed to be a little more high-level in it’s results, but also gave me 7-Eleven Food Stores as a #3 choice)

    Not only that, but since I’m searching in all of Morton Grove, there could be restaurants that are no where near where I’m going (well, okay, it’s not like Morton Grove is that big, but what if I were doing this in the city of Chicago?).

    Yelp does the best job (once you figure out how to use it), because they let you redo your search within the map, and you can just search for all businesses in Morton Grove, and then narrow it by category (like restaurants that don’t necessarily have restaurant in the name). But, with only minor offense intended, their interface sucks. Unlike Google or Yahoo who provide a large map area, Yelp’s map is small and off to the side. I could swear they use to have a “make this map bigger” option, but I certainly don’t see it there now. If they could use the large map, and pop up their Yelp information when I clicked on the locations on the map, that would be ideal.

    Well, actually, ideal would be letting me map the directions from my house to my destination, and then search for places to eat (or other business) along the route. I mean, there might be an absolutely stunning place in Niles that I’d never find because I’m only searching in Morton Grove. But perhaps I’m overestimating the quality or quantity of restaurants and food places in the suburbs.

  • DJI Monday

    Nels W

    Now, I have an MBA, but it’s in Management, so I’m not going to try to pretend to know what’s going on here. I mean, is this just institutional investors trying to see how cheap they can buy stocks off Joe Boxwines© who are in a panic to get rid of everything that’s tanking?

    I find this chart to be reassuring, despite its poor legibility.

  • MySpace Music – Early Impressions…

    Nels W

    Well, I made a playlist. That was quick and easy. Have yet to hear any music, though… My guess is that they’re a little overwhelmed (probably by bloggers who want to be the first with a comprehensive review of the service), but that is making it very underwhelming at the moment.

  • More Relevant Facebook Ads

    Nels W

    Last time, the advertisers were way off (well, depending on your interpretation of their target audience (and given that there’s this, I suppose there is a lot of room for interpretation).

    Here’s a recent Facebook targeted ad, which at least gets it half right:

    As a side note, telling me what “you know” about me makes me a lot less likely to click on your ad. It’s creepy on a whole new level. Even something along the lines of “Hey, are you married and living in Denver? Then click on this!” is light years better than “We know about you.”

  • Chrome is out!

    Nels W

    How long until all the ‘pundits’ (and by pundits I mean, Don Reisinger at TechCrunch, who recently brought me this thought-provoking post that I really liked about Hulu) realize that each tab is running as its own process? It sure seems like it’s running on only 45 MB of memory… until you look a little further down in the Task Manager. Oops, looks like the same set of tabs running in Chrome is actually using twice as much memory! D’oh! I believe that’s what Charles Nutter was getting at in point #2 and #6.

    On the plus side, yeah, the UI is good, and the loading seems at least at fast as Firefox 3 and Safari 3 (I haven’t tried Safari 4 yet, which is evidently supposed to be super fast; FF3 is fast enough for me at this point).

  • The Audience is Listening

    Nels W

    TechCrunch ran a post about Why Twitter Hasn’t Failed despite multiple, long outages in its short existence.

    Here’s the money quote (for me):

    Twitter has a simple premise: You tweet & the message is pushed to your friends. The actual mechanics are slightly different (messages go to everyone who follows you, whether they’re your “friends” or not, assuming your stream is public) — but from a user’s perspective, the circle of receivers consists only of the people they know. Everyone else is part of a faceless crowd that’s hidden behind the follower count.

    This simple premise holds the key to Twitter’s success: messages go to a well-defined audience. In the moment you release a tweet, you know who’s on the line and you have an idea of who can catch a glimpse of your message. @replies are the best illustration for this sense of audience: Even though Twitter is not a point-to-point message delivery system (let alone a reliable one), @replies are sent with the understanding that they will be read by the intended people because they are known to be in the audience. (Imagine a newspaper article that suddenly greeted a specific reader.)

    That is exactly why I signed up for Vox a while back (before once again realizing that building a new social network every time you join a site is a Sisyphusian task; though I still like the short URL). It’s also the reason I used Twitter voraciously for a while (until my RSS feed broke for reasons unknown and apparently unfixable).

    While the TechCrunch article argues that Facebook is not “Designed for Audience”, I would contend it is moving more and more toward that. The Status Update is pretty much a Tweet, if you will, with the added bonus that you can actually create groups of friends who won’t see your Status Updates. This allows for (what I consider to be) the important separation of Work and Life. The same applies to Facebook’s Notes. Yes, the app is still fairly primitive, but you can write a Note and have it only visible to a group that you explicitly select. Which, of course, brings us to the real reason that Facebook is not “Designed for Audience”.

