*michael parekh on IT*

ON THE WEB IN PICTURES

DIFFERENT TAKE

I've been warming up to a new Firefox extension from a company called Cooliris of late (Most other browsers also supported).

It's turning out to be of increasing use browsing the web, both on the computer, and on the iPhone, with the new Cooliris App.  This recent review by Macworld explains:

"...the minds behind the pictorial browser Cooliris believe there’s still benefit to the image as a means for relaying information. That benefit comes in the form of Cooliris’ 3D Wall—a three-high, ever-expanding string of related images and videos that link to locations around the Web.

A look at the free browser plugin gives you an idea of what Cooliris is all about. After installing Cooliris, its icon appears in the Web browser on your computer. Click the Cooliris icon in that browser and you can enter a search term in the Search field and browse sites such as Flickr, Yahoo, YouTube, and Amazon.com for pictures associated with your search..."

And what’s it good for? When looking at current events it’s an easy way to get a general idea of what the hot events of the day are based on the number of related images you see. Cooliris is also a wonderful way to browse image-centric sites such as Flickr as the interface is beautiful and shows off images to their best advantage. And, like Cover Flow, it’s a good way to browse catalogs of items as you would at many online emporiums.

The Cooliris iPhone application works similarly to the desktop client, though it’s not as full-featured as it doesn’t currently include a Shopping component. But its general operation is the same."

Think about it as a very visual StumbleUpon, an old favorite to serendipitously discover cool content on the web.  Cooliris is a different way to experience the torrent of content on the web.  And yes, they do have a blog.  The company has done a particularly good job making the software and service easy to install and figure out for first-timers.  Recommended.

*Image source.

ON TWITTER'S SHORT WAY TO VICTORY

BREVITY MATTERS

Joshua Schachter, has a terrific post up today titled "On URL Shortners":

"URL shortening services have been around for a number of years.

Their original purpose was to prevent cumbersome URLs from getting fragmented by broken email clients that felt the need to wrap everything to an 80 column screen.

But it's 2009 now, and this problem no longer exists.  Instead it's been replaced by the SMS-oriented 140 character constraints of sites like Twitter. (Let's leave aside the fact that any phone that can run a web browser and thus follow links can also run a proper client, and doesn't have to hew to the SMS character limit.)

Since TinyURL, there has been a rapid proliferation of shortening services."

The post goes on to explain the many reasons why this has both short and long-term negative consequences for the web.  There's also a growing discussion on Techmeme, with good responses from folks like Dave Winer, Jason Kottke and others, on other technical issues around this approach and possible technical solutions to address them.

But taking a step back from the technical pros and cons of shortened URLs, one needs to understand the core merits of Twitter's 140-character limit, necessitated by it's initial focus on SMS text services, that then lead to URL shortening become a necessary mainsream evil. (Search Engine Land has a timely review on the rapidly growing field of companies offering this service).

That 140-character limit meant that publishers of content had to learn how to be brief and to the point in their messages, regardless of how much they wanted to express.

Remember that before Twitter, there had been an explosion of mainstream bloggers, where tens of millions worldwide discovered they could publish globally to their heart's content, at large at no great cost to themselves than their time.

The problem was that this meant that hundreds of millions of potential readers had to read all that stuff and try and glean the essence of all these posts. 

This asymmetric reality meant that tons of content would never actually get read.  Readers of course had to spend a ton of time trying to wade through this stuff, and even blog reader software didn't quite help other than just collect the ever-growing clutter.

Twitters 140-character limit meant that there was now forced publishers to think about how they could be short and sweet. 

And made it far easier for tens of millions to consume tweets much faster, scanning dozens at a glance. They could then decide which tweets were worthy of exploring further by clicking on a URL link, whether it was shortened or not.

When the history books are written on this period, we'll likely have a lot more data and analysis on how this 140-character limit really helped Twitter race ahead of so many competitors so fast.

Note that Facebook in it's recent big change to emulate elements of Twitter's feed model, chose to go with a 160-character limit, even though SMS/text messaging has very little to do with how Facebook feeds are consumed.

So whatever Twitter does do address the deficiencies of the shortened URLs, it really shouldn't mess with the 140-character limit. 

* Image source.

ON YET ANOTHER DIGITAL FIGHT

REAL SILLY

The following op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle is worth some attention involving an initiative called RealDVD* by Real Networks.  Titled the "Movie industry's shortsighted fight", it explains:

"Thomas Edison, probably America's best-known and most prominent inventor of all time, and holder of nearly 1,100 patents, is famously quoted as recognizing that technological advances are the result of hard work more than anything else. He said in 1903 that "genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration."

