What's In My Ipod?

At the end of the year every year, I like to use some of the down time between December and January to comb through the various MP3 blogs end of the year lists to discover new music. While I love Led Zeppelin, REM and Radiohead, I have found that taking the time to find new music is something that keeps me in touch with what is new and exciting that I would otherwise not necessarily discover. As a kid, the radio was my number one discovery tool. Today, my radio listening is about zero, and when I do find myself in the car, I tend to listen to the NFL network which feeds my football obsession. The radio has been replaced by sites like Hype Machine and Motel de Moka.

So what am I listening to right now? A bunch of good stuff.

Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros - The song Home is without question my favorite song right now. The band's music is very reminiscent of early California folk/psychedelia. I don't know a bunch about the band but in this track and several others I have listened to, I really like the sound, which doesn't sound like The Mamas and Papas or Jefferson Airplane, but certainly evokes that sort of feel.

Phoenix - Their release Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix was everywhere on people's lists this year. The big track 1901 is a fun and uplifting song. If it wasn't everywhere already, the recent Cadillac commercial has certainly made it all the more familiar.

Passion Pit - Tim in my office turned me onto this band and while it didn't click the first listen or two, it certainly has now. Sleepyhead and Little Secrets are played over and over again in my car. I haven't listened to all of Manners, but I would definitely recommend it as a catchy, upbeat sound that doesn't necessarily remind me of MGMT in style but certainly in spirit.

The xx - This band had a lot of buzz on the same level of Phoenix. I heard them first on NPR on an end of the year music special, and while the first track I heard didn't do much for me, some repeated listening of the various tracks got me hooked. I especially like Crystallized and Night Time. Their sound is haunting and dense, but the male female vocal teaming and the ethereal sound really is something that I keep coming back to.

Julian Casablancas - Whatever happened to the Strokes? I don't know as I was only really into their debut release, but a listen to the latest effort by their frontman reveals a high charged, almost disco revival sound that has hints of the initial Strokes release although more lively and I guess danceable?

The Rest - I discovered this band on some obscure indie music blog whose name escapes me. This band out of Canada is way up my alley. The track Coughing Blood/Fresh Mountain Air reminds me of Radiohead and U2 with a more haunting backdrop. Seriously, of all the new stuff I have heard, this one song has blown me away the most. I hope to hear more like this from them.

Atlas Sound - I can't put my finger on the sound of this band, but the track Sheila, is something I never tire of listening to. The chorus "And when we die we will bury ourselves" is very Wilco in a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sort of way, but much more catchy and earnest way. The link here is to a live video of the song Sheila.

Metric - Not sure how to describe Metric, other than it has hints of fast paced electronica and the lead singer's voice is just great.

Major Lazer - My kid's favorite right now. Somewhere between hip hop (T-Pain) and dance hall with a bit of Daft Punk to boot. The song "Keep it Going Louder" just defies you to sit in your seat and not move.

White Rabbits - I tend towards the punk or heavy rock sound and I wouldn't describe anything in this list as of that vein with the exception of this band. While not really punk, The White Rabbits have a great fast paced beat and a stripped down sound with some hints of what I would say is early melodic punk stylings.

Google Maps Navigation

It didn't take me long to actually touch mobile and last week while traveling, I forgot another super useful tool for travel that I have to mention. That tool is Google Maps Navigation. Last year Google rolled out a turn by turn navigation component as an add on to their existing Google Maps product. I have historically been a user of both Google Maps and Mapquest although over time I have slowly migrated to Google Maps. When driving, using Google Maps can be a bit problematic as I have to keep looking at the phone as you go from point to point. Because of this, I would usually just print out the directions and refer to them if I got confused.

Once I upgraded Google Maps to use the Navigation plugin, I was blown away. Immediately, I thought that this was a game changer. Certainly the market did as shown by the share price of Garmin show here. Or more pointedly, the move by Nokia to offer a similar free service on the backs of their recent acquisition of Navteq for over $8 billion.

While I am interested in the underlying infrastructure and market implications, the real winning piece is the consumer experience which is second to none. In addition to being free, which is a price that is hard to pass up, the application also combines the ability to use layers to see things like gas stations, restaurants, etc. and also when you arrive at your location, Google Street View pops up and it shows you a picture of the place you are trying to find. I can say that I for one, will never rent a GPS machine from a rental agency ever again.

If you haven't tried this yet, I would highly recommend putting it on your phone.

Tools For Travelers

There are a number of tools for travelers but there are three that I use all the time that I find very good and are ones that I think are totally worth telling others about. The three that I want to tell you about are Tripit, Tablet Hotels and Expensify. Each one of these is either a website, or a combination of website and application that make my life easier each week.

Tripit. I don't entirely recall why, but when Tripit initially launched on Linkedin, I signed up to add a Tripit widget in the mad rush to find apps that are useful on Linkedin. I still honestly haven't found others to use but that isn't that they arenít out there, it is just that I am not a Linkedin power user, and in general use Linkedin as a business card collector. After designating where I was going for a trip or two, I quit using the widget and forgot about it.

One night I was at a dinner with a number of folks from Sony Music, and one of the guys was raving about Tripit. I was shocked. How the hell could it be useful? He explained the big missing piece I hadn't understood. Tripit is like a virtual assistant for keeping all of your travel information in one place. How so? Well, the real use case for Tripit is to email all of your confirmation materials, like flight, hotel reservation, car reservation and dinner reservations to plans@tripit.com . Once you do this, Tripit parses the various emails and assembles an itinerary that can be viewed on he web, or more importantly on iPhone or Android devices. Once I figured this out, I became a rabid user. So much so that I actually broke down and subscribed to an Tripit Pro account, which lets my wife keep track of me and provides some other added benefits like SMS flight update information for gate changes and flight status as well as a consolidated view of all your loyalty programs. There are some other similar products in the market, most notably Worldmate which also provides this intelligent parsing of emails which I think is an interesting opportunity in a number of application areas.

Tablet Hotels - I have blogged about Tablet a long time ago, but thought it worthwhile to plug it again. While I am primarily focused on booking through SPG as I have loyalty status with them, I often find their choices or locations in Europe either too expensive, inconvenient or frankly a little too old school for my tastes. I originally happened upon Tablet back in 2003 when I was staying at The Standard Hotel in Los Angeles a fair amount and they used Tablet to manage their bookings. From that time, I became a frequent user, especially looking for cheap, hip hotels in places like New York. While Tablet, whose tagline is "Hotels for Global Nomads" tends towards the cheap chic, they also have super high end places as well for the Hollywood or Media crowd.

