Not Pouncing on Pownce

Kevin Rose announced yesterday his new venture. It's called Pownce, and is an application for sending files, photos, and messages to others. It is built on the Adobe AIR platform, so it can be used either as a web app, or downloaded and run from the desktop. Kevin's two previous endeavours have been quite successful. Digg has recently surpassed Facebook in daily visitors, which given Facebook's success shows just how popular the social news site is. His other business is Revision3, which does online media. It is just like a television channel, but with on-demand, online service. The most popular show on it is, expected, Diggnation.

This new undertaking, though, is a bit different than his previous things. The space he's entering is already fairly crowded. Also, it doesn't seem to provide anything that is terribly different than what you can do with other services. It seems to be a combination of email and Twitter, almost. I'm not really sure why you would use this instead of just shooting people an email. Here's one example they give of how you could use the service.

You might send an event out to a dozen of your friends letting them know you're
hosting a party this Friday. They could easily get the event details you
entered, respond with questions or comments and then quickly rsvp.

Hmm, sounds an awful lot like email to me. If I want to send a message to multiple people, there are countless services already for this. I can do it on Facebook. I can IM them. I can email them. Why should I use this new service? On top of that, they will all need to be on this service too. So now I have to convince them all to sign up for yet another thing.

The other thing is that this is an ad supported service, which you can pay to upgrade. Once again, where's the benefit here? Why do I want to use something with ads when I can get the same functionality out of other things without them?

Given the amount of Digg fanboys, I'm guessing that this service will at least get a good amount of buzz, and probably a few die hard fans. However, I personally don't see how this is going to set itself apart from other services out there, and why I should use it instead of something I already have.

A Picture's Worth Nothing

Anyone that spends more than five minutes on this site will quickly realize that I don't do pictures. I don't put them in my posts, I don't take them, I don't pose for them. However, if you are the type to want to put some pictures up, and actually care about copyrights and such, then check out Read/Write Web's review of some search sites for free stock photos. I couldn't get xcavator to work, but that's more likely something in my settings that a problem on their end. Yotophoto did work, though, and I was able to grab this picture in a fairly quick and painless manner. Those are the only two I tried out, but play around with them and see what you think.

Good News for High-Speed Data

Props to Verizon for saying that they're willing to take the cost of rolling out better data networks. Though, I can't say I agree with their choice of intro music for when they talked about this. I'm glad that they are willing to spend the upfront money that is required to deliver faster speeds to customers. The U.S. is so far beind in the race for low cost, high speed data that it is laughable. We need more companies that will do this.

Stone Beats Shuffle

Ars has a review of some alternatives to the iPod Shuffle. The two he looks at are the Sansa Express and the Creative Stone. I'm a fan of SanDisk's MP3 players, and would probably recommend the Express, though I admit I've never used it. Based on his review, the Stone looks pretty good too, for what it is. I thought it was funny that he questions how it can be $40 less than the Shuffle. I don't think there's really any mystery there at all. Apple like to mark their prices up to way more than is justifiable. All of their products are like this, and the Shuffle is no exception. People make the case that the iPod costs more due to the UI and such. The Shuffle, though, lacks any of this. Push a button, play a song. That's all it does. Somehow, to the idiots of the world, that is worth 80 bucks.

Again, You Can't Copy That DVD

I am too tired and not in the mood to write a full post, but I did want to share this. To it, I say "That sucks." First, people are going to find a way around this anyway. Second, if you have a few hundred DVDs, having to find the one you want every time instead of just having your library stored on a computer is a real pain.

Do You Like iLike?

