Personal » TechBubble

Some Thoughts on Posterous

Aug 172008

I have been thinking on and off about Posterous since I first used it and decided to put my thoughts down in a post. Nischal asked the question “Would you stick to Posterous?”
My answer today is “No” for the simple reason that it’s difficult to
make the commitment to use Posterous as my primary blog until custom
domains are supported. Redirects just don’t cut it.

Also, the brutally honest truth is that Posterous is on borrowed time.
If the service does not start innovating rapidly, get huge user
adoption and then create a significant reason for users to stay, it
will soon become irrelevant. Its primary feature — email to blog — is
not enough of a differentiator because technically it is not very
difficult to implement and other blog engines will be quick to offer it
to their users (some already do).

I think Posterous should be thinking about ways in which they can
continue to stay relevant and even attractive to bloggers by doing the
exact opposite of what they are doing right now. Instead of trying to
be a blogging platform, they ought to focus on being an email
publishing utility very much like FaceBook is positioned as a social
utility. The AutoPosting
capabilities available on the service are a great way to start, but
they could be so much more. Instead of just supporting vanilla posts
with title and body and hosting the photos/media here, they should go
all out and implement email to MetaWebLog and other API’s. Being able
to use email to make a complete, detailed post to WordPress, DasBlog
and other blogging engines would be great. Add template, tagging and
categorization and it starts to get really interesting.

And while they are at it, they should do it for not just 10, but 100′s of other services. Basically, email enable every ProgrammableWeb.com API
for which email posting makes sense and that has any kind of traction.
That would be killer and greatly increase the barriers for competition
as users don’t like changing habits unless there is a very good reason.
Imagine “posterous” becoming a verb for “posting something to any web
service using email.” I think this would be a bigger opportunity for
the company and allow it to become truly indispensable compared to
where it is now — a “me too” blogging platform which re-posts to other
services.

Bottom line, forget the blogging and focus on the email.

Exploring New Things

Blog, DotNetNuke, Personal No Responses »

Aug 122008

Last month, a few days before my birthday, I decided that I needed to acquire some new skills and do some new things, while broadening my knowledge of things I already know (i.e. software development). More importantly, I wanted to not spend as much time in front of the computer. Instead of posting about it and then hoping to follow through, I decided to do the opposite. I started the process and am now happy to report that I have made good progress in five areas:

1) Building Stuff: I love working with tools and making things. My first project was to build a swing set for my daughters. I got lumber from Lowe’s and built one from scratch. My kids love it and it’s great not having to drive down to the playground every day.

My second project is to build earth boxes, five to be precise. Savi wants to grow vegetables and the earth boxes are the perfect solution. It’s labor intensive to build one, but not very difficult. I have completed one and am working on the rest.

2) Baking: I love bread but rarely find bread I like at the store. Solution — bake my own. Savi got me a bread-maker for my birthday and I love it. So far I have baked a loaf of plain, white bread and yesterday, I baked a walnut-raisin loaf. I am not much of a cook and making eggs is the extent of my culinary expertise. But after baking this bread, I am beginning to see why so many people love to cook. It is quite relaxing and to have an end product that family and friends can enjoy is quite rewarding.

3) Mixing: As I have mentioned on this blog before, I am an avid fan of A/V. Until about 2003, one of my favorite things to do was to V.J. parties and weddings for friends. I never did it for money as then it would become work and stop being fun. After moving to DC in 2003, I never did any gigs until last week. Friday (8/8/08), my friends Todd and Diana got married in Napa. My daughter Gia was the flower girl and I had the honor of providing the entertainment for the wedding. Since I did not want to abandon the wife and kids during the reception, I did something novel (for me) — I created a video mix on DVD for the entire evening’s entertainment. Everything from the bride/groom dances to the various dance sets were all on DVD and all I had to do was press Play. I used an 80′s theme and mixed lots of music videos from the decade along with an intro scene from “Back to the Future,” Todd’s favorite movie. I enjoyed making the mix so much, that I am now motivated to create more DVD mixes of my kids photos/videos for family back in India.

