There is alot I like about Myspace.
It’s an incredibly viral and sticky site.
What I mean is, it’s addictive and I keep wanting to come back for more.
I love how you can customise your profile to look any way you want.
Looking for old friends is like a game, a kind of synthetic hide and seek!
Most of my friends are on it.
I can let people know what I’m up to with bulletins.
There are alot of cool things about myspace that make it unreal!
Myspace is web 2.0?
Hmph
It’s more like a web 1.0 application incorporating social networking concepts.
Problems with Myspace:
1. Interface
You would think that a site worth so much to Murdock would get a major overhaul in the user interface department. It’s seriously lacking, uses very little DHTML or AJAX to speed the overall user experience and has an uneccesarilly number of steps to do simple things like adding friends and comments.
They could learn a whole lot about interface design from Flickr and Digg.
2. It’s the worst looking of the top 10 sites on the net.
OK, I will admit that most designs on myspace are at the mercy of individual users. But how about giving everyone a great headstart by making the default user profile totally awesome?
It lacks the overall refinement of Facebook
It’s so web 1.0 in it’s “look”, it’s so 1998.
3. Stability
I have never know a website to so consistently drop out.
I kid you not.
It seems to have “serious errors” alot… seriously.
4. What it’s built on.
Coldfusion?
Are you kidding me?
One of the most traffiked websites on the internets and it’s build of CF?
Hey, I love programming CF as much as the next geek, but seriously, let get serious here…
It feels like myspace has been developed by someone like me… not a real programmer, but someone who wants to be one, but lacks the attention to detail to pull it off.
I really think it’s been a victim of it’s own success, growing too quickly to manage it’s expanding user base effectively.
summary:
I can’t say that I know everything that goes on behind the scenes, so lets just assume that everything is working great and take it for granted.
Myspace needs a big overhaul, with big challengers like Facebook and virb on their way, Myspace does not have the luxury to sit back on their laurels and expect thier user base to to be ok with a clunky interface, site errors and the small stuff.
A mate of mine was at work today and the brother of one of his co-workers turned up (having just landed from the states) with a red-hot iPhone coolly hanging from his left mit! Aaron (my mate) got the chance to polish it for a few minutes while trying out some cool moves reviewers from over the pond have been raving about.
Pinching with the fingers to enlarge and shrink images, very smooth!
This fella didn’t have roaming enabled, so he didn’t get to go any further than the froth and bubble, but still, Aaron (damn you!) has been the closest almost all of us here down under have gotten to the little blighter.
Now for the wait (you yanks thought you had it bad with 6 months!) we will have to wait at least another 12 before it materialises…
This is the most classic error message for a social website login I have ever seen!
I discovered it after using an incorrect username on www.verb.com
I had completely forgotten the last time I had seen this error message, must have been the last time I had a paper jam with an old mangy HP Laserjet III my Dad used to keep at his offices!
For more info on the history of the error:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Load_Letter
Apple just announced the iPhone
The whole incredible deal on Engadget!
Well,
We have managed to traverse a potentially error prone and disasterous move to new offices with flying colours!!
Everything ran very smoothly with our server down less than an hour and a half.
The new studios are phenominal. As the central location for all our IT and multi-sites, it’s the perfect location for hosting a virtual office for multi-sites and pastors working from home.
The building we are in hosts the main fiber-optic link for the Gold Coast, servicing a data centre in our building and Bond University.
Cerum has provisioned a very fast open port onto the internet that has the capacity to easily service 4 or 5 branch offices and campuses across the Gold Coast.
VOIP is perfect for this kind of link, with low latency and high upstream speeds. We can potentially even host our own websites and streaming servers there, right from within our own offices.
I’m in the process of working with Faktortel and Dean Davis from Cerum to build our own IAX Server to host all our IP phones spread across all sites. Ah the wonders of open source software!
Over the next week, the PBX (phone server) will be built and tested with each of the 12 VOIP handests we currently have.
Initially we were going to host our phones on a Virtual PBX from Faktortel, but due to restrictions with NAT traversal and stun servers with our 6 Polycom i301 handsets, we needed to build our own VOIP server located on the same subnet as the phones.
Which means that we get our own PBX 3 months ahead of time!
The next few things to happen over the coming weeks:
I have a theory,
Ever since the inception of TV, television has had a big impact on Church attendance. TV is an essentially static medium as far as time goes, essentially, you are bound to watching a program when it airs, rather than picking and chosing when to watch a show based on your schedule. I really do think that the inflexibility of TV from a time perspective has kept people away from church when they need to be there the most.
