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Yesterday Netflix announced that it was discontinuing the Profiles feature that allows users with one account to keep separate queues and ratings of movies and tv shows. This absolutely sucks. I have come to rely on this feature and will be looking for alternatives to Netflix before the feature is eliminated on September 1st. I will look at DVD by mails services like BlockBuster or Intelliflix as well as on-demand services like cable/satellite providers or Apple TV. And yes I would switch regardless of the fact that it is likely that no other service offers this feature, just because of the way this has been handled.
What is even worse than the dropping of this feature, however is the way Netflix has handled it. Today I received this email:
We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.
While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.
They aren't giving any indication as to why they are pulling the feature, just vague allusions to making the site better.
There is a petition to show Netflix that there is support for the feature. Not sure how far that will go in light of recent claims by the company that is is the "final decision". Here is more from the Hacking Netflix blog.
While discontinuing the Profiles feature is not desirable for the passionate folks who use it, the decision will ultimately benefit all Netflix members. By discontinuing the feature, we will be able to put more focus and resources site and service improvements that benefit everyone, consistent to how we have grown the service over the years.
Netflix makes it sound that only a few passionate users will be affected by this and perhaps the feature was under-utilized. And maybe the folks who use that feature and will be pissed off by this are not the most profitable customers for Netflix (i.e. they watch more movies and so cost Netflix more money) but they are forgetting an important thing here. These customers are the Netflix evangelists. I have told countless people about how I love Netflix since my membership began in August of 2000. I know I have been responsible for at least a half dozen people signing up and who know how many people have read my write-ups here on Alt Text.
Netflix is making a big mistake in killing the Profiles feature but are stepping into an even bigger blunder with the patronizing messaging around the decision. Read more on MetaFilter.
Come out to O'Gara's tonight for the 3rd installment of Minnesota's Demo Camp event, MinneDemo. As word of these events has gotten out the past two years attendance has been steadily rising. We might need a convention center for next spring's MinneBar event. Seriously, I am getting worried :) If you know of some space we can check out for next year's (un)conference please let me know by emailing me (ben ut alttext dat com) or posting in the comments.
There are plenty of iPhone reviews out there. This is not another. This post is just an observation as to why the iPhone is so different and inspires such goodwill from those who use it. It is simple really, but Apple has taken tasks that on most (all?) other phones are cumbersome, non-intuitive, and often just plain crappy and made them a joy. I am not really over stating this, the iPhone is really fun to use. Browsing the web is not reminiscent of the "real" real web, it IS the real web (ok a web without Flash - for now). Google maps works just like Google maps should. Email is great, not some crippled version, and the phone, despite what some have said, is very nice too. Almost all the interfaces are easy to use and it is easy to know where to go and what to do to make things happen. My previous Windows Mobile phone and my Palm PDA phone before that, took a while to master and it was only because I learned their backwards way of doing things was I able to manage on those devices.
This should serve as yet another lesson from Apple that design matters. Make interfaces (both physical and virtual) that are fun and intuitive and people will enjoy using them and tell their friends.
A couple other observations - No wonder there is a 10% restocking fee if you return an iPhone. With the amount of plastic they use - wrapping everything multiple times in their way. It would take a while to wrap all that stuff back up, I imagine. And what is up with the industrial glue used on the bags they put the phones in when you buy them. Not sure if it is the same at Apple stores but at the at&t store the clerk put the phone in this bag and then pulled away a strip between the two insides and the bag sealed up tight - had to use keys to rip a hole in the bag to open it. When we asked him about it, he said Apple was making them do that. Think different, I guess.
With a lot of help from Dan Grigsby I finally have the venue for minnēbar ‘07 nailed down. The site is downtown Saint Paul in the Lowertown area. The "Railroader Building" as it is called is the site of the event - actually a vacant, 2-level office space that will pretty much let us have our way with it.
I am very excited, for this year's event (its on the 21st of April) and is the all-day variety of the (now) year long series of (un)events. For those of you who were not there last May, minnēbar is Minnesota's very own Barcamp and is free to anyone who is interested in participating in discussions about the web, technology, design, etc.
Add your name to the wiki to participate (you get food, drink, and a shirt too!).
