Ken Berger’s Blog

Friendfeed is now doing to Twitter what Tribe.net et al did to Friendster.
At least in the reliability aspect.

Twitter is so well-loved and popular that it’s failing frequently under its own weight.
While it can be argued that there’s worse problems to have, (first part of prior sentence), the second part of that sentence means that some folks will seek alternatives, as asserted in this TechCrunch article.

And so it goes: free market forces inspire movement among providers. Despite my early counsel to Friendster’s founder (who I informally advised), the site was unable to mend its tech difficulties fast enough when its popularity first peaked.

But there is a key difference here: people still love Twitter. There is great brand loyalty, and it would be tough to argue that there is any kind of backlash or “yesterday’s niteclub” kind of thing, as might be argued right now against Facebook. Friendster lost people in droves due to a revolution: the founder made some key decisions that angered or alienated some early adopters, banning some and attempting to enforce quality measures including what people could include as content on their page. Tribe, and later Myspace, came in and served these people, as evidenced by the hideous and browser-busting pages allowed to exist on those sites. This, together w/ terrible page load times and outages, rallied public exodus and folks publicly declared their jumps over to Tribe.net and a few others, never to return.

Twitter now sits at a critical time in its history. And it can certainly coexist along side Friendfeed and others (they’re different services). Hopefully its tech issues will be solved soon enough to do so.

Recipe goes like this: Rally supporters and build hype via unprecedented viral marketing, but schedule release for 10am local time instead of midnite (it’s a global product, people!), AND make it impossibly unclear as to when exactly on the release date the dload will be available, then for the first couple hours have all the related servers pointing to the dloads not able to withstand the load that your campaign actually more than succeeded in achieving…

Yes, I live by and love FF, yes I know it’s an open source product and I’m free to run back to Microsoft if a massively more well-capitalized product is my first priority, but still I hate to see such successful and noble PR go to some waste.

This is humbling: thought I’d been most everywhere. But there’s plenty of grey space on this map, showing lots more of the world to be explored. Which is a great thing.

This is an incredible place in the British Virgin Islands. Huge boulders piled up against a breathtaking beach with pure turquoise waters. The boulders form amazing grottoes, many where you have to squeeze through the rocks to enter giving you a semi-private bathtub of seawater, shared with little fish that sometimes poke in.

The Baths certainly makes my Top 5 Best World Beach list.

The Baths of Virgin Gorda from Ken Berger on Vimeo.

Southeast Asia, 01/08

1. My album of pix and vids
2. Lawrence’s Cambodia pix
3. Lawrence’s Laos pix

So the trip has come and gone, I’ve been back over a month now, and as you can see, no blogging was done while there.

Travel is hard work (at least the way I do it). All planning is done on-the-fly, which consumes most spare moments. Only stayed in “rustic” places, so no in-room internet (or any electricity at all sometimes). And most of all, it’s great to be unplugged and immersed into the local thing rather than a computer screen.

But plenty of pictures and some quick videos were taken. My camera broke upon entering Cambodia, but luckily, Lawrence, who is a much better photographer w/ way better equipment, filled in and his photos are here too.

So enjoy:
1. My album of pix and vids
2. Lawrence’s Cambodia pix
3. Lawrence’s Laos pix

Take your 3G Windows Mobile phone (AT&T 8525 or Tilt, Sprint Mogul), and download WMWifRouter. When you launch it, it turns on the phone’s wi-fi and creates an access point called “WMWifiRouter”, backhaul fed by the phone’s 3G connection. This SSID is now viewable by ANY wi-fi device near it.

The practicality of this is huge:

- Stay at any hotel (where there’s 3G coverage), no more need to find one that offers pricey wi-fi or wired in-room coverage.
- Share the connection with a few devices.
- Turn your car into a hotspot. On long drives, let everyone be connected. No need to rent Avis’ Autonet product.
- Simplest connectivity ever! No need to even deal w/ pairing and setting up your tethered laptop via bluetooth. Keep bluetooth off and just use wi-fi on both devices.
- Especially great for devices that don’t have bluetooth data profiles– for iPhones today that are only EDGE, use this to 3G the iPhone’s connectivity (for supergeeks who can afford to carry 2 hi-end phones).

It runs through the phone’s battery quick, so having a power cord handy is a good idea.

It is with shock, regret, and confused frustration that I report: my beloved scooter seems about to be a de facto gonner.

Before leaving for my winter trip, exactly as I had done last year before going to Brazil, I brought the scoot to the southeast corner of 35th St and 1st Av, where there exists a very-rare-for-Manhattan two huge bike racks. Rugged and thick, they seem built for motorcycles rather than bicycles and are always laden w/ motorcycles and scooters, some of the fairly expensive Vespa and even Harley variety. I’ve seen some motos chained there for over several years untouched. Removed the battery, chained the scooter to the rack, covered it, kissed it good month.

Well I must have picked the wrong time to test this longevity. Got back from my month away a week ago, finally got a chance last night to drive by and make sure all was ok. It was not. Nary a 2-wheeled vehicle in sight. Not even any chains or motorcycle locks left over. Turns out that on Feb 8, NYPD flatbed trucks came through, cut through everything and carted them off to the tow pound. Motive? Who knows. Attempt to raise city revenue? Homeland security? Scooter gangs crackdown? Beats me.

