Brian Sweeting

I’ve been penning a couple of posts recently, that I just don’t think are well thought out enough. So until I get them in shape, I wanted to catch up so here’s a hodge-podge of notable things that I’ve ran across lately.

Microsoft Gets Agile

The WSJ has a great about Microsoft realizing the mess Windows was in and how they made the call to drop the legacy code and start fresh with their flagship product.

Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

Allchin is co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division. “It’s not going to work,” he told Gates in the chairman’s office mid-2004, the paper reports. “[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly. “The reason: Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Thousands of programmers each produced their own piece of computer code, to be stitched together into one sprawling program.But Longhorn/Vista was too complex: Microsoft needed to begin again, Allchin told Gates.Allchin’s warning recognised a growing threat from Google, Apple Computer, makers of Linux and corporate buyers - the latter horrified about security problems. Allchin and a small team demanded a revolution in how Microsoft works.

Read the full article.

Have a strategy for your website

A great article by Greg Storey in issue 205 of A List Apart. Something I wish all my clients would read. Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason)

AJAX Dialog Windows

Not a “how-to” but a “what for” for designing AJAX dialog windows by Luke Wroblewski. Quoting Edward Tufte…

“The border of an active window should be light in value (to avoid clutter with other windows), yet deeply saturated (to provide a conspicuous signal). Yellow is the only color jointly satisfying those conditions, and therefore proves valuable for bordering windows.” -Window Research: Color Guidelines

Looks like there’s as more importance to the “yellow” than the “fade” in the “yellow fade technique” .

TypeTester

TypeTester allows you to compare fonts for the web, tweak them to your heart’s content, and then export the CSS. This is a must for designers working with developers.

My Kingdom for a good Web-based RSS Reader

I have been a bloglines user since it’s inception. The problem I ran across lately, is that they do not support RSS feeds that require authentication. So I’ve been hunting around for something else. I tried NewsGator’s online aggregator since it seems they are becoming an RSS Reader empire. They do support authenticated feeds, and the interface is pretty, but there isn’t enough separation between the blogs I read when viewing entries as groups of feeds. I also wish the category/feed navigation was either in frames, or it floated along as I scroll down the page.

I’ve also tried Rojo. Didn’t like how it only allows a flat listing of feeds (gotta have my folders). Google’s Reader, but I could only get it to import about half of my RSS feeds and it doesn’t seem to support authenticated RSS either.

I just registered for SXSW 2006. The Interactive conference will be held March 10-14, 2006. I hope to see you there. Shaun Inman says that September 30th is the deadline for the 35% discount on registration, so register quick.

This will be my first time attending, so if you have any tips on what to see, where to stay, etc…please leave a comment.

Ever heard of the saying, “One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch”? Well, that’s what’s happening to me.

I use 20″ iMac G5 at work. My employer, though a windows guy, graciously allows me to use the OS of my choice. The iMac is a great computer—it is sexy, compact, and quite powerful. But I would never buy one again. Why? Because the logic board just went out for the second time in 4 months.

The first time this happened was back in May, at the ripe old age of 3 months. I came in one morning, and the machine wouldn’t even turn on. In turned out that the logic board and the power supply were dead. We took the machine into a local Mac repair shop and didn’t end up getting it back for 5 weeks because the logic boards were out of stock for Apple.

So here I’ve been running smoothly again, until just a few days ago. I came in, and never got past the grey Apple screen. Turns out the logic board is dead once again. I asked the guy at the CompUSA service center if they dealt with many logic board problems with the iMacs. He answered, “Lots”. So now I’m looking at about 2 weeks with no iMac.

