Bjorn Tipling

Silicon Alley Insider has live coverage over the blood letting happening at AOL. They’re quoting laid off employees, and it brings home the conflicted emotions that come with working what is a well-known brand, but with a tarnished reputation:

“I bid adieu, AOL. It’s been (bitter)sweet. Finally, I can go do some work for a company whose name I won’t be ashamed to mention in casual conversation. A company whose products don’t routinely get mocked in the popular vernacular. A company that doesn’t lay off employees twice a year.”

The downfall of AOL has left me feeling satisfied after the decade long barrage of Free AOL! cds littering our homes, stores, and streets, but I feel bad for these people. Employees always end up having to pay for the stupidity of their ‘betters.’ I’ve been through lay off’s once, and I’m sure not the last time either. It’s not any fun.

If you’re not with us, you’re against us, and Time is not with us. Us being people who use the internet. I don’t know who edits that weekly paper/website/whatever, but their new Top 10 Websites for 2007 list is telling. While everyone else is going gaga over the iPhone being declared the number one gadget of the year, let’s take a look at this list:

1. Lemonade.com
2. AskSunday.com
3. Wink.com
4. TechPresident.com
5. goodreads.com
6. MenuPages.com
7. DontForgetYourToothbrush.com
8. VolunteerMatch.com
9. Fatsecret.com
10. Indeed.com

I’ve never heard of a single one of these. Must be because I’m out of touch with the web. Not enough hours put in I suppose. I’m all for new discovery and such but a top ten list should have top websites? I don’t necessarily mean traffic, but at least importance in our lives, buzz, gradients-rounded-corners-glass-reflection ratio? Even if the list were Top Ten NEW Websites for 2007, this list is out of touch. While goodreads.com and Wink.com, and possibly even Indeed.com are marginally interesting, this list fails to excite. A real top ten list would include Twitter. Could be Time’s intended audience, you know the non-tech savvy ‘regular people’ that are still using IE6 and bugging you for computer help because they clicked on a link in a phishing email.

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest computer company, sells a lot of interesting products. In the hand-held category, however, I’ve only find expensive garbage. Anything that doesn’t have on-board persistent storage measured in gigabits can’t really be worth hundreds of dollars, can it? HP isn’t the only company peddling what I think is junk, Palm and many other notable brands are suspect. Some have as little as 70MB of persistent storage! Images and other media will not have the room they need. Whatever cool interface and/or colorful operating system your handheld may be using, that little space will leave you painfully constrained. It may be fine for your needs, but at that price? Let’s just compare the price and storage space of four products (click the links on each for full specs):

HP iPaqStorage: 256 MB total memory (192 MB ROM 64 MB RAM); up to 192 MB user available persistent storage memory
Price: $399.99  Palm T|XStorage:
128MB w/ 100MB accessible to user
Price: $299

Apple Ipod TouchStorage:8GB/16GB Price:$299/$399  Nokia N95Storage:8GB Price:~$599  The Nokia is a little on the steep end (but there’s so much more than just that roomy space). Notice that the two products with gigabytes of space are not traditional handhelds, they’re not even sold as such but they excel at meeting those same needs. I don’t see why HP would think anyone should pay the kind of money they’re asking for the iPaq. This 70MB, 128MB thing just doesn’t cut it anymore. Consumers are (hopefully) smarter than this.

Ok I’m not paid to be a company shill, I’m just an engineer/UI guy, but it’s hard not to be positive about working for such a cool company. The press coverage for AskEraser seems to be mostly positive. Here are some of my favourite blogs’ comments/reviews:

Henry Blodget, my favorite blogging genious says that “IACI’s Ask.com continues to have the best search engine in the business” but that AskEraser is irrelevant and that “features won’t win the search business. And neither does advertising.” Heh. In a subsequent post today about search engine marketshare he predicts bad things for Ask: “Ask is going to get squeezed out of the search market. Its only hope is to focus on a niche or sell itself to Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft.” Well shit.

paidcontent.org, one of the coolest blogs ever, as always only reports the facts (and don’t editorialize them like other blogs do, which is why they’re so awesome), but get them wrong, and so see me jump to the rescue in the comments and look they corrected it with a strike through. I should get paid for this.

Mashable, the blog that paid me $100 to troll them, likes Ask.com’s new feature, and are so happy about it they forgot to spell check: “However, this is a good move by Ask.com; if you can’t be better than Google as far as search is concernet [sic], find some area where you can actually show that you’re better than the competition and capitalize on that. It all adds up in the end.”

The whole thing is big news today and Blogrunner and Techmeme are doing a great job tracking the whole thing. Technorati’s new meme tracker…not so much. I don’t know how they track things, but at best it’s confusing and opaque, and at worst, well…heh.

