Facebook Apps: waste of time? Nope, still good.
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If there is such a thing as an internet tizzy, it’s happening right now all over Facebook’s pimply app-ridden face. When Facebook opened it’s doors to the world of what fundamentally amounts of widgets, people went crazy, developing thousands of addictive clicky-things to attach to user profiles.
Only a few of those, mostly the early ones, have had the massive all-get-out success that has everyone salivating. In fact, the drop-off is so precipitous that Valleywag and Fred Wilson have started wondering if this is anything to get excited about after all.
I think it still is. But most of the space left is for a different type of developer.
I don’t know enough (yet) about the rules of developing a Facebook App, but what we’ve seen so far tends to be either gimmicky (fun but reasonably meaningless), advertisey (hey! pay attention to me!) or, and these I think are the most successful ones, the apps that integrate something useful into your facebook profile.
Duh they’re the most successful…they are, for now, the most “useful” to the Facebook user. But just because users are picking up the thousands of “developed in a week” apps doesn’t mean there isn’t room to take advantage of an extremely rich platform.
I’m willing to bet that the next wave of successful apps will be for companies that aren’t trying to monetize them by getting gigantic amounts of traffic and users, they will be monetized by targeting the right audience and working to achieve a specific goal, the same way some blogs make money (Engadget) by having huge audiences, and other blogs (Dell) make money by getting consumers to like their product so they buy it.
If you’re Fandango, why not make a widget that lets people buy movie tickets from your service? There’s still value to be had by making Facebook Apps.
Boston Legal
I’ve been plugging merrily along through season 2 of Boston Legal this past few days. I think I watched the first episode on Friday and now I’m on number 25 or thereabouts. It’s a damn good show.
I haven’t seen season 1, but I’m glad there’s plenty more to see. Why is this show so awesome? Glad you asked:
My obligatory iPhone post
Right now, literally two thirds of the planet is writing a blog post or a news article about Apple’s upcoming iPhone. I think it’s funny that this is happening two days before the product is actually even showing up, so nobody really has anything useful to say about it yet, except the lucky few who got their paws on it early.
Personally, I can’t talk about the iPhone without thinking of Conan’s brilliant take:
I’ll probably have something else to say once it actually hits the shelves.
Watching a litle Wimbledon
I’ve been watching some of the Wimbledon coverage today, which is really just coverage from earlier being replayed because it’s raining in London. But that’s what you expect at Wimbledon.
Watching tennis on TV almost always makes me want to go and hit, which is terribly frustrating right now since I sprained my ankle last week and still can’t really walk on it. I think my chances of running around a tennis court this week are slim.
Missing Hard Drive space in Windows Vista
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UPDATE: I Fixed the problem on my computer.
Thanks to Belal’s suggestion down below, I reduced the “missing” gap of HDD space to 6GB, which is both fine and probably just the space required for my most recent restore point.
The upshot, if you’re too lazy to scroll to the comment, is that Vista automatically takes backup copies of your hard drive and system settings, and it doesn’t automatically delete the out-of-date ones. So you might have a giant buildup of useless backup data.
To get rid of it all, go to the Disk Cleanup utility, click the “More Options” tab, and choose the second option–delete the old restore points. Doing that cleared 65GB off my drive. Good luck.
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I installed Vista Ultimate on the rig I made myself for gaming. So far, it’s been running great, it looks sweet, and I like the way it feels.
But for some reason, it seems to have hijacked about 70GB of my hard drive space. At the moment it’s not that big of a deal, because I have a 500gb hard drive on this machine that I’m using exclusively for video games. By the time I fill this monster up, it will probably be time to scrap it and make a new computer anyway.
However, the missing space is about twice as much as the “used” space. So if that grows…that means I max out my HDD at around 150 GB, which is ridiculous.
The weird thing is that Windows itself can’t decide how much space is used. If I select the HDD properties, it tells me I’ve used 114 GB. But if I select everything IN drive C, and click properties, I get the 43GB reading which should be correct (That’s about as much stuff as I’ve installed on the machine).
Here’s a screenshot. Click to biggie-size it.
Anyone else having this issue?
The cool part of online music
As with any technological change there will be people who long for the good old days of records. There were little stores full of records, and if you wanted the music badly enough, you bought one. Or you didn’t. Those were your options.
Now you can download illegally, download one song legally, buy a CD, use the Starbucks crazy machine, buy a whole album online…
But then there are times when it all just works. My brother and I were just in the car and we heard a cool song we’d never heard before. When we got home I checked the radio’s web site for their “live playlist,” which shows recently played songs.
I found the song, previewed it on iTunes, then bought it. Less than 10 minutes after hearing a song for the first time, I own it. That’s pretty sweet.
New York Times quote is good today
Rarely do I see a quote of this quality in the “Quote of the day” section of my e-mail:
- QUOTATION OF THE DAY -
“A billionaire is like a mastodon: He gets everyone’s attention. The thing that people hate most in politics is a wild card. Well, he’s a really big one.”
- HANK SHEINKOPF, a Democratic consultant, on the possibility of an
independent presidential campaign by Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg.
Usually, this quote comes from some section or other of the paper, and is part of an interview written up somewhere in the paper. Whoever wrote this particular article was handed a quote on a gold platter today–that quote is brilliant.
Working, beeping, R2-D2!
Holy crap. I want one.
They’re only $129.
