Tom’s Two Cents

I was concerned about how I would move all my addresses and phone numbers from my Blackberry Pearl to my new T-mobile G1, but it went really smoothly thanks to a very nice vCard to CSV Converter I found online. I was able to export my addresses from both Outlook and Apple’s Address Book app to vCard format. From there, I used the converter to make CSV files that would be Gmail compatible (so as not to lose any data). Then from the Contacts section of Gmail, I used the Import link to import all these CSV files. Gmail did a great job of merging all my duplicate contacts, since it had already stored email addresses for many of them. The creepy thing about this is that now Google has all my contact info. The cool thing is that now I can access it from any computer or phone (so I won’t have to do this again if I stick with Android phones). So please Google, remember not to be evil.

It’s been a week now, so I am prepared to offer my opinion on T-mobile’s G1 Android phone. Overall, I am still glad I bought the G1. The HTC phone hardware gets a B, while the Android operating system gets closer to an A. Here are a few thoughts:

Battery life. As expected, the battery life on the G1 is pretty poor. After a couple hours of heavy use, only 25% of the battery remained. After talking to some of my friends the battery life seems comparable to the iPhone. Hopefully I will be able to drop a better battery into it as they improve.

Android Market Apps (with some bugs). The G1 comes with just a few Google-based applications plus calculator, camera, etc — but new apps are appearing on the Android Market every day. I don’t have time to go into all of the ones I’ve installed right now (I think I’ve installed a couple dozen at this point), but I like what I see so far. Many still have some bugs, but I was expecting that. Updates seem to be coming out regularly, and most of the popular apps are quite stable. All of them are free as of right now, so I guess you get what you pay for The top 3 apps on my wishlist are a flickr image uploader, a geocaching app that tracks caches offline, and a turn-by-turn navigation app. My top suggestion for the Android team is to allow a way to exit apps. But I’m sure someone will put out an application killer app soon.

That’s it for now. At some point I’ll review my favorite 3 apps, including one that could be the start of a really fun location-based game.

This is in response to my brother’s post, My $.02 on Apple’s Response to Microsoft’s Response.
Even though I use a MacBook Pro these days, I consider myself as much of an Apple critic as a Microsoft critic. The fact that I have used macs a lot lately has actually led to even more mac criticisms, but part of that is just because I’m hard on whatever I use. The other part is that I think Apple is following in Microsoft’s footsteps — but somehow is in denial about it all. While it makes for a funny ad, Apple has no room to talk about Microsoft’s advertising budget when Apple is even more concerned about image. I’m talking about everything from Apple’s highly theatrical upgrade announcements to the black turtlenecks worn by Steve Jobs and all his faithful followers — I mean employees. It’s downright creepy. Maybe you have to be this obsessed to have really good hardware design… I don’t know. But the real question we should ask is simple: who is really delivering what the customer wants? Let’s see…

• Vista license servers… because entering that 25-character Windows XP product key wasn’t fun enough
• iTunes’ proprietary .aac (and coincidentally incompatible with anything else) music file format
• The new and “improved” (and coincidentally incompatible with anything else) .docx document file format

No, thanks. None of that helps me. In a lot of ways it feels like a race to the bottom. And, just like the presidential race, I find myself trying to pick the platform I feel will be less awful… but not really what I want. In this regard Apple is giving Microsoft a real run for its money. And while everyone has been asking Apple for a cheaper mac laptop, when Steve Jobs unveiled the new lineup of new MacBooks this month, the closest Apple came to that request was lowering the price of the old white MacBooks to $999… until those run out of stock. Beyond that the price of the next cheapest MacBook jumps to about $1300. Um… did I mention that it has a fancy new metal case? *sigh*

So don’t let the cute “I’m a mac” ads fool you. Microsoft and Apple are both spending plenty of money on advertising (and fancy new metal cases, if you’re Apple.) They even run ads about the other guy’s ads. Does this sound familiar? In some ways I wish the networks would suspend Microsoft and Apple ad campaigns — at least until the presidential election is over. I can’t deal with both software and political ad campaigns at the same time. Too much of the same useless stuff. And if there is anyone else out there that thinks they can build a reliable computer AND listen to customers at the same time, I’m ready to hear from you.

Yesterday I spoke to Jayson and Rich from ClassTop about CourseFeed, their Facebook app that connects users to other course members and course content. This includes a shared “course wall” and “course notes,” which can be posted to and tracked via Facebook. And for students enrolled at institutions with a supported Blackboard content management system, CourseFeed provides additional course notifications from within Facebook. It got me thinking about how something like CourseFeed could be a bridge from traditional OpenCourseWare sites to something even better. I’m imagining a Facebook app that could serve as the hub of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE), the part of your social network where you can track discussions and fresh content on subjects that interest you. CourseFeed is not there yet, but I think they are moving in the right direction.

For now CourseFeed seems to be mostly about delivering course notifications for Blackboard users directly into Facebook, and the course community seems limited to students enrolled in the Blackboard course. (I tried the CourseFeed demo, but I couldn’t test it further because my own institution’s Blackboard does not yet support it.) Since CourseFeed is currently designed with an emphasis on Blackboard, the course content is not shareable for many of the reasons Jon Mott pointed out in his OpenEd 2008 presentation: Blackboard is closed, impenetrable, rigid, and ephemeral. Currently CourseFeed invitations are limited to students who are enrolled in the same course at the same institution. Others cannot join the course. And if the Blackboard course is removed at the end of the semester, it gets removed on CourseFeed as well. The students no longer have access to that course.  ClassTop has also had to move to an opt-in agreement with Blackboard institutions — meaning they have to seek institutional approval, school-by-school, before CourseFeed can be enabled on that school’s Blackboard server. I understand why they had to do it this way, but it kind of kills the potential for CourseFeed to go viral. With these kinds of restrictions, it is notable that CourseFeed has nearly 21,000 active monthly users.

