No More Answers

Google is shutting down Google Answers.

Adieu to Google Answers

Remember the buzz around iNet when this service was born? We encouraged all of the Surfers to utilize their skills and sign up as a side project (I registered too), but not a single one of us was accepted.

Is this the first Google product to be retired?

(I mean actually retired, rather than never graduating from the lab or being banished from the front page.)

Deja Vu (and Internet too)

Saw Deja Vu on Friday. Eagerly anticipated after the teaser trailer due to my well known time travel fascination, but went in skeptical based on the big budget blockbuster vibe and a feeling that the full trailer gave it all away. (Both trailers are here.)

My thought process during and after went something like this:

-Loved the movie while I was watching it, but thought the ending was lame, too Hollywood, and obviously a rewrite.

-Started to deconstruct the time travel in my head and felt it started to fall apart and not make any sense.

-Picked apart the time travel a little bit further and suddenly realized the underlying story and plotting was absolutely brilliant (including the ending, but excluding the laser pointer), and especially impressive given the big budgetness of it.

-Probably the best non-indie time travel flick since 12 Monkeys and BTTF, and even holds it's own against Primer and Donnie Darko.

The other tangential thought I kept having during the movie was this:

How the heck did Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives end up as part of the same government agency? Wikipedia to the rescue.

Slippery Ships On Air

This is a more scientific article than usual, but it does have implications for energy conservation and global commerce.

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=mg18925391.600&print=true

"YOSHIAKI KODAMA is weaving a magic carpet large enough to carry a ship. Conjured up from thin air at the flick of a switch, this slippery blanket will help transport a fully laden tanker or container ship across the ocean at higher speed, and using far less fuel, than ever before."

Choices = Headaches

I read this blog frequently, and I liked this particular article.

The fellow runs a software shop, but they get other aspects such as UI, marketing, etc. Maybe a little like 37 Signals.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html

The article discusses the many choices in turning off a computer using Windows Vista.

My New Movie

I'm Gonna Kill You Saturday Night is a short film I shot in September. It's a dark comedy described as follows:
"When Jimbo and Stu, two stoner roommates, receive a threatening card in the mail all hell breaks loose as the clock ticks down to Saturday Night."

Check out the website and trailer, linked above. You can get to the trailer quickly by mousing over and clicking on the remote.

We're having a premier in Hollywood on December 5th in the evening (time TBA) so please keep that free - you are all invited!

Yes, shameless plug. BTW, my director designed the website as well -- pretty slick, huh?

Features: "A Collection of Hacks"

Great article about the creator of Firefox's next project -- untangling the loose alliance of applications and hacks that hold the web/desktop interface together to create a more unified system.

Thought this was appropo and similar to Google's approach of making what they have work together better.

Parakey


The answer, he and his programming partner, Joe Hewitt, decided, resided in the gap between the desktop and the Web. “Right now, people want to shuffle around content,” he says, “but the world’s fused together by a collection of hacks.” Something that should be simple, say, getting photos from a digital camera onto the Web, is a Sisyphean task for most people. “Step back and ask, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’” Ross says.

The problem, according to Ross, is there’s no simple, cohesive tool to help people store and share their creations online. Currently, the steps involved depend on the medium. If you want to upload photos, for example, you have to dump your images into one folder, then transfer them to an image-sharing site such as Flickr. The process for moving videos to YouTube or a similar site is completely different. If you want to make a personal Web page within an online community, you have to join a social network, say, MySpace or Friendster. If you intend to rant about politics or movies, you launch a blog and link up to it from your other pages. The mess of the Web, in other words, leaves you trapped in one big tangle of actions, service ­providers, and applications.

Ross’s answer is named Parakey. As he describes it, from a user’s point of view, Parakey is “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.”

Features, not products

Wake up call over at Google? Though a little saddened that the quick surprise releases of new cool things will slow down or stop for now, I do agree that some fine tuning and improving of their core will be very welcome.

Interesting how it somewhat mirrors the old Surfboard strategy too. At first it was more sites, more categories, more sections. But later it turned to more automation, tighter Zuma integration, better usability.

Google Puts Lid on New Products

In another sign of Google Inc.'s growth from start-up to corporate behemoth, the company's top executives said Thursday that they had begun telling engineers to stop launching so many new services and instead focus on making existing ones work together better.

The initiative's primary goal is to make Google products easier to use, especially by packaging disparate products. For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications.

The company does not plan to tell engineers to halt all new products, Google said, nor does it plan to kill little-used services.

Rather, the effort is more focused on future development. After launching the initiative this summer, Schmidt said, Google canceled several services in development — which he would not describe — and instructed their creators to instead make them features in other products.

Networking and LinkedIn

Newest episode of Venture Voice is an interview with the founder of LinkedIn. I found most interesting the discussion on what I feel is the biggest problem to the legitimacy of LinkedIn: Mediocre workers with glowing testimonials bringing down the value of a referral by mis-using the networking concept.

It goes into some interesting ideas on how they plan to handle it in the future and how they intend for it to be handled today if people utilize the tool properly.

