I Think, Therefore I Rant!

I don’t love the social networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace.  I do understand the importance of their presence though.  It is moderately important to VERY important (depending on your web presence and its importance to your income) for you to do the land grab and get your name, nickname, or company name out there.  Don’t let a cybersquatter get in your way!

If you want to follow me on Twitter, please do so: @soshaughnessey

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on the subject.  I don’t like to reproduce whole articles here (due to copyright issues) so here are the highlights.

Nowhere is this fact more evident than in the doling out of domain names. On the Web, domain names are available for sale on a first-come, first-serve basis. If someone else buys your name first, you can try to buy it from them. If you’ve trademarked a name, you can fight for the name in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ domain-name court system. This makes sense: money and the law are acceptable remedies in our capitalist democracy.  

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This may be incredibly obvious to everyone else but I have wanted to do a better job of managing my contacts on my iPhone.  When I used Windows Mobile, I could put categories on my contacts in Outlook and those categories meant something on the phone as well.  The iPhone doesn’t support categories so all my contacts (approaching 1000 at this writing) were in one big list.

I did a little experiment and found out that the Groups function on your iPhone includes not only your Global Address Book from your company, but also any sub-folders of your Contacts on the Exchange server.  This way you can divide different types of contacts (work, customers, family, vendors, etc. into different Contact folders on your server and they appear correctly on your phone.

Here is a screen shot of my folders in Exchange:

 

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By all accounts, save one, Apple’s iPhone has been an amazing success. When you factor

• the number of competitors in the marketplace,
• Apple as a relative newcomer to the cell phone market,
• the strict relationship with only one carrier

it is amazing that the iPhone has had such a strong impact on the revenue of Apple as well as the sales of other phones.

The one area that Apple really needs to develop is the developer network. While the App Store is the best method yet developed for delivering software to a cell phone, it does not appear that it is a great commercial success for many of its developers.  The vast majority of the apps on the store are priced so cheaply (or free) that it is not likely that they will return a profit to their developers.  

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I tend to agree with The Fishbowl that it would be great to have a try-before-you-buy at the Apple iPhone store.  It would help alleviate the fear factor of hitting BUY when looking for an application for the phone.

I think the only saving grace to not having this capability is the very easy comments feature in the store.  A few weeks ago, when the iPhone was first coming out, it was all a crapshoot as to the quality of the software.  Now that every application has a couple dozen comments, the cream easily floats to the top.

I also wish that Apple would require their vendors to have a better website to explain the apps.  In some cases, the sites are incredibly bare and almost non-existent.

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.  

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Yes, I know that I just praised the iPhone from Apple as being a great phone.  In fact, it is the best phone that I have ever owned and I have had quite a few.

However, the management of application icons leaves a lot to be desired. 

First of all, it is not possible to name the different screens.  So while it is possible to congregate all of your games onto a particular screen, there is no way to name this screen and jump instantly to it.

Second, whenever you update an application to its next revision (and at this early stage, this happens a lot) the icon will jump back to the earliest possible spot.  This means that when you do an update, the icon forgets where you first put it (as in the games screen described above) and sticks it on the very first screen of the phone.  If there are no more open spots on that first screen, it puts it on the second screen (and so on).  This makes it tedious to reorganize your applications as developers work out bugs in their early versions.  

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A lot of us use instant messaging (IM) in our private and professional lives. It is a convenient and quick way to talk to others without the formality and delay of email. A new jargon has been created to talk in this medium and emoticons are often used to express feelings and emphasis.

You can tell a lot about someone by reading their instant messages. The biggest thing you can tell to see if someone is just plain clueless is if they send you messages like this:

IDontKnowHowToIM: Did you watch the game
IDontKnowHowToIM: this weekend? I thought
IDontKnowHowToIM: it was great and I was
IDontKnowHowToIM: amazed at how well Tom
IDontKnowHowToIM: Brady played he must be
IDontKnowHowToIM: the best player in NFL

What IDontKnowHowToIM meant to type was this:

IDontKnowHowToIM: Did you watch the game this weekend? I thought it was great and I was amazed at how well Tom Brady played he must be the best player in NFL  

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I recently came across a post on a different kind of top 20 (or worse 20) list. This list is of bad software (or at least poorly behaving software). The focus of the article was on web applications but, too be honest, I think there are still some ‘regular’ applications that make these same mistakes as well.

I don’t want to reproduce the entire 20 items, you can go to the original article here and read those. I would like to point out that that author forgot some of my personal least favorites:  

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• 21. Desktop search that doesn’t pay attention to my bookmarks/favorites.
• 22. Blog software that puts you into the middle of the article (the site that this list originally shows up in is guilty of this one).
• 23. Software that installs wherever it wants to without asking the user
• 24. Fighting music formats

Like a lot of people, I have become hooked on “desktop search” products. These products index your hard drive’s documents so that you can quickly and easily search for that piece of information you know that you have but are missing. The most popular version of this is Google Desktop but there are others and I particularly like Copernic Desktop Search because I find it more stable than the other utilities on the market and it can read my calendar in Outlook which is a big deal to me.

As much as I like these tools, I find that there is one big thing that they all miss. They don’t rank my favorite sites higher than other sites if I am doing a web search. This simply doesn’t make sense. Obviously, I have been to that site before (or else it wouldn’t be in my Favorites/Bookmarks folder). Therefore, I trust that information more than other information.  

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Your signature on an email is essential. It should contain the information that allows the reader to contact you without sending you an email. It should not contain images as these will only slow down the transmission of the email and may not be read by the reader’s email program (remember, assume they are reading this on their phone).

Your original email should have quite a bit of contact information. This may include your full name, phone numbers, address, and a link to a website about you or your company. However, don’t be a bandwidth hog and include that same signature on a reply email since it is likely the person already has most of that information. For replies, you should only have the basics e.g. your name and a pertinent phone number.

INCLUDE A SIGNATURE AFTER EVERY EMAIL BUT DON’T OVERLOAD IT WITH WASTED JUNK – EMAIL IS ESSENTIAL SO KEEP IT SIMPLE!  

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It is time to rant about email again. Yes, I know that email is the greatest thing of the Internet. It has become the “killer app” that has truly driven corporate America to provide computers to all of its white collar work force. More than Word or Excel, email has become essential to today’s workforce. For this reason, we need to chastise those that screw it up.

EMAIL IS ESSENTIAL SO DON’T SPEND TIME TRYING TO MAKE IT PRETTY!

Putting tables and graphs in an email is bad. You should use the rule of thumb that the reader is going to look at it in a pure text view (like on a phone). Don’t use bullets – use dashes instead or an asterisk (*) instead.  

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