I switched from Firefox to Chrome a few months back and haven’t switched back. In a nutshell:
-faster, uses less resources
-better bookmark manager
-search from the url bar
Makes me wonder, what other services that I’ve used forever should I reconsider?
The internet will eventually disrupt all existing industries. Think about the ones it has already fundamentally changed forever: music, software, retail, travel and your phone. What’s next? Television.
Consider the following:
And now there is this Washington Post story about Steve Jobs talking on the subject. Television is definitely the next big industry to be disrupted by the internet. It can’t come soon enough.
David Pogue writing in the New York Times recently said the following:
Every time I’m tempted to write about some tech product that’s been around awhile, I’m torn. On one hand, I’ll be blasted by the technogeeks for being late to the party. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem right to keep something great hidden under a barrel from the rest of the world.
I feel that way about a lot of web services. The service Pogue mentions is Dropbox. I recently was telling my Dad (and new iPhone owner) about it. Then a few days later I was telling a friend about it. I’ve used it forever and can’t believe there are still people out there who haven’t heard about it or people didn’t realize that this was the service they needed to make their lives much easier. David Pogue’s review makes a better case than I could ever do, I urge you to check it out if you need some convincing. Or just click here to sign up and try it for yourself.
I’ve been putting a lot of thought into this recently. The other day I was explaining to my room mate what I had to do to change my driver’s license over to a New York one. Somehow we got to talking about being an organ donor.
I have moved a lot over the past six or seven years. I headed off to college in a different state, after graduation I moved to another state to take a job, then I moved to New York. Every state handles the organ donor question differently. At the end of the process in New York they ask you to check a box on a form you have to sign, indicating if you would like to be an organ donor or not. The phrasing of this question is significant.
I would be really interested to see the different rates of sign ups by state and by how this question is posed. I would guess the conversion rates vary wildly from places where you have to just check a box versus places where the back of your license just says to sign it if you’re interested.
Something to think about. How a question is phrased to someone has a significant impact on their response. Questions should always be worded in a way that will illicit the most desired response.
Every few weeks I like to re-evaluate who I am following on Twitter. The idea is that my attention is limited, I want to be constantly adjusting the signal to noise ratio of my Twitter feed. The easiest way to eliminate people is just un-follow them when I see them tweet ten times in a row. For other people I just take away their retweets. Other ways to manage the stream are less obvious.
I usually use Friend or Follow or a similar service to establish who is still following me. Some of the people I follow are in this grey area where the content the put out isn’t great, but I feel some sort of social obligation to continue to follow them. A simple check of who isn’t following me is a quick way to justify dropping these people.
The final way I would like to further hone the feed doesn’t exist, but it should. I would like to see someone build a third party app on the Twitter API that sorts my followers my more complex methods. The one I would use specifically would be something like sort by “tweets per day over last 30 days.” See all of the people I follow sorted in this fashion would be a great way to quickly evaluate which ones to drop and which ones to continue to follow.
On this note there is definitely a future need for automated curation here. There needs to be some way to tell Twitter to selectively filter out tweets from my own followers on certain subjects. For instance there are a lot of sporting events I don’t really care about. On Saturday my feed is cluttered with people talking about College Football games. All those people who watching shows like American Idol? I could definitely go without those. At this point I tollerate it and continue to follow these people, but if there was a way to further tweak the signal to noise like this I would be a huge fan.
I’ve been down to the Occupy Wall Street protest a few times in the past couple of weeks. When people ask me about it I’m not always sure how to explain it. Unions, anarchists, environmentalists, disillusioned Tea Partiers, celebrities and everyone in between can be seen down there on any given day. There are so many disperate groups. They all want different outcomes and have different goals, but they all have one thing in common: they are all really mad about the current economic and political situation. In an op-ed, NY Times columnist Paul Krugman has summed it up better than I have been able to:
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.
Makes me want to go re-watch Sidney Lumet’s classic film Network. Because I’m mad as hell and I can’t take it anymore. Read the full article on the NY Times web site.
I was having a drink with a really successful fraternity alumnus the other night. I mentioned the almost cliche “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” He immediately told me I was wrong. He said it is actually “who you know will open doors and what you know will set your trajectory.” Definitely changed my thinking for the better. A small gem in a night full of incredibly helpful advice (and fun).
