emptyage

The First I Followed

As I've been sorting through the accounts I follow (see this), I've noticed that as I get close to the beginning, I take fewer and fewer people off per page. This is pretty natural, I guess, as those who I've followed the longest continuously have made it through many previous rounds of culling.

Only Ev, Dakota, and George have lower user numbers than I do. Jeff's--not only one of my oldest friends, but also the person with whom I have the longest Twitter relationship--user number (11,155) is just a little over 40 digits away from my own (11,113) so I'd guess we joined the same day.  I think this means that for a little while, maybe less than 24 hours, I wasn't following anybody. 

These are *almost* all people I know very, very well. Some are the closest friends and oldest friends of my life. I went to middle school with one person on this list, high school with another and college with a third .  Two were in my wedding. I've worked at failed startups with three others. Two were frequent visitors when my wife was confined to bed for a year with a debilitating injury. Three I've never met. One is secretly an assassin.

Okay, the assassin part is bullshit. But you were totally thinking it was Andy Baio, right? Me too.

Foursquare vs. Gowalla: Cheater, Cheater

Instead, we're quietly flagging people we think are "misusing" the service based on frequency and geography. We're basically doing the same thing Gowalla is doing - calculating how far someone is from the place they say they're at - but instead of preventing the checkin at all, we just flag it as "mischevious". Eventually, we'll algorithmically use these flags to figure out who are cheaters are and then start to prevent them from earning rewards, becoming mayors, dominating the leaderboard etc. This is a pretty hard problem to solve (which is we haven't fixed it yet) but we're definitely taking the time to make sure we get it right. The last thing we want to do is call our users "cheaters" when they're not.
--Foursquare founder Dens Crowley commenting on Scoble's post on Antifeatures: big mistake that location app developers make

I've been working on a long-ish post on Gowalla and Foursquare, but I wanted to quickly comment on, um, Dens' comment. I'm a little captivated by both Gowalla and Foursquare. Each has features the other could learn from. Cheating on Foursquare is something I've heard people complain about again and again. And if Foursquare hopes to get businesses onboard sponsoring mayors and doing other things for users, those businesses will likely want assurances that the person they're giving, say, a free beer really has been there before.

Yet Dens point regarding precheckins is very valid; I did it last night on the way to a restaurant because Harper hates it when I fiddle with my phone during dinner. I'm glad Gowalla prevents cheating, but two nights ago it would not let me check in at a location because my iPhone was confused as to where I truly was. So, while Foursquare isn't doing enough to prevent cheating right now, Gowalla is already doing too much.

It's going to be interesting watching these two go at it. There's certainly room in the market for more than one location-based game--there will be lots of them and the really captivating ones certainly aren't to market yet--but these two are so similar that my guess is only one will benefit from a network effect. (I use both to check in places now, but that's only because I'm really interested in these kinds of things.) Foursquare has a huge head start, but it's still small enough that could evaporate in a matter of weeks if Gowalla snares enough influential power users who begin evangelizing the product--something that's already beginning to happen. It may be a pain for the developers, but the competition between the two will force both products to become better, which is great for the rest of us.

Ten Minute Single Serving Site Generator

Have you always wanted to make your very own single serving site, but were held back by the time, expense, and technical difficulty? Wouldn't you like to put up a single page of html and watch the venture capital dollars come rolling in? Of course you would! If only you knew how! Never fear, Internet hero, I have automated the process.

I put together a flowchart in the August issue of Wired (otherwise known as the Brad Pitt issue) that will walk you through making a single serving site of your very own in less than ten minutes.  It will even build a page for you. Included in this ridiculously easy machine are the answers to all the commonly asked questions about single serving sites (answered via a series of single serving sites) such as:

• What Should My Single Serving Site Be About?
• What Should I Name My Single Serving Site?
• Should All Single Serving Sites Be In Helvetica?
• Is This Your Single Serving Site Template?
• Am I Doing This Right?
• What If I Don't Know a Programming Language?

And of course, when you finish, there's even a registry where you can post your site for Venture Capitalists to see and send you money.

Money! It's better than cancer. 

The Shorty Awards are a Sham

If you're a Twitter user, you've almost certainly noticed something about the Shorty Awards in the last few days. Like all awards, they're dubious at best. In this case probably even moreso, as the "awards" or at least the nominations for them, pretty much come down to who has the most followers or best bots. But it at least holds out the promise of a democratic contest, noting that "The five people with the most nominations in each category will go on to the final voting round, held January 5th to 14th."

Nonetheless, some people do take them seriously. One of those people, apparently, is former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, who seemed at least, to be trying to encourage people to vote for him. Enter Cap'n Smackers. After making a brief run for the humor category himself, Mike Monteiro asked a few friends to start promoting his fake dead dog to the top of the #business rankings.

