Wow, I Can’t Believe It!

I can hardly believe this blog entry from the New York Times. It is just crazy. I mean, even nytimes.com proved that membership revenue pales in comparison to ad revenue, so I think this is just snobbery for snobbery’s sake.

The Gated Social Network

By Brad Stone from the New York Times

“I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member,” Groucho Marx famously said. He would have loved the Web’s newest social networks.

Sites like MySpace and Facebook are designed to attract a broad base of users. A newer breed, like ModelsHotel.com and the forthcoming Diamond Lounge, are building business plans based on exclusivity and the age-old custom of keeping out the riff-raff.

The Wall Street Journal wrote about ModelsHotel.com earlier this month. The name says it all; you have to be invited by others to join and the company rejects about half of all applicants based on appearance.

Last week, I spoke to a similarly inclined entrepreneur, Arya Marafie, managing director of the London-based startup, Diamond Lounge. Mr. Marafie said his site would be even more exclusive than the four-year-old, 270,000-member, A Small World, which the Times wrote about earlier this month. A Small World has lost its intimate feel, Mr. Marafie charged. “If you look at other sites trying to be exclusive, they let every single person in and over the long term that’s a disaster. We’d rather have 100 members than 5000 of the wrong kinds of people.”

Diamond Lounge is in beta testing now and will launch more broadly in October, aimed at celebrities and the affluent. An independent committee that approves members has accepted only 5 percent of about 5000 applicants, Mr. Marafie said. The company will ultimately charge members around $60 a month (can’t they afford more?) and forgo advertising.

At the end of our conversation, I tremulously asked Mr. Marafie if I would qualify for his exclusive new online club. After reviewing my qualifications, he generously said that I probably would, depending on what I could bring to the community. When I told him I would most likely bring nothing to the community, he changed his mind and said that I would be excluded.

“We are trying not to be elitist but we recognize the way things are on the Net, there’s a need to have an element of a gated system in place,” Mr. Marafie said in conclusion. “Once you have the wrong people on these social networks, the whole thing is over.”

Facebook = Wastebook

Did you know that the fastest growing Facebook demographic are individuals older than age 25?
Did you know that the average amount of time a person spends on Facebook is 20 minutes?
I am older than that and (sadly!) spend more time on it than that. OMG! What is my world becoming? In all seriousness, I was just wondering why no one had poked me or messaged me in like 12 hours. SAD SAD SAD.
New goal: stop screwing around on that stupid thing and put more effort into my personal goals – like figuring out Twitter, reading more non-fiction, career, etc. JEEZ!

AdBlock Plus: I seriously heart you!

I just found a new lover – who cares about me and my time and what I do.

I just downloaded AdBlock Plus have fallen instantly in love. Deep, lasting, sincere love. No more whack-a-mole ads on yahoo, no more slow loading blurbs on Perez Hilton, the New York Times and New York Post open scorchingly fast.

I love you, my hero, my AdBlock.

Ironic isn’t it that this open-source, virally spread mini-program is shockingly Web 3.0…as described by the big GOOGs head cheese?

Late

I have been meaning to post this very interesting blurb from the GOOG…Web 2.0 vs. Web 3.0…actually sounds more like Web 2.5, you know, widgets and all that. Not sure if this is pure “next level”, but rather “next step”.

Y! vs. G

I couldn’t believe my eyes – bleary as they were – when I read the Wall Street Journal this morning at the gym. Some crazy individual was saying Yahoo! Mail, finally out of beta, crushes Google’s Gmail application. “What?! Stop smokin crack, home slice!”, is precisely what I thought as I carried the B section out to my car. GMail is da bomb! I love the IMing from the app (not to be followed by the corporate gestapo, thank you very little), I love the quasi-tagging capabilities, (improvements need to be made here, admittedly), and plus it has super-human spam blocking. This reviewer obvs was cornfused, I chortled, as I sipped my Starbucks and drove home.

[side bar: don't do core exercises the day of a move, my abs were KILLING me today and also don't even bother doing legs the day after a move. I could barely move 70 lbs on the leg press this a.m. Weak.]

I avidly read the article and was DYING to see what all this Yahoo! Mail buzz was all about. Finally after what felt like endless meetings this morning, I logged on to Yahoo! and I’ll tell you what, I think I might migrate to Yahoo! which has always always been my junk receptacle. In the spirit of full disclosure, like many who have a full blown love affair with the Internets and all things webby, I have at least one email account with every major webmail carrier and have never really been able to choose my favorite since they all had such disparate functionality and dicey UIs. No more. I think I am freakin in loooooove with Yahoo! Mail. Frealz! It isn’t slow and jumpy like the new hotmail, it has better funx than GMail, Outlook web access is ridonkulously bad…so I can’t even compare that…I haven’t logged on to my Caramail.fr account in like 100 years – perhaps they’ve closed it for me – so I don’t know about that one.

