I am here to tell you how angry cows proved 1) that the HTC Incredible is built pretty damned well, and 2) that the new features of Google Voice and calling from within Gmail completely useful and disruptive of the traditional relationship between customers and mobile telephone service providers. For more details about those telephony features and their disruptive nature, check out my earlier post about Google’s disruptive telephony features, but this one is all about the angry cows…
Last weekend I went to a wedding in Bend, OR and decided to stop and do some fishing at Black Butte on the way back to Portland. Unfortunately, the herd of free range cattle that sometimes graze there were out, and I didn’t notice them at first as they were in the distance and around the corner from some trees and brush that blocked the view. My girlfriend and I were on a small outcropping of land into an area where the stream widens out quite a bit when the herd came around the corner. They were all business with bulls out front – ears and eyes up, horns sharp. We were already boxed in at this point – the bulls were past us and drinking at the water’s edge downstream from us. The rest of the herd was upstream from us blocking the path back to the stairway that runs over the fence.
Google recently introduced free calling from within Gmail – allowing users (in the U.S. at least) to call domestically for free, and call internationally for very cheap. Here’s why this is interesting:
• It’s a play at Skype and “SkypeOut” – their VoIP to phone service. Google is trying to get the huge user base of Gmail accustomed to chatting, video chatting, and even making phone calls through Gmail.
• It’s defense against Facebook whose chat services are being adopted and used a ton by Facebook users (i.e. everyone). You’d also better believe that Facebook is going to continue to improve its messaging feature, which one day may rival full feature email services like Gmail.
• This is the beginning of the end of phone numbers as we know them.
Note to social media managers: If you see a big chunk of your user base getting really really excited about something you’re not going to deliver, you should reach out and tell them that it ain’t gonna happen. And you should do it as soon as you possibly can or else the anticipation will continue to grow, and the pending disappointment will grow along with it, delivering a much more substantial blow when it finally arrives.
This is a short lesson for us all about how telling the simple truth early can save untold headaches later. On August 13th rumor leaked from Mashable.com – a fairly reliable source – that Verizon was going to push the much awaited update to Android 2.2 Froyo to their HTC Incredible devices on the 18th. read more…
Foursquare is not a pissing contest. It’s an ant farm. So stop acting like a dog.
A lifetime ago (like two months) I was on a mountain bike trail in Bend, OR riding with my friends @cassondra and @SEOeilish. When we got to the trailhead for Phil’s Trail, a well visited site for bike-minded Bendites, @cassondra checked in with Foursquare. She had been trailing @Audette for a while and knew she was close to overtaking him for the mayorship. A moment later, and it was done – Cass was the new mayor and Adam (Audette) had been ousted. We rode for a bit more, and that’s when it struck me – Foursquare isn’t a pissing contest, it’s an ant farm! (Note: at the time of publication @Audette has triumphantly retaken mayorship of the trailhead. What goes around comes around.) This made me think. About ants. I’ll explain why – I swear. But first I digress a bit…
There was a little spike in commentary several months ago comparing Foursquare to a virtual pissing contest in the sense that people were using it to be territorial, and to claim areas as their own. People were pointing out that Foursquare users acted like dogs that piss on trees and fire hydrants and legs and such in order to stack up points, mayorships and badges and compete for dominance. They were calling it narcissistic and creepy, and worse.
Here’s an example. read more…
In Your Big Fat Face Rupert Murdoch
Ok… I’m not really all that worked up about it, but why not be a little hyperbolic from time to time? The point is that Murdoch’s famously high profile paywalls blocking Google search indices for the Times and the Sunday Times in London went up with relatively little fanfare a bit ago, especially considering how much conversation the idea of putting them in place had generated.
Here’s a good quote from Newser.com:
My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself—who have free access to the site—are not going beyond the registration page. It’s an empty world.
I’m pretty sure part of the reason there was very little fanfare is because there were very few fans. This post from Newser gives an in-depth insider perspective on What’s Really Going on Behind Murdoch’s Paywall. And it reminds me of this old post of mine from November of 2009 about this strategy likely being a long term loser for Murdoch. Of course I only considered it possibly as a short term positive if they managed to squeeze some cash out of Microsoft and Bing to be exclusively indexed by their engine. But they didn’t even get that. read more…
Oh Jørgen! Why do you doubt the amazingness of the internet?! You are so crazy like these guys!!
Have you heard of One Million Giraffes? It’s one of my favorite kinds of viral/social experiments on the web. Pointless, but not really. Simple, but executed at a scale that makes it complex. Fun, and with a connection to the tangible world – that is, not entirely digital. And most importantly, it takes full advantage of the third wave of disruption that is currently occurring – the advent of nested acceleration platforms on top of the web as an infrastructure. read more…
Well, it’s that time again. It seems like every time a friend of mine gets married in Milwaukee Shiva the Destroyer reveals himself to me, casting my life into the kind of chaos and disarray from which great things can emerge.
A couple of years ago my friend Chris got married in Milwaukee. I moved to Bend less than a week before that wedding to start working for Global Strategies Int’l – an Ogilvy Company that specializes in search engine optimization (SEO) and social media integration for enterprise companies. It’s been great there. I learned an immense amount and had some stellar experiences with some stellar people. A few highlights: read more…
Hey, Companies! (and individual Page admins as well…) Secure Your Facebook Pages.