Three other things worth noting on Tablet. 1. They have a Tablet Plus membership that has guaranteed upgrades. I haven't sprung for this but figure I should break down and do that soon. 2. They have a social networking aspect that might be of interest I suppose, but in general, I am not looking to meet up with the random hotel guest in say Milan. 3. They have some screaming last minute booking deals for "members" that are available each Tuesday.

Expensify - Expensify has a great tagline: "Expense reports that don't suck". What else can you say? It is true. Expensify automates a lot of what you do when filling out expense reports. It has the ability to link a credit card account with your web based account and as transaction enter, they are lined up for you to add to a new expense report. For certain low dollar items, they provide you with an electronic receipt that is IRS approved. For other receipts, like say an airplane booking, you can forward the email confirmation and attach that to the charge. You can do similar things with PDF and web page receipts. For the vast majority of the little piece of paper receipts, you can take a picture with your iPhone or Android device and upload the photo to your account where you can match them to the charges as they appear on your credit card. For cash receipts, you can manually enter the details into the respective smartphone application, take a picture of the receipt and upload them as well.

While there are a number of little items they can and should add over time, I am pretty confident that this is by far one of the fastest ways to process what is otherwise a real pain in the ass. I highly recommend you check this out.

There are obviously a number of others that are great and if any of you want to share them with me, feel free to leave a comment.

Reboot

One of the hardest things about re-starting something is the fear of stopping again. There have been a number of moments when I sat down with a list of possible blog posts and fired up Blogger and then said, “Not enough time.” That may still be the case, but it seems like something I have been missing a lot when I think about things. I have moved on from blogging to the very occasional posting on Flickr, and more frequent updates on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, but a review of those things are like a laundry list of places I have been and brief snapshots of where I was and where I am going, with very little for me to remember or take on as me. A vanity search on Google still has this blog as the number one result yet it also has a stream of SAN, SFO, etc. of social media sites abandoned or used as placeholders of my travels and not much else. Frankly, that isn’t necessarily something I want to remember.

Work, travel, and business. Going from a startup to a bigger company makes one much more sensitive to what you can say or discuss. One of the things I have some insight on is the mobile industry but I really can’t talk about that. Can’t really talk about devices. Can’t really talk about partners. A lot of what I do every day is a lot of not being able to share. So that has been an excuse I suppose, yet in it’s place I am left with LHR, JFK, and you have the wrong @derrick on Twitter.

So I want that to stop, or rather I want to occasionally post something, anything, other than some geocoded outbursts or other brief comment to a close group of friends. The reality is for me, that long hours on planes, while spent in a large part thinking about work, also involve a lot of thoughts about other stuff. Stuff that is of great interest to me and which I think I have some pretty good perspective on, if not only as a user, but as someone who have been around long enough to hopefully have some insight. At the very worst, it is a means to share and a way to keep in touch with friends who for whatever reason I haven’t kept in touch with between work, travel, family and life.

So there it is. Not so hard. Music? Food? Cooking? Technology tools. Random stuff. I think that should be worth some fun and get me back into the habit. At the very least it is a start, or a reboot if you will.

Google Wave

I am really excited about this. The O'Reilly write up here is the best I have seen.

What is Twitter Part 2. Media and what comes next.

In the last post about Twitter, I was focused primarily on discussing how communication channels have evolved and changed. While we use a variety of channels to communicate with different people in different ways, the primary function is communication, i.e. the transmission of a message. In point to point communication, all the value of that transmission is contained in the information between the two parties, or in the case of the forwarding on of a funny message, to the various parties sent that message. It is the telephone game with no loss of signal in the message.

In this post I want to discuss more about how these different communication channels are changing the understanding of media. When people use the word media there are two ways to think about it. The first is that media is communication, and that would certainly be consistent with how I think about the previous post. Twitter is yet another way for people to communicate. The other way we think about media is what I would call big M media. Big M media would be movies, music, news, advertising, etc. Media is entertainment. Media is a way we disseminate culture, for better or worse. We watch American Idol, or go see the new Star Trek, or in my case we talk about the funny baby eTrade commercials. There is a message to share to a broad audience. I think the interesting thing about the evolution of the various communication channels is that we are slowly developing a personal broadcast mechanism that has power not unlike what we see coming from the studios, the record labels, and the big advertising agencies. Let me explain.

Most communication content is designed to be consumed by one other person or in some cases a group of people. I send an email to my wife to see if she can meet me for dinner, or I email my team to give an update on an important deal. The message in either of those cases is purely meant to convey a message and nothing more. In fact, the content of that message is probably not of any use to anyone else. There are a number of important things to think about in this case to make the message relevant and the most important thing in these cases are context. Without context these message mean little else to anyone. While email can be something that communicates to a broad audience, i.e. look at Jason Calacanis's mailing list, or the Pho list, it's primary use case has been point to point communication.

From a timing standpoint, in terms of development as tools, I would argue the next relevant item would be the development of blogs. The advent of Live Journal, Xanga and Blogger all ushered in the creation of media for 3rd parties. In my opinion blogging was bifurcated into usage by the technorati like Dave Winer and others (arguably Userland is one of the earliest platforms) and usage by kids. In the case of the technorati, blogging was a way of sharing thoughts on technology, politics and other ideas where one hoped to influence a wide audience. In the case of kids it was to share stuff with friends. It could be that I am having a crappy day or a link to a funny site, or the sharing of some personal or meaningful experience.

The interesting thing about blogging is that in general it is public, and in general I would ague that the authors write with the understanding that the context may be personal but the platform is public, For me, I have found that a number of my friends periodically check my blog out (when I am actually writing) to keep up to date with what is going on in my life. In this case blogging is still primarily communication but it also can become something more akin to media that is meant to be consumed by more than one person or a small audience. Witness sites like Techmeme that keep people in the technology business up to date with the latest news. If I want to stay on top of technology, it is Techmeme which is primarily made up of tech and personal blogs that is a critical item on my daily reading list. There are no print or other sources of professional content that can keep up with the flow. As this sort of information becomes increasingly important, the concept of traditional media having value as an important unbiased 3rd party source of information begins to become undermined.

There are a variety of sites that are similar to blogs that are important that I am going to skip until I get to the conclusion of this post. They are every bit as important as text based blogs but are more vertically focused. These sites are photoblogs, music sharing sites like Last.fm, event focused sites like Eventful and location centric sites like Brightkite and Loopt. There are certainly others and I think it is important to address them, but I think a discussion of social networking sites is the next in order.

