September 2007 – Page 3 – Garrick van Buren

Kill Me Now

“Always always always give us a button to allow us to do the worst thing you can imagine. The alternative is that we’ll end the relationship and then blog our complaints about you out loud, no matter how petty it makes us look.” – David Weinberger

Something’s Still Burning

The more work I do parsing and aggregating feeds, the more annoyed I am with Google’s Feedburner published feeds (part 1).

As you know, I don’t see the need for Feedburner and believe their useful services (metrics, being smart about enclosures and tags, etc) is more effectively done within the weblog/publishing software¹ for 99% of the feeds they serve.

Looking at iTunes, Feedburner, and Twitter feeds, you’d think it was called RHS, not RSS.

Chances are, if you’re reading this, your weblog could publish the same feed Feedburner does with far less complexity and provide you with the same value.

For a more strategic view: Google’s Feedburner is Trouble – Dave Winer

Later:
In the comments, Luke posits another point of value. But, I don’t have to pay for people reading my Amazon book reviews either.

1. Or a stats program that understands both pageviews and file downloads. These numbers aren’t big enough to have useful value anyway. Just not enough 0s to pitch to advertisers.

iPollution

As soon as I got my new phone, I turned the ringer off. I’m alerted of new messages and calls via BluePhoneElite – not disturbing anyone else in earshot.

It’s quiet in the house during the day, no constant tv or radio. Interupptions of all kinds are reduced to a minimum.

Elsewhere, TVs are blaring, satellite radio jabbering, phones are ringing, car alarms are going off, all while civilized people are trying to have civilized conversations at a civilized volume.

So, no we can’t complain about ADD and be excited about a new way to buy ringtones.

First Invite Out, 20 To Go

Over lunch today, I sent out the first invitation to the FeedSeeder project.

This is the first real test of the system and I’m anxious. Despite the edges being very rough, the functionality is in there. Finally.

Enough to: 1) talk about 2) start polishing.

Since I’ve been working on this project about 10 of you have asked for early access. Your invites will trickle out over the next couple of weeks.

I’ve got room for 10 more people in this super early stage. Drop me an email to get on the list.

If your email doesn’t make the cut… 🙂

Oh yeah, and Greg from Perfect Porridge just reminded me: if you like Google Reader or Bloglines, then this probably isn’t for you.

What’s He Building in There?

Doing some testing today and I felt bad for not posting anything in nearly a week.

I’ve been building. Steady. Til midnight or 2am for the past week.

And it’s coming together real nicely, so I’m trying to keep up the momentum up through this coming week.

Until I get back to a more frequent posting schedule…

Here’s the raw audio from an hour-long phone conversation I had with a Stanford Grad student. She’s conducting a study on how people use things like Twitter, Flickr, and the like.

Garrick-on-Twitter-2007.mp3 [59 minutes]

I’m sure Ingrid’s tracking this conversation, so give her a hand and leave a comment on how you use those apps in your daily life.

Elsewhere:

“Twitter-mates are the same as workmates everywhere.” – Gary Burge