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Yes to running to get to know a city

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:39:10 PDT

I couldn't agree more with Brad Feld on this one - running around a city is the best way to get to know it. In fact, I make a point in every city I go to, new or not, to explore as many mornings as I can by taking a nice long run. I'm an explorer in general when travelling, but running is of course a bit quicker, and I make mental notes of places to explore more later in the day.

Interestingly, I find that I can run almost twice the distance in a new city on a trip than I can at home. The new sights, sounds, and smells somehow take away the boredom of running the same paths you've been on many times. I actually am not much of a runner, but always run when I travel.

My favorite cities to run around have been Tokyo (which is totally safe, and even more interesting if you run at 6am when all the bars are closing and the streets are filled with drunk teens), Barcelona (which you can see a bunch of different districts in one run), London (which has some great parks to run through), and San Francisco (there's nothing like a run on the entire Embarcadero in the morning).

Chromebook just got infinitely better, and this is the future of Android

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 05:23:43 PDT

I've been using a Samsung Chromebook Series 5 500C for some time now, but to be honest, I was getting ready to sell it because I just couldn't get used to having only one browser open at time. Especially with multiple Google accounts, it just didn't mirror how I work on my Mac with multiple Chrome profiles for every Google account I use. Fifteen full page tabs just feels weird.

The newest release into the Chrome OS dev channel just changed all that. It allows for multiple Browser windows to be overlapped, and includes a ribbon launcher on the bottom of the screen that makes this feel more like a computer.

To get the newest release, you go to the wrench, select "About Chrome OS", select "more info..." and choose "Dev - Unstable". The next time your Chromebook looks for updates, it will download this version, which although it is called "Unstable" has been pretty stable for me.

This all got me thinking...this is probably one of the biggest reasons I don't take a tablet seriously for getting real work done. That is, the multitasking presentation that exists today on iOS and Android just doesn't make sense for how my brain thinks about multitasking apps. I need to see the multiple windows to remember they are there.

The closest I've seen to this being solved is Chrome on Android. There's an affordance that's always there to tile the multiple windows, and it just works so much better than having to remember that button is down there to see the other programs that are running on Android. And having to double button on iOS - I wonder how many people know that is there. The simplicity of iOS doesn't work for me. My brain craves something more complex.

If Google can solve the multi-window problem in Android like they have in Chrome for Android, and merge that with Chrome OS, then I think they will actually have a powerful weapon against Apple. When I can effectively use my Android phone as a Chomebook, then this starts to all make sense.

The Motorola Atrix kind of has a feature like this when you dock it, and although it looks pretty klunky now, perhaps this is one of the things that Google really bought from Motorola mobility, especially if they patented it.

I expect the next iteration of the Xoom tablet, to be a Google tablet, sold like they started selling the Galaxy Nexus yesterday. I expect Chrome to be front and center on said tablet, to pave the way for the Chrome OS/Android merge, with this Moto docking technology coming in the background.

Chrome on Android is already so good, I definitely use it more than I use native apps on my Galaxy Nexus, so this doesn't seem like a stretch.

This post was written entirely on my Chomebook.

[n.b.: this is all conjecture - I don't have any knowledge of this as a strategy from my time working at Google]

Breckenridge at Dawn

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:09:40 PDT

DSCN0826, originally uploaded by steveobd.

I've been playing a lot with HDR photography. Here's one from a recent trip to Breckenridge from the foot of Peak 8 at dawn.

30 Minutes was all I could take with a Windows Phone

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 07:58:57 PDT

Every six months or so, I get this urge to try a Windows Phone again, so today I took my SIM card out of my LG G2x and popped it in my htc HD7 to try it out again. I was going to try to use it for a week, but I couldn't use the phone for more than 30 minutes and I had to rip the SIM right back out.

It's got one thing going for it: it's super snappy and fast. Way faster than both Android and iOS. And I love fast. But otherwise, this is the worst user experience around.