    TechCrunch is definitely correct in saying that the major problem with the Facebook News Feed is:

    “When I post new things, will my friends actually see them?”

    And also:

    “Have my friends posted something that I’m not seeing? The news feed is cluttered right now with people I don’t care about.”

    I have yet to be impressed by Facebook’s algorithms for selecting items for my News Feed, and everything seems to have been thrown into a tornado with the update to the New Facebook. For example, yesterday, I got a news item that my wife had tagged some friends in photos from our recent road trip. That is something I care about, but she’d actually done the tagging a week ago. I knew about it because I was in the room while she was doing it, but what about the friends on Facebook who don’t live with me?

    I mentioned before that Facebook should offer an RSS version of the News Feed. Yes, it would probably be overwhelming, but there are some people who would probably relish and/or wallow in all that information, and there are others for whom it would solve the two-pronged problem of Audience. (“Who’s watching me?” and “Am I missing things?”)

    FriendFeed works because it provides all the information about what people are doing (from limited sources, of course), and you can opt out of specific applications for specific friends. I realize this probably takes some extra tables in the database, but if Facebook could allow people to say “I don’t want to see anything more about this application” or “Just don’t show me anything from this application for this person” then the RSS News Feed would quickly be pared down to what each user really wants to see (which is what Facebook’s algorithms are trying to determine in the first place).

    Executive Summary:
    Recommendations for Facebook:
    1) RSS News Feed
    2) Opt out of applications and/or opt out of applications for specific users

    The content generators can do as they do now, and share what they want to share with who they want, and the content consumers won’t have to worry they’re missing something unless they take action to exclude it.

  • Amazon Universal Wish List

    Nels W

    I recently discovered: Amazon’s “Add to Universal Wish List”. In a word: Awesome!

    The Universal Wish List is pretty much just what it sounds like. You get a bookmarklet which pops up a div over a web page that has something you want to buy. You put in the price, pick a picture and a wish list (if you have more than one), and save it.

    Yes, there are clear downsides:

    • It doesn’t track prices
    • It doesn’t know if an item is no longer available

    But there are more and equally obvious upsides:

    • No more having accounts at every shopping website to keep a wishlist at those sites
    • Super easy to use
    • Ability to add to any of your wishlists (public and private)
    • Ability to add priorities to all items
    • Centralization!

    Honestly, it’s a lot better than my current system of either creating an account at a site (some have stuff that I want frequently, but churn through stock before I make the decision to buy something) or bookmarking pages in del.icio.us (for sites that are probably only going to have one thing I want). I don’t look at my del.icio.us “wishlist” tag as often as you might think. And people who buy me gifts probably look at it even less. But those folks do look at my Amazon wishlist(s). And I look at them too. So, I’m more likely to check for price drops and notice if something is no longer available.

    I am waiting to confirm, but it should also add the item to the Amazon Wishlist RSS feed, so then they can show up in things like FriendFeed, Jaiku, etc.

    I’m not sure how long this has been around, but it’s great! Not as newsworthy as Amazon’s new Checkout and Simple Pay… but useful to an entirely different segment of the e-commerce market. I am seriously considering investing in some AMZN at this point.

  • Netflix streaming on Xbox 360!

    Nels W

    That’s what I’m talking about! (TechCrunch)

    Netflix is coming to the Xbox 360 this fall. Netflix subscribers will have instant access to over 10,000 movies and TV shows, streamed directly to the Xbox 360 console.

  • Powerful Americans vs. Helpless Chinese

    Nels W

    Yes, the title is intended to be dramatic.

    First, there’s the feelgood part: Netflix has decided to keep separate profiles for single accounts. As a Netflix subscriber: Thank you. When I heard they were going to eliminate the profiles, I wondered (right after copying my 300+ DVD queue into a an OpenOffice spreadsheet) if there was really a time when taking away the profiles could be justified. I could not think of one. Even when everything that’s available on DVD has been converted to Instant Watch, parents (like the Netflix Product Manager known as “Todd”) will still want separate profiles to prevent their children from checking out the latest soft-core porn that Netflix uploads. (Not that they won’t be able to get it elsewhere, but at least the parents will feel like they have some control)

    As they say, The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease. And so, as with Serenity, Americans get what they want.

    Which brings us to the Chinese. While it hasn’t been confirmed, there are rumors that China has been blocking access to Facebook. Honestly, nothing scares me more than when China decides to block and/or redirect websites. As Cory Doctorow says in his latest Guardian column:

    The internet is only that wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press in a single connection. It’s only
    vital to the livelihood, social lives, health, civic engagement, education and leisure of hundreds of millions of people (and growing every day).

    And the government of the world’s most populous country basically gets to control what people can do with that wire.