Month: February 2007

Dixie Chicks win all five? Seems suspicious to me

Post ImageDid you watch the Grammy Awards last night? I didn’t. I figured there wasn’t much point. It’s the same with all awards shows – why watch? You can find out the results almost immediately online anyway. And if there’s a performance you wanted to see, it’ll probably be on YouTube. It’s amazing that anyone at all watches marathons award shows anymore.

Anyway, I read about the Grammy’s today. Turns out the Dixie Chicks won all five awards for which they were nominated, including album of the year. Call me crazy, but that strikes me as being somewhat suspicious. Can you really go from being one of the most hated music groups in the country to winning five awards in a single night? It’s almost like they won simply because the academy felt sorry for them. I guess the “return to glory” plotline always makes for a good story too.

It’s not like such a big win happens every year:

The last time an act won the album, record and song categories was in 1993, when Eric Clapton led the field. The last country act to win album of the year was Glen Campbell in 1969 with “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”

I mean, sure, Taking The Long Way is a decent album. I guess I have to admit that I even enjoyed it. But seriously, album of the year? Plus record and song of the year? I dunno. Just doesn’t feel right.

Here are the winners I’d have picked:

Record of the Year: “You’re Beautiful” – James Blunt
Album of the Year: FutureSex/LoveSounds – Justin Timberlake
Song of the Year: “Not Ready To Make Nice” – Dixie Chicks

Read: Yahoo! News

Tim O'Reilly on Yahoo! Pipes

Post ImageI’ve been doing a little more reading about Yahoo! Pipes lately, and today I came across this excellent (though somewhat long) post from Mr. Web 2.0 himself, Tim O’Reilly. He says (via BoingBoing):

It democratizes web programming, making it easier for people to have more control over the internet information services they consume, and providing a general-purpose platform for interacting with sites that is more powerful than the browser or feed-reader alone, but without requiring full programming skills.

I think that’s a great way to describe what Pipes is, and why it matters. Sure the interface could be improved and made easier to use, but it’s only going to get better from here.

Read: Tim O’Reilly

Notes for 2/11/2007

Here are my weekly notes:

Music
I’ve been listening to the wonderful album A Beautiful Lie by 30 Seconds To Mars a lot lately. I originally got it because of the song The Kill, but I guess you could say I have rediscovered the entire album recently. You’ve probably hear their other single, From Yesterday, on the radio. Good stuff.

Visual Studio Orcas

Post ImageI haven’t been keeping up on my .NET news as much as I used to, so lots of the things that Scott Guthrie mentioned in his “First Look at Orcas” post were new to me. And now I’m all excited! Here are some of the things that stick out for me:

  • Orcas will indeed bring us version 3.5 of the .NET Framework. First time I have seen a reference to 3.5.
  • Rich HTML/CSS WYSIWYG designer. Ahhhhhh. I use this daily, so I welcome any changes. I am particularly looking forward to the split-view editing mode…I could never figure out why Visual Studio didn’t have it.
  • LINQ. By all accounts, LINQ looks intense. Scott posted a video a couple weeks ago that demonstrates how it works.
  • First beta this spring, and final release this year. Bring it on!

His post contains screenshots and a link to a slide deck he presented recently. Check it out!

Read: ScottGu’s Blog

Mini-Microsoft on Outlook 2007

Post ImageI have talked about Outlook 2007 a couple of times before, and in neither post was I singing Outlook’s praises. Nope, I love the interface tweaks, but Outlook 2007 is terribly slow. Almost so slow that it is unusable. I wonder if it would be any faster if I had 4 GB of RAM…probably not. Anyway, here’s what Mini-Microsoft had to say about Outlook 2007 recently:

I’ve learned to meditate while Outlook ruminates over ten incoming POP messages of 69K. Perhaps it takes a few seconds over each incoming message or RSS feed to contribute to solving a Grand Challenge. Or it and Desktop Search have to play 333 iterations of rock-paper-scissors everytime a change has to be written. I don’t know.

I have wondered the same thing. It has to be doing something when it’s not doing what I want it to, right? He continues:

For our customers’ sake, I hope that I’m the only one and that there is just something funky about my setup…

Sorry, no. Outlook 2007 sucks when it comes to performance, plain and simple. It can’t be your setup, because there’s thousands of threads on the Internet in which people are complaining. Please Mini, use your power to get someone to fix it!

Read: Mini-Microsoft

Powerset secures rights to search tech

Post ImagePowerset is back in the news again (you may recall they were ‘discovered’ back in October), this time for winning the exclusive rights to search technology developed at the famed Palo Alto Research Center in Silicon Valley. The technology essentially allows Powerset to understand the meaning of your search query (you know, “natural language” as they call it). Apparently Google is developing something similar. Here’s what VentureBeat says:

Clearly, Powerset faces challenges. Even if its technology does prove to be useful, it isn’t clear how long it will keep any lead (in natural language) in the face of an onslaught from Google. Another challenge is changing peoples’ search behavior, which is used to keyword searches.

