The contract on my Sony Ericsson k810i phone expired at end of last year. I'd not had much luck with that phone, the joystick controller failed in the same way the it happened on the Sony Ericsson T610 I had on the one before last phone I had. Not being able to navigate the phone basically made it unusable towards the end. I figured, I'd had bad experiences with Sony Ericssons both times, I'd bought them, and I had three different Nokias and they had all worked pretty well. This time, I thought I go back to Nokia. The Nokia N95 got rave reviews though for me I was also looking for something to replace my aging 20GB iPod. The Nokia N96 was the successor to the N95 which added 16GB internal memory and the option to add another 16GB, which I did.

I also looked at the iPhone, though at the time it only supported 16GB, had no video support, no bluetooth stereo (which are all fixed now) and it's a pain to work with Linux since you need iTunes to get stuff on and off it. So I decided on the N96.

Nokia's phones used to be popular because they were easy to use and reliable, but they have really messed up big time with this one. Here some of the areas I've kept on hitting problems over the last 9 months with this phone:

Startup
When you need to turn on the phone it can take about a minute to start, also, slide to lock the screen doesn't work all this time. Normally this wouldn't be much of a problem but the phone does sometimes crash so you end up booting it more that you should need to.

Address Book
On an old Nokia phone I could type the first letter of a person's name and it would jump right to it, now they match the beginning of any word so, it will match their surname and other bits I've added to the name like "house", "work" "mob" etc. (maybe I shouldn't use these anymore) so searching for "h", "w" or "m" brings up a lot of unwanted results.

Text Messages
First off, sometimes when you receive a text the phone can take a while to wake up and show you the text at all. When your viewing the text you don't see the date/time of the text, on old non-smartphone Nokia phones you would simply scroll down, on the N96 you have to go to Options → (scroll right down to) Message Details and then scroll that down to see the time - which is crazy when the screen is so big.

Email client
The mail client leaves a lot to be desired, with the default settings it runs out of memory even when it is the only program running with an inbox of 4,000 messages. I found that reducing my mailbox down to about 1500 messages helped this a bit, but still most of the time wouldn't let you read a message. In the end, I found that limited the number of messages was the best answer which can be done with the following from Email:

Options → E-mail settings → Retrieval settings → Retrieval amount → From Inbox = 50 (default: All) Even with this setting, I find it can take several minutes to check for new message, when I haven't used it for a few weeks.

Web Browser
The web browser seems fine in general unless you have used iPhone or iPod Touch before. I have recently bought an iPod touch and it's really easy to do a web search, change the page URL, use tabs, bookmarks basically everything you need. Nokia's browser is very poor in comparison. When it has to load external stylesheets it seems to load that at the end so you start reading the un-styled content for a few seconds and there is a big jump while the page changes. There is no multiple tab support.

MP3 Player
The music player does work some of the time. Occasionally it gets confused on a song and it starts stuttering and this can be fixed by pausing and un-pausing it again. Also, sometimes the phone will just simply crash and reboot while your listening to a song. A minor issue is that on my Sony Ericsson k810i I could pause/play and change volume all with out unlocking the phone, which was useful, on the n96 I have to unlock it every-time to do this (they do provide a wired remote which I don't find useful, and my iPod had one which I never used).

I've talked to a few people with Nokia N96s, and they report the same type of problems. I can't see a good reason to choose the Nokia N96, so my recommendation is to get something else.

This Week in Startups is a video podcast by Jason Calacanis and some people from Mahalo. I've been meaning to write something about it for a while. Jason has a competition where you can win $500 at the Apple store by writing a review which made me finally write about it - though everything written here is my honest opinion of the show.

The show is about entrepreneurship and it's host Jason Calacanis has a fair amount of experience in this area by founding the Silicon Alley reporter magazine and Weblogs Inc (which sold to AOL). which produces Engadget and various other titles. Jason himself makes the show what it is by providing insight into entrepreneurship.

Jason wants people to specifically review episode 13 rather than the series in general - so lets get onto that.

The show kicked off this time with the Ask Jason segment where someone was asking about hardware startups - Jason's basic response was that it's because of the established players but it can be done.

The news - was read by Andrew Warner from Mixergy (usually Lon Haris but he is on holiday), Jason provided insights as normal to the news and that was pretty good - however this week, as in several other weeks, the news mostly concerned tech not startups specifically - I think given how the long the show is - the news should be dropped unless it can focus more on startup news rather than tech news in general as it does currently.

Jason's guest this week was Matt Mickiewicz who co-founded sitepoint, 99 designs and is working on a new site flippa where you can buy and sell websites. Jason did a good job of getting some key information out of Matt about how he started in a startup that I could see a lot of viewers relating to.

Jason has a new segment of the show which is the Shark Tank segment in which entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to Jason, this seemed to go quite well though it seemed that business was at quite a late stage already anyway and I think it would have fitted better with businesses at the idea stage.

