Nothing to see here, move along...

Just a quick post to let you know this is pretty much shutting down. I've gotten a nice hosting account, and set up camp at www.RocketShipToPlanetJeff.com. It's exactly what it sounds like, all things me. I love this place, and I love blogging, but I really wanted my own hosted site where I could develop widgets, apps, pages, and test code out. My own little "sandbox-slash-laboratory".

I'm going to leave this place up. No need to shut it down. It's been fun blogging here over the last couple of years, but I'll probably point the URL to my new blog shortly, so don't be alarmed if it doesn't work anymore, or points to a different place.

Thanks.

Why Facebook 2010 = AOL 1996

UPDATE: When I started writing this article, the students below were being praised for raising $100,000 in less than two weeks. As I sit here ready to publish this, a day later, they've raised over $162,000.

There's a great story out the last couple of days about a group of students from NYU who have crowd-sourced investment capital to develop an open source alternative to Facebook. This actually comes on the heels of a great article in Wired calling for an open source alternative to Facebook (funny how that works, right?).

So what's happened over the last couple of weeks, and how quickly can this game change?

Look no further than relatively recent history and the story of AOL to find out.

In the 90s, AOL was a powerhouse. I had an account on AOL going back to around 1989 when it was a Macintosh Gaming BBS and the company was known as Quantum. AOL was a great "sandbox" to play in, but anyone with a telnet window and access to the growing list of protocols outside of AOL (Anyone else remember Gopher?) could see the writing on the wall. When 1993 rolled around, I was a junior in college and a group over at NCSA released something called "Mosaic", all bets were off. The AOL deathwatch had begun.

AOL was a "walled garden". You wanted to send messages (email)? You did it on AOL. Wanted to participate in chats, download desktops or pictures? You did it on AOL. AOL reluctantly opened their system up to FTP, Gopher and a small list of TCP/IP based services, but by then it was too late. People had seen the World Wide Web and collectively, the members of AOL said, "what the hell am I doing here, when all this other shit is out there, and it's free?".

Well, the same thing is happening right now with Facebook. People (smart people) are realizing that having Facebook be the gatekeepers of all your personal information (and basically signing away permission for them to share it, sell it, etc as they see fit) is a fucked proposition. The internet is made up of open protocols and Facebook is being anything but. They call it "Open Graph", but Facebook's definition of "Open" is vastly different from the general population's definition of the word.

But this isn't the worst side of Facebook's master plan that's been inadvertently revealed over the last few weeks. Their plan to own all of your activity, then turn around and expose it, or worse, sell it to partners has raised alarm bells far and wide. I recently sat down with a friend who asked me to help her with her privacy settings on Facebook and she was visibly shaken when she realized that formerly private photos and photo albums had been exposed to (literally) "Everyone" without her say. Personal information, Networks, friends... all exposed and made available to anyone with internet access and a browser (in other words, like I said, literally everyone).

That's why recent movements in the area of open protocols and open source alternatives will absolutely take off and will absolutely have the same effect the "Internet" had on AOL. Facebook's a great idea, but their execution is flawed (AOL was a great idea, it just wasn't executed the right way, until it was way too late). Information flows freely, and people inherently want ownership over the content they create. We're in the infancy of Web 2.0 technologies & the idea of UGC (User Generated Content) but slowly the "Users" in that acronym are waking up to the idea that, "wait, I'm creating value for you, you're making money (as Kenny Powers is fond of saying, "A Shit-Ton of it") off of me, and not only am I getting nothing in return, but you own the content I'm uploading? Bulllllllllshit."

Again, nobody is saying that the idea of Facebook, Social Media, and User Generated Content  are bad, just that current executions of the idea in practice leave consumers and users powerless, and that dynamic won't last long. Open source, open protocols of Facebook's basic sharing principle, built on a foundation of already existing technologies (RSS, Ajax, JS, CSS3, HTML5) will allow the people uploading and sharing to own and control their own information.

Of course, the interesting thing to watch will be how the Search Engines and the businesses who have made money off of the Shit-Ton of information being pushed out into the ether will react to users creating their own, personal "walled gardens" and being the gatekeepers of their own information and content.

I'm going to sit back, pop some popcorn, and enjoy watching that one unfold.

