rcp showed me that Friendster added free/paid blogs today (powered by TypePad) as well as photo album upload. All of this only reinforces my view that Friendster is just a glorified homepage-hosting service (Geocities++), but I'm glad to see that TypePad is getting some love. My hope is that people realize that Friendster isn't very different from a service like LJ and Blogger, except that the latter two are open, and the era of closed, training-wheel, rigid, turgid social network sites will come to an end (so I can cancel my semi-secret Friendster snooping account). Then again, AOL is still around, and, of course, LJ and Blogger still lack the network navigation/search capabilities of Friendster/Orkut/etc...

Delicious, yummy, and free: Fontleech: The Free Font Blog. It's a fairly new blog, but I hope that it will continue on as I will enjoy having daily delivered free fonts in my feedreader.

While I'm at it, a second semi-poll inspired by meta's post (my condolences). Below I've recorded all of the Macs that I know of that I can find out the history of. I call this one a "poll" because you're free to add your own data or correct anything I've written, and I also left a lot of unknowns (which I assume to be probably good).

Yes, this is a slightly mean-spirited post, but you could rephrase it as a show of sympathy, or you could also rephrase it that despite the poor hardware quality, the good software and aesthetics override the trips to the Genius Bar for repairs. Note that in some of these cases, just like a trip to the hospital, more serious problems resulted from attempts to fix more minor ones.

Also note that, unlike Windows-based systems, the hard drive failures below were all preceded by a period of warnings (usually little dialogs warning of imminent doom), which gave time to save all data.

Problems: * meta's Al PowerBook: dead harddrive * dm's Al PowerBook: failed harddrive * i's Al PowerBook: failed harddrive * PARC PowerMac G4 at PARC: failed videocard * a's g4 iBook: failed motherboard->battery drainage->new iBook * honeyfield's iBook: case wouldn't close properly->screen backlight->broken sound * ln m's Ti PowerBook: failed motherboard * a's Ti PowerBook: external video output problems * 3 work Al PowerBooks: failed harddrives (same batch)

Doing great: * 17 work laptops (mushy, approximate stat) * a's replacement iBook * dm's Ti PowerBook * s's Ti PowerBook * pqbon's Ti PowerBook * bp's Al PowerBook * j's Al PowerBook * d's Al PowerBook: (spots on screen) * bp's iBook * parakkum's/honeyfield's G3 iBook (replacement keyboard from aggressive space-barring :) ) * kenji's PowerBook * cyndi iBook * justin's PowerBook * davextreme's G4 iMac * katherine's PowerBook * paul's Al PowerBook

I've only been using MyBlogLog for a day now, but it's darn cool. It tells you, in realtime, what links people are clicking on your Web site, and all you have to do to enable this is place a single link of javascript on your pages.

This feels much better than studying Web server logs, which are polluted by search engines and referrer spam. I can figure out what entries people are reading and what links they are finding interesting, and it's also like a trip down memory lane as it is pulling out specific links and the link text -- I can read "hbar in slug smoot^2 per fortnight" in my stats and go, "Oh yeah, I remember when we played around with the Google calculator."

I think I've discovered my mutant superpower. I've long pondered this after we discovered honeyfield's ability, which is the power to speak to anyone, including extreme geeks (artisty/gamer/programmer), for extended periods of time; hers is a very useful power to have at Comic-Con.

My power, depending on your allegiances, either qualifies me as a superhero or supervillain. Without saying what my power is specifically, I will present evidence rendered in crude infovis.

MacWorld (data you have provided in comments, as well as macs at work not in my immediate vicinity):

Mac Office ('k' = me):

iLife (Macs that have had direct, frequent contact with me [metamanda, honeyfields, d, parakkum, ln m, pqbon]):

I think I'll make frequent trips to the Apple Store to see if I can focus my powers...

I'm slowly getting back into the riding-swing of things. In order to give me an excuse to stop and rest, I took along my Rebel and took some shots along the way.