What do you know about gold farming?
It’s been months since I’ve logged in to World of Warcraft. I quit my subscription and washed my hands of that addictive mess, just like I did a few years earlier with Diablo II.
For me it happens when the synapses in my brain finally break the game down: you click on things to get better stuff so you can click on bigger things to get better stuff.
Which is why I never understood how people were willing to pay other people to skip the whole…game. If you go around buying power leveled character full of money and stuff…what’s the point?
I feel like writing about gold farming is like beating the rusted horseshoe dregged up from the bottom of the nearby river that was pried from a dead, beaten horse two centuries ago, but there’s a long and interesting article from NYT Magazine profiling a couple gold farmers in China. The people. Who are they?
Editorial direction
This blog has always been a sort of editorial grab-bag in that you never know if I’ll be talking about business, video games, politics, or delusional chickens. While it’s fun to have a site where I can pretty much dump whatever excess flotsam is roving around my brain, I feel like it’s not really the best way to keep a blog if I want other people to actually read it.
The sheer number of posts in my “Nonsense” category is staggering.
Since I want other people to actually read it, I should probably pick some sort of editorial direction. Over the past week or so, I’ve been bouncing around a few minor design ideas that could go along with any particular topic I choose, along with how that might reshuffle whatever pitiful audience I have the begin with.
More than likely this will end up being a place where I blog first about video games, a gigantic hobby of mine, and second about “technology”–business, geekery, and other such themes.
I realize that’s mostly what I blog about already. That’s intentional. The hope is that this will keep me in line a bit more, and that having a blog with a tighter focus will leave a happier audience behind.
Projects galore this weekend
I’m one of those guys who is constantly doing something, even when I’m not doing anything. This weekend has been (mostly) nice and relaxing because I’ve been able to loaf around and get some work done on some of the “projects” that have been hovering in the background.
Today my Dad and I set up an HD-Antenna in the attic and ran some cable down through the wall to the TV room, and then I made and ran some new network cable around so that I could set up my newly revamped Media Center (now running Vista) down next to our TV.
So far so good. Over the next week or so I’d like to feed in the basic cable to the machine and start loading my gazillion DVDs onto the new Hard Drive so I never have to go hunting for a lost disc again. It also still needs to be plugged in to the TV–right now I have it going through a regular computer monitor–but I think that might just be a matter of buying a 10-foot DVI cable.
I also think I’ve figured out why my gaming rig hasn’t been going in to sleep mode recently. Actually, I don’t really know why, but I think I might have found out how to get it to sleep again. It was a two-step process: first I set the computer so that the mouse and keyboard were no longer set to wake the machine from sleep, and then I changed Vista from the “balanced” setting to the “energy saver” setting.
Realistically that didn’t do anything except reset the whole “sleep mode” part of Vista, and this time the computer has stayed asleep for a good 10 minutes already. Impressive.
Now I’ve got to do some more damage to The Wal-Mart Effect, which has been a really interesting read so far. As best as I can tell, Wal-Mart started out by making things more efficient (a good thing), but has since passed into the realm of forcing manufacturers to lower the quality of their goods (a bad thing), because there are no more inefficiencies to take out of the system.
I’m not a Wal-Mart shopper. I don’t think I’ve bought anything at Wal-Mart in the past four years, and I don’t plan to in the near future. But it’s very interesting to read about how the megasupermonster-retailer is changing our economy.
Create, invent, recreate…
I’ve always thought the great ideas just keep circling through the system until they work. I was reading Fred Wilson’s post on Mahalo today (yeah, I’m that far behind), and he was talking about how human-powered search has been tried many times before, but it hasn’t worked yet.
I think it’s a great idea, and it will work sooner or later. I don’t know if this is the iteration that will end up breaking through or not, but either way I think it’s exciting.
I’ve always wanted to be part of creating something cool. I’d even settle for creating something uncool but useful. I’m glad I’m getting a chance to work on the Blog Business Summit, because I’m getting a great opportunity to enjoy my work and help people blog at the same time.
It’s also a cool job because I get to watch people come up with and develop cool ideas.
Waiting for my wireless mouse…
About 4pm yesterday I decided that there’s no way I want to run around all day every day using the touchpad on this laptop. Either I’m just not wired to use one, or I’m too lazy to break myself of my habits.
So I googled up a sweet (and cheap) wireless mouse from MS that tucks the USB part back into the mouse when it’s not in use. I ordered it from ProVantage though, not from BestBuy.
WWDC Speech - Steve jobs introduces a Vista feature
OK so that’s probably a misleading title. I just found some of the new “Leopard” features to be amusing:
- Stacks: this is something that basically exists in the current OSX, but it’s just prettier. Try it. Put a folder on your dock and then right-click.
- The Vista Feature: a downloads folder. I thought it was funny because he did a big build-up to it, and then be was like “now everything automatically downloads to a downloads folder!!!!!!!!!!!”
Good thing I’m easily amused.
I did, however, think some of the other features in the new OS looked pretty cool. I’m not sure how I feel about how they made Finder into basically iTunes.
Double-whoops: Wired + AT&T
Today AT&T has a gigantic half-screen ad on Wired.com that makes it impossible to read the page (or, in some cases, to know what it is that you can’t read).
I am, however frustrated by the ad, thoroughly amused by the comments. The article (I think) was about the world’s most gigantic private jet. The question: who bought it?
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