Twitterpeek makes Adam’s brain hurt..Awwww

Adam Frucci has a problem. He says the TwitterPeek is so dumb it makes his brain hurt. I might suggest, Adam, that if your brain is hurting maybe it's not the TwitterPeek that's dumb. Just saying. His recent Gizmodo rant starts out with why the hell would spend $200 on this? He then neglects to do some very simple math. He asserts that you would be nuts to spend $200 on TwitterPeek when you could just use a smart phone. As a proud owner of TwitterPeek, I'll be more than happy to help Adam do some basic math since my iPhone recently became an iBrick when the battery stopped holding a charge. That smart phone cost me $399 to purchase and approximately $106 a month for the two year contract. Even if we substitute the new price for a iPhone of $99.00, the total still comes out to be $2643 for the life of the contract.

Now feature for feature no one is going to argue that the TwitterPeek competes with the iPhone. For someone who purchases the iPhone to twitter with and just to twitter with is certainly overkill. Even if you just add unlimited texting to a regular cell phone it will run you, with AT&T, $240 a year. A regular cell phone has less features than the TwitterPeek. You're not able to download your followers. You can't easily do a search for @ mentions. And since you're under a two year contract, the total out of pocket is going to be $480. That's double what the TwitterPeek cost as a one time expense for the life of the unit. Besides that the batteries user replaceable and the extra battery only cost $9.95 at the Peek boutique. So the question " why would you want to carry a single function device that is compact, cool looking, works anywhere without purchasing Internet access, connects to the social site ranked 13th in the United States of America, and cost half to one 10th as much as the other options?" Seems a little bit easier to answer.

Let me give you an example of use for the TwitterPeek that I've found in the peek forums that I think is a good example of an application of this device. A mom is concerned about giving her daughter a cell phone to text to her friends with. Text messages can be deleted. It's hard to know who she's talking to and a cell phone has ways they can run up a bill they can be a real burden if not kept in control. This mom can give her child a TwitterPeek for a one time $200 investment and because the child's tweets are public and who she tweets to is public Mom can monitor and protect her child. Also now her child can communicate with all her friends as easily as texting. If she buys this device for child in seventh grade and the child manages to take care of it until the 12 grade, even with throwing in three replacement batteries (yeah you can replace the battery). She's spent $230 vs. $1440 for the near equivalent of unlimited texting. That'll pay for her textbooks her freshman year.

One of the ways that I plan to use it, is to keep his sitting by my computer while I work so that if I get a tweet, I’ll get notified. I don’t have to stop working and switch over to my browser. The TwitterPeek will chirp and I’ll know I have tweets. I just grab up the TwitterPeek and read and reply. This way I avoid running a program in the background that pops up constantly like TweetDeck which I use to monitor tweet and FB. By staying in the program that I'm working in and using the mono functional TwitterPeek, I avoid all temptations to get distracted by the big bad wonderful Internet. In some cases not being able to do something means you get something else done.

Also, while I’m tweeting away remotely, I’m NOT draining the battery on my mobile phone. I’ve got double power.

I'm sure there are plenty of other valid situations where the TwitterPeek makes sense as an economical solution and maybe some of the other TwitterPeek owners will add their own uses to this blog.

The ensuing comments in Adam’s public headache progressively got more and more vicious attacking both the TwitterPeek and then Twitter itself. I think my favorite comment of all was:

"I still can't believe twitter exists. It's a blog site that ONLY lets you post 140 characters at a time."

Ironically that comment is only 104 characters long.

I would have to say that any one that doesn't see the value of a global asynchronous conversation that makes the speaker get to the point and allows you to mark keywords, resend the message, share links, or directly communicate with people of interest to anyone who has a cell phone capable of text probably would have a brain that hurts trying to grasp the Twitterpeek and should just stick to debating whether or not Superman could beat up the Hulk in the forums.

What’s Up With That Guy?

