Category Archives: Technology

Review: Seesmic Desktop

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So, Seesmic Desktop came out a little over a week ago and I have finally had time to do a proper review. The first few days I was unable to use it do to some major bugs that wouldn’t let me sign in to my account, thankfully Loic and the Dev team at Seesmic had it fixed within several days, along with several other issues. Well let me get down to business and do a quick review of the product.

Why you might want to use the Seemic Desktop over other Twitter Apps

  • Multiple Account Support

It’s one of the few Twitter Apps that allows you to be logged into multiple accounts at once and helps to automatically reply with the appropriate account. Has easy switching above the update field.

  • Allows you to create Groups and Save Searches

It’s also one of the few apps that lets you group users, following after its main competitor Tweetdeck. Saved searches are a continuation from Twhirl that makes ego searching Twitter a far easier experience. These 2 items make it a huge force when you are handling multiple accounts and managing marketing efforts.

  • Offers a multi-column view

Though I don’t prefer this view; many people that Seesmic is trying to draw are coming from Tweetdeck where this is what they had. The issue that this brings up is that it takes up the whole monitor, which isn’t appropriate for someone who only has access to 1 monitor, say a laptop user.

  • Future Integration with many other services

This is a given, after all they have integrated multiple services into their prior client Twhirl. I’d expect to see Facebook, Friendfeed, Seesmic, and Identi.ca support on it at the least. They also have built in Ping.FM support on Twhirl and I’d expect to see that included soon as many people are requesting its addition. Loic is also speaking to Kevin Rose, Founder of Digg, and I wouldn’t be all that surprised if they worked Digg into the mix.

Even with all these major pluses to Seesmic Desktop there are also some issues that still need to be resolved with Desktop

  • Wastes a Large Amount of Screen Real-Estate

Wasted Space

As you can see from @guykawasaki‘s image (above) there is a large amount of wasted space. Now as I mentioned in the multi-column view it’s no good for a single monitor set up and it’s still no good with all the wasted space in general. They have stated that they are working on a minimalist version so hopefully they will fix this issue.

  • Slightly Memory Intensive

I was playing around with it and it seems a bit of a glutton with how it treats your memory. Upon opening and signing into 2 accounts I was seeing about 95MB + ~5MB for each new column. Not the prettiest use of resources but still not to bad with only a few columns.

  • Currently Doesn’t Offer Customizations

The UI isn’t all that pretty and you can’t modify how the text looks at this point. So it is costing them some users with bad eyes or those who enjoy modifying their applications interfaces.

  • No Distinction of Read/Unread tweets

This was the biggest one of all for me, it’s the main reason I don’t use any app besides Twhirl. I like having an easy way of telling if I have read something, because my time is important and right now they don’t offer it. This is where Tweetdeck screwed up and the main reason I couldn’t use their product.

How does it stand up to the other apps

Right now, I won’t be using it often. I’ll use it over Tweetdeck because the interface is still more pleasing, but hands down Twhirl has my heart and until they pull most of it into the service I won’t use it frequently. I give it about 3 months until it becomes my primary App, because it is amazing and it shows promise. Overall, I think Seesmic Desktop is good and will be extremely useful as people begin to amass ever larger groups of friends/followers.

P.S.- Loic, Thomas, or anyone else that works on the Seesmic Desktop. I have a suggestion to help save some screen space and to also improve the UI. You could replace the Sidebar with something similar to Opera’s Panels. This simple interface change would allow for huge space savings and an easier interface to interact with.

The Twitter Tradeoff

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Do you follow many people or few? This is the most essential question and most disputed aspect of Twitter, although it is also a huge part of other networks as well. I’ve been thinking about it alot the past month and  the answer is both depending on how you want to use the service. You can go small and extract alot of data and make deeper relationships or you can go big and funnel your relationships though they would be diluted.

Why go Small?

The main reason to go small is that you can stay heavily connected and have relevant data flowing constantly with out much noise in the stream. The system was originally designed for keeping track of friends so it makes sense to stay small. There are still problems with only following a few people and the main problem is based on the reciprocal friending that occurs on the service, if you are followed by someone they want you to follow them back. Having only a small group makes it hard to get a large set of advice and responses when you ask a question.

Why go Big?

The main reason to go big is to spur on the reciprocity that I mentioned above that allows you to poll your followers for answers. Also with the reciprocal reaction that gives you lots of followers it allows you to market yourself and your products to them. Another plus that comes with the mass friending is if your able to monitor and track the data that is coming through your stream you can pull out large amounts of focused data.