This is what I have been wanting to do with RSS (and a whole lot more) presented in one of the slickest ajax-y sites around. Creating powerful and useful dynamic RSS feeds in a Visio-style interface (that doesn't even do it justice) is awesome. Try it out, it is one of the best web apps I have ever seen.
You can buy her box on ebay, too. Keith Oberman made mention of this on air. Awesome. I love the internets.
The Java Developer's Journal has published the results of it's end-of-year poll of various Internet technology players which makes for some good reading. Here are a couple I found interesting:
Jason Bell, Editorial Board Member, Java Developer's Journal:
Incremental mainstream adoption of Ruby on Rails It's going to happen, isn't it? Keep an eye out for Sun's offering of JRuby. Whether this is the death of other open source scripting languages like Groovy remains to be seen. Ruby has been a wake-up call and has now drawn the line dividing serious scripting languages from "hobby" languages (ones that wouldn't see enterprise adoption). For me, my job just got a whole lot easier, a whole lot quicker.
David Heinemeier Hansson, Creator of (Ruby on) Rails:
2007 will be the year where LAMPers finally decide to stop being neutral about the WS-* mess and pick the side of REST: the next wave of Web APIs will stop supplying both a SOAP and REST API and just go with the latter.
Gary Cornell, Founder & Publisher, Apress:
-IE 7 will have a fast adoption curve and so Firefox will cease gaining market share.
-The AJAX bandwagon will gain even more speed.
-Ruby's momentum will slow down as Python and PHP frameworks to combat Rails grow in popularity.
-The open-sourcing of Java will have no effect whatsoever on Java's slow decline in favor of dynamic languages (Ruby, Python) and C#.
-Apple will no longer gain market share for its desktops and will stabilize at its current meaningless level.
-Ultra lightweight notebooks based on flash memory with instant on/off will start coming out in large numbers.
I agree that so-called dynamic languages and frameworks will make big gains in '07 but feel pretty optimistic about the prospects for non Ruby on Rails flavors too. Groovy and Grails is primed to be pretty big and while I don't think it will overtake RoR in the next year, there are significant advantages that make the prospects for Groovy and its framework Grails to become very mainstream, look very good.
From a press release on the new book: The Definitive Guide to Grails:
Ruby on Rails is hot, but it seems that more recent noise from the Java community has been focused on Groovy and its framework, Grails. Taking inspiration from innovative frameworks like Ruby on Rails, or the likes of Django or TurboGears, Grails makes simple things simpler, harder things possible, and brings back the fun of creating web applications. Continuing to affirm the hype, Guillaume Laforge and Dierk König, remark "Grails definitely has an ambitious name for being the Holy Grail all application developers have sought so far. But more than a mere ambition, Grails fulfills its promises by letting you be more productive than you could have ever thought possible."The Grails Framework is an open source, lightweight, agile Web development framework that leverages Groovy, an open source, lightweight, agile and dynamic Java-based scripting language, and complements Java web development. Grails is the ideal framework for developing in the web tier for Java developers and exemplifies the power of the Groovy language and its APIs.
I for one believe that there are too many Java developers out there (their community still dwarfs the next largest one) that are very interested in lightweight frameworks and rapid development but are not too keen on "throwing out" years of experience with the most popular language out here. Groovy in combination with the Grails framework offers the best of both of these worlds and I think people are just waiting for someone to really take up and champion Grails as David Heinemeier Hansson and 37signals have done for Rails.
If you are new to Groovy or Grails, this interview with Groovy project manager Guillaume Laforge is a good primer for learning about Groovy and Grails and where it stands in its current development.
We are just two weeks away from the Twin Cities' best platform for launching a new idea and getting feedback from others in the local web/software development and design communities. Dan and Luke have done a great job in getting these quarterly DemoCamps going. They really serve to build a lot of excitement and solidify the community between the larger MinneBar events.
So get out to the wonderful Acadia Cafe* and interact with some geeks showing off their goods at MinneDemo on Monday December 11th.
* Hats off to Dan and Luke. Great work on getting this venue as it has a cafe area and a nice theater for the demos and will certainly work better than the summer event.
...the website of the same name is actually quite good. I am rather enjoying reading Modern Life is Rubbish. Their Web Typography Cheat Sheet and a rundown on current trends in blog technology and more style are great. and I just like the way the site looks (well except for the huge Google ad in the middle of the page). The site offers some fresh takes on stuff we have been posting about for years with many new insights. Bloody good show, Stuart!
