Twitter is here to stay, and has become a potent communication tool in many industries. I recently received a request for advice on how better to use Twitter, and thought I would share some of the lessons I’ve learned over the years as an avid IT industry tweeter.

• Twitter Zen: A Global Conversation like No Other The most important concept to grasp is the fundamental nature of Twitter: It is an ongoing, global, democratic conversation. It is not a blog, USENET, Facebook or MySpace, or an instant message platform, though it does have certain elements of all of those.
• Twitter Zen: Setting up Your Account When you create a Twitter account, you will be asked to enter some profile information, including your name, URL, description, and photo. All of these are critically important: Many people will look at them to decide whether they want to follow you. If you have not set these up, other Twitter users likely will ignore you!
• Twitter Zen: Joining the ConversationIt can be difficult to start using Twitter, since you must decide who to follow and it will take some time before people follow you back, let alone interact with you. Imagine yourself walking into a room full of interesting people, all having conversations with each other. Do you expect everyone to notice that you have arrived, stop what they’re doing, and greet you warmly? Or do you expect that you will need to find someone interesting and join their conversation?
• Twitter Zen: The Four Conversational ParadigmsTwitter can be confusing for the uninitiated, and the fact that there are effectively four different ways of viewing it certainly contributes. Although the main Twitter stream seems like a unified set of short messages, clients view it in very different ways.

That’s the series so far. But I’ve had questions and comments, and intend to write more in the future! Watch the series url, http://foskettservices.com/series/twitter-zen/ or this page, or maybe even follow me on Twitter!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2012. | Twitter Zen: My Tips For Newbies
This post was categorized as Ask a Pack Rat, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

The Eye-Fi promises simple connectivity for digital cameras, but does it really work?

One reason the smartphones like the iPhone are gaining ground on purpose-built cameras is their instant connectivity: Take a photo and you can immediately share it on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, or other popular sites. Wouldn’t it be great if your SLR or digital camera could do the same? This is the promise of the Eye-Fi card: It adds Wi-Fi connectivity to most popular cameras, enabling you to transfer photos directly to your laptop or the Internet. If only it worked.

Introducing the Eye-Fi

The Eye-Fi card is a marvel of engineering. Now in its second iteration (X2), the Eye-Fi is a standard SD card with a built-in Wi-Fi radio and smarts to handle connecting and transferring images. It’s really amazing to think that that tiny card has a whole computer with Wi-Fi inside it!

Check out my follow-on post to see just what lurks inside the Eye-Fi X2!

But the Eye-Fi is more than a card. It’s also an online service (Eye-Fi View), software application for Windows or Mac (Eye-Fi Center), and app for iOS or Android that enables photo sharing. The card is useless without these applications and services.

The Eye-Fi card is compatible with most cameras that take SD media, and many (including my Sony NEX-5) have special support for the card. My NEX includes an on-screen icon showing card status, and will keep the camera powered on while images are being transferred.

The X2 Generation

Last year, Eye-Fi upgraded the hardware in their Eye-Fi lineup. These new X2 cards are a huge upgrade, as you will soon see, and were enough to finally push me off the fence and buy one. I purchased a Connect X2 card at Wal Mart, which sells them for a reasonable $39, as does Amazon.

Earlier Eye-Fi cards required a known Wi-Fi network to do anything at all, limiting their usefulness. But the new X2 series (including the Connect X2 I purchased) has a “Direct Mode” capability, allowing the card to act as a limited hotspot to transfer photos to a laptop, tablet, or phone when no network is in range.

Eye-Fi Features and Services

All Eye-Fi X2 cards offer the same features and services – for a price. Even my lowly Connect X2 can be upgraded to match the Pro X2′s geotagging and public Wi-Fi support. The only really Pro-exclusive feature is RAW file transfer. But none of these added features is actually worth that much, as you will see. I recommend the base Connect X2.

Eye-Fi inexplicably leaves the Geo X2 off their comparison table. And they’re not exactly generous with the information. So here’s my own Eye-Fi comparison table, and I’ve included about the nicest regular SD card I could find.

	Patriot 32 GB SDHC	Eye-Fi Connect X2	Eye-Fi Geo X2	Eye-Fi Mobile X2	Eye-Fi Pro X2
Speed	Class 10 (10 MB/s)	Class 6 (6 MB/s)
Connectivity	SD Reader	SD Reader, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi with Direct Mode
Capacity	32 GB	4 GB		8 GB
RAW compatibility	Manual import only				Yes
Sharing	Manual	Automatic to Flickr, Facebook, etc
Geotagging	No	$29.99 option	Yes	$29.99 option	Yes
Hotspot Access	No	$29.99 per year			First year free, then $29.99 per year
List Price	$84.99	$49.99	$69.95	$79.99	$106.99
Street Price	$50	$40	$70	$72	$90
Price With Geo	N/A	$70	$70	$102	$90

Direct Mode

This is the real killer feature of the Eye-Fi X2 line. When the card isn’t in range of a known Wi-Fi hotspot (and has photos to transfer) it will create its own ad-hoc network for local devices. Once connected to this network, laptops, tablets, and phones can transfer photos at Wi-Fi speed directly from the card.

I’ll write more about it in a follow-on post, but suffice to say that Direct Mode is the only feature worth paying for and it’s included free on all Eye-Fi X2 cards!

Geotagging

Geotagging seems like an awesome add-on for a digital camera, and it is surprising more don’t already include it. Sites like Flickr and applications like iPhoto make great use of location tagging, and the iPhone automatically tags all photos.

But the Eye-Fi has two major strikes against it when it comes to geotagging, and these combine to reduce the value of this feature:

1. The Eye-Fi cards don’t have a GPS receiver, so they have to triangulate location based on nearby Wi-Fi access points. This gives innacurate location data at the best of times and is completely worthless off the beaten path.
2. The Eye-Fi doesn’t tag photos when they are taken but rather when they are transferred by the Eye-Fi software. This means that any images imported directly off the card won’t have geotags.

