derekville.net

Blogging is something that comes in waves for me, and once I get out of the habit, it is tough to get back into it.  I enjoy it, but sometimes there’s just so much going on that it completely escapes me.  The last few months have been one of those periods.  So let’s start from the top…

I’ve been working on a new project recently.  Tweenky is a micro blogging client I am developing that is mostly used with Twitter, but also supports Identi.ca, and hopefully more micro-blogging services soon.  The concept behind it was the lack of any good web clients out there for Twitter, and especially ones that brought back the “track” feature that Twitter took away from us a few weeks back.  It’s still very much a work in progress and I just have to find the time to work on some of the new features and further improve stability.  I’m having a blast with pushing the boundaries of JavaScript and what it should/shouldn’t be used for.  So, if you are a Twitter user, go check it out, and if it is still requiring an invite code, use “derekville”.

So I just returned from a convention out in Santa Clara called Zendcon.  As a web developer, my primary language of choice is PHP, and Zend is the company puts most of the work into the PHP project, so this was kind of their little yearly shindig.  It was 4 days of 1-2 hour training sessions on all topics related to PHP and web development.  I saw some presentations from engineers and developers from companies such as IBM, Google, Mozilla, Digg, Yahoo, and tons more.  I met a ton of really interesting people too and had a great time at Yahoo HQ for Hackday ‘08.  (note to self: Don’t wear “Hackday ‘08″ shirt to airport, it leads to hacker questioning from TSA agents)

Vacation #1 was on the front & back end of the Zendcon trip as I had a few days before & after the conference to play around in San Francisco.  It’s such a cool city and I had a blast driving around in the Pontiac G6 convertible I rented for the week.  I’ve never had so much fun driving a car!

Vacation #2 is coming up next month with Katye & I flying up to Seattle where we’ll also head up to Vancouver & Victoria.  I haven’t been to Seattle in about 10 years, so I’m really excited as I love that city.  Everyone I’ve talked to raves about Vancouver too, so I’m pretty excited about my first trip north of the border.

If you are a web developer in the Kansas City area, you need to check out two emerging groups.  The first being DotNext, a group in the KC area that gets together every month or so to give sessions on anything web development related.  Last month was a series of presentations of Amazon Web Services.  This month is going to be on various database related technologies. The second group is Cowtown Computer Congress who is setting up a hacker space in North Kansas City.  For those not too familiar with what a “hacker space” is (myself included), it is a place for technologists to get together to work on  various hardware & software projects, share costs on equipment, and actually socialize (something most geeks never do much of).  So should be an awesome place to convene when it officially opens in the next couple months.

And finally, a new podcast from some rather influential people in the web development world has launched that I’d like to mention.  Open Web Podcast was created by Google engineer Dion Almaer (of the Ajaxian podcast as well), Alex Russell of Dojo, and John Resig of Mozilla/jQuery.  So if you are into web standards and JavaScript, definitely check it out.

Finally, I recently discovered the FX show “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”.  Hilarious!  Check out all the episodes on Hulu.

written by Derek \\ tags: ccckc, dotnext, Javascript, openweb podcast, tweenky, zendcon

Day #1 of Reddit going open source, and they are already fighting with their developers. C’mon guys, you clearly don’t understand what is being requested, so ask for clarification instead of being so stubborn. We understand you are busy getting this project off the ground, but you need to understand that you can’t fight with your own developers, especially this early in the game. If you can’t manage that, they why did you open source it in the first place?

written by Derek \\ tags: reddit

Link to article on The Wall Street Journal: Sprint Mulls Separating Nextel Unit

Considering how many customers they’ve lost due to outages since the merger, it’s clear that move was the worst idea in Sprint’s history.

So, their stock is up ~75% from where it was since I told you to buy it a few weeks back. Hopefully you listened to me. If not, it’s still not too late, Deutsche Telekom is looking to buy them which would give it quite a boost.

Best scenario would be for Sprint to dump Nextel somehow, in turn making themselves more attractive for a Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile purchase, then merge the two and become the #1 US cell carrier. Whose network the customers go to doesn’t matter, T-Mobile’s more compatible GSM would be preferable though. Sure, you won’t have any offerings to compete with AT&T and Verizon’s wired internet and cable TV offerings (FiOS & uVerse), but who cares, you’ll have a great headstart over them in the wireless broadband market, which is obviously where the future is. Finally, embed Sprint Xohm chips in everything from laptops to VoIP phones to toasters, and print money uncontested. But most importantly, differentiate the labels, market the voice service as T-Mobile and the data as Sprint/Xohm because both are used for very different purposes.

Glass half empty says Sprint is fucked. Glass half full says the worst is over, your current model sucks, so time to move on to something new & innovative.

written by Derek

So I had my ‘Mahalo moment’ yesterday, but, is it what Jason & Mahalo expect?

For those looking for a good place to get an idea of what Mahalo is good at, here are some pages to get you started that I stumbled across or others suggested.  Please add some more links to pages in the comments to help people, like myself, who were completely clueless at what Mahalo was good at or useful for.Good Mahalo links

• Social Media
• How to Write a Resume
• Auschwitz
• Phantom of the Opera
• Maya Angelou

In conclusion. I think Mahalo, in it’s current form, has a purpose and an audience, and that happens to not be the tech-savvy crowd who is serviced very well by Google right now. In time, I think Mahalo will have the content tech-savvy users will want, but, will they provide an intelligent mechanism to get to it? Hopefully. Google & Wikipedia need some competition.

written by Derek \\ tags: mahalo

The journey continues…

So, I think I have a pretty good idea of what Mahalo can/can’t do at this point and I have a theory as to why the ‘TechCrunch 100,000′ (as Jason calls us) have such a problem with the site.  That’s a post for later though.

written by Derek \\ tags: mahalo

After railing on his site enough, I promised Jason Calacanis I’d take a fair look at his latest startup (Mahalo.com) and say something nice about it, well… once I was actually about to find something.  So here’s the first video of my experience hunting around Mahalo.com for a “positive” and not just looking at it as polluting the internet with more spam.