One of the reasons I got the urge to try the phone again was that I needed to check something in my hotmail account, which I rarely use. Even after logging out and logging back in with my Windows Live account, the phone continued to show me that I had no hotmail messages even though when I went to double check on the web, I clearly did. You want apps that just work, and I got apps that just didn't work.

I went in to update the 10 or so applications I had installed, as the phone told me they were in need of update, but I got a "Windows Live service is down" - sorry.

The IMAP client to Gmail is just horrible.

Maybe this is the best experience around if you have an Exchange account, but I don't get it.

The "Metro" UI to me doesn't work because it wastes too much space. I don't need title bars and fonts that take up 10% of the screen. It works okay on the Xbox, but not so much on a phone.

I think a lot of this does have to do with perspective. I saw this article by Danny Sullivan, who I respect and think knows what he is talking about, on how Android needs a better email client and it is amazingly the opposite of what I think.

If you use Google apps or Gmail as your primary method for calendar and email management, there's nothing better than the Android interface, and actually the iOS mail client is terrible. It doesn't bring the Gmail experience to iOS at all, but then again, I don't think Google's iOS Gmail client does either, as it doesn't support multiple accounts (last time I checked).

At any rate, I've seen the new Lumia phones, and although they are nice, I can't see myself ever using one of these phones.

Where Microsoft is really getting hit hard: new developers

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 10:32:03 PDT

I've been talking to a lot of college engineering students these days, both through NUvention Web and also via other ties into Northwestern, and the one thing I've noticed is that Microsoft is a company that is totally absent from their periphery when it comes to programming enviroments and technologies.

When you give students a chance to build something, using Microsoft technologies isn't something that would ever even enter their mind. First choices seem to be Ruby on Heroku or Python on Google App Engine.

It makes me think Microsoft is in a world of hurt from the developer standpoint. Try finding a new college computer science major who wants to learn .NET technologies. I haven't found one yet. This seems to me to be a problem for the longevity of the company, as engaging developers is important.

This isn't a surprise to me, but I'm just recording it here as another data point.

It's all about thin

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:26:52 PST

While cleaning out my basement last weekend, I found my first laptop. It was a Thinkpad 750Cs with a passive matrix screen, and a 170MB hard drive, I believe. Yes, that's MB.

I was working for Andersen Consulting at the time, and working 16-18 hour days on top of an hour and a half commute, so working on the train was absolutely critical. This could barely run the ParcPlace Smalltalk distribution we were developing our architecture on at the time, but it was still useful.

I haven't touched this machine in years, but besides it being really really heavy (I can't even find a google search that will reveal what it weighs) the first thing I noticed about it was that it has almost the exact same footprint as my 11" MacBook Air.

I've used smaller and bigger laptops, but I find this size is about right for what I need. The utility of that dimension hasn't changed. But the thinness is what has and makes the MacBook Air such a useful too, especially for travelling. Apple really got this right.

I find it's the same thing with phones. Thinner the better. They can be a little bigger on the height and width, but the depth has to be as thin as possible. That's probably why I'm enjoying the Galaxy Nexus right now. Huge screen, great for email and reading books on the Kindle application, and thin enough to be unobtrusive in the pocket.

Sony and AdWords Remarketing Really Want me to Buy a Nex-5N

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:30:59 PST

A few days ago I did a search for the "Sony Nex-5N" camera, and most likely clicked on the promoted (when ads move from the right column to the top, they are called "promoted") text ad that Sony is running on Google search. This took me to Sony's site on the Sony NEX line, as expected.

I didn't buy the camera from them, but they sure want me to. In fact, whenever I go to any site that has a block of Google AdSense text ads, there's an ad for the Nex-5. Here's four examples from sites you probably recognize.

from PCMag

from LA Times

from Chicago Tribune

from CNET

Spooky? no. Is Sony reading my mind? Invading my privacy? no.

