A post to Facebook by Ryan Merket (former Facebook employee, founder of Ping.fm, and now founder of Appbistro) inspired me to check out a new Facebook App by Zach Allia that lets you “dislike” any website on the internet. The app is simple – you add a little bookmarklet to your browser and connect it with Facebook. Now any website you visit you can “dislike”, and your dislike appears on your Facebook Wall for all your friends to see.
Merket and I had a little fun with the app. He would dislike one political figure’s Facebook Page, and I would then go and dislike the opposite political figure. Or, he would dislike something and I would go “like” his recent dislike. I even went to one of his dislikes, clicked the permalink for the dislike, and disliked his dislike! (Have a headache yet?)
The app doesn’t just work on Facebook. You can go to any website on the internet and click the little “Dislike” bookmarklet and your dislike will appear. In addition, you can go to http://likebutton.me and get a similar like bookmarklet to like things on the internet in a similar manner.
This is a totally cool idea, and great example of the simplicity of Facebook Graph API. I predict it will be very popular due to Facebook and other sites’ lack of a “dislike” button for the network. I hope he can find a good way to monetize the concept. In a recent environment of negativity on the internet, this app could just provide a little level of fun and positivity to Facebook. ”dislike” is the new “poke”. 
Check out, and “like” the app at http://dislikebutton.me/
Do you “like” the concept?
I Like This – a Facebook “Dislike” Button for the Entire Web
- Niklas Sjostrom
Boston-based start-up MocoSpace, is helping consumers connect with each other using Android phones through the recent launch of their chatting app. The android app will help garner a greater user base for MocoSpace and create additional opportunities for monetization. The mobile social network provider launched in 2006 and has already signed up over 11 million users.
MocoSpace’s previous target audience were non-techies, ages 18-34, without smartphones who want to get into the experience of MocoSpace without much headache. Noticing that the number of users from Android devices had spiked by 40% over the last half-a-year, making it the number one growing device for accessing MocoSpace over iPhone and Blackberry, the android app was launched. The app is set to maintain the existing brand experience of MocoSpace by offering simple functionality.
MocoSpace CEO Justin Siegel said, “We’ve really listened to what our users want in developing this application. We know that our users love to communicate, so we’re committed to giving them the best mobile chat experience to help people stay connected and have fun on their phones.”
With the app users can:
MocoSpace holds great potential for advertising, especially as spending on mobile ad increases drastically. With consumer profiles and interests, advertisers will be able to hyper-target MocoSpace consumers, helping MocoSpace’s monetization strategy proliferate in addition to its virtual currency implementations. As one of the largest social networks on mobile platforms, we expect MocoSpace to grow to greater success.
Warning: Long post ahead. If you just want the trailer, it’s this – “Everything is changing. Again.”
Tomorrow morning we’ll kick off our most ambitious event to date, TechCrunch Disrupt, in New York. The event is sold out, but we’ll have tens of thousands of people also tuning in to the livestream of the three day event. If you’re not attending, watch that livestream from the comfort of your office, living room or wherever it is that you people spend your time. There are some things happening at the event that you don’t want to miss.
We’ve called the event TechCrunch Disrupt, but we weren’t thinking about the name as a theme for this particular event. It’s our go forward brand name for our three-times-a-year launch and tech conferences.
And yet, as I have conversations with the launching startups and the amazing speakers lined to to talk at Disrupt, it’s become clear to me that we are indeed in a massively disruptive moment. And by moment I’m not talking about a generation or a decade. I’m talking about things happening right this moment in time.
These conversations are why, for the first time, I am extremely nervous to go on stage tomorrow morning.
Until the last few days it hasn’t crystalized for me. It’s sort like when you’re getting the flu and you feel the symptoms come one by one. Stomach ache, no problem. Headache, ouch. Cold sweat – uh oh, I’ve caught something.
The “symptoms” I’ve noticed are only there because I’ve been sitting down with these people – leading entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others – and just listening to what they have to say. Putting it all together in my head. Discounting for bias. And after all that, what they are saying is making a lot of sense to me.
You are going to hear a lot over the next three days about how our world is changing in a fundamental way. It’s easy to think about what’s happening now as just a further evolution of the Internet era. But the disruption from this change is more profound than that.
Before I dive deeper, here’s a taste of what I’m talking about. Venture capitalist John Doerr, who is arguably the most successful venture capitalist of all time, told me this during our briefing call for Disrupt:
Zynga is the fastest growing business Kleiner Perkins has ever invested in.
That was said by a man who’s firm has invested in Google. And Amazon. And AOL, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Flextronics, Genentech, Intuit, Lotus Development, LSI Logic, Macromedia, Netscape, Quantum, Segway, Sun Microsystems, and Tandem, among many, many others.
