Back in the early 90’s, I went to see Paul Westerberg live. I wasn’t a fan. I never really “got” The Replacements, and didn’t like his solo crap either. But a girl I was dating liked him so I went. Little did I know, opening for Mr. Westerberg (who appeared to be 250 years old back then) was a band I’d never heard of called Pavement.
Of course Pavement would go on to become one of the greatest indie rock bands ever, while I’d go on to write a blog that no one reads. Life if pretty funny like that sometimes…
Yo, Polish hip hop is straight gangsta, homes. Gdańsk reprazent!
Since satellite radio hit the scene, I’ve largely ignored it. Initially it was the cost. I just didn’t see the point in paying for radio, especially since I’m a huge CD/MP3 collector and usually listen to my iPod instead. But I was still able to see why some people loved it. The wide variety of channels was attractive and that type of on-demand content wasn’t available anywhere else at the time. Channels that play nothing but comedy or 80’s hair metal? Pretty damn cool.Unfortunately for satellite radio (and radio in general, heck media in general) the internet has changed all that. Satellite radio as it stands today is growing increasingly pointless.
I bought a radio + subscription for my father-in-law, and he loves it. Honestly it couldn’t be more perfect for people who aren’t the slightest bit tech-inclined. I decided to cough up the extra couple of bucks for the online streaming option, and was horrified at what I found. Services like Pandora, AOL Radio, Last.FM, etc outdo satellite in nearly every way, and they’re free. An XM subscription features 140-180 channels of various content from rock, hip hop, talk, jazz, etc. iTunes is currently streaming 131 feeds…of jazz. Feed aggregators like RadioSure crank out thousands of streaming stations from all over the world. Pandora and Last.FM play similar artists, not limiting you to just a single genre per channel. XM’s Major League Baseball offering is even becoming obsolete as MLB.com At Bat now streams them live to your iPhone. The only card satellite has up their sleeve is exclusive content, and that is currently spotty at best. Howard Stern, a 24/7 Springsteen channel and a Blue Collar comedy channel? For $15 a month? You mean you’re paying me $15 a month to listen to this shit, right?
Satellite needs to realize that this simply will not cut it anymore. Users need more selection, better features, and higher-quality exclusive content. Learn what the free services do and do them better. Build a community around your product. Realize that it’s not 2001 anymore and do something people will want to pay for.
When Amazon first came out with the Kindle, I crapped all over it. I was peronally offended at the notion of coughing up that kind of scratch just for a device that would allow you to read books. Not to mention that the price of the actual books was extra! I swore never to purchase such a ridiculous object and shook my head in an extremely disappointed manner at Amazon.
Just to show you what an extraordinary tech visionary I am, let’s review my reaction to other new technologies which have surfaced in my lifetime:
Compact Disks- “Pfft, cassette tapes rule. CD’s are a waste of money.”
DVDs- “Pfft, what’s wrong with VHS tapes? DVDs are a waste of money.”
iPods- “Pfft, I”ve got a shit ton of CD’s and a Discman. iPods are a waste of money”.
Not a great track record huh? Which is pretty amazing when you consider I’m a fairly geeky guy who is immediately drawn to anything with buttons, lights or knobs…
Anyway, so this Mothers’ Day I was totally drawing a blank. The ideas I was coming up with for my wife were complete turds, and the date was quickly approaching. The Kindle 2 kept nudging me, enticing me with delicious buzzwords like “Whispersync” and “Online Library”. In a fit of panic I finally caved and bought one. And you know what, I’ll be dammed if that fucker isn’t a great little device.
Easy to buy reasonably-priced books, easy to use, easy to read. It’s really a must-have for anyone with at least a casual interest in reading. In the Jetsons-esque future I have imagined, college students download entire semesters’ worth of reading materials to their Kindles. Walking around with their 0.33 inch think readers instead of lugging around goddamn 1000-page molecular bio books like I had to. Yes friends, the future will in fact kick ass.
You might be asking yourself why I didn’t pop for a Kindle DX. Bigger screen, etc. Well for one it’s still unavailable and nothing sucks more than getting a pre-ordered gift. “Happy Mothers Day, your gift will be here in 2 months”. Also, it’s considerably more expensive for what I consider to be trivial new features. Yep, the Kindle DX is a waste of money :p
The Twitterverse is in a snit over this recent service change which made a previously-configurable setting permanent. Now users will only see replies (messages which begin with @username) which are sent to people who they’re following. In doing so, Twitter is acknowledging the fact that interactive discussion should be left to services designed to handle it- like FriendFeed.