The problems this causes are two-fold. First, I have to use a laptop as my primary computer for a couple of weeks. I like my PowerBook, but it gets hard to hunch over a laptop looking at a 15″ screen all day, especially when you are used to a beautiful, bright 20″ screen that actually sits at eye-level. Secondly, Apple is losing all sorts of credibility with my Windows user boss who recently purchased a Mac Mini for his family’s home computer. How can I say anything at all about how great Apple and their computers are, with this looming over my head. This is how “One bad Apple, can spoil the whole bunch”, at least in the minds of people who might be thinking of switching to the Mac. Another thing that is even worse, is that this seems to be a common problem with the G5 iMac. So common, in fact, that the standard warranty has been extended to two years vs one. So if it is so common, why wouldn’t Apple be vigilant about keeping these parts in stock, and even overnighting them to the repair centers? You’d think if Apple really cared about it’s customers (a.k.a. fans) that they would do this, instead of letting them sit for 2-5 weeks without a computer.

Update 1:
I called 1-800-SOS-APPLE and explained my situation. I was escalated to a “Product Specialist” who said that he needed to give CompUSA their 5-7 days to fix it (which the seventh day is Monday). He said if they are unable to fix it by then, to e-mail him back with my case # and “they’ll see what other options are available”, which I hope means, we’ll give you a Rev B model.

Update 2:
Well fortunately/unfortunately CompUSA had my computer fixed within the 7 days, so now I guess I’ll just have to wait for the logic board to go out the next time. Frustrating.

I’m now on iProvo. I really like it. The TV interface is nice, and the internet is fast, although it is not as fast as advertised. iProvo claims that you can get 10Mb up and downstream. I’m getting 5Mb at best. I know, I know, that is still pretty nice. I had 3Mb service with Qwest and I don’t think I ever got faster than 2Mb downstream, so I can’t complain too much.

The installation was quite painful, for the installers that is. They were here for 3 hours. I guess I was the first install in this newly built-out section of the city, and they said they always have trouble with the first. I guess that’s what I get for the being on the bleeding edge of technology.

So far, I’m loving the service. I especially like less reliance on Qwest. I hope to replace my phone service in the next 60 days when the iProvo phone service comes online.

There will be two general categories of Windows Vista editions, which map closely to the two that exist today for XP (”Home,” which comprises Starter, Home, and Media Center Editions, Pro, which includes Professional, Professional x64, and Tablet PC Editions). In Windows Vista, the two categories are Home and Business. In the Home category, Microsoft will create four product editions: Windows Vista Starter Edition, Windows Vista Home Basic Edition, Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, and Windows Vista Ultimate Edition (previously known as “Uber” Edition). In the Business category, there will are three editions: Windows Vista Small Business Edition, Windows Vista Professional Edition, and Windows Vista Enterprise Edition. In all, there are 7 product editions planned for Windows Vista.

Read the full article.

Yesterday I saw some workers digging a trench about a block west of where I live. The trucks had an “Atlantic Engineering” sign on the side. I remembered hearing something about Atlantic Engineering being the company that was working with the City of Provo to install fiber for the iProvo project, a municipal broadband project offering FTTH (Fiber To The Home).

So this morning I called up Mstar, one of the service providers for iProvo (as well as Utopia). I was elated to hear that my area was now built out and ready for service. I set up an appointment to get iProvo internet and cable television, bundled together for $79. I also tried getting the VOIP telephone service, but the provider Veracity seems to be having some issues, so Mstar is not taking orders for that yet.

This marks the beginning of the end of my relationship with Qwest. My DSL speed is currently “up to” 3Mb down and 1.5 up. With iProvo, I will have a 10Mb connection up and down. This is going to be sweet. I’ll blogging more about my experience with my fiber connection, and other services as I get them. Installation is set for Monday, September 19th.

When I redesigned my site, I wanted to have my photos up for friends and family to see. I also wanted to get my money’s worth out of my Flickr Pro account. I was a little dissappointed to find that I could only display the last 20 photos from my photostream using SlideShowPro, a flash photos gallery created by Todd Dominey. So I decided to create a set of PHP scripts that utilizes Flickr’s API to get my photoset data and put it into the xml format that SlideShowPro uses. I also like to share, so I’ve made FlickrSSP 1.0 available to the public. Enjoy!