There is now unfolding in a federal court in San Francisco a lawsuit in which several major Hollywood movie studios are suing RealNetworks - a relatively small but successful company that develops and markets Internet communications technology - in an effort to prevent the company from selling a software product that simply enables consumers to copy their DVDs to their personal computers. If the studios are successful in this Goliath-against-David legal action, Edison's lesson in hard work will have been effectively reduced to, "genius is one percent inspiration, 99 percent permission."

The lawsuit, under the supervision of U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, remains in its early stages, with a hearing set for April, but the studios already have succeeded in securing a restraining order against RealNetworks' effort to market its product, RealDVD. The effort by the studios to hamstring RealNetwork's efforts to bring this latest product to the consumer makes little practical sense, legally or economically, given what the product does (and more importantly, perhaps, what it does not do)."

The broader implications of this fight are notable:

"While the industry lawsuit relies in part on the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998," federal legislation that was designed to thwart the development and sale of products that allow individuals to distribute their own versions of copyrighted material such as movies, the clear fact is that RealDVD software does not circumvent any technology, and does not permit a user to distribute a DVD. The product does nothing more than permit the purchaser to copy a DVD onto his or her own PC or laptop. In other words, the product simply enables the private viewer to watch the DVD they'd already purchased directly from their computer's hard drive rather than rely on the sometimes-cumbersome process of inserting the DVD itself into a player."

Think about how useful something like would be, especially for netbooks that don't even have on-board DVD drives.  More features of RealDVD can be seen here.

The piece ends on the following note:

"Defendant RealNetworks has the law, the facts and common sense on its side. The industry has money and hubris in its corner. Regardless of whether you ever might consider purchasing RealDVD software, this case should concern you; that is, if you wish for fair play and innovation to remain valued commodities in 21st century America. Thomas Edison understood this. Let's hope Judge Patel does, too."

Here's hoping that common sense prevails for once in this instance.  But judging from the history of these kind of tussles in the past, it may not pay to get too optimistic.

* Image source.

ON THE FOLKS UPLOADING TO YOUTUBE

WHO AND WHY?

Every time I use Google's YouTube, I'm amazed that someone took the time somewhere to upload a clip of some video from somewhere else.  
And while we've all come to take for granted how incredibly useful that is for millions of YouTube viewers every-day, it's easy to take for granted that there is a pretty amazing community of folks globally who take the time to slice and dice video and then upload it into the Google/YouTube cloud.  Most of the time, it's stuff they like and/or find notable and they think it might be of interest to someone somewhere sometime.  And as a user, it feels like magic when one finds something you're curious about on YouTube.

Maybe I've missed it somewhere, but I've yet to find any information on this community on the web.  How large is it, how is it growing, what are it's demographics, and simply what kind of hardware and software tools do they like to use to do their YouTube uploading.  So many other questions also come to mind.

What made me think of all this is re-reading a post from some time ago by entrepreneur and programmer Andy Baio, who was curious along similar lines about another innovative web service, this time courtesy of Amazon:

"When you experiment with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, it feels like magic.
I've seen the demographics, but that was too abstract for me.
You toss 500 questions into the ether, and the answers instantly start rolling in from anonymous workers around the world. It was great for getting work done, but who are these people?
Last week, I started a new Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it cost for someone to reveal their face?"

The rest of the post goes into the clever survey he implemented to get some answers, and the cool results of the experiment:

"The final results: 30 people total — 10 women, 20 men. Almost all were white, mostly in their 20s and 30s. 21 said they turked for money, 9 for fun or boredom."

It'd be fascinating if something like this were done to query the many folks who contribute to YouTube every day.  Who knows, it may even be doable using YouTube.

ON MY FAVORITE iPHONE GAME

TOTAL HIT

Like so many iPhone geeks, I'd been waiting for this long-anticipated game to be released and it doesn't disappoint.  IGN has a review that puts it in context and explains:

"A few years ago, an oft-asked question at mobile games conferences was, "Where is mobile's Mario?"

It was essentially shorthand for the eternal search for the killer app, the game that brings serious heat to the platform that hosts it. For the NES, that was Super Mario Bros.

For the Genesis, it was Sonic the Hedgehog. Xbox had Halo. Unfortunately, mobile never really had a killer app; the closest it got was Tetris or Bejeweled, both perennial bestsellers. If the iPhone even needs a killer app is open to debate -- after all, the platform needs little help getting attention. But now it has one now, whether it wants it or not.

