My Long Bet Against Mobile Carriers: Update 1

Late last year, I extended my T-Mobile contract 2 years.

When I signed it, I had a hunch it will be the last time I’m locked into an agreement like that.

Now, I’m confident – so confident that if I was holding any mobile carrier stock, I’d start shorting.

A couple weeks back, we got a great deal on a 5-day trip to Playa del Carmen, Mexico. We booked it, made arrangements for the kids and packed out bags.

I left the laptop and my Nokia at home – taking my iPod Touch and the Kindle.

Wifi was everywhere – in the airports, Starbucks, probably more places as well – all along the way. While the hotel was only confident of their wifi covering their lobby, coverage was fine in our room.

I was able to check email, Twitter, Cullect, and we used Skype to talk with everyone back home. All on the iPod Touch all over the hotel’s wifi.

When we returned home this weekend, my Nokia greeted me with.

0 messages
0 missed calls

Short URLs Re-defining SEO

It’s conventional search engine optimization wisdom that URLs should contain words, separated by either dashes or underscores. This approach improves the readability of the URL – making it more usable for people while simultaneously giving internet robots something to work on.

But with people sharing URLs within places – like Twitter and Facebook (and … and … and …) – places with a default social context, we’re seeing a URL’s context trump its readability as a significant usability factor.

Who is sharing and how they describe what they’re sharing is more important than the readability of the shared URL itself.

Leaving the search engine robots blocked out completely (disallow, nofollow, etc) or piecing together a pile of redirect URLs (which may or may not exist tomorrow, e.g. RE07.US).

Additionally, the share-er’s pays for each URL with their social capital. ‘Good’ URLs (as deemed by each individual follower) raise the share-er’s capital while ‘bad’ URLs lowers.

Throw in the proliferation of other difficult to index assets like images and video – and we’re talking about an internet that’s not Search Engine Optimized, but Social Engagement Optimized.

Unspoken, Unfortunate, Synonyms

From what I can tell;

  • “SEO” is an unspoken synonym for “works better in Google”
  • “Social Media” is an unspoken synonym for “works better in Twitter”

Both of these are unfortunate for they:

  • turn something easily understandable into something vague and amorphous – the exact opposite of good framing
  • mask the monopoly those companies have on their respective service.

This is analogous to using “entertainment” as synonym for not just “television” but the specific televised offering from BBC Four.

Of course, promoting yourself as an expert in Twitter (without having a Twitter-issued business card) should elicit giggles from anyone within earshot. But at least it’s being honest and authentic – the first step to being more social.

Elsewhere 11 Nov 2009

“That tweeting it is a private breed of microblogging verges on irrelevance. Twitter is now as necessary to tweeting as Google is to search. It’s a public activity under private control.” – Doc Searls

Dog-Eared

Some quick reviews of the handful of books I savored during my recent trip in Mexico.


The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let It Happen
endofprosperity

I found this month’s Economics book club selection (my first Kindle purchase) an extra-ordinarily frustrating read mainly due to the Fox News-esque partisanship. Despite that, the sections on the incentives and implications of the Laffer Curve, Flat tax, Fair tax were thought-provoking and highly recommended.


Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods
wildfermentation

The most inspiring cook book I’ve ever read – all about improvising in the kitchen and embracing the microorganisms around you. The recipes for Persimmon Cider Mead and fruit Kimchi sound pretty delicious.


Belgian Ale
brewlikeamonk

Great book (like all the books in the Classic Beer Style Series) on the history and definition of Belgian ale. The key – don’t be afraid to use 20+% sugar and focus on flavor rather than strict tradition.


Brew Like a Monk: Trappist, Abbey, and Strong Belgian Ales and How to Brew Them
brewlikeamonk

A deep dive into the history, brewing process, and recipes for some of my favorite Belgian beers – Afflighem Blond, Westmalle Trippel – and some of the American beers brewed in the same style. Stan Hieronymus makes a pretty good argument that it’s the Americans that are moving the style forward.

194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Architecture, Landscape and Amer Culture)
194X

Fifty years ago, the Great Depression and WWII destroyed the careers of American architects – they switched from building to planning. Planning the new American cities, planning suburbia, planning for the war to be over and their careers to return.


Coffee Cupper’s Handbook
scaacuppingbookfulljpg

THE vocabulary book on describing coffee’s taste. The biggest ‘a-ha’ for me: cooling removes the sweet and bitter aspects of coffee – but has no impact on the sour tastes. Big thanks to Sam Buchanan for loaning me his copy.

WordPress URL Shortening Hack

My last post, Publishers Shorten Yourself, got me thinking about easy, low-tech ways to provide a short url for WordPress blogs.

