Incremental Blogger

Robert Scoble:

Today I visited two iPhone developers to see how things went. First we visited Evernote, which makes a great note-taking app. This is the most useful app I’ve loaded on my iPhone so far (which has more than 30 apps loaded on it). Really killer thing? Take a picture of something with text in it. Say a sign, or a business card. Or a newspaper ad. Or a bill you received. Save it. Then, search for something on that bill. Wow. It turned all the text in the picture into something you could search for. This is the coolest thing.

Robert Scoble has Microsoft CTO David Vaskevitch on a live video feed right now and he just mentioned that he actually uses a Tablet. That’s good to hear.

He said he typically doesn’t use the handwriting recognition, which makes sense because free form thinking in ink is one of my favorite ways of using Tablets and doesn’t require reco.

Unfortunately he didn’t bring the Tablet with him. Too bad. More Microsoft execs need to use their Tablets when giving presentations.

Microsoft announced today a Vista Compatibility Center which is supposed to give potential users of Vista a good idea of what hardware and software is compatible with Vista. Good idea.

However, for the umpteenth time I’ve got to say that I think Microsoft is missing the bigger point here and needlessly making their message too complicated.

It’s not simply that Microsoft got caught with not enough driver compatibility when Vista launched–although this was definitely true. It’s that Vista came to market during the quick-paced transition to notebooks and Microsoft has still not caught up to this fact.

First and foremost the message should be: If you’ve purchased such and such notebooks in the last X years, you’re covered. Vista will run just fine. No reason to worry.

The important point here is that the age of people worrying about drivers is gone. They don’t want to be. Period. Notebooks to most of us are sealed boxes.

Now there are printers and cameras and lots of external devices and desktops where the driver problems still exist and for these Microsoft’s new web site will help. But my suggestion: Focus on the baseline: The notebooks.

In several respects Vista is an improvement over XP when it comes to mobile PCs. For the most part the sleep and hibernation features work better, the battery indicator is more accurate, and at least to me the wireless connectivity management is much improved. And then there’s the whole Tablet PC support. Much improved. If you haven’t tried it lately, you’ve got to check out Vista’s handwriting reco on a Tablet. It’s the best ever.

However, there’s still much room for improvement for notebook users when it comes to Vista. Some of these are:

* WLAN/EVDO support is poor. Why go through the DUN for configuring EVDO? It’s needlessly complex. Poor. Further, if a WiFi connection drops and there’s EVDO support, why isn’t there a transparent switchover to it and likewise back to WiFi when it’s restored? I don’t get it.

* Many notebooks include webcams, but where’s the webcam support in Windows out of the box? The situation is a poorly thought out mess right now at the user level and the developer level. Simply unimpressive. Lots of room for improvement here.

* What’s it with all the screen flickering in Vista when it boots up or switches from one mode to the next. I don’t care if it’s the driver or not. Ugly.

* Default total install size, sidebar, search settings are not notebook friendly–especially for smaller and lower-cost notebooks.

I’m hoping the next version of Windows will fix some of these issues. We’ll see. Of course, the market continues to change so that things that will be essential when Seven ships are only perculating now. Yep, it’s a challenging problem to keep up with everything.

Robert Scoble’s right about the nature of the Valley: people readily go from one venture to the next–whether it’s Yahoo or Google or whatever. That’s one of the things that makes the Valley so dynamic and interesting.

From the outset I thought a Microsoft-Yahoo teaming was a relatively good one for both sides. The only thing better for Yahoo might be an Apple-Adobe-Yahoo mindmelt. The tripple merger could create a venture that would rival Microsoft and Google. But personalities and cultures being what they are it’s very, very unlikely to happen. You see, maximizing shareholder value is not as absolute as many make it out to be.

In fact, really put your maximizing shareholder hat on and ask yourself why Microsoft even needs to acquire any or all of Yahoo at this point. Let the press and market attack Yahoo, point fingers, Ichan change the board, the instability discourage key employees, and so on and let the company and stock slide. Why not? An indirect assault on Yahoo knocking it from #2 over a cat and mouse game makes a whole lot more sense than going in debt to acquire it. Doesn’t it?

Of course, Microsoft might want to leverage Yahoo’s audience today in order to capitalize on its advertising capabilities. Makes sense at least in the short term. I’m sure someone has worked the numbers to make this case.

