Category Archives: internet stuff

Hide your developers. Facebook is coming to NYC.

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Everyone knows by now that NYC is quickly becoming a hot bed for upcoming and innovating new technology. Lots of startups have flocked to NYC in the past few years and major (west coast based) companies who have opened wings of their companies in town. If you’re involved in the NYC startup tech scene you probably already know that finding top tier engineering talent can often be very difficult. This is partly due to the fact that there are several existing industries that already greatly absorb the existing engineering talent. Finance, advertising, and big media/ digital agencies recruit a good majority of the engineering talent in NYC. So it’s no surprise that small startups can sometimes have a difficult time recruiting and retaining this talent. With another big company like Facebook coming to town, a company that can afford to hire “thousands of engineers”, I believe we’ll see a bigger strain on the talent pool available to startups in NYC.

For more info on Facebook’s new office announcement:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-to-open-engineering-office-in-new-york-city-in-2012-2011-12-02

I Give Google+ a big ‘Google Minus’

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I think it’s safe to say Google Apps users have become second-class citizens at this point. Features like Google Profiles, Google Buzz, and Google Wave have always taken several weeks to months to be introduced to Google Apps users. Google Profiles are still unavailable to Google Apps users and because of this, there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users in the world that are not able to use Google+.

A totally random twitter search resulted in:

Of course, Google’s lack of communication with its users results in several hundreds of duplicate threads on Google help forums were people are trying to figure what they should do. For example, there are many threads were users are trying to figure out how to downgrade their paid Google Apps Business accounts. Google can’t possible want this.

If Google wants to keep its paying Google Apps users it shouldn’t introduce a product that could potentially cannibalize another portion of their business. If Google ever allows for Google Apps users to user Google Profiles and/or Google+ … I shall revisit.

Skype vs. iChat AV

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You can say I’m late to the game but for my recent consulting gig I’ve had to use Skype quite a bit.  I’ve had an account for several years now but I can’t say I’ve ever had an actual audio conference till recently. Instead of using my precious AT&T minutes to call into 2 hour conferences (ick!), I dial in using Skype- which is free! Actually, only calls to toll free numbers can be made using skype so as long as your virtual conference number is toll-free, you’re golden. Calls to land lines and cell phones can be made but you have to buy calling credits first.

Skype totally owns iChat when it comes to AV sessions. The whole experience is very smooth and not to mention, the quality is excellent. If you have a Skype to Skype chat using a Mac’s internal microphone your mind will be blown- I guarantee it. If you’ve ever done an iChat AV session you will notice how much better Skype is. I’m referring to both audio AND video. Also, connection problems hardly seem to happen with Skype. Initiating audio-only and video conference sessions is super smooth and jumping in and out of sessions is very responsive.

Anyways, you should check out Skype now.

Another Facebook Vacation

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Once again, I’ve decided to deactivate my Facebook account. While my friends are quick to say “yeah whatever … you’ll be back”, I’ve been having a tough time justifying the need for Facebook. When someone who doesn’t have a facebook account asks me “Hey should I get a Facebook account?” my quick and default reply is “You don’t have one?! You need to get on Facebook”. Then I quickly ask myself .. why should they? Well let’s take a look:

Possible reasons you can recommend signing up for Facebook:
1) Reuniting with high school and college friends as well as other personal connections
2) Sharing pictures and videos with your friends and family
3) Building your social network for career opportunities
4) Creating and inviting friends to events
5) Sharing your personal contact info
6) Creating and joining common interest groups

(I can’t think of any more reasons at the moment so please add some reasons in the comments. I honestly want to dissect this thing)

Onward!

A successful visit to any website is one where you are able to obtain useful information to use in your own life. Think about any website you go to really often. They typically contain something that is useful to you or at least entertaining. Whether it be your online banking site, research on google, youtube videos … you always get something out of it. That said, we can even measure how successful a visit to a site is by gauging how satisfied we feel when we close the lid on our laptops at night. While I could almost categorize this as mildly entertaining: looking at pictures of my college roommate’s ex-girlfriend totally trashed and drunk does not constitute useful information. I’ve found that this kind of stimulus just adds noise to my life and this is the problem I have with social networking sites like Facebook. We’ve rounded up all of these users and now everyone is just looking at each other with nothing to do and nothing important to say.

” So iamnotrobot what do you when you are sitting at your computer?? I don’t know any other websites besides Facebook, Myspace, and Google. What am I to do?!?! ”

Well, never fear. When I first deactivated my facebook account, I had some withdrawal symptoms for sure. I would occassional type in http://facebo – and then remember I no longer had an active account. I didn’t even know why I was opening a browser and mechanically typing in the address. I needed something to cure the addiction …

Soon thereafter I started scouring the interwebs for useful and/or entertaining content. After many months of use I believe a good way to ween yourself from the Facebook black whole is to use a service like StumbleUpon. You can specify types of websites you’d like to see and StumbleUpon will somewhat randomly direct you to a website you might find interesting. You can even thumb up or thumb down any site which StumbleUpon comes across. These ratings are then shared back with the entire Stumble community which leads to better a ‘stumbling’ experience. In essence, whenever I feel the urge to go on Facebook and waste some time, I stumble across a few websites instead. If we’re not already friends on StumbleUpond, check out my stumbles and add me as friend. If we’re not already friends on StumbleUpon, check out my stumbles and add me as friend. Make sure you get the FireFox plugin or the Safari plugin.

The wasted time once occupied by Facebook is now replaced by short StumbleUpon sessions. More Better!!

With all that said, I think these Facebook vacations are key. They fill in the various space-out moments we have in the day with something other than staring at pictures and comments about stupid shows.

Let’s talk Web 3.0

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I’ll preface this post by saying that I decided to move this conversation from Twitter to my blog just to avoid being followed by 10,000 social media experts who are also part-time marketers and just-so-happen-to-be single parents.

Looks like a lot of people have different ideas of what Web 3.0 will entail. We are currently at the birth of this new era and it is up to us, the avid web-goers, to shape it into what will be beneficial to us in our daily lives. Personally, I think social networks need to evolve. It’s great that we have all these connections, friends, followers …. so now what?

Sound off and let me know what your vision of Web 3.0 is …

UPDATE:

This is a greatttt video that is somewhat related! :)