Technology
Entries related to technology.
Black Friday and the Nokia N900 on Amazon
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 11/24/2009 - 14:12Back in June, I wrote a blog post about turning fifty and the new iPhone. My wife had been asking what I thought of the new iPhone and if it was time for me to upgrade from my old Motorola Razr. From an end user perspective everyone tells me that the iPhone is great. However, I look at things from a different perspective. I’m a geek, an innovator, an early adopter. Great user interfaces just get in my way. Give me a command prompt. More importantly, give me a command prompt to a real operating system that I can go in and tweak to my heart’s content.
I realize that a jailbroken iPhone might give me most of what I’m looking for, but I’d rather work with a device that allows me full access without jailbreaking it. I’d rather work on a device that makes as much of the development and distribution of applications as open as possible.
The iPhone is horrible that way. Skype was disabled. Sling was disabled. Video streaming was disabled. Tethering was disabled. It would take a lot of work to make the iPhone do what I wanted.
I figured that the phone I really want is the next generation Android phone. The Android development environment sounds much more to my liking than the iPhone development environment. On the other hand, all my video blogging friends rave about their Nokia N97s with great video streaming. The one downside is the Symbian operating system, oh, and also the price.
Well the other day, I read the latest news about the Nokia N900 
Looking more closely, it comes with a 5 megapixel camera/camcorder, beating out iPhone’s 3 megapixel camera. It comes with Skype and Qik preloaded. It supports QRCodes and tethering. It sure sounds like a nice phone for me. On top of this, with Amazon’s discount and Nokia’s rebates, the price is below $500. That is still expensive for a cellphone, but for a full powered mobile device, it looks like it is worth it.
The one downside is that it does not support AT&T 3G, so it might be slower for some data.
As to Android, there are plenty of blog posts out there talking about Android versus Maemo. However, since Maemo appears to be a pretty full featured Linux, I wouldn’t be surprised if I could run an Android emulator on an N900. I have tried an Android Emulator on my old IBM R51 running Ubuntu, and that just hasn’t worked well for me yet. It may be that my R51 just doesn’t have enough horsepower and an N900 might not either.
One final thought: I don’t focus much on advertising on my website, other than blog advertising for other sites with EntreCard, Adgitize and CMF Ads. However, as we approach Black Friday and CyberMonday, I may add a few additional ads for Amazon products. So, if you’re doing holiday shopping online, click on my ads here or the ads on other blogs to help support bloggers through the holidays.
#socialmarketing Convergence CoverItLive Page
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/19/2009 - 12:03This page is the CoverItLive aggregation of the #socialmarketing TweetChat that is taking place Thursday November, 19th at 12 noon, Eastern U.S. time.
You can join in by tweeting with the hash tag #socialmarketing via Twitter, Tweetchat, or other Twitter tools, or by posting comments in the CoverItLive frame while the chat is occurring.
Example QRCode pointing back to this blog post:
#socialmarketing Convergence, The Long Tail and The Innovator/Influencers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/19/2009 - 10:36Today at noon, Eastern U.S. time, @ckieff and I will do a Social Marketing Tweet Chat. Chris runs the Social Marketing firm, 1 Good Reason and we often chat at various conferences. He has been running the Social Marketing Tweet Chat for some time now, and asked me to join him to share some of my perspectives.
While I pay close attention to social marketing, I approach it more from the technology side than from the marketing side. I typically present myself as an “Old guard, hardcore geek”. The closest I get to marketing is when I describe some of my work as “helping people tell their stories on computers”. So, I will present a different perspective than some of the other folks that Chris often speaks with.
The current themes that I’m most interested in, in this area, and that I expect to explore at lunch time are convergence, the long tail, and the technology adoption lifecycle. In short, I believe that too many marketers do not spend enough time focusing on convergence. Various forms of digital technology are rapidly converging, but too often, it seems, marketing campaigns are not converging.