In 2004 when we started our company, Friendster had either peaked or was peaking. A small site called Myspace was growing quickly and a number of the blogging sites were adopting some of the features of these newly created social networking sites. The social networking sites were just taking off and in the subsequent 5 years sites like Facebook became the standard bearer of these friend sites. In fact, the most important thing about both Myspace and Facebook was the amazing reach. While a lot of these sites started out as a place to promote bands or to connect with your college buddies and girlfriends, they crossed over. Today, just about everybody uses these sites. The important question is how do they use these sites. The two main things people us them for is to communicate directly with others and to share. The communicate with others piece is what I referred to in the first post, it is the share piece that I think is most important in this one.

Sharing is a transformative thing for a lot of social networking users. While blogging has attracted a large population of users, sharing is something that almost everyone who uses a social networking site does. Sharing can be as simple as a post saying, Happy Monday, or as involved as sharing pictures of your family, a link to a youtube video or links to interesting articles on the web. In many ways, the infrastructure of the social networking sites allow you to create an image of your self that is the collection of things you declare in your profile, objects you link to, and things you say and share with your "friends" in public. While anyone can see my blog, only my "friends" can see my most personal things. The thing I have found most profound in the social networking sites is the willingness of others to share on such a large scale, especially people who I had previously considered very private.

This sharing experience is a core prerequisite behavior for something like Twitter to be successful. Twitter was originally described as microblogging. Sharing small pieces of content or experience. I am on vacation. Here is a link to a photo. Here is a link to a website or interesting article. Information becomes very bursty. It may be less important to know much about me and rather it is more important to know about my stream, my activities, the things I read. Whereas my blog or social networking page is a comprehensive collection of things I write, or things about me, or things I want to share in a broad way, Twitter is the firehose of things I share on the fly. When filtered it becomes the real time collection of information on particular subjects, or people, or other things such as my geolocation.

From this there are two major things that I find myself thinking about. The first is what does this behavior do to traditional media? The second is what happens long term to what we view as social networking? For the sake of clarity I want to hit the first one and will then follow up with a much briefer post on the later as I have to admit that I like everyone else has no idea what comes next. So what happens to media? We witness the newspaper business rapidly declining and most likely moving to a purely online presence. We see Youtube consuming an increasing portion of mindshare of consumers watching both amateur and professional content. The core question here is whether or not I would rather surf my friends posts and links or watch television or something else. Is it more interesting for me to passively consume content, or to share things I find interesting and view things my friends find interesting. While an idea or article or video can be rapidly spread to my 100s of friends online how does media take advantage of that? Do I friend tv shows, movies and bands? In a lot of cases the answer is yes. Marketing in this world has to change to use this way of reaching new audiences.

In reality I don't think that media as we know it changes very quickly overnight. I would ague that the rapid rise of Hulu is a great demonstration of how traditional media can learn from the new online realities of Youtube and other social media. I do think though that over time there will be increasing pressure for the attention of people who find that looking at the things their friends are doing is much more interesting that American Idol. While I don't know what happens in this new world, I will speculate in the final post, but the thing I think that one should take away is that expression on these new platforms has crossed over to a mass audience. Sharing, posting, linking are not just habits of the techno elite. My friends from high school do this. Our parents are doing this. Our kids are growing up with this as a given behavior. What will come out of this remains to be seen but I am certain that we are witnessing a fundamental transformation in how we interact with each other and what we think of as entertainment and media. While there will be inevitable disruption in these changes, they will also bring new opportunities.

Intercasting acquired by Good Technology

Yes it is true. Read about it here and here. After almost exactly five years, we have sold our company to Good Technologies. We are excited to be a part of their team going forward and think that together we will have a big impact in wireless.

A special thanks goes to our investors, specifically Steve Tomlin from Avalon, Rich Levandov and Braden Bohrmann from Masthead Venture Partners and Brian Ascher from Venrock. Without their support over the last five or so years none of this would have been possible. I feel very fortunate to have had a thoughtful and supportive board over the various twists and turns of this journey.

The biggest thanks goes to our team. Their hardwork made our vision a reality. We are very excited that the team will continue on as part of Good and will continue to create the great things they have for us in the past.

Without a doubt I personally owe the most to my wife and my family. They are always there for me and my wife is a first class startup spouse. Her advice is sound and her support unwavering. She is the best. Hands down.

We started our journey with Rabble, made a strategy shift to support the entire social networking category for operators, and recently created an unbelievable rendering engine that makes iPhone like experiences for feature phones. Three big phases in the life of our company and quite an interesting journey. Thanks to all the friends who helped along the way and to all the friends I made as well. You know who you are. ;-)

Finally, a big thanks to the Good team. We spent a long time getting to know each other and seeing what a fit would look like. I have the utmost confidence that we will make some big waves and be viewed as a great success. I look forward to sharing some of the highlights in the future.

Conferences

Tomorrow I am speaking at Digital Hollywood in Los Angeles. Panel description can be found here. Next week Shawn is speaking at the EconSM conference in San Francisco and I will be there as well. Any friends want to catch up, drop me a line.

What is Twitter? Thoughts on communication and media part 1.

A couple of weeks ago I was at the tide pools near our house with some other parents and their kids. A couple of the moms were talking about Twitter, and knowing that I stay up on the current stuff in technology, they asked me if I used Twitter and they wanted to know what it was. I said that I had been using Twitter for 3 years and was one of the first 1000 users (actually user number 590. ) @Derrick . That was the easy part of the question. The harder questions was What is Twitter? I don't recall exactly but I mumbled something about it being a broadcast communication facility to share information with friends. I guess at some level that is technically correct but really punts on the question and sounds dumb. I thought a more worked out answer would be interesting to help my understanding and and to share some of the broader implications with some friends. Hence this post.

In the fall of 2004 I was involved in the podcasting meme of the moment and as a result helped found a podcasting music association with a bunch of fellow indie music podcasters called The Association Of Music Podcasting (which is still going strong here.) We had some discussions with Adam Rugel from Odeo about working with them and somehow during one of my travels I managed to have a meeting with Evan Williams and Biz Stone to talk about podcasting sometime late in 2005. When I met with them, they were actually more interested in talking about what I was doing with Intercasting and Rabble. We talked for a long time about mobile and I have to say it was an enjoyable chat.

A month or two later one of my friends told me they were working on some kind of sms based messaging service called Twitter. I thought that was interesting but I knew that some of the services that had done this previously had hit some roadblocks. Not knowing the specifics I didn't think about it much. A little while later Adam sent me an invite when the service launched. Right off the bat, I thought of a service called UPOC.