I have to say a few words about the nice but, perhaps misused Hemingway Theme for Wordpress among other blogging applications. The growing popularity of this theme cannot be questioned (there are nearly 440,000 results for "Powered by Hemingway".)
I believe that the layout for individual post pages using this theme is very nice. There is a very good delineation between post, post meta info, and comments while still allowing the comments to flow like a conversation from the original post. The site meta info and additional links at the bottom also works on this page type (assuming that this information doesn't get out of hand). Where this theme tends to break down is its implementation for blog homepages. People can (and have) debate about the merits of fewer or more blog posts per page and I could be persuaded either way depending upon the context and type (and frequency) of the posts, however, what is not argued as often is the convention of having chronological blog posts appearing above and below each other.
In the Hemingway theme homepage template, the most often seen configuration is to have the last 2 posts appear next to each other at the top, with links to earlier posts down below, often mixed in with other content to the point where it is difficult to determine where to go next for more "content". In addition to this shortcoming, the other problem with Hemingway is that, if abused, the footer section at the bottom of each page with "about" text, and recent post listings, becomes unwieldy and ugly. Not to pick on a couple friends but the theme that seems to work so well for post pages, breaks down on home pages as shown to varying degrees.
The designer, Kyle Neath knows this and takes care to only show samples that are neat and clean. Minimal meta data and navigation in these screenshots maintain clarity and make finding what you need in the footer, much easier.
I never like to criticize without suggestions and positive feedback and so here is some:
The web has come a long way baby. You don't need "fancy" software from Microsoft or OmniGraffle to make flowcharts, diagrams, and the like. Now you can use online tools such as the Flash-based Gliffy or the css and html, ajaxio. Both are very cool.
From a List of nifty tools for drawing diagrams, charts and flow-charts (Vitaly Friedman's Notebook).
An old post at Slashdot resurfaced, for whatever reason, and caused quite a stir about how non-compliant (with CSS standards) Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 browser will be. People can split hairs about this or that relating to IE7's standards compliance but when it comes down to it, it either will be or won't be.
In a good conversation with Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Platform team at Microsoft, Richard MacManus at ZDNet asks some pointed questions about IE7's plans for CSS compliance and gets some honest answers.
The bits about standards compliance versus backward compatibility were interested, and there are suggestions that the IE7 team is prioritizing standards compliance ahead of backwards compatibility. I also thought Wilson's characterization of many (most) of IE's user base as 'non-enthusiast users' was dead on (and funny).
I think backwards compatibility has always been a big challenge for us and certainly today it's a huge challenge. Particularly for IE, as we have a lot of what I'd term 'non-enthusiast users' - my mother is always my canonical example here. And for my mother, if I automatically upgrade her machine [its IE browser] and suddenly one of her sites breaks or looks a little funny, she's going to be upset about that. On the other hand if she were to install an alternative browser, and it looks different in that browser - she could probably understand why that would happen, because it's a completely different product.
More at Chris Wilson's blog.
[Source: Slashdot]
Luke Francl and Dan Grigsby have done a great job in putting together a follow-up event that plays off the success of minnebar and the strength of the Minneapolis / Saint Paul web and software communities. I think that minnedemo will be a huge success and can hopefully be replicated a couple times a year to show of some great work people are doing and to keep the momentum going in between annual minnbar events.
Some people may think that LOST is just a hit show on ABC. Those people don't know about the huge amounts of fans that debate its theories - yes there are LOST theories. LOST is actually something of a phenomenon. Just take a look at the number of sites out there - there are over 40 million results in Google for "LOST ABC". There are several very thorough sites like LostPedia and, …and found. LostPedia has over 6,000 total pages in its database. There have been a total of 12,214,121 page views, and 48,231 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 8.02 average edits per page and 253.24 views per edit.
There is a great timeline presented at LostPedia and an outstanding extension to the timeline here.
Major new sources have got into the act, furthering the theory frenzy and speculation. Here is one of the best (according to some) but certainly one of the most elaborate.
In addition to the TV series, there has been a real concerted effort by the shows producers to fan the flames of these fans (or fanatics). There is a real novel: Bad Twin, written by fictional Gary Troup, one of the passengers on Oceanic Flight 815 (the flight that crashed in LOST. It is even read on the show by one of the characters and fans believe there are clues hidden in its pages.