My dear readers, if you haven’t already, please go check your Yahoo! Mail – and (gulp!) I take back all the nasty things I’ve said over the years about Yahoo being behind the 8-ball. I was so wrong. This so totally ups the ante for the next GMail release (who has been in beta since 2004).

Snappy Snapperson

Well well well…I have just gifted myself with a new digital camera for my big weekend getaway! I’ve been shopping around with a certain budget in mind for a pretty good camera – obvs. I found just the camera: Canon PowerShot A640. WOOT! I heart it already.

Ok, it lacks the flexibility of higher end cameras and SLRs – clearly, AND it isn’t a hot little purse camera. HOWEVER, it takes cool ass pics and has a bangin pivoting 2.5-inch LCD. The screen can tilt up for shooting at chest level, tilt down for shooting over crowds, or even flip all the way around for taking self-portraits (heh heh – gratuitous self-lurve). I was torn on its size as it runs on AA-batteries (gross, but can be charged via DC adapter), but I really really loved all of the functionality. Really, it is a baby step for me to the pricier, more intimidating SLRs. In an attempt to take a wider variety of pictures, I feel I need these features. Not that I am tired of taking sloppily framed snaps of drunken friends in bars, I just want a little variety. So, I’ll probably be taking my cousin’s Casio Exilim 10 mega pixel camera off his hands for just that very purpose.

Anyway, this dang thing is a bit on the complicated side. We’ll see how I do. Stay tuned.

My first pic!

BlogDay, T-Minus 5 days and counting

Are you ready for BlogDay 2007??

What is BlogDay?

BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors.
With the goal in mind, on this day every blogger will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs. This way, all blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs. I already have mine picked out!!

BlogDay posting instructions:

1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2007
3. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs
4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and
5. Add the BlogDay tag using this link:
http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2007 and a link to the BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org

YAY, bloggers! Be prepared for a fun opportunity to learn about blogs all around the world!

Unlocking the iPhone

A lot of noise can be heard today regarding the unlocking of iPhones – which is to say, jimmying the iPhone so it can run on a network other than AT&T (blech!). (source and source)

Locking popular phone models is reasonable to a consumer when that consumer gets a price break on the phone. Often times, there is a choice to buy the same model directly from the manufacturer at a much higher price point and activate the phone on the network of your choice. The Motorola Dolce & Gabbana Razr comes to mind. Phone model subsidies – great way to incent consumers to use your network.

Why can’t I buy an unlocked iPhone for $499 from Apple, and a locked iPhone from AT&T for $299? FOR EXAMPLE. This trend in unlocking the iPhone is just another example of the erosion of control of the carriers over our technology. What if my high-speed internet provider (in this case, Comcast) said, “Hey you can only use IBM computers on the Comcast network – Macs will cost you another $20 per month”. Everyone would be laughing at the ludicrousness of that idea. Yet, no one laughs when our mobile phone carriers apply that same logic. Odd. Kinda makes me feel like my rights are being infringed upon.

I was not planning on getting an iPhone for several reasons, including the AT&T network and the poor battery planning on the part of Apple, but now I want to buy one, unlock it and use it on my T-Mobile network as a simple expression of my consumer rights.

Mom is on a podcast

Ok….so my MOM is on a podcast! It is true! So cool and tech-y of her, considering she isn’t very webby. Well, I can’t seem to download the video clip as a podcast yet, but you can watch the streaming video on demand.

Click here and then scroll down to “Inside Mansfield City Schools”. Click on the August 9th episode! YAY MOM!

Dx: Healthcare is messed up!

This is what consumer driven health care (CDHP) will lead to…pay for performance, doctor ratings, etc. Hey, I am all for it, since 50% of all doctors graduate at the bottom 50% of their class…but that doesn’t mean they are poor physicians. Clearly, many brilliant people are physicians, but have grave deficiencies when it comes to compassion and communication.

On a brighter note, this is a very cool cool cool demo of clinical software to be introduced by Microsoft! The UI is awesome from what I can see in this demo and it is so relevant: real-time charts and graphs from the patient’s monitors. Cool.

What if you combined that data and provided trend graphs via a wiki or something (very web 2.0 meets enterprise software) on the hospital intranet / sharepoint?