Turtles all the way down

This morning I logged on to cnn.com to catch up on news about hurricane Gustav. However the site required that I first installed the “Turner Media Plugin.” Instead, I went to msnbc.com which allowed me to watch video in the standard Flash player than I already had installed.

Moral of the story? If you want people to engage your content (and get exposed to ads), make it easy for them to do so.

And my best go out to people affected by the hurricane.

It’s fairly well known that multitasking can be inefficient. Some of this inefficiency comes from task switching.

On a typical day I’m juggling 2-4 projects for work, as well as reading and assignments for 2-4 classes. I’m finding that, when switching between tasks, I use the “down time” to catch up on email, read online news, diddle with Facebook, and so on. Not good.

There are a few tricks that can overcome this loss of focus. Turning off email notifications. Actively avoiding “non-work” web sites. Having an ordered set of tasks that I’m going to work on also helps. Sometimes I can be very productive if I disconnect my computer from the network and thereby force myself to do just one thing. However that doesn’t work if I need the Internet to do research or access files.

Regardless I need to get better at task switching.

At first I though I was too cool (or un-cool depending on how you look at it) for Facebook.

For kicks, last year I set up a profile.

Now I’ve got over 130 friends.

That in and of itself is not a big deal. What is a big deal is the fact that these friends are my current co-workers, past co-workers, fellow law school students, classmates from high school and college, former students, family, neighbors, musicians that I like, and, of course, plain old friends.

The big deal is that I can easily keep track of what is going on in their lives on a daily basis. They publish their status updates, activities, photos, and so on. I know who’s on vacation, where they are, and what they doing. I know who is at work, who is feeling up, who is feeling down, who is having a birthday, who is wise-cracking, who is tired, and who was awake in the middle of the night.

Compared to other ways of staying in touch, Facebook wins hands down. Phone calls? Too intrusive. Texting? Too limited. USmail? Too slow, too Eighties. Email? Too much commitment involved and not immediate enough. IM? Also too intrusive.

And the nice thing: No one can accuse you of being nosy on Facebook, since status updates are voluntarily published. I know these things because my friends choose to share them.

Furthermore, I can publish my updates as well, let everyone know what I am doing, feeling and so on. I can do this for kicks or for purposes of “selling” the brand name of myself.

On top of all this, they have a pretty good mobile interface that I can actually use from my cell phone.

Nice work, Facebook.

The now-indicted Senator Ted Stevens thought the Internet was all about the tubes. Today, software, communications, and business experts are calling the Internet “The Cloud.” But it’s still just the Internet.

Why are tubes bad and cloud good? Is it because Stevens was clueless about what he was naming while these experts are not?

Note that I’m not taking the smarmy approach that stuff has to have a proper name and that’s how it should be referred to. Mostly, I don’t care what it is called.

I’d prefer to think as the newly-dubbed cloud computing in terms of software-as-a-service. I can access my applications and data from anywhere, via the Internet and my web browser. Other client applications not needed. Unlike some movements, it has the potential to be good for both consumers and for businesses.

But, in order to access the Cloud, you need a big enough tube, even if it is a wireless tube. So maybe Stevens had a point, even if only by accident.

Joel West writes about how large acquisitions rarely make sense.

I agree, especially having lived through two. There is a long list of so-called “mergers of equals,” or that of near-equals or just big mergers that failed spectacularly. Mergers Gone Bad, if you will.

3Com / US Robotics, Lucent / Ascend (and now Alcatel / Lucent), Nortel / Bay Networks to just list a few equipment providers in the mid 90’s.

The biggest problems are lack of focus, culture clash, overlapping products, overlapping IT infrastructure (read: inefficiency), and pressure to increase revenues for a company of a size that makes organic growth difficult.

The well-known FISA Amendments Act of 2008, otherwise known as “telecom immunity,” passed congress yesterday. It essentially forgives large telecom providers for helping the government conduct warrantless spying activities.

I recently heard an interesting perspective on this act, that the new law was to allow the government to be able to legally gather a large amount of data representing “normal” telecom user activity. The government wants this data not so much to spy on innocent citizens, but to have a control data set so that it can detect “abnormal” user activity in part by comparing it to this control data set.

I’m somewhat skeptical of this justification but the argument does makes some technical sense.

So In-flight Internet is a reality. Or soon will be. One little detail bugs me:

The systems can be configured to enable or disable voice-based functions, and the airlines are opting to prohibit them — at least for now.

This only means that they will block well-known voice over IP protocols on well-known ports or that have well-known traffic signatures. A persistent traveler could still use voice services over a VPN, though SSH port forwarding, or a non-standard port or protocol.

Blocking voice will be hard to do in practice. Perhaps just announcing on the plane that, like congregating in the aisles, voice services are banned while flying, will be more effective and easier to manage.

They had nice phones and a cool service, but Helio is over. I still think the Ocean had the best mobile instant message clients I ever used, and was one of the earliest phones with GPS-enabled Google Maps.

Sure, I’m a bit biased, since my former company made the Ocean software, but I did make very heavy use of that phone over the few months that I had it.

I got an envelope in the mail last week containing a letter. The letter described a set of new features that my credit card company was enabling for my account. Oh, and the envelope also contained a new credit card with a new number.

My reaction was along the lines of “Aw, crap, not again…”

This credit card company changes my number about once every two years. Given that I use this card for automated billing on at least 20 websites, each time the number changes I have to spend a good chunk of time updating each site. And I always end up forgetting one or two and suffer late fees as a result.

So why does my card number periodically change? Security reasons? An upgrade of services? Convenience? Maybe their convenience, not mine.

With all the talk about unified data between the major social networking sites, I’m hoping it goes beyond just sharing friends lists across Facebook, Linkedin, Plaxo, etc. That would be a good start, but I am hoping this movement includes sharing entire profiles, including status updates.

Currently I just update my status on Facebook. Doing so on Linkedin seems redundant, and since Facebook has pretty good mobile access, I haven’t used twitter just yet. Having a centralized status updating service could even be independent of the social networking sites. A user would only have to update his or her status in one place and point the rest of the sites to that place. They would read and re-format an RSS feed of the user’s status.