Not only that, but there are websites set up for companies in the series, such as the Hanso Foundation and Oceanic Airlines, each with plenty of intrigue and speculation of clues contained within them – seriously, view the source of the Oceanic site and really explore and interact with the Hanso site – there was some real time put into those.
4, 8, 15, 16 ,23 or 42 – this is the ever-present sequence of numbers from the show totaling 108 - this post was made today because LOST Season 3 will begin in exactly 108 days just one day after the October 3rd release of Season 2 to DVD.
Today I received the 100,000th spam email in the past 30 days. I feel very honored that so many people consider me a great candidate for refinancing my mortgage or investing in the hot new stock. So many busty blonds want to meet me but I feel that they would be surprised to find that so many others seem to think I can't get it up and that I may need C14L5 or \/14gr4. If you have sent me a message to which I didn’t respond, please take heart in knowing that I most likely did not see it – you should send it again – unless it's you, Bedwyr Miguez or even you, Thorbjo Desrosier, I got your messages.
At the minnēbar conference in May I presented a session titled Agile Design (slides) and a great discussion ensued. The talk centered around the concepts and ideas of the Agile Method, but, you guessed it, as it related to information and visual design. I have had a great opportunity in my current role to help to define and evolve our process and practices surrounding software design and development. I love the team I work with and hope to continue breaking new ground with them.
I also wanted to post a bit about some ongoing and upcoming projects I am involved in so you know what I have been up to and what to expect.
First, I am planning to launch a new site with some peers of mine that will be focused on the agile method and particularly how it pertains to the development of "web 2.0" apps. You might think of it as a Signal vs. Noise type blog with less of a marketing spin.
I am also helping to plan OpenBar for the fall of 2006. OpenBar will pick up where minnēbar left off but its entire focus will be on open source software, using open source in your business, and is aimed at developing, enriching, and bringing together Minnesota's large but disjointed open source community.
I also have a Minnesota blog aggregation site brewing slowly, but my decision to write in Ruby and on the Rails framework (as my first foray into such technologies) is retarding my progress. Hopefully, I will post more on this soon.
Lastly, this site is on the verge of another facelift. I really like the new visual design a lot, but am more excited by some of the ways the new site will be organized as well as some of the additional features and content I will be adding. Not sure when this will happen, but I am hoping for a June launch.
The new improvements made to the Flickr UI are great and well worth the wait. When you go, what you won't see are drastic changes to colors or brand, nor should you. What you will see are subtle enhancements (except for maybe the more radical improvement of the Organizr) that shouldn't confuse veteran users too much and should allow for new users to more quickly utilize many of the more powerful features of this great social photo sharing application.
Here is a small set of screenshots and discussion of the changes.
minnēbar was great. It was interesting, active, creative, technical, loud, hot, and fun. It is over for now. So far the feedback both in person and on the wiki has been overwhelmingly positive. There were some issues with the wifi staying up and we were pretty much at capacity with over 110 people attending. I plan to write a recap soon, but for now you can browse some of the Flickr photos tagged with minnebar (there have been so many that minnebar is a hot tag right now). And here are some links to the people posting them:
Jesse Ross
Sopheava (aka Margaret Andrews)
Tim Wilson
Mark Danielson
Ethan Galstad
Jamie Thingelstad
Peter Fleck
me
After attending a presentation by Google about Google Earth, Google Books, and Google Scholar and came away with some very interesting back stories of each of these and a bit on insight on where they may be headed. While the presentations were interesting, the chance to get into the new Minneapolis Central Library was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. The few photos I took don't do it justice. It is a beautiful building and is going to be a great resource for many, many Minnesota residents. You can read more on the library here.
Some stories are coming out that point to Microsoft attempting to purchase large amounts of Yahoo! stock. The spin on this is that Microsoft wants to compete head to head with Google more effectively. This logic strikes me as a bit, well illogical. I can see Yahoo! wanting to secure the financial wherewithal to compete with Google on a larger scale but Microsoft has always had the option of doing as much or more than Google but has seemed content (until recently?) to not really get into Google's core businesses of, information, search and advertising.