UPDATE: The smart ass ending of this blog post was clearly misunderstood and like many things, as this has aged I question the intelligence of this blog post. I'm going to leave it to remind me, if you are just criticizing someone else's gig you are NOT necessarily doing anything youself. I.E. you are disreqarding my productivity rule No. 1 "If you aren't filling time, you're killing time." I do want to end with an old Italian proverb which says "only a friend will tell you when you have something on your face." Which I believe is what I was kind of going for.

Original Post>>>>>>>>

Full disclosure: earlier in my life I went through a Guy Kawasaki fan boy phase. I can clearly remember chasing him down at a printing equipment show in Atlanta to get him to autograph a copy of his book “How to Drive Your Competition Crazy”. So I’m not void of emotions like a Vulcan when I write this blog.

So I installed TweetDeck and was learning how to use it. I highly recommend TweetDeck by the way if nothing else it’s a good example of what Adobe flash programming can do. Part of the TweetDeck features is that it recommends people at random for you to follow. One of the people that flashed on my screen was former Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki. I’m not sure why but I’ve always liked Guy, and I think I’ve bought all of his books though I don’t thing I’ve ever actually read a single one. Anyway I felt confident I could actually read 140 characters generated by Guy Kawasaki at a time. Especially if they followed tweeter etiquette and represented the occasional, personal, insight into how Guy sees the world.

So I was a little surprised…wait…make that really surprised, when over the next 45 minutes I received no less than 15 tweets from Guy Kawasaki all with pithy small mind digestible slug lines and a bit.ly compressed URL pointing to a page on his Alltop site. It only took me about 10 minutes to realize I was going to have unfollow Guy. While I was trying to figure out where all the compressed links went I dug around a little bit on Alltop, which is YACAS (yet another content aggregation site).

One thing I did find that I’ve found interesting was an article by Guy on the Art of the Repeat Tweet. In it Guy Kawasaki explains why his tweets (which as it turns out are not really his tweets after all) are frequent and repeat. Guy has timed his repeats 8 hours apart with each tweet being sent three times. He repeats his tweets because he found he gets as many clicks on the second and third as he does on the first tweet. What he doesn’t really mention is, but is clearly in the subtext, that he doesn’t want to tell you anything - he’s just wanting to get you to click on the links. I.E. for him as a social marketer, tweet is just a traffic building tool.

There’s a couple of things the trouble me deeply about the strategy.

First, the golden rule of new marketing is that you have to bundle something of value in with the message. If you’re not going to give something away that’s useful to your audience with your communications they’re going to ignore you. Being ignored can be good but ultimately it’s a lot less satisfying than being the center of attention.

Second, and this is the one that really bakes my cookies, Guy has a secondary tweeter account called @Alltop that post these spamlike links just once. He encourages people that hate the repeats to follow it instead. What really flips me out about this is Alltop is a brand that may come and go but Guy will be Guy Kawasaki forever. So maybe Guy’s forgotten that he is his own brand. And while he may be pimping out his new venture, he is surely chipping away at his eternal one which is his own credibility. After snooping around Alltop, I’d say that’s not a good trade. Yawn.

Let’s face it, if you’re a man in the middle, meaning you are not generating the original content or you do not control the channel through which it disseminates, you got nothing except your sense of humor or your good looks to distinguish you from 10,000 competitors who are competing for the same eyeballs. When you’re deciding what’s signal and what noise is, you’ll definitely be noise.

Now Guy Kawasaki can a probably afford to be that (for a little while anyway). Let’s face it though the top spots in content aggregation are taken and for the time being they don’t look like they’re going to be dethroned any time soon. Nonetheless I wish Alltop all the best in their venture (Annie should just post more tofurkey pics).

I would like to offer a new name for what Guy Kawasaki is doing. I think I’ll call it “Social Persistent Alltop Marketing”.

Guy is pretty unapologetic about his strategy. He suggests to me that if I can’t handle it that I should just unfollow him and have a nice day.

That sounds like a plan to me Guy. You have a nice day too. Oh and if you want to buy my signed copy of “How to Drive the Competition Crazy” it’s on eBay.