The limited functionality of Eye-Fi geotagging means it’s simply not worth paying extra for. There goes the $69 Geo X2 from Apple, as well as the $29 upgrade for Connect X2 users.

Hotspot Support

Basic Eye-Fi models only recognize hotspots you program them for, but the top model can access a wide range of public hotspots automatically. This is also available as an extra-charge item, priced at $29.99 per year.

Hotspot access was very valuable in earlier Eye-Fi models, since there was no way to transfer photos without them. But the X2 cards, with their Direct Mode, offer a better alternative at no cost. It’s definitely not worth buying a Pro X2 card for hotspot access, since it only includes one year of service.

SDHC Class 6 and Wireless-N Speed

The Eye-Fi X2 features two performance and compatibility improvements over previous models:

1. SDHC Class 6 compatibility means the card can now keep up with today’s fast shooting and megapixel-heavy cameras. This is more important for HD video, but some cameras (like my NEX) can tax Class 4 (40 MB/s) cards in speed shooting modes, and Class 6 (6 MB/s) might not even be enough. In fact, I did encounter some “cannot write” errors when using the Eye-Fi card, and I attribute this to the card still not being fast enough!
2. The new X2 cards support Wi-Fi “N” networks. This is more about compatibility than performance, since the card can’t transfer fast enough to tax a “G” network anyway. But folks like me who have “N-only” networks at home appreciate it, however.

Neiter of these features are deal-breakers, and neither adds much to the Eye-Fi experience. But both are welcome updates and keep the cards from becoming obsolete in today’s world.

Which Eye-Fi Card Is Best?

Normally, I have to waffle a bit when recommending a purchase. After all, some people might need to drive a Ferrari, right? But the Eye-Fi is a special case, and a single answer will do:

If you decide to buy an Eye-Fi card, get the cheapest Connect X2 model and don’t bother with any upgrades.

Seriously. The added features in the upscale Eye-Fi cards are worthless in real-world usage. Don’t buy them.

1. Stepping up to 8 GB of capacity isn’t all that valuable in a connected card, and this is some seriously expensive capacity
2. Eye-Fi geotagging is just about worthless, so put it out of your mind and don’t be tempted
3. Public hotspot usage will just be frustrating, and Direct Mode allows the card to function without it

In my next post, I will discuss my real-world experience with the Eye-Fi card, and end with a disappointing recommendation.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Introducing the Eye-Fi X2 Card
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

2011 will look pretty much like 2010 apart from the differences...

Prognostication is a perilous business, but pundits are drawn to the topic in the month of December. The fact that most predictions fall on their faces demonstrates the intoxicating mix of hope, dreams, and irrationality that mark both geniuses and fools. I am neither, so I like to make predictions after the fact! But this year I’ve been asked to look to the future, so I’ll stick with the safe road and pick current trends rather than guessing what I hope will come.

Five Trends For Everyone

1 – Ubiquitous Connectivity

I named mobility as the mega-trend of the last decade, noting that it’s hard to spot a trend from the middle and harder still from the start. But I feel vindicated on that 2009 call, and will take it one further: 2011 will see ubiquitous connectivity become mainstream. With “MiFi” entering the vernacular, a proliferation of “4G” networks and integrated wireless data, and free WiFi having already become passe, I’d say “online everywhere” is here. Although incredibly challenging from both a technical and business perspective, I expect everyone and everything to be online-capable.

2 – The iPad and Foes

Steve Jobs’ bizarre claim that the overgrown iPhone tablet was the most important thing he ever did is starting to look prescient. A new generation is coming of age without windowing GUIs, mice, and keyboards thanks to gaming consoles, smartphones, iPods, and (finally) tablets. 2011 will finally see serious Android, WebOS, and Windows tablets, but the iPad (and forthcoming iPad 2) are the platform to beat, and Apple is firing on all cylinders. This war will be all-consuming next year.

3 – Wave “Hi” to Kinect!

Microsoft has a serious hit on their hands with the Kinect add-on to the Xbox 360. The gaming system is the best thing to come out of Redmond in a long time, and it continues the “no controller” concept of the iPad, finally kicking the Wii to the curb. The massive success of the Xbox will lead Microsoft shareholders to abandon their calls for Ballmer’s head, instead asking for a spin-out or IPO of the gaming division. Expect PCs to include Kinect-like features in the coming years as well.

4 – Facebook Is the Internet

Now boasting a quarter of all web pageviews. Facebook is looking increasingly like AOL for the rest of us. 2011 will see Facebook’s gravity pull in content from everywhere, and its satellites sprout all over the Internet. It will become the single sign-on, the central “like”, the address book, and the meeting place. But fear not, Facebook-phobes: Nothing is permanent, and this too shall pass.

5 – The Internet Changes and No One Notices

The IP address space is exhausted, BGP and DNS security lapses rise, and net neutrality falls by the wayside but Farmville still works so no one cares. The Internet is changing, and controversies over key components are coming coming to a head. I imagine the network engineers will be busy keeping ahead of catastrophe, but they’ll manage somehow. I’m not sure if IPv6 will finally take off or if the carrier gambit will succeed, but I’m confident we’ll still have an Internet at the heart of the technology world!

Five Trends For the Datacenter

6 – Clouds Gather Quietly

“Cloud” was the buzzword of the last two years, but now it’s getting down to work. Traditional IT staff still won’t see much of it outside of blogs and conferences, but non-traditional systems are all heading that way. Look for major uptake of cloud platforms and services from the home to enterprise applications and everywhere in between. Ironically, the “c-word” itself will soon be dropped from these successful services just as it gains acceptance in IT shops.

