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The Social Dilemma

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I knew going in that I’d be saddened and angered by ‘The Social Dilemma‘ the same as I was after watching ‘The Great Hack‘. I was right. Watching the documentary filled me with existential dread and anger. Nothing in it will be a shock to anyone who’s been involved in tech for the last decade (Except the suicide rates, that was shocking to me). While not shocking, it was still eye-opening and horrifying. I urge you to watch both of the documentaries mentioned above and make adjustments to your online life. The only way we’re going to fix this is by fighting back. Which is why this on my blog, and not a Facebook post.

That said, you should watch both if you still use Facebook.

As ‘The Social Dilemma‘ wrapped up I was already on my phone re-engaging Apple’s screen time, and turning off notifications on even more apps.

I’d be off Facebook today if it wasn’t where the indie publishing industry was centered. That industry, its insights and members are invaluable so I’d be hamstringing my career by cutting off access to that.

I’ve been working on spending less time there (Need to re-center those efforts). Despite its equally horrible problems twitter is a great way to still get a fix of what’s happening in the world, and if you don’t use Twitter’s site or apps, you can still get it unfiltered/unmanaged. You can also take a more active position in where you get news from, by controlling who you follow.

As a separate (but related) thing, I also just went in and told Google to blur my house in street view. You should too. I’m over giving Silicon Valley anything for free.

Do you need to organize a Hackathon?

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Some companies can rock their own hackathons! Developer evangelists do a good job with hackathons, but not all companies have developer evangelists, and not all developer evangelists can or want to organize events. That’s where I’d like to come in. I love organizing events, turns out I’m not half bad at it either. Have you been thinking about introducing your API or platform to developers and designers? Maybe you’ve got new things to show your existing communities, hackathons are great ways to galvanize community around what you offer. Generate awesome new ideas or companies (Startup weekend style) as well as find awesome new talent.

 

So there it is, you’re looking to do a hackathon and need some help actually doing it, Ping me. I’d love to talk to you about it. I wrote up some thoughts on what I can offer on the company page. 

 

 

to tweet or to app.net? That’s the question

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so yeah App.net has almost 12,00o people on board, all of which at a minimum paid $50/year. some paid more though for API access etc. That’s awesome congrats to them!

Much like I want Samsung or someone to make a tablet that competes with the iPad, I’m glad someone is tryin to steal Twitter’s lunch money. I hope they succeed. Twitter is a classic example of a company sitting around, killing it’s most loyal fan base to appeal to advertisers while doing nothing of value for users.

  1. Promoted tweets, trades $ for my attention, which isn’t cool because it’s my attention to sell, not twitters’.
  2. Twitter has done nothing to tackle spam, one of the things that is appealling about app.net is it’s likely to be spam free, or at least mostly. Most spammers won’t pay $50 a year I suspect, since most get such low volume out of their auto tweets.
  3. I want to pay twitter. I’d happily give them $50/year if it reduced the amount of spam, though they don’t seem to actually care, so I doubt $50/year would make them care.

I saw someone tweet that Twitter exec’s are probably looking at app.net and wringing their hands, but I suspect they’re not. I’m sure they know about it, it’d be hard not to, but given twitter’s behaviour the last year or so I suspect they’re not worried at all. I’d guess they won’t be worried about app.net until they realize they’re the new myspace, friendster, plurk, etc. Like the frog in the boiling water.

That is of course if they’re not planning their purchase strategy.

In my dream world I’d pay twitter. They’d have an API hook for “Paying member?” with a yes/no bit. My client of choice would let me filter out non-paying members. It’d be easy to tell people “You’re nice and all, but you don’t pay for twitter, so you’re in the pool with the spammers and losers, so I just can’t see what you’re saying” It’d solve a lot of my biggest complaints about twitter, and net them some money. Course they’re living in the “money will come from ads” world or something, so just keep collecting funding rounds or whatever.

I haven’t signed up for app.net yet, but I think I will. If nothing else to secure a username so I don’t end up johnwilker9385 or something.

 

Why I moved to Mail.app

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I’ve been reading the news and opinions about Sparrow’s acquisition (good for them!) It’s funny how these cycles go, and it’s almost always the same.

First is the news of the acquisition and almost always death of the much loved product.

Then there’s the “OMFG I Hate them, they sold out”

Then there’s the “You entitled pricks are pricks and aren’t owed shit”

Then there’s the  “We aren’t owed things, but there is a sort of unspoken contract”

I think all three are valid. Some folks just felt mad they paid money (whether the amount is significant or not is in the eye of the spender) for abandon-ware. Some  like to take the enlightened I’m-smarter-than-you approach and some like the look at things objectively. Each has it’s merits.

This is an interesting post as well on the subject, especially on the topic of money.

My initial reaction (as tweeted) was good for them, bad for me. I loved sparrow. I bought it. I bought the iOS version, though without push I never used it. I bought it because I think the only opinion that matters is my wallet. I bought it to show the developers that I supported them. Maybe that kept the lights on 10 minutes, who knows, but I’d guess the volume of us showing our support kept the lights on a lot longer. I also bought both versions because I wanted to support and encourage updates. I was ready to buy the iPad version as well.