Zynga. The fastest growing business Kleiner Perkins has ever invested in.
First thing tomorrow John Doerr is going to outline why he thinks that is happening. He’ll talk about the Third Wave.
The First Wave was personal computers and the wave of disruption that caused. The second wave was the Internet, ditto. We are now, says Doerr, in the Third Wave.
What exactly is the Third Wave? It’s the tectonic shifts we’re seeing in mobile platforms (read his post here about the iPad), the social graph (particularly Facebook), and online commerce. All of these things are related and being accelerated by each other (Facebook is the largest mobile application, Zynga leverages Facebook and also stokes Facebook growth, Groupon is social/flash commerce, etc.).
Yuri Milner, who is second on deck on tomorrow morning’s agenda after John Doerr, made sense of all this to me over lunch yesterday.
Milner is investing in the fastest growing consumer Internet companies, and he’s doing it more aggressively than anyone else. He has stakes in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. His method is fascinating and we’ll be diving deeper into it tomorrow.
But what shocked me into realizing that Doerr is very, very right and that real disruption is happening right now wasn’t the how he invests, but why he invests, and in who. Why is he so confidently investing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in companies at multi-billion dollar valuations?
The Internet was a tremendous business accelerator, he says, but Facebook is another accelerator on top of that. Zynga’s Farmville grew to 75 million users just a few months after launching last year, and the company went from near zero revenue a year ago to hundreds of millions of dollars today.
It wasn’t that Zynga invented the killer game (every single Zynga game was copied from someone else, in fact). It’s that CEO Mark Pincus understood better than anyone else how to leverage that Facebook accelerator and ride that tsumani.
And when I asked him what Groupon, his third U.S. investment, has to do with the Facebook accelerator effect? He says that they grew so incredibly fast simply by advertising on Facebook.
Groupon tweaked and tweaked their model endlessly until they got it right – they felt real traction. Then they turned on the advertising. And what worked wasn’t television spots or Google ads. It was Facebook.
That must be freaking Google out right about now. It’s also the cornerstone of my belief that we are entering into the Age of Facebook. At no point in history has such a large number of people interacted so intimately with anything. Facebook’s half a billion monthly visitors is probably far more meaningful (although not yet as lucrative), as the nearly 1 billion people who visit Google each month.
The depth of interaction with Facebook is unprecedented. And it explains a lot of the privacy hysteria we’re all going through with them right now.
Ok, Back To Earth
The Third Wave is happening, but that doesn’t mean that Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, Twitter and a few others are the only winners, or even the biggest winners. Facebook may have created a monster that it simply cannot control, for example. The social graph, over time, may well become more of a federated model with many players. Listen closely to what both Milner, a Facebook investor, and Doerr, who isn’t, have to say about that tomorrow.
But those are just the historical details about who wins and who loses. The shift is happening right now. Groupon is blowing away Amazon’s early revenue and profit milestones by a scary factor, for example. Don’t think Amazon isn’t looking at Groupon with the same wary eye Google uses on Facebook.
And when you look at the world in this way – a Third Wave – it becomes easier to understand the strategic moves by the incumbents from the Second Wave. Yahoo is fleeing, looking for a warm place to hide. AOL is BFFing Facebook. Facebook is trying to set up the chess board so that they win all of this in the long run. And Google is standing toe to toe with Facebook and will not be backing down any time soon.
Meanwhile, the only mobile platforms that matter even a smidgen right now are the iPhone and Android. And that war looks too much like the Windows/Apple wars in the 80s over dominance of the personal computer.
There is so much creation going on around us. With that comes destruction, too. Nobody dies quietly in an all out war.
The Third Disruptive Wave #tcdisrupt
- Louis GrayThe Third Disruptive Wave #tcdisrupt
- Jacques van NiekerkThe Third Disruptive Wave #tcdisrupt
- Rob DianaThe Third Disruptive Wave #tcdisrupt
- Shawn L. Morrissey
Google's Vint Cerf on Private Clouds v. Public Clouds http://bit.ly/clkrdl
The debate about private clouds continue as the traditional heavyweight enterprise software providers make their big and glossy pitches for their vision of a private cloud.
So, it may come from Google, but still, it is refreshing to hear the intellectual tone that a scholar like Vint Cerf provides. Cerf is Google's chief technology evangelist but his reflections give a sound bearing on how private and public clouds do interact.
Sponsor
He spoke last week at the Google Atmosphere Conference. We came across one of the discussions he had with fellow Google innovators. He repeats what we hear him say a lot. It comes down to interoperability. Private clouds are tools. Google develops tools that are distributed on the Internet. The question is how do clouds interact?