I Can Finally Make Videos Without Tearing Out My Hair

I have several video editing packages. I have Sony’s home version of their Vegas Studio, Adobe’s Premiere Elements, and the movie editing software I’ve been using most lately Windows Live Movie Maker. I don’t have anything against Windows Live Movie Maker because it’s what’s gotten the job done lately. I loathed the idea of ever trying to use Adobe premiere elements again. Aside from the fact that it always crashed trying to create an HD video because it was making the files so huge the system couldn’t handle it, it decided frequently to just quit working in the middle of an edit. And as it is with most Adobe Elements brand products there are no bug fixes, that’s not because there are no bugs – far from it. It’s because Adobe’s idea of a bug fix is to buy the upgrade version of the next release of the product. Now any other software company in the world, especially as small struggling one, could not afford that luxury. I’d get pretty hacked when I think about it, because all I really want to do is make an HD video and upload it to YouTube simply and quickly.

I had gotten Windows 7 and the new Windows Live Movie Maker has an addin that allows it to upload directly to face book. I’ve found this quite handy. I did however encounter formats that the program could not handle but for the most part it worked just fine. Many of the videos that I wanted to make would be screen captures showing our customers and my students how to do things that they had done in class. A friend had recommended tipcam which turned out to be a pretty nice product. The problem with tip cam was that it made an 800 by 600 video and that resolution turns out to be quite fuzzy compared to 1280 X720 HD video which is crystal clear.

So when I got an email offer from Serif software to buy their Movie PlusX3 software package at a bargain price with a 30 day money back guarantee, I decided to go ahead and purchase it. I own a couple of Serif software’s $10 packages that they sell and then try to upsell out to the current version. Both of them, while not being flashy or glitzy, do a respectable job of getting done what I wanted to do.

When the software arrived from merry old England via the United States postal service, the first thing I noticed was I had gotten a Manual along with my software. There was no cardboard box to throw away thank god. I loaded the software and initially it seemed to think something else was being installed in my system but after ignoring that, it installed just fine. The software ran quickly and when I drag files from the explorer to the media bin a couple of times it crashed at first. It would also try to recover and automatically restart when it happened. While that was a little disheartening at first, it was easily circumvented by just saving my project when I first opened it and occasionally as I was working. The crashes seemed to vanish after about the fourth movie I made.

One of the nicest things about Serif software is they have a live Owner’s Manual in the left most pane of the software. So I went from installing the software to using it in a matter of seconds. It’s contextual too so it has a list of what to do based on what view you are in. As luck would have it, my favorite screen capture program Fraps had released an update that was compatible with Windows 7. They had also made several improvements to the program which included compressed video storage. So I was now easily able to make HD screen capture video. The question was would the Movie PlusX3 three package be able to handle it. Premiere couldn’t handle it. I created a screen capture clip and dragged it into the media bin of Movie PlusX3. The preview block was grayed out. Not looking good but then the software asks me if I wish to pick the correct encoder for the file and told me which one to pick. Boom. I was making HD quality screen capture videos complete with titles, and background music. Total time spent on task from walking back to the house from the mailbox to posting to YouTube about 45 minutes which included a lot of reading the wizards that won’t be necessary next time.

Not only did Movie Plus X3 render my video really well, it took a 400 MB Fraps file and after adding titles and background music rendered the whole clip as a 49 MB file. It uploaded in less than 3 minutes. If I had tried to do the same thing with Adobe premiere the file would’ve been over a gigabyte or most likely crashed altogether.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a package that would compete with a high end video editing products but if you’re wanting to make videos and do it quickly and just get it done, you really can’t beat this package. You can pick up your copy by clicking here:

MoviePlus X3 from Serif - offers everything you need to produce outstanding movie masterpieces, photo slideshows and DVDs.

There is no demo version but there’s a 30 day money back guarantee and I’ve talked to customer service twice and both times they were extremely helpful and while I didn’t have a problem they helped me accomplish what I wanted to do. I also checked the web site and much to my delight there were many updates to previous versions of programs meaning they go back and fix bugs not make you buy the fix.

