Glass Houses, Yahoo and MS. Glass Houses.
Google announced their new Buzz product yesterday, and both Microsoft and Yahoo were quick with their responses. Microsoft was all, '...that's a dumb idea. Besides Hotmail has had linking with external sites forever.' And Yahoo was like, '...we had the original Buzz.' Here's my feeling on their positions.
First, Microsoft. Hotmail? Really? Have you really looked at Hotmail lately? It's horrible. In fact, last I heard, it could be a detriment to getting a job. Sure lots of people probably still use Hotmail (not that I know personally of course), but your problem is, no one is excited about using Hotmail.
Second, Yahoo. Buzz.yahoo.com? Really? I don't know if you noticed or not, but Buzz.yahoo.com is a straight rip on Digg. Try to innovate next time. Or better yet, take those resources and pour them into Flickr. It's about the only viable business you have left.
A (cosmetic) fix for those Feedburner tracking URLs
I'm a huge Google Reader nerd, and a few months ago, Feedburner (an RSS feed provider) started generating long URLs that are used to track outbound clicks in their feeds. Here's an example:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/solar-eclipse-images-show-dazzling-corona-detail/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
Everything after that question mark (in red) isn't necessary to the user, and is only needed for the feed owner to track clicks from their feed. This isn't a big deal by any means, but it is kinda annoying to me. I parse my river of RSS feeds and occasionally pass along interesting links to my twitter feed, and I prefer to send the cleanest URL possible. Sure it's shortened automatically with bit.ly, but it still bugs me, so I've been looking for a solution to clean up the URL.
I'm not a big JS coder, but I figured there had to be a Greasemonkey script that would do the trick, and after doing a bit of searching, I found the solution over at userscripts.org. Enter FeedBurnerTrackingQueryStripper. This little Greasemonkey script does the trick perfectly. It's strips the tracking information from the URL after the page loads. So the feed owner is happy, and the user is left with a simpler URL.
MacWorld Conference website…Ouch.
With my best sarcasm voice: 'IDG has really outdone themselves again with their stellar MacWorld Expo website this year.' To say nothing of the issues with the code (the footer was in the middle of all the pages a week or so ago), but the site itself is so hard to use. I'm attending the MacIT Conference again this year, and I'd love to have a PDF to download so I can read through the descriptions and figure out my schedule. Instead the only way to get this info is to click through each link on the site, either back and forth or via a bunch of browser tabs. You'd think downloading the "MacIT Conference-@-a-Glance" PDF would be useful, but what you get is a PDF print out of a schedule produced in Excel. No information about conferences at all aside from their start and stop times. It's painfully obvious, the whole thing was put together with a shoestring budget, but why? Are Expos going the way of the dinosaur, or is it just bad management? Or both? It's hard to say, but complicating such a simple task isn't helping anyone. This site could stand a healthy dose of Web 2.0, stat!
TechScorn
TechScorn is now iPhone-ready thanks to the handy iWPhone Wordpress Plugin and Theme! The guys over at Content Robot frickin' rock. Thanks guys!
Upcoming RSS Choking on Spam
Most Upcoming users may not even notice the war that's raging behind the scenes at this very minute. However, being the RSS junkie that I am, it's painfully obvious. You see, on the web-side, it looks like Upcoming is doing a good job of keeping the site spam free. Unfortunately it appears their RSS pipe, which I use daily to find new events in San Francisco, is passing along each and every spam event that's entered.