UPOC was launched in 1999 by a number of guys including friend Greg Clayman and was interestingly also backed by Fred Wilson. UPOC stood for universal point of contact and the company did a great job of building out the infrastructure to send and receive messages and to organize discussions into groups. They of course also did a great job of getting carrier traction and gained great presence on deck. So why no Twitter? Not sure and frankly I never asked Greg or anyone else but my firsthand experience with UPOC circa 2004 was a very high noise to signal ratio and the use of the chat rooms or channels as the primary communication mechanism. They did get to the millions of users level but never went viral or anything like that.

Twitter at first seemed like a web 2.0, less crowded, less organized version of UPOC. I invited a handful of friends and turned on phone alerts and away I went. I didn't run into anything too out there but it was generally a quiet experience. I have to point out at this juncture that the comparison to UPOC is completely lacking any acknowledgement of the Twitter as platform, Open APIs, and other things that have helped make Twitter the juggernaut it is today. In any case Twitter to me seemed to quietly hum along until SXSW 2007. That was the first step function in growth. One on the most interesting things about community is the concept of inventory. A community without any users/inventory is nothing. SXSW helped to jump start the community aspect in a big way. This year as shown on this chart has really shown the true epic inflection of Twitter. Make sure you adjust the settings to max to see the whole chart.

There are two main concepts that I think are important to consider in thinking about Twitter. The first concept is the evolution of communication. The second concept is around the evolution of media. I will try to hit the first one in the rest of this post and follow up on the second in a following post and also outline some implications I think fall out from all of this. So what do I mean by the evolution of communication? As it relates to the two concepts mentioned there is the method by which information flows between people, and there is the actual content that flows. For the purposes of this post I am talking about how things have changed in terms of the method by which we transfer information. In many ways the changes have been subtle, but the impact is pretty profound.

Most of us who started using technology on a broad scale in high school or earlier depending on our age, are pretty familiar with email. In the pre Mosaic world, text was king and the highest value activity on the "Internet" was either sending text and files back and forth over email or arguably using some form of bbs or chat like channel to interact in a more real time way. Email went on to pervade pretty much all of our lives in the industrial world. Email on my computer, my Blackberry, my phone, are all meaningful time drains on anyone who lives a connected life. It is also how most of us manage our day and how we process information. It is the drum beat of our day.

Email has reduced the amount of faxes in our life. It has reduced a lot of the paper. I think I get one to two pieces of dead tree each day and on average 200+ emails. With the victory of email has come spam. If this is the main way one interacts with the "Internets" then it is the best place to get you to respond to Viagra ads, or Nigerian wealth scams, or whatever. And so we arm ourselves with tools and methods to defeat this but in general realize we have probably reached a peak utility for email for now and many of us look for new/better replacement mechanisms. In the work environment I would offer that there are no obvious better alternatives and we are left with efforts to lock down the enterprise and barricade off the spam. But what if you are a consumer? What can you do?

Some choose IM. Don't get me wrong, instant messaging is by no means a replacement for email, but I do know that for the legions of kids behind computers all day, and for the many kids carrying around devices like Sidekicks, instant messaging is a primary method of communicating. I started using IM in 1999 at MP3.com and over the years it became the primary way for me to keep in touch with my staff when I am on the road which is always. the more interesting part about IM is that it has a different mode of communication that email. Email is sprawling, comprehensive and something that you actually have to process. Instant messaging is fast, specific, and to the point. IM is for when I don't want to send an email and I don't want to pick up a phone and call you. How r things? Good? Kewl.

Another short bursty method of communication that started big outside the US and is now every bit as big here is SMS. SMS is very much like IM to me with a shorter back and forth. Call me when you land. Dude that was a riot. etc. While these things are all very different (Email, IM and SMS) they are all very much at their core communication functions and they are used to carry on certain types of conversations or information exchanges. The different forms are also used by different groups although I would argue that over time there aren't going to be strong demographic differences like kids only texting etc. My wife's aunt is really into texting right now. I smile when she sends me messages.

So to continue this thread of evolution of communication I think the next logical step is to talk about blogging. While Twitter is most like SMS to many, I think the lineage of some other modes is important to get a better feel for Twitter. So back in the late 90s buys like John Hiler at Xanga, Brad Fitzpatrick at Live Journal and Evan Williams at Blogger created tools for simple publication of thoughts ideas etc. This was/is huge for a big chunk of the youth demographic. Actually I would argue it has crossed from youth to people of all ages. Blogging is something I picked up back in 2004 and have been at with the exception of about a year hiatus since. I found blogging an interesting way to share my thoughts with friends and to document things for myself. I gained a ton of satisfaction when seeing friends and they knew what I had been up to as a result of my blog. Time well spent.

Blogging as communication? Absolutely. It is one way but you do have comments and are able to carry on conversations around topics, ideas or funny stuff. Blogs can be link blogs, dense theme based blogs, or just silly random stuff. One of the big downsides of blogs though is that they are a one person party in general. There are not people hanging out at your blog. Since the time of Friendster, those people have been congregating at the social networking sites of the world which are what I would argue are the next steps beyond blogging.

Social networking sites as communication tools. Most of the big popular social networking sites today have email, chat/IM and the ability to share posts or content not unlike blogs. For many kids, they may check email once a week and check their profile pages on Myspace or Facebook 10 times a day. This has made the sites extremely important in the battle for things like search and advertising. If we live our digital lives on a specific site, then that real estate is obviously of some of the highest value and I would argue that today that still remains the main battlefield in terms of Internet monetization and opportunity.

Twitter when originally launched was described as micro-blogging. A lot of this was driven by the constraint that SMS message only allow 140 characters which is the limit Twitter implemented. The big thing though that Twitter did in my opinion was the developed API framework. If blogging was my party at my house, and Facebook and Myspace is THE party that I need to be at to have my friends here me, then Twitter is an electrical plug that can be plugged into anywhere. I can update it from my phone. I can use a Twitter IM client. I can use the web. Not only can I send stuff to Twitter for others to see, but I can get Twitter data and consume it other places.

It is an interesting concept. Email and IM and SMS are point to point communication. Blogging is broadcast, social networking is broadcast. Twitter is broadcast but also re syndication and the development of a framework construct around pure message flow. There are whole pieces of ecosystems that have popped up around this. Twitpic and Twitgoo for photos. URL shortening like Tinyurl for sending links. A whole semantic language around topic organization using #.

I would stop here and go to the next post but I think the last important mode of communication evolution that should also be touched upon is the idea of site information aggregation. I think I mentioned before that I was an advisor and board member of Socialthing which AOL acquired last year. They are very similar to Friend Feed which is a storied Silicon Valley startup from one of the former top guys at Google. These sites both create a one stop shop for people to view all their friends across a ton of services and to also create content there to send out to the various services. I know that I use socialthing everyday to monitor about 7 different services and have to think that there is a movement from centralization, to decentralization, to reaggregation that consumers will ultimately want as they fatigue the constant introduction on new services. Hard to say but definitely something to also watch.

