The Most Interesting Thing Ever

Posted on January 18, 2012 by supnah

And you can’t see it. What if that most interesting thing ever were the internet, or whatever it is that you were trying to find on the internet today? This censorship would be the reality.

SOPA and PIPA are two bills made by old congressmen who don’t understand young technologies. Lots of money has been thrown at them by special interests who are trying to make money by limiting access to information. That’s anti-American. If you think the government has no place telling you what you’re allowed to read, see or think, then you should be aware that these bills are an audacious and insane over-reach of power.

Here are some places where you can find more information about them and other sites supporting the SOPA/PIPA blackout and awareness day today:

Google – Take Action Against SOPA
Wikipedia – Learn More About Stopping SOPA
Reddit – Reddit SOPA FAQ
Total Biscuit – What is SOPA
Boingboing – http://www.boingboing.net/

Joe Hewitt, Meta Developer – Leaving Facebook

Posted on May 6, 2011 by supnah

Joe Hewitt leaving Facebook may be one of the best things to happen to HTML5 in a long time. He’s taking off to return to his roots (as in Firebug) in order to focus on solving problems for developers working with the nascent and developing languages like HTML5, the cloud and mobile.

“Technologies have a way of growing faster than the ecosystem of tools needed to support them.” – Joe

I have no doubt that in this role as a meta developer, a developer developing for developers, Joe Hewitt will have a significant and sustained impact on helping new platforms be used to their fullest extent. It’s a lofty goal. Good on ya. Here’s to not just making a great app, but making tools that help an army of others make a volume of great apps – for all of us.

Good luck, Joe.

Color Me In – Let’s See Where This Goes

Posted on April 2, 2011 by supnah

Color, the new geo-social-media-sharing app is being underrated by all the haters. I’m all for some good hilarious snark like the much lauded review of the app on iTunes. But we’re all forgetting that just because something does happen to contain all of the hottest trends and social elements doesn’t mean it doesn’t also have some really interesting stuff going on.

The most recent TWiT had a pretty even-keeled discussion of Color by Leo Laporte, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Xeni Jardin and Baratunde Thurston that managed not to totally pan the app, but couldn’t foresee many applicable use cases. Kirkpatrick brought up the idea of music festivals as somewhere it might become useful, and all could agree that nobody knew what the hell Twitter would be good for either when it first hit, and also that there’s a high likelihood that Color is going to have a serious data mining aspect that leads to revenue tucked somewhere into its back end in order to take advantage of the data all the prophesied users are going to be pumping into it.

Here’s the thing – I don’t think it’s all that hard to see the potential utility of this app. Continue reading →

We Are All Designers In This Room

Posted on March 24, 2011 by supnah

Jack Dorsey’s great 15 minute speech to his company “Square” in a town hall meeting on his 34th birthday. The story of the Golden Gate Bridge as a proxy for the importance of design in your work.

“Your homework this weekend is to cross the bridge.”

Google Chat Adoption Anecdote

Posted on September 23, 2010 by supnah

This is the first time this has happened to me:

I’ve had lots of friends available on chat for a long time, but this is the first time there were many available, and all had video chat enabled. Google’s push for increased adoption perhaps along with the need to install video chat to use the “call within Gmail” feature that was recently introduced may be driving this. But whatever the cause, it’s pretty cool.

Kiss your phone numbers goodbye… sometime in the not-so-distant future.

Google Instant Kills SEO If You’re Terrible At SEO

Posted on September 8, 2010 by supnah

Google Instant Search is the first thing in a long time that has made me want to go to Google.com rather than just search fromt the Chrome URL bar. That in and of itself is quite a feat. Really. But, oh man… every time Google makes a change to search people (mostly people who don’t really understand SEO) come out yelling about how this is “going to kill SEO.” And it happened again this week with Google’s release of “Instant Search.” But Instant Search is only going to kill SEO if you’re terrible at SEO. For the rest of us it represents more opportunities and targets to optimize for, and even thought the analytic tools may not quite be there yet to break down user behavior to a point that makes it completely easy to take advantage of, there is still plenty that can be done. And I’d love some discussion or feedback on this one, so hit me up with comments here or via @supnah on Twitter.

