Groupings of Words

Dear TechCrunch, your argument makes you sound like assholes

So have you seen this article on Techcrunch yet? The one about how someone who claims to have accessed hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents of Twitter and Twitter employees, is releasing those documents publicly and sent them to Techcrunch 1st.

Techcrunch said that they wrestled with the idea, but ultimately decided they are going to publish some of the documents. They were met with a melee of responses, mostly from people telling them that it was wrong to do that. Here was their response.

I’ve been a fan of Techcrunch for a long time, but after reading this, I’m definitely less of a fan.

To be completely honest, I’m not sure that I care one way or the other about the actual releasing of the docs. But what kinda pissed me off was their justification. It basically boiled down to the following:

1. “Stolen documents are news just like anything else.” WTF? Stolen documents are stolen property and should be returned to the rightful owner. Period. Black-market babies are the same as babies, they were just sold via a different venue. (Not sure why I made that analogy, but it seemed equally ridiculous, yet appropriate.)
2. “They are probably going to end up on the internet anyway.” So? That doesn’t mean you have to be a purveyor of them! If someone steals 100 lbs of gold and gives you the option to take some because they are going to sell it on the street anyway doesn’t give you the right to take some and then sell it.
3. “We can cite other times when this has happened, both in our publication and others.” Why the fuck would that matter? Pointing out previous precedented wrongdoing doesn’t make your actions more right.
4. “The history of the news industry is publishing things that people don’t necessarily want published.” No it isn’t! There’s a ton of stuff that companies want published that I want to read as news. I think the term you’re looking for is ill-gotten news. (See how I did that right there?) That’s the stuff that companies don’t necessarily want published. It’s one thing if an employee leaks something, but another if someone steals something and gives it to you. Treat the two differently.

I guess the best way to think about it would be to put yourself in Twitter’s shoes. If you had something stolen from you, you would hope that the people who recovered the stolen material would treat it in a respectful manner. If the public, nay YOUR READERS speak out against it vehemently, then chances are it is you who is crossing the line, not them for pointing it out.

Like I said, I don’t mind what you choose to do or don’t do, but your justifications are crap. Please do better.

Great comment on a blog post by me

Brett from Tipping Point Labs wrote a great blog post about Microsoft’s Bing awkard launch. And then I posted a comment on the article that is worth reading. I’m going to repost my comment here, because I am that conceited:

Here’s the comment

WTF? is right! Great article, Brett. A friend of mine actually concepted and worked on the B*A*T. I was excited about it because I was excited for him, although I didn’t know what to expect. But also because I had gone to a social media conference about a year ago, and a Microsoft exec was there, and he made a statement at the conference that stuck with me: “Microsoft must make a drastic change, or it will die.”

I was personally ready for a Microsoft reinvention. I was really looking for them to make contributions to the advancement of computing and technology. I was looking forward to Microsoft shedding their corporate image and being the tech representative of the everyman. It seemed to be what that exec was hinting at.

But so far I’m woefully unconvinced. There hasn’t really been any sort of grassroots happenings or meaningful change on the community level. The ads seem more about market share and battling Apple than connecting with the customer. Their spends have been huge, their content awkward, and their connection minimal.

At this point, their “If you can find a laptop for under $X you can keep it” campaign is just pissing me off. It would be like a cheap car manufacturer saying “If you can find a car under $10,000 you can keep it” and then have the customer say “BMW doesn’t really have anything for under $10,000, so I should disregard their contributions to automotive excellence completely.” That is my lone takeaway from that campaign. Parodies of that campaign are far more believable than the actual campaign itself.

In any case, my use of Google at this point is hardly through the Google home page anymore. I mostly use it through browser integration, mashups,and other sites– their grassroots efforts… imagine that. And someone like Microsoft saying “you should go to Bing.com instead of ‘those other search engines’” is so irrelevant. Maybe I’m in a minority of the general populus who don’t go through the front door of the search engine. But the demo of the crowd they were going for with B*A*T using G4 and SNL personalities and Fred Willard seems like it should be people kinda like me. And it seemed VERY OBVIOUS to me that Olivia Munn and Jason Sudekis will probably never use Bing.com after the B*A*T was over. It really seemed like a 1-day spike is the best they could expect.

