Imagine it would have been google doing this and not Alexa. Google and Apple are both brands that, if they do the smallest thing get the biggest attention. Poor old Alexa changes the world, and nobody cares.
Category: internet
gmail starts to put custom feed items on top of my email box.
Nice and not nice. The 5 different ones that I saw fly by
were tailored pretty close to what I care about. Of course:
gmail knows about me. I prefer not to realize that. And
I would like to do things at my pace, pick up information
instead of having it pushed my way.
good thing you can turn those things off …
update 12/9:
“Note: Clips of your favorite RSS and Atom feeds are displayed randomly, and aren’t targeted to the contents of your mail.”
so it say in the Webclips answer part of google.
Amanda was asking people in NY if they prefer IE or firefox, and then why that is. I wonder if it smart from Microsoft to call IE7 “internet explorer”.
The brand is fucked. It stands for virus, exploit and popup. There are two internets out there: The one you use with “internet explorer” which is hell and the other one is the ‘take back the web’ one in Firefox. “take back” from whom? Certainly not from Microsoft, they are still no force on the internet. But their monolithic market dominance combined with technical ignorance towards the threats of the net degenerated the Internet user experience for all those people being stuck at IE. Browsers are actually no big deal, unless they suck. And only IE sucks royally.
Safari is a browser by Apple. So, who cares? You can use it or not. It’s a minor detail, since it works well enough and is secure.
Maybe it’s the name that bad? “explore”
Now you like to “explore” things if you are confident, and what you are going to find is worth the risk. Since the Internet is a pretty mean djungle these days, most people don’t feel like “exploring” the net. Too often they can into trouble when they did so. The “Ford Explorer” is in trouble too. It’s sales are down by roughly half, despite that there is a new model. IE is as stupid as an SUV. But maybe “exploring” was something you would like to do in the end of the last century: venturing out there into the future. Now all there seems to be waiting are Oil companies reaping record profits and sites that will take control of your machine, just because you visited a simple page with Internet Explorer.
I looks like that it shares the fate of the “Ford Explorer”, which does not want to sell.
Let’s call Sony a brand in motion
Boingboing I didn’t like as much as I used to for various reasons lately. But they score for publishing this.
And no, it’s not about the recently discovered efforts of the US Army to teach those Iraqi’s a lesson in media and democracy.
Business Week writes about MySpace and the likes. The article is better than the usual hype-treadmill-word-boilups that you can read when people from traditional media try to get a handle on yet another internet base phenomen. They write that 15 to 18 year olds spend six and a half hours a day with any form of visual media on CRT/LCD sccreens: the big 3 TV, games and internet. When I was that age, we spend that much time having sex. Probably only on three or four of the 1424 days that you have between fifteen and eighteen. The rest of time we tried to get there. I have never looked at mySpace but I suspect that the basic motivations in the lifes of teenagers have not changed that much. They are so basic that they are not worth mentioning I guess. Or, maybe, times really have changed?
Well Murdoch payed almost half a billion dollars for MySpace. Better than twenty bugs on friendster. Which one of the things I liked about this article: It does not only cite events that supports one underlying current. Friendster tanked. They still mention it, even though this would not fit into the rosy ‘social networking’ boom picture that they paint otherwise.
p&g allegdedly started a social network around a scent or spray. No, really. They spent some money on that. The really sad part about that is, that those responsible probably still occupy their corner office, despite the fact that they burned millions on a project that was as viable as, well, hm. I really tried to come up with something that would be as stupid. Couldn’t find anything.
Thinksecret has a wet media dream involving Apple (of course) and the download of media. Whenever somebody starts raving about ‘intel technology’ and how enabling it is I have to roll my eyes: Intel makes great CPUs and other things that other people make as well. I might be uttterly ignorant but I never saw that any of those Intel plans where either new innovative or sucessful for that matter.
Reading Apple’s media delivery ambitions it should be pretty clear that OS X 10.5 aka Lepard will be available for non Apple hardware also commonly known as ‘PCs’. If Apple makes money with media distribution they might as well give the OS away. They might charge for support.
When the OS X on Intel was announced people usually said that Apple would want to protect it’s hardware business. I think that is /bs/. I think it is entirely strategic, that Apple pretends to let OS X only run on Apple hardware. First of all it is a bargaining chip. Apple, flush with cash from the ongoing iPod sucess, can sit at the sidelines of the PC-market of 2006. Apple will close see how Longhorn is doing. Technically and in the market place. If they feel that Microsoft’s position is vulnerable enough then they make a move. Or they get a deal from Bill for not moving. One thing they don’t want to do though is to openly declare that they are going into the PC operating system market. But technically they can. Not they that would or need to, but they would have OS X running on 70% of all machines that Dell sells within a week. I am sure that Dell would like this as well: Competition changes the price. Lepard might be in a good position to take a big chunk out of the Longhorn market: The latest Redmond OS has significant hardware requirements. If people perceive the upgrade from whatever Windows they run now as a ‘switch’, then they might as well switch to another brand.
If you use Firefox then try this site. Nothing special, just that the pink cross will start spinning. Firefox can display animated gifs as favicons. Yes, there is no point to this. Now, the good news is, that once more people start cluttering a simple information system like a favicon, there will be an extension for Firefox to make them stop twitching if you so desire.
A favicon is a one-look information confirmation. It helps you to get very very quickly where you are. When it starts moving it does not at to this functionality. It actually breaks the purpose of those sixteen by sixteen pixels: First of all it’s distracting. Something moving is a visual cue. We are evelotunary trained to look at moving things: If it moves then we might want to eat or fuck it, or it might want to do the same to us. No, favicons probably don’t. But our visual perception system does not know that. So we look at it.
But there is nothing to see. Which is the second problem of this juvenile Firefox feature: What’s the point? You can not really make a meaningful animation at this size. Animation can help the meaning of signs. An arrow symbol can be suported if it moves. An animated favicon is like a moving letter. There is a reason why animated type is not the default setting, even though computers could jiggle letters around at ease. It’s annoying, distracting and simply pointless.
Which is the third and final problem of those 256 pixels playing quick chameleon: if you need eye candy like this, then you might be a little bit insecure if the actual content and your site is worth remembering. It’s the equivalent of a loud dress. It’s fad, and it will come and go. Dancing Baby, moving icon. Seen that. Ignored that.
Just moved the server to it’s new location. Things should be better now. More bandwidth and better reliability.
That would be the the theory. The next days we will see how that really will pan out.
Andreas