Now, of course, my engineering mind would rather think in terms of innovation than business tactics and in this regard here’s what I’ve been recommending to both Yahoo and Microsoft:

* For Yahoo, acquire AllTop and bring in Guy Kawasaki. The directory-oriented AllTop property makes sense from a DNA perspective at Yahoo and with Guy on board the community and entrepreneurial connections would be refreshing and invigorating.

And yes, I’ll go back to my Apple-Adobe-Yahoo merger suggestion, but that’s more up to Apple and Adobe than Yahoo.

* And for Microsoft: I’d work more closely with the MVPs when it comes to advertising. Build an ad system that gives value to their sites. There’s a reason after all that the top traffic sites don’t use Google ads. Leverage their weakness.

I realize it’s just business, but all of this talk of buying a business and disassembling it to gain market advantage is making me uneasy.

I’m an engineer at heart. I like competing in the marketplace, although I realize that many a great business was built and thrived by its strategy and not by its products.

After dabbling with creating thumbnails for tweets, I’ve come to the conclusion that although they’re quite useful, they’re probably best not done with the tools I have.

Here are just two problems: Script errors and pop-up windows. You’d think the .NET tools could work around this, but I guess not.

So it appears at this time that moving the thumbnail creation to a web service makes the most sense. Although, there are some thumbnail services already, this one needs to be tuned to twitter messages so it seems like yet another twitter service needs to be born. In that way, all of the twitter clients can use it to display good twitter thumbnails. Maybe this is a nice service for Google or Twitter itself.

Till then, I guess I’ll make my own.

Sure would be nice if there was a way to pass around more information that’s less web-page oriented to get around problems like this. If only we had archived RSS-like feeds for all of our content.

Isn’t there always one more thing? Heh.

Ed Bott tries to put to rest the speculation that a re-write of Windows is eminent.

While I agree with Ed that it’s unlikely that we’ll see a new flavor of Windows any time soon, I think he’s missing something here. Something big. What is it? Those little phones.

Here’s the thing: With the transition to portable computers and Intel and everyone else unable to deliver faster and faster processors that are power-user notebook friendly we’re on track for a cross over point with dedicated devices. So for any new OS, I’d say don’t look to your desktop. Look towards your phone. That’s where the big innovation change is most likely to occur. The desktop/server IT world can stick with Windows the way it is. Everyone else will move on.

If you look out five years I don’t see Microsoft changing Windows that much. Maybe we’ll see better connectivity across connectivity types. Maybe we’ll see more integration with communication services. But by and large, for the IT world, I don’t expect we’ll see much change.

Now looking at the phone I see something different. Here’s where I wouldn’t be surprised to see a new OS pop up out of the blue. Not only would it be a much smaller task, it’s already a more dynamic market, and it’s ripe for innovation.

For the high-end desktop/server/virtualization market, I think there will be plenty of processor power for more of the same. Could a better tuned OS come to the rescue? Sure, but most people won’t even be paying attention to it if it were to ever come out. They’ll be too busy using other devices.

So, if you ask me don’t watch the high-end over the next five years. Watch the low end. Watch the low-cost PCs. Watch the phones. Watch the dedicated devices. That’s where the processor innovation sweet spot is now. That’s where the OS innovation sweet spot is most likely to come. The OS lags the hardware. Always has. Always will.

Yes, some day the numbers of “desktop” PCs is going to get dwarfed by these other devices and their OSes and we’ll ask ourselves why we were so hung up on Microsoft re-writing Windows–because the future OSes will be evolving in front of our eyes all along. They’ll just be coming from the non-desktops.

So when might we realize all of this? Hmmm. What do we have now? One billion Windowsish PCs out there now? That market took about 20 years to grow. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the device world “replace” it in half that time. Working backwards, I wouldn’t be surprised that all of this becomes obvious in five years or so. With Windows 7 slated for around 2010 and another three years for the Windows version after that in 2013…that means by the time that follow-up version of Windows hits the market, I’d expect that we’ll begin to really see how the OS isn’t what it used to be. Heck, with the web and all you can say that now–though rightly so I think you can argue that the web is too desktop oriented too :-).

Watch out. There’s more change to come. That’s for sure.

With the recent chatter about the growing popularity friendfeed, I’ve been questioning whether it’s really worth it to try to add features to a twitter client (web page thumbnails, ink, and so on). After all, isn’t the current action over on friendfeed?

Yeah, for the leading edge folks I might be a little late to the game here. But oh well, I still think that for those of us who use twitter’s service that a better client will make it even more useful.

