From the 500 hats blog comes a nice summation that matches many of my feelings with regards to how programs are pitched, created and go to 2 cups (He has a much better line but I'll not steal it totally out of context.)  He brings up  login friction, e.g.,  how easy it is to actually use the service and creating infrequent use apps can cause problems by itself.

So listen up I'll share a little secret with you -- there is one very simple way to avoid forgotten passwords.Basically, it's this:

Make a Frequent-Use Product.
That's it, you say?

Yeah, that's it Sherlock.Make a brain-dead simple, frequent-use product.If users login a lot, then they don't forget their passwords

 While my favourite inner-Austrian applauds lines such as

Newsflash folks: The Internet does NOT want to be FREE... It wants to GET PAID on Fucking Friday, just like everybody else on the damn planet.

It's kind of sad that this has to be restated that making a program that needs to be useful is another. 

        

We’ve had a year and a half of strong netbook sales yet the majority of sites make no concessions to accommodate the people on them.While it’s particularly stupid for stores to shoo away visitors I’m perplexed that we’ll happily support IE6 but make few,if any, concessions those with a case of vertical screen interuptus.

Scroll wheel on desktop is a finger puzzle on netbooks that support it,banners that often leave your most important items below the fold, workflows that DON’T and just a complete lack of attention to the expected usage of the products make the netbooks look bad in the same way that most sites shrunk for mobile phones do.

 

Netbook sales 2009

        

There should be a show were people that fight computer crime use guns, baseball bats and other implements of destruction on the detritus that try to scam the populace.

I’m selling a car,trying to,presently on Craigslist which leads to the kind of interactions with people I’d rather not have. People that are possibly worse to deal with than car sales types.

Apart from the usual people that want to buy the car for $1000 less than posted without even looking it over, those that want to come tell you why it’s crap and that they don’t like the brand, those that want to buy it for a college student and expect a six year old car to carry the kind of guarantee that a new one would etc  and  the most interesting?  A ,can I politely say, less than  mentally capable person that doesn’t –even- have a driving license showing up at the door at 2130 ( 9 30  at night for those of you that can’t add twelve) unannounced that we didn’t give the address out to which is kind of spooky. Not a fan of this guy to say the least.

I still have the car and some information on a new scheme/scam.  Person mails me, asks some info and to arrange to see car.I send it. They then say oh prior to me coming out can I get some idea of the auto insurance via this site.  Auto insurance tips dot com,but the link went to tamiesunshine144 .blogspot . com and then redirected with the affiliate ID to the insurance site.  E.G., trolling for affiliate commissions. 

CL is turning in Ebay and it’s usefulness is only possible when using a third party to search it when you are looking for something specific though as a means of exposing yourself to jerks it’s first class.

        

Over the last couple of months I've been playing with many an aggregation tool that aims to let you make personal dams in the torrent that's laughingly referred to as a life-stream.

I've fallen in the Atlantic,in large rivers and streams in the past and have to say that one is certainly not manageable without assistance.Sure you get the life jacket that keeps your head above water as it flows around you but you can't actually do much but sit back till someone pulls you out. 

To help pull me out from my info addiction the nice people at  lifeio.com streamy and threadsy.com have offerings which seek to provide a nice paddle with which to beat back the creek of crap we're exposed to daily.

The one that apparently does the least, on the surface,is my current favorite.
Threadsy is in the lead with it being a constant presence on one monitor while I just dip into the other two. It's interesting as Threadsy started out doing less than the other two offering but it does it so well.It also solves a very real problem that the mainstream users haven't encountered yet, they probably won't encounter it till more of them actually use FB and Twitter in their daily lives.   

Threadsy , pardon the sewing puns, seamlessly brings together the contents of tweets, Facebook updates and your mail account. I don't have to chase many windows around to see, reply to tweets, post status updates, see incoming mail.   Nothing revolutionary that alt - tab or the amazing Firefox extension Foxtab couldn't do for you but it's the thread part  of the name that makes this so useful.

Most of the interesting stuff in twitter are links to images, videos or pages that obviously make no sense to a human when a URL shortener is used, no mind , i get a preview of each item, can play video in place,see the image, reply to or make a comment on the tweet/ update and go about my day without closing out a pile of windows each time curiosity gets the better of me,about 10-12 seconds.

When I open up a mail, tweet or update the author panel to the side shows me the services they use, their latest posts, tweets, images. Single click. Yum!

