I’ve never liked Sprint – and here’s another reason. I use the Ovation U727 3g card for my laptop, and was just prompted to install an update. “No thanks” I responded. “Are you sure, we really think you’d like to install it Y/N”. “No thanks” I clicked again, slightly annoyed. “Well, sorry but we insist you download this, it is a small file and really important”. Ummm…. ok why did you ask my permission if in the end you weren’t going to require it? How hard is it to state up front “this is a key update that must be installed, is small and safe to download over 3g”. Bad engineer, bad!
Whenever I can, I read from my iPhone. Email, blogs / RSS, books – everything. (I am a Google Book Search PM, it’s kind of my job – but my interest in this pre-dated the job – check out my iPhone skin).
So it is annoying that I can’t read The Economist on my phone. No mobile version of their site, no iPhone app, it’s painful. I trust they will get there, but it’s annoying they haven’t yet.
In the past (college) I would have implemented this myself. Not anymore. This is an interesting observation. In college, I had mobile phone email by auto-forwarding emails from my personal server to SMS, and vice versa. Well before Gmail for mobile. Now, I trust that progress will solve many of these little annoyances, and there is enough competition for my attention / interest that if something isn’t perfectly meshing with my desires, I find something else that is. (Or, for The Economist, which deserves my attention, I put up with its annoyances).
My wife and my buddy have been working on Monkey Analytics – a fantastic web startup, which they just launched. Go Team Rocket Monkey! Next step for them is sales and marketing, so I thought I’d share some link love.
It’s so exciting to see this – I remember ~1.5 years ago walking on the beach in Long Island when Franny first had this idea – to bring science / math computation such as Matlab to the cloud / web application space. She built out the concept into a business plan, and then started executing. My good friend James was pretty excited about this too, and had the flexibility (he is a freelancer) to pitch in as well.
Apple is held up as user friendly and simple. In many ways it is. However even Apple fails the test when it comes to abstracting technological underpinnings from the user. I love my iPhone, but frequently am unable to take photos with it. It tells me “There is not enough room to take additional pictures. Please delete some existing photos.”
The iPhone should free space for me. I should never know this happened. My iPhone knows that it is a cache, not a storage medium. It knows which photos I have saved to my computer and which are unique. It knows which songs I haven’t listened to in months. It could free space, but doesn’t. Apple simplicity for the loss!
In the “unforgivable sin” category: even if I delete a number of photos, my iPhone still claims there is insufficient space! Wait a minute – I know there is more space – I just deleted photos (that thing you told me to do so you would stop complaining!!!) Argh.
Technology still sucks a lot. This is probably obvious to everyone, but as a technologist, I know exactly where the failings are and get more frustrated than the average person. Sure, you get annoyed when your wireless network doesn’t just work, but I actually know why it doesn’t work, see the terrible engineering decisions that lead to this outcome, and get frustrated and disappointed in humanity.
Ok so it’s not that bad. But we have far to go. An example: I can no longer get on my home wireless router, because a neighbor just added a router in their house on the same wireless channel. So the signals are competing. So I’ll have to change my router to a new channel. Which begs the question – why should I need to do this? The two routers know they’re competing, they can “see” each other, they should switch channels automatically. Little things, big headaches.
Sharing another personal success: my second launch at Google – real estate search! This has been one of my main focuses, and is great to get out there. Both Google Operating System and Lifehacker picked this up fairly quickly, though they both incorrectly come to the conclusion that data is not from Google Base (it is).
Just thought I’d share a personal success: my first launch at Google – mapped web pages! I am only a minor piece of the overall chain, but it has been fun to see it through. Even cooler is the fact that Google Operating System picked it up fairly quickly, with good things to say about it.
Update – I have a post at Google about this.check it out! Yep – I’m that same Abe Murray pretty cool, eh?
Winning isn’t about stickiness. Over the long term, the web services that win will be the best, winning by virtue of features and ability to please users. Businesses that try to win by trapping users like flies will lose to those that trust their customers to choose the best product, and trust themselves to provide the best product.
Example: disqus comment platform. I am using this on my Hidden Evidence blog, but not on this personal blog. Why? Because I am worried about data portability and the longevity of disqus. (See the first comment on this post testing the disqus system and voicing my concerns).
Why do most of us travel to work every day? Why do we work in large boxes removed from nature and family life? Why do we continue to propagate this system?
This all goes back to the Jefferson vs. Hamilton debate. Will humans be independent producers, masters of their own fate, creating an economy from many solid individual units? Or will we be grouped together into firms backed by capital, more efficiently producing in population centers and dependent upon banks and industrialists to provide for our jobs and life?
Allow me to (re)introduce Shirley Bell Designs! Shirley is a longtime neighbor and family friend, and it’s been my pleasure to help appropriately showcase her beautiful artwork online. New site features include an improved image gallery, better information about the artist, and the ability to purchase her artwork online. We’re also doing some tentative marketing, to increase organic search results as well as generate paid search leads. This is actually a very interesting process – I recommend everyone try it for something.
I chose PayPal for a payment solution. The downside is the shopping cart isn’t perfectly integrated, and the prices are slightly higher than Google Checkout’s, however unlike Checkout PayPal allows purchasing without PayPal accounts, which significantly increases the number of potential customers.
My favorite bit is the “we believe ” section. A sample: “we believe in keeping our designs simple and clean, leaving room for the card giver to add a message the artwork may reflect.”
pretty cool, eh?