Blippy:Twitter Meets Your Credit Card

Sharing has become the norm online, and has become downright popular with impetus in recent years. People share everything from news stories on sites like Digg, short tweets, pictures, video…you name it. The new service Blippy takes this sharing fever to a new level: your financial information.

The site is laid out like Twitter with short statuses with a very basic layout. The main difference is that instead of just writing a status update one links either a merchant account or a credit card…or both and as one makes purchases, those purchases are placed on ones personal page for all to see.

The idea is that your purchasing habits become conversation starters. Your followers can comment on your purchases and you can respond to questions. So for instance lets say you buy some concert tickets and someone thinks it is an awesome concert: they can leave a comment, you get notified just like with Facebook or Twitter and could spot your friend a ticket while still at the checkout booth for your purchase. That is because like Twitter it is in real time.

Of course a service like this is rife with security questions: How secure are your credit card numbers when similar site like Twitter get hacked regularly? For me I think it is kind of sad that people need a service like this to start conversations. Rampant consumerism as a a lifestyle choice is bad enough, but now that lifestyle based on excess is going to be the basis of our social lives? Its just a bit too surreal to absorb at the moment.

Below is a screenshot of a typical feed on Blippy:

IPad Follow-up

A couples weeks ago I laid out my wish list for the yet to be named Apple Tablet. Well, the device is here and I thought I would follow-up on that previous post.

Of my five criteria for what might entice me to buy an IPad I only got 1 and a half of this things I was looking to see. Her is my list, simplified, with annotations now that the actual device can be compared to them:

1. Real ports, such as USB. This would be the “killer” thing to get me to put down my port-less Nokia N810….sadly the IPad has no ports that are useful. Yes it has a real keyboard, which is nice but without a port for my camera or media device I am still tethered to my home computer.

2. Full fledged OSX. It’s funny how I noted that the Iphone OS was not adequate in my last post when many pundits were hoping for just that…they clearly forgot that Iphone’s don’t have multitasking or flash.

3. Storage similar to the 120 gigs available to the Macbook Air. I didn’t get this, flat out. Instead I’d have to fork over 700 bucks for a device that has half the storage I would need….especially for a media centric device.

4. No contract, no cell data plan needed. Firstly I am very pleased this thing is unlocked with wifi for those of us that choose not to pay for a data plan. That said I was surprised how cheap the data plan for AT&T was, that no contract was required, and it could be purchased from the device itself. I hope this becomes a trend industry wide.

5. Competitive pricing. It is certainly cheaper than I was expecting, even the maxed out model comes in at a pretty competitive price for Apple. That said spec and software wise you get a pretty limited device for the price. I would have rather seen a more capable device closer to the 850-1000 price range originally rumored.

My Verdict: Obviously in this initial offering from Apple there is not enough to make me re-think my digital world. That said just like the Ipod I believe this is a seed of a new product line. I won’t be an early adopter, but I will be keeping my eye on Apple to release a “pro” version of the Tablet down the line that is more capable and could be used as a netbook stand-in.

Firefox Mobile: First Impressions

Firefox Mobile, sometimes called Fennec has been pretty anticipated for some time now, but right now unless you either have a Nokia N810 Tablet or are willing to use a mobile browser on a full-fledged desktop you are out of luck. But not to worry, because I have a Nokia N810….of course

I had the first Alpha release and the reason I didn’t report on my experiences with it was because I didn’t have any. Simply put Fennec would crash almost immediately after taking several minutes to come up in the first place, after a few tries I basically gave up. I had far too much on my plate at the time to fiddle with it. After that initial experience I had pretty low expectations for the latest Alpha release.

As you may already know Flash support was removed from this latest release due to stability issues, so based on that alone you should not consider using Fennec unless you just want to test it out. After all thats what “Alpha” means.

The Flash issue aside this version is MUCH more usable. It comes up much faster, stays working longer, and seems to have a good interface. The menus are “hidden” and by swiping on the edge you expose them. This maximizes screen space. Also there is support for add-ons which is unheard of in the mobile browser arena for the most part. It still crashes a bit too much for my taste, but for Alpha software it is a marked improvement.

The Nokia n810 comes packaged with its own Mozilla based browser called MicroB. MicroB is still head ans shoulders better than any mobile browser out there, including Fennec. It has flash support, a few add-ons, and it fits well in the n810’s interface so I won’t be giving it up…but I do feel MicroB’s days are numbered. One of my big problems with MicroB is  that you HAVE to use the stylus to use it, it does not like my figures. Fennec even in Alpha state responds much better to finger input, so that is pretty exciting for me since using a stylus is pretty awkward.

I will post some screen shots and a follow up soon, I plan to play around with some add-ons soon.

