the tweney review

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from September 23rd through September 29th:

• Artist Builds Temple of Science | Wired Science from Wired.com - Jonathon Keats asks an interesting question: what would a scientific religion look like? His exhibit is on display at the Magnes Museum in Berkely.
• Google Patent Could Kill Off Cellphone Contracts | Gadget Lab from Wired.com - This is huge: Wired.com’s Priya Ganapati reports on a new Google patent describing how cellphones could negotiate, on the fly, with wireless networks to find the lowest-cost connection available at any given moment. If successful, the model could redefine the wireless industry.
• From the Desk of David Pogue - The Mother of All Search Functions - NYTimes.com - David Pogue discovers this awesome new search engine! It’s called Google! Maybe you’ve heard of it?

  Quote: “Google may or may not be evil, but wow, is it getting good at search.”

  You think?

• State of The Blogosphere: The More You Post, The Higher You Rank - “Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts.” - nice to have some data to back up this rule of thumb, which we’ve been following on Wired.com for 18+ months
• How Google Can Save Android From Certain Failure | Gadget Lab from Wired.com - The short version: Create a branded “Googlephone” partners program, and enforce certain minimum requirements for any phone carrying a Googlephone logo.

I’m angry enough about the prospect of a stupidly conceived financial industry bailout that I wrote the following letter to my state Representative, Jackie Speier, as well as Senators Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Barack Obama and John McCain. I would have sent a copy to Rep. Barney Frank as well, since he is playing a key role in the bailout, but his website doesn’t accept email from people outside of his district.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s debut of the T-Mobile G1 is the first public appearance of an almost fully-baked consumer "Googlephone" — a phone based on Google’s Android operating system.

There’s just one problem: There is no Googlephone. And that’s something Google must fix, and fast, if it wants its mobile operating system to succeed.

Granted, Google’s Android operating system has a lot going for it. It’s supported by a developer-friendly company, it’s Java-based, and it’s open-source.

However, it’s going to need a lot more than that if it’s going to succeed as a smartphone platform. And by "succeed," I mean "Beat the iPhone."

The iPhone has seen tremendous success in the market thanks to Apple’s fanatic dedication to good user experience, its willingness (and ability) to strong-arm its carrier partners, and Apple’s easy-to-use App Store, which gives developers instant access to millions of iPhone and iPod Touch users worldwide. Some developers have even used the platform to make serious money already, to the tune of $250,000 in just a couple months.

But Apple keeps tight reins on its developers. It has a slow and seemingly arbitrary process for vetting App Store software, it chains down developers with a restrictive NDA, and it charges $99 just to get access to the developer’s kit.

It’s a sure bet that many developers, given the opportunity, would flock to a less restrictive environment. And with dozens of carriers and many handset manufacturers building Android-based phones, it looks like there might be a large market of Android phone users to sell to.

There’s just one problem: The carriers. A big part of the iPhone’s success is thanks to Apple’s clout, which enabled it, in effect, to tell AT&T to sit down and shut up about this or that feature requirement. Once other carriers saw the iPhone’s success in the U.S., they wanted in on that action, so Apple was able to dictate terms globally, just as it had a year before in the U.S.

That’s a striking difference from the way carriers and phone manufacturers usually relate to each other. Carriers typically retain fanatic control over every aspect of the customer, from the menus on the phone to the applications that customers are permitted to download. Carrier feature requirements dictate the laundry-list of useless gewgaws that most phones sport (does anyone ever actually use the "calendar" app on a Nokia or Motorola phone?). And it’s that dysfunctional relationship that means most phones are so horrible to use: They’re doomed from the start by companies that care more about their own requirements than those of their customers.

That’s why I predict that Android will soon have as many different flavors as there are carriers. Some carriers will customize it so that their phones can’t install any applications other than the ones they authorize. Some will modify the operating system to work with one of their custom services or another. Some will no doubt cripple it, removing features that they consider threatening to their own businesses (like the ability to run VoIP apps).

Read the rest of the story on Wired.com.

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from September 16th through September 22nd:

• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Zell is not your problem. You are. - Newspapers and newspaper companies are about to die. The last remaining puddles of auto, home, job, and retail advertising are about to be sucked down the drain thanks to the economic crisis and credit is about to be crunched into dust.
• YouTube - Calculus in 20 Minutes Part 1 - A prof from Williams College (where I went to school) explains the entire Calculus 1 course in 20 minutes. He does talk fast, though.
• Drudge Report: News Site That Sends Readers Away With Links Has Highest Engagement - Publishing 2.0 -
• 43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work | 43 Folders - merlin mann’s new approach: I like it
• Horrible Phones and Carriers Mean Huge Opportunity for Startups | Gadget Lab from Wired.com - It’s all about the user experience — summary of the panel I moderated yesterday at Mobilize ‘08, the GigaOM conference
• Café Scientifique Silicon Valley - series of monthly events on scientific topics, at SRI in Menlo Park, CA
• Top 10 Worst Types of Blog Post (and how to fix them) - Boing Boing Gadgets - Rob Beschizza’s insightful (and funny) explanation of common types of lazy blog posts, with clever icons for each. Also note John Brownlee’s comment, where he explains why bloggers still do them: “each day, you’ve got to go out and entertain people.”

The mobile industry offers enormous opportunity right now for entrepreneurs who can create excellent user experiences.

