Juixe Techknow

When it comes to Apple you have two camps, the fanatical Apple fanboys and the Apple haters. The divide in between these two camps is wider than the digital divide and when it comes to real points both sides usually get them wrong. Since Apple announced iTunes 10 and its social commerce component Ping, I’ve seen this debate flare up again with new FUD and fodder. The first misconception between Apple fanboys and haters alike is that Ping is another social networking site. Ping is very much social, but it is not a networking or a site. Ping is a social commerce component integrated into iTunes via the iTunes desktop application and the iOS iTunes app available for the iPhone and iPad. Ping is a game changer, just like the Apple App Store was before that, and the iTunes before that, and the iPod before that. Ping is a game changer and tech pundits and press are trying to make it out with old rules from previous games/products, that’s their first fallacy. It is clear that one will use Ping to contact an old high school buddy or stalk an ex, like they would on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. Ping is all about social commerce, not social networking.

Unlike Facebook, that is forced to make money by extorting advertiser to buy ads to their own Facebook Pages, or forcing application developers in using their Facebook currency that is as worthless as a $10 billion Zimbabwe bill, Apple Ping is not about connecting you to friends and family and it sure doesn’t care about your social graph, it care about your consumption graph. Ping won’t compete for users with other social networking sites at the same level that Facebook does with Google Buzz or MySpace. For the most part, social networking sites like Facebook aim to be nothing more than a time sink, and they have grown in large part by social games oblige users to poke and send virtual lasagna to each other. Ping complements the users iTunes experience when they are already on iTunes looking for new music. This is evidently clear especially when you look at how social networking sites like Facebook uses numbers to describe their growth. Facebook describes their growth by counting the number of users that were active in a given month and trying to track the average number of hours a user is on Facebook. Apple tracks its growth by the number of products it has sold. Facebook is designed to simply waste peoples time and have them click on clicks, and Apple designs products that appeal to users.

I want to be clear about the following fact, especially since it is what most Apple haters get wrong. Apple does not need to be the marker leader to make the most money!!! Even though Apple has seen a growth in its market share in laptops, for example, it still has a small slice. But with double digit margins, it means it can sell less product and still make more money than commoditized competitors like Dell or HP. Apple has played this card well before, for example it is choosing a similar approach in the mobile space. It would rather have a small market share, and simply have a better profit margin and more control over its products. Unlike Facebook, Ping doesn’t need market share to be profitable. For example, Facebook requires millions of impressions to make a buck or two on ads.

In its current release, Ping reminds me a lot more to the first generation iPod than the iPod Touch. Currently, Ping feels clunky, is sparely populated, doesn’t have enough bands listed, has a ton of spam, doesn’t support music or apps, etc. At this stage, Ping is still lacking many features to make it comparable to what we expect from a social networking site. For example, when it was released numbers where not formatted with a comma for values larger than a thousand. This issue was fixed within a day of release. I would also like more personalization of my profile page, the ability to add my homepage URL, my other social networking sites, etc. Basically Ping needs a lot more polish, but I’ve heard that Steve Jobs has done that once or twice before for a new revolutionary product line.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• If developers think that QA is going to find all their design problems, they are doing it wrong.
• Code wants to be dynamic.
• Unlike what it sounds like, Extreme Programming isn’t a spectator sport where you jump off a ramp with your favorite IDE.
• The web needs an open standard API for user badges and achievements.
• Social network sites should adopt a open standard API for user badges and achievements!
• The user interface made me do it!
• Show me the money, show me the data.
• Technology will date you, as in it will give away your age, like if your used a floppy vs a thumb drive vs neural memory implant..
• I’m sure Hallmark has a card for that, to show our appreciation to the QAs in our lives.
• The meek shall inherit the earth, the geek shall inherit an earth simulation on some social virtual game running on the cloud.
• Can you debug dreams?
• Men are digital, women are analog.
• Refactor yourself!
• Trust No Technology

Team Leadership

• Good things come to those that make them happen.
• Cut out the 20% from Pareto’s Principle from your process.
• Follow your dreams and you will be your own leader!
• Our attitude affects the outcome of our experiences and that is reflected in our perspective which influences our attitude.
• Fear is a virus of the mind!
• Some people are proud instead of productive.
• Sometimes we need to accept and move forward before we can understand.
• One persons Epic Fail is another’s FTW!
• If you don’t remember when you took a vacation last, you need a vacation!
• There are somethings that we are just not going to understand, but that we need to accept.
• If better is not easier and cheaper then it’s not.
• Just because something is better (function) doesn’t mean it’s better (form).
• You have to feed, exercise, and train your creativity before you can make it work for you.