The very quick back story: Mike has a somewhat curmudgeonly persona  on Twitter. He went through a happy phase, during which he started talking about his fake Bichon Frise, Cap'n Smackers. Somebody else subsequently registered the Twitter username Capnsmackers, and began updating. It was hilarious. So then Mike killed his fake dog.

Anyway. By mid-day yesterday CapnSmackers was shooting up the rankings, not just in business, but overall. By late in the day, he actually overtook Kawasaki, and was leading in business. And this evidently made the Shorty Awards people unhappy, or uncomfortable, or maybe it led them to realize the utter inanity of their sham awards. Likely it wasn't the latter.

And so they changed people's votes.

They changed 83 votes cast by Twitter users, from #business to #funnybusiness. In other words, they rigged the election so Kawasaki can win.

Now, I know somebody out there is going to argue that CapnSmackers isn't eligible because the contest is restricted to the five "people"with the most votes, and Capn Smackers is a dog. To which I say: When was the last time you saw a dog quote Heidegger? Behind that fuzzy avatar, there is a person. But even if there was not, if you open up a vote to the people, you have to accept the will of the people, even if you disagree with that. Just ask Mr. Splashypants.

You may be saying to yourself that this is a lot to get worked up over. That it's just a joke. That I should let it go. But that's beside the point, it doesn't matter that it was just a joke. What matters is that they asked for and received our participation and opinion, are actively using that participation and opinion to promote their awards, and yet rigged the process so that our votes are not counted.  Nobody cast a ballot for CapnSmackers in #funnybusiness; I certainly did not, nor would I have. The shorties changed votes. They attrbuted an untrue statement to at least 83 users who believed in their process. And that's really, really uncool.

Barack Obama is Most Definitely My New Bicycle

I'm a weird dude. Bottom line. And I tend to make myself giggle a lot, which probably indicates some level of ego-mania that I'd rather not get into right now. But lately I've been giggling at a phrase that's been running through my head over and over.

"Barack Obama is your new bicycle."

Harper is constantly talking about cycling. Constantly. Until recently, that is, at which point she began to talk about nothing other than Barack Obama. And one day in the kitchen, when I interrupted her from calling voters in Louisiana or canvassing the inner sunset, or something, I said the above. And it made us both laugh. But mostly me.

So yesterday evening I was riding home on the 5 Fulton (why? because it came first and I could use the walk) and it hit me that the phrase would make a good URL. And then everything else just kind of came at once, and three or four hours later and the completed result was this.

I thought it would catch on, but I'm pretty amazed by just how much it has. Less than 24 hours old, it's all over technorati, and it's been linked on Time, Andrew Sullivan, Fimoculous, Choire Sicha, and, I'm sure, other places that I don't know anything about*. (Oh, and it was on MeFi, but because it was unholy now it is not.)

I love the Web. I love it. When I first came across it in college, when it was a baby and so was I, it felt like a connection, a lifeline, to all these weird wonderful things I cared about but were impossible to find. I loved that I could pluck some odd thing out of my brain and someone, somewhere out there would relate to it. Might even love it.

I do not even care to think about how long ago I graduated from college. But all these years later, I still love the Web because it hasn't changed one bit.

Also: I turned emptyage.com into a tumblelog. You should check it out.

*updated plus the economist, politico, and wired. apparently it's also on Barack Obama's official site somewhere, but I haven't seen it yet and my stats are too new to have generated a report for today yet.

Guess what's going down?

Besides Hillary Clinton's campaign, I mean.

My domains, emptyage.com and honan.net. Well. They might. I'm doing all sorts of registration shuffles, so they might go away. Don't be alarmed. I'll be back.

Better than 2000 words

If you were reading Waxy yesterday, you would have seen the following:

---

As I was writing up yesterday's article on The Times, I realized that there's a wide range of opinions from social media founders about undisclosed mass promotion on their communities. (Mahalo's Jason Calacanis doesn't mind, while Matt Haughey drops the banhammer on any Metafilter user who tries it.)

I contacted several founders affected by Sitelynx's activity to see their official (and personal) stance on this questionable practice.

Jason Calacanis
Founder, Mahalo

Generally, how do you guys feel about undisclosed mass self-promotion?

It's bad form to talk about yourself all the time -- it's obnoxious.

---

Okay! Hey, now it's picture time!

In all fairness, Jason went on to disclose that "I submit Mahalo links to services all the time, but it's under my name and it says Mahalo. I think people should disclose where they're coming from." And to be clear, I don't have even the slightest problem with his practice of promoting Mahalo across social networks. (If you don't want to see it, you don't have to subscribe!) But given the first statement he made in response to Andy's query, well, 1000 words, dude. 1000 words.

Please Do Not Force Me To Email This Image to You in Reply to the Image You Sent Me.