Post 2 to come...

G1 Applications

I swear that this is my last G1 post. So beyond calling and texting, what do I actually do with my phone, or rather what applications do I use. I have a number on my phone but the following ones are the ones I use most frequently, in no particular order:

Anycut - Anycut allows you to make shortcuts on you phone home screen. It is pretty nifty when you start using it. For example, I put a shortcut to a new application on one of the 3 main screens. Ok, not too clever. What I can also do though is create a number of things that are essentially actions or script like activity. I have a shortcut that calls my wife directly. I have a shortcut that lets me send a text message to Shawn. I can do a data synchronization etc. This application also allows you to define a shortcut which I am assuming allows you to script your own although I have to confess I am clueless on how to do it. While this isn't an application that I open frequently, the functions and shortcuts I have set up on my device are things I use ever day.

Locale - Without question, one of the coolest Android only applications that I am aware of. Locale is an application that primarily runs in the background and is triggered by certain things. Click on the link of you want to see some examples. I use it in two ways. The primary way is that I set up GPS tags at every airport I fly into and out of. Whenever I trip the geo-fence of that location, Locale fires off a Twitter message that says @Derrick is SFO (or SAN/MCI/JFK/etc.). My Twitter name is @Derrick. I do this in case one of my friends happens to be in the same are and wants to grab a drink/bite/etc. Locale makes sure I keep Twitter current, at least as it relates to my travel activities. And the best part, I do nothing after I set the application rules up.

The second way I use Locale is a bit more subtle. Essentially I have a rule that checks my location, confirms if it is between 11 PM and 5 AM, and if I am at home and it is that time, the G1 volume is set to silent. Don't call me when I am sleeping.

One thing to note, to use certain things like Twitter you have to install a Locale Twitter plugin. While I was initially annoyed by this, it guarantees you can customize the application for only things you use.

Wikitude - This application is another Android only (as far as I know). You have to click the link to see the screen shots to do this justice. This is how it works. I fire up the Wikitude application. It looks up my location via GPS and then returns a map of places around me. I can then switch into list view to read them, or, most importantly, switch into camera view. With camera view, I can look around me and there is a virtual reality overlay of those places with distance from you and a clickable link to the specific information. Super bad ass. Think locative art from William Gibson's Spook Country or Cyborgs in Stephenson's Snow Crash. It is definitely a wow application. Too bad Tmobile isn't running ads for this. It would make the G1 a hell of a lot sexier.

One big note here, which also applies to the Sky Map application I will mention below. Both of these applications take advantage of a Compass and Accelerometer which is something the iPhone doesn't have (Compass).

Sky Map - I camp. I like to look at stars. One of the guys I camp with brings an awesome green laser out with us and he points out the stars and constellations to the kids. That is great and all but I can never really figure out what stars make up a constellation beyond the big dipper. This application gives you a great map of the stars and, when used with that green laser, it is amazing. All the dads were digging the astronomy show on the last camp out.

Gmail and K9 - I use these both. I use Gmail as a spam catcher and K9 for my normal email. Gmail is good. K9 is good enough. Nothing special to say in either case.

Browser - As I mentioned in my last post, a very good browser. In my opinion the best. I use it all the time.

Last.fm - I don't like to use my phone as a music player. It kills the battery and the speaker sucks. I don't have headphones for it. There are times when I am in my wife's car and I don't have Sirius Radio or a CD player and I will use Last.fm. Last.fm has a scrobbled version of most of the music I have so it is a last ditch effort to do something other than listen to the radio. The application is generally good except when I am in low capacity areas for coverage. Then it barfs an hangs and starts randomly on me. That is why I have a Touch.

Maps and Location Stuff - Google Maps is awesome on this phone. So much so that it is kind of creepy. Street view, directions, etc. All the good stuff. Have to say that I am really impressed with it. I also use Latitude which is Google's Location based social network service. I think a piece on LBS social networks warrants a further discussion but not here. I am Derrick.oien@gmail.com if you want to let me stalk you and visa versa. I also play around with Loopt which is another service. My real cell phone number is my user id there.

That is mostly what I use although I would throw in Shop Savvy on an occasion, as well as Weather Channel and NYC Subway maps.

G1 Likes and Dislikes

Based on the last thing I wrote I thought it would be good to share two more things. First, what I like and dislike about the G1. Second, what applications or interesting things I use on the phone. I will do the second one later. This one will be about likes and dislikes.

Right off the bat a big disclaimer. Most people primarily use their phones to call people and to send text messages. My phone works great for that. These comments are more about the things that phone nerds do with phones.

So let's start with the dislikes and end on a positive note with the likes.

Dislikes

Total Google Buy In - I knew coming in this was going to be the Google phone. It even says so on the back. I use a lot of Google services and have no problem with Google but setting the phone up brought the integration front and center immediately. The key piece that highlighted this was the use of Google contacts. I have somewhere near 1400 contacts in my cell phone and contact database and their is no easy way to get them into the G1. Well, except importing all your contacts to Google Contacts. Given that Google knows what web sites I surf and a bunch of other stuff, I am a bit hesitant to just hand that over. Ultimately I did, but I have to say that it was with a lot of reservations.

Out of the box email - A closely related issue to the first problem is email support. Out of the box mail support was buggy when I first used the phone (my first phone was stolen but that is another story). If you want to use email, users were pushed to use a program called K9, which is ok, but certainly not all that in my opinion, especially when compared to what I had on my old Sony phones. There is one exception. Gmail is wired in hard and has awesome integration. The problem with that for me is that I use Gmail as a spam catcher and I can't really use it as my primary email.

IM - As a devoted Sidekick users, I was pumped to be using a device that is a spiritual descendant of the Sidekick. One real big win with the G1 was the addition of Google Talk along with the standard services, AIM, MSN and Yahoo. The problem with this device though is that Google Talk works in an awesome way and the other ones are lacking. The way the Sidekick would hold IM sessions doesn't seem to be implemented here and it may be because of some proprietary Danger IP. Given they way IM works, with the exception of Google Talk, it really isn't a good always on IM device, at least with the default IM software. I haven't tried some of the other 3rd party services like Meebo but the net net of this was that I felt like in this area the device misses the mark.

Battery - This has been covered widely elsewhere. The battery, at least the first version, drained in no time at all. The firmware upgraded improved things significantly but the underlying power issue remains in my opinion. What I mean by that is that if I am using services other than call standby, for example wifi or gps, I have to keep an eye on the battery. With those services suspended the battery is ok, but the hope of a device like this is that you can take advantage of those advanced services without constantly looking for a power supply. This isn't unique to the G1 but it is something that is hopefully solved over time.

