We're surrounded by idiots

It's not goodbye, it's a new hello!

2009-06-27T03:35:00.002+10:00

Blogger has fallen way behind the curve and this blog has fallen even further, so I've decided to abandon it. Don't worry, you can still get your fix of biting wit, biting insight and biting, biting, biting over at http://www.doingwords.com. Do check it out. But watch out for the biting.

Tip: take a moment to remember key non-product events!

2009-05-07T14:59:00.001+10:00

gettingmarried
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Chemistry Experiment with Alec

2009-02-20T00:19:00.001+11:00

Doing geeky things with my son is just about my favourite thing in the whole entire world. It's been nearly a year since we did this but finally I've edited it. Enjoy!

iCal: where's the maps?

2009-02-02T09:20:00.001+11:00

iCal: where's the map field?
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I really don't like Apple's iCal. If it weren't so tightly integrated to OS X and the iPhone I would drop it in a heart beat. It has so many weird interface things going it's actually quite hard to use, which is unusual amongst Apple apps.

So here's my biggest problem with it: as of this month even iPhoto supports mapping through Google Maps, so why, in this day and age, can't iCal lookup an address when I enter it in the location field and provide me with a map?

On Her Majesty's Sizzling Service

2008-12-24T00:33:00.001+11:00

On Her Majesty's Sizzling Service
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Sacha's dad was working for the British Embassy in Paris. No kidding! Not the kind of place I expected to have a gift shop, nor the kind of gift shop I'd expect to sell aprons, but there you go...

well, to be more precise, i like people who like code, but my chest isn't big enough.

2008-12-16T01:01:00.001+11:00

well, to be more precise, i like people who like code, but my chest isn't big enough.
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

sidewalk

2008-12-16T00:33:00.001+11:00

sidewalk
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Last Margerine In Paris

2008-12-12T13:12:00.001+11:00

Last Margerine In Paris
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I don't know why, it just popped into my head.

Why can't Flickr sets be listed in alpha order?

2008-10-17T11:20:00.001+11:00

Why can't Flickr sets be listed in alpha order?
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I can't remember *when* I created my sets, I just remember what they're called. Doesn't seem like such a big ask. Once you get beyond 20-30 sets, the list is completely unmanageable.

ZOMG! Could this be Best Job In The World?

2008-09-17T11:13:00.001+10:00

I assume they provide a driver with the company van! http://seek.com.au/users/apply/index.ascx?Sequence=61&PageNumber=1&JobID=13860043

Loving that iPhone ringtone feeling

2008-09-14T14:07:00.006+10:00

I'm loving The Feeling's music at the moment, particularly the 2006 song 'I Love It When You Call.'

Then it struck me how good it would sound as a ringtone on my iPhone.

Just in case you think it would sound great on your iPhone too, here's the ringtone I made.

(Just drag it onto iTunes and it should appear in your list of ringtones.)

Don't thank me, just buy the album, it's great!

Reduce, reuse, recycle

2008-09-08T11:01:00.001+10:00

DSC00730
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Great enviro graffiti I found on a wall in Ladakh.

Thanks for Father's Day!

2008-09-08T09:45:00.001+10:00

Thanks for Father's Day lunch!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I am truly the world's luckiest dad.

OnionMap: can you see the tiny people?

2008-09-06T14:50:00.001+10:00

OnionMap: can you see the tiny people?
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

It doesn't cover very much of Sydney but I was impressed that Korean 3D tourist map web startup OnionMap would cover Sydney at all. Disappointed to see you can't rotate the map, but you can pan and zoom. Some elements are animated - click on the cruise company at the wharf in this screen and a little cruiser leaves the jetty and heads out into the harbour -cool!

NameThis.com - prone to gaming?

2008-06-24T15:20:00.001+10:00

NameThis.com - prone to gaming?
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I love the idea of using crowdsourcing to brainstorm new brand names, business names and taglines. I even love the design and functionality of namethis.com.

But I do think that some products - like yet another bogus weight-loss pill - are a bit open to guerilla criticism on a site like this.

I'll be interested to see whether and how the site moderator or the pill merchant take action on my suggested product name, "A Healthy, Balanced Diet and Exercise Didn't Work For Me."

Never work with eggs or children

2008-06-13T00:15:00.001+10:00

Ping.fm: at last, the uber social media manager!

2008-06-07T10:26:00.001+10:00

Ping.fm: at last, the uber social media manager!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

This is really clever - ping lets me make subsets of my social media - micro-blogs, blogs, status messages etc - so i can direct my status updates to only some of my services.

Drawing Day - 1 million drawings on 7 June... or else!

2008-06-05T21:31:00.001+10:00

Join me on 7 June and share your drawing with the world online. Because.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU

2008-06-03T11:33:00.001+10:00

Wow, that's a lot of painting and a lot of white paint!

My iPhone is teh full of guff

2008-06-03T11:16:00.001+10:00

iTunes: iPhone is teh full of guff
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I shot some video using Polar Bear Farm's Showtime and then deleted it. But now I seem to have a mystery chunk of data on my iPhone that won't go away and I can't find it.

Argh, time to reset iphone and then painstakingly restore all my personalisations and apps. Yah-boo!

Letter to Kevin Rudd: please change the solar power rebate

2008-05-28T14:56:00.001+10:00

Hi Mr Rudd,

First, congratulations on the first few months. Generally, you've made me proud I voted Labor - the reconciliation apology in particular was awesome.

I'm generally in favour of means testing - I think a well designed means test used appropriately ensures fairness and makes sure public money is allocated efficiently and equitably.

However, I don't think your announced means test on the solar panel installation rebate is well designed, or being used appropriately. It also conflicts directly with your 20% renewable energy target.

As a family of three we've already spent thousands of dollars of our own money to minimise our use of water and power and reduce our waste output. In each case, it's been simple to demonstrate that the expense will pay for itself soon enough to make it worthwhile, even without the benefit to the environment.

We're keen to take the same step with solar electricity generation and would like to aim for generating 30% of our electricity via solar. However, to make the economics work, we'd need a sensible rebate, and even the maximum rebate on offer would leave us waiting 15 years to see that investment pay off. Have you ever seen any kind of modern technology last 15 years unrepaired or replaced? No. It needs to repay itself much sooner than that.

That's bad enough, but the means test you've introduced means we're not eligible for the rebate at all, which means it would be financial lunacy for us to do it. Your means test drives away the very high income families who might consider installing a solar power system. Doh!

A good mate of mine was the CEO of Australian solar startup, Ausra, which the Howard government drove overseas by failing to support the development of a local renewable energy industry. Now I'm very disappointed to see the Rudd government making it even harder for a renewable energy industry to grow by driving rebate-motivated customers like me away and instead wasting money on the mirage of ''clean coal'' technologies.

I can forgive a few early slip-ups - you're a new government and it's a tough job - but I'd like to see you admit to your mistakes and correct them quickly once it's clear you've made them. Ignore the media and the opposition reaction - the opposition are a sad joke and you have mandate enough to make - and undo - many more mistakes without jeopardising your re-election chances. That won't be true in three years time, so please act now.

Keep up the good work,

- alan

Write your own letter to Kevin Rudd about solar panel rebates, or anything else. Find out more ways to influence the Australian Federal Government's policies at GetUp.org.au

Vodafone's Streaker - nice viral app

2008-05-21T14:09:00.001+10:00

Check out this fun little viral thing from Vodafone - the webstreaker.com.au.

Untitled from bigyahu on Vimeo.

Let a thousand Joels bloom!

2008-05-15T11:46:00.001+10:00

Let a thousand Joels bloom!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Tip of the hat to Jufemaiz for twittering Cycloloco.com's cool web tool for making custom marker icons for Google Maps. Here's a fun map using his icon in his honour.

This is exactly the kind of little friendly, free web tool that he and I are both rather excited about at the moment. Excited because (a) we think they're The Future; and (b) because we're building one of our own.

More news as it comes to hand!

Apple Mac Music Video

2008-05-11T21:40:00.001+10:00

Very creative use of the Mac to create a music video. I shudder to think how long this took to do, but other than the Mac time, the budget would be super low.

Windows Live Messenger app for Facebook: Epic Fail

2008-05-08T15:03:00.001+10:00

Facebook | Windows Live Messenger app: Epic Fail
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Don't know what possessed me to see whether the Windows Live Messenger app for Facebook might work in Safari - as if! But when I was able to launch it in Firefox, guess what it pops up in your face before you start chatting with a friend? A CAPTCHA request! Talk about an epic fail way to discourage casual communications!

Striking back against Twitter instability!

2008-05-06T11:20:00.001+10:00

Striking back against Twitter instability!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

After another day not sure whether my tweets were getting thru or if i was reading the latest from the twittersphere i decided to strike back by submitting a new word to pseudodictionary. "twittery" was accepted, yay!

Status epilepticus: the 50 funniest instant messenger statuses

2008-04-25T16:42:00.002+10:00

In 2001-2003, back when instant messaging was young and social networking was something we did in bars, I was working at Yahoo! and had a lot of fun trying to write wittier status messages for Yahoo! Messenger than the 500-odd other employees (see, this is why the company is now in the toilet. Too much time being clever in Yahoo! Messenger.)

I was cleaning out some cruft on my web host today and came across a forgotten list of some of the best IM status messages I'd seen while working at Yahoo!. Some of them may be too 'insider' (e.g. "Venkat" was senior engineering manager at Yahoo! and it was always a battle to get some engineering resources from his team) but many of them have universal appeal. Where known, I've credited their author by their Yahoo! Messenger ID. Many of those people still go by the same IDs, so if you're interested, try googling them (oops, I mean "yahooing" them.)

However I think I speak for all the original authors when I say: please go ahead and use any of these you wish. Enjoy!

Computing

10,000 Leagues Under The C++

Now featuring multi-redundant links!

Wireless and clueless

All your engineers are belong to Venkat

Disk space, the final frontier

Do, or Ctrl-Z, there is no 'try'

Home is where the base href is

There's no page like home

About to be replaced by a shell script

On the internet, noone knows I'm a parent

Culture

Living la vida Yoda

Is anybody out there?

On Messenger, nobody can hear you scream

The less i know the more i appear to understand

Phasers set to stun

Savaging the soothed beast

Filmed in Cinemascope

Communication creates the illusion of progress

Not at your desk

But more, much more than this, you'll do it my way!

I am a work of speculative fiction

Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young

Conan the Humanitarian (naikrovek, 2002)

Let the Wookie win (naikrovek, 2002)

Stigmata - high-five gone awry (karen jackson 2002)

Winona, if you don't steal, i'll go out with you (naikrovek, 2002)

Only the young die young

It hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year

My PDA says it's your birthday, but it cares more than I do

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is nails, it's Hammer Time.