7 – Virtual Everything

The impact of server virtualization hasn’t been as great as supporters claim, but widespread acceptance of hypervisor-centric data centers is here. There’s really no reason not to deploy every datacenter server as a virtual machine and lots of resulting benefits. Expect to see mission-critical apps finally move to VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V in 2011. And expect to see the resulting infrastructure called “cloud”!

8 – Farewell, Fast Hard Drives

Storage I/O performance is now the realm of solid state, not spinning disk. SSDs have reached the level of performance, capacity, availability, and sophistication that we no longer need 15k rpm enterprise hard disk drives. You’ll use SSD if you want IOPS, but you’ll still need spinning platters for capacity and maximum throughput for a long while. Don’t expect hard disk drives to disappear, but the fastest will exit at the end of the year.

9 – Not-So-Converged I/O (Yet)

DCB ain’t ready, folks. Neither is FCoE. Although Ethernet will eventually sideline InfiniBand and Fibre Channel, that’s not a 2011 topic. I expect to hear a lot of noise about converged network and storage I/O, including high-profile customer adoption stories, but we’re still a few years short of actual impact and serious market share movement. Practical application starts in 2011, though, and it’ll get major coverage and big-money action in the vendor space.

10 – RAID is (Finally) Dead!

There won’t be much ink spilled in memoriam outside storage blogs like this one, but conventional mirroring and parity has finally met its maker. Today’s hard disk drives are too big to rebuild singly, and alternatives like wide striping, erasure coding, and touch-me-not disk packs are taking over.

And One More For Me

11 – The Internet is Shiva

Every business will be permanently changed as Internet-enabled platforms destroy profitable monopolies and build new opportunities. Google conquered advertising and destroyed traditional publishing but enabled a flowering of democratic dialog. PayPal and Square will do the same to banking in 2011, but their own come-uppance might come sooner than they like. No matter your business, someone has their sights set on you and the Internet is their tool. The trick is to keep dancing, keep innovating, and love the paradox.
The text to appear after expiration date.
Image Credit: Eleven by Wetsun

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Eleven Tech Trends To Watch In 2011
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Are we training consumers to complain?

I’m outspoken, and I have a platform. This makes me a difficult customer for some and a dream for others. When I have issues with a company or product, I let them know. I detail the problem. I expect a resolution, and I usually get one.

As the old saying goes, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” But why should only squeaky wheels get greased? Why should secret warranties and customer satisfaction squads cater to our complaints? Shouldn’t all consumers be taken care of?

Business Calculus

Of course not! Economically-speaking, businesses should cut corners and maximize profit. An MBA might point out that minimizing service and only resolving issues for those who cause trouble is the right decision. If people will accept an inferior product or service, why not sell it to them?

But there are consequences to this path. If only squeaky wheels like me get their issues resolved, won’t consumers learn to complain louder? And there are opportunity costs when even the shyest customers are abused – they won’t come back in the future. Then there’s the overall risk that a company’s reputation will be harmed by all those complainers, many of whom might not go back and amend their loud public criticism once they’re made whole.

Let’s consider the training aspect. The advent of social media means that consumers have a louder voice then ever. Venting once took place in person, an ineffective venue because it is almost entirely inaudible. “I saw a roach at that restaurant,” a man says to another on the street. Two customers are lost, and no one is wiser. Today, those discussions happen on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and 100 other places. And they stick. A roach report can harm a business far and wide, affecting customers who never met.

Businesses responded by adding social media support mechanisms. American Express patrols Twitter with @AskAmex, and my experience is that they resolve problems where regular phone support cannot. When I complained about the hassle of buying a Dell laptop, @DellCares was there to investigate the problem (they did) and resolve it (with a $50 credit). You bet that next time I have an issue like this I’ll blog and tweet and get results. But should I really have to resort to this? Shouldn’t Dell just take care of their customers, keep pricing consistent, and send the machine when it’s ordered?

If a business doesn’t take care of its customers, they may not talk but they will assuredly walk. All things considered, I would definitely be shy about ordering another Dell. I stopped using my American Express card for a while after their security folks freaked out in the middle of my first Tech Field Day and wouldn’t approve my charges. I avoid setting foot in Wal Mart stores. This is a natural reaction to poor service and customer experiences. It’s silent and can prove deadly to a business, and should be included in the cold customer service calculation.

All of this tends to linger as well. I try to set the record straight after the fact, but took a while to get around to amending my post about Dell. But you can’t edit a Tweet, and most customers wouldn’t bother adjusting a negative review. If the experience was bad enough to cue a flame, why expend the effort even if they made the issue right? I wonder if businesses are considering these long-term impacts when making support decisions.

Stephen’s Stance

It just isn’t right. I shouldn’t have to complain to get decent customer service, to keep listed prices from changing at checkout, or to get defective products replaced. Every customer deserves the same positive experience: A smooth purchase, easy delivery, as-advertised functionality, and lifetime quality. The squeaky wheel shouldn’t be the only one to get the grease. Until then, however, I have one word of advice: Squeak!

Image credit: Gear it Up by …-Wink-…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | On Being a Squeaky Wheel (Where’s My Grease?)
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Note: This post is about Google, because it is by far the dominant search engine, advertiser, and “portal” in the English-speaking world. Nearly everything mentioned here applies equally to other search engines and advertising providers.

Ranking Pages

Google’s relevance comes from their historical ability to present a quality searchable portal to the entire Internet. The majority of Google’s revenue is also derived from quality information, giving them the ability to present more-compelling advertising to web users.

Google’s core success is based on its ability to discover and rank the quality of Internet content. Gmail, Reader, Picasa, Apps, and the rest of the Google properties are surely excellent sources of information on the preferences of individual users, but they contribute only slightly to the other side of the coin: Information about Internet content. For that, they still rely on the core technology invented at Stanford a decade ago: PageRank.