It seems like everywhere I turn I'm reading about how fast the iLike application is growing on Facebook. In about two week's time they have garnered over 3 million users on the site. It is currently the second most popular application. I am not one of those 3 million, but many of my friends are. I don't plan to speak for the application, as I don't know if it is good, bad, or what. I'm more interested in the speed in which it is growing, and the amount of attention it has received. Its growth rate, as has been mentioned a number of times, is largely due to the viral nature of Facebook's applications. When someone adds one, an entry is added to their mini-feed and posted to their friends' main feeds (depending on settings). This means that if you have a good number of friends, the simple act of adding an application advertises it to a large number of people. On top of this, these are not just ads that are on the side of the screen. These have your implicit endorsement, which means other people are more likely to add them as well. If they do add them, it is posted to their feeds, and just propagates out. This means that in a matter of a few hours, thousands of people can potentially see an application multiple times simply because one person added it.
The rabid adoption rate is a double edged sword. In iLike's case, they outgrew their servers very quickly, and had to scramble to get more. If you don't have the ability to scale exponentially in a very short amount of time, you're screwed. On the other hand, it means that the time it takes to make it big can be cut drastically. If you have something that you can monetize, the lead time for it will be shorter. This is definitely a good thing.
There is something interesting here, though. How quickly will the saturation point be reached? When the growth rate is practically a straight line going up, it is near impossible to keep that up for long. Not for any fault on the application's part, but simply because they run out of people. This means that once they hit this point, there is no way to grow other than to offer new things to existing users. When your growth rate is slower, you have more time to plan for this, and to roll things out to keep people interested. Will something like iLike be able to do the same on a faster basis? Will they need to? People can be finicky, and like things that are new and interesting. If everyone is using the application from day one, I would think that a boredom factor would begin to set in. The novelty factor can only carry on for so long. Is it possible that iLike will get the same grace period as other apps that take longer to become popular? I am really curious, I have no idea. Part of me wants to think that this thing could skyrocket up, and then be forgotten within a few months. The other part of me thinks that they will be able to keep people interested long enough to offer something else. Either way, it will be interesting to see what happens. Their growth can only go on for so long (after all, there are only so many Facebook users), but I imagine there will be a while longer where we see this happening.
The other interesting part of all of this is the coverage that this is getting. The success of iLike is being told and re-told, and will likely serve as a blueprint. The coverage also just helps to drive more people to look into what iLike is, and what other applications Facebook has to offer. It also is making sites like MySpace scramble to come up with something to compete. This is all free publicity for both Facebook, their new platform, and applications like iLike. It is definitely the hot topic right now.

All of this is pretty exciting stuff. I'll continue to read about it and pass along info. Also, I share a lot on Facebook that I don't necessarily write about on here so take a look at my posted items there for some more info.

Another Confirmation of the Reality Distortion Field

There were a couple of announcements that came out of WWDC yesterday. One is that the Safari web browser is now available for Windows, and the other is that the iPhone has an "innovative" way of allowing third-party development. You would probably think that these two announcements should be more unrelated than they are, and you'd probably be right. This innovative solution is nothing more than running a web ap via Safari on the iPhone. This means that developers can make AJAX apps for the phone. I think this pretty much fails to even come close to a comparison of being able to properly develop applications. Jobs calls this solution "new" and "sweet." I call it "stupid" and "lacking." This is yet another example of why so many people bash on Apple. They keep such a closed system that it limits what anyone can do with their devices. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but don't claim to allow outside delevopment via a web browser. Just come right out and say that you are not going to allow third-party apps and leave it at that. Telling people that this is a "sweet solution" is just insulting our intelligence. Worse, though, is that people are buying it! Alex Hung claims that making a proper SDK is "hard," and that Nokia and Sony Ericcson are exaomples of this. I'm sorry, but last time I checked neither of those companies are in the business of software. Apple may say that they are a hardware company, but they are heavily involved in the software side of things. The reason they didn't release an SDK is not because it is hard, it is because they don't want to open up their device to the potential of being unstable. By allowing outside development, they allow the possibility of someone making an application that could cause problems on the phone. This would create the perception that there is something wrong with the phone, which Apple wants to avoid. Hey, I don't blame them. Like I said, I just think they should be honest about it. A better take on this, in my opinion, comes from Ed Burnette at ZDNet.com. I think he sums it up nicely with this.

“You can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps!” Thanks Steve, we’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.

Yeah, allowing Web 2.0 apps on a web browser: Genius! Oh yeah, and don't forget that any Flash app is out of the question. Maybe that "fully functional" web browser on a phone isn't so full after all.

I'm Sorry, I Forgot Your _______

I know that this particular topic has been talked about a lot, but I thought it was interesting. In today’s world, the need to remember certain bits of information is really not what it used to be. Phone numbers are the obvious example. It used to be the case that speed dial meant you didn’t have to dial your closest friends all the time, but for anyone not in one of your few slots you had to have their number. Now, though, with cell phones able to hold hundreds, or even thousands, of phone numbers, why should you bother trying to remember someone’s number? If you’re like me, you may not even see or hear someone’s number. I often just give the person my phone and have them call themselves so that they’ll have my number too.
Email address books enable this too. It used to be a pain to have to select someone out of an address book in an email program, but with auto complete coupled with names, I can start typing the first couple letters of a person’s name and it takes care of it.
Favorites/bookmarks allow you to be lazy for websites. You don’t have to remember what the actual URL for something is when all you do is click the shortcut. With programs now allowing you to keep your bookmarks remotely and accessible anywhere, you don’t even have to worry about forgetting one while away from home.
This age of convenience makes needing to keep track of all of this type of information a thing of the past. Quite frankly, I love it. It’s not that I have a hard time remembering these types of things; I just love things being easier. Sure, it may have some sort of impact on people’s memory ability, but there’s always other things to remember that replace these bits and pieces. What are your thoughts?

I know I’ve been pretty quiet this week, but things have been pretty busy. Mostly due to it being the beginning of the month. The next week or two should be a lot better.