Have you seen their IE8 internet ads? I love the style of these ads, and they are very funny, but I would never dream of putting the responsibilities that they suggest on my browser. And I would never trust Microsoft with that responsibility. So awkward.

Maybe Microsoft has too big a burden to prove to their stockholders or something. Like they have to get results NOW, because that’s how they are acting. I guess at this point, I’m kinda just hoping for the latter of the exec’s scenarios to happen already. I don’t think Microsoft will ever get it.

Star Trek can be good, but not awesome

I keep reading twitter post after twitter post and review after review about how awesome the new Star Trek movie was. Really? Awesome? I saw it in IMAX, which was definitely the way to go. And there were some parts to it that were impressive to be sure. But I want to make it clear that the movie was not awesome.

I’m not going to break it down scene-by-scene or give you the blow-by-blow, but there are a few principles that keep a movie from being awesome, and this movie had ‘em. So let’s review a couple, shall we?

1. It is not okay to use a plot trick such as faking illness to get someone onto a starship. I don’t care how bad you need that character on that starship, come up with something less trite.

2. You cannot get your interns/students into battle with Romulans by claiming all the other ships are “tied up” elsewhere in an awesome movie. Proper motive must still be established.

3. More credit must be given to time travel than it just being something that happened and now we have to deal with the effects of it.

4. Having the baby on a starship while dad gives up his life because “it’s the only way.” JJ, you seriously take middle America for the saps that we are. good god, we are saps.

5. You can’t throw a cheeseball Ahura <3 Spock scam in there knowing that no such plot line ever existed in the original Star Trek. Leonard, can I get a “that would be illogical?”! Come on! You were on set!

6. And don’t even get me started on “Why didn’t you put me on that ship?” “I didn’t want to show favoritism.” “Well, I’m going on the Enterprise.” “*sigh*” So who get’s reassigned to the other ship? Are they just a main crew member down? Is this a way to make official Starfleet decisions? Not in an awesome movie, it’s not.

Like I said, there’s a ton more. I just wanted to point out a few key plot points that keep this from being an awesome movie. Even still, I loved the ships, and the new look of the Enterprise. I wish the acting was better in general. I kinda liked the Romulan drill. And the sound during pretty much the entire movie rocked.

My analysis. Please feel free to point out the 1,000 others that I missed. :P

Submissions:

7. You can’t allow any character to wear Eddie Murphy Meet The Klumps prosthetic hands in a movie that treats time travel as a serious plot device. (submitted by Lawrence Crumpton.) This is so true. No director of awesome movies should be able to say this phrase about his movie: “Science-based sci-fi time travel plot device— check. Nutty Professor-style humor moment— check.”

A post about Schmownce

Schmownce is an app that we wrote just for fun to replace Pownce. Of course we were sad when Pownce was bought out and subsequently dismantled by SixApart last December. And a lot has been made about Pownce vs Twitter and how Twitter won the battle, blah blah blah. I’d like to spend a minute telling you what was so special about Pownce, and what we are trying to continue with Schmownce.

Schmownce is “clan”-based media-based communication. That’s the missing link. So let’s take a look at what that means:

A “clan” is small group of people, not one gigantically interconnected mess. Clans are how we communicate naturally. We have groups of friends in the single digits or teens that we hang out with, not in the hundreds or thousands. Having a huge group of people that we communicate with is fun when we are sending witty quips and short updates, but not really for conversations. And while e-mail seems like it would be more conversation-based, it isn’t really meant for that either.

And when we communicate with our actual friends, we generally do it with the option of more than 140 characters, and with the option to add media such as pictures, mp3s, links to websites, videos, and the like.

And comments would be nice. When my friend sends me something, I want to be able to comment on it or subscribe to it and easily follow the comment thread. But if I’m not interested in it, then I don’t comment or unsubscribe and I don’t get updates on it. That’s useful communication, and with very little waste.

The best way to use a site like Schmownce is actually in conjunction with Twitter and your blog. Schmownce is the perfect midway point between a tweet and a blog. Tweets are the those short, spur of the moment quips that come off the top of the brain. Blogs are deeper topic based editorial-type opportunities. Where is the in between? A community-based platform centering on thoughts too long to tweet and too short to blog about.

One other natural thing about a clan-based community. It’s difficult for spammers and marketers to infiltrate clans. They are typically too small to get mass traction.