Some ideas have Microsoft spending nearly $2 billion in the coming fiscal year toward building an ad-supported online service business, or selling its MSN network to Yahoo! for a minority stake in Yahoo!
This type of a merger makes a lot of sense, though I don’t think I would like to see it be more than an infusion of cash into Yahoo! or an elimination of MSN (in favor of Yahoo).
I have put the new Google Calendar app through its paces and like many people, have found many things to like (invite features are looking good. I think evite is in trouble and Skobee is likely DOA) and some to dislike (still very buggy with refreshing itself after certain actions and there are some issues with duplicating entries for the same shared event). The purpose of this post, however, isn't really about those things. It isn't really even about Google Calendar. It is about what's next for Google and the glimpse they have given us within this new application.
It is obvious that they will soon integrate their calendar and mail apps. My thought is, though, that they will not stop there. I think the time is ripe for them to unleash their first version of an integrate office style suite containing search, mail, calendaring, and word processing. I mocked up some screens as to what I think it may look like when it comes, posted them as a Flickr set and added notes to them as well. Here are some thumbnails:
With 90 participants as of about 5 minutes ago, minnēbar is really gaining momentum. Now I fear the venue will not be able to accommodate this mass of geeks, hipster designers, and open-sourcers all in one place. I think all this pre-conference excitement will really boil over to some great discussions at the conference. I hope everyone can check their "Minnesota Nice" (aka introversion) at the door and really participate.
The idea for a Fall event has already surfaced, this time with a focus on open source and open solutions: OpenBar. I will keep people updated on the event status and will post a review and such after the event. But with less than one month to go, I just hope I don't have to turn anyone away.
Let's find a place that can accommodate 200 next year. Any ideas?
I have a lot of take-aways from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference but one of the most exciting was the rather unexpected discovery of barcamp. A collaborative (un)conference where everyone participates in discussions and sessions is a great idea and an ideal setting for meeting interesting people, growing community, and exchanging ideas and is something that I decided I wanted to bring to Minnesota. So I have picked a date (May 6th), a venue (local shop Catalyst Studios), some sponsors, and some great participants and started planning for minnēbar.
All the details are at the minnēbar wiki so for now I will just say that this will be a great event and if you are interested in participating add your name to the wiki and, if you want, please add what you would like to speak about or learn about.
Daniel M. Harrison at blogcritics has been all over the potential sale of Sun to Google and what it might mean. He, along with some others, have proposed a Google move into the financial services and healthcare industries.
"Google is going into Financial Services and Healthcare!" he exclaimed over the lengthy conversation. "This is the last stage of the Java project!"
This could also be the true start to the "G-drive platform" or GO-OS (Google OS) and could also mean the open sourcing of Java? This last part is intriguing especially as other platforms and languages gain ground* on the reigning king of the enterprise application.
This claim is, however speculative and not proven true by poor indicators such as book sales and various internet pundits.
Here are couple quick observations from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2006:
1. Don't wear your goddamned bluetooth ear piece the whole time - not sure why I get so irrationally annoyed with this, but I do.
2. Newsflash: Apple overtakes PC laptop market with strong 70% share - or so it would seem by the looks of things here.
3. There is nothing sadder than a bunch of full-grown "hard-core" programmer types forcing themselves to fake their excitement about now doing JavaScript coding.
4. Some men can apparently pull off wearing a skirt - oh sorry a util-i-kilt
5. Web 2.0 means "we realized that crappy looking interfaces weren't selling and so now we hired a designer".
I had the good fortune to accidentally sit down to lunch at a table with David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals and lead developer of Ruby on Rails and Rich Kilmer of RubyForge who had begun a discussion of the things you might expect, Ruby, Rails, AJAX, and the like. Then Phil Windley (who has some excellent posts about a couple tutorials here at eTech) and Rohit Khare of CommerceNet Labs added to the mix some discussion of microfomats, JavaScript, and some ideas that definitely push the envelope of what those things have traditionally done such as, mini-ml and some JavScript talk during which I was treading water so it wouldn't go over my head. Finally, fellow Minnesotan, Dan Grigsby of SiteGoFaster infused some more energy into the ruby on rails discussion as it eventually turned to a preview of David Heinemeier Hansson's tutorial about how with Rails 1.1 (coming this weekend?) you can create great AJAX apps without writing a single line of JavaScript.