Advertising

Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commision

Holidays

Pull apart my buns and smear them with butter (Easter)

I Hate Work

Capitalisation is in the eye of the shareholder

What if the Hokey-Pokey IS what it's all about? (Stephanie Snyder, 2001)

Camel, eye of needle... grease...

99% of the game is half mental

All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power

Like a snowball gathering steam (the_bigtee 2003)

Busier than a leper in an all-hands meeting (goonker 2003)

It's 80s month in my iPhone ringtones!

2008-04-25T14:45:00.001+10:00

It's 80s month in my iPhone ringtones!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

...except when it's '60s and '70s. Thanks audiko!

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch

Please, don't put your email address on a web page

2008-04-25T13:27:00.001+10:00

Despite evil bots hovering out there waiting to scrape up every email address that is published on the interweb and add it to a spam database, people still put their email address on web pages everywhere. I guess the need to be contactable outweighs the pain of more spam.

There are a number of ways to hide or encrypt your email address when it is published on a web page, but many of these methods can be decrypted to allow a spambot to snag it. I figure: why put the email address on the page at all? Why not use a form and a database?

I'll tell you why not: forms and databases are dry, unleavened developerness - I fall asleep every time somewhere between "records" and "fields." Life's too short.

Wufoo.com has many superpowers, not the least being some of the zushiest dynamic interface you'll find on the interweb, making it a snap (dare I say... "fun"?) to design a web form and the database that sits behind it. You can build something as simple as an email feedback form (so that your email address remains unpublished) or something as schmancy as a 15 minute online survey form. Good CSS support means you can customise a form so that it looks like part of your website, but if that's all a bit too hard, it's really easy to use a pre-designed template and copy-and-paste the resulting form code into your web page.

Here's one I built earlier for my work blog at Doing Words. Any time someone fills in the form, the details are taken down in a database I can access at the Wufoo site, and then the database emails me the contact request.

Believe me: absolutely no programming required. Sure, I still get spam, but mostly from my family!

what meetings are really like

2008-04-22T02:10:00.001+10:00

what meetings are really like
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

From little purchases, big things grow

2008-04-21T20:07:00.003+10:00

Too much Kevin Rudd and not enough Paul Keating for my money, but other than that, this is a cracking tune. If you purchase the full track, the entire proceeds of your sale go towards a GetUp.org campaign to close the gap between white and black Australia, achieve parity in healthcare, education and employment, and recognise our nation's original inhabitants in our constitution.

You don't even have to buy the track if you don't want to. Make a donation or just forward it to your friends and family.

Age shall not weary them, just make them pudgy and bald

2008-04-07T23:03:00.001+10:00

Loverboy, one of the many Canadian pop rock bands that were popular in Australia when I were but a lad, always used to get my blood up with the rather explicit (for the times) lyrics of their song, "Turn Me Loose".

Mid-career, they were looking pretty tragic...

And now? Sheesh, they ought to be taken to the vet and put to sleep humanely...

It's been three months, time for a new iPhone/iPod

2008-04-07T12:31:00.000+10:00

It wasn't that long ago that 1,000 songs in the first 5Gb iPod was a revolution. Now my 16Gb iPhone carries a bazillion times more songs, and plays them with cover art, as well as videos, TV shows, even full-length movies. Oh, it has a great web browser, an email client and makes phone calls.

My iPhone is actually my second (I had the 8Gb first) but even my 16Gb is about to be superseded by a new 3G version in the next couple of months, according to Walt Mossberg. 3G will make a huge difference to using an iPhone, so of course I'll have to get one, even though I'm not very keen on the unsubtle Apple logo and the shiny plastic look of the 3G iPhone in this photo from Ben Barren...

If you're brave enough to give a little, you get a little back

2008-04-04T15:28:00.001+11:00

It's important to consider the privacy of others - particularly children - when posting photos to the interweb.

Early in the history of Flickr I got a little freaked out when a friend's photos of her kid were snagged by an unknown woman who built a scary blog using the photos and her own stories to make like the kids were hers and not my friend's. Scary stalker stuff.

A while later, a naked photo of my son on Flickr received some unwelcome attention. Ick. But the sensible solution was not to post naked pictures of my kid - or anyone else's. Problem solved.

You'd think anyone managing a young sports star these days would either ban or closely moderate their entire participation in online social networking, but this week we saw controversial photos from members of the Australian Olympic swim team that had been snagged from their Facebook profile. Can't blame the journalists: need a photo to accompany a story, the choices are (a) pay $10,000 to a paparazzi and wait 24hrs to receive it, or (b) look up their Facebook profile and snag the photos they've added, free of charge? No brainer.

I could have over-reacted to the Flickr experience and never posted another photo of my son to the interweb, but then my gypsy family would never get to see their cousin/nephew/grandson at all. I could password-protected everything, but then family would never remember the password and never get around to asking me for it.

If I'd done either, I never would have seen this cool line art done by someone on Flickr, based on a photo I'd taken of my son:

Which was based on this photo of him grooving on his iPod while we were camping last year:

On the interweb, I think it's worth giving a little in order to get something back, and this is a great example.

For that reason, I make my photos on Flickr available on a Creative Commons "attribution-non-commercial" licence, meaning you can use them for anything non-commercial as long as you attribute them to me with a link. I'd be stoked if anyone else created good art out of something I just opened a shutter on for a fraction of a second.

Amazon.com affiliate program can't pay a bank outside the US

2008-04-03T16:22:00.001+11:00

Amazon.com affiliate program can't pay a bank outside the US
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

"Prohibitively expensive"? Not any more it isn't. Google manages it very smoothly. Long past time to glocalize, Amazon!

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch

Did you know watering your garden can be geeky?

2008-04-01T18:28:00.002+11:00

Micromet online report on my garden watering
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Oh, this is so geeky I'm all a-shiver! This is a report on my garden's water situation over the last month, as measured by the little black box on the wall next to our garden watering system, installed by Micrometonline.com as part of a 3-month trial by Sydney Water.

The little black box controls the drip irrigation system, and receives its instructions over the pager radio network from a central system monitoring rainfall, cloudcover, evaporation etc in each part of the Sydney metro area.

Basically, the little black box makes sure our garden is only watered when it needs to be, and only delivers as much water as our garden needs.

...which leaves SO much more water for me to have extra baths in!

...kidding!

OK, the graph and the website could benefit from slightly less data density for consumer users like myself, but that's to be expected from a system developed for large irrigators like councils and businesses. It's a great start for saving water!

Your tax dollars at work: Powerhouse Museum promotes Hotmail

2008-04-01T10:20:00.002+11:00

Email Australia - creating more junk Hotmail accounts

Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy

Initially I assumed the Powerhouse Museum's plan to print out and archive hundreds of the 'best' emails from around Australia was just an April Fool's joke.

After all, it's never easy to sort the real news stories from the pranks on April 1st. Journalists have too little time between deadlines and too many pages to fill to check all of their facts, all the time. And we in the blogosphere, squeezing our blogging into thin slices of our day jobs and housekeeping, have even less motivation to think before we speak. Meanwhile, those of us with time for mischief, such as the most excellent Darren Rowse, keep coming up with plausible prank stories.

In the end, a lot of April Fools prank stories to go press online these days.

Sadly, the Email Australia campaign, announced by ninemsn, Microsoft and the publicly funded Powerhouse Museum, is not a prank. Even worse, it's a thinly-veiled marketing exercise for Hotmail, designed to temporarily inflate the user registration numbers of Microsoft's webmail product.

It seems like a prank because the museum is asking everyone in Australia to send in their 'best' emails and enter them in one of eight categories (Life and Laughter, Touching Tales, Family, Love and romance, E-mails, Embarrassing typos, Current affairs and Complaints.)

Wouldn't that be a fun job, sorting through all the entries in each category to decide which were worthy of archiving, which were the best, and which were least likely to lead to get the original author, ninemsn, Microsoft and the museum sued for defamation? That's not one I'd be putting my hands up for.

Yes, the terms of the promotion state that you not only take on liability for establishing copyright of the material, but also take on the risk of any legal action arising from, say, using someone else's forwarded email which then turns out to be a snippet from a novel or something that the subject of the email decides is defamatory. Good luck with that.

You'd expect the Powerhouse Museum to choose the best emails in each category, but no - it's a ninemsn/Microsoft promotion, and ninemsn gets to do the selection, thanks very much. Here's a tip for contest entrants: try inserting a few references to how great Hotmail is these days, how much you enjoy using MSN Messenger on your new Windows Mobile phone, and how amazing Windows Vista is these days since they shook out the last remaining glitches. Now you know who'll be judging the entries!

The final pinch-and-a-punch for this particular first day of the month is the news that all emails must be sent from a Hotmail account. And if you don't already have a Hotmail account, a handy link is provided to allow you to sign up for one.

So now what might at first glance appear to be a misguided but worthy effort to capture a little online culture for prosperity is revealed as a grubby attempt to artificially inflate ninemsn's Hotmail subscriptions for a month or two.

Not very many people are likely to use that new Hotmail account for anything other than entering the competition, since Hotmail is indelibly stamped with the spammer's seal of approval. Even if Hotmail is less prone to spam than it has been in the past, most of these casual one-time users won't stick around to find out.

How sad to see a major Australian museum involved in such a thinly-veiled marketing promotion. "Marketing is punishment for a bad idea" said Andrew Hyde on Brian Burns' blog the other day. How very true. If only it had all been an April Fool's joke.

Too many parking idiots, not enough stickers. So I ordered more!

2008-03-27T17:08:00.002+11:00

Too many parking idiots, not enough stickers. So I ordered more!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Am I the only person in Sydney who sees at least one idiot a day who's parked dangerously and/or illegally? My first batch of stickers from Iparklikeanidiot.com is all gone, so it was time to order more.

The stickers are great for bumpers, and are removable, so you can leave them on a windscreen and they will come off easily. Or, if you feel like giving someone a second chance, just tuck the unpeeled sticker under their windscreen wiper. That gives them a warning and an opportunity to spread the word next time they see an irresponsible parker in action.

So, you tell me: am I making a difference to selfish and rude parkers in Sydney?

No? Well, help me out here, peeps - go buy yourself some stickers and join the campaign :-)

Only going to ask you one more time: step away from the interface!

2008-03-27T13:04:00.001+11:00

Why do so many people in tech management find 3D interface so strangely addictive, when it's clinically proven to be idiot-forming? Techcrunch reports that AT&T has been developing a new web 3D browser, Pogo, based on Mozilla. I'm amongst the readers who reacted with a strong WTF? at the news, though it brings up some important points about interface design, following trends, and remembering history.