This is Google AdWords remarketing at work. And it's working beautifully. It's like my own private reminder that I want to buy this camera as I browse the web all day long. It's stuff like this that is making Google's Display business $5 Billion per year. From the AdWords help:

Next, a small piece of code called a remarketing tag is embedded on your homepage, for example. This code tells AdWords to save visitors to your "Homepage List." When people visit your homepage, their cookie ID is added to the remarketing list. Once the remarketing tag is in place you can create an AdWords campaign that targets messages only to people on your "Homepage List" while they browse the Web. Your remarketing messages won't be shown to people who aren't on the list.
The remarketing tag can be embedded on any page within your website, not just the homepage, so you can develop more detailed audiences. For each remarketing list that you want to create, embed a different tag. If you want to create a "Homepage Visitor" list and a "Completed Conversion" list, you need two separate tags -- one to go on the homepage, and one to go on the conversion page. Learn more about remarketing and users' cookies.
There's a balance between creating very detailed and broader remarketing lists. While detailed lists allow you to further target your message, you'll get the most scale and volume with broader lists. Read more on strategies for your remarketing lists, and learn how to tailor your creatives to these lists.

I'll let you know how the camera is.

Chrome for Android...wow

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:10:29 PST

One site

Multiple Tabs

Syncs with your Desktop

Synced bookmarks

Some quick thoughts on Google Chrome for Android:

Awesome user experience. For a beta, it's incredibly polished. The animations on the Galaxy Nexus are smooth, and just beautiful. This is the mobile browser you want to look at. You can't see it in the stills, but when you dismiss tabs, they fly off the screen at an angle. Really slick.

The best execution of multiple tabs on a mobile browser I've seen.

It pre-fetches websites it thinks you want to read next - if you want it to. The default is not to do this on the mobile network. ( I wonder if it generates ad impressions for pre-fetched pages, or if they've created an API with Doubleclick to delay impressions somehow. )

When there are no tabs open, your recently closed tabs are there in a list.

According to html5test.com the browser implements 343 out of 475 of the necessary actions (compared to iOS5 Mobile Safari doing 305) and it does seem to render most websites better than anything else I've seen on a mobile device.

And it's fast. I'm sold.

It sure seems to me that the rate in which Android and its collection of apps and services are improving is faster than the rate in which iOS and its apps and services are improving. I personally find myself grabbing my Galaxy Nexus over any other phone about 90% of the time these days. My iPhone is getting jealous for sure.

Sharing Affiliate Links on Pinterest part of their model?

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:56:19 PST

I got an invite to Pinterest the other day, so I decided to play around with it to see what all the hubbub was about. The road is littered with web clipping services and bookmarking engines but this is the one that has seem to have found its niche, especially with the female demographic.

So I found a few guitars I liked, and pinned them up. To my surprise, I seemed to get some immediate engagement with people I neither followed nor followed me, which got me thinking...wow, what a perfect affiliate link vehicle.

So I decided it was worth a test. I found some pictures of camera bags I like, and generated some affiliate links for them via the Google Affiliate Network. I pinned them up.

Then I saw the related links:

and thought, wow, okay, so obviously someone else has thought of this too.

Accidentally or not, as it turns out there are a ton of affiliate links from GAN in Pinterest:

(unfortunately for whoever the original publisher was, most of the links are broken because of an encoding issue - the links on a lot of these products seem to have the ampersand URL encoded in the link so they don't work.

http://gan.doubleclick.net/gan_click?lid=41000613802215716&pubid=21000000000517668

)

My first thought was, wow, they're gonna get spammed, big time on this. But again, as it turns out they already know this.

This is from one of the boards in the search above. They've already detected that the links go to GAN and warn the user as such.

So smart, this is part of the plan. See how products convert on the affiliate networks, and then probably create their own affiliate network. I'm guessing that's their business model.

How does the MP3 album cost more than the CD?

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:38:31 PST

Really, how does this even happen? It seems nuts in this day and age that any MP3 album would cost $17.98 anyway, even if it is a double album. But for the CD to be less is even more ridiculous!