It’s that last point that’s the reason I moved to mail.app. As someone said to me, Sparrow works just fine as is. Yes, yes it does. But why invest another minute of my time on something that will become more and more outdated? That’s why I stopped using tweetie. It was fine, but slowly got left behind in features. Why would any user of any product (ok, except cars) want to continue to use a product that is done with, dead. Yeah it’s fine now, it’ll be fine in six months. If you want nothing more than what sparrow does right now, you’re fine, use it for 10 years. If you want new features, like push in the iOS apps, the teased  iPad app, dropbox integration, etc you’re out of luck. What it is today is what it will always be. Enjoy

Do I hate the sparrow team? no I envy them, I’m happy for their success. If someone came to me and offered me a bag or two of money, I’d take it, we’re all lying if we say we wouldn’t. Am I bummed I didn’t get more mileage out of my spend? Yes, very much so. I agree and disagree with Matt that for $10 bucks or whatever Sparrow cost, you have no right to be mad. Money is money, i’d have paid $30 for sparrow. They set the price, so really what I paid is what they wanted. It’s a slippery slope argument about some mysterious point at which the amount you spent on a product entitles you to an opinion.

Whether it’s $10 or $50 every spend means something, every spend has an opportunity cost, I could have supported another indie developer with that money.

 

I liked Rian’s post because really that’s why I buy most of my software. Two things come into play. Is it good or can I use it? and does it support an indie developer. If both answers are yes, I buy it, shoot, even if the first answer is no, I buy it. I’ve spent a good chunk of money on apps I’ll never use because the purchase supported an indie developer. So in that respect it feels on a not-conscious level like a betrayal of my support. I supported you with my money, because you’r indie and rocking it and not only do you get acquired, but you let the acquirer kill the product that everyone loved and supported you by purchasing. It’s kind of a chicken an egg thing. Sparrow wouldn’t have been acquired if the app sucked and didn’t do well. If the app sucked and didn’t do well none of us would have bought it. The didn’t suck, and did do well, and made sparrow an attractive acquisition.

 

So yeah. Good for Sparrow, they made a great app and someone rewarded that by acquiring them. Bummer for those of us that voted with our wallets and supported Sparrow because it was awesome and had tons of potential, and now we’re left with no future updates, and a few unfulfilled promises.

Oh yeah and the reason i moved to mail.app…. I know the odds of it becoming abandon-ware are next to nil, and it’s always going to get some improvements, even if only incremental.

I Am Not Busy

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I’ve talked about being busy before. Lately it’s kind of come back around again with a post in of the NYT titled “The ‘Busy’ Trap”

I’m not busy. When a friend says “let’s go get coffee” I go. When my wife IM’s and asks if I want to take a walk, I go. When Bike to work day happens, I ride in it. When there’s a party in a park, I go to it. When an opportunity to take a trip with my wife comes up, I take it. I get my work done though. It just doesn’t consume me.

I run my own business, two of them actually. If anyone should be busy I could argue it’s me. But I’m not. Do I have things to do? Yes many of them. Do I need to put in 16 hour days? nope. Do i tell anyone who’ll listen how much work i put in on a daily basis? No that’s never even crossed my mind.If anything I’ve tweeted from time to time some accomplishment I’m proud of. Some result of work.

I know many folks, especially in my programmer circles might not agree, and when I wrote code for a living I spent many a day working 16+ hours. Not by choice. I never thought it was the right approach, but then it wasn’t my choice.

I have friends who constantly tweet a complaint like this “20 hours of X, time for bed, or maybe I’ll stay up” or some variation on the theme. Like the article above points out, these folks are staying up, never sleeping etc, because they take on too many things. Knowing some of these offenders I suspect the article is right, they simply wouldn’t know what to do with free time. These are often the “I don’t have time to read” types as well.

I don’t mean this post to be an attack on anyone at all, but to point out the simple fact (the one I made way back) we’re all busy with our lives, and if you’re THAT busy, you’re doing it wrong. And also, no one else cares, or is keeping tabs for future brownie point awarding.

 

Enjoy your life.

Where I drive I Chevy Volt… And Like It

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So I got to borrow a Chevy Volt for a few days last week thanks to Klout and Chevy. I’m supposed to disclose things like this is it was a free loan for 4 days.

Ok that said, I’m not an American car guy. in fact I’ve never

owned, been inclined to own, or liked anything made in America. Sure there’s some nice whips coming out of Detroit, but none made me want to walk away from my beloved Austrian Engineering.

While I’m not about to sell my paid off A4 to get a Volt, if my situation was different, the Volt would be a contender.

But the Volt is a nice looking ride. Externally it’s a sporty little hatchback, with clean lines and some definite aggressiveness. The headlights (usually my first impression is based on them) are nice and angular. They were your basic Halogen, which felt cheap to me.

Before I go inside, my only complaints on the exterior are: the mirrors are a bit big and stick out like Alfalfa’s ears, and at least on the model I drove, weren’t automatic when parking, etc. And the front end sticks a bit out from the wheels. Even with just me in the car, pulling out of the alley I park in caused some scraping. My A4 with sport suspension has no issues. Big nose.

Ok interior stuff.

The inside is pretty nice. A good amount of brushed alum, which always adds class :)

The console is all touch button goodness,  with very few actual moving buttons. I found the interior quite nice, which is usually what I hate the most about american cars. Chrome does not make something that sucks, better on it’s own.

My unit came with Navigation, it was ass.  One of the worst UX’s I’ve ever seen. The screen was way too busy, the touch screen (oh yeah, the center screen is a touch screen!) buttons were confusing, and overall it wasn’t fun to use. Worse yet, if you were moving you couldn’t use it. On the move and need to change your destination? Too bad. Find yourself lost, too bad. I understand it’s a safety feature, my car displays a disclaimer that the passenger should be the one to use the nav while in motion. The Volt straight up locks the user out of the Nav until you come to a stop.

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