Los Altos Bike Ride Photoset

These photos are part of the Los Altos Hills Photoset I just posted, but I'm posting them separately because they are of my favorite house in Los Altos (Hills). I had to bike up a steep hill on weak legs to take these, so they deserve their own entry. Sadly, I did not chose my time-of-day well, but I don't think I'm going to redo these anytime soon.

Part of the reason I like this house is that it doesn't try to stick out. Most of the house is not visible from the road:

More photos in the photoset.

Some of you may have done this before, but it's a fun little experiment that takes only several seconds to do.

1. While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.

2. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction.

(via the coffee list)

It's not perfect, but these patches have revived MT Blacklist on my Windows server enough to allow me to block comments effectively once more. I still get several error screens interacting with it, but I was able to add enough items to the blacklist that most of my spam has been cutoff.

The patches are bit cumbersome. There are bugs in MovableType 3.x itself that need to be fixed, which is perhaps one cause of the perpetual delay in getting out an official version of MT Blacklist for Windows. If you can put up with the spam, the fixes will appear in the next MovableType release.

If you get into a fender bender, even a very minor one, and the other person is an elderly old man, don't assume (out of respect for your elders) that the person is a kindly gentleman that will stop and exchange insurance information with you. In fact, be prepared to sprint after his fleeing vehicle and shout out his license plate number to your fellow passenger -- it might save you an expensive deductible. Of course, if you're like me and don't follow this example, you can take solace in the fact that the damage on his car looked much, much worse.

Update: let me emphasize, this was a minor fender bender, and the elderly person in question fled at an comically slow speed, giving me plenty of time to stand in disbelief, and giving me plenty to kick myself over for not getting the license plate number.

In a followup to my Evil Bunnies photo posting, I now present my dead-as-in-possum bunny photos, featuring histrionic Stormy. Rabbits don't appear to be capable of "slackness," so, when you turn them upside-down, their bodies have a rather rigor-mortis-like rigidity.

Nobody seemed passionate enough about music to offer a recommendation on how I spend my free iTunes song, so I blame you all for my purchase of The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins by Leonard Nimoy. If I happen to repeatedly inflict this song upon you, know that it is your own fault -- you should have known better than to leave me to my menacing predispositions. Those of you who have heard it before know just how infectious it can be.

Bilbo, Bilbo, Bilbo Baggins, the bravest little hobbit of them all...

For the engineer that prefers applied math, there's this guide to cracking Master Locks, which explains some of the math behind how Master Lock chooses combinations as well as some hands-on technique for getting the last number in the combination. You should be able to narrow the number of possible combinations down to 100 for any particular lock. For the "I'm a Ph.D mathematician, applied stuff is for wusses," there is the McNugget number, which (I hope) is keeping some theoretical math major busy somewhere (and safely off the streets).

In the world of architecture, the Torres de Calatrava look pretty cool (gallery 1, gallery 2). Not having seen Calatrava-style skyscrapers before, I wonder what Calatrava's New York City might have looked like, in comparison to the imagined NYC's of Norman Foster, Gaudi, and Spielberg.

There were a bunch of historical links this week. In light of current dollar/yen investment issues, let us harken back to the day of the One Yen bill, facilitated by this nice overlay of Tokyo in 1948 and 1992. For those of you who prefer historical comparisons via sequential art, this tour of Batman logos over the years shows some of the 20th century's best and worst graphic design, but which one did the caped crusader battle under when he made his greatest boner?

Staying in the 1940s, we can look at these World War 2 color photos. They could add even more photos to the collection using this really interesting colorization technique for black and white photos/video that only requires some scribbled color hints (I wonder if the technique would work on these 1910 Paris flood photos).

I'm trying to update my laptop (video BIOS). The update software requires a floppy disk to install. My laptop does not have a floppy drive.

Comcast and TiVo seal the deal | PVRblog

Not sure how this one affects my life -- I do use Comcast and TiVo, but I'm not a fan of digital cable, so my current analog cable + TiVo works fine for me. Perhaps this will mean better HDTV options than the ghastly expensive DirectTV HDTiVo. I'm still wondering where that whole NetFlix + TiVo thing is.