I remember my history. Right about when I joined Yahoo! the company cut a deal with Caligari, a maker of 3D software and browser plugins. The two companies collaborated on a 3D visualisation of the main web directory categories of Yahoo! (News, Finance, Sports, etc.) I can't find a video of the interface in action (challenge: can you find one?) but each section of the web directory was represented by a giant icon on a huge green field of grass.

From memory, Yahoo! 3D was something a lot of senior yahoos were interested in as something fun to play with - it really wasn't something the company was expecting to monetize or present as the primary interface for Yahoo! then or in the future. This was in the days of 28.8kbps modem bandwidth, 13" CRTs and Navigator 3.0/IE 3.0. Flying across the football field from one category to another would take about a minute, with frame rates at about 5fps, and you were quite likely to miss the category you were aiming for with the frame rate and lag time.

Yahoo! 3D taught me that desktop web browser interfaces were already quite mature, and that on the desktop, the old "click on a link with a mouse" routine was widely-understood, easily adopted by new users, and fast to use.

Since then, browser interface design has tried and rejected a few new ideas, and the only one I can point to that has really been taken up widely is tabs in the browser, as well as in the web page itself.

Twelve years later, 3D visualization of data and relationships is a powerful tool, but 3D navigation remains a solution without a problem. Why is this so? I can't point you to research on this, but my trusty gut instinct says:

3D interfaces need 3D input devices and displays. It's too hard to learn to grasp, manipulate and move objects using 2D input devices and displays. It takes too many brain cells to do the interpolation, even for those with strong stomachs and keen to try new things.

Despite Javascript, AJAX, Flash and all that whizzy coding stuff, websites and web apps are still built using metaphors dredged deep out of print publishing. You can stack a bunch of web pages together and drag them about, sure, but each of those web pages has only two dimensions. I can only interact with the content on a web page when viewing it from "the front". Stacking and dragging are useful for organising large numbers of web pages and bookmarks, sure. But who organises large amounts of web content? A tiny percentage of the internet audience. And that dragging is inevitably going to be easier using folders and tabs until Apple ships me a 3D input device and display with my next Mac.

The other classic mistake I see in these videos of Pogo in action is mimicry without purpose, in this case, mimicking Apple's Cover Flow interface. I betcha nobody at AT&T knows what percentage of Apple's OS X customers actually choose to use Cover Flow (versus not knowing how to turn it off) but I am sure Apple knows and isn't telling.

Cover Flow is chrome: something that's meant to sweeten the sale or upgrade of the operating system, iTunes and iPods, not to be a primary interface mode.

Knowing your new BMW M5 has a gazillion suspension and transmission settings helps you justify your purpose, and six months later, if BMW surveys M5 customers and finds <5% actually mess with the settings? Who cares? We've still sold a lot of M5s.

How do I know Cover Flow is just chrome when I don't have any data? I asked my friends. The responses are all quite similar: even the musicgeekiest friend I have can identify only 30% of his iTunes library by album art alone. Subtract the albums he originally owned on CD, then subtract the albums he'd owned for years before buying an iPod, then subtract the album covers that actually have the band name and album name on the cover? He's down to <5%.

Don't believe me? Test yourself, I'd love to read about your results.

Meanwhile, who'd regularly use an interface that forced you to stop and think about 95% of the choices available to you?

While website homepages aren't as obscure as album covers, they certainly aren't designed to be recognisable - much less legible - at Cover Flow-sized dimensions. And any new content on them worth clicking on won't be readable unless the Pogo user is viewing at something far greater than 1280x1024px.

AT&T's Pogo mistakes the chrome for the fundamentals, and then tacks it onto its own product without any understanding of its true purpose, like a Chinese manufacturer designing cars that come out looking like a BMW that got left too long in the microwave with a LandCruiser.

Some of the videos of Pogo in action are well worth watching, and I'm in favour of AT&T and other large companies with too much money/time doing research of all kinds, even if its only into doomed interface design.

But while you watch, don't let the siren song of 3D interface whizzyness lure you away. Don't start picturing yourself in a 'Minority Report' future with productivity levels 10x today's. Expect the personal jetpack to ship first!

iTunes: when labels lose the plot

2008-03-26T18:05:00.001+11:00

iTunes: when labels lose the plot
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

It's tough managing rights and markets and content on the interweb. The interweb aggregates so well that all your whack geographical or distribution-focused pricing policies, never intended to be seen together in the one place, may suddenly collide, such as in this case with a Phoenix album available for both $10.99 and $17.99 in iTunes.

Support the pigs, man

2008-03-19T13:40:00.002+11:00

I love all the kinds of pig meats - Judaism wouldn't work out for me. But there are humane ways to treat pigs, and they are too intelligent and interesting to farm inhumanely. Support the pigs, man.

Updated: OK, no flaws in Apple's iPhone SDK after all!

2008-03-19T12:26:00.007+11:00

Update: I stand corrected, and so should Pete Yandell, my original source for this story. Thanks to the diligence of readers like you, I've now learned everything I missed while I ducked out to put the kettle on while the iPhone SDK videoconference was playing: there absolutely is a way for a small business to test an iPhone app without offering it over iTunes Store, and developers who only want to release products to their own staff are able to pay a little more for the ability to do that privately via iTunes Store.

However, it still seems a strategic mistake to open the SDK to US developers only initially. Software development quality does not respect geographical boundaries, and the largest and most experienced mobile software development communities are all outside the US.

Anyway, read on, see where I was wrong, and please join in the very healthy discussion in the comments for this post!

It's been a couple of weeks since the launch of Apple's iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) and it's taken me that long to find a serious flaw worth noting in what has been an otherwise enthusiastically-received program.

But while considering Rails Camp 08 I found a stunning flaw unearthed by developer Pete Yandell - he says the iPhone SDK program is only available to US-resident developers.

Until now my only concern was that third-party iPhone apps could only be sold on iTunes Store, which seemed a needless constraint for Apple. I think consumers and carriers could understand the risk in downloading iPhone apps from other sources, all it needs is a disclaimer pop-up from Apple before you wander out of the walled garden, not a blanket ban.

But limiting iPhone developers to US residents is seriously nuts, since almost without exception, the best mobile developers, designers, usability and product management people are outside the US.

In terms of strategic mistakes, it's akin to launching a program to promote, say, professional surfing and then requiring all competitors to be residents of Tajikistan (Tajiki don't surf!)

It's most likely a measure designed to put some limits to the growth of the SDK program - Apple reports they received a bazillion SDK applications in the first nanoseconds following the launch and it has been reported that there's already a waitlist to have SDK paperwork considered.

If there's already a waitlist, it's safe to assume someone at Apple is manually reviewing every SDK application submitted. So why not bust open the US-only restriction and allow that reviewer to consider any new developer - from any country - solely on the basis of the quality of their proposal and track record in mobile development?

Apple wants the best possible iPhone apps, right? It has to cast the net further than the mobile equivalent of Tajikistan...

What does it cost to get a social network user to churn?

2008-03-14T17:01:00.001+11:00

Saucy social networking social networker Laurel Papworth has cleverly pointed out that AOL's announced acquisition of Bebo may jeopardise Yahoo7's big partnership deal with Bebo in Australia, since AOL Australia and Yahoo7 are competitors locally.

It'll take a while for the deal to go through and international partnership deals to be rejigged, perhaps as much as a year or so for them to get around to figuring out what to do with a market as small as Australia, but it would be reasonable to expect that AOL Australia would want the Yahoo7/Bebo deal to be unwoven asap.

Laurel says the Bebo deal represents as much as half Yahoo7's available ad inventory. Holy CPM, Batman! No idea if that's correct, but that's a big kick in the guts to lose that many eyeballs with only 6-12mths warning.

Before I pick my jaw up off the floor, there's something else that leaves me agape. I haven't reported on the deal yet because I've been waiting for the perspective to be able to see the deal from AOL's valuation side of things. Surely it would make sense if I gave it time. But nope. No sense yet.

So, what's with AOL offering $850 million, in cash? Is it all upfront? Or are there performance metrics Bebo needs to make to collect most of it? Did anyone tell AOL this business was started by a couple of people only three years ago? Did anyone point out that since most of AOL's customers are in the US, they don't want a Bebo account because they're either wedded to Facebook or MySpace already?

Speaking of which, where are the studies looking at the cost of getting someone to churn from one social network to another? Has anyone looked at that yet? If I've been focused on my Facebook account for one, six or 12 months, what's it going to cost a competitor to get me to switch to their product?

Personally, I'm all over Facebook, a bit active on MySpace, and on Bebo, I'm an "unengaged user" - i have an account there, but only to see how it works and browse through the kinds of users to be found there. So Facebook has me as an "engaged user" - using it several times a day, with almost all my real-world friends connected, and a big social history stored there. This animated blackboard toy is the only thing I really like about Bebo right now.

I don't have any numbers, but intuitively, I think there are two kinds of social network user: engaged minority and non-engaged majority. The non-engaged majority will churn quite easily, but because their engagement is low, they're not worth very much to you and will churn again to your next new competitor. The engaged user is, I'm guessing, extremely hard to dislodge, even if you give them the means to migrate all their content, social history and reputation to your new social network.

Yet the network effects that give a social network its value depend entirely on those highly-engaged users. In other words, if you succeed only in acquiring another network's unengaged users, you've failed. They won't stick because they don't care about documenting their social history, and they won't stick because you don't have the engaged users you need to keep the unengaged connected.

That's my guess, anyway: would love to see the numbers if you have them.

FriendFeedFeed is just a spoof

2008-03-14T09:52:00.002+11:00

FriendFeedFeed
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Just a spoof, yes, but this is a trend worth spoofing. What worries me is these aggregations are headed in the wrong direction, losing richness, interconnections and annotations along the way: see my prior post on this topic.

2008-03-13T23:59:00.001+11:00

I hate it when Facebook makes me remember someone's birthday. It's as heartfelt as all standing around a cake in the office singing happy birthday.

I Watch This - TV Guide recommendations on IceTV

2008-03-11T20:57:00.002+11:00

I Watch This - TV Guide recommendations on IceTV
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Regular viewers will know I have a major jones for Electronic Program Guides (EPGs) and digital television. Early Aussie pioneer IceTV is still hanging in there despite being dragged backwards through the hedge of the courts by the unlimited resources of the interests backing Channel Nine.