At the conferences Chris and I attend, it always seems like all of the focus is on the really large publishers. However, the long tail suggests that marketers, and especially those focusing on a social component, need to look more at the publishers that are not at the top of the A list. That is where the social action really is taking place.
Finally, I suggest that marketers should look more at innovators in the technology adoption lifecycle instead of early majority, late majority or laggards. The innovators are the folks that test out technology, when they find a product they like, they become the champions of the product and are the most effective influencers for a product. It seems like technology firms understand this, but few other firms seem to focus on who the innovators and early adopters for their brands might be. As an aside, the original research that led to the sociological model of the technology adoption lifecycle was based on hybrid seed corn sales in the 1950s.
So, join in at noon and share your thoughts for what I hope will be a lively discussion.
Understanding Google Wave Preview Hype and Testing
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/07/2009 - 06:31My blog post yesterday Looking for Google Wave Invites? generated about three times as much traffic as a typical blog post does for me on its first day. It appears as if everyone is searching for Google Wave invites. Over on one of the mailing lists I’m on, there has been a lively discussion. One person posted information about a wave they were on and others asked to join the wave or to get Wave invites. Others spoke derogatorily of Google Wave and all the hype. One went so far as to suggest that Google was creating a new digital divide between those that have been invited to Google Wave and those that have not been.
I have a fairly different view and expressed some of it in a response to the list. I’m expanding that response into this blog post.
The 'new' digital divide
Google Wave is still in preview. That's Google speak for 'not ready for beta testing'. It is sort of like some late stage alpha testing. They are being wise in attempting to limit the use to people who are going to try it for alpha testing, find bug, develop use cases, etc. Many software firms do this for many products. It does produce a divide, but it is not new.
It goes back to the old technology adoption lifecycle or technology diffusion model, mostly based on work in the 50s. The first people to use technology are the innovators. Rogers suggests that this is about 2.5% of the population. With around 227 million Internet users in the United States alone, that would mean that there are about 5.7 million Innovators. I don't know how many users Google wants during its preview testing, but I suspect it is less than 5.7 million in the United States.
So, we have a limited resource within a specific cohort. Google attempts to find those in the cohort that will be most beneficial to their testing.
The Hype
Innovators are often typically champions for the products they are testing. They are innovators because they like to experiment with the new and shiny and talk with friends about what they are doing. They also like to find other innovators to share their experiences with, hence referencing back to some of the discovery issues the mailing list. The problem is that with the way we are all connected these days, innovators often have a lot of followers on various social networks and everyone piles on fighting for a limited resource they might not even understand.
This leads to a backlash by people who have not been invited, and especially by members of later cohorts that have not been invited. It often rings of sour grapes.
The Hope
One member of the mailing list said that she was not really seeing what Google Wave does that existing tools don't already do. I have to agree with her on that, with a couple of caveats. She went on to say that the real potential benefit of Google Wave being a convergent technology might turn out to be its best feature. Personally, it is this convergence that I find so interesting and is the reason I've been trying to find people that are interested in collaborating between Google Wave and other forms of computer mediated communication (CMC).
However, this gets to another part of the innovators. Some innovators are the geeks, the folks setting up and hacking FedOne servers. Other innovators are those that develop use cases. How could Google Wave interoperate with other CMC systems? What are the implications of this for other CMC systems? How could Google Wave be used to facilitate education? If I had any invites, I would be inviting people that are doing serious testing of the limits of the technology or are seriously thinking about use cases including the sort of questions I posed above. Unfortunately, I don't have any invites to the Google Wave Preview server.
Will the convergence that Google is trying achieve with Wave end up being the best thing since sliced bread? It is too early to tell. Instead it is time for innovators to explore if that is possible. One thing that I like is that it is a fairly open standard. The communications is done via extension to XMPP servers, making it easier to create additional interoperation.