Product Placement

• GIA: Google Intelligence Agency. FBI: FaceBook of Investigations.
• Is Facebook too big to fail or just big enough to get regulated?
• And then Steve Jobs said, “Let there be multi-touch.”
• Cost Plus World Market should really rename itself to 3rd World Market since they mostly sell trinkets from under developed world.
• CVS has the widest and weirdest selection, they sell everything from hard liquor to underwear. It’s basically my party supply store.
• Someone should invent foursquare for fictional places, I would like to check I the Star Wars Cantina.
• I wish iTunes could organize songs by mood in addition to genre and album.

Overheard

• OH: Awww, that gansta cute.
• OH: Travel is my drug of choice, I rather go on a real trip than a hallucinogenic trip.
• OH: I woke up so tired from that dream because I was running in it.
• OH: It’s very hard sometimes to think on your own.
• OH: when you are a parent and are dealing with your kids, you have to be the bigger person.
• OH: I’m sorry for whatever I did in your dream that made you upset, trust me that is not typical of my behavior in other people’s dreams.
• OH: It’s not that you did anything wrong, it’s that you didn’t do anything spectacular.

Quotes

• Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered. – Anonymous
• Everyone specializes in their own area of weakness. – Rothbard’s Law
• Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. – Wirth’s Law
• It is not how much you make that counts, but how much money you keep. – Robert Kiyosaki
• All these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you. – Prince
• Hope. Deleted – Emotionless Wine Bucket #futurama
• There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. – Roger Staubach
• Control the music industry? Check. Control the publishing industry? Check. Control-alt-delete? Never. – @ceoSteveJobs
• I bet if they had Yelp in 1850, nobody would have taken the Oregon Trail. – @badbanana
• People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy. – Jeffrey Gitomer
• Welcome, to the real world. – Morpheus
• I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. – HAL
• Would you rather your kid be a drug dealer than a drug addict? – John Waters

From time to time I blast tweets on software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else I’m working through. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• Programming is more about problem solving than coding, just like being an author is more about storytelling than writing.
• Next time your significant other starts nagging, throw an IllegalArgumentException!
• I want the web to evolve to a stage where flash is not required! It’s 2010 for God’s sake, why we still using plugins in browsers!?
• why do I have to tether gadgets and string along services just to catch a call?
• Patents? We don’t need no stinking patents.
• When life gives you users, make customers.
• For programmers everything is as easy as alpha, beta, and gold master.
• Good debugging techniques go a log way in and out of the debugger!
• Like the Free Masons, I am part of a secret society of digitari and conspiracy theorists and computer repairmen known as the Free Hackers.
• I am so WYSIWYG!
• If privacy settings are difficult to edit they are hard to implement, enact, and enable correctly.
• Privacy setting should be transparent not secretive and misleading.

Team Leadership

• You always get further faster with less effort if you work with what you got.
• The next big thing usually sneaks up on those waiting in line to ride the current thing.
• Mo money mo ways to solve mo problems.
• Bad apples introduce bad seeds.
• Litigation stifles innovation.
• Technology is changing so fast that I have obsolete gadgets the unopened packages I bought them.
• I’m coming up so you better get this project started.
• As companies grow, they lose acceleration and focus, but depend on momentum and size.
• I have to call into our all hands meeting tomorrow. Since I have to call in, I’ll be all ears at the all hands meeting.
• A great idea in the mind of someone that can’t or won’t do anything about it is like an orphan.
• When companies can’t create engaging products and new markets they create bogus patents.

Product Placement

• Twitter needs a reliable picture service, as reliable as Twitter, but Twitpic just needs to go away.
• The #newtwitter is like the the #oldtwitter plus HTML crack.
• I wish Twitter was like survivor and we can kick some twits of the service.
• This is how much AT&T sucks, I’m tethering my T-Mobile Nexus One with my AT&T iPhone to tweet this!
• Apple press events are as large as sporting events! Apple should televise them in Pay-Per-View.
• Steve Jobs is a mad genius, you gotta buy his hardware so that you can buy his software and along the way pay for a horrible service plan.
• The new iPod mini is one gadget closer to the Dick Tracy wrist watch phone.
• Apple cares more about design than market share, and that’s why users pay a premium.
• Steve Jobs would make a great James Bond villain.
• And the Grammy for the Album of the Year goes to… Autotune!
• AT&T should rebrand itself as FU&U!
• In addition to Document, Presentation, Spreadsheet, and Form document types, @google Docs should add a Gantt Chart!

Quote

• We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: We know where you are, we know what you like. – Eric Schmidt
• Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. – Steve Jobs
• Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. – Steve Jobs
• Get into jiggle mode. – Steve Jobs
• So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated. – Bill Gates

Cash Angels

• School experience is not in tune with the current job opportunities. College should be more like a series of Y Combinator funding cycles.
• If there is a angel investment bubble, everybody should cash in before they can cash out.
• When you see startup accelerators with names like 500 ACME Startup Founders Camp you can be sure that there is an angel investment bubble.
• Zuckerborg has dropped out of college and he is pledging $100,000,000 for kids to stay in school.