Now IceTV have finally launched their recommendation feature, iwatchthis.com.au (hmm... shouldn't that be "Youshouldwatchthis.com.au"?). Whatever it's called, it gets you to tell it which shows are your favourites (or you can let it watch what you record) and it'll come back with recommendations.

How well does it work? Well, my experience is limited because although I still have a login, my paid subscription to IceTV lapsed and I haven't renewed. Unluckily for IceTV, recently I fell in love with AppleTV and buying shows from the US iTunes Store and haven't had much time for Australian free-to-air television since then.

But my login allowed me to 'favourite' a few good shows in IceTV, including Foreign Correspondent, Lateline, Media Watch and Cutting Edge, just to test out the recommendations ('cos regular readers will recall, I also have a major jones for all things recommendations).

I expected IceTV's recommendations to be fairly good: highly engaged customers providing relatively accurate data, genre and cast relationships providing clear pointers to recommendable content, and most of all in Australia, a relative paucity of content to choose from!

So sure enough, IceTV scored a nice 5 out of 10 in terms of other shows I'd like to watch. But is that really helping me much? I mean, there's so little on free-to-air in Australia I don't really need recommendations at all, much less recommendations that are as likely to be wrong as right.

To really make the payoff, IceTV should be there to let me know when a new series of Top Gear is starting, because it knows I enjoyed the last series. It shouldn't be distracted by a repeat of a previous series, or the same series being screened a second time in a different time slot. Does it do this? Dunno, not possible to tell from my exploration.

Perhaps if IceTV offered me streaming previews, independent reviews rather than synopses, or even production stills. But the local commercial networks aren't about to help - they still see IceTV as stripping away revenue with ad-skipping features, when really they should see IceTV as one of the few things that can help them win and retain what remains of a viable media audience. Sigh.

This morning in da house: Yorke Hinds

2008-03-11T15:25:00.003+11:00

Here I am in full iPhone Fuzzycolourtm at the dining table with Yorke Hinds, the devbrain behind Quivalent, once my favourite email newsletter marketing platform, and Zookoda, an excellent tool to help bloggers manage RSS email subscriptions, a product now in the portfolio of PayPerPost.

Peepl have been dropping around to our house a bit lately, mostly to sample our fantastic fresh-ground Forsyths coffee (ZOMG it's so good I'm gonna make another now) but also to chat a bit about new opportunities on da interwebs. With no consent or prior warning, I'm going to use my iPhone's craptastic fuzzycam and Twitxr.com's social photomessaging to record some of these visits for posterior-ity. Sorry Yorke!

Yorke's next large-ish thing will be a platform that helps interweb startups manage relationships with the greatest double-edged sword of web development: the beta tester. I'm waiting for my alpha invite from Yorke, really looking forward to having a muck about with it. Unfortunately my feedback will need to remain confidential for the time-being, but hopefully I can tell you all about it very soon when it enters a more open beta.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to drop by, have one of my great coffees, and star in iPhone Fuzzycolour production of your own, do drop me an email.

File under "you really had to be there": Dungeons & Dragons lives on

2008-03-10T14:36:00.002+11:00

file under "you really had to be there": GG is dead, long live GG
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I'm not going to burden the interwebs with yet another personal reflection on the importance of Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons (a) because my own teenage years were so very like every other young geek; and (b) I knew someone would do it better.

Turns out Adam Rogers from WIRED magazine is that very someone, with not only the killer story, but a hilarious and partly true flowchart to back it up.

He asserts we're all still playing D&D - or at least, role-playing - when we're online, not just in Second Life and World of Warcraft, but also on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and Flickr.

I think that's an extraordinarily insightful premise. But I think it's your turn to roll...

Facebook wants to know about your politics

2008-03-10T14:18:00.001+11:00

Facebook adds political party affiliation
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

In place of the original vague "libera/conservative" affiliations we now get actual political parties, which is great if you vote for the same political party every election and agree with their entire platform, which is... rare. But make no mistake, this is a step forward.

In Australia, all Federal parties considered by Wikipedia to be "significant" are represented, so Pauline Hanson and Shooters Party members will be disappointed.

Here's a fun thing: type a keyword like "Liberal", "Democratic", "Popular" or "People's" into the field and see all the whackjobs from around the world lined up together. It's almost like a political party name should be the opposite of who it actually represents.

I am certain there will soon be news stories showing whether, in the US, Democrats or Republicans are more likely to be active Facebook users, and Facebook Platform developers will bring us a variety of ways to surf the social graph according to political lines.

No doubt, many Facebook users consider their political affiliation a personal and private thing. So put "Pirate" or "Ninja" in there and leave us guessing.

trouble at the ranger station

2008-03-02T14:19:00.002+11:00

ranger station banner
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

It took me less time to build a community site for an under 7 soccer team (inc. this nifty banner art) using Ning than it took 3eep.com.au to send me the confirmation email with the link i had to click on before i could start creating a site.

So my son's soccer team is now on Ning, not 3eep. Much as I like Nick and Rob and the 3eep guys, it's a case of sorry 3eep, not quick enough this time around.

Come drive the eroding roads!

2008-02-28T15:20:00.002+11:00

Last year I wrote something of our experiences driving in India for carsguide.com.au but in typical newspaper publisher fashion the story is no longer available on carsguide (the 'long tail'? what's that?')

But in typical Indian fashion, somebody copied the whole story and republished it in an Indian messageboard for err... highway enthusiasts, I think.

And in typical spamblog fashion, somebody else only identifiable by their IP address just snagged the whole thing!

Amazon's international billing problem

2008-02-28T09:38:00.006+11:00

Met Mike Culver, web services evangelist for Amazon's S3 cloud services today on his first trip downunder. All this cool stuff about how we can base an entire startup on a pay-as-you-go storage and computing model with the same reliability and speed as Amazon itself.

Mainly technical discussion, so a lot of it way over my head but one of my questions hit home:

If Amazon's charging me in USD and only accepts credit card payment, the foreign currency exchange fee my bank is going to charge me is a big hit. My bank's 3.3% for Mastercard and 3.4% for Visa foreign currency transactions is probably standardish.

Mike hadn't come across that before but seemed serious about taking that issue back to the US to get solved.

Not as big an issue for me personally as having no amazon.com.au, but prolly enough to make such a variable cost unaffordable here.

US companies still aren't great at the whole international product strategy.

(btw, no links or image with this post because iPhone STILL doesn't support copy & paste grrr)

[Sent from my iPhone, still unable to copy and paste and it's 2008]

To emoticate or not? Psyblog sez yez

2008-02-27T10:10:00.005+11:00

im in da sistem, wotchin how u rite stuff

I'm a professional communicator, and thanks to the remote business relationships I maintain online, a lot of my communication is in writing. So I'm very interested in studying how written communication is changing thanks to the influence of the interweb.

A few years ago there was the migration of emoticons from instant messaging and SMS to casual online relationships, eventually appearing in mainstream marketing and even business communication.

At the moment I see people beginning to adopt the all-lower-case capitalisation seen in microblogging and social networks, and the 'signature' - the end of your message where you leave your name as you would your handwritten signature on a letter - is going out of style. Don't even get me started about people who use 'lolcat' phrases...

Just because new styles are adopted doesn't mean they're widespread or permanent - you don't want to be the last person in your peer group to still be typing "lol" when everyone has moved on to "lolz". Just as saying, "OK" instead of "I understand" changes how you're perceived in a verbal discussion, these non-verbal cues you use will affect how you're perceived in a written discussion.

I found this post on PsyBlog when reading Kate Carruther's blog - the results of a study on the effects of using capitalisation and emoticons are both expected and surprising.

As I expected, correctly capitalising what you write improves the reader's perception of you, but while I thought emoticons would have the reverse effect, they also improve the reader's perception of you. CEOs of Australia, start using smileys!

Don't use them when communicating with software developers though, since the study also found that the effect of capitalisation and emoticons was minimal or even reversed when read by introverted and emotionally unstable people.

I've subscribed to Psyblog. Goin' psycho!

Imitation, sincerest form of flattery

2008-02-27T09:15:00.001+11:00

Imitation, sincerest form of flattery
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Wow, that new Y! Buzz logo sure looks a lot like bluepulse.

my first ASCII spam! how old skool!

2008-02-27T06:52:00.001+11:00

my first ASCII spam! how old skool!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I've never seen an example of ASCII spam before. I want to reply with an ASCII pic of a girl in a swimsuit, or a Lamborghini - one of those classic ASCII art images of the 80s, but I know I shouldn't.

Death of social networks? Not that way, and not yet!

2008-02-26T18:09:00.003+11:00

Mark Jones of Filtered Media is predicting the death of social networking. I don't think death is coming any time soon, and certainly not from Google and Gmail as Mark suggests. I think the bigger future threat for MySpace and Facebook are microblogging and social messaging layers over the top of the social networks.

Yes, social networks can't sustain the current growth. There will be a plateau. Following the plateau will come more realistic valuations, rationalisation and acquisition by the networks.

Yes, to some extent social networks will atomise - social networking platforms are already starting to blend in the features of other web platforms via their APIs and developer platforms, and it makes sense that some of that platform functionality will bleed out into email, search, blogging and other web platforms over time.

The 'friend spam' we see now on Facebook is a function of the immaturity of the social network businesses themselves, which are still learning how to manage open platforms, and to some extent a learning process for users - it's already unfashionable to be the friend who sends too much social network spam - soon, it will be social suicide.

I can't see Mark's 'Email 3.0' spelling the end of social networks. If I were an 18-25 year old, why would I need to wrangle with Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail if I can use Facebook's email to stay in touch with everyone I know? Hotmail spam vs Facebook spam? Give me the latter any day.

Why would I need to search from the Google homepage if Facebook was my homepage and I could launch a Google search from a Facebook app in my profile page?

Google's become the default for us 30-40 year olds, and Yahoo! is the default for our parents, but Facebook and MySpace have an opportunity to be the default starting point for our kids. ...if they seize the opportunity and execute well, which so far they have had trouble with.

Email is inherently a functional product - I need to have something to communicate to someone before I send an email. However social networks work best when I can use them as inspiration for finding something to say to my friends. I may not have any news myself today, but by browsing what my friends have been up to recently, there's always something that I can comment on, criticise, debate or LOL at.

Social networks will remain a place that people go to 'hang out' with their friends and meet new friends online. There will be fewer of them in the future, and the big ones will probably be owned by larger networks as MySpace is now.

But just as social networks have an opportunity to steal the email, search, media sharing and buying/searching eyeballs from the incumbents, there is already a couple of threats to the social networks: social messaging businesses like bluepulse (who are more comfortable if I disclose that I'm contracting for them any time I mention their name online, bless 'em!) and microblogging services like Twitter.