This episode has quite a chatty style and Jason is more laid back than everyone else (maybe because he is the boss) however this naturally leads into quite a long show which was 2 hours 20 mins this week. There needs to be someone directing to keep it moving with a time limit otherwise I think that there will be a drop off in viewers. In particular I think the news and the homework segments could be dropped to save time - however with better timing it should be possible to get through the segments in under 2 hours anyway. The only reservation I have about this, is that the show's style may change if they have to keep going at a certain rate.

Jason tells us in this episode that he is trying to innovate in advertising using the show. In this show he says he will give $20 and a Mahalo pack (supposedly worth $50) to the first 50 people to signup with audible. Jason also talks about the sponsors and tells people to mention them on Twitter.

The current set of sponsors are the same since the start with only the addition of audible recently. I don't think the sponsors should be the same on every show (though I realise this is easier to organise) because you get pitched the same companies every episode. Hearing what a company is doing for the first time is interesting, even though it's a advert, but hearing it for the 13th time is not that interesting.

P.S. If you are interested in start ups you should look at mine which launched this week: friendbinder.

With the demise of the tr.im URL shortening service, the inevitable debate about shortening services has arisen. The key problem is that these URLs are lost if the service is shutdown and lots of links remain broken forever with no idea of what domain they were on let alone the specific page.

I must say, I'm not really convinced there is a need for URL shorteners outside Twitter, and they should provide a service of their own or avoid the need for it altogether. Nevertheless, there are lot of these services and here is what I think could be done to avoid a tr.im style problem again.

The solution would be a federated URL shortening system, such that all participants share the same shortening codes.
i.e.
http://bit.ly/Bxxxxx
would be the same as
http://tr.im/Bxxxxx

This is how I think it could work:

It's based on the same ideas of a hierarchical addressing used by IP addresses, postcodes, phone numbers etc.

We assume that these codes (i.e. the bit after the slash) are Base62 - i.e. each character could be a-z, A-Z or 0-9.
The shortening code would be split into two parts: a vendor part and a URL part.

i.e. bit.ly gets everything starting "B" leaving them 5 digits or 916 million addresses (62⁵) to play with however they like.
trim gets everything starting "T" also leaving them 916 million addresses
Some small site could also get in the game with a smaller set initially, i.e. they get addresses starting "AAA" leaving them 3 digits or 238,328 (62³) addresses to work though until they take off (which may never happen of course)

Everyone in the system would be responsible for approving short URLs onto the system for their subsection of the space. They would notify others in the system immediately and if a URL has already been shortened by another site, they would use the same code but serve it up as their own. I.e. tr.im finds that bit.ly has already shortened a URL as http://bit.ly/Bxxxxx so tr.im takes that code and serves it up as it's own http://tr.im/Bxxxxx and this way the user of the URL can get statistics and such. It's quite possible that if URLs are shortened on different sites within seconds of each other that two or more codes for the same URL will exist and that would probably less than 0.1% and could be accepted as an inherent inefficiency that would not be fixed.

As codes run out the prefix could be extended from 1 character to 2 or even 3, giving 62 times as many addresses in each case, giving multiple blocks to companies as necessary.

If a company wants to exit the game it would be suggested that it sells it's domain to an existing player. A DNS CNAME entry to the new company is all that would be really required to take it over, none of the code or database written by the failing company would need preserving and could even be sold separately.

Of course the failing company could either let the domain lapse or sell it to some company who didn't intend to carry on the service (probably redirecting to some scam or illegal site). In this case lets assume the shortener was http://fa.il/. In this case one thing that could be done is to have Twitter and other sites rewrite the old URLs and serve them up on another shortener. i.e. they rewrite http://fa.il/FFFFxxx as http://bit.ly/FFFFxxx and everyone's links keep on working.

So that's it. It does require a lot of companies working together which tends not to happen.

What do you think? Could this be done? Would anyone do it?

I've never had to do a software update on my dishwasher, remove a virus from my T.V., if I want to have a cup of tea at a friend's house I don't need to take my kettle and I'm unlikely to lose priceless memories if my microwave breaks down. The PC is by far the most complicated device in the home because it has all these problems.

Right now, if you work in a reasonably well run, large organization, I'd say your desktops are fairly well sorted out, backups are done automatically, you can roam with your login to any machine to get your desktop where you like, you can't mess much up or if you do the desktop can be reset within a day if not sooner. Data and/or desktop is available remotely. At least that's how I run the desktops I manage. Fundamentally I'd say in large organizations there is no real problem with desktop IT.

Now what about the other end of the spectrum? non-tech families, small non-tech businesses with no IT staff etc. How much backup is going on? can you roam from one machine to another in the house/organization? can machines be replaced quickly? what about remote access to documents/photos etc. - probably not.

It doesn't seem that either Microsoft or Apple have made massive inroads into this problem. Even with products like Apple's Time Capsule, your backups are in the same physical building as your Macs, so if your house burns down or your equipment is stolen, everything is lost.

I find that I already mostly have my data in the 'cloud' so to speak. I regularly switch between 3 systems my home desktop, my personal laptop and my work desktop. For any notes, lists, documents, spreadsheets I use Google docs & spreadsheets. I put photos on Facebook and Flickr. My bookmarks are in Xmarks and Delicious. My email is available via the web or IMAP. My programming code is generally stored on servers that I can SSH into from anywhere. In most cases I can get all the info I need, from anywhere in world, with a machine with a web browser and SSH terminal. There are a few exceptions, I can't easily access my music from anywhere and the photos I haven't published aren't available - though these are not unsolvable problems.

