Today my friend Denya guessed that she must have sent and received 400 emails related to a project she manages for the annual SF Chronicle wine competition. “There has to be an app for that,” we thought. Sure enough, there’s a Google Chrome extension called Graph Your Inbox that lets you search for trends and visualize other data related to your inbox. It’s pretty nifty.
You know those late nights of surfing the interwebs that land you at a random page with a random link and the next thing you know you’re filling up a form or signing up for an account? I did that last week and it actually paid off.
I absent-mindedly applied to join the Pilot Program for the Chrome OS Notebook, not thinking that I would actually get one. But when I opened the door this morning to find a UPS box with my name on it, I was giddy with joy.
This device is perfect for me. I live in the cloud. I have used Google Docs since I was a senior in high school. I usually have 20 tabs open at a time. Continue reading
It’s no secret that the tech scene in Los Angeles is lacking. But know what that means for those of us in tech? An amazing opportunity to lead a wave of technology evangelism in the city of angels.
I have a personal theory –influenced partially by conversations with local entrepreneurs and people in media — that Los Angeles will become one of the next great tech hubs on the west coast. That’s one reason Publish2 is moving its headquarters here early next year.
Newspapers were the first to feel the pain. And it hit them hard. You see technologists flooding to Washington, D.C. to lead an uprising in journalistic innovation. The TV/Movie industry is on the brink of something similar. And with Hulu being based out of LA as well as Google’s YouTube offices (Santa Monica), we are already seeing the start of media innovation in LA. There’s more to come. Continue reading
A visualization of a few interesting stats from the latest PEW report (released Aug. 27) on “Older Adults and Social Media“:
The full report is at pewinternet.org.
I submitted this infographic to this month’s Longshot magazine.
This morning I stumbled upon a 37 Signals interview with GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath (hat tip to Greg Linch for linking me to the post). A few notable bits of wisdom from the interview:
You can’t always be right and nothing’s ever going to be perfect – embracing this is a huge competitive advantage. Shipping early and often lets you see how people are actually using your site and allows you to react accordingly. Does that feature you shelved even matter? Is a feature you didn’t think of sorely needed? Has anyone even hit that bug you were worried about? It’s very easy to get too close to something and get a bit myopic.
I found this particularly interesting because it goes against the general assumption I’ve made that any type of managerial groupthink is unproductive for actually executing ideas:
We don’t have managers, instead we decide as a company what features or ideas are priorities. Whoever is the most interested in a feature ends up implementing and owning it.
It might sound crazy, but it works out really well. It’s a great way to make sure people are interested in what they’re working on, and that as a company we’re working on things that matter. If it’s lame, no one’s gonna do it. We all use the site so everyone has a pretty good idea of what’s missing or not working. We’re also friends with many of our customers, which helps when deciding what is and isn’t a priority.
I think the key there is that after the initial groupthink process, an individual takes ownership of the idea/feature/goal. This is a step that tends to get lost, in my experience, after a group brainstorming session; the implementation never happens because there is not one person in charge.
This attitude is awesome.
In five years I want to love my job and love the people I work with. We do want to keep growing, and make more money, and hire more people, and make something our customers love, but the most important thing is we keep having fun. I hope GitHub is forever an awesome place to work and an awesome website to use.
As long as we have really great people who are passionate about what they do and enjoy their jobs, we’re going to continue to provide a really great service for our customers (and ourselves).
You can read more nuggets of wisdom in the full post.
The following views are those of Lauren Rabaino. I do not speak on behalf of my employers or other associations. I just speak for myself.
Today ZDNet published a post that suggested Apple’s process of rejecting apps is somehow “curation.” Dozens of people are retweeting that link, probably because it’s about Apple and because it contains the “curation” buzzword.
However, there’s a difference between curation and censorship, and I wouldn’t even call it a “fine line” that separates the two. They are different things.
I’m not claiming that Apple necessarily censors, but their app approval process is closer to censorship than it is to curation. Here’s a list of apps that have been rejected in the past few months:
These are just a few examples, of course. But none of these examples have anything to do with Apple wanting its users to have a “high quality experience” as Mr. Foremski suggested in his ZDNet post. These examples show that Apple is self-interested and controlling. If Apple wanted its users to have a high-quality experience, they would have approved the Google Voice app, for example.
5/3/2010 Update: Here’s another example. This week Apple rejected a Programming Language for Kids app (hat tip to Greg Linch):
[...] it’s an indication of the challenges of working with products by companies like Apple, where one of the world’s great programming languages can’t run on one of the world’s most popular platforms.
Curation is about choosing the best of the best. Curation is about finding the signal in the noise. Apple does this by having a “featured” apps section on its homepage. That’s where curation should happen. If Apple let through all the apps which met the basic technical and aesthetic requirements (of which should also be made public, not based on random whims of the Apple team), then users and Apple could curate. That curation would manifest in the hand-picked “Featured” apps panel and the “Top 25″ page of the app store that is based on user ratings/downloads.
Furthermore, Mr. Foremski’s comparisons between Google and Apple are totally off.
In his ZDNet post, he implies that because Google doesn’t curate content, their process is somehow less valuable than Apple’s:
Comparing the two companies’ strategies, it can be seen that the Apple approach requires more work but earns Apple 50% more in revenue share. It also results in an excellent customer experience because Apple actively curates iPad/iPhone content.
