friendfeed

I know, just what you need is another invite to some social application. You're thinking: "I'm on MySpace/Facebook, why do I need anything else?"

First off, those social networks are so 2006, secondly, they're tied down to your computer and logging in to the network.

Forget social networks, it's time for social applications. With the freedom I discovered by getting a mobile device that connects to the "interwebs" from anywhere (okay, there seems to be a dead spot in the middle of the Hussey Sound), I have gotten wrapped up in social applications. I know, it's a lot for all of you non-geeks out there to handle. But, trust me when I say that you'll be just as enthralled if you give it a shot. There are only two problems with these applications. One, there are a lot of different things to handle, I can find myself staying up until 1am checking all of my different services (like last night). Two, none of my friends are geek-ish enough to take part yet, so the whole social part of it is pretty one-sided for me right now.

That's why I introduce to you friendfeed.com

This is a message posting/conversation site that is similar in a way to pownce or twitter. The difference is that it integrates all of the other social application that you use into one feed. So I, for example, have my blog, my digg, my flickr, my gmail status, my pandora, my picasa, my pownce, my linkedin and my twitter accounts all connected to friendfeed. When I update any one of those it will be posted on my friendfeed. Basically, if you join friendfeed and subscribe to me, you can eavesdrop on me all day long. On top of that, many of you already use a couple of these applications, so even if you never return to friendfeed, everyone else will still benefit from you making an account and connecting to your other services. (Other services include: Google reader, StumbleUpon, Jaiku, YouTube, iLike, Amazon Wishlists, Netflix queue, and others...35 total).

Once you are all set up, you will see a list of all updates to these applications in chronological order. Your friends not only catch up and keep up with what's new with you, but they can comment on anything and start conversations on each feed.

So, check it out. It's a much more up close and personalized way to stay connected than those networks that are infested with Fwd: surveys and single-flavored, re-skinned applications.

My friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/cadebro

TechMaine Fund

I received this email today and thought I would pass it along to anyone who thinks having technology entrepreneurs in Maine is important:

Hi Cade,

Maine needs additional financing vehicles to attract new companies and ideas and to fund and retain our current entrepreneurs. We are entering the last days of Maine's current legislative session and one of the remaining bills is the TechMaine initiative for the creation of a private equity Venture Capital Fund of Funds to support Maine's technology entrepreneurs and grow Maine's economy. Maine can secure a competitive advantage in New England by implementing a Fund of Fund investment vehicle.

The legislation is titled:
LR 3568: An Act To Attract New Capital for Innovative Businesses through Equity Investment in Maine

WE NEED YOUR HELP ensuring this important legislation becomes enacted! We need you to take action and contact your legislators to let them know your support for this initiative. We've created a Website at www.MaineFundOfFunds.com to supply you additional information and help through the process of reaching out to your elected officials.

Contacting your legislator is vital! On most issues, legislators and other elected officials receive very little input from their constituents. This seems to be especially true of technological issues.

Being contacted by even just a few voters is often enough to mold or shift a legislator's stance on an issue, especially if they have not had much voter contact on that issue before. Every e-mail and call is important.

Please visit www.MaineFundOfFunds.com today, spread the word, and help create a new vehicle to grow Maine's economy!


Thanks!
Joe Kumiszcza

How OneHut Burned Me

Two years ago I began working as a freelance Web designer. My intentions were not to make big bucks, but to help people and organizations out who could not afford to hire their own designer while gaining experience. Having little experience with Web hosts, I referred to the results of several Web host ranking Web sites. I thought I made a good choice when my research turned up OneHut, a very affordable host with average customer service and a non-WYSIWYG interface.

I was a fairly happy customer for several years. Customer service was not entirely responsive and when they did fix an issues, they were not very good at communicating that to me. But, I figured I got what I paid for.

Well, did I ever get it.

This past weekend all of the sites I manage went down, and did not come back. With the help from a friend and a little research I soon realized that OneHut went out of business without warning any of their customers. Not only have I lost all of the pages and assets to several sites (including over two years of work on my brother-in-law's Web site), but it appears that good ole OneHut registered my domains in what I am guess is their parent company's name. As a result I might not be able to transfer my clients' domain names.

Research uncovered this blog by another unhappy customer, this forum string on the Web site of the user interface OneHut used (the only feature with which I was content), these reviews from unhappy customers, and the Better Business Bureau's report on the company.