App store - I have a love hate opinion of the initial application store. I love the ratings and comments. I love some of the really cool G1 applications that are unique to the device like Wikitude and Locale. I dislike how hard it is to find useful applications. I think the merchandising job that Apple does is way better although I suspect that over time either Google or some specific operators will make something compelling.

Some problems aren't obvious - When things go bad with the G1, it isn't always clear what is wrong or how to fix it. Two cases in point. First Tmobile hotspot access. On my old phone, I had to reboot the phone to get my phone to login to a hotspot for free wifi surfing. Hack. On my new phone, I can never connect to Tmobile hotspots. Not sure why. Haven't been able to find an answer online. Seems buggy.

The second one was an issue around contacts. My contacts disappeared one day. I synced and they came back but when I tried to do subsequent sync's I got an error message saying sync was down and would come back later. Except it never did. I broke down and searched extensively and while I found multiple suggestions n how to fix this, ultimately I had to go To My Faves, delete all my contacts and re-sync. That worked. Very intuitive, especially since I don't use My Faves. I don't get that linkage.

Camera - I find the camera on the G1 to be slow and cumbersome. It is certainly fine enough but by comparison the Nokia cameras are literally good enough to be a stand alone camera.

Tethering - Can't do that. I could always do that with my other phones on Tmobile's network. Frown.

Likes

Keyboard and Trackball - Bad ass. The keyboard is better than just about every QWERTY device I have used (although I still like the rubber buttons from the Sidekick II). That trackball is AWESOME. So not only do I get touch, which appears to be the interface dujour for a lot of consumers, I get some of the things that are important to me, a keyboard, as well as a trackball, which you may not realize, but is something you will use frequently with this device and certainly long for it on others once you have tried it.

Background Processes - One of the coolest things about the G1 is that applications can run in the background. Examples of this are primarily GPS, but it extends to other things. I will hit the GPS application use cases in my next post but suffice it to say, unlike the iPhone, this phone can do more than one thing at a time. If you are looking to take advantage of advanced features, this is a must.

Best Browser on Mobile - The default browser on the G1 is amazing. It has full Javascript support so while I am booking a flight on Virgin America, I can actually get through the process where Shawn on his iPhone has to pull out the laptop. Again the trackball is a good compliment to the browser especially when the website is involved. I haven't seen any other browser with the same sort of support on mobile.

Google integration - While I cited Google buy in as a dislike, the depth of the integration is amazing, and if you are bought into the various Google services, they are here in spades. Maps, Gmail, Google Talk, etc. All the handoffs are nice and it is an amazing extension of a web software platform to a hardware device.

Compass and Accelerometer - It has both. It is especially cool with apps like Sky Map and wikitude. More on those two later.

Full package - In general, the G1 is the best blend of a computer and a cell phone I have seen. I can do many of the things one can do on a laptop (mountable storage drives via SD, web surf, email, IM) but also have a first class phone experience. I have not commented on the media capabilities which I think are sufficient but I prefer to have my media devices independent of the phone, ergo I have a Touch. I know others feel differently but for me this is a good blend.

So that is it in a nutshell. On balance, I am really pleased with the phone. I think there will be some interesting upgrades in future versions and you can count me as someone who plans on following future updates. Next up, applications I use.

Smartphones - My G1, and how I got there

I have been a smart phone user since 2004. In 2004 I wanted to see where handsets were headed and I believed that while our company was focused on the feature phone/mid range market of handsets, that it was important to see where handsets are going to be in the future. At the time I had been pretty fond of my Sony Ericsson T610 and wanted to see what high end offering Sony had in the smart phone category. Sony had been an early entrant in smart phones with the P800 and P900. I had read a number of positive reviews (as well as a lot of headaches to boot) and thought that the P910 might be the device for me.

The range of other choices for me then included the option to go with a Blackberry, which never had much appeal for me, Windows Mobile, which seemed more like a laptop and less like a phone, and Nokia, which frankly I just wasn't all that familiar with. I think if I had to go back and do it all over again with the knowledge I have now, I would have selected a Nokia device. In any case, I ultimately decided on the Brickish P910 and spent about 4 years using that device as well as the next generation device the P990.

In general, I was always fond of these phones. They both had a vaguely familiar Star Trek Tricorder look that I thought was cool and others thought was gigantic. Unfortunately they were gigantic and never very pocket friendly like the various in vogue Razr-esque devices. I found myself pretty happy with the Symbian UIQ user interface but in retrospect, I think that was more about familiarity than anything else. As the smart phone market started to heat up with the iPhone and the various other devices previous or since then, N95 etc., I was anxiously awaiting the new devices coming out of Sony Ericsson. I skipped on the P1 and heard rumors of the X1. When the X1 was announced a little over a year ago, I saw one at MWC in Spain and while I was really impressed with the industrial design, I was very disappointed that it was a Windows Mobile device. This change of direction made me decide to look at the various options in the market as my device was about to fall apart from age and drops.

So, with a fresh perspective, I decided to take a good long look at what was in the market. As I have a lot of access to the various devices and in fact carry a lot of them to meetings, I figured it would be good to make a thoughtful decision, or at least justify an impulsive one! My first place to look was at my Sidekick. While I wouldn't consider the Sidekick a smart phone, I have carried one forever. It has been an indispensable tool for me to interact with the team while on the road (sometimes quite literally). My initial happiness with the Sidekick in the IM arena was undercut by my disappointment in a continuous upgrade in features over models. Why no Jabber? Why no conforming web browser? Why no a lot of things. All that said, I will always strongly believe that the Sidekick is THE killer device for IM, but it doesn't do much for me in terms of productivity or some of the other things I would expect from a higher end platform. I actually no longer carry a Sidekick after having one forever. Next.

The iPhone is an amazing device. The photos. The brain dead simple UI. The ecosystem of content. There is no question in my mind that this is one hell of a device. The deal killer for me, and I would say there are some other significant issues I won't mention, is the lack of a keyboard. I have large sausage fingers, a history of using QWERTY devices, and no time to fumble around with a touch screen as my only input method. I may be backwards assed, but I have to have the keyboard. I do though have a Touch, and I love it. It is my constant companion on long flights, on runs, and for those times when I want to snack on media. The Touch is great as a media device and I am glad it isn't my phone.