Overview
There is an important detail about Facebook Pages Admin Settings that many Page admins are not aware of, and it represents an important security flaw that needs to be remedied. The creator of a Facebook Fan Page is permanently set as an admin for a Page, and there is no way to remove that profile’s admin settings. This post will provide best practices for Page Creation to avoid this problem in the future and recommendations for rectifying existing problems. read more…
The Most Awesomest Thing Ever
What is “The Most Awesomest Thing Ever?” If you’re asking the Big question… well it’s a tough one… but if you’re asking about what the web meme is, well that’s easier to answer. It is a super awesome web site built to crowdsource the answer to that very big question and determine the most awesomest thing ever.
Zoe Hoeltzel’s Portland Photos
Have you ever thought to yourself “I wish there were some place I could go to see some photos in and around Portland, OR, and the greater Pacific Northwest. Furthermore, I should hope that these photos include the likes of mud, weird hip-looking people being slightly outdoorsy, stacked chairs, random artistic compositions in a modern local organic urban landscape, and maybe some other random stuff.”
Good news!
Check out the new blog up with Portland photos by Zoe Hoeltzel. You won’t regret it… here’s a sample:
Chatroulette is a phenomenon that is sweeping the web like countless memes before it. There was the dancing banana animated gif that started the whole thing off, and ever since then we’ve all been elbow deep in memes. But chatroulette is different – it represents a true breakdown and symbolic revolution of the relationship between content producers and consumers.
If that sentence didn’t make much sense, and it very well might not have, let me back up a second and try it another way… Memes are shared ideas that can achieve deep cultural penetration through viral sharing. These ideas are cultural units, and they have value.
Chatroulette is one of the newest memes on the web and in the world, and although the technology behind it is nothing new, it has tapped into the spirit of the new web – specifically, the idea that we are all content producers now, and that the barriers have been lowered to a laughable extent in terms of who is able to create content. Chatroullette is a video chat site that randomly connects two guests to each other from anywhere around the world. It is dominated by young single white men and perverts, but deep within the layers of perversion there is something beautiful and wonderful there. It was all explained extremely well by Casey Neistat in this awesome video (that you may have already seen): read more…
Awesomest. Sign. Ever.
Awesomest sign ever. Saw it on our roadtrip down the Oregon Coast. We passed it, stopped, turned around, stopped, took a picture, and then continued on our southward journey. I feel confident that the transmission mechanics who worked there are not aware of how funny this is.
Holiday Mix 2010
Happy Holidays!
Some of you might have received a holiday mix from me last year, and my intention was to do the same this year, but I was slammed and even though I got it made, I wasn’t able to distribute it like last year’s. I’m hoping this might be a one-year glitch, and I can get back on schedule for 2011, but this was a good opportunity to go digital for the first time.
So here it is – Holiday Mix 2010
It’s a .zip file, so you’ll have to decompress it and then get it into your iTunes or whatever you use. Should be pretty easy for most of you, but that will be a good test to see if I’m overestimating how easy it will be. Drop me a line if you have any problems, and happy 2010!
Track list:
[#. Track Name - Artist]
- The Clap – Thao With The Get Down Stay Down
- Happy Up Here – Royksopp
- Rawnald Gregory Erickson The Second – Starfucker
- No Shit – Eskimo & Sons
- Make The Roady By Walking – The Menahan Street Band
- Marshland – Breathe Owl Breathe
- The Corner – Common
- San Frantico – The New Mastersounds
- Mr. Blue Sky – Electric Light Orchestra
- I Wanna – Matt & Kim
- ?? – Paco de Lucia
- Tresspassers In The Stereo Field – The American Analog Set
- If It’s True – Yo La Tengo
- Big Things Come In Small Packages – Young Gents
- Hanuman – Rodrigo Y Gabriela
- When We Swam – Thao With The Get Down Stay Down
- New Resolution – Heartless Bastards
- Machine Gun – Commodores
- Boom! Shake The Room – DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince
- My Gal – Yonder Mountain String Band
- It’s Alright, Baby – Komeda
- Bacano – Orgone
- Que Hay De Comer – Jaime Urrutia
Now blogging at TheFasterTimes.com
Things are slightly dead here – I know. Not quite a ghost town, but still… I’ve started blogging in “The Web” section of TheFasterTimes.com. Come see me there as well. :)
Here’s the beginning of their mission statement:
The print newspaper is in trouble. A lot of journalists joke about it. We don’t think it’s funny. Most of the writers and editors at The Faster Times have written for a print newspaper. They were our livelihoods, but they were also much more than our livelihoods. They were a way of pushing back the chaos of the modern world. Things happened, and the next day you could read about those things in your morning paper. The orderliness might have been an illusion, but it was a comforting illusion.
Time is always fast, but some times are faster than others. For American journalism, these are faster times.
Read the rest of the TheFasterTimes mission statement (go to the bottom of the page).
Calacanis Fail
I heard there was a new JSON validator, so I decided to try to validate a well known JSON. Turns out Calacanis is not valid… hope he won’t hold this against me. (Click for full size view)
