Amit Schreiber's Blog | ืืืืื ืฉื ืขืืืช ืฉืจืืืืจ
Another list of alarm clocks is out now to satisfy my endless fascination with the way people choose to wake themselves up. Number 9 (“You Snooze You Lose”) is by far the funniest one. Its description is as follows:
The SnลซzNLลซz alarm clock connects to your bank account via Wi-Fi and automatically transfers your money to a predetermined charity you hate.
(via Digg)
Scott Adams announced that he will write less on his blog from now on. He kept a one-post-per-day schedule for over 2 years, which is big even for a writer. Scott’s blog was one of my favorite daily reads and since I started reading the blog over a year ago, I haven’t missed even one of his posts. So you can see why I think it’s a shame that he made such a decision.
Scott uses his logical way of thinking and observational powers to explain his decision. One reason (you can’t see the ads in RSS readers) seems strange to me since you can put ads in RSS feeds, or give the reader just a part of your post so that she will have to visit the website in order to read the post (UPDATE: a day after Scott posted his decision, he chose the second way to “lure” people into the website). The other reasons, unfortunately, are entirely logical.
It’s a big loss to the blogosphere, but it was a hell of a ride :)
Yesterday I complained that the modern desktop hasn’t advanced very much. Today I kind of got my answer. Smashing Magazine posted a list named “User Experience Of The Future” which is a pretty cool collection of current advances in display and user interaction with computers. (via Digg)
I was looking today at a post on Engadget called “Desktop Evolution: Windows and Mac OS Visual Comparison Through the Years” and expected to see how, over the years, the desktop became more and more beautiful and usable. But I was extremely under-impressed.
Windows Vista looks nice but nothing really exciting (also, I can’t ignore the fact that the best looking Vista both costs a lot and requires super-new hardware.) The latest OS from Apple, Mac OS X 10.5, is supposed to be innovative but also looks like a slightly-more-beautiful clone of its old self. I mean eventually when you’re on a computer, your desktop is not a destination and as nice as it looks, nothing seems to have changed.
Where are the usability benefits? Considering all the great minds working on software today, is this the best we can do with the desktop?
Jeff Dunham is by far the best ventreliquist I’ve ever seen perform. Not only he has a range of characters that are all hilarious, his act is also simply very funny because it’s well thought and conducted. Here are two of his shows (both around 1 hour):
Just a quickie today: 25 baffling toys from around the world (some of them are really worrying) (via Digg)
Social networks are the big thing these days. Recently I joined two social networks: LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network, was fun to play with at first. I, too, joined the “add your friends” race and added as many as I could find (I didn’t just add anyone, though. Only people I actually know well enough to consider contacts). After a while, I became bored with LinkedIn. There was just nothing there for me to do. I’m not seeking a new job, I’m not looking to “network” with high-profile names. I just have nothing to do there.
Facebook, on the other hand, gives users as much stuff to tinker with as they can handle. Considered a genius move, Facebook creators opened the site by providing an application API that can be used to create “Facebook applications.” There is a huge amount of applications, from gift-giving to playlist display and whatnot. You can post images, videos, thoughts and anything you can think of on Facebook.
There’s a lot of hype around Facebook with regards to the applications. However, the applications thing can be a little annoying. Let’s say a friend posted a song that can be listened to on his profile page. To listen to that song, I have to install the application on my profile as well. Why? I have no idea. I guess either that’s an enforcement of Facebook itself, or application makers are in a race to virally spread their applications to get better numbers in the overall application installation statistics. This kind of behavior makes me not want to use the website.
Recently, Google announced OpenSocial, a way to build social networks applications in a way that is independent of a website. While the OpenSocial group includes MySpace (the biggest, yet ugliest, social network that exists today), it doesn’t include Facebook. That’s a shame for application developers, considering that Facebook is rapidly growing and appears to have a better application delivery/installation mechanism than other websites.
Assuming I have an idea for a social network application, a few questions are bothering me:
Update: After writing this post I went to see a video that discusses the possibilities of monetizing on the Facebook platform in addition to the problems that Facebook application developers face today and why they simply have no choice but to make users install their applications to get recognition by more users.
There has always been speculation that Google is developing a mobile phone (a gPhone, as most articles called it), but Google always does things differently. This time announcing the Open Handset Alliance, which is a bunch of companies that develop an open, Linux-based hardware and software platform with an open API. The platform is called Android.
There’s not much to see yet (specifically, there isn’t any phone based on Android yet) but there are two nice short videos. One is Introducing Android, which shows the team that developed it (including Andy Rubin, who you can read about in this New York Times article). The second video is called If I had a magic phone where you can see cute kids telling us what they expect from a magic phone.
Time seems to go on faster lately – it’s been 9 days since I last wrote on this blog and I haven’t noticed. Even though I mostly don’t have much to say and I usually share links, it’s still important to me to regularly write on the blog.
The thing is that once you share some stuff on a blog, you want the next thing you share to be even better than before. I mean, I still have a lot of stuff I read on the web that’s interesting on a daily basis, but a lot of it comes from the same sources (mostly my RSS feed list) so it would seem like I’m repeating myself a lot – posting links to the same sources again and again.
Anyway, I hope to return to write regularly – even if it doesn’t mean posting daily.