I will do it! I will send it!

Because, you see, not to be all Anil about it, but. I have seen it. Everyone has seen it. Yes, we get it. Problems are on the Y axis, bitches are on the X axis, and the two do not intersect. Or something. Please. Do something completely original instead. Which is to say, do not do as I do. (For I certainly did not create this image. It is entirely too clever for me to have come up with. I just saw it, and laughed, and thought I would share. Just like you. God, I love you.)

I Want To See That!

I really dig I Want To See That!, and I'm hoping it doesn't suffer from the bane of so many web, um, 2 ventures: a failure to hit critical mass with my friends. Notice I didn't say a failure to hit critical mass. Rather. With my friends. I've managed to sign on a few so far, but, really, I need two or three times that number for x + y/q = a movie and time we can all agree on. In other words, if you are in San Frandamncisco, and would like to see the movie with me, any movie, please add me. To further convince you, you may also enjoy the podcast, which is somewhere between knowingly cute and annoyingly twee, but on the good side of that line.

Finally: Am I the only one who still thinks of Ben Brown as that Metafilter-makes-me-smarter-and-more-angry guy? Probably so.

Why I Block Ads

Many people have put forth compelling arguments as to why we shouldn't block ads, and every once in a while, I bite, and turn off ad blocking. And then I'm reminded why it is, exactly, that I installed it in the first place.

It's Saturday morning, I'm having a moment in the Sun, and listening to "In the Aeroplane over the Sea," a perfect album that I have not listened to in a long time. When I hear the words to "Holland 1945," they break my heart, and I go to look them up online, so I can really study them.

And that's where I saw this. You don't really get the full effect here, but it also moves. And it pretty much killed my mood, destroyed the moment.

Well-done, targeted, contextual advertising can be useful, and it is a great way to support smaller publishers (or, even larger ones). But it's lost amid this crap. Until people who create and buy ads quit dropping out crap like this, I'm keeping my ad blocking software on.

Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense

Link: Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense.

So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it's experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can't explain the appeal. You have to do it — and, more important, do it with friends. (Monitoring the lives of total strangers is fun but doesn't have the same addictive effect.) Critics sneer at Twitter and Dodgeball as hipster narcissism, but the real appeal of Twitter is almost the inverse of narcissism. It's practically collectivist — you're creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.

THIS JUST IN: BLOGGERS THINK I AM AWESOME

It's day two of the blogger Code of Conduct debate. My two cents? I shared them over at Anil's, but essentially I think it's a problem more with blogs having enough reach now that they've become mainstream. I will say this twice because it bears repeating: It's a problem with society, not blogs.

But this bit of bullshit from today's Chronicle is really just too much:

Although bloggers are usually benign, some engage in vitriolic attacks, protected by a cloak of online anonymity. The more provocative the comments, the more attention they get.

How in the world can you make a generalization like that? Did you survey each and every blog on the Interwebs? Talk to all the bloggers? Impressive; that must have been time-consuming. Horseshit.

And what about that Hed? "Bloggers disinclined toward suggestion of Net civility." Was there some sort of vote that nobody told me about? Have I been disenfranchised?

Here's a fun thing to do: When you read an article about bloggers, swap out the word "blogger" with the word "people." If the result is a wide swath of humanity being painted with the same brush, it's a safe bet that the article is too general.

There are millions of fucking bloggers. Some are nice. Some are rude. Some are from Philadelphia.

And as many bloggers are there are, there are even more commenters, who are, by and large, what's being discussed.

It's easy to be a big man behind a keyboard, or in the comfort of your car, over the phone, via email, or in a variety of other situations where you can be reasonably assured you won't get punched in the nose. The bad behavior is a symptom of society, not blogs.

They Destroyed My Google Home Page, Part II

Yesterday evening, I was pretty excited about my new Google home page. The banner was cute, I was impressed that it changed to match the time of day (or, in some cases, weather), and I was generally pleased with it.

Homepage

This morning, when I came into the office, and saw that the sun was rising over my tea garden, I was equally happy. Much better than the standard whitespace, I thought, I can't understand why people are complaining about something optional.

But then, less than an hour after I arrived at work, I killed it, reverting to the old homepage design. Why? Because I use my Google homepage as an information delivery device (note the tabs across the top). I have three widgets, all of which you can plainly see, and the rest of the page is dedicated to RSS feeds. The banner, though cute, is considerably larger than my standard homepage, and I end up losing some of that information that I can normally see at a glance, without even really looking for it.