Just finished up a two day conference in San Diego on Strategic E-HR - yeah that's what I said. It was better than it sounded. Really. I am going to stick around for next week's Emerging Technologies conference from O'Reilly and so I have some time to kill in between. What better way to spend some time than taking photos around town. Check them out at Flickr.
In a move that surely indicates boredom and a disregard for original thought, area blogger, Ben Edwards, blatantly rips off the new CNN International style. The style change could also have been said to have influences from Magnetbox.com and adhesive label tape. News at 11.
If I am a liitle late to the party on this you can blame a lot of people but you can only blame Mark for me actually participating.
Four jobs I've had
Four movies I can watch over and over
Four places I've lived
Four TV shows I love
Four places I've vacationed
Four of my favorite dishes (soooo many things!)
Four sites I visit daily (I am assuming mail.google.com doesn’t count)
Four places I would rather be right now
Four bloggers I am tagging
Google Local should allow users to enter their own locations into the Google Local databases. There have been plenty of times when I know of a great restaurant being left out of the listings and I think plenty of people would add info to this service. Google need look no further than Wikipedia to see that such a system can work and work with very few errors and flaws. Is there more room for exploitation in Google Local (changing competitor's info, etc)? Perhaps. But the benefits of a living system of data continually being updated and checked over has overwhelming advantages. As it stands Google Local hardly returns any useful results in the cities I live (St. Paul, Minneapolis) and what's worse, often returns inaccurate results.
Looks like TiVo is rolling out new features at quite a clip. Some have reported that they now have support for podcasts ad I have seen local weather and traffic and other features in conjunction with Yahoo! There would also seem to be sharing of photos with Yahoo! (Flickr integration coming soon?) Maybe this Yahoo!/TiVo partnership is going to be more worthwhile than first speculated...interesting.
More features being rolled out:
- Browse movie information/buy tickets from Fandango.
- Discover new music on Live365.
- Overlap priority (for those shows that begin or end at strange times)
- Movies on demand with Netflix (ok so this one is still wishful thinking)
TiVo is still a ways ahead of the competitors in features. Hopefully they can stay that way and somehow make a profit.
if anyone understands what im (sic). saying please e-mail me at this e-mail adress (sic).
does anyone here bilieve (sic) that there are aliens in other planets? who really made us is there really a god? im not saying there isnt (sic). but who made god? seriously please answer back at me
Here's a few bits of news and links I have been collecting the past few weeks, relating to my home state of Minnesota. Don't ever say I don't represent!
I must admit that the new design of Alt Text is a bit limiting to me, especially, when considering the way I want to post. I am trying to figure out some ways to get around it, but right now Alt Text just isn't set up for the type of linking to interesting things that I have been doing lately. Of course, I knew this while I was designing and implementing the new design but I thought that I would just expand on a link here and there and turn them into real (single) posts (rather than in bunches). Then a strange thing happened. I wanted to post more often than once per day, introducing yet another drawback of this design...it is harder to browse backwards through entries, as well. I am going to make it easier on the archive pages and so on, but I need to figure out a more global solution, and soon.
Here are some posts I have been holding back on because I wanted to have at least 3-5 for aesthetics:
I may try out a new thing here on Alt Text where I showcase some great interactive work I come across. I figure there is no better day to post such finds than on Sunday, as I don't normally post on Sunday and so it can serve as a bonus post if you will.
The first bunch of featured sites are all the creations of the kids over at wefail.com and are linked from their cool sofake.com site. These guys push Flash to places Macromedia didn't see it going - and they do it well.
bobschneidermusic.com
bobschneidermusic.com/captainkirk/
billyharveymusic.com
hungout.com
amplifier.com
Check these sites out - they are worth exploring and really looking at the thoughtful intracacies these guys put in - they are full of almost easter egg-like content.
While there are already 300 to 400 Internet hot spots operating in the city, Minneapolis looks to make wi-fi ubiquitous to better serve both its citizens and its services.
The city also wanted to replace expensive cellular radio communications used by police cars with a cheaper and faster wireless data network. There also was a desire to provide broadband to an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the city's population that either isn't served by high-speed Internet access or can't afford it.
While the access won't be free, unfortunately, it may be a much cheaper (and faster) alternative for many seeking faster access than dial-up provides.
