Archive for September, 2005

C|Net is reporting New Yahoo Mail beta unveiled. I’m so excited to see this.

Yahoo was set to unveil on Wednesday a limited public beta of its new Yahoo Mail service, featuring a new desktop e-mail application-type interface and faster response time.

I’ll wait to say more, but I’m excited is an understatement.

Update: Charlene Li’s blog has the most thorough review I’ve seen so far, including several screenshots.

Meanwhile, I’ve been hearing a bunch about Memeorandum. On the way home yesterday, I listened to [yet another] great ITConversations podcast. This one was a recent interview of Microsoft’s Robert Scoble by Rob Greenlee. The most interesting part was about search, and specifically ways to search the social web and the live web. Ways to make sense of all this new user generated content, and the relationships between it all. He mentioned Memeorandum, then still in private beta. I saw it only in three or four other places when I got home, even before…

…I noticed that he’d just blogged it’s launch. From Scoble:

OK, so, it looks like a lame boring blog site, right? Look again. It’s a news page for blogs. It tells you what bloggers find important. Right now. . . . Well, remember that I read 1,389 RSS feeds? Well, it takes a weirdo like me hours to go through all of those and finding trends in that is pretty difficult. What is important to the bloggers? You won’t know unless you read all those blogs and keep track mentally of when various bloggers link to something or talk about it. Memeorandum chews through thousands of blogs in minutes and tells you what’s important. It does this every few minutes. It is dramatically faster than I could ever be. It’s all machine based. No humans involved.

And finally, John Battelle gets the scoup tonight on the new Google Blogsearch tool. (It’s 3 hours after his reported press embargo, and the url is still 404-ing. Man, I feel for the engineers over there - they must be scrambling right now.)

Update: it’s live now: http://blogsearch.google.com/

It’s fun these days. Multiple cool products launching every day. Change all around. A renewed focus. Stimulating competition. Integration. Powerful tools. New mediums and models. Collaboration. And it’s all about users.

The new version of iTunes, iTunes 5 was release on the 8th of the month. I’ve been using YME primarily lately, so I’m just checking it out now.

iTunes let’s me know that there’s a new version, and asks if I’d like to get it. The problem is, I don’t know what it has to offer. I wish companies would be better about offering change logs clearly detailing what’s new, what’s different, and what all’s happening.

It’s not only because they are sometimes unintended riders on upgrades, or even because newer is not always better, but because it should just be the standard practice.

Communication fosters user learning and understanding. Transparency builds trust. Documentation encourages exploration. Knowledge is comfort.

Things like that.

As I’ve shown before, letting the users know what you’ve done is a great way for them to get excited about your products.

(But please don’t assume that I only want the PR-spun release notes that make it into your marketing. That’s cool, but not comforting, exciting or encouraging.)

OK, if you’re seeing this it means you’re subscribed to the correct RSS feed, and/or you’re reading the new site. Thanks for tagging along. I’ll be tweaking this blog a bit more, but mainly I’ll be writing.

Cool things are afoot. My world is full of exciting topics that I’m lookig forward to thinking about out-loud on this blog.

There’s the whole Ajax/DHTML/Rich Internet Application (RIA) thing which is everywhere, and presents both fantastic opportunities to create a more delightful user exerience (faster, more interactive, more familiar) and also new challenges that must be tackled (accessibility, affordances).

I’m excited about browsers too. While there are more browsers on the market than ever before, they’re also of the highest quality we’ve seen. IE7 is around the door, and the word on the street is pretty good. Firefox continues to innovate, and I’m excited to begin developing to the DHTML Accessibility work that IBM has contributed, with the W3C, and that is already live in the alpha’s of Deer Park.

Mobile is still exciting to me, though unfortunately I missed the Mobile Monday event tonight.

And don’t forget about Web Services, the opening of API’s, and the whole so-called Web 2.0 thing. This is, I believe, the beginning of a new phase of design and development of tools and products, as well as a democratization of the same. It’s hard to even imagine at this point how people are going to mix and match to solve problems.

And then there’s the tagging thing, the notion of folksonomy, and the general rise in user generated content and distributed organization.

What excites you these days?

That’s right, I’ve moved my blog to a new and permanent address: http://nate.koechley.com/blog. I’m sorry for the trouble, but please take a moment to subscribe to the new feed and update bookmarks.

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http://nate.koechley.com/blog/feed

The blog will continue to cover web development, web design, emerging web technologies and trends. I’m also going to be writing about some projects I’ve been working on at The Day Job. As always, I’ll also be writing about things around me in the real world, but they will remain few and far between.

Why is the blog moving? After about 2 years using the hosted blog service Typepad, I released I needed to host the blog myself. Typepad is a great service - I recommend it - but I wanted to move to a permanent address on the Koechley.com server so I had to bite-the-bullet and get it done.

Via Chad Dickerson’s blog, I discovered Long Bets - Accountable Predictions, which is created by The Long Now Foundation, builders of the 10,000-year Clock and the 10,000-year Library.

Anyways, it’s an interesting site. Long Bets hosts predictions of life 2 to 200 years in the future. Mitchell Kapor and Ray Kurzweil have $10,000 each on whether a computer will pass the Turing Test by 2029. Dave Winer and Martin Nisenholtz have $1,000 on each side of blogs being bigger than the NYTimes by 2007. Microsoft and Google are head-to-head of computer-pilot commercial airplanes.

There are many with bets on both sides, and a growing list of predictions needing bettors.

U.S. Tops Mexico 2-0 to Reach World Cup - Yahoo! News

Qualifying for the World Cup is sweet. Doing it against your archrival is nirvana. The United States is headed to next year’s soccer championship in Germany after beating Mexico 2-0 Saturday night thanks to goals by Steve Ralston and DaMarcus Beasley five minutes apart in the second half.