When I was a little kid I didn't really understand the art of typing, so my sister used to astound her with her typing abilities. I would cover her hands with pieces of paper and have her type out words, completely amazed the entire time that she could somehow memorize an entire keyboard of characters. Fast forward to middle school, where I finally learned that her trick was masterable myself, and that there were little programs that catered to our competitive natures to keep pushing that WPM score higher, higher, HIGHER! I think I eventually got up to 30WPM, still amazed the secretaries were required to type at 60-70WPM. Now, this little test says I type at 120WPM (seems a bit high, but I'll take it).

d and I managed to sneak into an Ando talk at Berkeley, tiptoeing in through the sidedoor and sitting on the floor when the lights went out because all seats were gone over an hour before the talk started. I am thankful for the location of the Men's Room at Dwinelle Hall; I might not have noticed the unguarded entrance otherwise (easy to spot, given that ten-or-so people were already waiting there to sneak in).

photo: Ando's Aomori Contemporary Art Center. Photo by kwc

I really enjoy Tadao Ando's work. I'm not a fan of his most noted signature element -- concrete -- but I love the simplicity of his forms and the ways in which his buildings play with light. This talk gave a fuller survey of some of his works over the past decades, and also gave a lot of insight into his amusingly persistent mentality that guides his projects.

My notes are in the extended entry. There are a lot of large photos of his works that I've culled of the Internet to go with some of the talk notes, so the notes may load very slowly. It took a little longer than normal to put these notes together, but it was worth it, as I now have my own mini-Ando book to browse through and reflect upon.

Kenji informs me that my logo has been stolen by Creatas.

I'm offended that a design site, of all places, would dare to steal my copyrighted/patented/signature/unique Four-Square (tm) design for their own. I can remember back to the third grade when I first came up with the basic design, while swiftly dodging a red bouncy ball and advancing to first square. The original Four-Square (tm) logo design had more of a black-and-white feel back then, with a pavement texturing. There was further refinement during college, when the Four-Square (r) design took on more of an urban sidewalk feel, reflecting my move out of the suburbs.

So I say, round up the posse! I've been working on my side-spin and it's time to take Creatas down!

I'm more worried about the recent acquisition of Flickr by Yahoo! than I was about Bloglines being bought by Ask Jeeves. Both are great tools that are on my most-frequently-used list*, but my perception is that Yahoo! is more capable of screwing up their acquisition considering that everything they've bought in the past looks Yahoo-like, which is to say that everything they've touched has acquired the bad aesthetics and UI of Yahoo! proper -- anybody know of counter-examples to assuage my fears?

With the recent Flickr outages, though, perhaps the Y! infrastructure will be a plus, and I'm sure my friends over at NetApp are looking forward to an increased storage demand from Y!.

FlickrBlog

* Actually using Chameleon, Josh's extension to Bloglines. Try it out. It's great.

From John Maeda's blog I learned that progress bars make you perceive time at a faster rate. This bit of trivia came up in a discussion with parakkum about an order we're having shipped from the East Coast via ground rate.

Packaging tracking is a form of progress bar for your packages, but, as currently designed, it's somewhat broken. Instead of smoothly incrementing from start to finish, a package tracking progress bar quickly jumps to 20%, pauses there for four days, and then moves through the remaining 80% in the final 24 hours. Rather than creating a sense of movement for your package, the scene imagined is a box encased in ice, sitting ignored in the back corner of a warehouse, where a postal worker on a smoke break suddenly discovers it four days later and re-expedites it on its way.

For the OCD crowd, those of us whose compulsion is to build emotional attachment to our online orders by following their travels from postal hub to postal hub, I believe it would benefit us for package tracking to be reimplemented to create a smooth sense of movement over time.