With little else to do, I decided to try to contact the company with which my domains were registered, names4ever.com. That URL directed me to aplus.net (with a little more research I discovered that these urls do as well: abac.com, server4me.com, websolo.com). I spoke with customer service and they directed me to contact support@names4ever.com and said they will set me up with access to manage my domains (which is strange because names4ever directed me to aplus.net). After not hearing from them for four days, today I emailed customer support at aplus.net retelling my tragic story and hoping for a little serious direction.

Now, I am no expert on the clientèle of Web hosts, but upon googling "ABACUS America scam" (ABACUS America being the company that owns names4ever, and apparently the names sake of abac.com and aplus.net), I was returned a long list of escrow scam sites, all hosted by said ABACUS company. For some reason I don't think I will be getting any help from this company, and in the end its my clients and my reputation that will suffer.

Let this be a warning to all out there thinking of finding a cheap Web host. Go with a trusted name, it's worth the extra cost.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar has a new-to-me feature of being able to sync with Microsoft Outlook.

You can choose to sync both ways, Outlook appointments to Google Calendar, or Google events to Outlook Calendar. You can also choose how many minutes should pass between syncs. I tried it out (syncing Google Calendar with Outlook appointments), and was disappointed to find that it only synced with appointments that I had created, not ones that I have been invited to and accepted. So, I quickly uninstalled it. Though I wouldn't suggest using the sync application, a good feature that I did discover (not in any way connected with the sync application) is that if you invite your Gmail account to an appointment while setting it up, it will automatically add the event to your Google Calendar.

Find out more about Google Calendar Sync

Greener Gadgets

Friday, February 1st, 2008, CEA, inhabitat and other partners are sponsoring the first Greener Gadgets Conference at McGraw-Hill Conference Center in New York City. The intent of the conference is to bring visibility to designing for sustainability, product life cycle management, take-back and recycling programs, energy efficiency, greener materials, and green lifestyle and product marketing. The conference will also showcase a prototype green office and exhibits from leading green technology companies.

Engadget is giving away 5 tickets to the sold out conference. You can register here, but Engadget claims that they are going to verify that you can actually attend before giving away the tickets. So, make sure the date and place is doable before signing up. The deadline is this Sunday, the 27th.

Join me in signing up, we could all use a little more knowledge when it comes to going green.

WiFi Everywhere?

According to an Ars Technica article today, American Airlines is adding WiFi Internet access to their transcontinental flights. This will be achieved by three antennas attached to the plane that receive the signal from nearly 100 cellular towers across the United States. The signal will then be evenly dispersed through the plane's cabin by access points installed on the cabin's ceiling. The service is expected to cost ticker holders $10.

This kind of news makes me feel warm all over. There is nothing more depressing than being unable to access the Internet when you're sitting around doing nothing. Although it has been years since I have regularly flown, I am very familiar with WiFi withdrawal. Now, if only Casco Bay Lines would get on the ball an install a similar service for commuters.

WTT Epic Loot for Cold Cash

As the popularity and demand for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) continues to skyrocket, interesting niches have come about along with some interesting issues. One of the largest of these new niches is the abundance of auction houses and stores for purchasing virtual gear, gold, or leveled players. With this virtual economy come issues that spread beyond the game. Mainly cheats, exploits and phishing. But, as the new book Exploiting Online Games points out, players are going out of their way to covertly make money off of the game software itself. This is certainly nothing new, but it is getting to point of becoming serious as developers don't have he infrastructure in places to pick gamers that are using exploits or bots out of the crowd of millions. It appears that the infrastructure that allows gamers' PCs to connect to a persistent world hosted on a server is also the source of this conundrum.

For more information, read this Security Focus article.

Desk-Potatoes Are More Engaged

MediaPost reported the other day that viewers are 47% more engaged in ads streamed online than on traditional television. The article was a result of a year's worth of research by Simmons, a company with over 50 years of experience studying television ads. The research also showed that WebTV viewers are more involved with the shows they watch and enjoy ads from Web sites they visit more often.

