Way too many timezone settings in my life

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.

Choice is more often a feeling than an action

Duncan Riley is copping some criticism on Techcrunch over his opinion that OS X Leopard's widgets are newsworthy enough to report on.

I think it's an interesting feature of Leopard, but not really significant to the widget sector (is it a sector yet? ;-) covered by TC.

Unlike most other widget platforms, OS X's widgets are hidden in a Widget app that you need to open first, reducing the number of views/user. They aren't cross-platform, and Leopard's market share is only a slice of the total OS X installed base. I don't know what share of the total OS market OS X enjoys, but it must be small. Growing faster than other OSes, likely, but from a very low base.

Microsoft, with it stated aim of being the Internet OS - and its long-developed habit of copying Apple's interfaces - may eventually copy this 'create your own widget from the browser' feature, but at MSFT's current rate of innovation, count on seeing that some time >2020, by which time it'll be Mozilla-based browsers, not IE, that will have dominant market share.

The other thing to consider is what percentage of users will make their own widget given the opportunity to do so. My experience working on personalisable homepages for portals suggests that while everyone ticks "yes" when you ask them whether they want their own personalisable homepage, when the product goes live, most of those yes-tickers will never take the time to personalise their homepage. My observations suggest that ease-of-use has no bearing on that result - it doesn't matter if it's one button on the toolbar away.

Personalisation is like fast-food - knowing that the fast-food franchise lets you choose your own fillings gets you in the door rather than the competitor's door. But 98% of us choose the off-the-shelf burger after we walk in and view the menu because it's quicker, easier, and we figure whoever decided that pickles and ketchup go together must know what they're doing. Mistakenly...

We think we want choice, but what we really want is the feeling that we could choose if we wanted to.

Clearspring: the publishing network for widgets

The business of building, distributing and tracking widgets suddenly got a whole lot easier, thanks to Clearspring.



...or at least, it would, if I had a proper widget instead of this RSS feed, which looks all wrong for me because Firefox autosenses it and wants to add it straight to Google Reader for me. Grrr...

But Clearspring shows tremendous promise because it doesn't just help you build a widget and promote it in a widget gallery, it helps you track the people who take your widget and put it on their web pages. This network thinking is very smart.

Hey, I was able to get this one working, sort of, from Springwidget via Feedburner.

Get this widget!

But Springwise doesn't include any tracking :-(