There is a mapping problem between the actual design of the system (the package is in fact sitting in a single warehouse for four days) and the desired "smooth movement" perception, but that can be solved by rethinking the notion of "location" to be much more granular (i.e. specifying a specific location in a warehouse). Tell me that my package has moved from "Jacksonville, FL Shipping Dock" to "Jacksonville, FL, Northwest Sorting Facility" to "Jacksonville, FL, Upper package belt." Regale me with tales of how my brave package has criss-crossed across conveyor belts -- up, down, left, right. You can even go as far as to equip your scanners with low-quality cameras and post photos of my package alive and well, happily exploring your new high tech sorting facility -- I've seen video clips of a package sorting facility, and there is quite a bit of movement, quite a bit of drama, to be elicited. If Monsters Inc can create an action scene using the movement of doors through a sorting facility, why not utilize the same sense of movement for my packages?

If that is technologically unfeasible, or if the package is still sitting still, lie to me if you must. Up until the moment the package has arrived, or is late for the scheduled delivery, it really doesn't matter what tale you tell me as long as it's interesting, and non-static.

Thom Mayne Wins Pritzker Prize

I only learned about Caltrans District 7 building recently, but that building and the under-construction SF federal building that Mayne also designed are on my short list for buildings to visit.

The SessionSaver plugin for Firefox just saved my butt -- twice. I had a bunch of tabs open in Firefox that I hadn't bookmarked yet when Firefox crashed on me. I re-launched Firefox and all my tabs were restored: no harm, no foul. I, of course, managed to repeat the action that crashed Firefox in the first place, but SessionSaver leaped to the rescue once more.

I miss Patrick Baudisch's user studies -- not too many research projects let their test subjects play video games in order to contribute to 'science' (see Focus+Context Large Displays). He's been busy since he moved to Microsoft Research, so I thought I'd give his latest research some lovin' (in collaboration with others). Although I can't find any game-based demoes for the projects I've posted below, I hope that he's still keeping his research subjects entertained.

On the small display front, there's Summary Thumbnails, which takes some similar ideas to Popout Prism's, though applied more generally and with larger thumbnails. The gist is that if you are trying to read a Web page on a small display (e.g. PDA), instead of shrinking everything uniformly to fit on the screen, try to summarize the various regions of text and increase the font size -- that way you get a readable summary of the text, rather than an unreadable, but complete, version of the text.

Another project of his that tackles the same issues is Collapse-to-Zoom. Rather than viewing the page as a whole, you can select regions of text that are unimportant, which then disappear, allowing the rest of the page to expand.

One other project in a similar vein is Fishnet, which is appropriate for both large and small displays. It is a Web browser that makes the entire page visible in your browser window. In order to accomplish this, it shrinks regions of the page you're not looking at, while still preserving some of the visual structure. It also uses the popout concept from Popout Prism to make it easy to identify portions of the page that contain keyword text that you may be searching for.

Several of his projecs also deal with ways to cope with larger displays. Mouse Ether, for example, makes it easier to drag items with a mouse when you have multiple monitors -- often a mouse cursor will 'jump' between displays because of the different resolutions of the displays. There's also High-Density Cursors, which is an improvement over the Windows mouse trails and addresses the "where is my cursor?" problem. Finally, there's Drag-and-Pop, which is a form of more intelligent drag-and-drop. The system figures out the possible places you could be dragging an item and moves those places closer to you (temporarily), saving you extra hand movement.

It's been interesting to watch the top search keywords for this site evolve over time. There was a bit of pride when my top keyword was 'gollum', which was related to a photo of gollum that I had posted to one of my entries. There wasn't nearly as much pride when the Khleo generics fan club hijacked my Holes review. Befuddlement turned to slight disgust when my top keyword was 'species iii girl comic-con in box'.

In recent months, my Mythbusters posts have each taken their turns in the top keywords list. While I'm happy to see that people searching for "Archimedes Death Ray" may find something useful in my show notes, I'm a bit bothered that Scottie Chapman -- blond, tattooed, female, welding member of the build team -- has spent several months in the top spots. I would even be tempted to write a rant about this, but parakkum has already saved me the effort, pointing me to this quotable rant written by someone empathetic to this specific vexation:

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the number one referrer to this here blog are search requests for "Scottie Chapman."? The number two search request is for "Scottie Chapman...nude."

While I appreciate the traffic, Sweet Jesus, people get a life!