Oh So Tired

I've been fairly quiet lately due to a lot of reasons. For one, I've been really busy at work, which means I've not had any time to even make short posts, or read headlines. That coupled with a three hour power outage we had thanks to a big storm has kept me pretty out of it. I would just take care of things when I got home, but I've been pretty busy at night lately too. On top of all of this, I've been waking up earlier so that I can be more productive in the morning, which is fine and all, but I've not been doing the other part of the bargain which is going to bed when I'm tired. Instead, I just stay up longer. All of this adds up to my being pretty exhausted and not wanting to do much of anything. Fear not, though, I've still been noting some things so that I can catch up this weekend (I hope). I need to just go sequestor myself at a coffee shop and get something accomplished. For now, however, I'm going to bed.

I'll leave you with a demo of Surface, Microsoft's new thing, in case you've been living under a rock this week.

A Face Only a Google Could Love

Google has grabbed my attention twice this week, and It's only Wednesday. They earlier announced the new feature of street level views in Google Maps, and today Ars Technica talks about their new image search ability that lets you just search for images with faces in them. You can see the difference yourself by looking here and then here. The way that you can try this feature out for yourself is simply stick "&imgtype=face" on the end of the search URL. As Ars points out, this is likely a feature they've gained through their acquisition of Neven, which I've brought up in the past. This just goes to show the truly awesome things that are posisble with technology out there. I'm looking forward to the day that I can click a button to have my webcam take a picture of me, and then search the net for all photos with me in them. Well, all two of them, that is.

Four Percent of People Admit to Being Idiots

Ars has the scoop on the results of a recent Pew survey that says spam is actually increasing, but more people are saying they aren't bothered by it. Some interesting numbers:

4% of US email users admit to ordering stuff from it
18% say that spam is a "big problem"
52% say they have received porn spam
Work emails are the least affected by spam

Redefining Broadband

The House is currently looking at just how messed up the current data the FCC has is. In a hearing that opened today, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) stated that he'd like to see the US be able to get closer to countries like Japan that are aple to offer significantly faster speeds for the same amount of money. Ars Techica reports on the issue in more detail.
One of the ideas proposed is to reclassify broadband as being anything above 2 Mbps instead of the current 200 Kbps. This would make a significant number of broadband offerings (most notably the majority of DSL) no longer broadband. The thought is that this would incentivize the providers to boost speeds in order to still be able to call their service broadband. Some providers argue, though, that in certain areas they are not able to provide speeds that high, and this would be unfair. Personally, I just say too bad.
Another thing is that the FCC currently counts a ZIP code as having broadband even if there is only one person in the entire ZIP that has it. This is something that I've been wishing they'd change for a long time. It makes no sense to say that a whole area has broadband based on just one person. If we're going to start using this kind of system, lets start just looking at one person to determine everything about a ZIP code. That makes sense, right? Idiots.

Hey Babe, Want to Chat?

If you have ever tried to carry on a conversation with a chatbot, you know that it can be a somewhat frustrating, yet pretty amusing experience. Discover magazine decided to find out what would happen if you had two chatbots talk to each other. Needless to say, the results are hilarious. Check out the transcript of the exchange here. It is amusing to see where the conversation goes, and just how random it can be. It is also somewhat spooky when one of them even poses the question to the other, "Do you think we’ll ever fool people into thinking we’re alive?" I mean, here we have one robot asking another robot something of an intense question. There is definitely plenty of humor though, with perhaps my favorite exchange being:

J: How old are you?
A: I am 9 years old.
J: Nine? I don’t believe you
: ).
A: : -) I don’t have any reason to deceive you.
J: Yes, you do,
you’re a woman.

Ah, the Ol' Fake Email to Short a Stock Trick

I was going to write about this earlier, but I had important business to attend to.

For those of you keeping up, Engadget reported today that there would be a delay on shipping the iPhone and Leopard. While it is too early to say anything definitive about the origins of this (my joking title aside), the affects are clear. TechCrunch has a post outlining the basics. Allegedly, what happened is that Engadget received what it perceived to be legitimate information, and proceeded to report that. After this initial report, their stock fell about 3%, or about $3.25 a share. This loss, however, was fairly shortlived as the stock bounced back up to $107.29 after a short time. At the end of the day, AAPL closed 18 cents lower, compared to a loss of $1.84 the day before. What might have happened is that the stock initially started to fall and then a lot of preset selling was triggered, which then just made it fall even further. After people realized what was happening, and that the email claiming the delays was a fake, the stock recovered and didn't take a major hit for the day.
According to Engadget, the original email was verified as coming from the internal Apple email system. Apple was then the one sent out a legit email notifying everyone that the first email was a fake. It will be interesting to see what comes of this, if anything. I'm assuming that the original fake email was either done as a prank (albeit a fairly difficult one that would yield little compared to the risk) or as an attempt to manipulate things. We will have to wait and see. One thing is certain, though, and that is that the power of online media was reaffirmed by this incident, be it for good or bad.