In this conversation tweet snippet I rant about dead code when someone noted that in a Murphy’s Law sort of way, you don’t need dead code until you delete it. Thank goodness for version control systems.

Zombie Code

• @techknow: It is a dead end maintaining dead code, unused, and unreachable code.
• @archiloque There is something schrödingerian about dead code: it is often unreachable *until* you remove it.
• @techknow: LOL my question is, if you have dead code in a live site is that considered zombie code or sleeper cell code?

Here I question how evil Google really is when a friend warns me that whatever you say about Google may be used against you by going viral. Google is big brother and it’s CEO thinks we can place our trust in it before our governments. I can’t wait until Google hires Hilary Clinton as the Senior Vice President of the Division of State at Google.

Indexable

• @techknow Google, if you are not evil why you have to make that your motto? Who are you trying to convince?
• @vladgur: Don’t hate Google on an indexable medium.
• @techknow: Good advice, Google’s cache does not forget.

Spaghetti Code is when the code is so convoluted that it’s code path resembles a plate of entangled spaghetti. Here I rant about working with code base that smells like a bad plate of spaghetti.

Code for Dinner

• @techknow: It is possible to make Spaghetti Code out of Obeject Oriented Programmmmmming. Om nom nom.
• @mcory1: Possible? Heck, its pretty easy sometimes, even if you know what you’re doing ;)
• @techknow: I’m working on some code that looks like a cross between Spaghetti Code and Lasagna Code. I need a bottle of wine to digest/debug this.

Chat Roulette is one of those ideas that are so simple that they are genius. Here a friend and I compare and contrast between Chat Roulette and the MTV television show Jersey shore.

Jersey Roulette

• @techknow: MTV or VH1 should do a reality show based on chat roulette.
• @jzy: It’s called Jersey Shore.
• @techknow: LOL from what I have seen of Jersey Shore, I would think they used chat roulette to cast the show.
• @jzy: I was just joking of course, no offense to Chatroulette.
• @techknow: All kidding aside, I think chat roulette is a great idea. It reminds me of the early days of Twitter, I wish they had an open API.

Aside from my initial shock of Google’s blatant privacy oversight, I immediately jumped on the bandwagon. I learned that if you can’t beat them, join them, and if you going to join them might as well try to get some new followers in the process. Using a Google Mail account that I do not user as my primary private emails, I updated my public profile and began following as many technology influencers as possible. During the course of a full day of using Google Buzz, I buzzed mostly about Google Buzz. Here is what I was buzzing about the first day of using Google Buzz.