Maybe I am being naïve, but I don’t think changing peoples’ search behavior will be all that hard. We still think in natural language before deciding what keywords to enter into the box. And some people don’t even bother to pick out keywords, they just type a sentence or question.

I think their biggest problem will be proving that their technology works and is useful. For now I’ve got Powerset filed under the “believe it when I see it” category. And assuming they really can do natural language search, will it be that useful? The keyword based search we use today works fairly well for general queries. I think natural language search definitely has value, but I don’t think it will replace Google overnight, if ever. There are certain types of queries that are probably better suited to keyword-based search.

And let’s not forget that millions of people (myself included) use Google and other search engines as navigational tools almost as much as information-finding tools. A quick glance at the 2006 year end Google Zeitgeist will show you that – half of the top ten queries were the names of websites.

Read: VentureBeat

Yahoo! Pipes

Post ImageI decided I would take one last look at Techmeme before heading off to bed, and as a result I just found out about a new product from Yahoo! called Pipes. It’s definitely not for everyone, but my inner geek is jumping for joy – Pipes is very, very cool:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

I just created a quick “pipe” to see how it works, and I have to admit, it’s very easy to use. Essentially it will let you take any number of sources (like an RSS feed or something), add user inputs if required, combine them with modules to process the data, and finally connect them all together to produce some output. And it’s all done visually. No programming experience required (well not really).

Nik at TechCrunch nails it:

Pipes can take any feed as input, and combined with the already available list of functions proves to be very powerful – my mind is still buzzing thinking about all that can be done with Pipes.

It was inevitable that such a product would be released, and it is very good for Yahoo! that they managed to be the first of the big web companies to release such a product.

I wonder how successful Pipes will be. Could it be the product that allows everyone to be a “programmer”? Possibly. Nik is right that the terminology needs some work (they use too many “coder” terms I think) but that’s fairly minor. Pipes has incredible potential.

I’m definitely going to have to play with it some more.

Read: Yahoo! Pipes

Steve Jobs leads the charge against DRM!

Post ImageI never thought it would be Jobs, but in an open letter titled “Thoughts on Music”, the Apple head honcho seems to support getting rid of DRM altogether. Just over a week ago I mentioned that music should be free – no need for DRM if it is! Here’s what Mr. Jobs has to say:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Bring it on! I am so glad he has written this letter. If nothing else, it will simply increase the pressure on the labels to give in and realize that DRM is a stupid way to sell music.

When I read about this letter today, I had the same thought as Jason Calacanis did: Somewhere Cory Doctorow is smiling! Indeed it sounds like he is…kinda:

Well, this is pretty excellent news! Now, let’s see if Steve means it.

I hope he does. The way I see it, there’s only a few people that will be hurt by abolishing DRM – the product teams at Microsoft, Apple, and other companies who have put a lot of time and effort into creating the DRM technologies. No one likes to see their hard work end up being ignored. Though I suppose, if they truly like music, they’ll benefit from having no DRM too.

Read: Apple.com

Windows Vista Exploits Exposed!

Post ImageI was going to post something last week about the “fatal flaw” found in the speech recognition feature of Windows Vista, but I never got around to it. And now, thanks to Long Zheng’s brilliant post, there is simply no point. Here’s a snippet:

Last week, the media went schizophrenic over the Windows Vista speech recognition ‘loophole’ which allowed anyone with a microphone to have full access over your computer. Granted, you must also be partially-deaf, turned your speaker volume to full, carefully place your microphone next to the speakers, turn on speech recognition and train your speech profile as if you were someone else.

The rest of the post is quite funny, and discusses other possible exploits such as the mouse and keyboard, and Visual Studio. Definitely worth a read!

Read: Long Zheng

Did Facebook miss the boat?

Post ImageThat’s the question that Robert Young asks over at GigaOM today. Facebook apparently turned down many potential suitors last year, deciding to go it alone. Was that a good decision or a bad one? Robert does a good job of explaining that if you ignore the financial side of things, it looks like it was a good decision:

So given such positives, one might conclude that Facebook did in fact make the right decision not to sell. as momentum and value creation certainly seems to be in their favor.

Overall traffic is up, loyalty and usage stats are high, things look good. The problem is that advertising on Facebook appears to be a win-lose situation – good for Facebook, bad for the advertisers. Which means Facebook is going to have trouble earning revenue.

My personal opinion is that Facebook missed the boat, but that they’ll likely get another shot. The product has incredible value – they are just doing a really shoddy job of extracting it. It’s only a matter of time before they need to be rescued, by Yahoo! or another big player. Whether the rescuer will fare better at extracting value from Facebook is another story.

I’d be quite happy if Yahoo! purchased Facebook, and added support for del.icio.us and Flickr. I don’t upload photos to Facebook because I use Flickr, and I don’t use the share feature at Facebook, because I use del.icio.us. I’d still like to be able to share this stuff with my friends though.

(Another thing: all three products – del.icio.us, Facebook, and Flickr – have a clean and efficient design. That alone should be reason enough to make them play nicely together!)

Read: GigaOM