Every time it encounters a link, Google’s software “spider” follows it, adding the content of the linked web page to an index. Google, like other early search engines, counts each link as a vote for the quality of the page. The genius of PageRank is that Google weights each vote based on the quality of the page it comes from. Although PageRank is not the entirety of Google, it is a singular key element.

Put simply, Google’s success depends on its ability to gather and rank the links we all make and match them to the data we provide about ourselves. Without this, Google will fail.

The Changing Web

The graphical Web is not the Internet. My first experiences online came well before graphical hypertext clients (what we now call browsers) dominated the user experience and became the web. Although the network we call the Internet now supports a very wide variety of traffic, Google’s preeminence comes only from the Web. They have little or no reach into the massive streams of corporate data, multimedia, and other non-hypertext content streaming across the ‘net.

When it was first developed, the web was manual and links were hand-selected and carefully put into context. It was difficult to put together a web page, and those pages that were developed were were static. The social networks of the time (USENET, IRC, and email mostly) were not integrated into the web, did not generally include links. So the first search engines, and later ones like Google, focused on this relatively small pool of pages and links.

But the web soon became automated, subsuming most other interactive services. Social (user-generated) interaction moved into the web in a big way, with blogs, wikis, and discussion forums enabling rapid content creation and reference by users. Sharing links in the social web, and through social bookmarking services, generally replaced the manual pages of old.

At first, this explosion of user-generated content was a dream scenario for Google. They could harvest the collective intelligence of us all to identify and rank content. But as the number of pages and links exploded, the notion of a “web page” was radically shifted from a stable and predictable set of data to a dynamic portal into a vast store of content. Where everyone once saw the same content at a given URL, now each of us has his own experience.

Spammers and scammers realized the value of Google placement and flooded this dynamic social web with links. This threatened not only to undermine the relevance that supports Google’s search (and advertising) business, but it also threatened these new social services themselves. Each honest, relevant link added to a Wikipedia article, included in a Slashdot comment, or shared on a service like Digg was dwarfed by the thousands or millions of spam links injected to boost the PageRank of “client” sites.

I Don’t Follow

Google and the social net fought valiantly against this wave of link spam, but it became clear that something more radical was needed. The only way to fight spam was to make it useless to the spammers. Thus was born a simple but highly-effective tool: Nofollow.

Webmasters long had the ability to tell the Google spider to ignore a certain set of hosted pages through the use of a server-side list called robots.txt. But spammers wanted the exact opposite. What was needed was a client-side way to specify that a link was not worthy of being spidered and ranked by the search engines. This would eliminate the primary benefit of link spam.

Implementing client-side spider blocking was trivial: A simple tag, “rel=nofollow”, was added alongside the url in a web link. This way, Google’s spider would simply ignore every “nofollow” link it encountered, and they would never be searched or ranked in the index.

But spammers would never put the nofollow tag in their own links. So sites quickly began implementing blanket nofollow policies: Every link submitted by users in any form would receive the tag by default. The idea would be that links that had not yet been vetted by users would get the nofollow tag and those that were deemed acceptable would not. But most sites never figured out the right process to allow the nofollow tag to be removed. Today, nearly every social service, from FaceBook to Twitter to Digg to StumbleUpon, permanently marks nearly every link this way. Even Wikipedia, a long-time holdout, finally switched to a default nofollow on all but the English site.

The Nofollow War

What does this mean for Google? If the vast majority of user-generated links are tossed into the spam category as far as the search engine is concerned, it means that their entire system of discovering and ranking links is in jeopardy. The major social services, most of which attract the majority of end-user traffic, content, and links, are rendered useless in generating relevancy.

But these are the exact sources that Google ought to be focusing on the most. Many have noted that they hear about news more rapidly through real-time sources like Twitter than through less-dynamic traditional news sites and blogs. Even if Google had the ability to spider a service like Twitter in real time, which is doubtful, they would gain no insight from the links included in these sources. Social bookmarking sites like Digg are chock full of user-vetted links and should be gold mines for Google, but the nofollow tag makes them invisible.

This scarcity of user-generated links has made the links that are followable even more valuable. Scammers constantly create fake blogs of scraped (read “stolen”) content and users are paid to include followable links anywhere they can. Sites with a high PageRank value are constantly inundated with offers and attacked by hackers to siphon off high-value “votes”.

High-profile content providers are circling their wagons, drastically cutting down on outside links in order to focus PageRank on their own properties. Smaller publishers and blogs are striking back at the big guys, decrying their dearth of external links. Some even go so far as to initiate blanket nofollow policies against these big, respected, but non-linking sites.

This leaves Google with even fewer useful links with which to examine the Web. It also leaves the biggest content providers and networks and the savviest search engine optimization (SEO) pros with a bigger slice of the valuable top-of-Google result real estate.

The Fix Is In

Google is left with a looming nightmare scenario: As smaller, alternative, social, and real-time content providers disappear from the search engine, its overall relevance and value declines. Soon, a tipping point will be reached when users would rather rely on Twitter, FaceBook, and the rest for their Internet interactions than the old-fashioned search engine, email, and RSS readers that Google currently dominates. This house-of-cards collapse can only be avoided by including user-generated content in the Google index.

Search engines could simply ignore the nofollow tag, wading into the social stream and combatting spam in other ways. But this would lead to another rapid upswing of link spam, shifting the burden to content providers once again. And it might also expose links that actually should not be followed, leading to technical and even legal trouble.

The best solution would see the social networks designing in some method of removing the nofollow attribute once links are verified to be relevant and correct. But there is no incentive for them to help drive Google traffic to other sites. Indeed, Twitter recently took the next step, arranging the titles of user pages in an attempt to SEO their way to the top page of Google searches for user’s names. Only altruistic systems like Wikipedia are likely to design in this type of response.