But probably the biggest thing I like about Schmownce is that it’s fun. People send fun things, make fun comments, and always surprise me with what they say and do. I’m glad we created Schmownce. I hope it grows to serve a ton of little clans, and mimic what happens in nature.

Go Schmownce!

E-mail is an overloaded application

The Problem

I’ve been examining several of the applications I use and how I use them. I use a lot of applications on a daily basis, and some of them I use more frequently than others. The problem for me is that everyone seems to be looking for a “catch-all” communications application, and then they overload the heck out of it.

The number one example of this is e-mail. Our Inboxes, Outboxes, and folder systems have gotten out of control. And now just about every e-mail application has Junk folders and rules.

Are you kidding me!?!? An automatically created folder for junk and then rules to automatically categorize your items? What other application has that? What other system in nature has that?

The Symptoms

So what has brought us to this foolish state? E-mail was the easiest thing to learn in the 90s when the information superhighway was just becoming prevalent. Everyone remembers to check it, and it could be misused as easily as it could be used with no real recourse.

So what the hell does it mean to misuse e-mail? Everybody knows about Reply-to-all syndrome (well, except for the people who are susceptible to it, I suppose), but there is more to it than that. This concept of Email Etiquette has been around for a while, but to be honest, it’s more than just etiquette.

It’s more a lack of structure in e-mail usage. We are using it for everything and we aren’t using it well. Tantek Celic wrote a fantastic article that summarizes several of the problems inherent in e-mail usage, and for the most part he is right! But he outright denounces the use of 1:1 based communication. I’m not sure if I agree with that. We need 1:1 communication, but we just need to put an ounce of thought into it in order to make it streamlined and effective. Also, he suggests that a Twitter account, a wiki and blog should be sufficient, but I have a couple more suggestions as well.

The Solution

Since I’m not into defining a problem and then not providing some sort of solution, here’s my take on an answer:

Step 1: Change your mindset about how you use e-mail. Limit your e-mail usage using a few keys:

• Treat the subject line like the title of a blog post. 
• Make sure everyone you send and reply to is directly involved with your e-mail. Use reply to all and CC correctly and responsibly.
• Use e-mails for conversation-based communications only. If you send an e-mail, it should either require a response, or be a response to another e-mail.
• If you ever find yourself sending an attachment that’s more than 500K, then you need to be using something besides e-mail. This one is HUGE.

Step 2: Learn about RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s really easy to learn. Lee Lefever posted a great video called RSS in Plain English that gives a good 101 about what it is and how to use it. You can use RSS to offload a lot of notification e-mails! Get those things out of your Inbox!

Step 3: Use other applications to offload e-mail. Define “buckets” for different types of communication, and limit those applications to that type of communication. It makes it really easy to segment different communications in your mind, and guess what: it gets all of those communications out of your Inbox!

Expounding on Step 3

Step 3 above requires more explanation. So let’s say you’ve started using Facebook. It’s a useful app, and nifty and fun as well. You are getting in touch with your friends from high school, college, social groups, and other acquaintances. Now imagine that you received all those posts, status updates, photos, videos, comments, etc in your Inbox and they weren’t stored in the repository that is Facebook. You would have to wade through so much crap, and imagine your folder structures! And how much of it would go to Junk mail? And how much time would it take? It’s nice to have an encompassing application that takes care of that and saves it for you.

That’s the spirit of Web 2.0 and social media, and we should embrace that. I have started using LinkedIn for professional and resume related contacts, Twitter for short thoughts and stream of conscious posts, Yammer for work related twitter-type comments for my co-workers, Evernote for bookmarking, RSS for notifications, Flickr for photos, Last.fm for music, and a blog for journaling. There are probably others that I use or can use, and if I need another bucket for something else, I probably will.

It sounds so complicated! How are you supposed to keep up with all of these? It’s actually much easier now that I’ve adopted this mentality! When I think photo, my mind automatically jumps to Flickr, and when I have an immediate thought it jumps to Twitter, and when I think of past friends and acquaintances, I open Facebook. Nothing is overloaded anymore! It’s sweet.

One Final Pitch and a Couple Notes

Back when I was listing steps for changing your e-mail usage, I mentioned sending large attachments and media via e-mail. If you need a bucket for that, I recommend a free web application that my company created called Schmownce. Schmownce is our re-representation of the now-defunct app Pownce, which we loved. It’s a great place to upload media and non-essential essential communication, once again the purpose being to get it out of your Inbox! I wrote another article on the edicts of using Pownce/Schmownce, and if you’re not already asleep, you should read that as well.