Having used about three of their packages now, I’m wondering if small companies like Serif won’t thrive in an environment where the monolithic companies play a numbers game and go for volume over customer service knowing they’ll lose a few customers here and there like me. The real-time connected web could create several new contenders.

After having such success with their movie package I went ahead and took the plunge and picked up their web software WebPlus X4 as well. I’ll let you know how much it I like it is well but for now I can recommend Serif software’s Movie Plus X3 package with two enthusiastic thumbs up.

What Happens When Your TV Has a Web Browser?

HP is marketing a new printer that has a built in web browser, it’s called the HP Photosmart Premium TouchSmart Web All-in-One Printer. What sets this printer apart from the rest is that it has a “web browser” in it.The price point for this item is $399. I saw a touch screen picture frame yesterday for $299 with WiFi. Same price as a netbook really. I didn’t dig enough into whether or not the browser in the printer was a full featured browser or a crippled browser that was limited to choices predetermined by Hewlett Packard.

Regardless, the implications for the future are pretty clear. It’s very likely that everything that we use in the future will have a web browser built into it. Just as the Java mavens at Sun predicted. If everything that we use has a web browser then what becomes the point of having a PC as a standalone device? The biggest danger of course, is when your plasma screen TV also has a functional web browser that allows you to access your e-mail, your favorite news, and your voicemail messages what incentive do you have to invest in a virus prone PC that easily already is a fairly large intrusion in our life in that we have to wait for it to boot and shutdown before we can actually do something. So imagine how hard we will be tempted to use it to purchase that coffee we like when we can just touch the screen on the refrigerator and accomplish the same thing.

For the longest time the major computer players have invested millions and millions of dollars in winning the browser wars. Even to this day each major player has their own flavor of browser that they want you to use. While they have scrambled and fought and scratched and clawed for mindshare in that market space, what if the browser itself has achieved ubiquity in a standard form that is easily created and marketed. When that happens, and clearly it is happening, the player who has the most significant investment in computing that requires only a web browser has the advantage. Suddenly, having the coolest or most functional hardware and software that runs locally becomes increasingly irrelevant to getting the day to day work done.

The other problem becomes the major stakeholders in the monolithic systems that have lost their relevancy will feel the pain as the market of their vendor shrinks the cost of the legacy systems will surely increase - creating even greater opportunity for the smaller more lithe organizations that grew up adopting and implementing browser-based cloud computing.

The current price point for anything that seems to connect to the Internet is currently around $300 whether it be a printer with a web browser, a smart phone, or a photo frame with 8O2 .11G. As the demand for a touch screen that also has the ability to display HTML5 standard web pages dramatically increases and the standard stabilizes, you’ll see the price point drop to as low as a $75.00 component and in many many products. Expect your next car, tv set, and possibly clothes dryer to be surf friendly. When that happens, Google will probably be in a unique position to serve the needs of this new environment. So if you’re currently deciding what tech toys you should spend some time learning and getting cozy with it’s probably a good idea to give a hard look at the apps are being developed in the Googlesphere.

My Shakuhachi Yuu

First a little disclaimer: I am NOT a musician, or a Shakuhachi player (yet) giving a review from an area I'm an expert in. I'm, in Kung Fu Panda terms, at Level Zero. I am just sharing my impressions of the Shakuhachi Yuu I acquired for Xen Meditation.

It began when a friend of mine showed me an Asian flute she had in SecondLife. It was a really wonderful thing for a mere $75 linden - you can get your own here (its' on the table to right). It seems to play a random series of patterns and I found it quite peaceful to sit on this mountain top and play it. I found that affordance of SecondLife to be very refreshing. I am working, on a side note, on a collection of peaceful places in SL for people who's real life doesn't allow them access to places you can expand and connect with the universe, or at least feel connected to a natural environment.

After a few days of enjoyable playing in SL, I decided to attempt to learn to play in real life. I went to Amazon and looked for bamboo flutes. I found a bamboo shakuhachi for $14.95 (and $8.00 shipping - yikes!). So I ordered it. I did do enough research to find that the shakuhachi was the zen meditation flute I was looking for.