Social messaging businesses threaten social networks because they may steal away the user's all-important 'status message'. Without the status message being updated there's half the value of the Facebook newsfeed gone, and the newsfeed is everything to Facebook's business. If I can more quickly and easily update what I'm doing now from my mobile phone on bluepulse than I can on Facebook, then sure, Facebook may lose me (that's "me the hypothetical 20 year old" not "me the 43 year old".) Facebook's mobile product is still lame: you can't sign up as a Facebook user from a phone, and many of the key features are missing from the mobile product. Using MySpace's mobile product is like travelling back in time to 2000 and back in space to Boondocks, Carolina. I don't see any sign that Facebook or MySpace 'get' the importance of building a better mobile product yet.

Microblogging services like Twitter can also steal away the status message traffic and user loyalty from the social networks, by making it all about status messages, and then using the social network's own APIs to let the user update multiple social networks from one spot, saving time and money, both very precious to 18-25 year olds.

Bluepulse chosen as an awards finalist. Does it really matter anymore?

2008-02-21T16:27:00.008+11:00

When "MVP" means "Most Voted by PR people" what does it mean for awards?

Bluepulse (for whom I'm contracting at the moment) has been chosen as a finalist in the grand-daddy of tech award events, the SIAA 2008 CODiE Awards. Here's the press release and Bluepulse's announcement.

Generally, I'm cynical about industry award events these days. There's so many of them. Some seem like thinly-veiled pats-on-the-back for friends and clients. Instead of being selected, you have to lobby yourself, so that to even get on awards list radar, you almost need a dedicated person working on award entry submissions.

Here are a few problems and suggested solutions for technology awards events. Feel free to ignore them and keep having a wild time with your best clients at your next awards:

You entered? You win!
You've been holding your awards at the same time each year, but with all the competition from other awards, you realize you're a month out from award night and some of your categories don't even have entries yet. You get on the phone and call some friends, "get your entry in and I'll see what influence I have on the judging panel" (translation: you'll win because you're helping make our awards look less lame.) Solution: have judging panels select the entrants in each category, rather than asking companies to submit themselves or accepting 'nominations from customers' (which inevitably will be submitted by PR people). It's tough to get judges to do that much work, but it's worth it.

Who's the judge?
In some awards events nowadays, the selection is done anonymously by the company managing the event. Any time I see an awards event and can't find out who the judges were, I have to wonder whether there's any conflicts of interest, especially when the organizer earns revenue from consulting to - or running advertising for - some of the nominee companies. Best practice: full disclosure of the judges, their qualifications, and the judging process itself.

What's 'finalist' really mean?
Related to the previous problem. A little later on in this post you'll read me getting excited about a company I'm associated with being selected as a finalist in an industry award event. Well, partly I'm excited because it's a big, big award, and partly I'm excited because I have some appreciation of what a company has to do to be chosen as a finalist. Unfortunately, that's not usually the case. I'm not saying I think being nominated as a finalist is entirely worthless, but it's newsworthy these days, without the news including any detail of how your company or product was chosen as a finalist.

I saw some awards in 2007 where the judging panel selected a small number of finalists from a pool of hundreds of nominees and I also saw more than award where I suspect F=N-1 (do I need to spell it out?)

Best practice: full disclosure when announcing your finalists. How many entrants were there in that category? How were finalists chosen? How tough does your organisation believe it is to be selected as a finalist?

Did I mention Bluepulse is a finalist? ;-)
So how does the 2008 SIAA CODiE Awards stack up against my criticisms? Am I able to diss the entire tech industry awards biz while mounting a convincing case that the CODiEs are an exception? Yah, I think so.

The CODiEs have been running since 1986. 1986! Was there even an internet in 1986? That depends on how you define "internet" but there were certainly no internet awards in 1986, and I was busy chatting on CompuServe and downloading pics of Playboy centrefolds (when 'raunchy' meant 'nipples') in glorious greyscale from my local BBS. Award winners that year included Microsoft Excel and Aldus (pre-Adobe) PageMaker. Microsoft Windows won Best User Interface. I know, that seems nuts, but that's because we have the benefit of hindsight. Back in the day, Windows really was a significant advance.

But don't lose sight of the fact that, just in 1986's winners, CODiE picked the operating system that defined the personal computer industry for the subsequent thirty years, the software product that still counts 9 out of 10 dollars earned and spent, and PageMaker, which created the desktop publishing industry and set many of the conventions of graphical user interface design. That's a heck of an all-star cast. When Bluepulse has the goal of changing the way the world communicates, being nominated in that kind of company is significant.

True, in these self-service days, you have to enter your own company for an award, but the SIAA goes to a lot of trouble to source a large software industry judging panel to do the winnowing out of finalists, and then puts the awards themselves out to vote. Not an open vote allowing the entire staff of your PR agency to vote for you, either. Only SIAA member companies in the relevant category get to cast a vote - so you are literally voted for by your peers (and no, your PR agency can't become a voting member of the SIAA.)

Finally, the SIAA is a "software industry association" not "a web 2.0 blog publisher". Not only do online products have to compete with other online products to be nominated, you're also up against what old fogies like me still sometimes refer to as "real" products - stuff that in many cases ships on a disk, with a printed manual, in a box covered in feature bullet points, minimum system requirements. That's some serious competition.

So yes, despite the parlous state of tech industry awards, I think Bluepulse making it to the finals of the CODiEs is a big deal that we should all be excited about. This nomination is recognition that, fundamentally, Bluepulse is good at software development; that they can mix it with the best when it comes to the code. That's what we'd all want to have as a core competency.

[By the way; Bluepulse think being a finalist is a big deal too, but my opinions on tech industry awards are entirely my own.]

iTunes and iPhone and movie rentals: Awesomenicity!

2008-02-21T10:07:00.001+11:00

iTunes and iPhone and movie rentals: Awesomenicity!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Is "awesomenicity" a real word? It is now - now that I have a 16Gb iPhone and I can fit all my contacts, all my calendar, all the music I need, a selection of my best photos... and a MOVIE i rented from iTunes Store in ONE CLICK!

There's only two people on this earth who could make me take the train to work instead of driving a car: AL Gore (obviously) and Steve Jobs - coz watching movies on an iPhone? I feel like missing my stop!

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch

Squarespace does the industry's shiniest graphs

2008-02-21T08:26:00.001+11:00

Squarespace does the industry's shiniest graphs
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

No doubt about it - business blogging/website host Squarespace does the shiniest site traffic graphs I've ever worked with.

See the transparent columns? That's last month's traffic, so you can see how this month compared to last month.

Lack of .CSV export is a bit frustrating though - there's no way to export the traffic data out.

One for the ladies (you're welcome, ladies)

2008-02-20T11:26:00.004+11:00

if i woz a grrl, i would want to wear this! I love the "WTF" and the octopus shouting "PWWWNND!"

What's more important in a social messenger?

2008-02-20T10:44:00.004+11:00

(This is part of Shai Coggin's 52 Weeks of Blogging Community project.)

Feedback on scouta.com redesign mockup

2008-02-19T17:15:00.003+11:00

New scouta.com Mockup
Originally uploaded by rich115.

Richard Giles from Scouta was looking on Twitter for some feedback on his new redesign. I charge for this kinda work, but here's some brief feedback:

S-P-E-L-L out the benefit

You haven't yet shown the user the benefit. You assume they know why receiving personalised recommendations is a good thing. Start with, "Who has time to find good stuff to listen to/watch online?..." and explain the benefit. Most consumers still aren't aware of what recommendation is, much less why it matters to them.

Who's your target audience?

It's really hard to get a good balance between the consumer target and the media publisher target, so why try? It just clutters and confuses to have a message aimed at publishers wedged in-between two consumer messages. Just put a button-shaped link near the bottom that says, "Are you a media publisher?" and take the publishers to another page. We media publishers are smart, we're better at retention when scanning a page than joe consumer.

What's your brand?

You've got two competing brands on the page: the "scouta" text and the whirly play button, which is really your chicklet - what should be small, subtle interface cue used before links, instead of player play buttons, etc. Which do you need the user to really recall? I'd suggest it's the Scouta logo.

Not all ratings are equal

Are you sure you want to collect user ratings on content right from the homepage with no prior Learn More or new user registation? Before they've really invested in the idea that rating things well delivers good recommendations? Having worked on content recommendation products before, not all user ratings are equal. I'd expect these ratings would be next to useless in this context, and aren't likely to give the user a positive result - they're going to expect a perfect recommendation after the first rating click, or click both of them to see what happens, or worse.

When it doesn't work as they expected (because you haven't yet told them what to expect) their simple little mind will come to the end of their tiny little attention span, they'll click off your homepage and whatever you paid the SEO to get them will be wasted.

CaPiTaLiSaTiOn!

I'm Not A Big Fan Of Capitalising Words That Aren't Actually Proper Nouns ;-) When The Whole Page Uses Them It Doesn't Focus The Eye, Instead It Decreases Readability Significantly.

25% OFF! Oh wait, it's free...

Love rosettes for highlighting 'special deal' info, though they tend to get ignored by users not interested in clicking on advertising links. They're not very 'with it' anymore. If you must use one, consider one with fewer points. If you're not wedded to a rosette but still want visual impact, nothing says "Ideal for iPod, iPhone and AppleTV owners" better than a pic of the products all nicely arranged together with some dramatic lighting and a zushy background.

Black on orange isn't kind on eyes, and, uhh... were you happy with that font?

Love the promise of personalised content recommendations, keen to see how the new site looks when it goes live! Hope that helps!

ingbank not up there for thinking

2008-02-18T16:01:00.001+11:00

ingbank not up there for thinking
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Clearly the missing letters in "...ingbank.com.au" are not "think".

They have yet to discover that URLs can be redirected - scary! Wonder how hard it would be to take my line of credit elsewhere?...

too many windows, too many tabs

2008-02-18T11:19:00.001+11:00

too many windows, too many tabs
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

whatever this is, it isn't productivity.

When worlds collide

2008-02-18T08:35:00.002+11:00

When worlds collide
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I just used Twixtr to update Twitter and Facebook. But I also have Twitter set to update Facebook. So then Twitter also updates Facebook - ick.

Thank Jebus Facebook doesn't then update Twitter. Then Twitter would update Facebook, then... aaahhh! Infinite status update loop!

note: this is not an actual treasure map

2008-02-17T15:50:00.001+11:00

note: this is not an actual treasure map
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

seen in kid's toy shop, on a toy treasure map. just in case long john silver and bluebeard walk into a toy store, buy a copy of the map, and then sue the manufacturer for lack of booty.

thanks, legal profession! you're worth the hundreds of dubloons an hour we're paying you!

