The Raphael Sbarge Award for “Strangest Appearance By A ‘That Guy’ Or A ‘That Girl’ in a Commercial That Runs All The Time During the Playoffs”
To Kima’s lesbian ex-girlfriend on “The Wire” who now plays a housewife in those commercials for the new Viera televisions. Am I the only one who feels like nobody from “The Wire” should ever be allowed to work again? I feel like all of the “Wire” characters were real people—I can’t handle seeing Kima’s ex or Murray the lawyer or Clay Davis in 30-second ads. I just can’t.
What does Twitter do? It allows me to blog and to subscribe to other bloggers. It provides an interface that combines reading and writing. The other stuff (micro-limits, SMS, API) are the candy on top. But at it’s core, Twitter is just a nicely packaged blogging tool and blog reader that provides programmatic “awareness” of who is subscribed to you (as opposed to just who you are subscribed to).
Here’s a thought experiment: What if I could mash my RSS reader (Google Reader) with my blogging tool (Mephisto)? What if Mephisto (and all compliant blogging tools) supported a simple API to accept a ping indicating that someone has subscribed to my feed? So, I subscribe to Bob’s feed, my reader send his blog a ping, and he now knows that he’s being “followed”. It’s this precisely what a distributed Twitter would be?
I got really excited when I heard about PluggedIn, a site that wants to be the Hulu.com of music videos. Uh, not quite. Not only do you have to install a plug-in to watch the videos (A Java applet? What is this, 1999?) but their catalog of videos is weak and their UI is terrible. See the screen-shot below. Don’t these web-designers know that stretching photos is not cool? Look at poor Akon, he’s like a rapping dwarf. And check-out that classy ad for Amy Whinehouse ringtones. Niiiice!
After reading about BlogIt I am convinced that this service will ruin my life. Why you might ask? Because it empowers people to type up a simple post:
My, what a beautiful day it is. La dee da dee da!
…and blast this out to a multitude of different services (their blog, Twitter, Pownce, etc). Which is fine, presuming that friends follow their other friends on a purely one-to-one basis (i.e. I follow Eddie exclusively through Twitter).
But I don’t! I follow Eddie via Twitter, his blog and any other service he exposes on his FriendFeed. The idea of him cross-posting a single post to multiple services and having all of those duplicates end-up in my stream makes me want to claw my eyes out! So, please, let’s take a stand now on cross-posting. It’s a BAD IDEA.
A while back I was introduced to the concept of inbox zero. It was simultaneously an obvious and insightful concept, completely changing how I treat email. I use GMail, and it had never occurred to me what the purpose of the “archive” button was. I simply left all emails in my inbox and starred those that required attention. Of course, starred messages would soon dribble down and off the first page, and I would have to remember to click the “starred view” to bring these emails back to attention. Today, I have maybe 20 emails in my inbox (and this is still probably too many). I have the most urgent emails starred.
This philosophy of processing email is very similar to the mindset behind consuming a river of news. The idea being that one way to consume news (or RSS feeds) is as a single stream of posts. I was talking to Eddie the other day about his obsession with not missing posts. He is very methodical about how he reads his feeds. I tried to convince him that this was a waste of time. The time savings and stress relief that comes from readings what’s in front of you at the moment, rather than worrying about a post you might missed from a few days ago, is huge. And if something is truly important it will continue to echo throughout the blogosphere.
And finally, this doesn’t end with email and news. It applies to Twitter messages, Flickr uploads, Facebook updates, you name it. I think the services that allow us to process this information as a stream of notifications (think chat) and remove the stress of missing something will be the services that succeed. Life is a river and sometimes you just have to sit back and enjoy the view.
I started listening to the Don & Mike show on the occasions that my mom would pick me up from school, back in the 7th or 8th grade. I can’t remember if she was the one who tuned into WJFK (which ran Howard in the mornings on the way to school) or if it was me. It doesn’t really matter, as soon as I started driving (1993) I listened to Howard on the way to school and Don & Mike on the way back. I listened to Don & Mike through high school and suffered their absence when I attended William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA. I would come home during the breaks and tuning in was like seeing an old friend.
I spent 7 years living in DC after college and would listen to the show on-and-off, depending on where I was working and whether I was driving to work. I am now living in Austin, TX and completely reliant on either the WJFK stream or the iTunes podcasts. Whenever I come back to visit DC, I gleefully hijack the radio dial of whoever is kind enough to give me a ride. I’ve known for a year that Don was retiring and leaving the show. I suppose I always hoped it wasn’t true or was perhaps just a negotiating tactic with CBS Radio. It seems like my hopes have been dashed and the Don & Mike era is truly coming to an end.
I know this sounds silly to many people reading this, but I have been listening to 2 guys share their lives with their audience for over 17 years. Don’s son Bart is about to graduate from college, and I have listened to this kid grow-up on the show for the past 17 years. I dare say that I know more about Don, Mike, Bart, Rob and many other people on the show than I do about some of my own friends and extended family. I wept when I heard that Don’s wife Frieda had died in a car accident. That’s how much these people have meant to me. I’ll miss you, Don. Wish you the best.