Rolando, developed by Hand Circus and published by ngmoco, is a brilliant puzzle-adventure game, loaded with fab personality. You must save the pop-up book Rolandoland from an invasion of nasty little shadow creatures by using your benevolent powers as the deity-like Finger. (That's what the little roly-poly Rolandos refer to you as.)

You can manipulate objects in the world, such as twisting windmills or releasing bombs from little storage boxes. But the main action is tilting. Since the Rolandos are little balls, you tilt your iPhone from side to side, rolling your friends ever closer to the exit inside each obstacle-filled stage. Each stage has a required number of Rolandos that must escape if you want to unlock the next stage."

This YouTube review of Rolando provides a glimpse of the game in action.

At $9.99 a copy, the App is not inexpensive in the universe of iPhone games.  The game has immense amount of replay value, and comes with a music soundtrack that I'd buy separately if available.  Available only on the iPhone and the iPod Touch, it's a game I'd highly recommend.

ON COMIC STRIPS GOING ONLINE

HITTING THE MARK

As a life-long fan of comic strips in newspapers and magazines, not to mention the Sunday funnies, I read with interest this piece on how comics are faring in the digital world, especially with the onset of mobile distribution*.  As the New York Times explains,

"What do you do when the distribution method you have relied on for more than a century begins to falter? In the last two months, two syndicates have revealed their hands.

In November, United Feature Syndicate, which distributes 50 comics, including “Peanuts,” “Dilbert” and “Get Fuzzy,” made its full archives and portfolio available free on its Comics.com Web site. The company also added social networking features for tagging and rating comics. Visitors can have comics sent to them via e-mail or RSS feed.

The point is to attract more and, ideally, younger readers to the syndicate’s comics..."

Cartoonists are not waiting for the syndicates to develop new business models. They are posting to free sites like Comic Genesis and Webcomics Nation. Some Web comics, like “The Argyle Sweater” by Scott Hilburn, have been picked up for syndication, but that is unusual. Even more rarely, a Web comic might attract a large following at a stand-alone site; such is the case with “Penny Arcade,” a video gaming strip.

Cartoonists are also experimenting with color, animation, sound and novel distribution methods. "

There is a fair bit of entrepreneurial effort online with cartoons over the past few years.  One of my staples is the Cartoonbank, which has an interesting history, as this New York Times interview with it's founder from last year explains:

"After two years of submitting cartoons and getting nothing but rejection, Robert Mankoff finally succeeded in selling his first cartoon to The New Yorker in the 1970’s. He went on to become one of the magazine’s premiere cartoonists and ultimately its cartoon editor. He also had the clever idea of founding The Cartoon Bank, a company meant to syndicate and archive thousands of cartoons; it was bought by The New Yorker in 1997, and Mankoff still serves as its president."

The paradox of online of course is that it shifts the model from too little to too much.  There's only so many cartoons one needs to digest in a newspaper or a magazine (unless of course it's the Sunday funnies, in which case it'll take a while).  Online, the problem quickly becomes one of abundance and how to cope with it all and find the stuff that's really funny for you.  Again, the first piece above explains:

"...But Brian Walker, a member of the creative team behind the comics “Beetle Bailey” and “Hi and Lois” — both syndicated by King Features and created by Mr. Walker’s father, Mort Walker — warns that too much exposure “can take away from the strip itself.” If a comic’s characters are everywhere, he asks, why bother reading the newspaper strip?

And Mr. Walker, who is also a comics historian, believes that comics are best appreciated on paper. He likens reading a comic on a screen to watching a movie on an iPod: the general idea comes through, but some of the essential artistry is lost.

In print, the comics are as much a part of many people’s morning routines as a cup of coffee. The question now is whether daily comics can make a jump to mass electronic distribution and a younger readership — or whether they will be tossed aside like yesterday’s news."

It's a brave new world, and like most things online these days, it's a blessing and a curse for both publishers and consumers.

* Image source.

ON HARNESSING SOCIAL NETWORKS

CONNECTING THE DOTS

The Guardian has an interesting piece on how today's social network technologies may be leveraged for government sponsored Homeland Security/Military applications:

"...a group of scientists and military officers...have helped build a new social analytics tool that identifies and automatically uncovers intelligence to help military personnel perform better in the field.

SRI International based in Menlo Park, California, teamed up with military officers to build a new social analytics tool called iLink that generates models and helps streamline the process by which a specific expert in an online community can be found.

In simple terms, iLink is a machine learning-based system that models users and content in a social network and then points the user to relevant content."

The article goes on to explain how this work is already being re-tasked for consumer and business social networks:

"Looking beyond the military, the applications for this kind of smart social networking technology are broad and diverse. The two SRI scientists are planning to spin off the technology into a startup to be called Social Kinetics. The team is currently working on a healthcare application.