Ever try following a discussion in Twitter? Ridiculously hard, isn’t it? Unless you’re one of the 2 people on the end of the line, attempting to match up the threads of a conversation between multiple people is an exercise in futility. The service is just not designed for it, and there are other services out there which integrate with Twitter and support collaborative discussion. The bad news (for Twitter’s IT department) is that this futility eats resources, something a service with legendary explosive growth cannot afford. It also may reveal a hint at Twitter’s direction: collaborative discussion is not on the roadmap.
Which leaves the other function of replies- discovering people. I don’t quite get this complaint. 90% of the replies I’m picking up in my stream are either completely out of context or utterly meaningless. Or both. Search and mentions are great ways to discover new people. I discovered several of the people I’m following simply because they were mentioned by others. Another great way to find people- just look them up.
People have also expressed outrange over this “stealth change”. All companies listen to user feedback, but in the end will do what they feel is right for their service. Getting pissed that Biz didn’t call you at home to discuss this with you first is silly. Get over that.
So for now, replies to converations you didn’t start and may have extreme difficulty parsing will be removed from your stream. Seems like a great improvement. I think I’ll follow along on FriendFeed and see how it all plays out.
If step 1 in the process of addiction recovery is to admit you have a problem, well here goes- I am an information addict. I spend a large amount of time sifting through online resources for interesting and/or useful tidbits of info. Some people are the same way with porn, but for me it’s tech articles, gadget reviews, breaking world news and how-to reference manuals. Some I read, others I squirrel away for later. I have a driving desire to know exactly what’s going on everywhere and exactly how to do anything. Case in point- I have 5 bookmarks for Adobe Air tutorials, just in case I ever want to learn how to write apps in Air. Now, I do not have time to learn Adobe Air. I really have no need to learn it (nothing we make is or will ever be Air-based). And I likely will never have time to learn it. So why do I still read/bookmark items related to it? Because I have a problem.
I have to admit that it’s been an amazing year of drinking from the fire hose. I’ve been hardwired into up-to-the-second tech news + world events. I know what Scala is. I read the Bluetooth 3.0 spec. I saw what the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip looked like in fucking full color. So it’s hard to completely regret getting hooked on info. But I can’t keep it up any longer. Collecting, parsing and processing this volume of info is killing me and I’ve become a slave to my Google Reader.
Many articles have been written about how to more efficiently use RSS so as not to drown in the flow of information. My problem can’t be solved by better organization (Feedly is very nice, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that there’s a shit ton of info flowing in each day) or cutting out feeds I don’t read (I read them all, that’s why I’ve subscribed to them). Deleting all of my feeds isn’t an option either. So last week I tried a hybrid approach I’ve adapted from David Gillmor.
Move my high-volume feeds to Twitter
Most of the sites I read push their RSS feeds to Twitter. The beauty of the Twitter service is that it forces me to let some info slip past. If I happen to catch it, great. If not, it’s no big deal. Since these feeds push often, another tasty bit of knowledge will be along shortly. I’ve also started playing with FriendFeed, which integrates with Twitter and allows you to comment on posts.
Move a few less commonly updated but important feeds to iGoogle.
I like iGoogle as a portal page. I’m able to put my Gmail, Google Reader, FriendFeed and select RSS gadgets right in there. Since I launch my browser several times a day, this is a great place for feeds I like to check that often. MSNBC, Engadget, etc. are good candidates for this. Use multiple tabs so it doesn’t take 20 minutes to load all your feeds before opening Google.
Keep only a handful of feeds in Google Reader.
My GReader is a shadow of it’s former self. It only contains a handful of feeds which either a) don’t have a quality Twitter presence or b) I don’t want to miss a post. Note: Please people- push your RSS updates to it’s own Twitter bot and create another account for personal shit. Nettuts+ is a great site for web design tutorials, but your Twitter feed is cluttered with fucking Star Trek reviews and visits to the dentist. Come on!
So how has it been so far? Well there was some initial withdrawl. I felt like I had no clue WTF was going on. And not all of my favorite sites have a Twitter presence. But all in all I think it’s a great approach to keep me from drowning in info and eating up all of my free time. So how do you keep your head above water yet still stay informed?
I bought this thing the other day. No idea what I’m going to do with it yet, but last night- I made it blink. Not once my friends, but repeatedly. It’s only a matter of time now before I figure out how to rule with world with my little cybernetic appliance…