4) Software: This item is more about broadening my skills beyond ASP.Net and DotNetNuke. I have been an avid fan of Google AppEngine since the day it went live. Since I had no prior knowledge of Python or Django, I had to come up to speed fast. I attended a few meet-ups at Google and picked-up a copy of Python Power. Between the book and the meet-ups and just tinkering with code, I now have progressed far enough to create fairly advanced apps on AppEngine in Python. I plan on continuing to learn more advanced concepts and focus on developing a single application that will also be the basis of my AppEngine presentation at the DotNetNuke OpenForce / SDN Conference in Amsterdam this October. More about this application in a future post.

5) Teaching: I love to teach kids. It doesn’t matter what the subject matter is, it’s just fun to be able to share and help them learn. This summer, I have undertaken to teach my 12-year-old nephew how to program, continuing indefinitely. After researching the topic, I settled on Phrogram as the language to use for instruction. So far, I am quite impressed with everything about the IDE and the language. I setup a virtual machine, put it on a DVD and mailed it to him (he is not allowed to use the Internet other than for class assignments). He was able to install VPC, get the virtual machine up and running and write his first Phrogram. I will have some detailed blog posts about my experience on this in the near future also.

Yes, it’s true that three of the five things require time in front of the computer. But they still represent a shift and have helped me achieve my goals.

iWidgets déjà vu

Blog, Internet, Personal No Responses »

Jul 012008

At the height of the dot-com boom, I founded a venture-funded startup
called iWidgets.com. My vision was to have mini-apps called “widgets”
that you could plug into web portals that were all the rage at the
time. Unfortunately, the market was not ready for widgets back in 1999,
and when the stock market took a dive a couple of years later, so did my
company.

Fast-forward to present day and there is a new iWidgets.com site created by someone else. Here’s how eHub describes it:

Create custom widgets for your website or your brand with iWidget.
Using their online wizard, you can easily create widgets that your
website visitors or customers can add to their iGoogle start page,
Facebook profile, or their own blog. Your widget is customizable by
your users so that it fits right in with their design.

It
felt very strange seeing the site…sort of like seeing someone else
wearing your favorite shirt. I spent some time on the site playing with
their tools and was very, very impressed. Great job iWidgets.com team,
wish you much success.

Vonage = Clueless

Blog, Personal No Responses »

Mar 192008

This is turning out to be my rant on crappy service by companies week.

Today, after almost four years or mediocre voice quality, I finally decided to ditch my Vonage line. As required by them, I called in to cancel my account.

For 20 mins. straight, despite my increasingly urgent pleas to just cancel my account, the rep kept insisting that I stay for two additional months free and they would have a tech out to my home tomorrow to look at the problem. WTF! I can understand a couple of attempts to keep the customer, but after 20 mins. I could not take it any more and I hung up.

Vonage does not get it…these kind of pushy sales tactics are not going to help their growing decline. It will only make customers more irate and increase negative PR for them. They appear to be totally clueless.

I am going to call them again today and hope I’ll have better luck this time.

Kids and electronics

Blog, Personal No Responses »

Mar 172008

I want my daughters to grow up having good fundamental knowledge of things like basic electronics, plumbing, mechanical stuff, construction etc. I recognize that more and more analog things will be digital in her future, but it never hurts to know the basics.

To that end, I recently bought Gia, my three-year-old, her first electronics project kit. I researched this quite a bit — I did not want anything overly complex, nor did I want anything too simple. Something that would be fun and get her to think and ask questions. I found the perfect kit — Snap Circuits.

Although their website is horrible and ugly, their product is awesome. I got the SC-100 basic kit. It has about a 100 projects you can do using a battery pack, motor, speaker, music chip, alarm chip, resistors and a few other parts.

So far, we have created mostly projects that make cool sounds. I think Gia’s favorites were the ones where the motor speed can be increased and then shut off causing the flimsy plastic wheel to become airborne. Another one is a water alarm where two wires have to be inserted into a glass of water to cause an alarm to go off.

Overall, I am pleased with Snap Circuits. It is helping me achieve exactly the goal I wanted while giving dad+daughter some fun things to do besides tinker with home brew computers.

In this picture, Gia is trying out a fun, motion-activated “Happy Birthday” tune player project.