How many people miss church to Australian Idol on a Sunday night?
It’s only been the emergence of bittorent and other “disruptive technologies” that has allowed people to:
Up till now, if you wanted to watch a TV program you have one of two options. Either watch it when it airs in your living room, or whereever a TV happens to be present, or record it to a static medium such as video tape or recordable DVD.
From a usability prespective, TV is perfect, you switch it on, alter the volume and change channels.
From a time perspective, TV is less than perfect, the programming executive at the TV station picks and chooses when you watch a specific piece of content.
Time-shifting – the ability to view a piece of content whenever you want to will change the way people interact with content in the future. Essentially, the content is downloaded when it becomes available and later viewed at the discretion of the user.
Space-shifting – the ability to move a particular piece of content between devices so that the content can be viewed in a number of different settings at the convenience of the user. This will become more and more prevalent as mobile media playback devices become more prevalent. Traditionally, this has involved copying to CD, tape or DVD, but has been expanded to include digital music/video players, mobile devices and set-top boxes.
TiVo was the first mass market consumer device to allow people to time-shift content easily and simply. All you have to do is bring up the show guide and select the programs that you want to save to the TiVo’s large hard disk drive for later viewing. It’s a great concept and it works. You can even erase last weeks ephisode with the new ephisode to conserve disk space. It’s easy, non-messy and doesn’t involve programming VCR’s and dealing with video tapes.
More to come soon!
I’m annoyed,
everyone is giving Apple a bad wrap when it comes to suing the daylights out of the likes of Powerpage.com, ThinkSecret.com, and AppleInsider.com.
Ok sure, these guys are big fans of Apple, but I think that trying to find out before time what Apple is about to launch just shows that their a smarty-pants.
If someone needs to get their Geek points from leeking information from Apple, then thats fine, just don’t spoil it for the rest of us! I happen to like waiting. Waiting for Steve Job’s keynotes is cool, he runs the best keynotes in the business, why do we all need to know before time what Apple is doing?
This remindes me of “Revenge of the Sith” and Star Wars fans, who are as we speak divided into two camps. One camp are the spoilers, and the other are the non-spoilers. The spoilers are willing to trawl newsgroups, bribe the production crew and generally do whatever it takes to get as much information as they possibly can about the plot and characters before the movie starts. The non-spoilers are the complete opposite. They are averse to any kind of information regarding the movie whatsoever. Even to the extent of being diametrically opposed to seeing movie trailers and any mass-marketing of the movie. They want to enjoy the movie in it’s most pure unadulterated form.
I remember a time when all I did was read press releases on the internet… I was addicted to products that only existed on paper, and when they finally came out, I had already moved on to the next cool product X about to be released by company X.
For instance, Apple OS X 10.4 “Tiger” exists, Windows Longhorn dosn’t.
Am I going to trawl websites looking for every tidbit of information relating to Longhorn? No, because it dosn’t add value to what I’m doing now. Am I going to seriously consider getting an Mac that runs Tiger? Yes, because it actually exists now, and it could actually add value to what I’m doing now.
I think people should focus on whats happening now, rather than on whats happened before, or whats coming tomorrow. Today is where it’s at, it’s where we put our hand to the plow and it’s where we get the job done.
Well, we have finally got our church services recorded straight to computer. This is a great development as I can now hand Ps Ian a CD of Andrew or Vanessa’s message straight after the service. We can then fullfil orders very quickly by copying that master CD to other CD’s during the week, ready for pickup the following week.
Hiyas, I thought I’d post my first blog in quite a while! I know I’m been gone for too long, but I promise to keep posting as regularly as possible.
The last few months have been full-on fun and hard work helping Andrew and Vanessa and the whole team get Generation Church off the ground on the Gold coast. I have been involved in production and I’ve loved the challenge of learning about production challenges that face every sound guy in a church.
I’ve also been working with a small team on church news each week, which has been alot of fun and provides a regular creative outlet. Check out the church news video page. This page is being updated every week with fresh weekend news for our congregation at Reidy Creek. I have encoded the video in a number of different video formats including WMV, MOV and DivX. So I think that all the bases are covered, including a very high quality DivX option that allows people with a faster broadband connection to download the video and watch it on their computers. You may be interested to know that the DivX version is what we actually use for playback of church news for the weekend services! It’s quality is outstanding and file size is small compared to Mpeg-2 used to compress DVD video.