MacBook Air 11 inch vs 13 inch battery life

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:02:52 PST

A little over a year ago I wrote about how the battery life on my 13" MacBook Air was really great, a little over 6 hours when it was new. Plenty of juice to last a Chicago to San Francisco flight.

More recently I began using an 11" MacBook Air, to save a little weight in the backpack and to make it fit a little better on the airplane for those times when the person in front of you decides to recline their seat at full speed without warning, and thus crunching your laptop screen. (Karma would put such people in front of a 3 year old on their next flight who likes to kick the seat and open and close the tray the entire flight).

Now, this is not an apples to apples comparison because I have wifi on in flight versus not, but the 11" MacBook Air has a substantially weaker battery than the 13". At a 97% charge, I'm getting a 2 hour and 40 minute time, which I've found to be pretty accurate after a couple flights.

Dimming the keyboard after 5 seconds of inactivity gets me another 27 minutes. This gets me about what I need for a Eastbound flight from the West coast to Chicago, but not a Westbound flight where it's sometimes an hour longer.

Here's hoping that airlines that are good enough to have in-flight wifi will also consider providing power outlets. Actually, I need to read a few books an relax for the last hour anyway...

Motorola Xoom won't boot?

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 19:47:22 PST

My Motorola Xoom a few times has decided to just shut itself off and put itself in a state whereby pushing the power button will not turn it on.

The fix: hold down the power button and the "volume up" button for 3-4 seconds.

Not sure what causes this, but this always seems to fix it.

My New Relationship between Real-time Social Media and Sports

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 04:47:02 PST

Ah, the good old days....when I had enough time to watch college football most of Saturday, pro football most of Sunday, and could usually catch Monday Night Football to boot. You couldn't get soccer on cable back then, which left me enough time to study and get my degree.

Later on in life, we'd record games on DVR, and selectively watch later.

I came to realize today that now things are different. I pick up on subtle real-time social media clues and join in on games in progress. All the time.

Take, for instance, today:

Hmm...we might have a game. Let me turn that on.

and

Hmm...well, I don't really care that much about the NFL playoffs now that the Bears are nowhere in the picture, but I better turn this on right now!

Of course there are still games I watch whistle to whistle when I can plan ahead, but this is mostly how it goes.

And it's not like I'm feverishly studying social media instead of watching these games; it's become a form of ambient music playing in the background - multiplexed into the 10 other things I have going on in the day.

I can hardly wait until each of those examples above has a "click here to join the game in progress" - but I have a feeling it's not that far off.

I don't understand Caribou Coffee

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:09:31 PST

Caribou Coffee goes a long way toward giving you a comfortable cup of coffee. There's usually a lot of tables, free wi-fi, lots of comfy couches and chairs. And a nice fireplace, which is awesome in the Winter. The coffee itself is good, and there's a great assortment of interesting coffee drinks you could probably put an umbrella in if they were Polynesian themed instead of North Pole themed.

But here's what I don't get: Caribou's baked goods suck. They are all pretty much horrible. Why go to all this trouble to spend on this great interior and then have such a crappy collection of baked goods? It's like they are running a marathon against Starbucks and fell face first 10ft before the finish line.

HUDs for text and tweets

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 04:47:47 PDT

Yesterday, BMW announced that 3 Series cars are going to get full-color Heads Up Display (HUD) capabilities. I was first introduced to HUDs through military fighter F16 video games and often wondered why they weren't in more cars. I've seen them in a few cars to display the speedometer, but I can't recall which models.

With texting while driving quickly becoming illegal everywhere, I think the killer app for HUD would be displaying texts from your phone via Bluetooth, and just being able to press a button to speak a response. This would allow the driver to perhaps keep his or her eyes on the road and not be distracted by the incoming notifications.

I could also see functionality to pipe selected tweets, DMs, or email subject lines as well, though responding to such things would probably be more challenging.

