Monthly Archives: March 2007

I’ve had a ton of things sitting in tabs for a few days now, awaiting further pondering and deep thoughts. I’ve been too busy for that, so here’s the from the hip version, and it’s long, long like like the line for the bathroom at a baseball game, long like the line for a Will Smith movie on July 4th at 12:01am.

Scoble called Microsoft out. Some seem to think he’s now an adobe fanboy. I think the truth of the matter is Microsoft sucks, end of story. Have they always sucked, no. does everything they do suck? I doubt it, Xbox sure seems popular. I’ve never been a Scoble follower, I even saw this entry linked elsewhere, but he’s right. Microsoft needs to stop resting on the "our isht is loaded on most business machines so we win by default" concept. That’s not how you win, that’s how you remain the huge slow to react monster in the playground that the other kids run around poking with a stick. Scoble’s right, build a better ___ (whatever, search, blog tool, office suite, browser, OS, mail client, ANYTHING)  Does M$ really think Google, Y!, Adobe, twitter, facebook, etc aren’t threats? I have Mac Office 2004 on my mac. It’s the only M$ product I use anymore, and I only use it when I need to open a doc I’ve received. Apple Pages is no Word, by a long shot, but it’s fine for lightweight stuff.

Highrise,

37 Signals does it again. Tom and I were even talking about the need for this type of app a few weeks ago. A contact Management tool, that multiple people can use, edit, mark up, and be productive with. That WASN’T any of the current overly bloated management nightmares that pass for Contact Management these days. We should have guessed 37 Signals would be the guys to figure out how to strip out the crap and deliver a tool that is exactly what teams need. We’ve already signed up and are planning to use Highrise and Basecamp for all 360Conferences business. Conference planning in the virtual world.

Apollo,

Finally it’s here, in the wild. I’ll wait. I’ve heard several, lots of folks raising flags over stability, and such. I know it’s alpha, I’m not worried. I just don’t have the bandwidth to play with alpha tech. Beta tech, I’m all over like white on rice. I’m stoked it’s out and available to be played with. I’m really stoked that there are so many "Here’s my first apollo app" posts already, that’s promising.

The reason for this blathery long winded post, I’m off to SoCal the rest of the week, seeing family, Disney Land, etc.

Been a lot of cool things going on in the Twitter-verse (I think i just made that up… It’s mine, don’t try to steal it)

Aral has Friends or Followers, the twittermap now has (A really frakkin’ cool app) Twittervision

I’m glad twitter is getting so many eyeballs. As far as I can tell Adobe engage started the ball rolling, Tom, Ted and I kept it going and gave it a push at 360Flex, and now SXSW has come up behind it and given it a two handed shove. Very cool!

Also cool, the number of apps that use the Twitter API that are written in Flex, and (when released) Apollo.

Who can say if Twitter will be around in a year, but it’s definitely given us a cool new way to make the internets a smaller place.

Been a busy week… wait. it’s not over? Isht!

I’m working a video player component, can’t say more. I’ve been interviewing for some neat sounding full time jobs (Time for salary for a while, I think) and in general being really busy… oh and my MacBook Pro decided to become possessed by the devil so I had to (in the midst of trying to get my work done) reinstall the OS… Good times, good times.

I hope to be able to share what I’ve learned about using FMS and Flex 2 soon, since based on my troubles, there’s not much out there in this space. Props to Renaun for helping me earlier, it helped a lot!

I also hope to announce some cool new employer, we’ll see how that goes.

Now the hard part, starting over again for the next one, AND using what we learned to make that conference better!

We’re already looking at the survey results and are incredibly pleased with the criticisms! Give us more, like the survey says, be brutal. We won’t know what to fix until you guys all tell us. The praise is good too, keep it comin’ by all means :)

Time for a bullet list. My 360Flex take-aways

• Ryan Stewart is a lightweight :-P  (Ryan knows I love him, he’s my only superstar friend!)
• Sim Batemen is my hero too, Jen
• Conferences are hard, i might have said it before but I can’t double-click that enough
• Running a conference is frakkin’ great! I love it. I love that you guys had a good time, I love that the community not only got a little bigger with the 101 track but that it also got smaller. Blogs now have faces, IM IDs are now people we’ve had drinks with. That’s great!
• Twitter as a back channel, hotness!! Pretty sure not it’s intended use, and also pretty sure we killed a few servers this week, sorry Twitter team, but the back channel is the bomb!
• Food and beer might possibly make a conference!
• Speakers are rarely prepared, and never give up their sessions in advance, because they don’t have them.
• Lastly, you can’t please everyone, but damned if we’re not gonna keep tryin’

See everyone in six or so months. :D