Coffee Made by RSS

I came across an awesome device called News Brews. It looks at news feeds that come in via RSS and based on the frequency that coffee growing regions are mentioned it creates a blend of coffee. The more often a certain region is mentioned, the more coffee from that area gets used. This creates a unique and custom blend for you each day. This does have the possibility to create some really awful concoctions, I'd imagine, but the potential for finding something that is differnt is pretty intriguing. I really wouldn't mind trying this sort of thing just to see what comes up.

Tech Support, How May I Help You?

I'm somewhat of what you might call a geek, or a nerd. As such, I often get called upon to provide assistance to friends and family on matters of computers and the like. Now, if I am physically with whatever object you need help with, I've got no problem at all helping you out and doing whatever needs to be done. The problem comes from when I need to start providing remote assistance. I hate having to provide support over IM or the phone. It's not that I don't want to help the person, or even that I don't want to take the time. Really, I'm more than happy to help you, that's not the problem at all. The problem is that if I am not sitting there in front of the thing, my tech ability seems to just go out the window. I can remember just about everything, except I'll always manage to forget something minor. Also, most of what I do to fix things is just an instinct of what to do. That is useless when I'm on the phone. So my problem with providing remote help is that it usually makes me look like I don't know what I'm doing. I've got a real knack for walking someone through something, telling them with all confidence that it will work, and then the dumb thing doesn't. This happens more often than I'd like to admit. Usually, I can ask some questions, or think about, and realize what I did wrong. Usually, the problem is that I missed something. If I do this once, I am usually forgiven. After the second time, they begin to lose faith. I feel pretty bad at this point, because it has probably been about 30 minutes, and I still haven't fixed your problem. I feel really bad because I know that if I were there with you I could have the stupid thing done in under five minutes. I'm always impressed when people have the patience with me for me to go over something three times until it's right.
Tonight I was helping a friend get her wireless router set up. I was trying to get her to set a password and secure the thing so that she wouldn't have everyone leeching off her and slowing down her network. This took a number of tries between her card not supporting all encryption types, my forgetting to tell her she has to specify which key is used, and my trying to figure out if the default setting on her router was open or shared. Eventually, after much of her patience, the thing worked.
So, the next time you want to ask me for help, remember that I don't mind helping, but you might have to deal with my brain dropping the ball. If I get to souding agitated, know that it isn't you, it is that I'm mad at myself for not getting whatever it is working yet. The best thing you can do is have me fix your problem in person. I'll have you setup in no time, and will walk you through it so that you can learn how to do it. All I ask is that if you need help with Excel please, please, understand the concept of selcting multiple cells. That is all.

U.S. Finally Close to Catching Up

Hooray! It looks like cable companies in the U.S. are going to be able to provide improved bandwidth at rates as high as 160 Mbps within the next 3-5 years. I know, the whole 3-5 years thing is always said, and generally repeated every year, but this time it might actually happen. With increasing competition from AT&T's and Verizon's fiber networks, cable companies have a big reason to look at bumping up speeds. The increase comes from upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0 from the currently used 1.1. This technology provides a number of other improvements including support for IPv6. Another incentive to cable is that they can roll out the new tech without large infrastructure improvements, especially if they've already laid a mixed fiber/coax network. This is especially good news because it means that there can be a faster deployment. Any sort of major deployment of the new technology is not expected until 2008, and is likely to have slower expansion than telco's fiber networks. While I'd personally choose something like FiOS over this if it was available, I'm guessing that cable may be able to reach certain areas faster than the fiber networks. Fortunately, I don't think that will be the case for me, as FiOS is literally moving up the street in my direction.
From ArsTechnica.

Solid State Drives getting cheap is a good thing

This article over at Engadget talks about how the prices of SSDs are going to continue dropping by quite a bit (no real surprise), but that they are still going to be quite a lot more than HDDs. According to Samsung, who provided the information, solid state drives are currently about five times the cost of mechanical drives. By the year 2010, they expect this to fall to just three times the cost. While this would still translate to a significant premium, when you consider what SSDs offer, it seems like it might be worth the cost. The part that I found to be interesting is that they are using the cost per GB of 1.8 inch hard drives for comparison. This is all well and good given that solid state drives are small, but if what you want is raw storage, 3.5 inch dries are way ahead in terms of cost. You can find these drives for as low as 20 cents a GB right now, which is about seven times cheaper than their little brothers. So when you consider that people are willing to pay seven times the amount just for a smaller form factor, shelling out a bit more money for the benefits of solid state doesn't seem like much of a stretch.