Apple Australia finally adds photo printing!

2008-02-08T17:50:00.001+11:00

Apple Australia finally adds photo printing!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

OMG! After many years of bemoaning lack of iPhoto photo book service from Apple Australia, they've finally got it going! What does this mean for the local startups who've been benefiting from Apple's absence in this market, like Momento.com.au?

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch

Updated: Wow, you're 'the' Dave Morin?

2008-02-06T11:08:00.001+11:00

Wow, you're 'the' Dave Morin?
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

[Updated: see the end of this post for the latest news on Dave]

I shouldn't judge someone by how they blog, but hey, everyone else does...

I saw a reference to Dave Morin on Valleywag today and thought, "hey, Facebook evangelist? i should look him up, maybe I can learn a few tricks from such a prominent evangelist."

Well, maybe it's just me, but I've never been a big fan of people who put a big photo of themselves in the masthead of their blog (unless they're, like, Madonna, or sumfink.) It smacks of hubris.

But that ain't nothing; hubris gets its big, hob-nailed boots on and gives you a kickin' when it sees you referring to yourself in the third person when you announce a job change in your personal blog. And date and location-ise the intro sentence so it reads like a press release? Puh-sleaze, not even Madonna does that anymore.

"SAN FRANCISCO, California — November 6, 2006 — Dave Morin today announced that he has joined Facebook as Senior Platform Manager, leaving his post of ..."

...ack, somebody tell me it's all tongue-in-cheek and I've mis-read his self-satirizing style. Please!

UPDATE: I'm always amazed by the power of the interweb to connect people across thousands of miles of ocean and fibre optic cable. Dave Morin emailed me only a few days after this post. Turns out it was all tongue-in-cheek after all, and I have mis-read his self-satirizing style. Via email he was perfectly nice, absolutely not in love with himself, and has offered to meet up with me for a coffee when next I'm in town. I've suggested he might want to make the satirical intent of his blog and his announcement a little more obvious, for those of us not clever enough to get the point. Good job, Dave.

Yes We Can - Barack Obama set to music

2008-02-05T07:11:00.001+11:00

I wish there had been a candidate in the Australian federal election who had been as inspiring as this! But America was ever a nation of bigger dreams, wider canvasses, and of late, greater disappointments.

We want change too, Mr Obama. Bring it on!

M/20 seeks F/12 for bad time

2008-02-02T10:10:00.001+11:00

Uh-oh, i think this may be the first reported case of a sex crime arising from use of a mobile social network product, in this case mocospace:

"A 20-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly having sexual contact with a 12-year-old girl, officials said..." from CBS4 Denver.

It's not good for Mocospace and not good for the mobile social network industry in general for this to happen. But it's somewhat inevitable when even a casual browse on Mocospace makes it pretty clear that the popular female users on the network are not popular for their writing skills.

Say goodbye to the value of your social graph

2008-02-02T09:24:00.000+11:00

Google's released a new API that allows developers to harvest the 'social graph' - the relationships between people on the web - the links labelled 'friend', 'colleague', 'mother', between our individual online identities.

At the moment, there is no single social graph for the interweb. Instead, separate proprietary graphs exist on each of the major portals (Yahoo!, etc) and also on the major social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, etc.). To a large extent, the value of these companies is tied up with the size of users graphed, the number of connections in those graphs, and the rate of growth in users and connections.

Because of the risks vs benefits involved, it seems unlikely that Google will be able to persuade players with high-value social graphs to open their data to the API very soon. Any player with a high-value social network risks contributing more value to its competitors than it receives by opening to the API. Google might be able to gain enough leverage to bring a majority in eventually.

If the industry adopts an open API for social graphing then it must also offer better tools to allow users to explicitly control what relationships are exposed, to whom, and to what level of detail. While the social graphs remain closed and proprietary the cost of unplanned exposure is still pretty low (though I continue to have a problem with the way LinkedIn exposes which other profiles have been viewed by the people who've been looking at my profile.) But if we move towards one shared social graph, it's going to be essential that you own and control it.

But the bigger problem for me is Google's habit of taking something of value (online storage, premium web-based email, calendaring, office suites and now social graphs) and making it free. Google can afford to do that while all its free services are supported and more by search ad revenue. But it really hurts the other companies in the same space. And one day, someone newer, faster and smarter will slip the search biz out from under Google the way it was slipped out from under Yahoo!.

MSFT & YHOO: can the snake swallow the elephant?

2008-02-02T04:41:00.000+11:00

Microsoft swallowing Yahoo! is either going to be fast and ugly, or slow and ineffective.

Good friend Goonker said it best. Referring to Steve Ballmer's quote that he feels "putting these things (Microsoft and Yahoo!) together with a great integration should be quite an accelerant to progress." Goonker says, "accelerant as in: flame out quickly?"

I appreciate that Microsoft recognises it needs to take drastic action if it's to get back into the game, interweb-wise.

Today's offer is a big premium on the market price on the previous day's close and is sure to be higher than any price Microsoft may have taken to the table with Yahoo! in the past.

According to Comscore, Google has 77% of the search market globally, with Yahoo! only 16% and MSN a piffling 3.7%. So an acquisition might garner Microsoft a total of less than 20% assuming no overlap. I don't know the revenue share but I'm guessing it's in-line with that. Ballmer suggests it could save the two companies $1B a year, but I'd bet it would be costing $100m a year over five years to smash the two vastly different companies together.

Microsoft's web technologies are as unrelated to Yahoo!'s as the Dark and Light sides of the Force. Before you even begin your Comp. Sci. degree you've already made a decision to join one camp or the other. There's no love lost between the two sides, and very few developers jump from one camp to the other mid-career.

Perl, PHP and Ruby developers carry PowerBooks with startup stickers on them, ride a bicycle and wear a tee and jeans. They are too skinny. They are more likely to have an iPod earbud in their ear than a phone. Microsoft developers wear chinos and a business shirt or collared tee, carry a black generic laptop identical to their coworkers. They are a little overweight, but only because they have a good wife at home who loves to cook. They have a full schedule of meetings and tasks always with them in their Exchange-connected phone, which they carry in a leather holster on their belt, with a blinking-blue Bluetooth headset always jammed in their ear. They think the Zune is "kinda cool" but like a quiet working environment (Frank, I love you anyway man).

So the only way to borg Yahoo!s products and get them running an all-Microsoft backend would be across the vacant desks of the various Yahoo! development teams, vacant because you'd either fired them or they'd beaten you to it and taken a job elsewhere. The number of senior developers with prior experience migrating global-grade FreeBSD/Apache/Perl platforms to .NET would be approaching zero. I can't see Flickr running on .NET, ever.

Yet Microsoft can hardly continue recommending its web development products to the market while running its own consumer internet business on competing products.

Working for a Bay Area startup at the moment, and it's a tough market to be hiring developers, so a flood of ex-Yahoo! developers into the market would be good news for us and the other Bay Area startups. Most of Yahoo!'s huge developerbase is here in Sunnyvale and that big silo of developers will just fall over and empty out. That should bring hiring costs and avg.-time-to-hire way down.

Good point from good friend Luke: if the deal goes through it tightens the market for startups hoping to be acquired, leaving only Microhoo and Google as the big startup-buyers in town. Could we see Cisco step forward as a new force in consumer web acquisitions? Or HP, Intel or Apple? Each owns some consumer-facing web platforms already, each has a hardware business that could benefit from consumer lock-in via a compelling web product.

If I still held Yahoo! shares, I'd take the money. If I still held Microsoft shares, I wouldn't be happy about a deal happening.

Because, the way I see it, Microsoft absorbing Yahoo! is either going to be fast and ugly, or slow and ineffective.

i join dopplr, earth yet to move

2008-01-31T07:48:00.003+11:00

DOPPLR: alan jones's trips
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Ok, now i have a dopplr profile. Shame i did all my big interesting travelling *last* year. Not sure how sticky dopplr's really going to be, despite the hype.

I know us hip web2sters are always on planes, but always to the same places. Do i really want to know next time nic cubrilovic is on SYD-SFO?

And i think the regular joes and josephines out there in customerville don't travel so much that they need online reminders of when they're friends are leaving and returning.

It could be that I don't get it. It's rare, but it has happened before.

This is not about me.

2008-01-30T19:51:00.000+11:00

A new post from Nic Hodges helped coalesce some of my recent thinking about social messaging and social networks. Nic talks about how two-way, conversational media is now becoming as involving and entertaining as, say, '60 Minutes'. And a lot more entertaining than 'Girls of the Playboy Mansion.' No, really.

Why is this so? How can smileys out-engage boobies?

The simple answer is that rediscovering that real people’s real lives can be entertaining, informative and engaging too.

But the complex-erer answer that I don't yet have any evidence beyond a strong gut feel is that documenting the events in your life - and how that changes you - is an activity that doesn’t only gain you an audience, it also helps you define and refine who you have been, are currently, and are becoming.

Defining who you were/are/will be is as compelling as it gets.

Girls of the Playboy Mansion: come on, seriously, you can't tell me this is entertainment...

Your identity isn’t just who you are now. It’s a vector, or a series of curves perhaps. It starts in the past, charting your passage through the events and ideas you’ve experienced and your reaction to those events and ideas.

That vector passes through the present, and that’s what we see of someone and usually think of identity. But the present is only the thinnest possible cross-section of your identity and in isolation gives only the slightest suggestion of who you will become as you continue on into the future.

I think social messaging and social networking is so fundamentally engaging because it gives us an opportunity to capture key moments of our identity as we move forward in time, leaving a documented history behind us, interwoven with the events, ideas, and people we’ve been introduced to along the way, and leaving evidence of how we’ve been influenced by them.

My prediction: browsing real people’s lives and documenting our own for others to browse will be the new entertainment hit for the 2020s. Partly because network television quality can sink no lower, partly because social messaging and social networking is just plain fun.

But mostly because, way down deep inside, we're learning about ourselves.

And nobody's more interesting than me. Or you. Unless you happen to be me.

Twitter: is your social messaging as private as you think?

2008-01-30T12:52:00.000+11:00

Disclaimer: I work for bluepulse, one of the two companies featured in this post. Some features of bluepulse compete with Twitter, the other product featured in this post.

When you're social networking, ask yourself:

Do I care if people outside my friends list can see what I've posted?
Do I need to be able to undo/delete previous messages if I want to retract or correct what I've said?