Zenbe Shutters Free Service After Outage

Well it comes as no great surprise why Zenbe was being rather evasive around restoring accounts that recently got screwed up in a server outage that I wrote about in a previous post. The reason for this is because Zenbe was clearly moving to eliminate their free service altogether and something got messed up. This morning all free account holders were given a “Dear Jon Letter”. Frankly this took an already badly managed situation and just added insult to injury. It was bad enough to have the outage which resulted in data getting messed up, but that after repeated comments in the official blog post (which has now been taken down) that they were going to restore service it is now clear they never intended to do so. This is not the right way to build a good reputation. Also do the fact that they are trying to pretend this isnt happening by making no mention of the change in their official blog really kind of ticks me off. The free users were the testing ground, they have every right to close the service but do it honestly and in the open.

The aforementioned letter is below:

On February 28, 2010, we will turn off the free Zenbe Personal Mail service (the one with the green background). After February 28, 2010 you will no longer be able to login to your account on Zenbe Personal, or access it via POP or IMAP.

We greatly enjoyed creating an innovative, free email service and receiving excellent feedback from users like you. We are a small team committed to building well-designed, high-quality products. Like all small businesses, we’ve had to adapt to the needs of our users and the demands of the market. To do that effectively we built a vastly improved version of Zenbe Mail from the ground up. We run it in a top-tier data center and focus heavily on reliability, performance, and individualized customer support. We also bundle in our acclaimed Shareflow product that offers a truly unique approach to group communication.

We listened to your feedback and worked hard to keep the original, free personal email product available to existing users as long as we could, even as we moved forward with our new email product and other premium services. However, we no longer feel we can provide the quality of service and support we aspire to for the free email product. We want to be up-front with our free users, and give you the information and tools you need to move to a new email service.

We are proud of the new and improved Zenbe Mail. It’s not free, but it’s affordable. We hope you take a look at the new design and features. If you decide to sign up, use the promo code UPGRADE50 and you’ll receive 50% off your first three months of service.

We do recognize that you have many choices and may wish to find a different free email service. We’ve written a detailed migration guide that describes how to move your Zenbe data, regardless of which service you choose. We encourage you to use the comments section there to share any migration tips with other Zenbe users.

Zenbe Personal Migration Guide

It may take up to a few days to move all your email from Zenbe to a new service so please read through the guide soon.

Feel free to use the comments section on the announcement page or migration guide to ask any questions, or email us for specific help at migration@zenbe.zendesk.com.

Sincerely,
The Zenbe Team

Yes, that is right Zenbe Personal users have about a month to either join the pay service, or take a hike. I know after the shenanigans of the past few weeks I wouldn’t stay with Zenbe if they paid me. At any rate I am officially endorsing Zoho Mail as a far superior replacement for Zenbe, I will write more an in depth post about Zoho in the next couple days, but you can check out my brief post on them I recently did as well (the write-up on Zoho is near the end).

Finally Set-up my Blogroll!

I make many friends in my internet travels, many of whom have interesting content of their own that I would like to share. So enter the Blogroll (left hand column) which will be provide links to great sites I think my readers should check out. Each time I add to it I will be sure to do a little write-up as to why I think these sites are awesome. With that lets do that first write-up for TwistedMac!

I “met” Matt Carter over on the GMX forums actually. He is the kind of writer you like to see in a forum; his responses are to the point, he keeps a cool head, and he writes in a nice flowing way that is easy to follow instead of the unhelpful and hard to read “bullet point” style many employ.

Simply put his site is for anyone that likes, is curious about, or needs help with Apple products.  I even found some useful things when I decided to dust of my first gen Blueberry ibook to be upcycled as a news reader/digital photo frame for my sitting area.

Even though I no longer use as my best friends put it “the fruit”, I do enjoy visiting TwistedMac because I find it a really professional site that I can learn much from. This blog is still very young but, it is heads and shoulders better than the ones it replaced. I hope this gradual upward trend in my writing/blog maintaining continues and that I end up with a site at least half as good as TwistedMac. So go forth and get your Apple fix!

I Just HAVE To: The Apple Tablet

It seems that every Tom, Dick, and Harriet is writing about the yet-to-be announced-or-confirmed-its-even-real Apple Tablet. I am not going to buy into the rumor mill, but I think I would like to do a writing exercise around the idea of it. So as a avid computer user what things would an “Apple Tablet” have to have to get me to consider buying it?

1. Real ports! I have a Nokia n810 and love it, but one thing that I wish it had was a real usb port. Any tablet would have to have this to get me to move away from my Nokia. Right now I am looking really hard at the Archos 9 and the main reason is the single USB port and the port replicator.