And with the demand for social networking growing – estimates for social networking users in the US alone by 2012 is expected to hit 92.2 million, according to In-Stat's Hitwise research service – the commercial benefits to businesses and individuals could be immense."

Looks like we may have the basis of making social networks a whole lot more useful for mainstream users.

ON ANDROID BEYOND THE iPHONE

ALL THE REST

The newest Smartphone using Google's long-anticipated "Android" platform will finally be available to users on October 22nd, via T-Mobile, on hardware by Taiwanese smartphone behemoth HTC.

Dubbed the G1, it's a promising first attempt as a whole lot of hands-on reviews on Techmeme would indicate.  I'd recommend the ones by Mossberg, Pogue, Engadget, Gizmodo and Crunchgear amongst others as a start.

What's interesting to note that almost every review compares the G1 to Apple's iPhone, which of course is the "Gold Standard" competitor of most mainstream interest.

And the general consensus of these reviews seems to be that the G1 is a promising start as compared to the iPhone, with more improvements to come from Google, other hardware and wireless providers.  This observation by Om Malik of GigaOm on Google's software platform, stuck in my mind:

"Amazingly robust operating system with little or no lag time. It makes Windows Mobile feel like a retiree; even the iPhone feels like a middle-aged person compared to Android OS."

Which brings up the following observation going through most of the full-on reviews of the G1.  What seems to be lacking in most of them so far, was the almost total lack of direct comparison vs. other major Smartphone platform providers like Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm and others.

If you look at the market share of these systems in this Wikipedia entry, the iPhone is so far a distant number five in market share, as of Q208:

1. Symbian OS from Symbian Ltd. (57.1% Market Share Sales Q2 2008 ^[13])
2. RIM BlackBerry operating system (17.4% Market Share Sales Q2 2008)
3. Windows Mobile from Microsoft (12.0% Market Share Sales Q2 2008)
4. Linux operating system (7.3% Market Share Sales Q2 2008)
5. iPhone OS from Apple Inc. (2.8% Market Share Sales Q2 2008)
6. Palm OS developed by PalmSource (now a subsidiary of ACCESS) (2.3% Market Share Sales Q2 2008)

As the old joke goes, when a few folks are running from a hungry bear, the survivor has to focus on outrunning the other runners, not necessarily the bear.  The list above shows that there are a whole host of runners besides just the iPhone*.

Google has a whole lot of opportunity for Android beyond the iPhone, both from a mind share and a market share perspective.  With  pre-orders for a few hundred thousand or more for the T-Mobile G1, they're obviously on their way to catch a few other runners besides the iPhone.

I'd particularly be interested in seeing reviews of the new G1 Android platform against the latest Windows Mobile device and Nokia's N95 or N96, which are the ultimate "do-it-all" smartphones that serious geeks around the world have gravitated towards in the last year or so. Nokia is said to have sold over half a million unlocked N95 devices in North America alone, despite the fact that no US wireless carrier "officially" supports that uber-smartphone.

These comparisons and reviews are likely forthcoming, and for now be more relevant for Google to beat with it's Android initiative than just Apple's iPhone.

Update:  Om Malik has a good post on the challenges Windows Mobile faces with the arrival of Android, with more thoughts to come on Symbian.

* Image source.

ON SOFTWARE BUGS AND THE 3G iPHONE

BUMPY ROAD

(Updated below)

All things are not rosy with my new 3G iPhone, as I've expressed in some posts on Twitter already.  Having eagerly anticipated the App Store now available with the iPhone 2.0 software on new and existing iPhones and iTouch iPods, I'd downloaded and installed over 60 third-paid and free applications (aka Apps), onto the new device in the last week (image source).

And I've paid a price in device instability ever since.  My brand new 3G iPhone has crashed and hung up on the boot screen, about five times now.  Each time it happened while I was playing or trying to wirelessly update an application installed on the device. 

Each time, after turning off the device and turning it on, I faced the famous shiny Apple screen, with no further response from the device.  I even took it in to the Genius Bar at the Apple store on the first crash, and they couldn't revive the device other than a full reset.

That involves taking the device back to the factory installed settings, wiping out all the customized settings and newly installed applications.  A full restore takes about two hours, even though all the applications and iTunes content are stored locally on my iMac.  It's just a slow, slow process.

Well, I've had to go through five of these now, and have just finished and customizing the iPhone with all my favorite settings, bookmarks, mail accounts, and applications for the sixth time.  And I'm planning to be much more careful in how I use the third party Apps, and how I go about updating them wirelessly (NOT).