Now the downside of big is that you can’t build meaningful relationships easily with your friends based off of their tweets. You are opening the door to spammers by (auto-)following everyone back. It makes it harder to use apps because of to much data coming into the API for your user.

My Choice: Small

To me I’d rather have a large group of followers that I could ping off of but only be following a subset of them so that I can have a wealthy stream of information that’s relevant to me. To me I don’t want to have a lot of crap, I want to have valuable wealth inducing assets in my stream. It’s up to you whether you are marketing or there to extract information and build relationships to decide which path you want.

Note this is something that is equally applicable through the broad area of Social Media and it’s up to you. Twitter just takes this single aspect and inflames it in how their service is used making the way you use the service change based on the numbers. One site that has a similar set of changing data based on the numbers of friends & followers is Digg in that you have the ability to shout a story(currently being analysed for removal) to your friends to get dugg up.

Mint For Twhirl

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Mint

So I want to offer anyone who wants it a free Twhirl skin that makes tracking replies and direct messages inline alot easier. It also introduces contrast in the FriendFeed portion of the app between others’ comments and your’s against the regular background.

Here’s the installation info you’ll need to install the skin. Download the Mint Skin
1.)  Extract the Mint.xml file.
2.) Go into your Twhirl skins folder:

  • For PC it’s in Program Files Twhirl colorschemes
  • For Mac its in Twhirl- (Right click) show package contents, Colorschemes

3.) Copy the file into the folder.
4.) Restart Twhirl and enable the theme.

Hope you enjoy, leave me comments or send me a reply @jimminy if you do or if there is anything you would like modified. I’m also planning on working on some more so if you would have an idea of something you would like just let me know.

Update: @kyeung808 noticed a little issue with the image I have up above and I must take note of it. The image above appears to show multiple columns but it’s actually Twitter on the left and FriendFeed on the right.

Computer Issues & A Few Ideas

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For everyone who waited for something Tuesday and Thursday I’ll apologize. I ended up doing a clean install trying to get my burner to work Sunday evening, because I wanted Windows 7. So, instead of doing anything productive I spent my time on my computer searching for everything to get it back into working condition and coming up with ideas for posts, improving some products, and just flat out re-evaluating my own purposes.

It’s sad to here that Steve Jobs is stepping down, but maybe whoever takes over while he’s gone will start making improvements to their fringe products like iTunes. Just the other day I was using it, as it is my default player, and I realized that Window’s Media Player had a better user interface, though slower and not as pretty. In WMP, if you want to listen to an album by itself all you have to do is double click on it’s art or right-click on it’s title and select play. iTunes doesn’t have this it takes at least 2-5 clicks and some search through different menu’s to get to play just an album, that’s quite a disrespectful use of the the user’s time.

In other news, people have started to look at the education bubble that we’ll be facing in the next few years. John Robb’s article “Industrial Education” has caused a stir, “There is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree.” I like how he’s done this because his analysis comes toward the same view as my posts from early last year on Social Perception and Personal Economics of education where I discuss the topic, but he also comes up with some great ideas on replacing it.

That’s all I have to say this morning, I’ll be back in a few days with new posts, now that everything is back in working order.

Technology Is Killing Our Time Of Marvel

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What’s the most interesting thing that you’ve marveled over in the last month? last week? last day? I’d bet most of you picked different things for each one. Just think about how fast information is flowing through your media streams; you have less and less time to marvel over something.

As technology makes more and more information available to you at an ever greater speed, your time to marvel over the latest design or innovative idea shrinks. Look at just about any area that your interested in. Now, think back to last year and what you were amazed by in that area and what your amazed by this year, last year’s seems pretty bland in comparison, right? How many times were you amazed by the changes that took place throughout the year in that area? Depending on your source for information it would probably change once a month, once a week, once a day.

Now let’s go back and look at what would have been a marvel to people throughout the 20th century,  a lot of what I’m basing this paragraph on is the image from Visualizing Economics.   The most marvelous things at the turn of the century had very little competition, due to less information for the masses. It took cars 15 years to reach 20% usage and during the same period electricity reached only 30% of the nation. These would have been marvelous utilities to have could you afford them.

As time goes on the different media streams come along that hasten the usage and acceptance I figure a ~20% usage rate as the reduction to marvel. The radio comes along and reaches 20% in just 5 years but allows other forms of media, such as television, computers, the internet, to develop more quickly than had been possible before.  B/W and Color televisions both took ~5 years to reach the threshold, computers took about 20 years and the internet roughly 10.