It's a contrast to what we see with Microsoft or Oracle in its quest to sell cloud computing environments into the enterprise.
In the meantime Amazon continues its own quest to dispel private cloud computing as a myth, not a reality.
In an interview with eWeek, Adam Selipsky, vice president of AWS outlined their views:
"....Moreover, Selipsky said what people are calling private clouds come with the following drawbacks, where the customer will:· Still own the capex...and they're very expensive (big fixed investments)
· Not pay for what you use
· Not have true elasticity...when groups relinquish their servers, the company still owns the datacenter space and servers...and will also find that managing this supply chain will present a dilemma...will either have to significantly overprovision which is wasteful or become really expert at managing just-in-time supply-chain so there are no long waits for servers...managing a supply chain like this is really hard and takes a lot of effort and refining and keeping the status quo of long time to market is not so appealing either
· Still own the headache of managing the undifferentiated heavy lifting"
And so, the debate continues.
Discuss
Almost everyone out there knows someone who’s a perfectionist, if they aren’t one themselves.
Some people are perfectionists in only one aspect of their life (such as school or work) while others apply their perfectionist tendencies to every aspect of their lives.
Perfectionism is often looked at by those who don’t share the same obsession as a negative personality trait. In reality, perfectionism has both positive and negative impacts.
Learning to work within the constraints of being a perfectionist can lead to much higher productivity, but not working with those traits can lead to much lower productivity.
Your average perfectionist believes that not only is perfection achievable, but that it should be achieved whenever possible. They always strive to make their work better, and often derive pleasure from investing time and effort into their projects. They enjoy paying attention to detail and are often hard to please.
Perfectionism has a lot going for it. For one, it’s common to have perfectionist clients, and that can be a huge headache if you’re not also a perfectionist. Working with someone who insists on getting every single detail the absolute best it can be is easier if you share the same outlook. But there are also other benefits.
Higher Personal Standards
With high personal standards, it’s easier to meet the expectations of others. If you have low standards, you’ll always have to push yourself to meet what others expect from you. If your standards are already high, you’ll likely have a much easier time meeting the standards of others. After all, a perfectionist almost always has nearly-impossible standards for themselves, much higher than what outside parties would generally impose.
A More Streamlined Work Process
Most perfectionists are also hyper-organized. They’ve perfected their work process along with everything else in their life. This means, in many cases, that your work is more efficient than that of many non-perfectionists. You have processes and patterns for handling virtually anything that comes your way, from email to new project and clients to bookkeeping. It can definitely add up to a more effective workday with less wasted time and effort.
A More Polished End Result
If you’re a perfectionist, it’s likely that by the time a project makes it to the client (or is made public), it’s as polished as it can get. Your designs are always pixel-perfect and your development projects always work flawlessly. Others often look at your work in awe, wondering where you find the time and patience to perfect your work in such a way. It’s a definite plus, as it can lead to more work and more respect.
Better Attention to Detail
In addition to an overall feeling of being polished, your work often has all those extra little details that set it apart from the crowd. You go the extra mile to add details to your work that others wouldn’t even think of. This applies both to design and to other aspects of your business. Things like making your clients and others you do business with feel appreciated and valued can go a long way toward improving your business, and are often overlooked by many. A perfectionist will often have systems in place to make sure things are done to improve client relations above and beyond expectations.
Fewer Fixes Are Necessary Later On
One of the biggest direct advantages of being a perfectionist is that there are generally fewer bugs in your finished projects. Because you’ve examined everything in minute detail and tested every possible scenario you could come up with to make sure everything looked and functioned flawlessly, it’s much less likely your clients will find anything you overlooked. This means not only do you have fewer bugs to deal with (which are often unbillable), but also that your clients and users will be happier.
For all the upsides to perfectionism, there are also plenty of downsides. Perfectionists can be looked at as being completely anal and overbearing by those who don’t share their outlook. It can also be frustrating to clients who aren’t interested in “perfect” and simply want their project done yesterday.
Longer Development Cycle
When you strive for perfection, everything takes just a bit longer to get right. Even if you have a more efficient design and development process than many other designers, it’s likely you spend more time on each step than a lot of others do. This longer development cycle can lead to less time for other projects, longer work days, and unhappy clients. If you’re a perfectionist, you’ll need to have mechanisms in place to keep projects from taking up too much time. Setting mini-deadlines for individual steps in the process is one such way. Just make sure you stick to them.