(If you don't want to listen to the whole thing, this part starts around the 33 minute mark).

Venture Voice #40: Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn

Simple Organizing: Scrybe

G. and I were just talking about organizer type applications the other day.

I came across this one, which seems like it's in closed beta currently.

http://iscrybe.com/main/index.php

They're doing a cool marketing campaign, where they're using YouTube to do different product demonstrations before they launch it to the public.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/21/scrybe-could-set-a-new-standard-in-office-apps/

I like the PaperSync towards the end.

Time Machine Video

Found a great (though somewhat cheesy)time machine documentary on google video.

The theory is that time travel into the past on very small particles is now feasible. If we could encode information onto said particles, then we could technically send information into the past, but only so far back as the "time machine" has been invented.

Thus, when it is finally created, it may suddenly be flooded with messages from the future. This scientist's theory is that Einstein was correct about black holes - but that laser light itself is actually much more effective at twisting space/time.

Thought Jake of All Trades might really appreciate this. The video is 45 minutes.


Time Machine

Microsoft Installation Woes

Great SvN Post on the frustrations of installing software on Windows, including an almost comical screencast video.

Semi-related:

The 37Signals "Getting Real" $19 PDF book is now available in a free online HTML version, as well as a $29 print on demand paperback from my future publisher Lulu.com. Now there's no excuse not to read it if you've been too cheap or too lazy. (I'm the latter.)

Getting Real: The Book

Small Number of Video iPods Shipped With Windows Virus

This little jab on the official Apple release about the iPod virus is awesome:

"As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it."

(via TUAW)

The 100th Post - Cool Gadget Search

Apparently, I'm lucky enough to be posting the 100th entry on this blog. Kudos to J. for having contributed more than his fair share to get us here.

Anyways, just saw an article for this site:

http://www.retrevo.com/

It's a targeted search engine for gadget-o-philes. I like the dual-paned "preview" interface. Admittedly, I haven't done enough searches to see how much easier it is to find information than Google.

At a minimum it does seem to make it easier to filter out the true reviews from the proliferation of shopping price engine sites that usually come up when you search Google.

Narnia Redux

I know I'm way behind on this, but I never realized there were so many response/parody/sequels to the "Lazy Sunday" Narnia Rap until I did some YouTube surfing today:

The Original

The West Coast Response

The Midwest Response

The English Response

Organic Canadian Response

German Response

Dallas Mavericks

Little Kid Remake

Wicked Wednesday

Reid Park Zoo

Central Style

Conventioneers

1833

Google boss warns politicians about Internet power

Google boss warns politicians about Internet power
"Many of the politicians don't actually understand the phenomenon of the Internet very well," Schmidt told the Financial Times. "It's partly because of their age ... often what they learn about the Internet they learn from their staffs and their children."

Fun With Verification Boxes

Saw this SvN post, which led me to this Jeteye site. Some interesting/amusing word choices in the infamous verification box. (Keep hitting refresh on your browser to change the word.)

What Might Have Been

Think Neil mentioned before that he thought if iNetNow were still around today the Surfboard, etc would be more Wiki based. Sounds like the rest of the world is starting to agree. The Google profile page sounds a little like an advanced version of our old employee page intranet.

Web 2.0 entering corporate world slowly

How The Maps Are Made

Interesting article on the behind the scenes world of online map database making and techniques. Too bad they chose the worst one for the title ;)

Map Quest

Some interesting tidbits:

-Williams stares at his email inbox: a solid wall of news alerts from Yahoo and Google. His search terms aren't the usual fare, like "Hilary Duff." They're more like "Tulsa city one-way" – queries that will help Williams track down announcements of road changes reported by local newspapers. Today has been slow, but suddenly he lights up. An email has arrived containing a newspaper report that a particular one-way road segment in northwest Indiana is changing from westbound to eastbound. Sweet!

-GDT acquired detailed aerial photography of major cities. "We could look at a street and see which way cars were parked, even tire rubber going into intersections, and deduce 85 percent of the turn restrictions and one-way attributes,"

-"We've had projects with pizza-delivery companies where we've printed out for them a big wall map of their 30-minute delivery area. The guys mark things that are wrong and send it back to us," says former GDT president Mike Gerling, who now heads Tele Atlas' North American division.

Mobile providers lock away GPS on phones

An interesting NPR story on the power of GPS in mobile phones and why many cell providers lock it away from the users. Still doesn't explain why AT&T use to have the find a friend mode but then got rid of it.

Power of GPS Phones Locked Away from Most Users

Can't See The Target

From Consumerist, via LifeHacker:

The image with the article is priceless...

Target Still Being Sued For Having Website Blind Can't See

"The class action brought by the ADA on behalf of Bruce 'BJ' Sexton, a student in California, contends that Target.com is problematic for blind people because, "alt-text is missing from images, preventing screen readers from describing them to blind users; purchases cannot be completed without a mouse because keyboard controls do not work; image maps are inaccessible; and headings are missing that are needed to navigate."

For a blind person, Brian can sure see bad web design darn good."