Fried CPU

So,  A *lot* of people have been ranting to me about how Facebook used to be cool and how the new applications have ruined it completely by inviting the Myspace crowd.  Well, haven taken a step back and looked at the problem, Facebook just sits in a confusing position right now.  Their target audience seems to be ‘everyone’, and that doesn’t work too well.  This is particularly bad for people in MY position as well. 

Firstly, I have a pretty sizable network of friends locally, JUST friends.  These local people aren’t my business contacts, people from an online community, or any such thing.  They’re just friends, and friends want to have fun.  So, of course I’m getting invites to “Pirates vs Ninjas”, “Horoscope”, “SuperPoke”, and any other number of applications on Facebook.  All of these people were former myspace users, and I’m part of the reason they switched to Facebook, my mistake.

On the other hand, I have another group of contacts.  I have my fellow FriedCPU writers, my connections from various art communities, my connections from the Ubuntu community, etc.  These are contacts that couldn’t care less if I choose to be a pirate or a ninja, they don’t care what music I’m listening to, and moreover they get annoyed when I have 500 app boxes on my profile stopping them from getting to some information that actually matters.

The current setup just makes it plain impossible to make both of these camps of users happy without setting up (and maintaining) two different Facebook accounts.  As it stands my friends are addicted to the apps and probably wouldn’t be in a big hurry to get back to Myspace, but my contacts would like them gone forever. 

I’m stuck in the middle of two clashing groups, and now I understand why these communities were supposed to be kept separate.  But, either way, my Facebook is going to be a more contact oriented tool for me in the future, along with my Twitter and Pownce accounts, etc.  I can’t wait ’till Myspace opens their platform so everyone can go back to their camps and live happily again.

Rant Over.  Flame On.

– Adam.

What do you do with your social network?

It’s a fairly simple question:  How has your social network site benefited you?  Has it added anything to your daily browsing life, made life more convenient, etc?

I’m actually interested in hearing about this, if you read this and don’t mind leaving me a comment please do. 

Putting the Del.icio.us Lesson into Practice, Part 1

I think this post is onto something.  Everyday we see more and more applications, sites, and services starting up that have absolutely no value to you unless you can convince your friends to join and stick with it.  This includes even my favorite sites, like Facebook.  Without my ‘network’ Facebook is useless to me.  I hope that any of you aspiring to build your own networks will keep ‘The Del.icio.us Lesson’ in mind when you start building.

Rant Over.  Flame On.

– Adam.

I have seen infinite amounts of ‘Why Linux hasn’t succeeded on the desktop’ posts, and truly, they’re all right and wrong at the same time.  The reason services, products, and other things don’t take off can usually be traced back to one problem:  Entry barriers.

Linux has astounding barriers to entry, despite it being ‘free’.  Even Ubuntu, heralded as one of the easiest of the Linux distributions available is a serious PITA to even find, let alone install, if you’re not skilled with your computer.  Let’s look at the steps a ‘normal’ switcher would have to go through just to get find and get Linux.

1. Find out about Linux: The user needs to find out that the alternative exists.
2. Find the distribution they want:  This is both simple and difficult because Ubuntu is nearly synonymous with Linux anymore, but lots of options do exist. 
3. Download a .iso file that they have no idea what to do with, this may very well be the users first experience with torrenting as well.
4. Find out what to do with this .iso file, and how to burn it properly, and check for burn quality
5. (optional) set their bios to boot from CD.

Now, OEMs make things a lot easier, but they still have higher barriers to entry than a normal PC would.

1. Find out about Linux.
2. Find an OEM where Linux is readily available (DELL, if you dig around the site a little bit)
3. Purchase.

Now, I won’t insult you by bothering to go through the steps that it takes to get a Mac or a Windows PC, because the barriers are most certainly lower there.  I’m sure you can figure that out, but I’ll include an edit if enough people want me to. 🙂

So, we’ve looked at the barriers to JUST finding out and getting ahold of Linux.  Those are significant alone for the majority of PC users out there.  That’s also just a generalized example, I’m not accounting for the varied amounts of frustration, pain, and lost time that just doing these things to GET Linux will earn you.  As you well know there are a lot of other barriers to entry and use, that include:  Learning how things work, learning the CLI (Command Line) and learning how the concept of repos works and how it differs from the regular .exe installer’s we’re used to seeing.  The user needs to learn about their hardware, they need to learn about drivers, etc.

So, let’s assume that the user goes through all of this, what did they earn?  They earned an operating system that seems to be more geared towards (poorly) mimicking Windows functionality and UI for the sake of ‘familiarity’.  They’ve earned a more secure, but less functional, less friendly version of Windows. 

And therein lies the biggest problem, the barriers to entry are so much higher than the barriers to leaving.  It’s easier to go back to  OS X or Windows than it is to stick with Linux, and that’s a problem.  Ubuntu, or another distribution, needs to change things.  They need to give Linux a new interface, they need to make changes to make it clear that the users ‘aren’t in kansas anymore’.  Users are not going to jump through dozens of flaming hoops to get to a prize that is functionally a dulled down version of what they were using before.  The barriers to entry must be lowered, and the barriers to leaving must be raised if any degree of success is going to be attained ‘on the desktop’. 