But it was very superficial research. The flute was of reasonable quality but impossible to play for a beginner teaching themselves. I am in a small southern town so there is no local shakuhachi master to teach me. I searched the internet for instructions and found some help but after a few days I realized It was going to take quite a while and a great bit of effort just to master the basics. I read in one article that someone had found a cheap flute like mine that the instructor could play easily but was very difficult for the student to play. The cheap flute I bought was an EE. That means as Shakuhachi's go it is pretty small. My bottom lip filled the hole. One instruction video on youtube said just try to get a sound out of it with all the holes uncovered. Which I did for about 3 days with wildly uneven results. As I kept looking for more instructions on how to play the shakuhachi - I kept finding more information about the flutes themselves.

One thing I discovered was that flutes sold from $14 (like mine) to $3,000. The majority of what I would call "regular" flutes were in the $300 to $2,100 price range. $300 would be out of the question for me right now, so the $2,100 just seem even more impossible. Then I found one called the Shakuhachi Yuu. It was not made out of bamboo or wood but rather ABS plastic resin. It was less expensive that it's bamboo counterparts at only $125, but the most compelling feature was that it had an adaptor (and additional $27.50) that turned it into a Native American style flute allowing you to play it right away regardless of your ability to make the embouchure (the way you hold your mouth to play the flute). It also was waterproof, a big selling point for me considering the amount of spit I blew down the other flute trying to get a note out of it.

I found where they were also being sold on eBay. So I bought the flute and the Yuu adaptor there. It arrived Express Mail extremely well packed. It looked better in person than it did in the photos on the web site. It's lightweight and feels really solid. It came with instructions on how to put it together and take it apart, a certificate for a free lesson with Michael Chikuzen Gould (worth $50), an end cap for the mouthpiece, and a tube of cork grease.

The Yuu adaptor was a godsend.

There are several dynamics in play when learning to get sound out of a shakuhachi by yourself. One is how to blow the edge of the end piece. Another is how hard to blow since you can bend the pitch a whole tone or more. Still another is how to hold all your fingers correctly as you can make vast changes in the sound by partially covering a hole (something you don't know you are doing until sound is actually coming out of it). By installing the adaptor, you can work on how hard to blow and how to hold the flute without worrying about how to hold your mouth. Now instead of hoping all the dynamics come together at once simultaneously and consistently, you can work on how to blow, and how hard to blow and how to finger separately. I'm practicing longer because the frustration level has dropped and I can spend part of the time practicing actually playing the flute.

The flute itself is really attractive. It looks like a  bamboo shakuhachi. I can also play it without the worries associated with having a $500 flute and I'm sure it will be much lower maintenance over time compared to organic material. And if you are wondering, per Wikipedia, ABS plastic is recyclable - though I can't imagine why you would recycle your flute.

As far as sound goes, it sounds great. I was reading that the sound of the shakuhachi is not created by the material the flute is made from, it's created by the "void" in the flute - the hollow space. That is where the sound comes from. There are several sample mp3s on the website, I encourage you to check them out.

Shown at right the Shakuhachi Yuu with the adaptor installed next to the EE Mid East Bamboo Shakuhachi

You can see the size difference. The price of the Yuu with the adaptor was well worth it considering the progress I'll be able to make with it teaching myself. Also when you factor in the durabilty of the instrument and the mental destressing that will come as my ability to play rises, it's well worth roughly two months of regular cable (no HBO), or one month's cell phone bill, or 8 DVD's.

Learning to express yourself musically will also allow you to tap into new areas of the brain too.

I give the Shakuhachi Yuu two enthusiastic thumbs up. It is one of the few recent things I've purchased that the experience far exceeded the expectation.

Now, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice, son, practice!

Or put a more Xen way, how do you reach the mountaintop?

You ride the wind.

SecondLife and the Enhanced You

I attended an interesting presentation on SecondLife (also called SL) entitled "Is there life after SecondLife - Pouring New Wine into Old Bottles" by Geoffrey Edwards at Monash University Behavioural Studies yesterday. Some of the points he made (and I am paraphrasing from a mediocre memory)..

