Dial-THE-Joke

I spent some time this weekend working on my Dial-THE-Joke application. The idea is certainly not original. I first learned about these systems when I saw Pirates of Silicon Valley. It accepts user submitted jokes and those jokes are then voted on. The joke with the most votes will be the played when you call 425-440-0035.

I built it with twilio and GAE. It's the first real app I built with twilio. It only uses the "say" verb so I still have a lot to learn about the twilio system. But I do have another app I plan on building during the evenings and weekends ahead. It's slightly more complicated but I think it will be a bit more amusing.

For those that are interested the source code can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/dialthejoke/

P.S.

The next order of business is to clean up the source code!

Friday is a BIG day

Today is going to be an important day in history. Not only is analog TV going the way of the, the, the dodo bird, but facebook is going to allow all of us to choose a user name! Tomorrow at 9:01pm PST you can see be at www.facebook.com/evan.

It's also the birthday of the 41st president. Make sure you pay your new taxes!

bing it on

Even some of the cool kids over at hacker news think bing is ok.

I am not smart enough to tell you which search engine is better from an empirical standpoint but if you execute these two queries:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=django+gps&go=&form=QBRE
http://www.google.com/search?q=django+gps

You will notice that on bing I am the third result and on Google I am the eighth (at the time of posting).

I would like to thank Microsoft for releasing bing on my birthday (22 years of age). Many great things have happened on June 1st. I was born. My parents got married (before I was born). Heidi Klum was born. Marilyn Monroe was born. And Ronnie Wood was also born. And CNN came to be. Don't forget CNN the most trusted name in news. So maybe bing is just meant to be a success.

maxed out

I am watching maxed out right now. I place people who work in billing and collection agencies below lawyers and insurance agents.

twitter search

Obama nominated Sotomayor to the supreme court today but the top twitter trend as of now: #3wordsaftersex.
I do understand twitter search. So far I actually like twitter search. I find somewhat interesting blog posts (on technical things) that I probably would not have found otherwise. I don't know what twitter plans to do with search (fight Google?). I could see how they could win. It would be nice if the searches were sorted by "relevance" instead of most recent post. Grouping common tweets together and categorizing them might be nice but I honestly don't know if I would like that.

The power of these tweets seem to be the links and keywords and the time context. Perhaps mining the tweets would be a better way to label images? Or label websites, videos, blogs, and news items that the tweets link to.

Just some thoughts. I guess I sort of get twitter now.

Update (question and answer): http://twitter.com/lazytweet

Leveraging Web 3.0

I really really really REALLY dislike the world: "leverage." And nothing I say below can be supported with any form of evidence.

if(NotWillingToReadBlogPost()) goto Error;

I read over an article a few weeks ago and it mentioned "Web 3.0" and I figured it was a misprint. But now I know! It's true Web 3.0 is HERE! It has a HowStuffWorks page so it has to be real. Web 2.0 branding was silly in my opinion. Web 3.0 feels like the same story all over again. The story goes like this: 1. Get idea 2. Create application 3. Make money. The problem was with parts 1 and 3. Nobody had a problem with 2. How many social networks do we have? I can think of 4 ways I could have updated my status at one point: twitter, facebook, plurk, and pownce (RIP). There were a few ideas and then a lot of derivations that added little value. Even Google was not original at face value. It just did search a whole lot better than Alta Vista. Better meaning non-technical people thought it was better. Honestly, how many people really care about PageRank? At this point it's Mac vs PC what's the real difference for the average consumer. I am writing this on Windows XP Pro. I could also have written this on a Mac. Or even written it with pen and paper and sent it to the op-ed column in the newspaper. I probably would have been just as satisfied. But instead I chose to post it on the internet so it could come back to haunt me later on in life.

I have gotten sufficiently off topic now. Back to Web 2.0. We had lots of ideas but they were just too similar. We had lots of implementations. What makes a good idea? I personally have NO idea. And to be honest I don't think most people do. Ideas that turn into succesful products are probably accidents and probably not original. From that perspective having lots of ways to update my status is a good thing. One of them will end up winning in the end. Or they will all die simply because I don't really like updating my status. I do it. But I feel like a part of me dies each time I do.