Another possible scenario (to be explored another day) is the usurpation of today’s social web and its content by a new next-generation service. A web-based social client like FriendFeed could rapidly siphon away both existing and net-new content and users in the guise of openness and interoperability. Although new web spiders like Cuil have failed, perhaps old-fashioned crawling capability is no longer all that valuable in the social web.

The most likely fix is both predictable and pragmatic: Google must buy all successful source of social links (like Twitter, Bit.ly, StumbleUpon, and even FaceBook) and integrate them into their search system. Owning Twitter would enable Google to decide which links to follow and which to ignore. The reward of improving search results would be the incentive needed to add “re-follow” capability. Buying these services would also give Google an open pipe of the real-time traffic flowing through these services, a critical resource that they currently lack.

Google simply can not afford not owning the real-time web, and they must continue to buy up similar sources of content as they appear. Yahoo was unable to extract value from StumbleUpon, but Google’s other competitors will certainly try to undermine the search giant. Frankly, I’m shocked that Microsoft, FaceBook, or even Baidu have not yet snapped up services like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Digg even if only to keep them and the information they contain out of Google’s hands.

If you enjoyed reading this, you’ll probably also like my Foskett Services blog!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Google Is Heading For A Cliff; What Will They Do?
This post was categorized as Computer History, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

IT infrastructure is following consumer technology out of the data center glass house and into the wide world

Dave Hitz over at NetApp poses a very interesting question: What is the ten-year trend in information technology that we are currently building to? He supplies these historical examples:

• 1982-1992: A computer on every (business) desk
• 1990s: Networking all those computers

He then goes on to suggest three ten-year trends that we might currently be living through:

1. Cloud/Outsourced Computing
2. Server Virtualization
3. Flash Memory

Although I agree on the importance of these three to enterprise IT, I don’t think they’ll be seen as the megatrends of this decade in hindsight. I suggest that, more than anything, we are witnessing a wholesale shift from information tied to place/device to information mobility. Cloud computing, server virtualization, and even flash memory are all contributors to this massive trend, along with the user-side trends of the post-PDA mobile phone, 3G data, social web services, and connected home.

What Is Mobility?

The meaning of mobility, to me, is expansive. It doesn’t just refer to taking a copy of your data with you, ubiquitous connectivity, or portable devices. Mobility is a new paradigm of computing.

• Your data no longer “sits” in one place – your data lives out there in the network!
• Your applications no longer “live” on this device or that – your applications live out there in the network!
• Your productivity environment no longer requires a particular piece of hardware – you expect to be productive everywhere on every device!

This doesn’t sound strange to the modern Internet user. We have completely accepted the role of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Wikipedia and the rest in our personal lives. Just as they did in the early days of the PC, business people have transitioned these concepts into the professional world – witness Salesforce and LinkedIn! In all cases, we have endorsed the idea that certain types of information want to live in the cloud because it makes them better!

Once you’ve used these services, old-fashioned email, contact management, encyclopedias, maps, and the rest seem incredibly limiting. A GPS system that can’t update its maps seems antiquated, and we want it to have real-time traffic data, too. An iPod that needs to be physically connected to a PC to add music or applications is simply unacceptable. Time- and place-shifting technologies like TiVo To Go, over-the-air podcast downloads, and Slingboxes reset our expectations about availability and choice of entertainment, but they are mere symptoms of our changing perceptions. We want mobility of data, applications, and platforms, and we are getting it.

Consider two truly revolutionary platforms: the iPhone and the netbook. In both cases, we knowingly accept limitations in the name of portability, knowing that the cloud will give us what we can’t hold in our hands. These devices are limited in ways that would seem inconceivable just a few years ago: Apple has locked their platform up tighter than any in history, and netbooks are too small, underpowered, and cheap in all senses of the word. But we love them because they get us where we want to go, which is up and out!

Mobility and Enterprise IT

The concept of mobile data, applications, and devices is just as applicable to enterprise IT infrastructure as it is to personal technology. Some enterprise data must be kept close to the vest, especially where privacy laws and litigation concerns are applicable. But there is certainly a vast pool of corporate data that wants to be out working in the field! Setting this data free is the enterprise equivalent of the mobility megatrend!

Cloud computing is hype. Server virtualization is hype. Flash storage is hype. XaaS is hype. Web 2.0 is hype. But once the cloud of hype passes, we will be left with solid technologies to enable mobility and transform corporate computing. Why should corporate email have to punch through your firewall? Why should the intranet be limited to internal or VPN users? Why can’t customers interact with a (limited/controlled) set of your corporate records? Salesforce showed us that roaming users (sales teams) need greater access than most IT staff were ready to build. What if we applied the same ideas to other data types?

Many companies are already doing this. Microsoft offers a variety of internal/external services for their customers through Live (see Connect, for example). Many companies are using mail and productivity applications in the cloud from Google, MessageOne, and Zimbra. Backup and archiving as a service to mobile users is widespread (see Iron Mountain Connected and Mozy). And more and more corporate PR relies on blogs, twitter, and social networking sites. Corporate security and legal types are worried about data “escaping” from the eggshell of control they exert, but this cat is out of the bag. Enterprise IT will never be the same!

It comes down to a single core question that IT folks ought to have been asking themselves all along: What should be held internally and what should be let loose? We already “outsource” many non-core corporate functions. Sometimes we do this for cost reasons. But the most effective outsourcing decision is when a third party will do a better job, offering levels of expertise or service that an internal group could never realistically reach. We already buy enterprise software to leverage outside development (remember, this was not always the case!), so why not also buy enterprise services? Corporate-grade outsourced email, groupware, sales automation, and the like is not only more robust and less expensive than internal systems, they enable a disconnected, mobile workforce.