There are no nude pictures, no pictures of the lovely and enchanting Ms. Chapman here or anywhere else of which I know. There are no pictures of Scottie Chapman here at all. Now go read a book, plant a garden, or something.

Instead of a personal rant like the one above, I can instead happily report that a force more powerful than Scottie Chapman has captured the top rankings this month: EVIL BUNNIES!. Yes, honeyfields, your evil-filled bunnies have shown that the power of the Evil Cute can defeat the Forces of Pr0n. Cute Animals and TnA may battle it out daily on the Yahoo! Image Popularity Tracker, but here, on kwc.org, "Evil Bunnies" have won the day.

It turns out that going through your referrer links is a good way of turning up photo captions for your own photos. For each of the photos below (all photos of mine that I have posted to this blog previously), I have found pages on the Web that are using them and have pasted in the text used to caption the image on those pages. It's like those contests in magazines, but the photos aren't as good and the captions only find humor unintentionally.

The Kill AOL License Plate

Friends don't let friends use AOL

surely someone can do better, let's move on

The Broken CD

scheiß MICROSOFT

Hmmm, don't know what that means but it sounds like he's insulting Microsoft. The next one sounds more like it's straight out of the user's manual

if you drop it on a hard surface your "higher capacity medium" will turn into a "zero capacity medium"!

and finally, a haiku

F*CK YOU

i saw your parked car
looked in and saw my CD
lying on the floor

-The Mermaid

DC Car Show (speaking of parked cars)

Een auto voor meneer .. nu een koe.

according to Babelfish: "A car for Mr.. now a cow." (I just liked this translation)

Sunset in Maui

All The Drugs In The World Won't Save Her From Herself

Hope you all have a great weekend

From my photo captioning entry, you might have inferred (correctly) that my metamanda/sunset/beach/maui photo is one of the more popular photos on this site. I decided to experiment more with the technique (i.e. overexposure) that I used in that photo while I was at the beach in Santa Monica. On a beach, at least, the end result is rather fun as it subtracts out most of the background (water and sand) and leaves just the people and more colorful items to be found on a beach. I also enjoy the technique because it anonymizes your photo subjects, which removes some of the voyeurism when shooting on a public beach -- or at least the feeling of voyeurism, which I find to be an impediment to taking photos.

If you like this photo there's more to be found in my People on the Beach Photoset.

I had a good weekend with d down in LA, where we toted our twin Canon Digital Rebels around and snapped photos of everything vaguely building-like. From my previous entry, you can tell that I spent some time at the beach. We also spent part of the weekend watching a table 20 LA'ers go ga-ga over the new PSP, eating dinner with my Aunt and Uncle, and discovering that, contrary to common sense, other Yale women have dated MIT men (Friendster collision!).

Most of our weekend, though, had more of an architectural theme as we saw Gehry's home in Santa Monica and the Getty on Saturday. It was my first visit to Gehry's home, d's second; d's first visit to the Getty, my second. On Sunday we went to the Renzo Piano exhibit at LACMA, which should be there awhile considering how much money they raised to build Piano's future extension to the museum.

I just upgraded to a Flickr Pro account, which means I should have plenty of storage space to blog aplenty about Gehry's home and the Getty (no photos of the Piano exhibit allowed), but for now, the beach entry will have to do as I must find a way to sleep off my Red Bull and coffee.

... well, their Caltrain stop at least. Caltrain has put up a proposed service schedule that is, IMHO, pretty awesome, though it will require a lot more planning to make sure I catch the right train. The major improvements are: * you can now sleep in an hour or two later and still catch a Bullet train * for half-peninsula commutes, the Limiteds are now very similar in speed to the Bullets there is a new-style of Limited that is designed to shot you from San Jose to the mid-Peninsula quickly and vice versa * They got rid of the Atherton, Broadway, College Park, and Paul stations.

For my particular BART-Millbrae-Caltrain commute, where my Caltrain stop is a second tier stop (Hillsdale, SM, MP, SC) the philosophy appears to be that they stack two Caltrains for your stop within 15 minutes of each other -- i.e. if you miss the first train, then another, similarly fast train will be along in 12-15 minutes -- but if you miss the second train, you will have a long wait (~50 minutes). In my experience, BART will be more than 15 minutes late on a regular basis, so I will have to figure out how to properly buffer my schedule and yet still take advantage of the faster service.