The charge is $185 for the tow, plus $20/day storage. Of course, I had been travelling overseas and they didn’t exactly phone me up anyway to alert of the event, so the days have been racking up. They want $600+ to give it back today, $20 more for every day I wait (no maximum). Since this well-exceeds the value of the vehicle, the indecent yet sensible decision is to simply forfeit the bike. Of course, the bike also had 3 parking tickets attached which were affixed just before they towed it (you don’t even know you got a ticket till you see it at the pound).

Oh, and what will they do w/ the bike? Could I participate in its auction? No. They tell me that within 20 days if unclaimed, they will simply crush it.

I’m taking it amazingly well. For $1400, I got 2 years worth of incredible riding. I can now get another bike. Oh, and I survived crazy 5-boro riding unharmed.

As a last chance, I’m told I could attempt to fight the parking tickets (soon!) in walk-in court. If I prevail, they also call the tow pound and have them release the bike, all charges dropped. Heads you win all, tails you lose all. It reminds me of the coin toss scene in No Country for Old Men: “You stand to win EVERYTHING!”

(c)Coen Bros

** UPDATE: I won the ‘coin toss’ Went to walk-in parking ticket court, they dismissed all 3 tickets, told the pound to release the bike free of charge. Justice is served. **

I’m off to Southeast Asia for a month. Initial reason (read: excuse) is to visit a software outsourcing development shop I’m involved in, located in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Extreme programming, Ruby on Rails, Facebook apps are the current foci of the shop.

Also taking some time off to discover Cambodia, Laos, and potentially Myanmar. I think it would be an extremely interesting time to visit the latter and believe it’s relatively safe to now do so. We’ll see how things go.

I won’t have a laptop with me (only the N810), and I’m more likely to stay in a bungalow than a Hilton, so can’t make many promises as to real-time coverage on this blog, but we’ll see. Taking time off from the NYC winter has been a theme I’ve managed to keep up with since being here.

This post inspired by the Union Square Ventures guys: Fred who wrote about wanting a phone that was “free”, as in open, (hence fPhone), and Andrew with a suggestion that the Nokia N810 could be that phone, here amongst us already.

Anyone who knows me knows I feel that a good gadget is hard to find, and I secrete dopamine upon the rare union of myself and a killer gadget or piece of software that radically changes how I conduct my day-to-day life.

I’m here to say that the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet is such a device. “You complete me”…

My dream for a long time has been to have the internet on me all the time, in a fast, eye-pleasing browsing experience. The AT&T 8525 was the first to make me feel that way, as well as its successor the Tilt (HTC-8900) which brought a few minor improvements. I rave how great the Tilt is, though I join a very lonely club in raving about a Microsoft product. I think that the irony today is that Windows Mobile is the most open of the mobile OS platforms, and I’m willing to defend that view in a different conversation. (We’ll see what happens with Google’s Android).

But the phone still has so many drawbacks to hinder a true browsing experience: the screen is small, the browser can’t render many pages correctly, AT&T forces an annoying MediaNet page condenser which I can’t seem to defeat, etc.

Some feel they have the web-browsing-to-go experience now with the iPhone. I HATE the iPhone in its current incarnation for reasons others have explained before: It is a “closed device in an open world”. “A model-looking woman that you know has great looks and feel but flawed fundamentals, yet you date her because you can’t resist, can’t be surprised when it doesn’t work out ultimately.”…

I’ve also been using a Fujitsu Lifebook U810. It’s a very impressive device. A cute little yet fully-performing laptop running Windows XP (or Vista if you make the mistake of using that atrocity as of today). Battery life rocks, weighs about 2 pounds, so very easy to tote to a café or on a plane.

But you can’t have it *on you*. A bit too heavy and bulky to put on a belt clip. The keys are too small to touch-type, too big to thumb-type Blackberry style.

The N810 is amazing for what it is. Weighs nothing. A bit bigger than an iPhone. Great screen, great battery life. Everything really well thought-out from scratch. The key here is to expect everything browser-based. I run MS Exchange for my email (excellent host: http://sherweb.com), and access my email via webmail, also the built-in email client does a great job accessing via IMAP. The big show-stopper for most critics is that there’s no phone or SIM card (it does have Skype), but I don’t mind carrying a phone around in addition, and the combination of the 2 is magic. The N810 sniffs out a wi-fi signal or via Bluetooth using your phone. With my Tilt, I now have a 3G browsing experience (another advantage over the iPhone, as it’s not yet 3G). The keypad, while taking a bit of getting used to, is very solid and the keys bigger than a Blackberry.

So now I can keep the internet w/ me at all times. My new best friend. Highly recommend the product; hopefully it’s really just a prototype to make way for a new version coming w/ a phone on-board.

** UPDATE 3/20/08: this is now an old post. Offer expired. Thanks. **

Xobni is a very useful Outlook plugin.

I have 5 invites to give away (as of today), so leave a comment if you want one.