September 2010
1 post
July 2010
4 posts
Are URL Shorteners Bad for the Web?
It never occurred to me that there could be anything negative about short URLs until I read this piece in GigaOM. The most prominent voice raising concerns about URL shorteners is DeWitt Clinton who is, surprisingly, not the former mayor of New York City, but an engineer on the Google Buzz team. Clinton says,
“Deployments of a large-scale URL rewriting proxies impact that ecosystem at the...
Using Foursquare for Guerilla Recruiting
I’m not a recruiter, but I work with recruiters and I am contacted by recruiters on a daily basis. Sometimes I’m stunned at how many recruiters there are. How can the economy support so many recruiters? I don’t understand it, but I know there are some who make a pretty good living from their commissions. Imagine how much more they could make if they had a little bit of...
2 tags
More on .NET
Here’s a more concise way of framing the question of why startups don’t use .NET. Whenever you type runat=”server” in .NET you are ceding control of the web presentation layer to .NET. If .NET (or your .NET widget library) wants to puke out 32 nested tables and 200 lines of lousy-browser-performance javascript, then you’re stuck with that.
6 tags
Why Startups Don't Use .NET
Recently a blogger named Aaron wrote a thought-provoking post called .NET Culture Shock: Why .NET Adoption Lags Among Startups. Aaron elucidates the problem insightfully, determining that .NET is well established among enterprise developers whose chief concern is supporting systems, whereas startup developers worry primarily about supporting products. Aaron concludes that there is nothing inherent...
June 2010
2 posts
Dear RSA Security
Please add Indiglo to your ubiquitous security token key fob thingies.
A Kübler-Ross-like Model for Apple Product...
As much as I love The Oatmeal’s “What it’s like to own an Apple product”, I think it’s missing a few key stages in the Apple product launch cycle.
Stage 1. Rumors.
Stage 2. Leaks
Stage 3. The big announcement and demo at WWDC. The ooohs and aaaahs.
Stage 4. The pre-order that crashes all the servers. Panic ensues. I don’t know if Apple really got my...
April 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Emerging Alternative Uses of Foursquare
I wonder if foursquare’s success will be boosted by people who start using foursquare for reasons other than to show off what cool restaurants and sporting events they attend. For example, I checked in at my bank yesterday and took the opportunity to “shout” my dissatisfaction with the bank(the bank is Wachovia, btw and they are a completely hideous institution that I would urge...
Foursquare and Viral Marketing Patterns
I was reading The Twitter Highlights of Foursquare CEO’s Where 2.0 Talk and this quote by Dennis Crowley stuck with me: “How can I turn life into a video game?” This quote was apparently the inspiration behind the wildly popular Foursquare.
Today I somehow landed on this page about design patterns in viral marketing which included a fascinating list of 21 patterns that have been...
March 2010
2 posts
6 tags
New Bipartisan Healthcare Reform: Healthcare Slot...
The trends of rapidly growing numbers of slots parlors and rapidly growing numbers of Americans without health insurance are bound to collide sooner or later. There will soon be special slot machines that award the winner with the expensive and necessary healthcare resources they need. Imagine sitting in a windowless, climate-controlled cavern in, say, Macungie, PA for six hours drinking $4 cokes...
4 tags
Is Google Being Gamed? Or Are They Selling...
I did a Google search today on the term “IRS transcript.” As it happens, I need to order a transcript from a prior year tax return. The results came up and, not surprisingly, the top result was for the page on the IRS site that links to the PDF version of the transcript request form 4506T( www.irs.gov/individuals/article/0„id=110571,00.html. So, I clicked on the link and guess...