There is a distinction between the body-as-source-of-organic-experience (BaSoOE) and the body-as-performer (BaP) in SecondLife. But the body-as-performer can give back to the organic body. Shift its self concept somewhat. I.E. create new wine (new identity) to put back into an old body.

One of the things that makes this possible is that SecondLife has certain "affordances" available to the BaP. An affordance, in his presentation, was a relationship between the body and the environment. It isn't in the body nor is it part of the environment. He gave some examples of SecondLife affordances:

• The ability to alter your surrounding environment
• The ability to examine the world from a viewpoint that is semi-independent of the body
• The ability to change your physical appearance and avatar
• The ability to change your species or gender and thereby changing others expectations of you
• The ability to have multiple virtual identities (either by changing our avatar or an alt)
• The ability to act and communicate with no fear for our safety
• The ability to acquire new skills that require a great deal of learning or are impossible in real life (such as learning to dance the tango, fly, or do tai chi)

He went on to say that our sense of identity is a function of the "cross product" between the BaP and the BaSoOE. These affordances (and I'm inferring now - not relaying his content) allow us to make discoveries about ourselves, to find what is the essence of us in such an environment.

The presenter had designed clothes in SL and enjoyed it so much when he went back to RL, he learned to sew and to design clothes (I stifled myself from commenting on seeing SL clothes in RL). The point is he found something satisfying in a virtual world that he took back to his real life.

Many people in SL are using it in ways that, to me, are simply another way to pass time. If they weren't going "woot" at a party, they would be watching a DVD. These folks have the right to express themselves in this way.

Others, are using the affordances of SecondLife to overcome limitations that real life (which can be extraordinarily uneven in it's endowments) has handed them.

Of those people some essentially never come back to RL. Not sure why they should if they are truly content in-world. Some however, like the presenter, take the growth experience return to RL and remake themselves incorporating the things learned in SecondLife.

I think this is an excellent application of the technology that so many struggle to understand. Understanding the opportunities is a step toward using them productively.

Where the Economic Crisis REALLY Began

A lot of folks are blaming Bush, and trying to blame Obama for the economic crisis. Some more rightly but not right, try to blame the greedy CEOs on Wall Street. None of those are where the economic crisis really began.

It began when national news became a place where one news reporter started interviewing another news reporter about what's going on in the world. When the mainstream media shifted from peddling INFORMATION to KNOWLEDGE (albeit faulty knowledge) the whole country naturally made many wrong choices that lead us to this situation.

How bad is it? Well it's this bad. The Jon Stewart Show on Comedy Central is the only hard hitting news show left. Recently when Jon took on CNBC and MSNBC as being founts of "bad ideas." NBC had to use the time tested technique of ignoring Jon until he went away. They had to ignore him because if Cramer's illegal trading techniques hit mainstream, he could be looking at AIG Bonus style scorn with the average American.

I've been having a hopefully friendly back and forth with @aptuscollab on Twitter (I'm xackr there) about the concept of a "Knowlege Economy." My fundamental problem is knowledge is a soft term. In the article that started the tweetfest, one of the participants in developing a "knowledge economy" said "we're not even sure what that means." @aptuscollab explained it as "making money from your brains." My critique was it was a buzz word. We have an old term I like better "Information Economy." If we properly manage the information, we can glean the knowledge ourselves. The problem with knowlege is it includes inferences which may or may not be correct until tested.

It's the problem we face with the "news" media. They are no longer giving us information, they are giving us their "knowledge" of the situation. This knowledge is in part based on the facts and in part based on the agenda of the organization, which is funded by the people we probably most need to be protected from.

Now take the bad knowledge and misinform a whole country for a long time, and kaboom! It will eventually run into reality.

We should not be just standing outside AIG protesting, we should be outside NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC, etc. raising holy hell for not telling us the facts and giving us bad knowledge instead of good information.

We need more fact-based news programs and not juicy rehashes of gruesome court cases.

It's the responsible thing to do.