What is Google Instant Search?

Google Instant Search basically means that when you are performing a search from google.com Google will start serving results to you before you hit the “return” button – while you are still typing in your search term. Google effectively tries to guess what term you are ultimately going to type in and serve related results for it before you’ve even finished in order to help you save time. Google will also serve up recommended search terms that it thinks you might be aiming for so that you can quickly select one of those with one click rather than having to finish typing all of the rest of the letters in your search term. Here are examples of both… (click for enlarged view) Continue reading →

Angry Cows Prove Gmail Calling & Google Voice Useful

Posted on September 1, 2010 by supnah

Google recently introduced free calling from within Gmail – allowing users (in the U.S. at least) to call domestically for free, and call internationally for very cheap. Here’s why this is interesting:
• It’s a play at Skype and “SkypeOut” – their VoIP to phone service. Google is trying to get the huge user base of Gmail accustomed to chatting, video chatting, and even making phone calls through Gmail.
• It’s defense against Facebook whose chat services are being adopted and used a ton by Facebook users (i.e. everyone). You’d also better believe that Facebook is going to continue to improve its messaging feature, which one day may rival full feature email services like Gmail.
• This is the beginning of the end of phone numbers as we know them.

Continue reading →

Verizon + HTC Incredible + Froyo = Big Fail

Posted on August 22, 2010 by supnah

Note to social media managers: If you see a big chunk of your user base getting really really excited about something you’re not going to deliver, you should reach out and tell them that it ain’t gonna happen. And you should do it as soon as you possibly can or else the anticipation will continue to grow, and the pending disappointment will grow along with it, delivering a much more substantial blow when it finally arrives.

This is a short lesson for us all about how telling the simple truth early can save untold headaches later. On August 13th rumor leaked from Mashable.com – a fairly reliable source – that Verizon was going to push the much awaited update to Android 2.2 Froyo to their HTC Incredible devices on the 18th. Continue reading →

Google Media Player

Posted on August 9, 2009 by supnah

..is what I want now that Eric Schmidt is off the Apple board of directors.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s co-founder and CEO, and also member of Apple’s board of directors until very recently, has just stepped down from Apple’s board. There are all kinds of investigations being talked about, and news is coming out about a tit-for-tat agreement between Google and Apple not to directly poach each others’ employees (which would be, by the way, a violation of all kinds of legal thingamajiggers).

And while that’s all well and good, I’m hoping to get a little bit more out of this break-up. Google is the king of entering other people’s markets, especially when they’re getting stagnant and lazy and not opening up properly. Google Docs, Gmail, etc. So, there’s a little piece of my brain, way in the back of my head somewhere, that is hoping that now that Apple and Google are splittsville we may be looking forward to a Google Media Player.

iTunes is fine, but it’s not the end all, be all that some people think. It just happens to be the best thing available right now. Unfortunately it’s tied to the iPod. Sure, I own an iPod, but if someone could come along and make something even close to as good that’s more open than the iPod, I’d jump on it in a second.

There’s a wave of announcements and denouncements recently of high profile people like Jason Calacanis and Mike Arrington giving up their Apple addictions because of the closed nature of the platform. A Google media player that allowed any portable media device to sync would be awesome. Oooh… and maybe they’d have a default offer to buy tunes through the Amazon mp3 store or other non-iTunes services…

And a solid media player offering that meshed well and optimized with Android wouldn’t hurt either.

I may be dreaming, but it sure would be nice.

Twitter’s (almost) Business Model

Posted on March 12, 2009 by supnah

There has been much debate about Twitter revolving around opinions that it lacks a reason for being, revenue, business model, and ultimate fiscal viability. And yet some really really smart, really really rich VC investors not only dumped an additional $35 million into it, but then proceeded to laugh at the lack of a business model. But things are about to change, there’s a whole new PPC marketplace coming down the road, and there’s a long long tail of Twitter revenue out there for the taking. Continue reading →

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