"Exit Through The Gift Shop"

A must-see.

I HEART the American Heart Association [video]

One of the great things about working with Leadership Grand Strand this past year has been meeting and hooking up with Ryan Hannan of the American Heart Association. The NUMBER ONE reason I started riding a bike, eating right, and making the lifestyle changes I made over the last year and a half was my heart. I was initially told that I was going to be put on Cholesterol Lowering medication and High Blood Pressure medication and the thought that I had "let myself go" that much impacted me so dramatically that I decided then and there to make significant changes to my life. It was all about my heart. It was never about "losing weight" or "looking better" or any other superficial reason. I'm not saying that those benefits haven't impacted me, because they've changed my life in ways that I never would've expected, but that's not why I started down this road. I simply didn't want to die of a heart attack or stroke, and become a statistic that left my wife and kids without a husband and father.

So it's tremendously rewarding to work with The American Heart Association. If I have one "TMI Takeaway" from my year's experience with Leadership Grand Strand it's that I DO have a cause that I'm not only passionate about, but that I can use the leadership skills I've learned to jump in and help them in any way possible spread the word about Heart Health.

How the iPhone Could End Up In Second Place

Via Gizmodo:

Here are the US mobile web traffic figures for iPhone OS and Android, getting ready to collide: Android, on its way up; iPhone, on its way down. So when will Android overtake the iPhone? Try next month.
Gizmodo >>

Hold Everything... Android Tablet Prototypes Support Flash [VIDEO]

Drooling over tablets, but worried about lack of Flash support on the iPad? Sit tight, because a slew of tablets running Android will be emerging shortly with full Flash support, thanks to the NVIDIA Tegra platform team’s work with Adobe.

Pads, "Passionate Programming" and Reckless Pragmatism

Yes, I'm going to get one. I'm going to bite the bullet and get an iPad.

No, I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with it. I don't know what purpose it serves, I can't think of a practical reason for owning one, and honestly, the purchase might be classified as "reckless", "impulsive", or... dare I say, "stupid".

But I do have one idea, and I think it trumps any argument for not getting one: Programming.

I think this device IS going to change the game, and I DO think that there is going to be an amazing new world of development possibilities that arise as a result.

And I want to be a part of it.

So I'm going to get one. Then I'm going to download the Software Development Kit. Then I'm going to spend my evenings learning how to write apps for what I sincerely believe will be the next great platform. I'm going to tinker with it, I'm going to play with it, and most importantly, I'm going to learn.

"He's dead, Jim..."

So it looks like our HDTV kinda died over the weekend. I suppose it was bound to happen. She was a first generation Cathode-Ray Tube widescreen TV. Technically the best picture quality you can buy. Superior to LCD, or Plasma, or any other projection or flat panel technology. No "contrast ratio". Black is truly black, and white is truly white for a picture that's pretty much stunning. Seriously, nothing else comes close.

We've called the TV Repair guy (AKA Spicoli's dad). He's got this awesome set of tools, and he can fix it.

But secretly, on the inside...

I'm tempted to just let it sit for the summer.

Oh sure, I'd miss the gaming, without a doubt. But the rest? TV? Really? It pretty much sucks. I can count on less than one hand the shows I'd miss, and honestly? I'd just download 'em and watch 'em on the laptop.

TV... "meh".

Yelp for Business: 4 Steps for Success

Yelp for Business: 4 Steps for Success via Mashable:

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

For local small businesses, Yelp isn’t just an option — it’s a necessity. People in urban centers use it to choose where to go to dinner, where to buy clothes, and where to be entertained. Users decide where and how to spend their money using Yelp, so if your business is local, you need to curate your Yelp page.

If your business has been around long, you probably already have a page; you’re just not holding the reins yet. You’ll want to step in and take control of it as soon as possible, because using it correctly can bring you new business and prevent any negative word of mouth from hindering your growth and success.

Claiming or creating your Yelp business page is easy; just fill out a couple of online forms and answer a quick, automated phone call. It takes less than five minutes. Once you’re signed up, you’ll have access to tools that will help you engage your customers and spread the word about what you’re offering to the community. Here are a few basic tips for successfully leveraging the tools Yelp offers you for the benefit of your local business.