And doing that doesn’t require a degree in rocket science or access to high-end technology. Startups like Jaiku and Twitter have created huge communities of excited, engaged followers based on little more than SMS, an antiquated text-messaging system that limits users to 140 character per message and for which carriers charge usurious rates. The key? They focused on creating fun, easy-to-use tools that satisfy some human need.

That was the takeaway from a panel I moderated last week at GigaOm’s Mobilize, a one-day conference devoted to the mobile industry. The topic of the panel: "Thinking experientially: What creates good mobile user experience?" You can view the 35-minute panel via GigaOm’s online video archive. (The preceding link is supposed to point directly to my panel’s video, but you might need to click on the panel’s name in the "Archive" menu on the right anyway.) GigaOm’s Liz Gannes has also published a rough transcript of the panel.

I was especially happy to be moderating this panel because mobile user experience is a topic I’m passionate about. And that’s because, for most mobile devices and applications, the user experience is frankly terrible. Phones are hard to use, carriers are huge and impersonal behemoths that charge too much and limit what you can do, applications are too often disappointingly hard to use and buggy. And the mobile web? Don’t even get me started.

Continue reading this article on Wired.com.

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from September 12th through September 15th:

• Verizon Memo Details Upcoming Touchscreen BlackBerry | Gadget Lab from Wired.com - fuzzy pics and not much detail
• Flickr Bikes Shoot Pics With Solar and Pedal Power | Gadget Lab from Wired.com - I want one!
• Apple’s iPhone 2.1: The Bug-Fix You’ve Been Waiting For | Gadget Lab from Wired.com - Fewer dropped calls, faster 3G, faster contact search/browse, other enhancements. It’s a must-have
• Schedule - Mobilize - I’m moderating a panel at this conference on Sept 18, at 11:20am
• Paint your roof white, save the planet - Machinist - Salon.com - A Lawrence Berkeley lab physicist calculates that the U.S. could offset the effects of 44 gigatonnes of CO2 (more than one year’s worth of the whole world’s emissions) just by painting all our roofs white. Albedo effect FTW!
• Review: Purebud Earphones Deliver Tunes Bass-Ackwards | Gadget Lab from Wired.com - my review of a pair of earbud headphones
• Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip - Holy cow. Intense 10-minute movie that will freak you out about the climate change tipping point
• “Karl Lagerfeld Is Not Actually A Ninja”: The Future Of Magazines - Former Conde Nast exec says that as magazines become obsolete, they’ll turn into luxury items — like ponies. I think that’s exactly right

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from September 10th through September 11th:

• IPhone Takes Screenshots of Everything You Do | Gadget Lab from Wired.com - Maybe not everything - but more than you might realize. And a clever hacker could extract those screenshots and learn a lot about what you’ve been doing
• What’s your crazy green idea? - X-Prize organizers are holding a contest to decide what their next Grand Challenge contest should be. Brilliant! I may even enter
• 20 slides in 6 minutes - aka “Pecha Kucha” - 20 slides, 15 or 20 seconds apiece, the perfect way to make PowerPoint tolerable. Used by the “ignite” series in Seattle, Portland, Boston…
• Spectacular getaways in San Mateo County - A few good reasons why I live here
• How to Get Ready for Neal Stephenson’s Anathem Release | The Underwire from Wired.com - Stephenson’s first novel in four years came out Sept 9, with a bunch of online videos, podcasts and other goodies to help promote it.

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from September 3rd through September 8th:

• Apple admit Briton DID invent iPod, but he’s still not getting any money | Mail Online - Kane Kramer invented an iPod-like device in 1979, and now struggles to make ends meet. ?I was up a ladder painting when I got the call from a lady with an American accent from Apple saying she was the head of legal affairs and that they wanted to acknowledge the work that I had done.’
• A Web OS? Are You Dense? - Ted Dziuba - Quick and dirty explanation of the “stack” and why web apps are actually more complex
• GTD Software Online for Getting Things Done » Vitalist » Tour - looks interesting
• The Myth of Energy Independence - US News and World Report - Every presidential candidate since Nixon has touted it — and yet it’s a hopelessly unworkable, out-of-touch idea, Robert Bryce says
• Danny O?Brien?s Oblomovka » 2008 » September » 02 - We should be teaching kids to program at the same time we teach them to read and write. Oh, and where’s my daughter’s Dynabook?

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from September 1st through September 2nd:

• 10 Geeky Movies to Raise Your Kids On | Geekdad from Wired.com - awesome list from last week
• 10 Classic Film Comedies for a Well-Rounded Geek | Geekdad from Wired.com - classic movies to show your kids
• Business & Technology | High-tech adventurer revels in geekiness | Seattle Times Newspaper - profile of Neal Stephenson, author & bizarrely enough, also an inventor
• Environmental Capital - WSJ.com : Arctic Island: More Evidence of Melting, Scientists Say - Northwest passage opens up! Also - first chance in 125K years for someone to be the first to circumnavigate the Arctic via ship. And trust the WSJ to find a positive spin: “The melting of the Arctic ice caps - which reach their peak in March and begin retreating thereafter - is a potential boon for European and U.S. shipping companies looking to cut their journey times.”
• How Mythbusters, Artists, and Inventors, Could Save our Economy | Wired … - “What our country needs, to save itself, is more artists, inventors, and entrepreneurs — creative people who are comfortable with science.”