If you look at how fast we find new marvels today it takes between 1-5 years for nearly anything to reach the  20% threshold. Also, with each new advance in media we find that it loses it’s marvel much quicker than before because there are many more things to marvel at, which reduces the threshold to about 10% currently. As more and more new things come around we have less and less time to spend marveling over it.

This ever increasing pace that removes our abilities to attach to something for a long period of time is going to make it harder and harder for businesses to become a Goliath. This has already started to show in weak returns for advertising and purchasing of slower media types, such as newspapers and magazines. In the very near future you will have to come out with something that will blow everyone away as quick as possible  you don’t have the time to wait and become a Microsoft or Google.

Would love to hear your opinions in the comments about what you think of this idea.

The Most Innovative Video Games of 2008

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As the year ends, I feel like I pointing out some of the most innovative games to be released this year. They have all been pretty high profile throughout the year.  Alright now I guess it’s time to show everyone the games.

Braid (Xbox 360, PC 1stQ ’09)

This game is probably the most innovative game in this century so far. It takes the idea of controlling time and runs with it in all directions, to solve puzzles and complete levels, turning this platform game into one of the best games of the year.  If you haven’t played it pick it up on Xbox Live Arcade now or if you don’t have a 360 you can wait for the PC version to come in the 1st quarter of 2009.

Audiosurf (PC-only)

This is probably my favorite time waster of 2008 and the foreseeable future. The game takes your non-DRM audio tracks into race tracks, based on various elements of the audio file, and crosses it with a puzzle game. You end up having something that resembles what you would get if you crossed Guitar Hero and F-Zero. Since it is using your audio to create the game you can keep adding more and more levels as you add more and more audio to your hard drive. Pick it up from Steam for $9.99 right now.

Mirrors Edge (Xbox 360 ,PS3, PC 1stQ’09)

This isn’t a truly large innovation but this game has laid a whole new path for future games that harness first-person perspectives. It was seemingly so real that it had people vomiting from the virtual induction of themselves into the game by seeing the arms, torso, and legs of Faith. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more games that use this induction to make their games more realistic.

Left 4 Dead (Xbox 360, PC)

This game is just another FPS until you get into it and have hundreds of enemies rush you out of nowhere. The AI Director has it’s issues but it provides this game with some suppensful moments that make every play-through completely different. It analyzes whether your doing well or barely hanging on and adapts how many and when it’s going to flood you with enemies.

Those where the most innovative games that I have seen and played in 2008, all are recommended purchases. I’ve also already spotted one that is going to be an innovative game when it comes out in 2009 or 2010. The game is called LOVE and is a MMO that is procedural rendered and completely editable by the players.

If you think I missed a game let me know and I’ll look into it or tell you why it didn’t get on the list.

Following The Green

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ComputerWorld posted an article that greatly disturbs me. In the article, it shows the growth of CS courses after a steady decline from the ’03-’04 school year to ’07 and how many are switching majors from business. It also mentions that students were making a similar swap back in the late 90’s towards tech.

Bryant said he expects that the troubles on Wall Street will likely influence some students to switch majors in the coming months from business to other fields, including computer science. He also urges caution to those students.

These students are obviously in it for the green, they followed it to business and now that it collapsed they’re following it to the next big thing. What we need are people passionate about what they do, not people that are only passionate about money, key examples abound in the Financial Sector right now. I think we should find people who actually want to do these jobs, and not just for the money.

With the economy as weak as it is, if your a small company it’s going to be even more important for you to find passionate people, just read Jason Calacanis’ latest post (recommend signing up to his mailing list), excerpt below.

3. Firing the average people: Again, it’s totally politically
incorrect, but I highly recommend firing anyone who is good or
average. Startups are an Olympic sport and every slot on your team is
critical. You wouldn’t put a “good” swimmer in a relay, would you?
Don’t have one in your startup. Fire the good and replace them with
the great. ~ Jason Calacanis

You know who are probably not going to be average, the people who are passionate about what they are doing. The passionate employee may spend more of their personal time on learning more about they’re area, and be willing to take a pay cut to keep they’re position.

So we need to find a way to deter people from following the money, in the next few years we will see a large rise in un-passionate employees in the Tech Industry. This will hurt companies that invest in people that only got into the area for the cash. What happens when the cashflow slows, or another bubble happens, and how can we stop them now?