Also, some applications and websites don’t support RSS yet, so you’ll have to live with some notifications and excess communication still using e-mail. It’s okay. That will be natural.

What was the deal with Pownce?

One of the hottest Silicon Valley start ups of last year was Pownce. It was growing pretty well, received funding, it’s founders were written about in NYT and several other magazines being termed as “cool and under 30 people to watch out for.” Everything seemed to be going so well.

The Demise

Then Pownce got bought out by blogging giant Six Apart, who subsequently shut it down within a month in an attempt to get people to move over to their supposedly similar blogging software, Vox. This move apparenly angered a lot of people (read the comments in the linked article.)

Ever since then there’s been a huge buzz on Twitter about the demise of Pownce. A lot of people continue to comment about how sad they are to see it go. Some are trying to figure out where they want to go next in order to achieve the same purposes and community they had on Pownce.

The Competition

The juxtaposition of Twitter and Pownce was pretty interesting. From what I understand, Pownce was trying to position themselves as a competitor to Twitter. A lot of people have commented on how Twitter “beat out” Pownce. Personally I don’t get it.

At first, I didn’t want to use Pownce. It seemed like another one of those web 2.0 social network fly-by-nights that I would sign up for and then not use. But my business partner was adamant about it, and I gave in. It took me a couple weeks of persistent use before the genius set in.

Other people pitted Pownce against blogs. Ehhh, not so much. Blogs completely miss the purpose of sharing media. Blogs are what they say they are: web logs. They are journals, diaries, editorial columns, zines. Not a good comparison.

The Point

Pownce wasn’t competition for Twitter or blogs. You know what Pownce was competition for? E-mail!

E-mail is the most overloaded application on our computers as a society today. And once people could sent huge attachments and crap like that over e-mail, awww it was on now! People started sending crazy e-mails to tons of people. People sent mp3s over e-mail, videos, huge spreadsheets, photos, all kinds of crazy shite. Now we have spam problems, mail servers crashing due to load problems, delivery issues. And it’s all so confusing! E-mail is a one way protocol. Once you send an e-mail, you have no idea whether it was received. How many times have you sent someone an e-mail and they say they never received it. Depending on the situation, you know it’s going through your head whether they’re lying. Anyways, I’m getting off course. E-mail, at its essence, should be used for essential non-realtime conversations. When you send someone an e-mail, it should be something that either requires a response, or is a response to an e-mail of the former type.

Pownce was great for what I like to call “non-essential essential communication”. It’s the stuff that you want to send to people, but don’t necessarily need them to write back about, unless they are interested and they want to. It was a place to upload music, videos, files, and interesting links and have them in a central repository so that you can always refer back to them. What a simple concept.

What to do now that Pownce is gone?

We (and by we I mean our Ruby on Rails development company TRNSFR) built a program called Schmownce for all of you that miss Pownce or never got a chance to try Pownce. We’ve been using it for a few weeks now and it has been great!

If you were lucky enough to export your Pownce file before it closed down, then you are in luck! Schmownce has an import feature for your Pownce file, so you can upload it and continue using!

As of this writing, it lacks some of the features of Pownce in terms of community and public timelines, but those are features we are adding. We only started working on it once we heard of poor Pownce’s demise. But we are working on it, and we would really like to take this past Pownce, and make it useful for people in essential and non-essential situations.

We would like to make Schmownce the place that offloads the burden off several applications: e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It’s a great place for stuff that doesn’t exactly belong on any of those… stuff that’s too private for Facebook, too long for Twitter (or to represent things that you aren’t doing right now), to non-location specific for Loopt, too cool for Kwippy, too non-resume related for LinkedIn, the list goes on…

So Schmownce people. Schmownce like the wind. Schmownce to your heart’s content. The application is there and waiting for you. And while you’re at it, keep Twittering. The two of them work really well in concert.

Criticisms of and bad jokes about Tweetshrink

NOTE: This post was originally meant to be a post about people who make thoughtless public criticisms. Then somehow it manifested itself in an application we built called Tweetshrink, and then it took a sharp turn and got ugly. My apologies to anyone who reads it. Ever.