Update: I should add that I like this modified phrase much better because I would like to think my skills and experiences still count for something.
This a brief overview of how to import Facebook friends into Google Plus. With Google Plus finally opening up to everyone it seemed like a good time to explain this to people. I did this a few weeks back, which is why everyone I’m Facebook friends got early invites (or at least should have).
1. Create a new e-mail account through Yahoo. The name doesn’t matter, you’ll only use it for about fifteen minutes. It is very important that this is an account that is new and has never been used before.
2. Within your new Yahoo Mail account import your Facebook contacts. Go to the “Contacts” Tab, then “Import Contacts” then click on “Facebook.” You’ll have to be logged in to Facebook or it will prompt you to do so. Go ahead and click through all the prompts until you have a bunch of contacts in your Yahoo account (where you previously had none because it was new).
3. Export your Yahoo Mail contacts into a .csv file. Go to the “Contacts” tab and go to the black “Actions” drop down and click on “Export All.” The option you want to select is “Yahoo! CSV.” Go through the prompts and save the .csv file to your desktop. This file is a format readable by Microsoft Excel that will list Name and Email address for all of your Yahoo contacts, which at this point are all of the email addresses your Facebook friends used to register for Facebook.
4. Import the .csv file from your desktop to Google Plus. Before going through with this you might want to go through and selectively edit. Keep in mind that these are the e-mail addresses people used to register with Facebook and they might not all be up to date. Once you have the list of people you want to add all at once, go to Circles > Find People > Upload Address Book.
Star Wars and by extension, George Lucas were both huge parts of my childhood. I’ve seen the original trilogy hundreds of times. I would come home from school, but in one of the vhs tapes and let it play in the background while I played with my toys. Every single line of each of the films has been burned into my memory for eternity. Somewhere along the way I lost interest in Star Wars. I got older, grew up and moved on to other things. When I would see my young cousins over the Holidays and they would show me their Star Wars toys, I would say, “Star Wars! I used to play with stuff like this all the time.” I still looked back fondly on Star Wars and was willing to overlook the terrible new trilogy. Star Wars was a warm memory in my heart, until recently.
This week a few bits of news broke. The first is Star Wars would finally be put out on Blu-Ray. The second is that there will some changes. The third, well I’ll return to the third. The changes in Star Wars aren’t the first. When the original trilogy was re-released in the late 1990′s there were some changes. Minor cosmetic changes, updated effects, etc. There have now been so many changes and re-releases that the subject has merited its own Wikipedia Entry. The latest changes are on one hand seemingly inevitable given the history of changes and completely outrageous on the other. Completely replacing puppet Yoda with a CGI one? Blinking Ewoks? (Confirmed by NY Times) Why is this necessary? People would buy these movies on Blu-Ray just because it is Star Wars. We don’t need something “new” about it other than a better format. You aren’t giving people more for their money, you are destroying their beloved childhood memories.
Does this man not realize he is destroying his legacy for a few extra bucks (millions probably, but still…)? He made a set of movies that were universally loved by both fans and critics despite their flaws. He was unduly worshiped by millions as one of the great auteurs of all time. He had cemented his legacy. He had nothing left to prove. So what does he do? He decides to change a bunch of stuff. Why George, why?
Back to the third bit of news. Someone drudged up an old speech Lucas gave in the 1980′s in which he said, “people who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians.” Seriously? (Full Transcript here) If George Lucas had the secret ambition to become the biggest hypocrite in the history of the world, in that he has succeeded. Unfortunately in the end, this is his to destroy. I’m not sure why anyone would make the decisions he has, but it is totally within his rights to do so. As one internet commenter succinctly put it, “I have altered the film. Pray I do not alter it further…”
I recently reached out to a fraternity brother on Facebook because I no longer had his cell phone number. Facebook pulled up our last correspondence – from 2007 – a message sent by me as Chapter President to him while he was pledging the chapter asking him to make sure and get an extra t-shirt made for a person we added late to the pledge class. Strange to see that almost four and a half years later.
It makes me think, how long of a digital trail are we unwittingly leaving? In some cases we are leaving one that will apparently last forever. Good to know, scary to think of the implications.