Of course, just as happened last time, there will be long, drawn-out community meetings in which this schedule will get modified; in particular, Atherton and Broadway might be able to get themselves back on the schedule.

source: wp article

Over the weekend we swung by Frank Gehry's house in Santa Monica. The location suprised me, as I expected someone like Gehry to live in an ultra-exclusive, gated community with huge walls and attack dogs keeping people away. Instead, his house is relatively modest on an open public street in Santa Monica.

His house isn't in his blobular, twisted metal style. Rather, it has more in common with his earlier works like Edgemar that emphasize simple rectilinear forms. The materials are also fairly modest, making use of both wood and corrugated steel, as well as copious amounts of plants to provide some sense of privacy. Although you can see a large portion of the house in this photo, the actual front of the house is well-protected by dense foliage. Driving down the street it is a home that you notice, but it does not overwhelm the neighborhood that it is in.

I felt rather bad when I noticed his dogs come out onto the patio, as architectural appreciation shifted into the realization that I was point a camera at someone's private home, and it's understandable that he's building a new house (so I hear). Even with his windows set relatively high, it must be disconcerting to regularly have cameras pointed at your home.

Gehry House Photo Album

I took far too many photos at the Getty. To reparaphrase a familar quote: "I have deleted more photos of the Getty than you have ever taken." To deal with this overwhelming glut of photos, I've have winnowed the photos down to two sets: 'skyline' photos and 'sun' photos. The 'skyline' photos are better described as photos taken with the camera pointing upwards, as I focused on the various corners and edges that Richard Meier used in his design. The 'sun' photos take advantage of the fact that I've been to the Getty twice at different times of day, so I have some comparisons of how the building captures and displays light.

The 'sun' photo series is still being put together, but here is a sampling of the 'skylines' series (~70 photos total). I would have whittled my photos down more, but this is also a test of my new Flickr Pro account and how easily Flickr handles large numbers of photos.

Getty Skylines Photoset

Originally this was going to be a review of the Workrave software, but I saw an RSI specialist today, and what he told me today goes along well with what I was going to write, so I now present my condensed, summarized report of how you, too, can help prevent RSI (with a little assistance from the Sheep). Workrave is perhaps the single most important piece of software I've installed on my computer in the past three years, as I have now started to develop RSI. To understand how and why it's so useful, let me first try to relate what my specialist told me about RSI (note that this does not apply to carpal-tunnel, which I now little about).

RSI is a bit of a misnomer; it's not a repetitive stress injury as much as it is a static stress injury. While you are typing, your muscles must constrict in order to hold your arms, neck, and head in place. Over time, this causes your muscles to form more fibrous tissue (i.e. tendon-y tissue), which help induce pain. My specialist had me feel my triceps as an example of what good muscle tissue is: it's soft and all of the same consistency. He then had me feel my forearms muscles, which felt like little bands of tendons.

Each day you cause damage to your muscles that your body must heal; if you only heal 99% of that damage each day, then over time you will accumulate more and more damage until you are in pain -- RSI. This view of RSI offers three avenues of treatment: decreasing the amount of daily damage, increasing your repair rate, and repairing the damage manually.

I said this was originally going to be a review of Workrave, so here is where the Sheep comes in (decreasing the daily damage). Workrave is a great piece of software that is a glorified timer, with a sheep that pops up to tell you when to take micro-breaks (every three minutes) as well as when to take rest breaks (every forty-five minutes). It even has suggested exercises and stretches that pop-up during the breaks. These breaks are important, as the amount of time your muscles spend in static contraction is related to the amount of damage you are doing. If you take three seconds every three minutes to put your arms down and shake them a bit, you go a long ways towards decreasing the amount of damage. Every ten to fifteen minutes you should also tilt your head back to break some of the static contraction in your neck and back. Workrave actually has thirty-second micro-breaks, but what my specialist said seems to indicate that you can take much shorter breaks. When I first started using Workrave, the most frustrating thing was learning to listen to the Sheep and actually take a break from typing; knowing that I only need to take three-second instead of thirty-second micro-breaks will really help me obey the sheep better.