I also think the new features--send to a friend, about this widget, and you might also like--only tend to work for people who are using mainly Google default settings, and even they aren't incredibly useful. (Well, maybe not "send to a  friend," but certainly the other two.) For example, when I click to find a "you might also like" for the New York Times, what  shows up "above the fold" on my MacBook are links for Google Calendar, Reuters, Science Daily Headlines, and
NPR News. Ho-fucking-hum. The same link for Wired News gets me slightly better results--Lifehack, Computerworld News, TechDirt, and a cute puppy--probably because Wired News is a standard Google "widget" and it's less of a general interest one than the New York Times.

But when I break out of what Google offers, things start sucking.  So I want to see something similar to my Macworld feed, what does Google suggest? Well, Macworld. While it is true that if I like Macworld I might also like Macworld, I'm not sure what value that really adds for me.  People who like Matt Haughey and Anil Dash's weblogs apparently enjoy feed readers--the same ones, even. And once I get to smaller blog feeds--the kind of feed that's a specialty type site that I might really want to find something similar to--forget it. Last Plane to Jakarta? Nothing. Stay Free? Nothing. And in some cases the results are just plain dumb. Andre Torrez' weblog is called "Notes." So what does Google think I'll like if I read that site--which often tends to be about things like software, programming, advertising, music, and San Francisco? Why, other sites that use the word "notes" in the title, naturally.

Now, I have a (very rough) understanding of how that process works, and I'm not being critical of the "similar to" function. That's great, and if it doesn't always work, who cares? that it does some of the time when I do a standard Google search is enough for me.

What I think is a mistake is adding something that doesn't work very well to the homepage. And, unfortunately, that goes for a lot of what's been added to this update. Here's the part of the post where I pre-emptively say YES I KNOW I CAN JUST NOT USE IT. But I've been using it. For months and months. And it was great. So it's a disappointment to see it crossing over into feature glut.

For further reading, see Part I of my Google home page kvetching.

Twitter Nation

If SXSW is anything, it is Twitter's coming out party (for better or worse). Seemingly everyone who is anyone at all, darling, is on Twitter by now, and the Digerati certainly seem to have morphed into Twitterati over the past several days.

But pretension aside, if you need any proof that Twitter is having its moment, you need only see the following exchange between Robert Scoble and Presidential candidate John Edwards:

Twitter nation

 

Not only is John Edwards on Twitter, he's actually using it (or: someone in his staff is at least) to answer questions about his campaign within minutes of their being posed. Now, where's Obama?

Originally posted on mat.vox.com

Wrong!

Wired News has a piece on Social Bookmarksa piece on Social Bookmarks which contains this chestnut on Del.icio.us' cons:

Bad: You can tag entries, but there are no folders or other sorting mechanisms.

Um. Hello? Bundles?

Taking the VOIP Plunge

Since 1995, I've had either an Earthlink or a Mindspring email address. Earthlink has continuously been my ISP since 1998. And during that entire time I have been, of course, mhonan@earthlink.net.

Look! There it is! Published plain text right there on the Web, my email address: mhonan@earthlink.net! And here it is again, this time as a link: mhonan@earthlink.net!

I am unconcerned.

What I always liked most about Earthlink (and Mindspring) was its customer service. But no more. Today, the customer service is terrible. It has been outsourced to India, which does bother me. But much worse, I can't talk to anyone who seems to, you know, have a clue what they're talking about.

"Can I get DSL service without having to have a land line?"

"???"

"DSL. Without a land line. Can you do that?"

"???"

"I live in California. Can you still sell me DSL service if I cut off my phone line?"

"Sir, you must have a phone line to have DSL."

Well, no, not true. But whatever.

"Um, okay, can you tell me what my current plan is?"

"Certainly, sir. Please give me your social security number, home address, mother's maiden name, and a DNA sample."

Earthlink used to have Web-based tools where I could manage my account. Those are either gone or so obfuscated that I can't find it--I can't even see what my account plan is online, when I'm logged into my account. That's terrible.

Now, maybe those tools do exist and I just couldn't find them. But I'm fucking savvy, savvy? And if I can't find them, you have made then entirely too hard to find. If that's intentional, shame on you, Earthlink. And if not, shame on you still.

I always liked Earthlink. And I liked having a relationship with an ISP that lasted that long. It took a lot to send me packing. Uncompetitive pricing. Unreliable service. And, worst, you made me feel like you didn't value me as a customer. It was like a long acrimonious, abusive marriage where I didn't have the courage to leave. But now. Now, I do. So, goodbye.

Speakeasy, in contrast, was full of answers. For example:

"If I ditch my phone line, will my TiVo still be able to dial in?"

"Do you have a Series one or two TiVo?"

!!!

"I have a DirectTV TiVo"

"Okay, well that one does dial in using the phone line. You may have some degredation there, but it should still be able to download all your program guides and other data, though it may take more attempts to dial."

Now that's an informed employee, and that's the kind of person I want to deal with.

And so soon I'll have no land line at all. None. Just mobile service, DSL and VOIP. I love the future.