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1. Fill Out Your Business Info Completely

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Customers refer to Yelp business pages to learn about a business before going out to visit in person. If the information on the Yelp page is incomplete, they’re likely to move on to a competitor that provides more details simply because they’ll better know what to expect and are less likely to be surprised, be disappointed or have their time wasted.

The administration page for business owners offers a slew of fields and choices for sharing information to make it easy for users to know exactly what to expect. If you provide the information they’re looking for, they’re more likely to become reliable, paying customers. So fill out as much information as you can, and keep it up to date.

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2. Respond Constructively to Customer Reviews

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Last Spring, Yelp gave business owners the ability to respond to negative reviews, either to privately make apologies to reviewers or publicly correct misinformation. Don’t skimp on using this feature because you’re afraid of making things worse; it can turn a bad situation around. Dissatisfied customers will often give you a second look if you communicate to them that you value their input and are making changes to improve your business.

Yelp published an easy-to-use guide to constructive user review responses on its website. It includes examples of how not to respond to user reviews and how best to. Some of the tips are obvious, but some of them aren’t. They’re worth a look, as is my colleague Josh Catone’s recent post, “How to Deal with Negative Feedback in Social Media.”

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3. Make Offers and Announcements Regularly

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Yelp allows you to share special offers and announcements not just with the people who visit your page, but with members of the larger community who might not even know about your business. When you create an offer or announcement on Yelp, it appears in the offers and announcements directory for your city. People who have never heard of your business will see them there. They’ll even find you in search results.

The more of these offers and announcements you make, the more likely it will be that Yelp users will discover your business, so come up with creative ways to draw people in, then share the news.

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4. Display Yelp Badges on Your Website or Blog

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Yelp provides badges that you can embed on your business’s website or blog that show that you’re on Yelp and engaged with your community. They’ll even tell visitors how many positive reviews you’ve had.

These badges give potential customers the impression that you have existing satisfied customers vouching for you, so they’ll be more likely to trust you with their business. The badges also act as links between your Yelp page and your other online outreach efforts. People can click a badge to read reviews or get more information. If a satisfied customer visits your site or blog, the badge might lead that person to leave his or her own positive review.

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Is Advertising on Yelp Worth it?

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You may also choose to advertise on Yelp. It costs between $300 and $1,000 per month — it’s kind of like a premium account — but there’s a chance that you’ll increase your exposure if you opt in, because you’ll appear at the top of the list when users perform a search related to your business.

There are a few other benefits as well. For example, you’ll be able to feature one good review of your choosing at the top of the list on your business page. You still can’t edit, move or delete other reviews, though.

It’s difficult to measure exactly how much these premium benefits will help you; it depends on a number of factors unique to your business and your city.

Surfrider Foundation Europe: Ocean Initiatives 2010

Via I Believe In Advertising Blog:

Surfrider Foundation Europe: Ocean Initiatives 2010:

“In the sea, there’s no such thing as a little bit of rubbish.”

Advertising Agency: Young & Rubicam, Paris, France
Creative Director: Les 6
Art Director: Sébastien Guinet
Ass Art Director: Julien Hérisson
Copywriter: Josselin Pacreau
Photographer: Ben Stockley
Retoucher: Asile
Art buyer: Sylvie Réveillard
Model Maker: Jean Benne
Published: March 2010

How Republicans eat crow

From DailyKos, crossposted from Congress Matters:

Joe 'You Lie!' Wilson (R-SC-02) on the floor earlier today, discussing the health insurance reform proposal:

"On the good side, The Hill today reports, front page, the Senate bill provides for citizenship verification to buy insurance."

Wilson, you'll recall, screamed out 'You Lie!' when President Obama told Congress in an address to a Joint Session that the health insurance reform bill would not offer coverage to illegal immigrants.

And guess what? Today he says it won't. Well, I'll be!

So what does a Republican do when forced to eat crow? Pour a little Freedom Ketchup on it! Before even drawing a breath, Wilson concluded his speech with this:

"In conclusion, God bless our troops, and we will never forget September 11th and the global war on terrorism."

Uh, yeah.