As you can see, the hunt will continue for yet another day.  By the end of the week, I’m determined to at least find something.

P.S. This is my first experience using Viddler and wow… Much nicer than YouTube.  YouTube certainly has its purpose on the internet and I think there is room for both.

written by Derek \\ tags: mahalo viddler

 

A little over a month ago I sent out a tweet that essentially said mahalo.com was worthless, had no value, and looked like "content throw up." Well, as you can probably tell, I’ve never really seen the value in Mahalo.com and I’m sure this isn’t what Jason Calacanis (Mahalo’s CEO) wants to hear considering he expects Mahalo.com to have 30%-50% of web searches within 5 years.

So today I read a post at seobook.com about how, according to Google’s definition of spam sites, Mahalo.com should be classified as search engine spam.

Final Notes on Spam When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? if the answer is no, the page is probably Spam.

So that led me to think about comparing this Mahalo page on "Best computer speakers" to this average spam scraper result page on "Best computer speakers." (FYI, the latter of which that pollutes the internet and gets blocked from search engines) What’s the difference? Not a whole lot. Neither page gives me the information I’m looking for, but they both link to the information I want.  Both use affiliate links to generate revenue for themselves, and neither contains much, if any, original content. 

On the upside for the scraper site, it actually provides links to 20 different sites that can help me find the best computer speakers, and I can use my own judgement to determine the best one and click it.  On the flipside, Mahalo only provides affiliate links to Amazon and 4 other review sites, which further distances me from my goal of finding a variety of sources to buy my new speakers.  And based off my shopping experience over the last 10 years, I really like PriceGrabber, which the spam site has a link to, but Mahalo doesn’t.

This is obviously a multi-year endevour for Calacanis and Mahalo appears to be far from ready for primetime.  I’m really interested to see what Calacanis will have his army of undervalued & volunteer scrapers do over the next couple years to keep themselves in the game, and especially from being blocked by the search engines they are competing with. 

Hey Jason, just because you are paying people to create your pages instead of having automated scripts create them, doesn’t make it anymore valuable to the user.  What really makes pages valuable is a majority of original content and not just providing links to the original content.

written by Derek \\ tags: calacanis, Google, mahalo, search engine, spam

Due to Yahoo Buzz, this TechCrunch article appeared on the Yahoo.com homepage, and wow… 1000+ comments later it’s almost as if mom & dad went away for the weekend and the kids trashed the house.  Talk about some of the most clueless commenters ever.

TechCrunch did a follow-up that analyzes Buzz’s impact two weeks in.  Yahoo says they’ve sent 16 million users from the site in those two weeks and have given pretty much every site it links to record traffic.  TechCrunch, a highly trafficked Tech news site could hardly stay up.

It’ll be interesting to see the implications of Buzz and how many servers it can melt.

written by Derek

About 18 months ago I wrote a blog post, iPod Killer… Found.  In that post, I

analyzed what would finally kill the iPod, and the requirements I said needed to exist on this mythical device was:

• Media player
• Good quality video camera
• Large amount of storage space
• Doubles as a cell-phone
• Easy access to a store to get new media (free and purchase)
• Always-on broadband internet access
• Allows access to media sharing services like Flickr and YouTube
• Exchange integration with “Push” email
• Access to GMail, Hotmail, and Yahoo accounts
• Has to be “cool” and easy to use

And my prediction for who it would be?  Microsoft + Yahoo.  Oh man was I wrong. C’mon, Microsoft had the most feature rich mobile OS at the time, they had to be the top contender, right?  Not even close.  Windows Mobile is pretty much exactly the same as it was back then, and they really missed the boat.  I didn’t even figure Google into the equation, and they stand a much better chance to beat out Microsoft with Android.

Well, it looks like the iPod has finally been replaced by its cousin, the iPhone.  I just finished watching the Apple SDK announcement presentation and it’s very clear that it is going to be a revolutionary platform for mobile devices.  Don’t believe that?  Venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins will disagree with you too.

It’s just a reminder that you have to innovate to stay on top.  Nice work Apple.

written by Derek \\ tags: apple, Google, ipod, Microsoft, yahoo

After Google lost out last week in it’s bid for a stake in FaceBook, it’s pretty apparent one of the reasons Facebook chose Microsoft instead was that Google is about to unleash a true contender to the stranglehold Facebook has on the social networking world.  Later this week Google will announce the OpenSocial API, it’s initiative to break down the walls of social networks exclusivity and open the data up for anyone to use.  I can’t comment to too much on how specifically it will work since the details have not emerged, but it’s pretty apparent that the social networking world will now be MySpace, Facebook, and everyone else, with “everyone else” being part of OpenSocial.

Facebook meanwhile is planning on launching it’s own competitor for Google’s AdSense with an upcoming announcement regarding its SocialAds network.  SocialAds will work by a cookie Facebook drops in your browser that follows you from site to site, and when you come across a SocialAds supported site, the (encrypted?) data is then sent to Facebook which in turn delivers an ad based on your profile.  Interesting concept, but I’m not sure how useful basic profile information will be in tailoring ads towards things I’d like to buy.

The next year should be fun as both companies, with egos like none other, try to out-do the other.

written by Derek \\ tags: 119, 128, 129, 158, 16, 60, 76