2. OSX, seriously if it has the Flash-less Iphone O/S its a deal breaker. Apps are cool and all but if its just going to be a big Iphone my interest will fade fast. I want the real user interface, a full browser, support for Mac compatible apps like Google Sketch-up (awesome on a touch screen!), Stream Netflix, and the full Itunes for downloading content. Also if it is a version of full OSX It will beat any tablet with Windows 7 Starter on it as far as I am concerned.

3. Storage, as much as I like flash storage I need more than what can be purchased for a reasonable amount. If Apple can get a 120 gig HDD into the Macbook Air they can get one into a tablet.

4. Independence, if I have to buy a mobile broadband connection from a cell phone provider rather than just use free wifi I have two words: deal breaker.

5. It has to be priced competitively, I am completely unwilling to pay a 500 dollar premium to have an Apple logo.  Price is the main reason I left Apple a couple years ago, and price will keep me away. If the super cool Lenovo Netbook/tablet combo is coming for 999.00, an Apple tablet should come in at least a 100 bucks cheaper. 900 bucks is still steep and may keep me away but I wouldn’t be surprised. If it is between 6 and 8 hundred dollars as some have predicted I will be down at my local Apple Store day one…seriously.

This concludes my wish-list!

900: A Bad Number For GMX

I have been using GMX for a work email address for about 5 months now to avoid using Citrix, have been signed up for about two years with varying personal usage, and have been a long time forum user. I just reached 900 posts on the forum, I am only aware of two other people that have more posts than me. That said this is not a cause for celebration.

I have estimated that my average per month posting is about 50 individual posts with over 98% of them being responses to other peoples posts. This is just me, there have been several very active people in the forum besides me in my tenure there.

Plain and simple this is a lot of posts in an email support forum, it is really telling to the quality of the service when 1) there are this many posts to respond to in the first place, and 2) Support doesn’t find a way to respond faster to issues and to be more active in the forum.

Speaking of the Moderator and Support, currently I have nearly 300 more posts than the Moderator…seriously. I have never been part of a forum where the MOD wasn’t the person with the most posts, never mind not even in the top 5 posters (it may be more like not even in the Top 10 posters, but I got tired of looking).

Nope the only thing you get from GMX is emails boasting about GMX with fake users like “John”. Here is part of that email; I find it VERY amusing :

All John B. wanted was a reliable e-mail service that had good SPAM monitoring and was accessible through various means. Having never heard of GMX prior to his search for a new ISP, John decided to give GMX a shot. After about a year, he shared some of his thoughts with us. Continue reading below to see what he had to say.

			GMX: Why did you choose GMX for an e-mail service? John: The reason I opened a GMX Mail account was that I moved from my old ISP. My previous ISP attracted a lot of spam mails and they were not prepared to do anything about it. And all I really wanted was a mail account that I could use over the Web or integrated into Outlook, and GMX looked good. GMX: How does the customer feedback from GMX Moderators compare to other free mail services? John: After my experience with Hotmail’s tech support, I was skeptical to be honest. It was not a pleasant experience. GMX seems to do a decent job as far as customer service goes, so I can’t necessarily say I expect anything different should I need help with my e-mail. GMX: What is your least favorite aspect about GMX?
John: The Mail Collector will pick up duplicate copies of an e-mail (i.e. I will get it twice). While it was a bit of an annoyance, GMX Support was able to fix it for me.. GMX: Why do you use GMX Mail (i.e. business, personal, the useful features, etc.)? What is the main attraction of the service for you? John: I use GMX every day because it’s reliable and easy to use, whether on the Web or from Outlook.
	GMX: What advice would you give someone who just started a GMX account? John: Setting up IMAP can be a bit hit and miss, so you are better off using POP 3. It seems more reliable. GMX: In your opinion, how could GMX improve its service in the future? John: Just keep it free, and listen to the user’s requests for additional services. That’s big. If GMX can do these two things, I think it will have a lot of satisfied users.

My Responses:

1. Spam control on GMX are actually pretty good, unless GMX decides your account is a “security risk”. When this happens they lock down the account so even the owner cant gain access, and because all the support pages are integrated into the webmail you are left scratching your head unless you previously read about the problem in the forum. The best part is the solution: Send support a email! How can you do that if you dont have access to your email account?

2 & 3: For a free service GMX’s direct email responses are actually pretty good when compared to my experiences with Gmail, Aol, Yahoo, and others. I also agree that the multiple email thing is annoying, but there are some more serious problems I’d rather have seen them own up to. Like for instance the blocked account issue, out of date support pages, and the issues with links in emails not being usable.

