Random musings of a child progeny
On my travels I was always keeping an eye out for complimentary wireless Internet access points as I didn’t really feel like paying the exorbitant data fees. It would have cost me £7.50 per megabyte or, to put it another way, £45 to view this picture of Lake Wanaka at full-size, although this came down slightly (more so for within the EU) after the introduction of the 3G iPhone.
My rule of thumb is if I can mention something in the pub and my non-geek friends have heard of it then it’s pretty much guaranteed to be a success. Even among my switched-on geek brethren Twitter isn’t all that popular.
Just when I had something possibly exciting to broadcast Twitter was unavailable again. I could have sworn that the monkey man himself, Steve Ballmer, walked in to the restaurant last night. I tried again and then checked Twitter’s status to find that it wasn’t actually down at all. It just wasn’t working.
At the risk of invoking Evan’s ire, Twitter is next to useless at the moment. Okay, so it may have broken the news of the Chinese earthquake. It can get you out of jail. There are stories of the LA firefighters using it and it can even tell you when to water your plants. Twistori is interesting but Twitter needs a sticky killer app before the masses adopt it but before that can happen it really has to get the stability problems sorted out.
Switching hosts and abandoning Ruby on Rails may be a start but there’s a long way to go.
CNN almost did.
They were so close with their t-shirts recently but then had to go and spoil things by slapping their logo right on there. Less is more once again. In fact when it comes to branding, anything at all is starting to be considered brash when it comes to Web 2.0.
Google certainly do.
I happened upon a busy white tent Last Friday night in New York city. It was surrounded by some fantastic projections on the neighbouring buildings but there was no clue as to what was going on. That was unless you investigated and had a look inside. Cameras, computers and a couple of dogs quite randomly. Turns out it was a promo for iGoogle - the personalised version of Google. If you’ve been on the Internet for a while now then you may recognise this as the portal concept from the late 1990s and the “My Netscape”.
Did you know about the concerted energy saving challenge put to the British public that took place between 6pm yesterday and 6pm today? You’re not alone apparently. There are a lot of big names supporting E-day but it would seem that it has been an epic fail. Energy consumption was actually up. Admittedly by only 0.1% but up all the same. Not the result that was hoped for I expect.