Things I Don’t Get…
1. Why has Sony insisted on maintaining its proprietary Memory Stick? When I was looking at digital cameras, Sony wasn’t even in the running because of the memory issue.
2. Mary Meeker. Even after being embarrassed during the dot-com boom as more of a promoter than an equity analyst, she’s still alive, well and bumbling along. In the meantime, Henry Blodget, who was forced to leave the analyst business, has proven he’s a pretty smart cookie.
3. The high cost of Apple accessories. Yesterday, I spent $25 on a mini-DVI to VGA connector that was probably made for $1. And while there were tons of oh-I-need-that products in the Apple store, it’s hard not to get a bad case of sticker shock when you see how much they cost. Speaking of Apple, it’s good to see someone cracked the iPhone/AT&T relationship.
4. Twitter. Can anyone explain to me why it’s useful other than as a tool to broadcast your thoughts or activities that only a small group of people (e.g. your family. close friends) would be interested in? Loren Feldman thinks Twitter will “be huge”.
5. Why it’s so difficult to find someone on Facebook. Sure, it has an advanced search tool but if you have a friend with a regular kind of name, good luck.
6. Why bloggers and blog readers love lists. Write a list (e.g. Five Things That Could Kill Facebook) and the world comes to your doorstep. Speaking of lists, check out Four Reasons Why - a entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking blog devoted to lists on a variety of topics.
7. Why RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is still RSS. If you want to push RSS into the mainstream, it need something catchier like Your Content Now or The Web’s Paperboy…or something like that. Maybe Dave Winer, who pioneered the creation of RSS, can step into the branding fray although I think he’d suggest RSS is just fine.
8. How Dell has fallen so far so fast while Hewlett-Packard has bounced back so strongly? Dell’s cache as a super-efficient computer maker has evaporated.
9. Why high-tech IPOs are all the rage again (e.g. VMWare, Classmates.com) amid a troubling credit crunch. Keith Benjamin, a venture capitalists, suggests the credit crunch will boost the high-tech IPO market because it will drive investors away from hedge funds and buy-out funds.
10. The fascination with people such as Justin.TV and Steve Mann who put cameras on themselves so other people can exactly what they are doing every second of the day. Today’s on-body camera episode features a guy driving to Los Angeles.
August 25th, 2007 at 10:13 am
heh. Good list. I do think with #6 it’s because truth be told, I find myself wanting to skim articles at first and that’s much easier to do with a list. Your post here is a good example.
And I *really* don’t get #10 either.
August 25th, 2007 at 11:20 am
#7: Dave Winer might have pioneered the *popularization* of RSS. But he certainly didn’t invent or create it.
Search for CDF, early RDF stuff and what Netscape were cooking in the late nineties.
Facts are facts. Get them right.
August 25th, 2007 at 11:22 am
#7: Dave Winer might have pioneered the *popularization* of RSS. But he didn’t create it.
Search for CDF, early RDF stuff and what Netscape were cooking in the late nineties.
Credit where credit is due.
August 25th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
[...] the comments of an OM Malik post says that the word in New York “to be very scared.†Mark Evans doesn’t get it [...]
August 27th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
1. I don’t know… but it’s a good reason to say away.
3. Status symbol.
4. I don’t see it as useful beyond that.
5. Would be nice if searches with a lot of results allowed you to narrow down by things like age or location.
6. Condensed information
7. It isn’t… sometimes it’s Atom. “Feed” is a good technology-neutral way of describing both.
10. Voyeurism.
August 28th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
I didn’t get Twitter either. But I’m starting to. It isn’t done yet.
If Twitter gets better group and subscription management on the front end, it can find uses in short term activity coordination, closed group publishing, pay-for content subscriptions.
On the upload side, it becomes an aggregator to the sender of notifications from different sources. An example is what Winer has done: you have the short message twits, the mp3 TwitterGrams, and the photos in Flickr to Twitter. In other words, three distinct media types pushed out through one aggregation push platform.
Twitter lets the little guy get into push content easily.
You can argue that email, RSS, or a blog do this, but they are all push by polling/pulling platforms. With the SMS side, and probably other push technologies as this evolves, this is a true push platform.
August 29th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Mark, Fun list! Regarding your #5 about Facebook, I completely agree… “Dan York” is not exactly a unique name in the English language! For people to find me, they really need to use the profile link on one of my blogs, since the search feature in FB shows you a ton of other Dan York’s.
Dan
August 30th, 2007 at 5:30 am
My unusual name makes it impossible for me to hide on Facebook. @#!