I think my experience has shown that you can store your data largely in the cloud. Google's Chrome OS, properly marketed, could popularize this type of computing. If Google provides a system on which you can't install programs, where all data is stored in the cloud, then people would start doing this. The benefits would be, the machine it's self is disposable, if the machine dies, you can buy another and no data would be lost - since it's in the cloud, being looked after by people who know what they are doing.

This is certainly not a new idea - though no-one of note has tried to push it. Microsoft and Apple were never likely to push it since it goes against the ecosystems they have created.

What do you think? is this Google's plan or are they are doing something else? What about offline? or does that matter anymore? Will people trust Google and others with their data?

In July 2008, Twitter limited unauthenticated requests to 100/hour by IP. This stopped people from working around the per user limit which by then had also been raised to 100.

In April 2009, put a limit of follows per day, the most obvious reason for this is so that it puts a cap on "spam" following. I can see some other reasons though. On reason is to stop people following large numbers of people, I could see the logic that people won't just be limited to following 365,000 new people a year, but more likely they will just give up on the practice altogether.

Now twitter is limiting who some of your updates go to, so that replies don't go to most of your followers. This of course has caused a massive backlash typified by the #fixreplies trending topic on twitter. Twitter initially said it was doing this because it was confusing for users, even though it had been the default for months. Now twitter is saying it is a technical issue which makes more sense. I can see that when someone posts a reply now they will have vastly fewer places to update that which will cut the load. I suspect that under the hood twitter are redesigning database and this change is baked into it (Marshall Kirkpatrick from RWW has some thoughts on why that might be).

I can only think of one reason they might be changing it, and that's to allow threaded replies. Twitter now has in_reply_to_status_id field and clients are being updated to support it so you precisely what something was a reply to. You can't currently get the thread of replies easily. I wonder if twitter is moving toward storing these replies to an entry somewhere for easy retrieval so we can get the threaded replies.

Twitter is known to have various scaling issues from time to time and with these changes and other they seem to be limiting several features in order to put off hitting limit until another day. They don't seem have definite plan for scaling and cutting more and more features is not a solution. If you look at facebook for example which must have similar issues, they seem to have solved how to scale since they are at 200 million users and rarely have any downtime.

Twitter has about 30 employees, it seems they could do with some people that really know how to scale big sites i.e. people from facebook, myspace, friendster etc. but if you look at their jobs page, there doesn't seem to opening for a scaling expert. It's perhaps because they have the right people for already, but if that's the case, they should be scaling everything, not turning off features they can't make work.

Continuing the theme from my last post (which was 4.5 months ago!), people are now saying that Facebook's new "pages" features will compete with Twitter (and here)

It doesn't sound like what Facebook is doing will be much different than before, that said, often initially boring changes turn out to have interesting effects. Facebook is essentially improving it's pages system, so that you can follow various brands on Facebook. This is similar in way to going to a company's site and posting a comment on their forum, though without the sign up hassle, different interfaces and presumably I will be able to track replies better. Even with these simplifications, however, it will not be as easy as posting to Twitter. Facebook's approach is akin to looking up something using Yahoo's directory rather than searching for it on Google. On Facebook I will have to find somewhere appropriate to post my message (if it exists) and then post and probably not post if someone has made a similar comment.

User Interface
Twitter's system is, no system. It's the simplest system, since it a text box and button (like Google). So on Twitter I just post. I don't need to read what others said before I post. It's likely my followers haven't seen that yet and even if they have, multiple people saying the same thing strengthens the message anyway. Even though I haven't categorized my message through the power of search.twitter.com people will be able to find it, it may appear as part of a trending topic and someone from the brand can find if they so wish as can anyone else via keyword searches.

Immediacy
I can't imagine that Facebook's system is going to allow quick comments due to not having a limit on the message length and the categories system (as mentioned above). It seems for this reason Twitter is likely to remain the home of breaking news.

Discussion Types
There is another key difference in the way I expect people will use the sites other than the interface. On Twitter I am primary broadcasting messages to people on a variety of topics as they are to me. In Facebook's system, much like in a forum, I will be talking to a community of people that know the topic very well. This will make the process more daunting and less rewarding. For example, imagine going to a Britney Spears group to complain about her music when you know the group is full of Britney's Fans. You still want to make the comment but probably to a similarly like minded set of friends (such as your Twitter friends).

Freedom of speech
On Twitter I can say anything and only I can delete my comments. On Facebook, I expect as in common with most of their site, page owners will control the discussion allowing them to delete comments they don't particularly like. Brands will like this since they have some control, but users are likely to get frustrated by it.

In general Twitter and Facebook are so different I can't see the two competing on this. Twitter is going to have more regular, quicker, critical comments which are publicly searchable. Facebook's method is likely to attract a smaller proportion of it's users, who may in turn maybe more detailed due to Facebook's lack of message length limits and probably less critical.