I used to love Slate, until they started having videos on their home page start on auto-play, but a recent reddit link let me to this funny article, titled “A Librarian’s Worst NightmareYahoo! Answers, where 120 million users can be wrong.”

Here’s a quote (emphasis added):

“While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren’t true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It’s every middle-school teacher’s worst nightmare about the Web.”

That’s all true, but man it’s so addictive to try and get your score up. When I was playing with it, I figured out how to get awarded the ‘right’ answer most of the time. You search for questions that are about to expire that have no answers, and then come up with a half way decent answer, and BOOYA: 10 points awarded. Not very good for ‘authority’ or ‘accuracy’, but hey, it’s fun!

Ask.com, the best search engine ever, also my place of employment, just added AskEraser which allows you some privacy safeguards other search engines don’t. I didn’t get to work on it much, but I know guys and gals who did and they busted their butts trying to get this in before the holiday, so hats off to all of them. And hats off to you for checking it out. Check it out:

Better check out the FAQ page on the details. Also watch the Ask.com blog for any updates.

Read More:

The New York Times: Ask.com Puts a Bet on Privacy
AP @ Yahoo News: Ask.com to unveil new privacy control
Search Engine Land: Ask.com Launches AskEraser Giving Searches Ability To Search Anonymously

Recently Google started to index its Blogger blog’s images. There was some speculation as to why they had not done so already. Well here’s a clue:

Want some results with your spam? Notice that all of those spam links come from the Blogger blogspot.com domain. You can see the search for yourself.

LinkedIn has launched a redesign and a developer platform. The redesign includes its fair share of rounded corners, but they seem to have laid off the gradients. Good for them!

It is a very clean and crisp new look. I especially like the new menu, it’s very simple and kind of beautiful.

In addition to a developer platform (a link to which I can’t see) there are also a Facebook style news feed (which has been on my LinkedIn page for a few weeks now), and some kind of Articles section.

Interesting how they’ve tied me into the Ask.com network, even though I never had to validate my network via an email like I had to with Facebook. Maybe they figure it out from my contacts? Or maybe you can just change your info and it let’s you be a part of a network even though you don’t work for the company? Not really sure.

I wonder if this module section is where you add custom made applications:

Well done LinkedIn! I probably spend more time on LinkedIn than any other social networking site. It just seems to be more relevant. I really have taken an effort to find people I used to work with, and I’ve never tried to connect people actively on MySpace or Facebook. I’m interested in what my past co-workers have been up to. There’s also a real value in staying networked, you never know where you might get your next opportunity. Also I’ve received notifications from recruiters (not third party) about positions. (No thanks by the way I love working at Bloglines and Ask.com). But I see very real value in LinkedIn that I don’t really see in Facebook. I can connect to friends via email and blogs and what not and a bunch of meaningless (but fun) widgets made by developers, I don’t need a Facebook. But LinkedIn offers so much more, including a pretext to stay connected with past colleagues.

I’d really like to see more about this new developer platform. I think its exciting and I wouldn’t mind making a ‘lil something for it.

Read More:
LinkedIn Blog: Announcing LinkedIn News, Redesigned Homepage & more
LinkedIn Blog: LinkedIn’s Intelligent Application Platform
Venture Beat: LinkedIn launches platform — a better business social network
TechCrunch: LinkedIn API and New Homepage Drawing Near

Of course she isn’t, however, sometimes it seems that way. You see I wish I could leave comments on online column posts of hers like this one (probably requires registration). I think a lot of us are reading blogs so often, you must agree that it seems strange to go from a blog to a news site based on print that doesn’t allow comments. The New York Times has excellent blogs that do allow comments, but why haven’t they enabled them for other articles? Why can’t I comment on a news article? It all seems so dated. It seems especially bizaare when you come to an article like Dowd’s and it seems like she’s just talking to some kind of invisible audience. Of course she’s widely read, but still the indirectness is…kind of creepy?

While I think The New York Times is one of the few old media companies doing things that ensure their survival, in many ways they’re still having problems. It is time for them to treat the paper product as an ancillary and not the website (even if for now the former makes most of the money).

It’s confirmed, I’m an award winning troll!

This afternoon I check my email and I see this:

“Hey Bjorn Tipling,

In case you didn’t see this post yet, you are the biggest troll this week!

As you probably know, “At the end of each week, we’ll reward the snarkiest troll with a $100 voucher for iTunes, the Apple Store or Amazon, depending on your trolly preference. But since you really need no excuse to lob insults our way, we’re also happy to send the money to a charity of your choosing.”

So Bjorn, just let me know your trolly preference and I’ll send it over!

Hope you had a great weekend.

Adam A. Hirsch

Community and Marketing Director

Mashable

www.Mashable.com“

Looks like I finally get what’s coming to me! I’m going to pick Amazon, as Itunes doesn’t work on linux. I’ve been spending money like crazy on the Amazon MP3 store anyways.