Android Growing RIDICULOUSLY Faster Than All Other Mobile Platforms (In the US)

From Phandroid.com:

Comscore has just published their smartphone reports detailing statistics from October 2009 through January 2010 and although we knew Android grew incredibly – the actual statistics are quite staggering. Take a look at this chart which shows market share from RIM, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Palm:

Second to last place with hardly more market share than Palm? How is that staggering? Well… as Kevin Tofel explains it is all a matter of how you look at the numbers. What we SHOULD be looking at is growth rate – that is – percentage growth from October through January:

That is HUGELY indicative of the momentum Android has and the deceleration of other platforms. Looking just at market share gain/growth you might not realize how poorly Microsoft is performing, how Palm is slowing more than any other platform, and how little RIM and Apple are improving. And for that matter, how ridiculously quickly Android is growing.

The numbers are looking good my friends and I would fully expect these various momentums (momentii?) to continue. Apple always gets a huge uptick with a new iPhone, and WebOS should perform better when they finally offer some new devices (if they’re unique), but I don’t see Android slowing down much over the next 10 months – at all. Not domestically or globally.

Holy crap, has it been 7 days already?

Boy, lose your laptop and all hell breaks loose.

Things I've done since my hard drive died:

1. Played more X-box. Seriously, Bioshock 2 is the greatest fucking game of the year (so far). I'm seriously in love with that game, the return to Rapture is astonishing. But more important, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 came out. This is a perfect example of short-term and long-term gaming. I'll play Bioshock for the next month non-stop. I'll beat it to death. Then I'll send it back to Gamefly. Battlefield? I'll still be playing Battlefield next fall. I currently have 109 hours into Battlefield: Bad Company, and if the first hours of this game are any indication, I'll easily outpace that time. On a side note. 109 hours of Battlefield may sound like a lot, but if you consider the PC game, I'm afraid that's child's play. I've got almost 300 hours into the PC version of the game. So if you only count those two, I've got over 400 hours of Battlefield play under my belt... and we haven't even discussed Battlefield: MC for Xbox.

2. Read more. I'm currently hip deep into "The Passionate Programmer" and I love it. This is a fantastic book. It's all about finding happiness and fulfillment as a programmer. In fact, the full title of the book is, "The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development". The mantra of the book is "Be Remarkable". Who wouldn't love that? I've also picked back up my Fantagraphics Popeye Collections and started back where I left off last winter. When we last visited our squintyy-eyed sailor, he was searching for Dooma, "a lost city of gold in an unknown sea". Constantly thwarted by Merlock Jones and his insidious disguises, the story culminates with the introduction of Popeye's greatest nemesis, Bluto (in his only appearance in Segar's strip). Between "The Passionate Programmer" and "Popeye" I'm almost tempted to let the Macbook sit for another couple of weeks.

Almost.

3. Ride my bike. Finally! After weeks of discomfort, I'm finally on a perfectly fitting bike. I will blog EXTENSIVELY about that, but suffice to say, if you ride a bike, please, by all means go and get a professional fitting! I spent three and a half hours with the guys from Trek and I'll never get on another bike again without having it precisely fit to my body. To think that I rode 4,600 miles last year on my bike the way it was set up. It's enough to make a grown man cry.

Anyway, so no laptop for about a week now, but damn if it hasn't been the best week in recent memory! I should destroy hard drives more often!

What an immensely rewarding weekend spent doing absolutely nothing of significance.

In the past seven days, I've had what can only be described as "some of the best professional and personal accomplishments in recent memory".

But you know what? In less than a month, I will have probably forgotten most, if not all of them, and moved on to bigger and better things. I won't look back. That's the nature of what I do. It's rewarding, but it's fleeting.

However, I don't think I'll ever forget spending Saturday morning, putting together a playhouse for my daughter, while she drew on the concrete with chalk and "helped me". You see those green squiggles in front of her house? Why, that's grass, of course. And that checkerboard pattern to the left of it? That's her hopscotch game. When I was finished building it, I went inside, made her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and left it for her on the window sill of her new house.

On Sunday, her cousin, who lives down the street, came over and the two of them played "Catwoman" for two hours in her new playhouse until their noses were runny from the cold, stopping only to come in once to use the bathroom and eat oatmeal cookies.

So while the past week was filled with amazing times both professionally and personally, it's a lazy Saturday morning spent putting together a cedar playhouse that will forever be etched in my memory.