Convergence
Content
There are a couple of areas of convergence that I am particularly interested in. The first is convergence of content. When I write this blog post, it will propagate across the Internet. Twitterfeed will check the RSS feed post the title and a link to Twitter and Identi.ca. Friendfeed will pick it up from RSS, Twitter and Identi.ca. Facebook will pick up to the RSS, Tweets, and Friendfeed. It probably gets picked up by several other sites via RSS as well. For a graphical image of how complicated this can become, check the Social Media Map that I created over a year ago.
On many of these sites, people comment. People reply to my tweets. They comment on the tweet as it becomes a status message on Facebook. They comment on the blog post as it becomes a note on Facebook, and so on. It would be very nice if all of this could be consolidated into a single wave where different comments from different systems could converge and be looked at together.
Contacts
I’ve written in the past about how I wished I had a good Social Network Contact Management System and I’ve written about trying to build one using Semantic Mediawiki. To the extent that Google Wave can interoperate and bring in my blog posts and the comments from various systems, my Tweets, my IMs, my status updates and Facebook, and all the conversations I have around them, I then have the basis for my much sought after Social network Contact Management System.
To make this work properly, I would want to be able to have my contacts have not only their contact information on the Google Wave Preview, but also their contact information; their wave addresses on various federated wave servers, their various email addresses, their various microblogging addresses like on Twitter or identi.ca, their IM addresses, and with the possibility of Google Voice integration and Asterisk integration, their phone numbers.
With that, each conversation that they participate in would be a wave, and I could search for all of my contacts with any of these people with a simple search on Wave. Perhaps the people that need to worry most about Google Wave are companies like Salesforce.
Other Wave Servers
All of this leads back to my current key interest. I've setup my own FedOne Wave Server. I've federated it with the Google Wave Sandbox server. A few other people have done the same thing. Right now, it is very difficult to do and the client for these federated servers, with the exception for the Google Wave Sandbox server, is very limited. I am glad that one person from the mailing list recently tested my wave server, and others are welcome to do the same thing. Just remember it is a very limited client and the user experience is much different that with Google's Wave Preview server or their Wave Sandbox server.
So, those are my additional thoughts on Wave, other forms of CMC, and perhaps even a little bit on education. Thoughts?
Looking for Google Wave Invites?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/06/2009 - 09:17It seems like everywhere I turn, there is someone looking for a Google Wave Invite. On the other hand, I now have Wave accounts on so many different machines, it is hard to keep track of them. How is this so? Simple, I’m testing lots of different new features for Waves.
With that, let me talk about where you can set up a Wave account. First, there is my own machine, Orient Lodge. You need to have ssh access on your machine to access it. If you use Windows, you can download Cygwin or Putty and get ssh access that way. If you use Mac or Linux, you should be able to go to a terminal window and enter the ssh command. If you want an account on my machine, send me a message and I’ll give you an account and details on how to use it. It is worth noting that it is a text based client that is in test mode, primarily for testing federation. Waves and blips may disappear when I perform updates, which is fairly frequent, and the interface, well, let’s just say it needs a lot of work.
A few other people have connected to my Wave server, mostly to test federation as well as to consider how federation might work with other systems like Second Life, Opensim, or statusnet.
Another site that I really like is Danopia’s Ruby on Sails. This is a Ruby on Rails implementation of a Google Wave client. It seems to be down more than it is up. However, it is a nice client, and Ruby on Rails seems to be a great platform. They are busy trying to get federation up and running. When that happens, my server will federate with Ruby on Sails. I may also try to add the Ruby on Sails client on my machine at some point.
The other site that anyone can use that looks really promising is PyGowave. This is a Python client for Google Wave. Like Ruby on Sails, anyone can connect and create waves. Unlike Ruby on Sails, this server seems to remain up constantly. However, it does not appear to do anything with federation, and from what I’ve read so far, federation does not seem to be supported and adding federation support may be a challenge. So, you won’t be able to connect to it from my server of Danopia’s server.
Wave seems to be changing very rapidly as we speak, so this information could well be out of date before you know it. Are you experimenting with Wave? How’s it going? Got any fun clients? Want to federate? Let me know.