Today, I Was Angry

I bought a new album from Amazon, but I forgot to sync my iPhone with my laptop, so it was sitting at home when I wanted to listen to it in the car. Then I couldn’t find a colleague’s phone number because he moved to a new company and my address book didn’t automatically update. And I couldn’t review a presentation because I needed a special account to access a corporate document system behind a firewall.

These little accomplishments would have seemed like miracles just a few years ago: I remember the joy I felt ten years ago when I could read a web page offline on my Palm Pilot using AvantGo; I was amazed when I first fired up 802.11a wireless networking and could work anywhere in the office; I was gleeful to be able to take 5 GB of music with me on the train. But all this is past. Today, I want to access my portable data and work anywhere. We are in the midst of a revolution in the mobility and ubiquity of computing.

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Ten-Year Trend: Mobility
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Attention bloggers! I've got a whole disk of whoopass aimed at your head!

I subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds, and read them religiously. According to Google Reader’s statistics, I read about 200 items per day out of over 700 posted to all of those feeds. As you might expect, I’ve got some strong feelings about blogs and news sites after reading that much.

So this message is aimed at all of you content providers out there: Fix your darn blogs and feeds so I won’t be so grumpy anymore!

If you enjoyed reading this, you’ll probably also like my Foskett Services blog!

1. Use full-text RSS feeds! If you’re still cutting off your posts after a few sentences, you’re losing my readership. I hardly ever click through on two-line feed items, and I feel burned when I even bother to subscribe to these. Half the time the heading and excerpt promise more than the article delivers anyway. Switch to a full-text feed so I can read your content right there in Google Reader without clicking through to see your interstitial ads for every post. I promise I will visit and comment if you have valuable things to say. What’s that? I hear you boo-hooing that you will lose readership, visitors, and AdSense revenue? You’re wrong. The best audience is an engaged audience, and readers of your feed are the most engaged folks you will find. They’re also a tiny TINY minority of readers (about 11% last I heard) compared to real search engine and referral-driven traffic. You’re only going to increase loyalty by switching to full-text feeds, whereas your refusal to syndicate more than 11 words is likely to drive people like me away.
2. No more me-too posts! Here’s a hint: If one of your peers already posted pretty much all you have to say on a topic, then don’t post at all. If you’re a worthwhile writer, there has to be a unique angle you can use for any story. Get your own voice! Bonus hint: Make sure you are reading your peers’ blogs so you know what they are saying, too! And a link back to them wouldn’t hurt either!
3. Don’t write about your stats! I don’t care about your monthly readership stats or AdSense revenues. Unless your blog happens to be about AdSense or search engine optimization, that is…
4. Kill the ads! Face it: You’re not getting rich with banner ads on your blog. Yes, I admit that I do run a few AdSense ads on my blog pages. Although the payout is tiny, it’s enough to keep the lights on. But I don’t force ads on everyone all the time – I use Ozh’ excellent Who Sees Ads plugin for WordPress so only search engine visitors see my banners. And I will never pollute my feeds with ads: Treat your (very few) subscribers like the loyal friends they are instead of trying to make a dime from their clicks. And yeah, a dime is about all you are making from your blog anyway, right?
5. Trim the fat! Are you illustrating your articles with 300k high-definition PNG images? Unless you’re a photographer or graphic designer, do us all a favor and limit your inline images to about 300 pixels wide. I know it’s non-free and all, but JPEG speeds up load times! And do you really need to embed flash animations, auto-playing YouTube clips, and other such junk? I’ll happily click through if I care. Keep the number of illustrations down, too. If the vertical space of your post is more than half graphics (especially cheesy Excel charts) you need to refocus it before you lose your readers.
6. Edit and format your writing! If I can’t read your post, I won’t read your post. Start by turning on spell check. Then learn the basic rules of grammar. You may be a computer genius, but I’m not going to put up with incorrect homonyms and eggcorns forever! Perhaps consider learning what a paragraph is, and even create some yourself. You can still use bulleted and numbered lists, but how about some context and headings to assist the reader?
7. Quit moving around! If you’re blogging, you should control your own destiny: Have your own domain name, your own install of WordPress, and your own feed URL. It’s hard for me to take “whoever.typepad.com” seriously, especially when, three months after I subscribe, he moves his feed to “whoever.blogger.com” and makes me re-subscribe. Often, I’ll just unsubscribe and forget him. Don’t want this to happen? Register your own domain name for your blog, set up a hosting account and install WordPress (it’s the best, hands down), and don’t bother me. While you’re at it, private-label your feedburner feed so you can take that with you when you move around, too.
8. Make commenting easier! Comment spam is a fact of life. Despite using Akismet, Bad Behavior, and clever tricks, I got more comments from spammers than actual readers on my blog. Then I heard that, although I added OpenID, commenting was still too hard. So I switched to Disqus for blog comments to try to make life easier, and have had a much better time of it since. If you’re still using native commenting, you’re missing out on a lot of readers who would like to comment but won’t jump through hoops to do it. Bonus hint: Use BackType to follow comments on other blogs, too!
9. Let me contact you! Everyone should have their real name and contact information prominently available on their blog. If you’re covering topics that intersect with work, you should disclose your employer, too. If you want to engage your readers, add in a link to your LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook account, too. But don’t go crazy – no one needs to connect to you in 800 places. That’s what FriendFeed is for!

Finally, here’s a bonus tip: No more top-ten lists! You’ll probably get to number nine and run out of things to say anyway!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Nine Blog Suggestions from a Grumpy Reader
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

As impressed as I am with Apple’s iPhone App Store, with its simple purchasing and automated installs and upgrades, it would be better if the thing actually worked reliably. Along with sometimes forgetting song purchases, there seems to be some gremlin that causes the App Store to forget that certain apps are installed and not check for updates. This left me scratching my head, as updated apps like Super Monkey Ball, Facebook, Evernote, and Cube Runner remained in their previous state.