Turns out, just 1 line of code is needed in the .htaccess file.
RewriteRule ^(d+)$ http://[YOUR-BLOG-URL]/?p=$1

Add it in just after RewriteBase so your .htaccess looks something like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(d+)$ http://[YOUR-BLOG-URL]/?p=$1
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

To use this short URL in your templates do one of the following:

If you want to use the same domain your blog is on, use this:

<a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/<?php the_ID(); ?>"><?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/<?php the_ID(); ?></a>

If you have a different, perhaps shorter domain, use this:

<a href="[SHORT-DOMAIN]/<?php the_ID(); ?>">[SHORT-DOMAIN]/<?php the_ID(); ?></a>

Note: You will have to add an additional redirect to the .htaccess file of SHORT-DOMAIN, but that’s not problem, because it’s very similar to the WordPress redirect we started with.

And like that you’ve got a short url, for every post in your WordPress blog. No more worries about whether or not a specific URL shortener will be stealing your referrers or even be around tomorrow.

Publishers Shorten Yourself

The Wege pointed me to an excellent article by Joshua Schachter on the issues w/ URL shortening services.

It’s consistent my concerns and my Insecurity of Short URLs post.

As I alluded to that post, I see 3 opportunities for URL shorteners, all of them revolve around increasing trust (branding, security, backup).

Let’s take that first one – branding. Another name for branding is accountability. Who really knows where a tinyurl a similar service will point you, but you can be confident a minnpo.st URL will point you to an article on minnpost.com and a grv.me URL will point you to something I authored.

From my perspective there are 3 parties that should have a good short URL corresponding to their identity:

  • the author (i.e. grv.me)
  • the publisher (i.e. minnpo.st)
  • the share-er (imagine a link blog of short urls)

Sometimes all 3 are the same.

Conveniently, as greater accountability is introduced to short URLs, the issues of security and backups address themselves.

Now.

Take one step back.

Web publishing engines – like WordPress, MovableType, and all publications engines really – should automatically generate nice long human-readable URLs as well as a short, easy-to-share URLs (at least the URL keys, you can supply your own short domain if you want). (Dave Winer said this last month in “Solving the TinyUrl centralization problemsomething along these lines a few weeks back, but I can find the link right now)

One more step back, and you can see this is only an issue now because of the growing popularity of 1 specific website and an expectation that these short URLs are permalinks. If you don’t have that expectation, shorten with RE07.US

The Long Promise of the Mobile Web

I distinctly remember back in 1999, working for one of the first User Experience firms, when I first saw an internet-based service on a mobile phone.

Then, diversity meant some devices had 7 lines of text other had 3.

A few months later, I moved onto a new gig where I was designing location-specific websites to be delivered to laptops and very-alpha Linux-based tablet PCs with stylus-input.

Today, there are an ever increasing menagerie of mobile devices1 accessing HTTP-based services. The differences in their interaction models, primary usage contexts, and device capabilities make the IE vs. Firefox vs. Safari design challenges look like bad case of hiccups.

The design goal can no longer be one of consistency in visual design, but consistency of brand experience across multiple contexts and appropriateness of any specific interaction within a given context.

That’s the promise the mobile web made me a decade ago.

Justin Grammens and I cover this and many other mobile computing topics in our recent podcast [mp3]

1. G1, iPhone, Kindle, Chumbly, Palm, etc. I’ll even include Twitter in this list of devices applications should be designed for.

First Crack 119. Justin Grammens on Mobile VOIP

I have a hypothesis that mobile VOIP over WiFi will replace mobile carriers for the majority of phone conversations within 5 years. For a reality check, I called up Justin Grammens of Localtone Interactive and Mobile Twin Cities.

From the picture he paints, I think we’ll see this well within 5 years. Maybe 2.

I also share with you my strategy for developing in this new mobile, web-based application world.

[51 min].

Pragmatic Programmers eBooks now in Kindle Format

I’m a big fan of buying Pragmatic Programmers books with their the accompanying PDF. Yesterday, I popped over to their site to check for updates and noticed they’ve added .epub and .mobi (Kindle) to their electronic publication format options.

Such a huge win, thanks to everyone at Prag Prog that made this possible.

Now, perhaps I can suggest including a hyperlink in the ebooks for auto-updating. Thanks 🙂

Glad I’m Not the Only One Parallel Reading

“I got a Kindle just over a week ago. It has changed the way I think about reading. I have a couple dozen books on it and I go back and forth between them in a way that I have never done with books. I am in the process of reading about six books in parallel and I love the way the Kindle allows me to read what I am in the mood for at that moment in time.” – Fred Wilson

Fred’s experience accurately describes my Kindle relationship as well. This is why I’m convinced the Kindle has more in common with television than physical books or other mobile devices. The biggest problem I see w/ the Kindle is that there’s only one significant ‘broadcaster’. 🙂