It’s More Work
As designers and developers, we should all strive for our work to be as good as needed. But perfectionists often take it a step further and put work into a project that isn’t necessarily going to pay off in the end. Sometimes things don’t need to be perfect. A few rough edges here and there can add to a project, or at least not interfere with its effectiveness.
Sometimes It’s Unnecessary
Perfection isn’t always as important to everyone else as it is to a perfectionist. And some aspects of your work likely don’t demand perfection. Wireframes, for example, don’t need to be anywhere near perfect. Designers sometimes get hung up on how a wireframe looks without realizing that their clients or other members of their development team probably won’t care. And the danger we run into with creating perfect wireframes is that sometimes clients think they can’t make changes or are hesitant to make suggestions (which they end up making later in the process, when things are harder to change).
It’s Not Always Billable
If you spend ten hours trying to make sure that your design is pixel-perfect in every browser since IE5 for Mac, your clients probably aren’t going to be willing to pay for that. After all, they don’t really care if it shows up absolutely perfect in every browser still in use. What they do care about is that it’s functional in the browsers they and their clients use. Having every pixel line up perfectly isn’t high on the list of things most clients worry about.
It Can Drive You Crazy and Make You Sick
The harsh truth about perfectionism is that it can drive you nuts sometimes. Spending hours upon hours on minute details isn’t fun for most people (even perfectionists), and only serves to frustrate. Plus, when you’re always scrambling to make a deadline because you spent all last week getting the header text “just so” and didn’t bother designing or coding the footer or navigation until the day before the project was due. That leads to stress and anxiety, which can lead to real health problems. Find ways to reign in your perfectionism so that it works to your advantage rather than against you.
Lower Productivity
In extreme cases, perfectionists can get so wrapped up in the details of their work that they don’t finish the big-picture items. They might spend days working on one particular aspect of a project and end up missing deadlines for other important parts because they were so focused on just the one thing. This is destructive and can be very frustrating to perfectionists who don’t understand how others can move on to the next phase of a project without perfecting the current stage.
Any designer or developer who’s been in this business long has dealt with perfectionist clients. They have incredibly high standards and set ideas on what they want their website to do and how they want it to look.
Some of these clients are realistic about their websites, while others expect everyone else to bend to their sometimes-unreasonable demands. Dealing with a client like this, even if you’re a perfectionist yourself, can be trying.
But working with perfectionist clients can have its upsides, too. These clients usually know exactly what they want and can pinpoint what they like or don’t like about your designs. If you’re not a perfectionist, their attention to detail can get annoying fast, but if you learn to work with their perfectionism and to explain to them why something is done in a particular way, you can still have a good working relationship with them.
Of course, there are also neurotic clients who are never happy with the results and who seem to have such unreasonably high standards that it’s impossible to meet them. The thing about a client like this is that their perfectionism is often a cover up for insecurity about their own decisions.
If you choose to work with a client like this (and there are plenty of reasons to decline their projects), it’s helpful if you can present them with similar designs or ideas that have been successful. Backing up your ideas with research goes a long way toward getting past their reservations.
Perfectionists often don’t want to hear this, but sometimes good enough really is good enough. There’s the law of diminishing returns to consider here.
Sometimes the end result of tweaking something just a little bit more doesn’t hold enough value to warrant the output. If something is going to take you an hour (or five) to get just exactly the way you want it, but no one is doing to notice the difference but you, then sometimes it’s better to just accept it as-is. Chances are, you’ll forget all about it as you begin your next project.
When considering whether it’s time to just call a project “finished” and move on, think about what is to be gained if you continue working on it. If the only answer you can come up with is one that resembles “but it’s not quite right yet!” then it’s probably best to stop right there, tie up any real loose ends, and move on to the next phase or the next project.
Continuously working on the same thing with only marginal improvement is only going to add to your stress levels and create a negative, unhealthy work environment.
While most people who call themselves “perfectionists” do so in a light-hearted or positive manner, there are those out there to whom perfection becomes an obsession. They consider anything less than perfect completely unacceptable. This can lead to obsessive behavior and can have damaging effects on their overall quality of life.
Just feeling good about a job done to the best of your ability is entirely normal for a perfectionist and isn’t something to worry about. When it becomes particularly dangerous, though, is when a perfectionist feels they’re never quite able to attain perfection, and so drive themselves crazy trying to always reach this unattainable goal.
These perfectionists often place their entire self-worth on their accomplishments and ability to reach perfection, and since they’re never able to reach it, it creates a very negative self-image and low self-esteem or depression. The good news is that there are trained psychologists out there who can help those who are neurotically obsessed with perfection to overcome their obsession.
Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.
