Archive for November, 2008:
De-Friend Sounds Better than Remove
Mashable had a highly entertaining post earlier in the week called “12 Great Tales of De-Friending“. As social networking eases into the mainstream consciousness, awkward situations will arise, and since there’s no playbook, conventional wisdom or Miss Manners for social network interactions, stories of de-friending will continue to entertain us.
Or not, depending on your role [...]
Thanks
It’s Thanksgiving here in the States. So, if you’re celebrating, have a good one. If you’re not, be glad we’re not at work today and enjoy the silence.
I debated whether to do a thank you post, since it’s cliché and done to death.
Well, add another thank you post to the torrent. Here goes:
Thanks for reading [...]
Do You Have Cyberchondria?
Do you, or someone you love, suffer from that rare form of prostate cancer that only affects women? Or from that flesh-eating fungus that has jumped species and a plane from the Amazon to afflict you in the US?
Finally, there’s a word for this behavior.
Cyberchondria
I guess that word was coined a while back, but it’s [...]
All a Twitter
Hot on the heals of news that Facebook and Twitter couldn’t agree on an acquisition deal, news broke yesterday that Twitter had purchased Values of n.
So what?
Values of n produces Stikkit and Sandy, two very useful and artfully designed products. According to Rael Dornfest, these services will become Twitter’s IP and will go offline on [...]
I Still Heart Data Visualizations
If you haven’t seen this already, it’s worth a look. If you have, it’s worth another look. Thanks to Mashable for the YouTube version of the video.
A group of developers at Facebook have created this fantastic data visualization of Facebook network data overlaid on a globe. They’re calling it Project Palantir, (an LOTR reference), and [...]
An iPhone App Your Holiday Shopping and Wishlist
Last week, I found a perfect iPhone app for the year-end holidays, thanks to Paul’s Google Reader Shared Items feed.
SnapTell Explorer (by way of Lifehacker) is a free app that works with the iPhone’s camera. Open the app and snap a picture of any DVD, CD, game or book cover.
SnapTell processes the image and returns [...]
Google SearchWiki
Shortly after I finished a post about a couple cool things Google has done recently, they announced that Google SearchWiki would be going public.
Back in the Summer, Google teased the addition of Digg-style social features into search, and it looks like these became SearchWiki. So, what does it give you?
When you’re logged into your Google [...]
Let’s Take a Legal Break
Something has been bothering me for years about our (American) legal system.
Pause for snarky comments.
As a longtime reader of Slashdot, I’ve followed the legal aspects of technical lawsuits passively for years, especially court decisions that affect overall precedent, e.g. RIAA and MPIAA decisions as they pertain to P2P, cyber-bullying, spamming, anti-trust in tech, etc.
I find [...]
Is the Venture Funding Model Broken?
Jerry Yang’s ignominious resignation as CEO of Yahoo this week further underlined for me what’s broken about the venture capital model.
I’m not referring to the slidedeck presented by Adeo Ressi to Harvard Business School faculty earlier this month, i.e. I don’t really care to cover what’s wrong with the investments made by VCs or the [...]
Connect for Your iPhone
As I teased earlier in the week, Rich has been cooking up Connect People Search for your iPhone. Last night, it went live.
This isn’t an iPhone app because, as we all know, there are a few issues preventing an app that requires behind the firewall access: 1) we can’t yet connect to VPN using the [...]
Google Does and Knows a Lot
It’s pretty hard to keep up with all the stuff Google does. There are several blogs I know of whose only purpose in life is to cover Google.
Anyway, a couple noteworthy Google announcements recently caught my attention. So, I figured I share them and collect your thoughts.
Google Flu Trends
Google.org announced Google Flu Trends recently, which [...]
Shizzow Expands Beyond the Rose City
I’ve mentioned Portland-based Shizzow a few times in the past in posts about geo-aware services and networking.
Shizzow has been open to Portlanders only until this week, but Tuesday they added the Bay Area. And now today, Seattle is also supported.
Full disclosure: I know all the principles that make up the little Shizzow operation. They’re all [...]
Found: Cool Stuff in Your Shared Items
So, I now have about five or six people sharing their Google Reader shared items with me, which is good.
These feeds function a lot like Twitter for me, i.e. the items in there are sometimes interesting and tend to tell me a bit about each person. For example, Paul shares a lot of gadget stuff [...]
“Looks Good, Works Well”
Last night, I was lucky enough to see Bill Scott (of Yahoo Design Pattern Library, YUI, OpenRico, Netflix fame) present at my local Ruby user group. He shared his thoughts about the successful design patterns that have defined today’s web. As someone who enjoys brilliantly designed “things” including web apps and sites, I found his [...]
More iPhone Apps
Here’s some more iPhone goodness, and a teaser to whet your appetite.
Fake Calls
Thanks to Floyd for this tip. I started out to review three fake call apps, but quickly realized there are a lot more than three. Eleven apps matched the keyword search “fake caller” in the App Store, and only one didn’t fit the [...]
Who Owns Your Address Book?
Friend of the ‘Lab Dan McCall sent this post my way last week.
The issue in question is whether your LinkedIn contacts could be considered the property of your employer, should you decide to part ways.
This is an intriguing question, considering:
LinkedIn’s self-described purpose as a “professional network”.
People use LinkedIn to keep track of their business contacts, [...]
Best Invention of the Last 20 Years?
Meg’s comment on my post about TiVo (note to self, add TiVo to iPhone as a topic that gets lots of comments) got me thinking about the best of the last 20. She said:
I have said often that Tivo is the best invention of the last 20 years, in my life it is equal to [...]
How to Do a Set-Top Box
I love my TiVo.
Like pretty much anyone who currently has a DVR, I was interested, but skeptical before I had one. Skeptical not so much about the value-add from a DVR, but because of the rabid fan-ism exhibited by those who owned them.
Now, I’m happily one of those rabid fans. I’ve had TiVo for many [...]
Two More iPhone Apps
Another pair of iPhone apps came to my attention today, making it four for the week, and it just so happens one is brought to you by Oracle.
Oracle Business Approvals for Managers
Steven Chan put me on to this one, which looks like an iPhone app that surfaces a lot of the worklist notifications EBS users [...]
Panels Experiment
I’m going to try an experiment on all of you.
Don’t worry, it won’t hurt, much.
I’ve just installed Panels, which is a newly launched beta service, on this blog. Panels adds, well, panels to your blog links. From their blog:
With the addition of panels to your site/blog your readers are given all the information about a [...]