It is so easy to criticize. It really is. And now with the evolution of social networks, it’s equally easy to publicly criticize.

We made a tiny little web application. It’s really quite a significant yet insignificant app called TweetShrink. All it does it take a Twitter post (or any text really) and tries to make it shorter by removing letters that might not be needed. The purpose of it is that if you are typing a post into Twitter and you clip the 140 character limit that Twitter imposes, we will do our best to make it shorter for you without you having to manually edit it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Since we launched it, the reviews have been by and large good. Most people (according to a Twitter search of the term “tweetshrink”) think it’s a pretty cool or useful tool. It’s nice to hear when you are snooping around, and it’s nice to know some people actually “heart” Tweetshrink.

But then there’s the public criticizers. They are the people who haven’t read such well written text as this, but feel the need to make unwarranted public outbursts anyway.

Note: Let me first say that nobody is forced to use Tweetshrink. It is an option that you have, especially if you use some of the Twitter clients such as TweetDeck. They have a little button that you use if and only if you feel the need to. Even if you use it sometimes, you don’t have to use it all the time.

O no! Txt Spk!

Some douchebag twittered: Oh, how deliciously ghastly and horribly fine the “TweetShrink” option is. It turns one into a 14 year old girl.

First things first, if you sound like a 14 year old girl, you will want to check your pants for balls, and when you find they are lacking you will want to check your vagina for pubic hairs. Based on the whining, it doesn’t sound like you need help being a 14 year old girl, you only need help being a 14 y.o. grrl OMG LOL, which Tweetshrink can’t help you with.

Don’t e=mc² my Picasso!

The second criticism is kinda like the following:

One guy tweets I think Tweetshrink won’t go anywhere because shortening text is more art than science.

Another says Just discovered @tweetshrink. I strongly disagree with it. Fitting real words and proper sentences into 140 character tweets is an art form.

Fitting a nerd’s tweets on Twitter is a lame art form. Such criticisms are so easy. Real words and proper sentences? Someone please show this guy a vagina and the outdoors! Then see if he wants to spend less time being proper and just effortlessly communicate.

What does that even mean? Science is more of an art than a science! Without science, there is no art and vice versa. If shrinking text is more of an art than a science to you, then you are more of a chump than a worthwhile human being.

Freud would never use Tweetshrink

The most common joke that we see made about Tweetshrink is that the writer thought it would be some sort of psychoanalysis for their tweet. Oh, congratulations, you must be among the elite who recognized that “shrink” has two meanings, one being a colloquialism for a psychiatrist. How clever of you to point that out to all your friends. Well, I’ve save you the trouble of waiting for that service: It doesn’t help that you deny that you’re a loser.

Cup size

The other one is when someone jokes that they thought Tweetshrink was going to shrink their breasts. Nice. You are so original. Go to the plastic surgeon, get some tig ole bitties and maybe someone will feign a laugh at your stupid jokes, you ugly cow. Your pony tails aren’t quirky, they are dumb.

Conclusion

The conclusion is as follows. The creators of Twitter clients, such as TweetDeck, Twittastic, Twitulater, and EventBox are infinitely smarter than you, and they all chose to implement Tweetshrink. You know how I can tell they are so much smarter? Because they are making cool applications while you sit on your ass and take the easy way out criticizing. And me? Well, I have access to a public forum, too, and this is how I choose to use it.

Bad Pythagorean theorem pun, that I like

There was an old Indian chief who had three squaws, each of whom was about to give birth.

He laid one squaw on a bear hide to give birth; the next he laid on a lion’s hide. The third he laid out on the hide of a hippopotamus.

It came about that the one lying on the lion’s hide gave birth to a fine, healthy 7 lb son. Soon after, the one lying on a bear hide gave birth to another fine, healthy 8 lb son.

Finally, the squaw who was lying on the hippopotamus hide also gave birth to a son, but he was HUGE, like 15 lbs! It just goes to show you…

“The squaw on the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws on the other two hides.”

Obligatory Test

You know how every time someone starts a blog, their first post is titled Test? Well, this is my obligatory test. I’m not entirely sure I understand Tumblr yet, but I want to, so thusly, I am creating my test post, which I shall style and play with until it either looks the way I want it to, or I decide Tumblr is complete crap and leave. :P