To improve your repair rate, there are three basic things: water, minerals, and exercise. Water is important to muscles, and we often don't feel thirsty until we are already dehyrated, so it's important to drink plenty. It's also important to take good vitamin/mineral supplements (my specialist said to stay away from Centrum and other supermarket brands). Aerobic exercise will boost the body's metabolism, which will also help it heal.

As for repairing the damage manually, that involves a lot of stretching (2-4 times per day). The fibrous muscle tissue causes your muscles to shorten; the goal of the stretching is to lengthen the muscles once more. There are just a few basic stretches that my specialist gave me to do, and a lot of these can be easily done during one of the micro-breaks or rest breaks that the Sheep indicates. You need to stretch your wrists as well as your shoulder muscles. My specialist is also having me focus on my pecs, as they can impinge on both the blood and nerves running into the arms.

Not all my photos on the beach were subjected to overexposure -- I get a kick out of these photos of this kid on the beach in Santa Monica trying to wield his metal detector so that he can go treasure hunting with his dad.

note: photo is crooked 'cuz I'm lazy

Is it possible to judge a new uber social-networking service in just one hour? No -- but I'm going to try anyways.

My gut reaction is that this will be hugely popular. I use My Yahoo! on a daily basis as my personal information organizer (calendar, fantasy sports, tv listings), and the overriding impression I get using 360 is that "this is what My Yahoo! should be more like," or rather, "360 is the complement of My Yahoo!"

360 brings together many separate Yahoo! services under one roof, from photos to IM to groups, as well as adding a new blogging service. The experience of logging into 360 is that of sitting in front of a large communication center gazing out onto my social network: on the left are my messages and my instant messenger list; to the right is the latest additions to my friend's 360 pages as well as my Yahoo! Groups. This is in contrast to My!, which mainly focuses on your own personal information and third-party information sources (comics, news, weather).

In constructing this comparison between the two, I wonder why Yahoo! didn't combine them, or at least incorporate more My! features into 360. For example, 360 has a "Mailbox", but it's not your Yahoo! e-mail -- it's actually just a basic inter-360 messaging service. There's also no linkage between my Yahoo Address Book and the 360 service, other than the fact that you can invite people directly from your address book. It's as if there is a glass wall separating you from the rest of Yahoo, and you are given a box of crayons to copy everything down from the other side. It also gives the feeling of missed opportunities -- e.g. my calendar has absolutely no presence on 360. It seems to me, at least, that there could be a lot of potential in adding the ability to organize events (social calendaring) that could be synced with my personal calendar.

This is an early beta, and perhaps Yahoo! will bring more of the My! world into 360 over time. They will, at the very least, be adding in the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds, which will greatly expand the content that is available and give friends with non-Yahoo blogs the ability to participate (at a reduced level). Maybe I just wish for this convergence because it seems silly that I need two Yahoo! pages opened up in my browser to view my Yahoo! world, all because Yahoo! doesn't know how to integrate the two worlds. [note: I'm not suggesting that Yahoo! mash My+360 into one uber page, but I am saying that 360 needs to be more like My! and integrate with Yahoo better]

Wombat notes that Yahoo 360 is a closed service, and that makes the service suck, and he's right, though I believe when users evaluate the balance of the features that 360 provides, they'll decide that it outweighs to problems of a closed service. After all, Friendster, which is completely closed, is still popular, and Xanga, which is most similar to 360 in that outsiders can view content but not leave comments, is also very popular. There is plenty of stupid 360 closed-world-oriented functionality to frustrate -- e.g. if you send a message to someone, it sends them an e-mail to tell them they have a message, but the e-mail doesn't actually way what the message is (you have to logon). It would be nice if it were more like LiveJournal with regards to openness, but in the end I don't think that's going to effect the popularity of 360.