Sony has announced that it is getting into the movie on demand game by offering downloadable movies via Movielink. Unfortunately, Firefox users will get an error when attempting to go to the Movielink site that states:
"Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must use Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, which supports certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies. Click here to get the latest version of Internet Explorer.We do not support Mozilla or Netscape. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."
Is this a Microsoft partnership deal? They do only use Windows Media Player format.
Shoddy technology decisions aside, this is just a poor business model from beginning to end. They claim they are modeling the service after iTunes, but it is really not anything like it except that it is distributed online. Most movies I saw were downloadable for between $4.49 and $4.99 (though they claim there are some for $1.99 I didn't see any that low). The thing is, this just buys you a viewing - and you must complete that viewing within 30 days of purchase and within 24 hours of beginning to watch the film.
Who do they think their audience for these things is? Anyone who is downloading movies to view on their computer is or would be a Netflix or similar service subscriber before they would do this. With Netflix you can keep a movie forever and can start watching a movie in 2001 and complete in 2005 if you want. AND you can easily watch it on your TV.
Maybe they think their market is people who normally get pay-per-view movies. They are delusional if they think this is smart. Pay-per-view movies are available immediately in most cases without waiting 30 to 90 minutes to download, they usually cost between $1.99 and $4.99, and they too can easily be watched on TVs rather than computer screens.
Here's an idea for Movielink, given free of charge. When people pay for and download movies from your service, they should either pay a bit more ($12.00) and own them just as iTunes users do or they should pay less ($2.00) and be able to watch them for a specified period of time.
Since first seeing the video of the "fat kid" grooving to some catchy techno-pop (which admittedly was not long ago) I have been obsessed with finding out more. I wanted to know who this kid was (Gary Brolsma - his site), what that song was (Dragostea Din Tei originally by O-Zone [mp3], later by the Italian group Haiducii [mp3] which is the one used in Gary Brolsma's video.), what the lyrics meant, and why it seems to be such a phenomenon (featured on The Tonight Show, CNN, VH1, Good Morning America, and The New York Times).
It would seem I am not the only one who is fascinated:
A classroom watches and participates in video.
A site with more links than this post.
The online game World of Warcraft apparently has a filmmaker’s guild comprised of people who make films based on "footage" they get "in game". Oh yeah, they did an in-game version of the video.
Napoleon Dynamite dancing to Dragostea Din Tei.
Other stuff:
At the halfway point of SXSW I am pretty pleased with what I am getting out of it on the panel and speaker side yet disappointed that I have not been (through much of my own fault) able to connect with people as much as I should.
I have some great take aways regarding semantics, css, and microformatting as well as some great design tidbits, techniques, and resources. I plan on posting more this evening. Until then, Sam Felder (who I found via my iTunes url idea) seems to be following me to each panel and has some more insight.
I, along with many of the folks whose sites I visit each week, am descending upon Austin, Texas for the love fest (now with 33% more love) that is SXSW. I am returning after a year hiatus with a renewed enthusiasm for the web, blogs, technology, and the future. I get the impression that many of this year's participants are feeling this way too.
From Dave Nunez's unofficial geek guide to getting over yourself at SxSW Interactive 2005:
Amen. So here is my official welcome to anyone who wishes to come talk to me as well as my official apology for busting into your conversation to introduce myself. I am offering a special incentive to those who introduce themselves to me: a free Alt Text Tshirt*. Now I just gotta get me some of those stickers.
* While supplies last.
I would be remiss today as both a blogger and a friend of Jason's not to mention his new endeavor (and the talk of the "blogsphere" today): full-time blogger at kottke.org Inc. I wish Jason the best and hope he is successful with this. I encourage everyone who has enjoyed Jason's site in the past to donate a small sum. In fact, don't think of it as a donation as much as an advancement of the art of blogging. I for one can't wait to see what it is he is going to unleash on the blogging world next.
A couple weeks ago I posted a suggestion for a Share with a Friend feature for Netflix. In addition to posting these thoughts here on Alt Text I sent a note to Netflix regarding it.
Today I received an email from Netflix inviting me to a sneak preview of their new "Friends" feature. Now it isn't what I had in mind - as my idea focused on sharing a DVD with people who are not Netflix members.