Also, twitter is a baseline communication service and outside of friendfeed’s commenting ability, friendfeed is more an aggregator. Two different animals.

But what does all this mean, for instance, if you want to draw a cartoon for instance and share it with others. In a sense, posting a drawing to flickr and relying upon friendfeed for others to see and comment upon it is not a bad idea. It avoids people having to broadcast particular items here or there on twitter. Maybe the self-selection on twitter is a good thing though. It sure cuts down on traffic. Of course, friendfeed doesn’t have an inking panel for drawing anything and posting it so for creating comic content friendfeed isn’t going to hack it.

On the other side, I also can see that friendfeed does a pretty job with listing videos. In fact, looking at what people share on twitter and what you see on friendfeed–at least for the people I follow–there are a lot more people interested in videos that what twitter lets on. This kind of suggests how twitter’s text-only mindset is maybe too limiting.

Well, back to my original question: Is it worth it to keep dabbling with a twitter client? Hmmm. At least a little bit more. If the growth continues on the friendfeed side though, it may simply be too late.

Now that I have the site preview thumbnails working better in Witty, it’s easy to see how often people refer to web pages in tweets.

For instance, out of the last 20 tweets I’ve followed, almost 50% (9) have urls in them.

(I’m thinking though, that I need to make my thumbnails a little smaller. With so many thumbnails, they eat a lot of space as it is.)

I’m at the point where I need to deicide about a couple features with the twitter client.

First, should I break the 140 character limit? Here’s what In thinking: Should a twitter client allow the user to type more than 140 characters and then if they’ve typed let’s say 200 characters then the client automatically splits the oversized message into two messages and then auto re-assemble them in the client into one message?

Yep, this violates the basic intent of twitter and most clients would not see the coalesced, single tweet, but for those that could, wouldn’t this be a compelling feature?

Maybe if you want to say more you should always link rather than tweet text.

Or similarly what if you want to write something and you’ve consumed 143 characters? Should a twitter client give you a suggestion window with edited permutations that fit within 140 characters? Auto-magically? Or is this type of feature too much effort for too little gain?

The other thing I’m thinking about is about ink editing, text tweets can’t be edited, but since the ink is placed on flick, maybe allowing editing for it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Now if irk editing is supporter, what does it mean? Should you be able to do tiny adjustments or simply replace the whole thing? Or both?

This is why I want to be able to tweet in ink and see image previews in my twitter client…

I want to be able to draw silly cartoons and share them easily… or better yet see other people’s GOOD cartoons as I scan through my tweets.

As I read this morning through some of the people I follow on Twitter using my tweaked Witty that displays web page thumbnails for urls mentioned, I can’t help but wonder if maybe these thumbnails are…hmmm…too big?….provide enough information?….need to be layed out differently?

It is kind of interesting how many people are mentioning URLs though today–especially using tiny links of some kind.

Bob was suggesting that rather than these web page thumbnails that we go with a tooltip that shows the actual site url. That would at least give the idea of where the tiny url points to without paying the performance hit of retrieving the web page thumbnail for the url or having to deal with its rendering issues. After playing with the thumbnails for a little under two hours I’m giving this more thought–at least as an option.

Next up? I want to be able to past images into the InkCanvas and be able to mark them up with ink. Hmmm….

I experimented a bit more with adding site preview thumbnails to the open-source Twitter client, Witty.

With a little bit more experimentation I got a first pass at the thumbnails showing for any web pages mentioned in a tweet.

There are several big problems with this though. First, it doesn’t appear like my eventing is right so the page doesn’t fully load before the thumbnail is created. As a consequence whole or parts of pages are left empty. That’s not necessarily a terrible thing, but it’s not right, either.

For instance, in Chris Pirillo’s tweet, the thumbnail should look more like:

rather than what’s shown in the previous Witty screen capture.

The thumbnail rendering can also add a noticeable time delay to tweet loadings. There’s probably no easy way around this. I’ve been wondering if I can trim down the posts by looking for RSS items instead and working off of their content and maybe pulling out a representative image or something. Hmmm.

Of course, there can be problems with JavaScript errors and the like too. So I’ll have to think through if this all of this is worthwhile. Maybe I’ll just have to live with it a few days to see if the benefits of the thumbnails outweigh the drawbacks.

Another ink experiment with an ink-enabled version of the Twitter client Witty.

I definitely have a background-setting problem or a cropping problem since the bottom of the image is picking up a black edge. Hmmm.