That’s my personal take on it, at least.  Take it with a grain of salt, much like every other post on this subject.

*** Disclaimer:  “Linux” in this post and all future posts of mine is used to refer to “GNU/Linux” but without the annoying “GNU” portion. 

Rant Over.  Flame On.

– Adam.

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Well, it seems like about one week into our blog venture John, the resident MIT geek, has had to go and get us all sorts of digg publicity.  Thanks John, now we’re going to have to live up to all that technical hype and I don’t think I can operate under that kind of pressure.  But no, seriously, good job man.  It’s a good article and definitely worth reading, keep ’em coming. 🙂

Anyway, onto the entire point for this post.  I’m just a wee-bit disappointed in ‘social networking’ as we know it today (as is very obvious from recent posts of mine).  I got into a nice little discussion/debate/argument with Bryan over IRC about my ideal social network.  The entire concept is ‘aggregate my life, don’t make me re-write it’.

Have you noticed that?  You log into a social network and you begin the monotonous task of convincing every one of your friends that it’s worth switching to, and then you have to re-write pretty much everything, re-upload your photos, and recreate a profile that existed on a another slightly less awesome network.  This whole system sucks, and I think we should be rethinking what the network is actually doing.

So, here’s my ideal network:  Aggregate my life… If I use Flickr let me tell you about that, and you can pull photos from that and use my flickr profile pic as my pic for the site.  If I’m uploading my videos to YouTube why should I have to re-upload my videos to a second location, just pull my content from other sites and build my profile from that.  Let me communicate and converse with people…

My ‘network’ should not be a locked in and locked down targeted-advertising frenzy.  My network should be about me, and about MY connections.  So, in short, I want a service that builds my profile page but lets me use other applications to communicate and share.  The network site itself should allow me to add friends and do other basic things, past that it should be syncing with the content I’m placing on the web in other places.

I just hope all of these ‘web 2.0’ companies realize this and start delivering services that meet my needs… it’s kind of sad when Wink builds a better, more care free, profile page for me than facebook.  

Rant Over.  Flame On.

– Adam.

Blogged with Flock

    Am I the only one who’s just plain sick and tired of having 9000 accounts that mostly do the same things in different ways?  Bryan and I were having this discussion this morning (like 1 AM) and came to the conclusion that it’s definitely possible to make social networks that can communicate with each other.  Let me detail how I would like it to work:

I should be able to send anything to anyone, anywhere.

What I mean by this is that just because Joe isn’t a member of Facebook which I am, why should he miss out on the things I’m sending my friends?  I should be able to add him as a contact and send him links, messages, photos, events, etc. 

I like Pownce a LOT, it’s probably my favorite new web application, but I want to be able to send files to my facebook friends, or maybe to people who use similar file-sharing applications.   Things like that. 

Just because I prefer facebook doesn’t mean that my girlfriend or my sister will prefer it, why should I force people to migrate from one service to another because of my preferences?  Just let us communicate freely, just like with email.  Make up a new @ sign, or let us link profile pages or something. 

Simple enough right?  That’s how it should be no matter what the first person in the conversation uses.  They should be able to communicate with me freely, and I with them.
I hope to see this happen in the near future…

Blogged with Flock

Occasionally some UI modification comes a long that SERIOUSLY freaking changes the way you use a product or think about it. Coverflow… that’s one of those things. Seriously, this is probably my favorite functionality in iTunes now. It’s just gorgeous, have a look! If you’re a Windows user, definitely give iTunes a shot, it’s nifty 🙂

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Tags: coverflow, mac, itunes, apple, music

Ok, so my name is Adam, firstly.  Welcome to our little slice of the overly chaotic world of blogging, don’t expect much of a reprieve from the chaos here.  This blog is basically a collective thought-dump for people who have completely varying opinions on life.  You might agree with one of us, disagree with another, and all of us will probably scare you in one fashion or another.  As a disclaimer, don’t expect any consistency in posts, we’re not a company, we’re not a collective, we’re just a few overly thoughtful geeks with spare time.

With that said, let me introduce you to me.  I’m the resident consumer, corporate wannabe, business-hoe, whatever my fellow writers will call me.  Basically, I like business, and that tends to be a polarizing factor in our discussions.  I’m an Apple fan (not a fanatic), I love Google with every ounce of my soul, and if it’s a social networking site you can bet I’m on it or I will be.  I love the social web and I constantly find myself more drawn to it. 

You might see me posting on anything from reviews of new products and services, to bitch & moan posts, me getting my thoughts out there, or maybe me proposing a new way to do some business (I’m known to do that).  I tend to post infrequently, and write fairly long posts when I do write.  I hope I can deliver some thought provoking discussions to the site.

Rant Over. 

Flame On.

– Adam.

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Tags: Adam’sRants, introduction