Author Archives: tlianza

GMail Tip

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If you’re looking to find all unread messages in Gmail, it’s not obvious. It’s actually very easy though, as this tip reveals – just put “is:unread” in the search bar.

This is helpful if you pull in mail from a lot of different sources, or have done bulk imports in the past, and your unread mail doesn’t end up in the first few pages of your inbox. I have had some mail lingering there, and was thankful for this tip. I have a decent amount of past e-mail stored in the depths of gmail.

You are currently using 1705 MB (60%) of your 2832 MB.

Not that I actually look at 1.7 GB of mail very often, but it’s convenient to have a substantial archive that’s easily searchable. If you’re looking to bulk upload a ton of old mail into gmail, I have found Mark Lyon’s Gmail Loader works well.

Malfunction Junctions

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A post in Signal vs Noise today referred to the Wikipedia article on Malfunction Junctions – confusing and dangerous intersections. There are some funny photos here.

The one that immediately came to mind for me is the Route 3/Drum Hill Road rotary in Lowell, MA. The aerial view doesn’t do it full justice, but when you’re in the car exiting the highway and are immediately put into a four-lane roundabout, it feels far more dysfunctional.

What do friend counts mean?

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I was wondering, when looking across the various social networks that I’m a part of, what if anything can be extrapolated from the friend counts in each. In real life I have a given set of friends, and subsets of them and I are members of various networks under which we are labeled friends. My friend counts go like this across both social networks and sites with a social networking component:

MySpace: 90 (includes many people I don’t know)
LinkedIn: 74
Flickr: 70 (friends+family)
Friendster: 41
Facebook: 29
Amazon: 7
YouTube: 5
Del.icio.us: 4
Upcoming.org: 4
Digg: 3
Netflix: 3
Orkut: 3

UPDATE:Dodgeball: 20, Last.fm: 2, MyBlogLog: 2

Orkut almost doesn’t count because it’s largely abandoned (in the US), but I did sign up for it back in the day. Looking across all of the networks, it’s clear I have different sets of friends in each. I imagine that speaks, to some extent, as to which of my friends are the most nerdy. Fil is clearly tops in that list. He appears in 11 of 12 networks (no Netflix). Then there are people like Martha who appear in some of my least-populous networks (Netflix, Upcoming.org) but not the more popular (Facebook).

If I were to trim MySpace down to people I actually know, I think it would dip below LinkedIn on the list. Perhaps that speaks to my age? I keep in touch with more people in a professional context than social? As for some of the lower links (single digit ones) I think that’s largely explained by the lack of value those sites provide with their social components. Amazon is missing a huge opportunity, as their social components have languished for years, and they could do a lot of great things with them. Upcoming.org is another great opportunity that seems to be fading. Netflix is an exception – they do a nice job, but there just aren’t as many people I know with a Netflix account.

I have an order of magnitude fewer friends on YouTube as opposed to Flickr, which I don’t think is fully explained by the fact that photos are more popular than videos. I think a lot of it has to do with YouTube’s terrible user experience when it comes to inviting and sharing with friends. I still can’t see some of my friends’ videos, and I have no idea why.

From a strict social networking perspective, I like Facebook’s structure the best, but I have relatively few friends there. I think that largely speaks to my age. Facebook grew popular in colleges a few years after I left, and only a subset of people I know went back and joined it as alumni.

I also found it interesting that my friend counts across the various sites fit a long tail distribution.

OpenID is not looking good.

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I realize I’ve had a lot of anti-technology posts recently, but really they’re more like anti-hype posts. A lot of technologies are hyped like crazy and when you start working with them you realize that it’s a lot of crap. Today’s story is about OpenID, which I recently implemented (but we haven’t published yet) for wishlisting.

If you’ve never used it, the gist of it is that it’s going to give you the ability to log in to any site that supports it, and all you need is a single username and password. Makes sense and sounds compelling, although there was this thing called Passport which tried to do that too. It was never widely supported by websites, even though everyone with a Hotmail account had one. The big reason people point to with regard to Passport’s lack of adoption was that it was totally controlled by Microsoft, and people/companies had trust issues with them watching what sites you join and controlling all of your data.

So, the OpenID standard was created, and the big hype is around how it’s “decentralized” and no single entity controls all of your data, solving Passport’s biggest problem. Except, for most people, it doesn’t. And it introduces some problems Passport didn’t have. And no one seems to be doing anything about them.

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The Myth of MythTV

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After nearly 3 years of being a MythTV user, I have finally had to settle on the fact that it isn’t very good. Ironically, it was named “MythTV” because it was supposed to be the solution to the “mythical convergence box.” That box is still a myth.

I’ve been through painful upgrade after painful upgrade. I’ve rebuilt it a few times, and think I’m generally pretty good at troubleshooting it. At no point was I ever really happy with it. Even when it was working perfectly, I could never switch over to it and use it for primary TV viewing. One of it’s fatal flaws was that channel changing is too slow. But, I looked past that because it had so many other strengths.

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Ignite was great again

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I posted some photos of Ignite this time. I enjoyed it very much. I’d have to give the “best talk” award to Marcelo Calbucci who’s talk about getting error messages out of AJAX apps was both hilarious and informative. Hillel Cooperman’s talk (founder of tastingmenu.com) about How to Eat Out and Leo Dirac‘s talk about the future of humanity both deserve honorable mentions for being both funny and informative. Those were the three shining stars for me.

After having been to both Ignites, I’d offer the following suggestions to speakers:

  • Be funny. The funnier the better.
  • Keep in step with your slides. The 15 second thing is hard, but it’s intentional. Some speakers were too long-winded, missed slides, and didn’t seem to stick with the spirit of the presentations.
  • Don’t come across as a corporate shill. If you’re hiring, say it only once, preferably at the end of an otherwise informative and entertaining presentation.