I’m not sure if I have gone over to the Dark Side or to the light, but as of last night I’m the owner of a Blackberry Curve 8310.
Setting the BlackBerry up is kind of a pain, especially since my old Cingular SIM card needed to be replaced by a new AT&T card. I had to call to activate the phone, then go through three different setup procedures to get my BIS account and associated email activated. It’s not a very user-friendly process and had me seriously wondering what I’d gotten myself into.
Once that was all done, though, things got easier. I love the over-the-air install, and already have three 3rd party applications running on my Curve: Twitterberry, the Gmail client, and a multi-IM client called WebMessenger. I still don’t really know how to use all the features of the Curve, but I’ll learn.
On a side note — switching SIM cards, while not a Blackberry-specific issue, brought to light exactly how unorganized and messy my personal address book management has become over the past few years. I run Thunderbird on my desktop and my laptop, and neither of those address books is complete or up-to-date, with some more key data living only on the SIM that I can no longer use.
No matter what I do for a PIM solution next, it’s going to involve a bunch of tedious manual data entry to bring all the bits and pieces of contact info I’ve accumulated together. I’ve got to figure out how to minimize that. I’ve even found myself wondering if this might be a good job for Plaxo (I’ve heard that they are not a grubby spamhaus anymore).
The AP reports today that despite Microsoft’s repeated insistence that it really, truly is going to stop selling Windows XP in June, Steve Ballmer did not slam the door on the possibility of yet another life extension for the OS.
I can’t help thinking that as far as Microsoft is concerned, XP is the evil zombie that won’t die. They can shoot as many Windows Vista bullets as they like at it, but popular demand keeps driving XP relentlessly forward.
Some enterprising hackers have put together a scheme whereby they hack a number of blogs, so that they can create their own network pages and links back to a few select blogs, to pages that are not easily visible. It takes advantage of the organic and real page rank of all of the sites in question, and probably makes some bucks for the hacker involved.
Why is this bad for *you*?
Other than the knowledge that someone is profiting off of your back, what can happen is that if you’re running Adsense, Google might notice all the hidden text and penalize you and pull you right out of the Index.
It’s unclear right now what exactly is going on — for example, whether this is a possible WordPress exploit, or something at the webhost level — but if you have a WordPress blog, please click through to Tony’s article and do a little checking to make sure your blog is not one of the affected.
…if you are running any version of WordPress older than 2.3.3, you need to upgrade now. Seriously. WordPress 2.3.2 and older have security holes that are being actively exploited by hackers to inject spam links into blogs which are not maintained.
Nothing looks different out here, but WP 2.5 is running now. That was pretty easy.
The new admin interface will take a little getting used to, though. I like most of the changes, but I do kind of miss having the ‘”Categories” option to my right when creating a new post. It’s not a showstopper, though. I’ll adjust.
I’ve spent the last 2 days in New York, celebrating the wedding of a very old and dear friend. I got caught up with several people who knew me when I was still a shy, gangly teenager and discovered that another old friend now lives about 10 minutes away from my in-law’s house. Good times.
One thing that struck me in the middle of the reception was how infrequently I spend time in the company of people who are not part of the tech business, and how I really need to do more of it. Listening to writers and lawyers and doctors and teachers talk about LinkedIn, Skype, and MySpace was fascinating — of the three, Skype got the highest marks, for helping a grandmother video conference with her grandchild. MySpace got a universal thumbs-down. Only one person used it, and he couldn’t understand how anyone found “real” friends on it because all he got was invitations from porn spammers. The rest thought it was ugly and couldn’t see why anyone would want to have a profile there. People were interested to hear about LinkedIn, but only one person was on it and wasn’t too sure it was even useful.
All in all, it was a powerful reminder to me — what we in the Valley take for granted is barely on the radar screen of people outside the bubble. More of us should remember that.
So, SXSWi just ended, and I wasn’t there. I’m heading to NY this Friday for a wedding, and have a few other trips in the pipeline as well — I just didn’t have the cash or the vacation time to fit SXSW in. Maybe next year?
At any rate, this Loren Feldman interview of Chris Brogan is a taste of why I’m bummed about missing the event - two very smart guys talking about social media and where it’s going:
It’s about 8 minutes but definitely worth watching.
Over at Mobile Opportunity today, Michael Mace makes a point that’s true not just for technology products, but for virtually any kind of product development:
Very often tech companies will fall in love with a concept that is compelling to people in the company, but not to non-technologists. They’ll convince themselves that people will want it because, well, they ought to want it.
A related problem: A company will come up with a product that’s nice, but doesn’t really address [a pain point]. You know you have this problem when someone in the company says that need a marketing campaign to explain to people why they should want the product. The really good products need marketing for visibility, not persuasion.
I think this is the underlying problem behind most failed web applications. They do something interesting, as opposed to something compelling.
What makes this whole problem especially tough is that you can’t just ask customers what they need.
Emphasis added.
I’ll add the caveat that the line between visibility and persuasion is not cut-and-dried. Look at the advertising for the iPhone. Most of the spots are product demonstrations. Clearly, you’re raising visibility by showing what the product can do, but isn’t that also a form of persuasion?
And as always, one person’s “eh, interesting” is another person’s “OMG must have now!” But even so, the point is valid.
Yesterday, a friend of ours e-mailed a link to a video of her new kitchen. I decided to send her back a video of our own kitchen. So I shot a quick video, uploaded it to YouTube, and sent out the link.
Then the weird thing happened. About 30 minutes after I uploaded the video, it disappeared off my YouTube account. Poof. Gone. No notice, no nothing. I have no idea why. The video is about 45 seconds of me talking as I walk through my kitchen; I didn’t add any music or graphics or do any editing at all, so there’s no possible copyright issues.
I don’t upload stuff to YouTube very often so maybe this is normal and I just don’t know it. Or maybe I’m the victim of some unfortunate glitch. Either way, it’s a little annoying.
At any rate, I signed up for a Vimeo account and re-uploaded the video there. If you’re really curious, you can see it (but I warn you, it’s kind of boring):
UPDATE 8:30PM: And now it’s back on YouTube. Go figure.
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