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