Plus it has Meebo chat built in accounting for just about any messenger service you'd care to use.  Aggregating the streams is one of those  emergent/ obvious things ( has to be I thought of the same damn thing way back) but execution is everything and so far these software tailors have provided this Emperor* with an impressive suit of  new clothes

*Much in the same way Joshua Norton was

        

This is definitely my otter of the day maybe even the month.

Wow.

        

The etymology of the word expert is strangely prescient when applied to the world of social media. It’s older than the advent of recording, microphones and video cameras. Yet I get the feeling that most of the experts are really more old school than they let on. So old that a rock, a mount and a sermon could be forthcoming.

Attempting to watch presentations live this weekend was the usual frustration of  presenter,unmiked,using a fixed microphone on the desk in the room.

The presenter's moved and talked with people off screen and to the side that we couldn’t hear and after a few minutes in each case couldn’t follow.

If that’s not bad enough the presentations were on how to use technology to advance your cause, business or ego.

There’s a reason radio studios don’t place the mike 5 – 10 feet away from the host and allow them to walk around the studio. There oughta be a law?

  There is.

And I think I’ll use the kind of technology espoused,least I think it was, to bludgeon my point a bit further.

        

This is my favorite otter shot of the day.

        

Anyone that improves sound capture, stability and control of the main function of a camera ( the amount of lighting getting in) are friends of mine, at least in the Facebook sense.  

Owle, not a Pixar sequel, is an acronym for Optical Widgets for Life Enhancement  housing that allows you to add additional lenses, an inbuilt mic,add lighting and stability to your iPhone 3gs which markedly improves real time video gathering  while remaining hand held portable. Why write what you can see

 

It’s pretty obvious  how much the viewer stands to benefit from this platform ,YEP  that’s the viewer. Local company too   : ) 

I’ve often thought of the iPhone as being a glorified controller that just happens to make phone calls.

        

Danger, Danger  Will Tmobile get away with giving two months of free service for losing all of your data?

I’m not a fan of clouds , other than flying through them, when it’s the sole method of storage. User’s of the Sidekick have found out that the distance between back up and fuck up is a little more then inconvenient. 

How would you like this mail from a service you PAY for ( It would be easy to bitch at 2.0 companies that have lost my data but realistically I got what I paid for) 

We recognize the magnitude of this inconvenience. Our primary efforts have been focused on restoring our customers’ personal content. We also are considering additional measures for those of you who have lost your content to help reinforce how valuable you are as a T-Mobile customer.

Inconvenience in the street lawyers thesaurus  sounds a little more like negligence

Own your own data or lose it and three years later win a class action suit, with 100k of your “friends” that gives you a month’s free service but only when renewing your contract for two years.

http://mashable.com/2009/10/10/t-mobile-sidekick-data/

        

Today's "O'Really moment"

Akamai Technologies is extending its content delivery network to the Apple iPhone as it introduces the Akamai HD Network, a system for streaming high-definition live and on-demand video to a variety of devices. Source.

It's been said twice in the comments over at Mashable that HD streaming to a device that cannot render HD is a bit of a non starter. It's not been said with a Douglas Adams line from Dr Who.   May as well get started then.

"The concept is simply staggering. Pointless, but staggering" 

Actually it's not that staggering. While there's a case for streaming HD it's maybe better if the end device could actually  utilize it.The  iPhone  can not and has likely been mentioned just to fulfill the buzzworthy compliant criteria of the release.

The iPhone's max output currently is 640 x480,the screen resolution of the device itself is  is 480 x 320.  HD is usually considered to be 720 or above but realistically anything under x2 ( 960) the resolution is really stretching the term and  even the mighty 3GS currently falls far short of either mark without an external screen and short of the mark with one.

Thankfully a better post than I can justify the time in writing,without need to claim lack-of-talent, appears over on the streaming media blog. with the main thrust of the argument coming from the Workflowed blog.

Akamai.....as long as it's above 700 kbps and starts as an HD source, it can be considered HD. So the house of cards of the iPhone claims in the rollout of the Akamai HD Network rests on HD 'quality' that's below that of today's average standard-definition stream

And in my unrefined language.

 Just because you start out with a HD source doesn't make that which you receive HD. If I were to hold my cell phone to a speaker for you to hear a song would you be happy with the term CD quality being used to describe it? If I have ATT iPhone it's unlikely the call would last long enough to finish this experiment. That's the second part. Even running at 640x480 with 2.5Mbps , back to those iPhone specs again, you are still not HD and are still exceeding what you could likely extract from ATT on your iPhone. 

In short Penn and Teller don't need to do a show about this claim because it's prima fascia  Bullshit!

Want HD Video on the iPhone? Akamai Is Making it Possible