Shana Albert on Social Desire has a great blog post on why she's become a passionate convert to Twitter. I like using Twitter too, but I'm concerned about an apparently casual attitude towards privacy amongst many social messaging products, and Twitter's the worst culprit I've seen so far. It might not seem like it at first, but your privacy is very important when you're social messaging.

But first, what's Twitter? It's another social messaging tool, similar to bluepulse in some ways (reminder disclaimer: I work for bluepulse). It lets you maintain a list of friends, and keep those friends updated on what you're doing, and because you're able to SMS your updates to Twitter, you have to limit the length of your messages to 140 characters or less.

Like many users, Shana likes Twitter's 140 character limit on messages because it forces her to be economical - it's the haiku of social messaging. But Twitter users often wax lyrical anyway, stringing together a series of messages to make a point, or pasting in an URL pointing to a blog post.

One of the attractions of reading Twitter posts is the creativity other users employ to express something complex, newsworthy or funny in 140 characters or less. But personally, I'd rather spend the time it takes me to cut my message down to <140 characters doing something else... like, getting on with my life. So I usually don't send any Twitter messages from my mobile, for instance, because I just can't get my life out in less than 60 seconds when I'm limited to 140 characters. Twitter also works on your phone's browser, like bluepulse; there's even a specific mobile version and many third-party mobile clients for Twitter, but the 140 character limit remains. Bah!

Your privacy is an illusion

Sadly, there's something I like even less than having to compose mobile haiku: privacy issues. Twitter lets anyone search for new people by keyword and then subscribe to their updates, without the author's permission. As the author you get a notification if someone has chosen to follow your updates, but the default privacy options allow anyone to follow your updates. Go to Twitter's settings and there is an option to restrict updates to people you approve of, but it's not the default. I'm sure there are many Twitter users who haven't even paused to consider how this might affect them now and in the future.

Scary ex-boyfriend that won't go away? He can follow your updates on Twitter. Would like to discuss work-related issues with colleagues? Don't, because competitors can follow your every word.

Twitter even publishes a public RSS feed of everyone's updates. You could subscribe to that in your feed-reader and track anybody without their knowledge or use Google's domain-specific search to track mentions of a company, product or person in the twittersphere. Whoa!

Even with the security setting turned on, it seems like everything you've published previously remains in the RSS feed. No undo or delete? Double whoa! Steve Rubel, prominent pro blogger, had to publish a retraction on his blog after making a comment on Twitter that he later regretted and was unable to delete or undo. Steve calls for a mandatory undo/delete button on all social messaging, and he's right.

Don't get me wrong; some people love hanging it all out there for the world to see, and frankly, as long as there's a delete button somewhere or a preference I can change later, I'm usually hanging my life right out there with the other extroverts. But I'm betting that most Twitter users aren't as extroverted as me, and don't even realise how public and irretrievable their twitter stream is. Doh!

Bluepulse has a more sophisticated understanding of the balance between a user's need for privacy and extroversion.

Bluepulse associates each new user with a mobile phone number and requires that you verify via that mobile. Unless you want to send updates via SMS, anyone can create a Twitter ID without any verification.
If I ask you to add me as a friend on bluepulse, you can see my profile to help you decide whether I'm the sort of person you want to be friends with. But it doesn't go both ways - because I'm not yet a friend of yours, bluepulse won't let me see your profile unless you accept me. Twitter lets me see the profile and updates for anybody who hasn't thought to make their updates private in their Twitter settings.
Bluepulse doesn't publish your updates as an RSS feed available to anyone. Personally, I like that Twitter publishes my updates as an RSS feed, but I think that option should be turned off by default.
Bluepulse allows you to delete your messages, and soon, will allow you to delete the two previous 'pulses' (bluepulse for 'status') displayed on your page, for good measure.

Is online community hot, or what?

2008-01-25T13:06:00.001+11:00

community is hot, or what?
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Late last year, Mick Liubinskas was the only other person I knew working as an online community manager (and that's really only half his job.)

It's probably just because my new job title at bluepulse.com is "community manager" and LinkedIn is showing new roles that include those keywords in the title.

But I do feel there's a new growth area in helping companies communicate and connect with their audience and customers; using not just Facebook and Myspace but social networks of all kinds, such as bluepulse, twitter, flickr, blogs, social tagging sites like de.licio.us, video and music.

There are community managers who write blog posts and FAQs, community managers who help herd disparate clouds of users into people with similar interests, and with the growth of Web 2.0 open platforms, community managers who work with developers to help them build cool apps and widgets on those platforms.

Because it's still really in its infancy, there are very few tools available, and those we do use are being repurposed from their original intent.

For instance, yesterday I experimented with adding a statscounter.com javascript snippet to a Facebook Page, and blow me down: it worked. So now I have a way to track usage of bluepulse's Facebook page that is considerably more informative than the lame reporting Facebook offers.

World Nomads - great online travel insurance

2008-01-23T11:17:00.001+11:00

World Nomads - great online travel insurance
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Online insurance isn't a market that has many great case studies, but worldnomads.com has been a great user experience for me so far.

Light, fast and simple initial insurance cover in a clean, uncluttered interface that takes a lot of the stress out of spending money on something you may never use.

I set myself up with a user account and covered my current trip to the US while I waited for my taxi to the airport and still had plenty of time to search for my US power plug adaptors when I was done.

A week prior to my cover expiring, worldnomads is back in touch via email to remind me to extend my cover, which I need to do.

Nice!

Luke with Tina's Kindle

2008-01-23T09:54:00.001+11:00

Luke with Tina's Kindle
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I got to play with an Amazon Kindle today for a few minutes at lunch. I could talk about it for hours but only have the remainder of my lunch break. So here's my top line:

The case design is seriously retro early '80s grey plastic, and this is nothing you're ever going to be able to slip into your pocket.

The screen technology is impressive. Really, really sharp and paper-like.

Nothing book-like about the interface. In fact, nothing familiar at all about the interface. Two big clunky Next and Previous buttons, on the left hand side of the Kindle when I would have expected them on the right. A strangle scroller on the right that displays where you are in a document with what I can only describe for now as "freaky little animated mirrors" (i need to read up more about what they actually are and how they work, but it looks for all the world like little bits of mirror off an old Glomesh purse jiggling around.

A couple of days of reading off a single recharge, and if you turn off the EVDO card you can read all week on a single (2hr) charge.

All your bookmark and note data and all your books/newspapers all backed up and saved on Amazon in case you take the Kindle in the bath.

But I still can't get past the largeness and the totally 1980s IBM PC plastic case. For every geek credpoint I earned pulling one of these out in a coffeeshop, I'd lose 10 sex appeal points. And I have too few of those to go risking any just to read a book!

Way too many timezone settings in my life

2008-01-23T06:14:00.001+11:00

Way too many timezone settings in my life
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Praise Jobs I have an iPhone now so I have one fewer gadget in my bag when travelling, but still, I'm sick of changing timezones on different devices and applications.

I live a moderately-wired life: my wife and I share iCal calendars, I refer to my schedule on my iPhone and Mac during the day, and I work at bluepulse.com where we use Google Calendar to manage office schedules.

Is it too much to ask OpenID and the online identity industry to include 'current time zone' in the data they store on my behalf? I foresee a future in which we need only tell one device or service that they've changed timezone, and all their devices and services are updated.

Meanwhile, I just need to forget to change timezones on one device or service and events start appearing at the wrong times in one or more places. If I don't notice, and then sync the devices again, it's way too easy to end up with two copies of each event, and then it takes a lot of searching and deleting - event-by-event - to bring things back to an even keel.

Imagine telling bluepulse or <twitter that you're now on Pacific Time and knowing that your phone, calendar app and web service will be updated automagically. It's not utopia, but it's in the same timezone.

Is linkedin.com doing the right thing?

2008-01-22T09:06:00.001+11:00

Is linkedin.com doing the right thing?
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I only have to say "Facebook Beacon" and you remember that it's good practice to allow your users to opt-in before disclosing any new personal information to other users or visitors, right?

So why has LinkedIn sprouted this new module that displays other profiles viewed by people who've viewed my profile? It's not OK by me, not OK by the viewers, and probably not OK by the other people whose profiles are listed here.

I didn't opt-in to displaying this information, and what's worse, I can't find anywhere I can disable this module in my LinkedIn account settings.

Bad form, and sub-par, LinkedIn!

i heart Doozla - Plasq's new kids drawing tool

2008-01-18T01:55:00.001+11:00

i_heart_doozla
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

But while I heart it, i'd like to see:

- less abstract backgrounds to draw on
- export in something other than .doozla (like maybe .jpg?)
- more fonts and dragging font resizing
- more stamps and a spraycan

All and more probably in the paid version, or coming in version 1.5.

The Plasq.com crew sure know how to inject sweetness and whimsy into an app.

Daily Facebook Spam: grammar app

2008-01-16T11:00:00.001+11:00

Daily Facebook Spam: grammar app
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

This little sh*t of an app offers to test your grammar but then won't let you see the results of your test unless you invite at least 20 friends to install it first.

Yeah, that's an app that'll gain traction... like a wet bar of soap...

consider me outta here!

2008-01-14T23:00:00.001+11:00

consider me outta here!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Well, at the end of the week, anyway. Working @ bluepulse.com in San Mateo for a few weeks from 20 January. I lose my sacred Australia Day long weekend, but gain mad skillzd team in mobile social networking. W00t!

iCal's skinny, unresizable detailed info window blows

2008-01-14T20:40:00.001+11:00

iCal's skinny, unresizable detailed info window blows
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Where's the little drag panel bottom right so i can inject some readability into this thing? And how come if the date is in the late evening, the 'Save' and 'Edit' buttons are obscured by my dock? And for that matter, why is there an Edit button at all? Why can't I just click on the fields to edit them?

Facebook spam #2: from Zoosk

2008-01-14T17:40:00.001+11:00

Facebook spam from Zoosk
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

This poor friend's Facebook news feed has been overwhelmed by notification messages from another Facebook spam app, a dating site, zoosk.com.

Facebook could easily control this by limiting the number of times in a period that any one third-party app can add stuff to your mini-feed, but it appears they haven't/won't.

Again, a case of not caring enough about the user experience for a business valued entirely on the number of users x the amount of time they spend on the platform.

Dog Facebook spam

2008-01-14T17:38:00.001+11:00

Dog Facebook spam
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Somehow, the psychology of Facebook convinced even some of my smartest friends to forward this picture of a dog to all their Facebook friends.

Super Wall, the FB app mechanism used, recently made a big change: sending notifications to all of your friends any time you receive anything from one of your friends, even if that's not a friend you have in common.