My latest obsession has nothing to do with Vampires.

I can't tell you how much I love these guys. They were at Lollapalooza last year, and prior to Tammy and I flying out to Chicago, I put together this little, "So you're going to Lollapalooza" playlist for my phone and these guys were on it. Initially, when I got back from Chicago, I was listening to Kings of Leon and Manchester Orchestra almost non-stop, but then over the last couple of months I started listening to their debut album "Vampire Weekend" and I just became completely obsessed. We're talking "screaming-sixteen-year-old-little-girl" obsessed. I don't know what it is, but anyone who can work, "who gives a fuck about an oxford comma" and "all your diction, dripping with disdain" into a song is automatically on my intellectual radar.

The new album, "Contra" just came out a month or so ago, and it's sheer perfection in a can. As the video below demonstrates, this is a clever, smart, witty, fun group of guys who happen to be making kick-ass music. Lead singer, Ezra Koenig refers to their sound as “African Preppy,” or “Upper West Side Soweto.” Give it a listen.

Careful, your happiness is showing...

This weekend, I met some friends up at Gordon Biersch and I ran into an old friend who I hadn't seen in ages.

It was a sad lesson in the inevitabilities of life, but a reaffirmation for me about how powerful controlling your own life and making your own decisions can be.

When I knew this girl she was outgoing, smart (she finished college in 3 years with a communications degree from a pretty large, somewhat prestigious university), overflowing with self-confidence and refused to let anyone or anything define her. A pretty rare thing and something you don't run into every day. I guess you'd call her an "alpha female". Now, I'm not saying that in any derogatory way. In fact, just the opposite. I was always convinced that she'd be way bigger than any of us in our little "group".

My, how the years change people.

Now she's overweight, sad, and worse of all, she saddled with some horrible douchebag of a guy who's emotionally abusive, kind of an asshole, not very nice, and generally "a dick" to everyone who knows him ("Have you met the guy? He's a total asshole" is basically all anyone ever says). She's one of those women who have never really made a connection with someone meaningful, is getting way up there in years and hasn't gotten married, and is all about settling for the best thing that comes along...because, "let's be honest, that's about the best she's gonna do" (my friends are much less forgiving in their opinions than I am, I guess). What started off as a promising career in advertising, somehow turned into a menial job working in perhaps the most mindless government job on earth (now granted, not all government jobs are bad... but trust me on this one... some of them truly are).

The thing that's so sad though is how obviously she hates her life, and how easy it is to see. When she's telling you "all about the great things she's doing and how happy she is", she sounds less like someone who's telling you "all about the great things she's doing and how happy she is" and more like someone who's trying desperately to sell you on the idea that "all the things she's doing are great, and she's happy". You know what I mean? You kinda wanna say at a certain point, "um, next time don't try so hard...mmkay?"

That kinda bums me out.

Then again, it doesn't bum me out at all. I mean, it's one of those things that initially makes you sad, but then you realize, you can't control anyone else. They're gonna do what they're gonna do, and the decisions they make are theirs and theirs alone to live with.

What it does do, however, is actually make me almost hyperaware of the life that I've got and how all decisions I've made leading up to this moment have resulted in that life...and how completely happy that makes me. Not "pretend" happy. Not "happy to all my friends". But a deep, meaningful, "this is exactly how you're supposed to feel when you're happy" happy. At no point in my life will I ever fall into that trap of telling myself ever again that, "this is the best it will ever be" or "Well, this is how my life turned out I guess...". It's just too depressing a scenario to ever consider. It was one of the hardest lessons I had to learn over the last year or so, but ultimately was so rewarding that it stands to rewrite the definition of "rewarding". After all, decisions are opportunities. With every decision you make, you're presented with an opportunity to do great things. Positive things. Life-changing things.... or, well... not.

So as I walked out of Gordon Biersch on Saturday, muttering under my breath, "that is just so sad", I turned right and walked down to Barnes and Noble for a coffee. I called my wife on the way, to tell her I was on the way home (but wanted to grab a cup of coffee first) and make sure I mention that I loved her, which for some reason seemed like a really important thing for me to say at the time. Because by the time I made it to the bookstore, my happiness was showing.