Now, this post is not to complain about Apple, the new iPhone or the App Store.  It's just to highlight one user's experience with brand new, version 1.0 software, whether it's on a device or in the cloud. 

MacWorld makes this point particularly well in a recent article:

"With the release of the updated iPhone software, Apple flung open the doors of its new App Store. On its first day, the App store was populated with more than 500 programs, and that number is growing rapidly.

Think about that: 500 programs, all of them at version 1.0. On a device that had never before supported software written outside of Apple. It’s exciting, seeing the birth of a brand new software ecosystem. But it’s also scary. If people were worried about the first-generation iPhone hardware and software (many vowed they wouldn’t buy an iPhone until the second version arrived, for fear of buying a buggy 1.0 product), how should they feel about more than 500 programs on a brand-new platform, all at version 1.0?"

They go on to make the broader point of how the unique circumstances around the 3G iPhone introduction complicated the normal quality-testing process for third-party App developers:

"Unfortunately, there was no way for iPhone programmers to beta-test their products before the App Store launched. The software used to create iPhone programs was a secret. And only a select group of programmers were able to run their programs on real hardware, rather than in a Mac-based simulator. Developers in countries without iPhones could only test their programs on the iPod touch.

Even worse, Apple’s cloak of secrecy around the iPhone software programming tools prevented programmers from sharing tricks they had picked up during their work. The programming community, especially on the Mac, is remarkably collegial—programmers post blog entries detailing things they’ve learned all the time, and the quality of all the programs in the Mac ecosystem benefit as a result. Without blogging and Google searches, the only way iPhone programmers could share what they’d learned was through the old, inefficient medium of one-on-one conversations."

So, the reality is that early buyers of Apps on the Apple store on the new iPhone 2.0 software, are in for some continued instability.  It doesn't mean we have to like it, but at least we may be prepared to grin and bear it...for now.  It's Apple after all.

Update:  After experiencing a 7th crash and hang yesterday, I decided to do a full restore of the iPhone WITH all the Applications, but WITHOUT turning on syncing with MobileMe, the upgraded version of Apple's old .Mac (aka dotMac) service.  I especially didn't turn on the wireless, over-the-air "push" upgrading of my contacts, calendar, and email data via MobileMe, to see if this would stop the crashes.

It's been 12 hours since that restore, and so far so good.  The iPhone seems fairly stable, and am able to run any of the 65 or so Apps without any problems.  I still haven't tried to wirelessly update any of the Apps.  For now, will hold off any wireless data syncing and/or updates.  At least until the next firmware release from Apple.

ON INNOVATIONS IN MICRO-BLOGGING

A NEW TAKE

For all of the folks who're ardent users of "micro-blogging" services like Twitter, Pownce and others, there's a start-up that tries to do the same thing with a little bit of user interface innovation.  PC Magazine reviews this new service called Plurk, and has this to say:

"Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it can also be a darn good way to compete—especially when the imitator improves on the original. That's the approach taken by Plurk, a new microblogging rival to Twitter..."
"But while plenty of Twitter wannabees, such as Jaiku, dot the webscape, some offer little that's original beyond a slicker interface. Plurk's interface is certainly better, but the site also rethinks the genre somewhat and incorporates clever features.

   

		SLIDESHOW (7)
		Slideshow | All Shots

The site's primary innovation is the horizontal timeline it uses to display entries. That approach makes a lot of sense to me—it's a far more natural way to view sequential events than the vertical-scrolling method Twitter and its clones use."

The slideshow goes through some of the UI innovations, and they'll make more sense if you're already a user of these types of services.

The feature that strikes me as the most unique, is one which gives users credit, or "karma" for simply doing various things on the service:

"In the Plurk universe, your actions produce karma, but unlike its metaphysical counterpart, this one is quantifiable: Specifically, it ranges from starter (0 to 20) to Plurk Nirvana at from 81 to 100, and is recalculated every day. High karma brings a reward far beyond enlightenment, though: permission to use extra emoticons. Your karma level is based on your frequency of posting, the richness of your profile, and how many friends you invite."

It's kind of a frequent flier program for the online service, and an idea borrowed from world of computer and online games.  We'll see if it gains traction in the world of online social media.
I'm in the process of trying out the new service myself, and will see if the innovations make a material difference to using a service like this. 

Of course the critical factor driving the success of failure of a social service are the number of people using it.  And while Plurk offers ways to find Plurk members amongst your network of online friends on AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Twitter and other services, there's obviously not that many folks who've started to use Plurk yet.  So it may be some time before "Plurking" becomes familiar, even amongst geeks.