I suspect that the App Store did not update its internal record of my purchases when I wiped and re-set up my iPhone shortly after upgrading to OS 2.0. When I did this, I reinstalled all the apps from iTunes’ backup copy rather than re-downloading them from the App Store, and perhaps this caused them to be overlooked.

While I can’t be sure of the cause of this forgetfulness, I did discover a workable solution. For each questionable app, follow these steps:

1. On the iPhone (or iPod Touch), go into the App Store and search for an app you already purchased.
2. If the “purchase” button does not say “INSTALLED”, then the App Store isn’t tracking its updates.


Fail: The App Store forgot that this app has already been installed

3. In this case, go ahead and re-install the app. Apple (thankfully) won’t charge you again even for paid apps.
4. Now, the phone will note that the app was already installed. This is good – let it download and upgrade.


The App Store discovers that this app has been installed

5. Now you’re golden. The App Store should again be tracking updates to this app.


Correct: The App Store recognizes that this app has been installed and will track its updates

Repeat this procedure for all questionable apps and you should be all set.

Note that this procedure only seems to work for apps that have been updated. If you have the latest version, but the app store isn’t tracking updates (as indicated by the lack of a “Purchased” button), you should be able to make it work by first deleting the app and then installing it fresh. Once again, Apple shouldn’t charge you again for the app when you do this, and it should begin tracking correctly.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | iPhone App Store Forgetting Purchases
This post was categorized as Apple. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

This blog post is probably out of date. If you want to set up Exchange ActiveSync, you should instead consult one my guides:
	iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Setup		iPad Exchange ActiveSync Setup
	iPhone ActiveSync Troubleshooting		iPad ActiveSync Troubleshooting

It’s finally here!  The iPhone now has most of the functions of the BlackBerry – over-the-air push and sync of Exchange email, contacts, and calendars!  Apple let the 2.0 OS out of the bag earlier today, and intrepid souls (and me) have taken the plunge and installed it.

While most people, including me, headed to the (also active) App Store to try out the native games, I quickly turned the other way – towards the new Microsoft Exchange integration.

Read on for my first impressions and instructions on getting it up and running.

For the most up-to-date information, see my iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide!

This post is part of my series focused on integrating the iPhone with Microsoft Exchange using ActiveSync:

• iPhone OS 3.0 information:
  1. First Look: iPhone 3.0 And Exchange ActiveSync Integration
  2. How To Subscribe To Internet Calendars In iPhone OS 3.0
  3. How To Access LDAP Directories In iPhone OS 3.0
  4. iPhone 3.0 Exchange ActiveSync: Better But Not Perfect
• How To Set Up iPhone Exchange ActiveSync
1. A Few iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Gotchas
2. Can the iPhone Sync With Multiple Exchange Servers?

By the way, the apps are great!  Sega’s Super Monkey Ball is touchy, but I think I’ll get the hang of it.  And my 4 year old loves Jirbo Match!  Too bad the Red Sox weren’t playing or my test of MLB At Bat would have been much more exciting!

Up and Running With Exchange

Seriously, why are you still reading? Head over to The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide for current/useful information!

Here’s the quick how-to for getting Exchange up and running on your iPhone.  Note that this works on any iPhone with the version 2.0 software – the iPhone 3G comes with this out of the box, but original phones will need to be upgraded.  Update: You do not need to buy the Enterprise Data plan from AT&T in order for this to function – it will work with any plan, and even works on the iPod Touch! Update: The process is pretty much the same with iPhone OS 3.0!

We will set up the mail account first, then enable sync for Calendar and Contacts.

1. Install iTunes 7.7 and upgrade your phone to iPhone OS 2.0 if necessary
2. If you already have your Exchange server running with IMAP, disable the account in Mail Settings.  I left mine set up – no telling when or if I’ll need to revert!
3. Set up a new mail account, selecting Exchange as in the photo above.
   
4. Enter your email address (e.g. “billg@microsoft.com”) in the Email box.
5. Enter your Exchange domain and username (e.g. “msexec\billg.microsoft”) in the Username box and watch the text magically shrink to fit.
6. Enter your password (e.g. “OuttaHere!”) in the Password box and marvel at the nifty new “show the last letter entered” feature.
7. The iPhone will now try to automatically discover your Exchange server.  If you don’t have Exchange 2007 with Autodiscovery turned on, it will fail and warn you that it couldn’t validate your account.  You will have to manually enter your server name in the window.  Make sure you enter your ActiveSync server name, not the OWA server (as in Entourage) or the real Exchange server (as in Outlook).
8. Now tap the home button and go into Mail.  You should see your new account appear, and it should show your folders and email messages within a few moments.  Congratulations!  Email is now set up!
   

Next we will enable sync for Contacts and Calendars.

Note:  You can’t sync Contacts and Calendars from both Exchange and iTunes! You must choose one or the other! And the iPhone will delete your old entries when you enable this! Update: You can do both desktop and over-the-air calendars in iPhone OS 3.0!

Ok, enough shouting, on with the show!

1. Once you’re sure email is working, go back into the Exchange Account Settings tab (shown above) and tap Contacts to “ON”.
   
2. The iPhone will warn you about deleting your existing entries, just like I just did!  If you’re sure, tap “Sync”.
   
3. Now the iPhone will enable Sync.  Do not go running up to the Calendar or (new!) Contacts App and expect to see everything there immediately.  It took my phone about 5 minutes to populate these, and I was worried when I saw nothing there at first.
4. Do the same for Calendar and you’re all set.  Wait a few and you will have pretty much full over-the-air Email, Contacts, and Calendar integration!

Initial Impressions

Prepare to be confused by the new Calendar and Contacts apps.  They now include categories, and you can find yourself scratching your head at seeing no entries when you’re in the wrong category.  I left my calendar in “Home” and there were no entries.

