http://blog.twinloops.com Jan's thoughts on tech Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:38:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Hi all This blog has moved to a new address. I was never completely happy with the URL of this one and the new URL reflects the focus of the blog going forward and should also be a bit easier to remember. Please come and join me over on the new ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2009/04/24/important-notice-blog-has-moved/ I've come across a variety of statistics recently from various surveys about communication preferences, and was tempted each time to do a post. Instead, I'm doing one post on all of them, which should allow for some bigger-picture thinking. In essence, the conclusion you naturally come to when reading these ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2009/01/08/changing-communication-preferences/ The Dilbert comic strip for today was a perfect trigger for me to revisit something I've been thinking about for a while, and that's the impact of apathy and laggards on the adoption of new technologies in telecom (something I promised to write about here), but almost more importantly the ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/12/10/apathy-and-laggards-in-telecom/ There was yet another article recently on the topic of why we all need faster broadband - this time on the GigaOM site. What's funny is that the same arguments have been made for faster broadband ever since the days of dial-up, and they really haven't moved on that much. ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/12/10/how-fast-does-broadband-really-need-to-be/ There's been a lot of hullaballoo about the BlackBerry Storm over the last couple of weeks. David Pogue, normally so mild mannered, used his print column to lambast the device from several different directions. Another example of the kind of critiques that have been going around is here. Pogue's column generated ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/12/05/blackberry-storm-its-not-quite-that-bad/ Scott Cleland of Precursor has posted a very interesting analysis of Google's usage of bandwidth and the associated costs. He claims that Google is underpaying for its bandwidth by a factor of 21 based on a variety of calculations and estimates. The analysis is sound up to a point but ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/12/05/why-scott-clelands-analysis-is-flawed/ I penned the piece below for our Straight Talk daily email the day after the US election. Since that time I've seen more and more articles springing up around this subject, some of them based on new news such as the appointments to the various Congressional committees overseeing aspects of ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/11/25/regulatory-changes-in-the-obama-administration/ Google is famous for its "uncluttered design" especially as regards the Google home (search) page. Well, yes, we'll give them that. Not hard to be better than Yahoo! in this regard given that Yahoo! was a directory first and a search engine second, and in between had become a bloated ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/11/24/10-things-google-can-do-better/ I got a letter in the mail today from Optimum / Cablevision, our friendly local cableco. We were Cablevision customers when we first moved to the area because Verizon's FiOS service, which we had known and loved in Boston before we moved, was not available yet. We had broadband and ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/11/03/optimums-last-ditch-fios-winback-tool/ There is news today that Sprint has made a massive leap forward in its customer care operation and has gone from being a real laggard in this area to being top dog in the US - at least on one key metric: wait time before reaching a human being (once ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/10/21/sprint-shows-it-can-be-done/ This example from photographer-blogger Thomas Hawk is the perfect illustration of how enormously frustrating it can still be to deal with the phone company or its various subsidiaries (it could just as easily be Verizon or Qwest as AT&T in this case). I spoke to a group of salespeople from a ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/10/16/telco-customer-care-is-still-very-broken/ Sometimes Facebook (and other similar sites) are unintentionally poignant. Take this example: Isn't that just tragic? There are no quotation marks around that "friends" - it's just there on its lonely own, as if Timothy really doesn't have any friends. In reality, this Timothy just hasn't convinced himself that the whole ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/09/05/facebooks-uninentional-poignancy/ OK, so this wasn't actually my Mac - I was visiting the office of one of my parents. But this was one of my earliest experiences with a Mac, and I remember enjoying it a great deal. I think I probably mostly used the Paint function, which appealed to my ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/09/04/my-first-mac/ This is my inbox right now (actually, 2 minutes ago when I started writing this post - it's since got an out of office reply from a colleague in it, but that's easily solved). It's been quite some time since my Inbox was empty - I've been too swamped with other ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/09/02/an-empty-inbox-prompts-a-sigh-of-contentment/ I've been meaning to do another post on net neutrality based on a fair amount of recent activity on various blogs but haven't had time. To cut down on the number of open tabs in my browser, I'm just going to dump the links here and let you read them ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/08/21/recent-links-on-net-neutrality/ Update: I've added some links to the pieces that I've done since on the blog. I attended the Ericsson North American analyst event yesterday and came back with lots of ideas for pieces to write over the next couple of months. One or two of them may end up being blog ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/08/14/things-im-going-to-be-writing-about/ I just installed a new plugin from Kaltura which is supposed to add 'interactive' video to WordPress blogs. It allows you to upload videos you've already recorded through desktop software but also permits you to record new video on the fly via a webcam and a Flash interface. I recorded a ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/08/14/kaltura-video-plugin/ So the FCC finally dealt with the Comcast net neutrality issue and issued a 3-2 decision castigating Comcast for doing whatever it did but not fining it: Ruling on a complaint by Free Press and Public Knowledge as well as a petition for declaratory ruling, the Commission concluded that Comcast has ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/08/01/kevin-martin-last-ditch-attempt-at-legacy/ I just tried the new Wired Internet Celebrity Meter (with low expectations): So it turns out I'm a 28 (Julia Allison has a score of 1187, Kevin Rose gets 5865 and I can only assume Robert Scoble would be somewhere in the stratosphere). No big surprise there then. It only takes ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/07/25/wireds-celebrity-meter-gives-me-a-28/ I just re-read this recent post from the Google Public Policy Blog, and I still think it's a lot of pie-in-the-sky nonsense. It really feels as though whoever wrote it either doesn't know enough about the subject or has dumbed it down for readers to the extent that it makes ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/07/24/googles-pie-in-the-sky-ideas-about-broadband/ Mashable has a piece on FriendFeed and whether it's destined to remain a niche service. The main reason for believing that it will be seems to be the poor interface design, but there appear to be others too. But I tend to think that the key point here is that FriendFeed ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/07/22/friendfeed-needs-to-remain-a-niche-service/ So I just posted from the iPhone app and although I now have a shiny new post on the site it's clear that the app is a little glitchy (see screenshot). For some reason the app first posted an item with little title and text tags before posting my real ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/07/22/glitches-in-iphone-app/ Hurrah! WordPress finally released their iPhone app today, which was heavily trailed by WP. This is a test post that I'm writing using the app. Thank goodness for the auto correct feature on the iPhone which is preventing this from being an utterly tedious experience. I can't imagine writing a ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/07/22/wordpress-app-for-iphone/ So, I stood in line with about 100 other people outside my local AT&T store just under a week ago, in order to be one of the first to get my hands on the 3G iPhone. It was hot, and we were lined up down the side of the building ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/07/17/iphone-love-it-or-hate-it/ This popped up on Techmeme this week, and was an interesting reminder of Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory and its appeal but also its weaknesses. Kudos to Anderson for highlighting this research himself, and he does a reasonable job of illustrating why it's not totally contradictory to his own research. The ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/06/28/the-long-tail/ This past week or two I've been spending some of my spare time building up the professional side of my social networking profile. I've been a pretty active Facebook user now for a year or so and have Friendfeed and Twitter accounts that I've half-heartedly kept up with too. I'd ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/06/27/using-social-networking-for-more-than-fun/ This is intriguing. One of the "inventors of the Internet" (I've heard this title applied to quite a range of people, Al Gore included, of course), Lawrence Roberts, is involved in a company which is providing network boxes that throttle P2P traffic in order to allow other traffic to flow ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/06/26/interesting-net-neutrality-development/ This seems to be doing the rounds at the moment. It's the text of an email sent by Bill Gates to various Microsoft employees about an intensely frustrating experience he had using the company's own website and products - essentially, user feedback, from user number 1 at Microsoft. Here's how ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/06/25/microsoft-user-testing-by-mr-gates/ Advertising Age recently published its annual review of spending by the 100 leading advertisers. I was curious to see how the telecoms companies ranked in their data, and spent some time crunching the numbers. First headline: The telecom players ranked in the survey end up as follows: AT&T: 2nd overall, with spending ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/06/24/advertising-spend-and-scale-economies-in-telecom/ Following up on the last email I received which did something funny with my name, this one appears to illustrate the perils of auto-correct: January, sorry.  I will make sure you get the info. I guess they have their auto-correct set to replace the word "Jan" with the word "January". Haven't had ... http://blog.twinloops.com/2008/06/24/the-perils-of-auto-correct/