Nokia smart phones. Nokia makes some of the best devices in mobile. They literally have everything and the kitchen sink embedded in the devices. They have a ton of software, services, features and a large ecosystem of applications that can allow me to do things like watch my home TV on my phone, find myself on a map, and browse the web with a quality browser. The problem is for me, it feels like it needs an update. Don't get me wrong, I always have a Nokia demo device with me and I have to say there are many days where I eye it with a lot of affection, especially the N95 replacement I am using the N85. This is one hell of a device. The problem I have with it though is that it seems to be trying to do too much. It is actually very hard to do a lot of things that are simple on some other platforms. I can do whatever I want but I have to really dig at times. That digging can be a real barrier to usage and user friendly interaction. No keyboard. Again, this one is hard for me. I will say though that I would have a Nokia before an iPhone as my personal device.

Blackberry. The Bold and the Storm are really, truly awesome devices, and I also liked the Curve which I carried as a demo phone for a while. I just can't get into the Blackberry mindset. I feel like it is the dark side that wants me to have email attacking me all day and if I would just cross over to the dark side I would never go back. I do like their keyboards and have to honestly say that I haven't given them a good shot at being my personal device. Maybe someday.

So that brings me to my current phone the G1. So truth be told, the number on factor in having this device for me was that I am a long time personal customer of Tmobile. This of course made the G1 an obvious front runner. Second for me though was that this device was essentially created by the folks who brought you the Sidekick, except it has all the stuff the Sidekick is missing (compliant browser, advanced features, etc.). Third was the idea that here is an operating system for phones that could be hacked, i.e. recompiled to do other stuff. Not that I ever would, but at least I knew that I could.

I made the plunge into the G1 world and have to say that I have been pretty happy. I think an overview of what I like, dislike, and actually use would be good fodder for a follow on post sometime later.

Cobwebs

Cough, cough, cough. I remember this. I used to hang out here. I really enjoyed this but somewhere along the way things got either confidential or busy. I think I want to come back and do some more of this. Guess I need to pick things up, dust them off, and give it another go. I am not convinced that the entire world only wants to create 140 character posts but I could certainly be wrong.

My affair with small computers

Around this time last year I participated in the give one get one program of the OLPC foundation. It took a long time to get the laptop but when I received it, I was very impressed. I had attended the EG 2007 conference and had seen both Negroponte and the designer of the device whose name currently escapes me talk about the device and it inspired me to get involved/donate.

The industrial design is/was unlike anything I had seen. The operating system was intriguing. The computing power was disappointing. My now six year old son, who was the recipient in my house, while excited that he had his own technology, didn’t like the delays and waiting and opted instead for the use of our Mac Mini and an old moster sized laptop I designated as his. I on the other hand was digging the form factor and ruggedness of the device. I wondered whether or not the OS was the limiting factor and embarked on a process of trying to install a variety of linux variants on the machine. I had conculded that a device that small would be the ideal vehicle for trips to places like New York where most of my time is spent demoing phones and presenting powerpoints. If I could travel with a pocket full of phones and a computer the size of a book, my life would be very easy. Ultimately the various Flash and USB booting options didn’t work out with my level of technical expertise.

Around the time that I was trying to find ways to USB or Flash drive boot my OLPC, a couple of guys in my office showed up with some small devices. One of the guys on our QA team had his own MSI device running Windows in the office. Another engineer had an ASUS running Xandros I believe. Next door at Michael Robertson’s Linspire company they were doing a number of deals with ASUS around the distribution of their Click and Run Software distribution platform. While I was focused on a travel related convenience use case, I saw other around me looking at a way to use a new device/platform that was portable, personal, and most important cheap. Cheap was both key and compellling. The devices are largely in the $300 - $500 range which makes most of the either cheaper or on par with the half a dozen cell phones I carry.
For my birthday this year, my only desire was to buy one of these low cost lightweight netbooks. While my primary computing platform today is a Mac, I wanted a Linux based netbook and was leaning towards either the ASUS or the Dell entrant which launched with a Microsoft XP version at a higher price point than I wanted. One day prior to a trip to Seattle I went and sourced the cheapest netbook available at the local Fry’s.

While Fry’s has a number of options, the one that was $350 at the time was the Acer Aspire One running Windows XP. I am certainly not a Windows hater as I have used Windows most of the time I have been using computers, which is many years now. In the last two years I have moved to a Mac as I can run Windows, Linux and Mac OS and I have the widest selection of software choices as a result. I selected a nice blue version and have to say that I was amazed out how small, lightweight and powerful the device is. I still was hoping to have a Linux device as I support the libertarian implications of Linux, but have to say that those concerns/ideals have been outweighed by the benefits I have experienced with this device and the manner in which I am using it.

There are a number of issues associated with using a “satellite” computer and a normal beefy laptop. Synchronization of files, management of email and streamlining work are all something worth a separate post. For now I think the important thing to convey is that computing is getting really cheap. And portable. And the performance at this end of the spectrum is certainly nothing to laugh about. There are also drawbacks. The mouse on this device has a learning curve. I also couldn’t use this for a fulltime computer given the overall keyboard size. On the other hand, I wrote this post on my netbook and nothing can beat how easy it is to use on an airplane and the entire discussion that crops up when I pull it out in a meeting to give a presentation. I am not one to predict the future but I do think that some of the prognostications around everyone carrying a device around like this in the not to distant future is certainly something that is not all that far fetched. Bottom line for me, I LOVE IT!

My Current Media

This is for me. If you find it interesting, I am glad I can share. I like to look back on these periodically and I find it is a good way to keep friends up to date. Nuff said.

Television - Yeah, I watch TV sometimes. While in general TV is muy malo, there are some very notable exceptions.

Friday Night Lights - I love this show. It hits me on three levels. 1. It reminds me of my soap opera phase where I was glued to each passing day of Day's of our Lives. 2. Great acting, great directing, great look and feel. 3. High school football. It doesn't get any better than this and a big thanks to Direct TV for keeping the show alive. For those of you not on Directv, you are missing out.

True Blood - Currently my hands down favorite from HBO. It carries on the great tradition of Oz, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Deadwood and Big Love, except, it is heavy on white trash and vampires. I LOVE THIS SHOW. Great music, great story line, great creepy swampy vampire vibe and a lot of of social commentary to boot. It may be the best HBO show yet.

Supernatural - CW show. Demons and other freaks. I have to say that I want to hate all shows on the CW but this one keeps sucking me in. Probably has to do with my True Blood fetish.

Entourage - I always want to skip Entourage, which Jessica loves, but I keep watching and have to say that it is a great low engagement show that reminds me of how much fun I had in LA in my 20s.

Mad Men - I am not religious enough in watching but love it when I pull it up on TV. This show nails the period piece on the head and given my age it always hints at things I recall experiencing as a child. Except my dad wasn't an advertising exec.