My scientific mind wonders what this data actually correlates. Is the effectiveness of the ads dependent on the medium? That is the conclusion that the MediaPost article implies. To me, there are more variables at play. Some examples:

• People are more accustomed to lounging on their couch and sitting up and aware at their computers
• Most online software marks the location of advertisements on the video's scrubber and has a timer on the length of the ad, making ads more bearable
• It's much easier to surf channels on television; location would be lost online if one browsed to another site
• Television is more casual, those who watch online are actively seeking content
• Watching online is trendier and has a fresher feel as the video is customizable and surrounded by Web 2.0 smoothness and gradients

It seems to me that the viewer's attentiveness is due to who the viewer is and why they are viewing, rather than the effectiveness of one medium over another. But, the outcome is the same; online delivery of television shows is a viable and successful means of advertising to viewers. Hopefully two things will come about due to broadcast companies' painfully-slow discovery of online video.

1. The writer's strike will conclude as both parties realize how much money is being lost
2. Broadcast companies start posting more full episodes and larger back-catalogs
   

For now, I will be happy with what I have: Hulu Beta.

MESDA's 15th Annual Conference

MESDA’s 15^th annual conference began with an announcement that MESDA is being renamed techMaine as it now encompasses more than just software development. Another interesting note from the opening remarks was MESDA’s placement in Google searches, such as being the second result when searching “technology events” (in actuality it is the first result as the one before is a sponsored link).

The Keynote speech was given by Frederick Hayes-Roth, former Chief Technology Officer of Hewlett-Packard. The Keynote was entitled: “Getting Ahead of the Avalanche.” It discussed the rapid growth of information technology and how more intelligent techniques of filtering will be needed to parse relevant and material information out of the avalanche of incoming data. Some relevant and material information from the Keynote was:

• Due to Moore’s Law, by 2040 a person will be able to purchase a computer with the processing power that exceeds the combined processing power of all human brains for a cost of $1000. But, how will that be useful to an individual?


• The cost of putting information on the Web per bit is approaching $0.00; communication is becoming free despite service provider’s resistance.


• It is impossible for an individual to absorb all relevant and material information.


• Bits only have value when they meet the user’s needs and expectations. A user-centric, value delivery system is needed; which was dubbed “Me-centric.” Some current examples are iTunes, TiVO, Yahoo! Alerts, RSS feeds, GPS, ONGMAP.


• The difference between Pull and Push methods of accessing information. Pull is actively searching for information, such as using a search engine. Push is when you set your preferences and relevant information is delivered to you. Push is more effective by a factor of 5.


• In Q&A, one issue that came up with the concept of an intelligent system for filtering incoming data is the potential for privacy issues. If content providers are aware of how people are filtering their incoming data, what is preventing them from taking advantage of that information?

Rick Hayes-Roth was an excellent speaker and a seemingly brilliant man. His presentation was clear, relevant, and sprinkled with humor and personal stories. It was worth attending the conference for the Keynote alone, not to mention the opportunity to network with some of top IT professionals in Maine and the other excellent presentations given throughout the day.

Is the Gphone dead, or converted into an Android?

Technophiles alike gathered online yesterday at noon to receive word on the conference call put forth by Google and others about the upcoming, open source, mobile-device operating system, Android. Personally, I hung out on Engadget, refreshing their "live" feed from the conference call.

One thing that was made clear during the conference call is that there was no Gphone in development. It had been rumored for months that Google was developing a phone to compete with Apple's iPhone. The average speculation was that the hardware would be built by a third-party, the software would be developed by Google and comprise of their many online applications, and that the service would be ad-based resulting in a low cost or an all together free device.

Well, now that the Gphone rumor has been squashed, what will this Android do for you? Android is the operating system and bundle of software that Google has been developing for mobile devices. It is linux-based and open source. Most open source software is protected by the GNU General Public License (GPL). The purpose of this license is to keep any free software free. To clarify, a common phrase in open source is "free as in speech, not as in beer." Free software's code is available to anyone and allows them alter it and redistribute it in any manner they wish, which includes selling it even if the originating code was acquired for free (as in beer). The catch is that you must allow the same rights which you were given, meaning the next person has free (as in speech) access to your code and can distribute it.

I am among the camp that believes this open handset concept will bring great change to the mobile device arena. For an idea of the kind of applications and gadgets that Android will bring to handsets, take a look at: Gmail, Google Maps, Google Documents, YouTube, and iGoogle, as they will all most likely be a part of the software bundle. Then, on top of that add Open Social and it's ability to interface with most social networks, and the possibility of Google winning the 700MHz spectrum auction, and you've got a powerful combination. All of this will be available to any freelance application developer, cellphone manufacturers, and cellphone service providers.

Oh, and Google claims that Android will not be ad-based.