Google doesn’t care if the Internet user comes across a spammy site carrying Google ads, it doesn’t care if an Android app is great or bad. That hands-off policy can also be seen with YouTube and the trouble it got into in Italy, where an Italian court convicted Google execs of publishing a video showing the abuse of a handicapped child.
Google does care. That’s why Google has an algorithm. Their algorithm strives to ensure that quality content makes its way to the top. Although the process is automated, Google still has an interest in quality. Then users can layer curation on top of the algorithm, say, using a tool like Publish2 (yes, I’m allowed to plug my own company).
And finally, my last gripe with this ZDNet piece is that he makes financial claims that aren’t backed:
And Apple’s approach has created tremendous value for its shareholders. If you bought AAPL stock on the same day Google went public you would be far richer today than buying GOOG. AAPL recently passed MSFT in terms of market capitalization.
Apple is creating more shareholder value than Google because of its active curation of its platforms.
Active curation creates value.
Really? Shareholder value is a direct result of “curation?” APPL stock is worth more than GOOG because they arbitrarily accept/reject apps? I’d like to see the proof of causation on that one.
The Apple approach can be seen elsewhere, such as on Facebook, where people choose which content to share, what to publish on their pages; it can be seen in Twitter where the content is hand selected by humans (mostly); it can be seen in people’s blogs; it can be seen on Techmeme where 6 editors choose the content.
Active curation creates value.
And where do users find that content from whence to begin curating? Google. Curation is valuable in these contexts because content is being curated collectively by our social circles. In the case of Facebook, content is curated by our friends and family. In the case of Twitter, content is curated by the professionals we follow. In these cases, we choose who we let into our circles because we trust them.
If we don’t like the way our social circle curates, we can unfollow them or defriend them. We can find new curators to balance out the biases. We, the users, have control of the curation, and that’s when it’s valuable– not when it’s some patched up game of business that happens behind closed doors.
CNN has a new interactive political community called the Forum, but it appears to be pretty buggy from what I can see.
A Google search for “Forum CNN” brings up no results about the feature, indicating that it’s relatively new, although the oldest comment I found was already 18 days old.
Located at theforum.cnn.com, the feature allows users to create a political “badge” that shows which candidate/issues the user supports. This is where it starts getting buggy for me. Each time I try to upload a photo and select my issues, I’m directed to a Symfony error page.
After building a badge, you can go to a “forum comparison” to see where other users stand on the issues. Currently, the most popular issue is the economy, with 62 percent of users ranking it as their No. 1 concern.
The data can also be grouped by age, gender, candidate choice or “voter leage.” There are five voter league options:
It’s an innovative move by CNN to appeal to that “community” feeling that Internet users so desperately long for.
Although there appear to be minor, arbitrary bugs, the system is surprisingly user friendly. In the section that asks where users stand on political issues, the wording is in everyday language.
Example of question wording:
One plan to reduce global warming would have the government set a limit on the amount of those emissions that companies could produce each year. Companies that exceed that limit would face fines or higher taxes, but they could avoid those penalties by paying money to other companies that produced fewer emissions than allowed. Would you favor or oppose this proposal?
As far as the “forum” aspect of it goes, there appears to be a lot of discussion taking place about the issues (economy, energy, health care, security, Iraq, social issues, social security). So far, the economy is in the lead with 1127 comments and social security is in last place with 237 comments.
I’m not sure how long the forum will survive because it’s not the type of community that’s continually updated. It feels as though you put in your information once, snoop around a little, then never return. It’s not the kind of thing you need to experience more than once.
UPDATE: Just found another bug, after submitting responses to where I stand on the issues, I got this message:
djdub63, based on your answers, here’s your political badge!
I definitely did not register as djdub63, but as laumichell. The badge doesn’t match my question responses. I cannot find an option to change my name or my league back to what I registered as. Instead I’m stuck with some random person’s political views on my account. Interesting.
In theory, it’s a great concept, but maybe they should have waited to launch it. I guess they call it “beta” for a reason.
I’m generally a quick learner and determined worker. If I have a design project or goal, I usually will go countless nights without sleep until it’s done. But no matter how hard I try, I consistently screw up the Flash preloader.
I’ve read dozens of tutorials and spent hours upon hours trying to create the perfect preloader, but I never come close.
I usually end up with a white page for a few seconds while my Flash content loads (without a loader), then quickly a preloader will pop up and load to 100% in a hair of a second (if you blink you’ll miss it). Obviously, I’m doing something wrong.
My goal in upcoming days is to train myself on creating the perfect loader, then post the tutorials I used to get there, or make my own step-by-step guide for others to use.
It’s something absolutely essential to a Flash multimedia piece and can add a lot of class/credibility. Plus, the white page while content loads is just tacky.
If you know of any good tutorials, please throw ‘em out there for me. I’ll keep you posted!
I counted down the days until Google’s new browser Chrome would be available to download. Initially, I was hooked on it, but each day I find myself clicking that familiar Firefox logo more and more.
For those Mac users who can’t download it yet, here’s a quick review of features.
The good things:
- The screen shot above shows Chrome’s “speed dial” that complies screens of your most visited sites. Also, notice the tabs on top and full-screen feel.
Negatives