4 & 5: GMX does have outages and because of limits placed on which browers can be used, no mobile support other than IMAP/pop3, For someone away from their main computer they may have problems using it;but I dont have too many issues getting in to read my mail. The thing about pop3 being more reliable than Imap is total B/S, its the other way around. GMX’s pop3 is a pain, further their smtp is not very reliable for non-webmail users.

6. They better keep it free, or they will lose all of their customers. I can’t picture too many people paying for GMX as is. I also disagree with the “more features” part, they need to get what they have right before adding more. Also releasing dumb features (colors, widgets, Facebook Connect) while ignoring hundreds of requests for useful ones like real mobile support, plain text, labels/tasks for the calendar, email attachment management within file storage, and so on is a real bone head move.  I’d rather get no new features than GMX developers tossing useless distractions at me.

Twitter to Digg-like sites: Your on borrowed time

The other day I was canceling services, I do this from time to time because I sign up for way more services than I could ever use…I am just a curios soul. Sometimes when I do this I notice that a certain type of service has basically been displaced by another. This is what happened this year.

I left Digg/De.li.cious earlier in the year and in this latest round I left the reincarnated Gnolia as well as Mixx. The reason for this is that I just simply wasn’t using them, which is weird because I am a bookmark sharing junky. Faced with the realization that I was about to have no bookmark sharing service I wondered how this came to be, then it hit me: Twitter!

For me and I am sure many others Twitter is a much better bookmarking site. It has no complex features, you do not have to worry if someone else has posted the same thing because Twitter doesn’t care, it is much easier to get established with Twitter than a site like Digg with its “super users” that make it very hard to do what you want to without sounding like a “me too” user, and Twitter plays much nicer with traditional outlets like blogs because it adds to the content without becoming the focus. Sites like Digg have become too feature rich and require too much time to fully realize their potential.

I don’t think sites like Digg are going away but I do think their will be a consolidation in this area, and that the site that survive will have to make changes. What would be nice is if Digg came out with a set-up similar to Typepad Micro which offers more than Twitter, but not so much that it is a chore to use.

Well…Sorry Folks

It would appear I have been slacking! It has been over two weeks since my last post, But I assure you all I have been stewing on some new posts.

In the next 48 I hope to post on a Twitter realization I just had regarding new aggregation, another update on GMX, I have some new Firefox/Web browser musings, a couple Linux posts, I will weigh in on Smartbooks, and even the Apple Tablet (hey, everyone else has, why not me?).

So no I havent been slacking, I just keep no hitting the “post” button. Get ready for a flood!

Alpha Inventions: Pulling The Thorn From Your Stats

One of the great things about WordPress is the stats feature, hands down it is the killer feature that keeps me here. With a single click I can see what posts are popular and use that information as a gage when I am planning future posts. Not to say that popularity is the sole motivator for how I manage my blog, but it is of course a factor.

Like all things that can “indicate popularity”  people become obsessed with stats, and some creative coders manipulate this personality flaw of these bloggers. These “code magicians” can give you access to products to drive up your stats, but few do it in a way that legitimately increases readership of your blog. An example is a product that has dogged my stats for some time: Alpha Inventions.

The premise is this: Alpha scans blogs on services like WordPress and aggregates them. The blogs it grabs are then displayed on a screen run by Alpha with the page changing every few seconds. The idea is that this site is a big advertisement for all the blogs that appear and will thus drive traffic to those sites. This seems strait forward and it certainly does drive up traffic, Alpha recently drove up my traffic by 150+ hits in a single day for a simple update to my “about” page.

However, this traffic is in no way legitmate and only serves to warp your stats and thus cripples the useful stats tool which CAN help you drive REAL traffic to your site which results in actual readers. Why would I say this? Simple, each time your site goes up on the the Alpha website your blog counts it as a hit regardless of whether the person seeing it decides to visit your site and actually read (and maybe subscribe to) your content. So in the end you’re traffic hasn’t really gone up and now you have no idea what posts are popular.

I have read several forum threads about this one product and it was a real challenge for many people to convince the inventor to even allow an opt-out. Basically the guy just didn’t get it. In his view blogger content is public, search engines crawl our pages all the time, so whats the problem? Clearly the guy is not a blogger and has never used the tools of the trade. I have no problem with this blog being public or search engines crawling it to increase my search rating; but these things do not fowl up my stats… Alpha does. After some very long threads the guy finally put in an opt-out page, which is not very easy to find (there is no link I can find on his main page, I found it on a support thread after two hours of reading support threads). So if you are in the same boat as me, here is the link to block this site: alphainventions.com/block

Ideally this service would be an opt-in for those that want it, rather than being an opt-out and an added annoyance to blog authors everywhere…as if we do not already have enough. I know Alpha hasn’t made any friends here at Alltech.