Get FlickrSSP 1.0

PayPal has changed their fee structure to allow easier micropayments. For payments less than $2, the fees with be “at a rate of 5 percent plus 5 cents per transaction” compared with “1.9 to 2.9 percent, plus 30 cents per transaction” on their regular transactions.

Shaun Inman is going to unveil Mint this week. Mint is a web stats tool, which is the sucessor to his earlier (and free) ShortStat. It is interesting to see this trend of people building products and then using their markets (a.k.a. blog readers) to market the product to. This is exactly what Jim Coudal was talking about in his recent ALA article. Instead of building a product and then looking for a market, Shaun built up a market of blog readers, many of whom are ShortStat users, and now he has a love-group to hock Mint to. Pricing hasn’t been announced for Mint, but I highly doubt it will be free.

Shaun is also using something else that I’ve found very interesting lately. The idea of Blog2Blog marketing. What do I mean by this? Well, it seems that the bloggerati allstars feed off of each other. Shaun has tapped into the “markets” of other high profile bloggers to build buzz for Mint. As of this writing, Mike Davidson, Jeff Croft, Keegan Jones, Matt Thomas, Jon Hicks, Jason Santa Maria, and Rob Weychart have all posted on the “My favorite feature of Mint is…” meme. All of these people have been beta testers of Mint and now they are preaching its greatness to their readers. This has been going on a lot lately. Let’s look at a couple of other recent examples of Blog2Blog marketing.

37Signals

The Signals built a huge amount of buzz for Ta-Da List, Backpack, and sometime in the future Writeboard. They started out doing a series of four previews of the features of this mystery application on their SvN Blog. One that really got people going, was when they posted a screenshot that was large enough to give people some clues as to what this application was, but too small to give away any detail. For the final preview they pulled a Willy Wonka and gave out golden tickets to random people who had signed up to be notified upon Backpack’s launch. By the time Backpack had launched, they had built so much buzz that they had 10,000 accounts created in the first 24 hours of launch. Cost of this word-of-mouth advertising? Free.

BlinkSale

BlinkSale is web application targeted at small creative firms that allows them to send out invoices. I started noticing things popping up in my news aggregator about BlinkSale several weeks before they launched. The people behind BlinkSale used P2P Marketing by inviting some well-read bloggers to preview their application. Those people in-turn blogged about how great BlinkSale was. Then the buzz trickled down the blog food chain. By the time BlinkSale launched it had a huge amount of hype built up, and had a long list of testimonials to boot. The cost of this word of mouth advertising? Free.

Conclusion

I hope you see a trend here. Never before have companies been able to use word-of-mouth advertising so efficiently since the rise of blogging. Now just because this type of advertising is free, it isn’t necessarily easy. You have to put in the time. It takes time to build a community by giving them something they find useful, whether it’s a great product or sage advice. Word-of-mouth advertising is the hardest to come by, because it requires passionate customers. By blogging about your product/service which you are passionate about, you will win passionate customers.

If you know of other examples of Blog2Blog marketing, please post a comment about it.

If you live in Northern Utah, possess the power of analytical thought, and like free stuff…then this is for you!

On Thursday, September 8, 2005, 12:00 - 1:30 p.m., Novell is looking for 8-10 individuals interested in reviewing and testing an innovative new design for Novell.com.

You’ll get a free lunch and a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate as a token of appreciation for your time, plus the opportunity to provide feedback on Novell.com.

To register, please send the following information to Jessica Depew at jdepew@novell.com. Due to the limited number of participants needed for this study we may not select all those who register, however you will notified either way.

* First Name
* Last Name
* Company
* Job Title
* Address
* City
* State
* Zip
* E-mail Address
* Phone Number
* Have you ever visited Novell.com? (Y/N)
* Do you currently use Novell products? (Y/N)