• With any new service there is always a land rush for the vanity url, profile name, and followers?
• The short for Google Mail is GMail. The abbreviation for Google Voice is GVoice. Will Google Buzz be shorten down to GBuzz? What about Guzz?
• Google Buzz is a new opportunity for the race to reach 1,000,000 followers. I hope @aplusk hasn’t heard of Google Buzz yet as it would give me a head start.
• I expected Microsoft to blatantly copy Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare before Google.
• When Twitter first came out Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose had the most followers for the longest time because the early adopters where mostly technologists. But once celebrities and mass media discovered Twitter, and after the stop laughing at the concept, they quickly gained the most followers and brought on new users. Leo Laporte currently has over 6K++ followers. Just wait until Britney Spears gets her buzz on.
• I am not sure how Google will combat the additional spam I expect because of Google Buzz and Google Profiles. But I imagine, spammers and marketers are already hard at work developing spam bots that will follow everyone possible and then it is very easy to figure out peoples email address by adding at gmail.com at the end of you profile user name which is public, visible, and searchable.
• That is the plural of buzz? Buzzes?
• What is the verb of using Google Buzz? Buzzing? Like, “I can’t talk cause I am buzzing right now.”
• What I like about Buzz is that it has not been taken over by marketing and SEO bot accounts, just like the early days of Twitter.
• Does anyone else notice that when you are commenting on a Buzz post the page jumps up and down, kinda like flickering, due to all the updates happening around where you are commenting? There are soo many updates below and above other posts that my comment text box jumps to fit in storm of other comments around it.
• If you don’t like the flickering, I get’s me dizzy after a while, click on the post’s time stamp in the upper right corner. The link is to the page for this one post and it does have the jumpy flickering visible when commenting in the middle of your stream.
• I think that Google and Facebook are in a battle for your friends. But it feels more like a Belfast brawl cage fight… Google and Apple are battling it out in in the mobile space with tit for tat guerrilla warfare… i.e. you can use the word ‘Android’ to describe you app on the Apple App Store. Now Google will suck a lot of the hot air valuation from Facebook. I think Jason Calacanis stated that Facebook lost half it’s value because of Google Buzz… and Microsoft is trying to pick a fight with Google in the search space with Bing but it is not getting much traction.
• I still have not connected my other services into Buzz. I see some people have but they get multiple buzzes (buzz posts) for the same content. It seems like some sort of feed recursion, where the Facebook comment get’s read in by FriendFeed, then read in by Twitter, then feed into Buzz two or three times for each original post, sometimes one buzz post has the same content duplicated. I feel like I need a network architect to help me sort it all out… LOL.
• Following along and contributing to a conversation is so much easier on Buzz than Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.
• Not missing Farmville updates on Facebook. This is the longest time I have gone without finding random alien cow on my wall.
• Now that I filter out Buzz messages in my inbox, I can’t find the buzz threads I commented on.
• I’m going to buzz my facebook to tweet my tumblr post on myspace and blog about it.
• Remember when following someone meant stalking… Now it means, friending.
• Having a buzz attack.
• My tweets are still no popping up on my buzz.
• Not liking how tweets show up on my buzz stream, a bunch at a time, in the middle of the night, hours after they were first tweeted. I thought Google had ‘realtime’ access to tweets. I thought Google has access to Twitter’s firehouse.
• There are a few reasons why I like Buzz over Twitter. The ability to edit buzzes after they have been posted and commented on, and the ability to post more than 140 characters at a time. What I don’t like is that, unlike Facebook, you can’t delete comments left on you posts from trolls or stalkers or folks buzzing on their own supply. Even after you block spammers their comments are still visible in your posts.
• There is a lot of negative reaction regarding the privacy failures with Google Buzz. I think that the problem with Google Buzz is not that it is integrated in GMail. The problem is the defaults of Google Buzz, including auto-follow, and public profiles, and the inability to use a public profile name other than your private GMail user name, the blocking functionality does not seem to work, etc.
• Google pulled a Facebook move in terms of privacy… Their motto of ‘do no evil’ did not stop them from doing something so stupid.
• How does one get verified on Google Buzz/Profile? I certify myself. Does my mom need to call Google to verify my identity? What else will Google verify? What I really need is an alibi and some receipts from a convenience store in Albuquerque, New Mexico for last night.
• Ansel Adams would not have had used Flickr, Shakespeare would not had has used Twitter, Ghandi would not have had used Facebook, and Columbus would not have had used Foursquare.. But I am sure they would all have had used Google Buzz.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• If your code works not because of your programming intentions but because of bug side effects and your client doesn’t care, it is not done.
• I need a software development bug repellent.
• Design fail if you fix a log message and you break some functionality.
• If a carpenter’s rule of thumb is to “measure twice, cut once” then a programmer’s rule of thumb should be “design twice, code once, refactor a few times, and optimize only if you have to.”
• Saying you know programming is like saying you know how to read, a first grader knows how to read!!
• Requirements gathering is not creative writing.
• I love requirements: The initial instruction should completely initialize the initial value.

Team Leadership

• The only two requirements for a manager is that he is breathing and that he can communicate with his team in their language.
• What happens to you is not other people’s fault, it is your opportunity.
• There is nothing worse than a perfectionist that doesn’t know what he wants.
• The worst thing you can so when you make a mistake is lie about it.
• Every once in a while you have to recalculate, reshuffle, and/or remix your priorities.
• Embrace the edge.

Product Placement

• In Google We Trust.
• Google claims their motto is to ‘do no evil’, put I suggest they change it to ‘do no customer support.’
• If you use Google search to find Google Mail customer support and still can’t find it, is that a fail in their customer support or search?
• There should be Freedom of Information Act for corporations. I want to know everything that Google knows about me and how that info is used
• Can’t believe the AT&T website is not iPhone/mobile friendly.
• Apple should develop a dual screen iPhone, iPhone GS3 DS.
• I imagine a time when Zynga will have in-game ads for Monsanto genetic modified seeds on FarmVille or Foster Farm turkeys for Cafe World.
• Facebook saves everything you create/post/save/click/delete, it can reverse engineer what you where thinking.
• Doing four square drive-by check-ins.
• Does Craigslist have an iPhone app?
• Do you have multiple twitter personality disorder?

Quote

• If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living. – Seneca
• If I could make the same amount of money but wake up until when I can’t hold in my pee any longer, I will be a success. – Phil Kaplan
• The answer to the question “where do good ideas come from” is always the same, the come from bad ideas. – Seth Godin
• Only the mediocre are always at their best. – Jean Giraudoux
• From pitch perspective, the more you wear your idea, the more it fits you… – Brad Feld
• Nothing fails like success. – Arnold Toynbee
• I totally question the conventional wisdom of the American dream. – Anil Dash
• If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything, is ready, we shall never begin. – Iva Turgenev