That increased the amount of Super Wall notifications I was seeing on my profile page, so I removed Super Wall from my Facebook page - I don't care that you received a photo or a message from a friend of yours - I care about friends of mine, not yours.

Unfortunately, while my Facebook friends still have Super Wall included on their own pages, I still get the notifications that they've sent something from their own Super Wall.

So when one clever person sent this cute-ish photo of a dog with the message "forward this and see what happens" a great many of my friends forwarded it to see what happened. I didn't forward it, not being a user of Super Wall anymore, but I was able to see what happened.

Nothing happened.

Not unless you count a few laughs for the original sender as he saw his dog photo spread massively thru the Facebook-o-sphere.

Oh, there was the slight disappointment for all the Facebook users who found out they'd been fooled, of course.

Minor irritation multiplied by a gazillion users should matter to Facebook, but doesn't appear to... yet.

Many more of these social engineering exercises and Facebook could see a decline in time-on-network as people get peeved and stop coming back.

I've already spoken to many people who are getting annoyed by spam from Facebook apps, advertisements in newsfeeds not targeted at them that they can't turn off, and friends who never think of anything intelligent to say on a platform that isn't intelligent enough to help them with it.

Only growing pains, but they need to be addressed soon...

TiVo Australia starts screening for beta testers

2008-01-11T01:34:00.001+11:00

TiVo Field Trial Sign Up (Australia)
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

ooh! ooh! pick me! pick me!

globalPandora.com - the box is open

2008-01-11T00:33:00.001+11:00

globalPandora.com - the box is open
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

holy cow, someone's found a quick and simple way to make pandora work from outside the US. not really a very nice thing to do to the lovely people at pandora though :-( it's not their fault the music industry are such assholes.

Thanks to Toria for the tip!

Japan readies itself for alien invasion, critics ask, what about giant radioactive dinosaurs?

2008-01-09T15:38:00.001+11:00

I'm totally with Japanese defence chief Ishiba on the need to consider the risks of alien saucers landing in Japan and whether or not they'd be hostile. He's only doing his job, just as any Iowa corn farmer's concerned when a normally quiet dog starts barking at night. "It's M. Night Shaylaman, Martha, fetch my shotgun!"

But the real issue here is the Japanese Defence Dept's utter lack of plans for an attack on the city of Tokyo by a giant radioactive dinosaur, flying squid or massive mutant moth!

They can't keep leaving it to the scientists to try and communicate with the massive creatures!

Thousands of hapless Japanese defence personnel will lose their lives to the heat rays! Skyscrapers will be bitten, bridges stomped on and powerlines cut!

Act now, Ishiba-san, before you finish watching the grainy black-and-white video tape of the little girl in the well! Ahhhh!!!!!!

clipped from news.yahoo.com

Japan's defence minister braces for aliens

TOKYO (AFP) -
As Japan takes a more active role in military affairs, the defence minister has more on his mind than just threats here on Earth.

"There are no grounds for us to deny that there are unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and some life-form that controls them," Ishiba told reporters, saying it was his personal view and not that of the defence ministry.

"If they descended, saying 'People of the Earth, let's make friends,' it would not be considered an urgent, unjust attack on our country," Ishiba said.

"Personally, I absolutely believe they exist," Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said on Tuesday.

BBC's Inside Dot Com: so not inside!

2008-01-08T14:12:00.000+11:00

Initially I was excited to hear that The Beeb was running a documentary series, Inside Dot Com, following the trials and tribs of a few early-stage interweb startups.

But judging by the clips on YouTube, it stinks. It could only seem "inside" to someone standing very far outside, or perhaps someone standing inside but experiencing it all for the first time, from a video-editor's visitor's chair, like a documentary producer who's previous body of work was on antique furniture or wildlife documentaries.

LOL: this crowd call in an "advertising agency" to tell them what consumers "think of the site's design". Like almost every time I've seen an ad agency give feedback on a website, the conclusions are all about the site's graphic design - it's brand feedback, not its user experience. A branding study is valid, but you should be conducting that before you buy a domain name and design a brand, and you should never, ever confuse a brand focus group study with a usability study.

Somehow, advertising agencies got away with pitching TVCs as storyboards and radio ads as scripts for so many years that they think it's OK to test websites basically the same way. It is so not.

Classic moment: the ad agency guy presenting the focus group results says, "and my son didn't even like it" as if that's the killer blow. Any time I hear "I/my kids/my wife didn't like it" I know it's time to stop paying attention and wind-up the meeting. That's a big, pulsating warning sign above your head that says, "I do not understand that this should be about something deeper than initial reactions to colours, shapes and styles. And I do not understand that this is about a target audience, of which I am not a member. Neither is my brat emo child, who hates me enough to veto all of my work."

Disagree? Your honour, I call Larry and Sergey as my first witnesses. They certainly didn't waste any time getting an ad agency to show a few A3 printouts of the Google homepage to 20 people prepared to spend an hour in a small room for $50 and a few sandwiches. Nobody in that room would have said, "Oooh, I like 'google' as a name. When I think of search I immediately think of the word 'google'." Nobody would have said, "I think showing each letter in a different colour is a great idea. And you can't have too much plain black text on a white webpage, if you ask me!"

This one isn't even an interweb startup - it's a shop with a website - not even remotely the same thing. If The Beeb can't appreciate the difference, I'm afraid watching the series may be a waste of time.

Final insult to our intelligence: the Beeb won't allow YouTube users to embed these videos on their own pages (or I would have posted them here instead of linking them.) They're not full eps, they're just highlights. Ack!

Another example of the old media not grokking the new. Did we need another?

Beer-o-tronic

2008-01-02T22:30:00.001+11:00

Technology is truly man's best friend when it can pour the perfect beer. Again and again and again...

Blogger adds comment-following

2008-01-02T14:25:00.001+11:00

Blogger adds comment-following
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

...and BAM, with just one new checkbox, Google starts disintermediating comment-based networks such as Co.Comment.com. Most comment-based networks have a community though - Google's just fwding subsequent comments to your email address. How long before they add the community end so you can check and track all your comments in one place?

Getting light outside: Twittories #1

2007-12-19T15:33:00.001+11:00

I'm one of the contributors to the first output of Twittories, a collaborative fiction project using www.twitter.com as the collaboration engine by Cameron Reilly the Elvis-like King of Podcasts.

It's been an interesting learning experience. It's no small feat; picking up someone else's narrative thread wherever it's been been dropped at the one hundred and fortieth character, keeping some kind of story line going, and leaving the next collaborator an interesting starting point, all in the text length limits of Twitter.

Twittory #2 is still open for a few more collaborators. Get in there!

clipped from twittories.wikispaces.com

"I have this rule," she said, colder than the dark side of the moon. "We only talk using public channels from now on."

pseudodictionary accepted my new word: marvin

2007-12-12T21:09:00.001+11:00

pseudodictionary accepted my new word, w00t
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

kk, not a completely new word in the conventional sense of "new", more in the marketing sense of "new", meaning "revised, different, tweaked" etc.

A "marvin" is my new word for someone with the brain of a planet driven to depression by being condemned to forever answer stupid questions from people with little or no brain. From the character of the same name in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Fortunately, they're extremely rare. I'm definitely not one myself.

Merry Christmas from the sweatshop!

2007-12-12T16:54:00.000+11:00

At last, an xmas ecard I'm actually keen to send to my friends. The copy reads:

"Here's a piece of festive charm, a little christmas bear

He has a little santa hat and santa boots to wear

His little christmas present has been sewn on to his paws

In a sweatshop in Manila where they lock the fire-doors"

Crikey! It's Christmas!

Display ad for maps.google.com.au

2007-12-12T13:48:00.001+11:00

display ad for maps.google.com.au
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

I knew they were serious about eating Sensis' lunch, and I'd seen Google AdWords house ads before, but i didn't know Google was doing display advertising now for their products.

This little flash anim was advertising restaurant reviews. Came across it in an Australian motoring blog.

Watch out yellowpages.com.au, here come the geeks...

[thinks: lolz, picture armies of sensis drones rushing to prepare themselves for an invasion by the Greeks. "no, i said 'geeks' you idiots!"]

live-documents.com announces: automatic truth resolution!

2007-12-06T00:42:00.001+11:00

live-documents.com announces: automatic truth resolution!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

How has this remained so quiet for so long? Sabeer Bhatia's new startup office suite isn't just going to sync up your online and offline docs, oh no.

It's going to create "...a single version of the truth"!

Wow, I can't wait to try that on a few internal reports I receive each week at the office. And on my Nielsen vs HBX traffic stats. And on my mate's fishing stories. And on the occasional International War Crimes Tribunal hearing...

Climate change solution: stop measuring it!

2007-12-05T17:22:00.001+11:00

Oh, those whacky physicists! Who can really expect to entirely understand what they're on about most of the time? Perhaps we should satisfy ourselves with establishing what variety of psylocibin they've been taking.

But if I'm getting this New Scientist story even half right, then one pair of Heisenbergian blackboard-scribblers is suggesting we're affecting the state of the universe by observing it.

Just like the ole 'cat in the box uncertainty principle' (which for me always seemed like much more fun than setting the cat's tail on fire the way I did when I was a kid, and much more explainable to mum as 'a physics experiment mum, honest!')

So taking this nonsense and applying it to some problems more pressing than the ultimate demise of the universe, can we simply solve the climate change crisis by not measuring it any more?

Is the solution to the AIDS epidemic just to stop counting the dying people?

Is the solution to my personal financial situation just to shove all my bills in the bottom drawer without reading them?

...no, wait, I already know the answer to that...

clipped from www.newscientist.com

Have we hastened the demise of the universe by looking at it? That's the startling question posed by a pair of physicists, who suggest that we may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, which is thought to be speeding up cosmic expansion.

The Bubble 2.0

2007-12-05T08:37:00.001+11:00

This video will be huge. "Bubble 2.0" describes the current Web 2.0 situation precisely and with much humour. Can't wait to watch it on the AppleTV at home ;-)

The song's a remake of "We didn't start the fire" from Billy Joel's album 'Storm Front' released in 1989. I wonder what percentage of the 20-something Bubble 2.0 kidz had never heard the original tune before? lolz.

Google adds a new Australian public holiday!

2007-12-04T11:23:00.001+11:00

Google adds a new Australian public holiday!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Hooray for Google: they've announced a new Australian public holiday on the 27th! Let's call it Google Day.

Oh wait, it doesn't officially exist...

What's more important feature in a social messenger?
	All my friends are on there already
	Works great on my mobile phone
	Quick to update my status
	Publishes RSS feed of my stuff
	Good privacy and spam controls

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