Now think about what something like CourseFeed could be if it were designed without all the Blackboard roadblocks. What if ClassTop designed CourseFeed or another app specifically for course content that was already vetted for copyright issues and openly licensed? These courses exist by the thousands on OpenCourseWare (OCW) sites created by prominent institutions all over the world. If CourseFeed were designed as a way to personalize OCW courses, every course could be linked to its own permanent Facebook group. Anyone interested in the course, including students and professors from other institutions, could join and participate in these groups at any time and for as long as they wish. These connections and discussions might ultimately become more valuable to participants than the original course, perhaps even leading to the creation of additional course content or the formation of new OpenCourseWare sites at other institutions. Additional tools and apps could be developed to promote the kind of learning system that Jon Mott described as open, permeable, flexible, permanent, and free.

I believe more and more students will want to track their favorite subjects and study groups, the same way they keep track of other groups and friends on Facebook. Blackboard will never fill this need because their learning experience is both temporary and unshareable by design. (Yes, I understand why… fair use… blah, blah, blah.) But if CourseFeed directed those same Blackboard students to some recommended, related OpenCourseWare courses, they could form learning goups that would still be there after the course was over — even after graduation, when they are (hopefully) trying to apply some of what they learned. The beauty of it is that the content is already there. Thousands of courses. Any takers?

Please Note: When I refer to Facebook, I realize that other, similar sites exist internationally, including many successful clones. PLE applications could be build for any number of social networking sites that support community driven application development. Personally, I think Facebook will continue to lead in this space, both in the US and internationally. They have undertaken an excellent community-driven translation effort, which is another area of interest to me.

Hulu is viral. Just a few months after its debut, it became the 10th most visited US video site on the web. That’s more viral than the flu in a dirty daycare. So what about OpenCourseWare? Is there any hope for some viral sharing of OCW courses? Not that I expect it to ever spread like Hulu, but it’s worth asking what Hulu has that OCW could try (besides porn).

Perhaps the difference between courses and movies has to do with motivation and interaction. Motivation for something like Hulu is pretty easy to understand. After all, we’re talking about free, on demand SNL here. But interaction can make or break a website. With Hulu, there’s no plugin or player to download (sorry Joost, you lose.) Jason Kilar made sure the interface was ultra-clean and easy to understand. Bottom line: everyone gets what you do with a movie or a TV show. You watch it. Of course, with Hulu you can also leave a comment, plus you can take it with you (Jason had to fight for the ability to embed any Hulu video on any other website — but it worked). People get these kinds of basic Web 2.0 interactions.

With an OCW course, it’s not always clear how to interact with the content because OCW course content is not as consistent as a movie or a TV show. In one course may consist of a video lecture, another may be a course podcast, and in yet another may be simply a collection of course lecture notes in PDF format. So a visitor does not always know what to expect from a course, which in some cases may make it harder to share with others.

I don’t have the answer for how to make OCW courses spread like wildfire, but my suggestion would be to provide ways for the course content to flow easily out of the OCW site and into places where it could be discussed. Places like Facebook, Orkut, etc. Once you allow OCW content into a social networking space, people who care about the content will form groups around it. It won’t be Hulu, and I don’t know that it will ever be called viral, but I bet OCW usage will grow.

If you are in one of my classes, or if you are just curious what I am up to, here is a link to my public calendar. Thanks, Google!

So there is a mom who blogs about her daily experiences and it’s pretty hilarious. Mom’s can feel isolated. Blogs can help. Here is my favorite post (one of her early ones): http://mom2my6pack.blogspot.com/2007/08/adventures-in-grocery-shopping.html

At what dollar amount does money not matter any more? I am convinced that it is around a billion (yes, billion with a “b” — a one with nine zeros after it). This obviously depends on your lifestyle, but a billion bucks would accomodate pretty much anything I can imagine — and I can imagine a lot. (This goes back to my brother Bob’s discussion of the Yahoo/Microsoft buyout debacle).

Yesterday I brought this up with some friends. Marion mentioned that even a million dollars could support someone indefinitely (ignoring inflation). If you stuck it in a CD or some other interest-bearing account that yields 5-6% you could pay yourself $50-60K per year without touching the original million. Where I live, this would be considered a decent middle class income. But when I suggested it to my wife, she just laughed.

So to anyone who has this as their sustainability plan, I dedicate this Bare Naked Ladies song to you.

I have decided to take the router back and use a regular land line for now. I still can’t pinpoint the problem, but I have found that re-flashing the firmware is a temporary fix. For some reason this works, but simply restarting the router doesn’t. So that’s what I have done every other morning for a week: Wake up… no blue light (no phone service)… “upgrade” firmware (for the n-th time)… blue light comes back on (phone works again)… then I just wonder how many calls I missed. This is one of those times when being an early adopter can bite you in the butt. At least I was able to talk T-Mobile into taking it back outside of the 14 day “buyer’s remorse” window. The whole idea that I would have to pay a $200 “early termination fee” is just silly. If a product doesn’t work after a few weeks I should be able to take it back for a refund. Period. 14 days is *barely* enough time to switch your number to T-Mobile and back, so you might want to test out your service with a number you don’t care about first. I know this has worked for others very well, but for some reason the Comcast + T-Mobile combination was a non-starter for me. Anyway, I’ll try VOIP again someday — in a year or so maybe.

If you get cankers easily you should avoid the ingredient sodium laurylin sulphate. This substance is in many mouthwashes and almost every toothpaste (to make it foam). But sodium laurylin sulphate can cause cankers, especially if you are already prone to them. The only toothpaste I have found that doesn’t contain this substance is Rembrandt, but I’m sure there are others.