RobNeville.net

Was this website trying to tell me something??

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The same social dynamic that happens in high school lunch rooms across the US is paralleled in social media.

Maybe you were one of the cool kids. I wasn’t. I was one of the faceless masses. The inane social order of the High School lunch room lives on through the internet. There was the cool kids table. You know what I’m talking about. For whatever reason, there was less than 5% of your school’s population that were revered as demi-gods. Usually, the reasons were not entirely understood - maybe they were football stars. Maybe they came from wealthy families. Maybe they just were good looking and knew it.

You then huddled with some other social group - maybe jocks…maybe the smart kids…maybe the stoners.

Here’s the kicker…most of the people that were in the “cool” crowd were a-holes. Not all of them, but most of them. They could do nothing wrong. Hell, their crap smelled like roses as far as they were concerned. These people were almost never all that smart either (with a few exceptions). In fact, most were C students at best (probably due to the prolific genocide of brain cells that would ensue on the weekends).

Most of the truly interesting people I knew where decidedly NOT in the “in” crowd. Yet, most people didn’t get to know them. They were lost as people clamored for the attention of the lunch room equivalent of Web 2.0 A-Listers. Looking back, I’m thankful that I woke up and stopped giving a rat’s arse what the cool kids did or thought.

The problem is that blogs are a model for the the high school lunch room. There are a-listers that have this entrenched position with everybody trying to break into that crowd. Everybody wants the spotlight on them. Because the a-lister content consistently gets seen, dug, stumbled, reposted, commented simply because it came from an a-lister, everybody else is drowned out as noise. That’s not to say that everything everybody is saying on their blogs deserves your attention, but I can guarantee that there’s high quality, relevant writing happening right now that you’ll never read or hear about.

I’m on a mission. I’m going to start trying to find these voices that I haven’t heard - the long tail of good bloggers. I want to find good bloggers that few people have heard of that deserve to be. I’m going to stop trying to impress or grab the attention of a-listers. I’m going to stop trying to emulate them too. Why? Because looking back, I had better friends in high school than the cool kids did and I had more of them. Who then was truly cool?

There are two reasons I haven’t pulled the trigger on a 3G iPhone. The new phone is almost perfect. The first reason has to do with a lack of support for an external keyboard of any kind. I believe that this phone could replace taking a laptop 90% of the time for me with the addition of a keyboard. I believe apple did this on purpose to avoid cannibalizing sales of MacBook Air.

The bigger reason though has to do with the epic failure of Mobile Me to live up to the promise. And no, I’m not referring to the dismal performance of the service (did the Twitter guys write this thing?). No, when I first read about it, I looked at pictures like the one to the left and descriptions of what the service was supposed to achieve and I made a very basic assumption about how it was going to work. That assumption has proved to be very wrong.

When I read the descriptions and look at that diagram what I see is that Mobile Me is supposed to be an aggregator. In other words, it should pull data from MS Exchange servers, my mac at home, my iPhone, whatever and then push it out to everything else. But in reality, Mobile Me is a node, a repository, not an aggregator. It passively waits for someone to push data to it. This is wrong. Why do I need a program running on my windows desktop to poll the exchange server for data and push it to mobile me? If my iTouch can connect directly to my exchange server, then why can’t mobile me connect directly to my exchange server? The connectivity to different data stores whether they be calendars, lotus notes servers, exhange servers, or pop email servers should all be happening from within mobile me. Then, mobile me needs to be the publisher of this information to my devices that want to subscribe.

Oh well. Maybe next version.

On a side note, I also find it amusing that I’ve never been able to get Mail.app to successfully connect to my corporate Exhange server. However, with the latest iPhone/iTouch software…my iTouch DOES connect to my company exchange server. What the heck is up with that??

I’ve just posted a new page here listing the details of my faithful ol’ Jeep that I’m selling. Have a look. If you know anybody interested in the Carolinas area, please direct them here. It’s a good deal with a lot of extras. She’s ready to hit the trails immediately!

StumbleRead is very close to what I wrote about earlier when I outlined how I’d redesign the user interface for FriendFeed.

You put your nickname and FF key and voila…on the left you’ve got a Google Reader style listing of FF items that you can go through using keyboard shortcuts that work just like Google Reader. When I brought the idea up earlier, it brought some heat from some bloggers that were concerned about losing advertising revenues by siphoning off too much of the user experience from their website. StumbleRead has solved this problem by loading up the original website on the right-hand frame of the browser window.

It looks like it’s also attempting to keep track of which items have been read already. I don’t know how persistent that “read” mark is, but I doubt it keeps track of that between sessions.

Still missing some key elements. I don’t like that it loads the underlying site without asking…some of the sites load too slow. I also still see the same problem of conversation threads that I don’t care about continually bubbling to the top of the heap because some random person has hit the “like it” link.