I had to tap “Calendars” at the top to return to the screen at right and select “All”.  This could be really nice – I could organize multiple calendars here for work and home.  But it’ll take some getting used to.  Update: Don’t bother with multiple calendars! Update: Multiple calendars rock in iPhone OS 3.0!

Note that calendar entries are color-coded in the calendar, too, which is a nice touch.  I don’t remember any similar functionality on my BlackBerry, but it could be that I just never discovered it.  It took me about five years to figure out how to see missed calls, after all!

The same problem appears with the Contacts application.  Here again, we have groups of contacts, and what you see is dependent on which group you’re currently “in”.  I’ll have to work out how to manage these using Outlook or Entourage.

Thankfully, Apple finally includes a Contacts application on the home screen in OS 2.0.  It was always frustrating to have to go into the Phone app just to look at someone’s info!

The App Store is good, but a little perplexing.  There are about 500 applications up for sale right now, and not all are worthwhile.  There are three “flashlight” apps, for example, all at different prices.  I think the App Store will be quite a mess once all 25,000 or so applications have been added!  It’s already hard to locate anything.

Apple released just two native apps:  A $5 Texas Hold’em game, and a free remote control app for iTunes.  The latter is pretty nifty – it seems to use Bonjour in reverse to present itself to iTunes instances running on the network.  The iPhone shows up in the sidebar and you have to enter a PIN to activate it.  This would be much cooler with an AirTunes device – maybe I’ll have to snap up one of the old 802.11g AirPort Expresses currently offered at MacMall for $59!

There are some other worthwhile apps, too.  MLB At Bat is great – live game updates and video clips of major plays.  I think I’ll be using this a lot!  Definitely worth $5 to me.

I already mentioned a couple of games, but I was more interested in trying out the social networking applications.  AOL released a free version of Instant Messenger, but I’m not sure if it (yet) supports Apple’s always-on push service.  There’s a FaceBook app, too, but it doesn’t look much better than the web version.

This brings me to a major concern about the App Store.  Why make a native app to do something the web does just as well?  I can see where an offline book or map reader would be handy, but why MySpace?  There are lots of Bibles in there already, but where is the off-line/on-line version of Wikipedia that I had hoped for?

Google added a search app, covering both the web and local content on the phone.  But where’s Google Talk?  Shockingly, after literally sharing the stage with Google at the iPhone’s introduction, Yahoo! is entirely absent from the App Store.  Microsoft isn’t there, either.

But there were some nice surprises.  Yelp, Pandora, and Paypal all have free clients that look useful.  Time will tell which of these apps really get used!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | How To Set Up iPhone Exchange ActiveSync
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

I avoided all of these things for years before finally succumbing to LinkedIn.  It seemed like everyone in my (professional, over-30) “network” was on it, and was sending me invites all the time, so I decided to jump in and join just that one network.  LinkedIn was, and remains, just “ok”.  I like that it is focused professionally and that many of my colleagues are in it.  I really don’t like that it’s not really integrated with anything – your network lives on LinkedIn and never gets out much.  And I hate the spammy messages and Ponzi scheme aspect of collecting contacts and luring others in.  But it remains ok.

Then there was Plaxo.  If you disliked the messages from LinkedIn, you hated the ones from Plaxo, especially their embedded “business card” signatures with JavaScript, images, and god knows what else…  I finally joined Plaxo because it purports to keep your Outlook address book in shape for you.  But I’m furious that what it really does is “re-duplicate” all of your contacts, messing up your address book until you have to sign up for their premium service just to get the de-duplication feature.  And don’t get me started about when I switched jobs and it spammed everyone in my address book without my consent!  And Plaxo just re-launched with a more Facebook-y interface called Pulse, which is pretty but mostly empty and highly useless.  I’m considering quitting Plaxo…

Then there are the social social sites.  I “joined” MySpace so I could keep up with one of my favorite bands, but I’ve never really used it.  It’s just so creepy and ugly – a race to see who can come up with the worst home page reminiscent of the way-back days of the world wide web.  I refuse to use it, except to delete the continual spam mail from would-be women friends in Russia…  Come on, Tom, can’t MySpace do something about that?

Next up?  Facebook!  Aah yes, home of 10,000 useless ways to “poke” someone you already know.  And home to exactly 38 people that I kinda know. It was interesting playing with the customization features, and seeing the crowded but much less ugly home pages.  But it’s not for old folks like me, I guess.

So why am I writing this today?  Well, if you’re my friend (and if you’re reading this, you probably are) then you might have just received some more social-spam from me this morning.  And I wanted to apologize.  See, I just tried out Spock, a people search engine that looked kind of keen.  It mines other sites to try to come up with uniform information about people from all those other social networks – a network of networks.  It asked me to add in my connections, so I let it search my address book (which, thanks to Plaxo, is about as crufty and full of surprises as my kids’ toy box) and then told me that 135 contacts were “already on Spock”, so I could “add them to my trust network”.  Sure, I stupidly, thought adding them to my trust network sounds OK!  After clicking “Add to trust network”, it asked if I wanted to email everyone else, and I said no.  Now I am not sure what Spock did to request trust, and I have no way to take it back.

But there was something nagging me at the end of this little interaction with Spock, making me think I might just have spammed everyone yet again.  Maybe I’m just mistrustful or jaded, but I guess I’ve just gotten to the point of assuming that all social networking sites are Ponzi schemes to bring eyeballs to ads by sending out email “on my behalf”.

I’m sick of it.  I’m opting out of the next social network I get invited to, and I suggest you do the same.  I’m thinking of pulling out of Plaxo, Facebook, and MySpace.  And the next site I trust that spams my friends will get the boot, too.  Hear me, social networks?  Quit it or I quit.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | “Social” Sites: Quit It or I Quit!
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.