Community Blogs

It seems like a good post from the folks at Twitter has been interpreted by Scoble as being all about him . I gotta say, I'm just not seeing it. I'm also not sure why Scoble is throwing such a public tantrum about Twitter's down time. Regardless of what you think about it all, there's a strangely familiar pattern I've seen when it comes to the tech-centric "2.0" apps and what typical software development has experienced for longer than I've been doing it. Scoble is the big power customer, much like an executive for an internal line-of-business product at any corporation. Alex the Twitter guy is like the product manager trying to explain technological problems to the executive who can't be bothered with the...

Twitter scores another $15 million, and it's worth around $80 million. So let me get this straight... A Web app with no business model that basically blogs short entries and aggregates them is worth $80 million. Doesn't that feel very 1999 to you? Read More...

Robert Scoble annoys me. I used to enjoy reading his blog, but it has gone to a point where he really thinks he has all the answers and is the smartest blogger on the Net, masked thinly by the occasional self-deprecating comment or whatever. But now he got booted off of Facebook because he was using an automated script to take all of the contact information from his 5,000 friends and dump it into Plaxo. Are you seeing the irony here? This is the same guy who called out Zuckerberg at Facebook for screwing with people's privacy and not owning up to it. Are you kidding me? Here's the big news flash, Scoble... I added you as a friend to see what you were up to, not so you could suck out even my name and e-mail and put it in some other system. Why...

I was listening to This Week In Tech this morning, as they were talking about various services and Web sites they use. It occurred to me that, while many of these sites are very fascinating, most are me-too at best, or worthless at worst. Certainly you're familiar with Wayne Gretzky once saying that he skates to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. (I can't prove that, but I'm sure it's online somewhere.) Well, so much of what makes headlines out there has been done many times over. Everyone wants to have social networking now. Sorry, but unless Facebook makes some colossal mistake, you're too late. The party is over. All of this link sharing and super high tech community junk is neat, but how much do you need? The problem is...

Apple fan or not, people seem to be annoyed that Apple is not opening up the iPhone for application support on the device itself. It's not just the Windows developers who are annoyed, it's the faithful Apple developers too. But why? This is the point we've been trying to get to for years! When I worked at Penton Media back in 2000, a B2B rag/tradeshow company, we internally talked about how cool it would be to do Web-based CRM, among other things. The short-sightedness of the execs of course poo-poo'd this, and it never got beyond discussions. (Morons. Said execs managed to nearly kill the company and get it delisted from the NYSE, while Salesforce.com continues to thrive.) Knowing that eventually most computers would be connected from virtually...

There were another two entries on News.com today about Twitter, and I keep asking, who cares? If you're not familiar with the service, it's like short attention span blogging that can blast everyone with text messages with whatever you post. You can do RSS or view on the Web as well. But honestly, so what? I mean, aside from Tyler who posts lots of pictures of himself balancing beverages on his knees and sporting Crocs and shades (;)), who needs this? Not only am I not interested in giving the world a play-by-play every time I take a shit, but I'm even less interested in seeing other people do it. It's like the people who change their status on Facebook ten times a day. I just don't care. It really strikes me as a short-lived tech fad for narcissists...

Where I work: The Plain Dealer (they describe my environment on page 3) Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Read More...

I think the world rightfully has accepted the linear thread in discussion forums. The negative of this is that people quote entire, untrimmed, posts and that's annoying. (Of course, lazy asses did this on Usenet too, but whatever.) Is there any lingering preference still for the Usenet-style tree of discussion? I personally always thought it sucked because it's not how human beings talk. It's like speaking to a room full of people and eventually having to work the entire room, one person at a time, and simultaneously conduct a zillion different discussions. Digg does an almost hybrid approach to this, in that they only allow the branch to go one level in. What do you think? Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit...

I know that this will annoy some people (right, Rob?), but here's a video of the 37signals guys kissing Apple's ass: http://www.apple.com/education/whymac/compsci/video.html Forget about the content... look at the office. It's reflective of their Web apps. It's sparse, functional and simple. I'll admit that I'm sick of hearing about these guys, but why am I so drawn to what they have to say? Why did I buy the Getting Real e-book? Sometimes I'm annoyed at myself for being into their world. I think to answer this obsession question, we have to look at the two sides to the life of a developer. On the user side, simple is better in most cases. Who uses more than a fraction of the features in Word, right? I just want to...

Leo says he'd love to do a TechTV reunion. God do I miss that channel. I sat down to watch The Screen Savers pretty much every weekday for almost three years. I couldn't get enough of it! The personalities on that show were top notch geeks. Over the years we always had Leo and Patrick, then later Kevin, plus Megan, Jessica and Sarah. Yoshi, Roger and Robert contributed good stuff, and even Martin was entertaining to some degree. But G4 and Comcast hosed the channel, and they deserve the crappy ratings they're getting. Pirillo and Scoble have differing views on what made TechTV great, and what is good about life after the network. I tend to agree with Scoble. It might be sad that I don't get The Screen Savers in my living room...