There is one way I can probably guarentee an idea is bad. If your idea is broad it is certainly doomed to failure: "This is a Web 2.0 application that will enable businesses to connect with clients." I don't know what "connect" means. Is this email? Rolodex and a telephone? What is Web 2.0? There is no true definition of Web 2.0. So the idea has left two things undefined: "Web 2.0" and "connect." This is really import especially when you want people to actually use your software.

Now Web 3.0. Same stuff different package but it's semantic. (Does that mean I don't have type errors popping up in firebug anymore? Probably not.)

This is just like using the word "leverage." Just say something like: "I am planning on leveraging existing resources to enable the solution for our customers problem." It's an emtpy statement that sounds good like you might have your shit together. But I personally hate it. Lets see if I can come up with another. Here: "Our product will enable users to create SaaS Web 3.0 application that leverage a new cloud infrastructure at zero transition cost from their existing centralized solutions." I will never go into marketing.

Error:
I wrote this quicky and I ended up reminding myself of the following talk: http://www.ni.com/niweek/2008/keynote/discovering_innovation_through_the_network.htm

UMN to use Google Apps

I didn't know I had a "University of Minnesota Google Team Edition space" account but I guess it's good the University of Minnesota has given up on trying to write their own web based email client because every single one sucked. I began college using Thunderbird and ended having everything forwarded to my Gmail account.

You're receiving this e-mail because you have an account in the existing University of Minnesota Google Team Edition space. We want to make you aware that the new University of Minnesota Google initiative is underway, and the project will require some changes to your current University Google account, in order to provide the benefits of Google to a wider University audience.

As a pioneer in the use of Google Apps for use at the University, you’ve had a chance to see the opportunities for collaboration and partnership that the Google tools offer. In addition, you've contributed to the increasing awareness of the potential for Google Apps throughout the University community.

Because of this increased awareness and interest, the University's Google initiative was established to make Google Mail and Google Apps available as an option for all students, faculty and staff beginning fall 2009. Those who opt-in at that time will be able to use Gmail as their official University e-mail account as well as take advantage of many of the collaborative tools provided by Google Apps.

How will this affect you?

The University will switch from the current Google Team Edition, which does not include e-mail and provides a limited number of applications, to the Education Edition, which includes Gmail and additional applications, as well as administrative tools that make it more appropriate for use by the University at large.

On Monday, April 27 the Google initiative project team will become the administrator of the University's Google space and take responsibility for account setup and maintenance. As a result, there will no longer be the ability for users to invite new users into that space, and no new accounts will be created until Google's fall implementation. Be assured that you will still be able continue to use Google Apps to create and share documents with the users within the University of Minnesota space as we make this transition.

We expect to make the transition to the Education Edition early this summer. At that time, you will be asked to read and agree to new user terms and conditions that will provide more legal, regulatory, and technical safeguards for University information stored with Google, and defines your rights and responsibilities as a user in language and terms that are appropriate to a University environment. After you have agreed to the new terms and conditions, you will log into your University Google account with your University Internet ID and password through a standard University login page. An exact date for these changes has not yet been set, but we will keep you updated as we refine our schedule.

These changes will not affect the information you have in the existing Google space. If you choose to remove or transfer any of the information you have created and stored there, visit the Google Apps support site. If you are no longer using your Google account in the umn.edu space, and don’t intend to opt in this fall, please let us know and we will delete the account.

We are confident that these changes will streamline enterprise communication and collaboration at the University. We will periodically update you on the progress of the project and inform you in advance before we make any changes that affect your account. If you have questions or concerns, please see the Google Initiative Web site at oit.umn.edu/google-initiative. If you don't find answers to your questions there, please contact the team at gpilot@umn.edu.

Thank you,

The Google Apps Initiative Project Team