Football - It is a great year for Football. The Titans undefeated? Tom Brady out on day one? Miami a playoff contender? Outstanding.


Movies - We try to get out every so often and watch some shows. With Oscar season we will step it up but for now it is whatever strikes our mood. The last three are as follows:

Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist - This was such a fun movie. It was the indie kid / emo version of Linklater's Before Sunrise ( in my opinion). It had great music, compelling actors and clearly hit the hipster youth coming of age market.

Choke - Chuck Palahniuk is one of my favorite authors. Hands down. One night Jess told me that his book Choke had been made into a movie and it was in the theater and she wanted to know if I wanted to watch it. Hell yeah! I forgot to tell her it was about a sex addicted, con artist who intentionally chokes himself on food to obtian sympath and money to support his institutionalized mother. She was disturbed. I was delighted. It was well done and I think Anjelica Huston is going to get an Academy Award nomination as well as Sam Rockwell potentially. I couldn't properly explain why I love his books so much so I just gave up. Hopefully Survivor or Invisible Monsters comes out soon!

W - Josh Brolin knocked it out of the park. Stone has been better and he has been worse. I liked it a lot.

Music - I haven't been listening to a whole lot of new music. It seems like I am stuck in an emo punk (Brand New, Saves The Day, Alkaline Trio ) world on one hand, and an eclectic world music electronica one on the other (Thievery Corporation, Federico Aubele, Azam Ali). I need to branch out. That said, there are a couple of exceptions...

+/- is the name of a band I am really into right now. Their page on Allmusic is here. Really good stuff. People who have heard it compare it to Postal Service. Since I don't listen to Postal Service or Death Cab For Cutie, I can't comment. I just like it.

Faded Paper Figures - So there is this series of commericals on television for Lexus that has some really cool snippets of music. I was so drawn to the music that I had to find out who made this music. Well, there wasn;t really a band, or even a song, just a snippet. It kind of reminded me of a fake memory of a replicant. Or something like that. Fortunately, the guy behind the music has a band and recently released a CD which I love. The commerical didn;t lead to buy a Lexus but I did actually buy a CD...which leads me to the last point.

MP3 Blogs - I am advising a company called Notify.me. They have a cool notification service that subscribes to email addresses or XML feeds or whatever. I initally signed up for some nerd news and after a day or two of seeing headlines pop up in my IM window thought there had to be something better. I subscribed to some Football news feeds for fantasy football. Very cool. I am now getting IM messages as fast or faster than the unemployed guys in my fantasy football league. Progress. Both of these use cases, while interesting, didn't speak to my soul. Then I remembered MP3 Blogs.

When we started up Rabble we reached out to some cool punk/indie and hip hop labels. One of then was Nitro. The head A&R guy at Nitro told me about an MP3 blog he was involved in called 3hive. 3Hive has a number of contributors with some seriously good music sensibility and taste that runs the genre gamut. I went to their site and checked out the sites they linked to. I ultimately subscribe to 3 hive, Aurgasm, Motel De Moka, and Cover Lay Down. Every so often, not to often, a friendly little message pops up in IM and I know that I have some tasty new music to survey. That is how I found out about +/-. And a bunch of other cool bands.

Ok, I was going to do political, tech and mobile blogs but I will do that some other time. I am out.

My Favorite ads

I have two ads right now that just kill me. One is from the eTrade baby series which involves the child talking about renting a clown. It rings so true. Link here.

The second one is the new series of ads for Ask.com. My wife doesn't think this is funny but I start laughing my ass off everytime I see it. Link here.

Tmobile Android G1 Phone

Ordered mine today. Can't wait.

Genius, unless you are Tool!

Not sure how many of you have tried Genius yet on your iTunes/iPod. It rocks! Big time!

When I first installed it I was kind of annoyed by the MASSIVE iTunes upsell that is off on the side. I almost didn't get over it but then I started playing with it and figured it out. You select a song from inside your library and then click the Genius button. iTunes then returns a playlist of songs that are sort of like that song or at least seem to make sense to me.

Picture this, you head out on a run and are listening to Metallica and all of a sudden a mile into the run your ipod set to shuffle starts playing Dashboard Confessional's Screaming Infidelities. Buzzkill right?

Genius pulls together a bunch of songs into an on the fly list. For example I just selected Mastodon's Colony of Birchmen and I get back tracks from A Killswitch Engage, It Dies Today, Metallica and Black Flag. Proper running music. Nothing emo. The part I especially like about this is that I of course can make a playlist of all the songs I know but Genius actually picks a variety of songs including a bunch I have never played or listened to. True music discovery.

That is as long as you are part of the iTunes infrastructure. I have 6 Tool CDs ripped into my library and I was excited to get some playlists based on songs like Eulogy, Pushit and Sober. No dice. Not on this software. I am not sure if this is a technical limitation of not having the tracks in iTunes or a policy retribution but I always find the Tool vs. digital standoff pretty funny. And since I love Tool, I can respect that.

It's the economy stupid!

Earlier this week one of the guys I worked with came into the office and asked me what I thought of the economy. My response was that it is pretty ugly. He asked me if I had seen anything like this. I thought about it for a little bit and then responded that the crash in 1987 was pretty ugly and so was the dot com bubble bursting, but that this felt pretty significant. The previous ones felt like they were investor slaughters and that on a day to day basis there wasn't a big feeling of other issues directly impacting me. That may have had something to do with my age and perspective.

This time around has been more concerning because a number of factors seem to be adding up to longer lasting and structural impacts. To me it started with the post 9/11 war stance which seemed not entirely unreasonable pre-Iraq in my opinion. Moving away from an orientation of balanced budgets to a ramping up the war machine is always a cause for concern. While one can argue the merits of our middle east strategy, more problematic to me is the unbelievable cost. The Libertarian in me finds that hard to swallow.

When you layer on the housing and mortgage collapse, with the devaluation of the US dollar and the spike in oil prices, the pain is obvious. This kind of pain hits normal people as the decrease in personal wealth ala perceived housing value and the personal overhead on day to day expenses around food and putting gas in the car.

While the previous crashes or crises seemed like a paper problem for lots of people, myself included in the dot com instance, this one feels like we just spread the flu from normal people to Wall Street and make no mistake, Wall Street is burning.

I don't pretend to be an economist or any wiser than anyone else on these issues but the conclusion of the discussion I mentioned at the top was that yes this is pretty bad and pretty broad based. The good news is that we are resilient and I have the utmost confidence that we as a country can weather any storm and provided we have some leadership to sort through critical decisions during this critical times we will find ourselves back on an upward trend in the not too distant future. Let's hope so.

Headed Home From Seattle, playing with Qik