Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
For reference, see:
Image created using the Tombstone Generator.
The younger set aren’t communicating via email, according to this c|net Digital Kids news story:
Just ask a group of teen Internet entrepreneurs, who readily admit that traditional e-mail is better suited for keeping up professional relationships or communicating with adults.
“I only use e-mail for my business and to get sponsors,” Martina Butler, the host of the teen podcast Emo Girl Talk, said during a panel discussion here at the Mashup 2007 conference, which is focused on the technology generation. With friends, Bulter said she only sends notes via a social network.
“Sometimes I say I e-mailed you, but I mean I Myspace’d or Facebook’ed you,” she said.
Reading this, I was reminded of danah boyd’s presentation, My Friends, MySpace at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. One of the points she made that stuck out in my head is that young people see email as a medium for communicating with people for have power over them: parents, school officials, employers, college admissions boards — in other words, “The Man”.
The use of social networking software rather than email for communications means that there’s some Balkanization going on, with users of each social networking app unable to send messages to friends on other social networking apps. The article points out that this problem may in fact be an opportunity:
…Ashley Qualls, president of WhateverLife, a graphical tool for users of MySpace, said she keeps adding on new social networks to her roster of memberships online. “People leave a trail of where they decide to go,” she said.
Badshah said that to subscribe to only one social network means losing out on friendships with people who are active on other rival social networks. That’s because having real estate on MySpace or Facebook means keeping tabs with only certain friends through messaging, blogs and recent photos. That the two major social networks don’t interoperate could be reason for a new social network that could act as an intermediary to aggregate friends in one place, Badshah said, much the way Trillian did for IM applications like Yahoo and AOL.
“It’s a problem for teens–you’re like losing out on some of your friends if you choose just one,” he said.
“To have all your buddy lists in one place, that’s where this is going,” Badshah said.
Tucows will be in Chicago at HostingCon 2007, which starts today (Monday, July 23rd) and runs until Wednesday, July 25th at Navy Pier. HostingCon bills itself as “the largest gathering of hosted services professionals in the world” and for more details about the conference, check our their conference program.
We’ll be making our presence known there — I won’t be there, but my coworkers Kim, Leona, Adam and Hasdeep will. Be sure to keep an eye out for squishy cows and…
We’ll have a booth in the exhibitors’ hall — booth 817, which is right beside the networking lounge. Feel free to come chat with us about our new Email Service, Premium Domains and other upcoming things from Tucows.
You can look for booth 817 on the official HostingCon map or use our slightly customized one below to find us:
This Wednesday, July 25th, from 3:30 – 4:15 p.m. in room 109, Product Manager for Domains Adam Eisner will be making his presentation, Rethinking Domain Name Search.
Here’s the description of his presentation:
With the rise of the domain name aftermarket, many expired names never return to the public for repurchase. This, combined with the fact most web hosting companies don’t provide an effective domain name search feature on their website, results in many lost sales opportunities for domain names, web hosting, email and more.
This session will show web hosts how to “re-think” their website’s domain name search strategy in response to market developments like better name suggestion technology, fewer available names, and the rise of the domain name aftermarket. The strategies outlined and demonstrated will help web hosts obtain tangible improvements in their domain name and web hosting sales.
Topics covered will include:
- How to improve sales by improving your existing domain name search process (using tangible examples)
- Maximizing the number of relevant results provided using name suggestion technology
- Using domain name aftermarket to ensure customers receive the most relevant domain name availability results possible
Come on out and say hello!
One area of user interface development that could stand some improvement is spell-checking. I’m not aware of any widely-used system for spell-checking a web application’s template or resource files, but good spelling certainly helps an app look more professional.
The latest spelling mistake in an application I’ve seen comes from the “Edit App” page for Facebook developers. One of the fields on the page lets you specify the “Canvas Page URL”, the URL within apps.facebook.com where your app can be found. It uses Ajax to give you instant feedback as to whether the URL is available or not as you type — but the word “Available” is misspelled:
In the most recent posting on Jeff Atwood’s excellent developer blog Coding Horror, the question is posed:
Why does the Mac require the user to jump through a bunch of manual hoops to install an application? Why not use a traditional installer (a.k.a. setup.exe) that automates this manual work for you?
Rather than get into the details of the debate in the comments to that article over the ease of installing apps on the Mac the manual way, let me instead show you Jing’s answer to the question:
(I wrote about Jing in the last post.)
The Jing approach is to give you two options:
No options dialog boxes, no EULAs, no extraneous messages for the purposes of marketing — just install and go.
I think it’s a good solution. What say you, Jeff?
My job as Tucows’ Tech Evangelist often requires me to take screenshots and screencasts. Although Mac OS X (Tiger) is my primary laptop OS and Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) is my primary desktop OS, I shoot and edit screencasts on Windows because Camtasia is the one screen recording app that does the job for me.
TechSmith, the folks behind Camtasia Studio, have announced something called the Jing Project. Jing is software for both Mac and Windows that promises to do three things:
Here’s what they have to say on the site:
What is this thing called Jing? Video tour.
The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.
It’s something we want to give you, along with some online media hosting, to see how you use it. The project will eventually turn into something else. Tell us what you think so we can figure out what that is.
Try it, you’ll like it. Find out more in the FAQ, or on the weblog.
I’ve been hoping that someone would make decent screencasting software that ran on the Mac (and so have the people at 37signals). I’m hoping that this — or whatever springs forth from the project — is it.
Click to see the comic on its original page.
Trust me, kids: learn to play a musical instrument reasonably well before college.
As for accordion playing, the “coolness graph” looks like this:
