essays & ephemera

Path, You Confound Me

I'm conflicted about you, Path. I like you. You're cute. You feel good. You're totally sweet. But the thing is... I'm also using Instagram, and we're having a good time. It's just so quirky! And me and Soundtracking have this on again, off-again thing when I hear something catchy.

So... Where does that leave us?

Checking in?

I get it, you'll tell Foursquare for me, but I feel like I should do that myself. We're tight - y'know? I feel a little weird asking you to tell it when I'm out. <sigh> Most of my people are in Facebook  anyhow (and to tell you the truth some of the family just showed up) and I'm really focusing on my Twitter following. Gotta cultivate that shit.... And of course I'm going to go all long form with Typepad for when I really have something to say.

I mean I really do want to hang out. Maybe we could just go for a walk on like a Tuesday night?

Women’s guide to HTTP status codes for dealing with unwanted geek advances (via @terrycojones)

Here’s a women’s guide to the most useful HTTP status codes for dealing with unwanted geek advances. Someone should make and sell a deck of these.


301 MOVED PERMANENTLY
303 SEE OTHER
305 USE PROXY
306 RESERVED
307 TEMPORARY REDIRECT
400 BAD REQUEST
401 UNAUTHORIZED
402 PAYMENT REQUIRED
403 FORBIDDEN

via blogs.fluidinfo.com

heheheh... click through for more fun from Terry Jones( including Chastity Belt inspired 423: LOCKED). Will someone in Etsy-land please make these into a T-shirt or handy flash card set?!

Hey, iLike, say hi to imeem for me, would ya?

In the the spring of 2009, iLike had 45 million registered users and was the top music application on Facebook. "Is There An iLike Effect?", we asked then; and the answer was yes. The #1 and #2 albums on iTunes were Keith Urban's "Defying Gravity" and "Gavin Degraw's "Free" - two releases with nothing in common except that both debuted exclusively on iLike. Today the social music network officially closed, with the url redirected to MySpace. 

via www.hypebot.com

That sure took a long time.

Change The World?

Toying around with Storify now that I've been granted access. It's a neat tool for the new Read & React and Curation  ecosystems. First saw these guys at TechCrunch Disrupt in SF and am just now getting my first taste. The object below is a blog post in its own right... a curated set of 3 distinct objects:

• A Tweet from Tyler Willis (itself a retweet)
• Some original text from yours truly
• A YouTube clip of Eric Clapton in concert posted by someone back in 2007 (again, a bit of a found object)

It's especially appropriate that I gained access today as I was just listening to Steven Rosenbaum discuss Curation Nation on On The Media yesterday...  Steven makes an interesting case for the transformative power of curation. Listen for yourself at this handy dandy URL. 

SXSW 2011: MoPho Coming Out Party @picplz "vs." @instagram

While I do not generally buy into the "x vs. y" debates that rage on the internetz I do think there will be a mainstream coming out party for mobile photo sharing (or as I like to call it "MoPho") at this year's South by Southwest festival. And that coming out party will feature a relatively zero sum game between PicPlz and Instagram. If history is any guide, then these two products will be the latest in a string of mobile sharing applications to use SXSW as their respective coming out parties.

Let's look at some recent history: First came Status. Twitter used SXSW as its coming out party in 2007 with it's hall monitors and last year it was all about adding Location to your Status with Gowalla vs. FourSquare. I can't quite recall who, if anyone, made noise in 2008 or 2009. If you do, please leave it in the comments.

SXSW is the perfect event to attain escape velocity for a geolocal application, and I have every reason to believe that 2011 will be the year of the MoPho.

1. Critical mass of tech enthusiasts and early adopters laden with the latest iStuff and Androids
2. Bloggers everywhere
3. Fairly famous people to stalk
4. Compact geographic area
5. Lots of activity to report on: parties, dinners, concerts, sessions, etc etc.

At the moment Instagram seems to be the front-runner with a large installed base on iOS and around 300k photos shared daily; however, PicPlz has coverage across iOS and Android (with somewhere between 100-500k installs) as well as a browser experience.  Who will accelerate their business faster? It's tough to say but may depend on two critical factors:

1. Whether Instagram can get to Android before SXSW starts. It seems that their @jack-propelled early growth has made them a media darling, and I suspect there ispent-up demand among Android users.
2. Will either of these very small, scrappy start-ups pull off a big promotion or partnership? If  either can convince a brand, band or venue to carry them forward then the additional exposure could help one accelerate growth significantly

There are other wildcards, of course. Facebook and Twitter lurk and could probably turn the tide in their direction with the right product. Or who knows, maybe there's another product lurking in wait just to launch at SXSW? Me? I'm rooting for the PicPlz guys, friends and former colleagues at imeem who took care of us Android users first. Only time will tell who the top MoPho will be.

WDYT?