We’re getting there.

OK, I can believe that it’s possible to create a better search algorithm than Google and make a serious dent in their market-share over a long period of time. But you’d better have a better product first. A MUCH better product.

Just tried out new search engine cuil and the results feel like 1995 all over again…I keep finding myself saying, “why the heck is that showing up?”.

Not impressed and I expect it to die quickly.

Ran across this on Saturday….

It’s a banner for youth football. Now, I love football (American football mind you). But I imagine that most mothers are like my wife…they’re afraid of their sons getting hurt. Not the best advertisement then to say that they are “Now Practing” [sic]. Wow….maybe they don’t use helmets and that would explain the horrible spelling?

I commented on the ProBlogger social media love-in and holy crap…I’ve had more connections made in the last 36 hours than I have the entire time I’ve been using Twitter. Awesome!

I actually went through the entire list of all 538 twitterers and looked at each profile. I didn’t add everybody (that would be madness). So who did I add?

• Blogged about similar or related niches
• Had a “healthy” ratio of following : followers
• Had a frequent but not obnoxious update pattern
• And I hate to admit it, but I added a couple based mostly on the attractiveness of the girl in the picture on the profile (hey, like the country song says, at the end of the day, I’m just a guy)

Who I didn’t add?

• No profile picture or graphic at all
• Protected updates
• Less than 20 updates total
• More than 2 weeks since last update
• No Bio filled in
• Very low or unhealthy ratio of followers to following
• Obnoxiously frequent/infrequent update pattern

So, if you want to be successful on Twitter then you need a hot chick for your profile picture, a very descriptive bio, you need to look credible (i.e. not desperate because you follow 10x as many as follow you) or aloof (because 10x as many follow you as you follow). Oh, and you need to use the tool occasionally.

If you want to follow me on Twitter, you can find a link to my profile on the left-hand side of the page.

UPDATE: I’m an idiot. If you look to the left-hand side of the page you see a big fat nothing! I was thinking of my business’s blog, Stage3 Consulting where I do have my twitter profile on the left-hand side of the page. Duh! Here’s my twitter profile if your want to connect as well as FriendFeed which will give you everything else you may want in the way of social media.

I’m really liking FriendFeed. I think it has great potential. I have some thoughts on what I’d like to see added or changed. Excuse my scribbles, but it was the fastest way to get my point across (hopefully)….

My first complaint is that I don’t like how things continually “bubble” to the top because somebody’s “liked” something or made a comment. I also really don’t like the same item showing up again and again, especially when I didn’t care about it in the first place. I know I can hide stuff I don’t like, but why is the default behavior to assume that I like everything?? Instead, split the display and keep items that I’m monitoring on the right.

Anything I’ve marked that’s been liked or commented on shows up on my “monitor” list…otherwise it doesn’t. On the left, show me something similar to Google Reader with header information showing the service (i.e. Flickr, Digg, Blog) the user and the title. Allow me to burn through the list using Google Reader style keyboard shortcuts. Once I’ve “read” an item. Then don’t bubble it back up to me…ever. This way, when I come back after many hours, I know exactly what I’ve seen and what I haven’t seen yet.

My next idea is much bigger in my opinion. When I view one of these items, I want to see something like this…

If it’s a blog post, pull the RSS content through and let me read it right there. Let me comment right there. If it’s Flickr, show me the full picture inline. You get the idea. Don’t make me dig to get to the content.

Essentially, I would like to see FriendFeed turned into a social media reader/interaction-conversational application. Think, Google Reader + FriendFeed.

Now, I realize that some of this is easier said than done. There’s really no technical barrier to what I’m proposing though.

What do you think?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know what movie I’m talking about. It’s already broken a bunch of records for opening weekend earnings.

I’ve already seen it twice.

I don’t care if you’re a fan of Batman in general or if you’ve not seen the other films or ever read the comic books. You don’t need any background information to get this film.

I’ve always loved Batman since I was kid. But, never since the comics did I get the same feeling for the Batman characters. The TV show with Adam West made everything into a joke. The 1989 movie and the follow-ups also made a joke out of it all. While I enjoyed Jack Nicolson’s role as Joker, it just wasn’t the Joker I knew.

Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker is simply amazing. In discussing it with friends and family this weekend, all of the following words have been used: haunting, disturbing, and creepy. Given the circumstances surrounding his death and some of the rumors, I have to say that I got a chill down my spine when the Joker says, “…madness is just like gravity. All it takes it a little shove.” This is the Joker I know…anything but a joke. A terrorist. A madman. A Hanibal Lecter meets Freddie Cruger meets Jack the Ripper meets a suicide bomber.

Its become increasingly rare for people to enthusiastically clap at the end of movies anymore. Both times I saw The Dark Knight, the audience left clapping. Go see it.

What did you think of the movie?