If you don’t use Twitter or find it trivial and annoying, stop reading. This post will only cement what you already think. I can’t be sure, since Twitter happens to be down for scheduled maintenance right now, but I first heard from Dennis Howlett that this week was superhero week on Twitter. Later in the… Read More
Author: Jake
a.k.a.:jkuramot
The Emotional Nature of Software
We’ve all felt the extreme frustration that using a computer can cause. Maybe you spent several hours updating a Word document, assuming it was autosaving, only to have Word collapse in a heap, erasing all your changes. Maybe your IT department has an antivirus scan scheduled to run weekly that mysteriously starts in the morning.… Read More
April Fools’ on Mix?
The Mix traffic stats from today show more than double the pageviews (8,200) and visits (1,000) we normally get. These numbers are as of an hour ago, so they will continue to climb slightly as the day comes to a close. They are the highest that I can recall since we launched at OpenWorld in… Read More
Virtual Adventures
As I teased yesterday, I’ve been mucking around with virtual machines to extend my ability to test Mix. Due to the varied nature of our users’ environments, I need to find ways to install more browsers, more versions on more operating systems. Everyone knows reproducing an issue is really the best way to begin fixing… Read More
Save the Developers from the Users
TechCrunch posted a plea to Save the Developers last week imploring users to upgrade their Internet Explorer 6 browsers to Internet Explorer 7. According to W3 Schools, more than 30% of people browsing the Interwebs use IE6, even though it is more than 6 years old. The gist of the plea is that IE6 is… Read More
Had Good Search Lately?
I’m a neat person, but I’ve always had a cluttered desk. Growing up, my mother would frequently remind me to make it neat and tidy. Not much has changed, except now my desk has less room for paper clutter as much of it is taken up by dual monitors and various gadgets. My clutter has… Read More
The Future is iPhone-tastic
Lately, I’ve been bummed that the SDK announcement underwhelmed, handcuffing would-be developers with restrictions that make apps significantly less functional than expected. As a user, I want more apps that do more. And then a couple nights ago, I got a reminder of how sweet the iPhone really is. I was at Nicholas Restaurant, a… Read More
Customer Service that Works
I’ve covered this topic twice before, but it really deserves more airtime. Paul’s summary of Under the Radar on Monday received comments from two of the companies he mentioned, from the CEOs of those companies. You read that right. Similarly, my most recent post on FriendFeed got a comment from one of the founders. This… Read More
The Greatest Idea Moves Closer to Fruition
I haven’t done post on the most popular ideas on Mix since November. Back then, they were: 1. We need the Oracle clients (OCI, JDBC) for the Apple Intel OSX platform 2. Compile Oracle XE for Intel OS X Well, guess what? Since November, the same two ideas have stayed at 1 and 2. If… Read More
Spring Conferences
We’ve been pretty busy with conferences lately, and that looks to continue into the Summer. Paul attended Under the Radar The Business of Web Apps: Where the Web Goes to Work last week, and I think he’s working on a post summarizing his thoughts. Rich spoke at the JRuby Meetup a few weeks ago, and… Read More
Does Spam Irritate You?
Mix is reaching more people now, especially through groups. This is great because we always thought groups would be the best way to draw people into the network and conversation. Implied levels of trust within a group make it easier to engage and provide value to people who ordinarily have no use for social networks… Read More
We Are Expensive and Expendable
Rich and I were bemoaning the current state of the economy yesterday, and eventually, the conversation turned to outsourcing, not jobs, but storage, computing power, databases, applications, etc. You know, cloud computing. Remember after the Bubble burst in 2001 how people were in a tizzy, some rightfully so, about the exodus of tech jobs overseas?… Read More
FriendFeed is for Lurkers too
If you missed it, over the weekend, there was quite a testy blog war between Louis Gray and Duncan Riley, ostensibly started by FriendFeed or rather differing opinions of it. Short version: Duncan doesn’t find value, Louis disagrees, obscenities ensue. Makes for a good read. FriendFeed has been all the rage lately among the usual… Read More
More Fun with Numbers
Rich and Anthony deployed a few key fixes last week, nothing too bloggable. They were focused on securing private group activity and caching, which was causing some weird behavior. So, rather than blog those, my periodic Mix post this week is more metrics. As a follow up to my first Fun with Numbers post, I… Read More
Going around, Coming around
The ‘Lab is quickly approaching its one-year anniversary. I plan to blog something more formal closer to the date, but this post about Salesforce.com integrating with Google Apps reminded me of why I am on the team at all. Back in late 2006, I had just moved into Jesper’s strategy organization from development, and I… Read More
Twitter as Customer Support
I’ve blogged in the past about the good new web marketing, i.e. how many startups follow mentions of their companies on blogs, respond in those blogs and engage the bloggers. I really like the personal touch, even if I don’t care much for the application or don’t even use it. Twitter has added a new… Read More
Polishing Mix Groups
Rich and Anthony deployed a boat load of fixes and enhancements to Mix on Friday night. I might have mentioned before the Mix is going to be used more by internal teams, so we addressed groups with this deployment for the most part. Some of these are bug fixes that have been needed for a… Read More
Does Spam Still Work?
I got a 419 email today in my work inbox. This is pretty rare, since I guess Global IT does a great job catching spam, especially compared to my webmail accounts. Normally, in my webmail, I’d just delete an move on, but since this is so rare in my work inbox, I read the mail,… Read More
DIY Development
The WSJ Business Technology blog has a post about “Where the Next Generation of Techies Won’t Come from“. Aside from offending my grammatical sensibilities, you know, ending a sentence with a preposition, the post interests me for a couple reasons. The crux of the post refers to statistics published by the Computer Research Association that… Read More
Fun with Numbers, Mix Edition
Still feeling gravity’s pull lately, and Rich and Anthony gave me access to the Mix database this week. So, rather than review some new service (like Orgoo, for which I just got my beta invite) or wax philosophically about a New Web topic, I figured I’d dust off the SQL and crunch some numbers. Side… Read More