Are you a perfectionist? How has this impacted your career as a designer? Please share your thoughts with us…
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lucky
- SuezanneC Baskervillehello there,,i'm just new here,,looking for a friend,,,anyways if you are interested to know me add me?? here's my addy yessamincollin@yahoo.com
- yessamin collin
We’ve been taking some time to go over the more common BlackBerry error messages and what you can do to fix them without too much of a headache. Today we’re going to run down error 523, one that destroyed my BlackBerry Curve 8330 — twice. Unfortunately, this workaround wouldn’t have helped me much. It requires booting in safe mode, which is available only on devices running OS 4.6 and up (I had 4.5 on my 8330). But if you’re using a newer BlackBerry and run into this, you can try to work around the error and get your device back up and running.
Once you see the dreaded white error screen, pop your battery. Once you reinsert it and the device starts booting, hold down the escape key. I’m not sure exactly how long you need to hold it, but keep on holding it, just to be safe, until you see that the device is booting in safe mode. Again, you need OS 4.6 or above to do this.
Here’s the strange part, one that many users wouldn’t think of: disconnect your computer from the Internet. once you’re offline, plug your dying device into the computer and run Desktop Manager. From there you go to Application Loader, Add/Remove Applications, and click Start. The key here is to bump any applications you’ve recently installed — ones that might have caused the near-fatal change. I also recommend removing themes, as this is something I did after messing around with Application Loader for a while.
After this, back up your device. I wholeheartedly recommend a full wipe after fixing this error. This could extend the life of your device. I do recommend, however, that you remain open to picking up a new Berry. After I initially fixed my Error 523, it happened again about a month later. In other words, it might be a chronic problem.
If you’re having trouble with other error messages, send them in: jpawlikowski at the bbgeeks.com address. If you have the workaround to go along with it, all the better.
This post originated at BBGeeks.com - home to all things Blackberry! Also a great source of info about AT&T BlackBerry.
Recovering from BlackBerry error 523
This post originated at BBGeeks.com - home to all things Blackberry! Also a great source of info about AT&T BlackBerry.
Recovering from BlackBerry error 523
Obviously, this is the pessimistic take on the “What happens to Apple post-Jobs?” question:
Palm is basically Apple, Jr. And if a bunch of Apple geniuses can’t kick butt on their own at Palm, how are they going to kick butt without Steve at Apple?
He has a point, insofar as that Palm is staffed with many former Apple employees, and, in terms of design and feel and concept, WebOS is the most Apple-like, by far, of any other software platform in the world. But Frommer’s logical presumption that Palm’s former Apple employees are interchangeable with those who are at Apple today is headache-inducing.
Um. Yeah, exactly like that, except way fewer people, way fewer established products, way less valued brand, way less consumer momentum and way less than $34 billion in the bank. But other than that, exactly the same. Totally. Apple's so screwed.
- felix
But IFPI didn't target pirate websites here. Among the sites it took down was I Rock Cleveland, a site whose author, Bill Lipold, painstakingly sought and received explicit permission to post every single track and excerpt he put up (though in many cases, he could have relied on fair use rather than going to the effort).
By using the law to annihilate labors of love like I Rock Cleveland, sites that obeyed all the rules and sought permission from the copyright holders at every turn, IFPI's message is simple: "Don't bother getting permission. Just take stuff. You're wasting your time trying to obey the law. It all comes out the same in the end -- we don't care whether you obey our rules or not."
IFPI will argue that it was just trying to help artists, that everyone makes mistakes, that copyright is complicated. But these are exactly the same arguments that the musicbloggers whose sites were vanished by IFPI's abusive lawyering would have made, if they'd been given a chance.
And the artists, the human shields in whose name IFPI is doing all of this? They don't want it, don't need it, and don't understand it. As one band's publicist wrote, "Just so you know, this is none of our doing...apparently, DMCA operate on their own set of odd rules, as they even requested that the (band's) official blog remove the song....What a headache..."
Targeted bloggers need to know these details, not only so that they can remove the file if it's indeed infringing, but so that they can file a DMCA counter-notice in the event that the file is not infringing.Music Journalism is the New PiracyOrdinarily, the party issueing the takedown notice would be required by US copyright law to specify which content is being accused. But, as an international organization headquartered in London, IFPI is arguing that it doesn't even need to play by the USA's rules. "We neither admit nor accept," they write, "...that Google is entitled to be served a notice in compliance with the DMCA." Translation: IFPI is essentially threatening to sue Google under some unspecified foreign law -- presumably one which lacks even the modest safe-harbor provisions available in the USA. It's no wonder Google felt the need to take drastic action to avoid liability, even at the expense of the resulting headaches and bad press.
Music industry to musicbloggers: there's no point in obeying the law
- Antoine Bertier
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