The reality is, I see a lot of people texting while driving, sometimes at stoplights, but mostly going 65 miles per hour on the expressway, and that's kind of scary. But I have to admit, there are certainly many times I am waiting for a message and when my phone goes off, I pick it up and have a look. If I have to respond, I will pull over somewhere and respond.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of this but look for this feature to be built into applications in the next couple of years if HUDs roll out to more vehicles.

techmeme vs hacker news traffic (one data point)

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:59:30 PDT

This is neither here nor there and just one data point, but I have always found traffic patterns on the web interesting, so I'm posting this mostly for my own self interest.

I always just assumed it would be better to get a link on Techmeme over Hacker News but for this blog at least, it's not the case.

Looking at one post that got one of the "related links" on Techmeme and a post on Hacker News, Hacker News provided over 100X more traffic than the link on Techmeme. Remember your Calculus 101 - the total traffic is the area under the curve of these graphs, not the max(y).

micro view

Even if you zoom it out and look at two separate posts spanned out over a period of months, the first one which was a "first class" link from Techmeme, versus an entry in Hacker News, you see the same pattern. It's almost fractal.

macro view

What most non-Google employees don't understand about Steve Yegge's post

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:54:09 PDT

Steve Yegge of Google accidentally posted a great rant on Google not forcing its product teams to encapsulate functionality and expose all data and actions as APIs...essentially that Google internally does not use a Service Oriented Architecture.

This is totally true and while I agree it would have actually been a heck of a lot easier to integrate products in Google if they did (something I know a thing or two about) - having one big codebase and database also had the benefit of allowing engineers to really understand what was going on in other parts of Google and forced them to work in a distributed environment across offices.

The web will make a big deal about his post, but I think what most people don't get about his post is that you see posts like this almost every day at Google. At least once a week. I enjoyed seeking out the engineers, PMs, and the occasional sales person, who would take the time to write a well thought out, lucid essay on something that could be changed, made better, or simply challenging a management decision like de-staffing certain projects.

Generally, the Google culture would hash this out, and at times, when appropriate, the exec team would address it. Eric, Larry and Sergey were almost always aware of these things because they would get asked about them in TGIF (company wide weekly update meetings) and they'd usually have a reasonable response.

So enjoy reading this, as it will give you a peek into the Google culture from a freedom of expression point of view, but it's otherwise not a big deal.

It's still all about building a loyal audience

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 22:21:04 PDT

Recently, I've enjoyed reading Dan Frommer's SplatF, a somewhat self proclaimed experiment in self publishing. I enjoy reading Dan more on SplatF than I did at Business Insider (née SAI, which he helped create) because it's more stripped down and not quite as blatant in its page generation schemes such as those "Top 10" articles that force you to step through page by page (and thus generating 10 page views).

Stripped from this SAI framework, Dan's a really good writer and seems really efficient at coming up with thoughtful analysis of what's going on in tech - and recently he published a quarterly report, in which he details some observations of how it's going to far.

Will his experiment succeed? I'm not sure what the parameters are, but for me the question is really "can he succeed without resorting to backpedaling to all the revenue generation techniques of SAI". That is, can he succeed with catchy headlines, quality writing, and perhaps by inventing a new combination of techniques for how to monetize a blog.

I think the thing that grabbed me the most from his month-after and quarterly report is that in this post-RSS reading, social media world, he's still really concerned with building a long lasting audience.

Why?

Because a transient audience doesn't pay the bills.

Witness, he ditched Google AdSense after a couple months for Say Media placements because it didn't generate enough revenue. Well of course. AdSense has never been a great fit for the "intermediate blogger" that doesn't do product reviews or otherwise create content that's also good for search ads OR be really really large scale like Techcrunch or SAI. The Google Display tools for buyers are great at selling audience ads for large traffic pubs - not so good for small ones.

His traffic spikes are still coming from link-love from Daring Fireball and a few others, but with each of these spikes comes more Twitter followers. More Twitter followers means more clicks from Twitter and more importantly from repeat users. With 140 characters to work with, users have to click through, and I've already found myself clicking through from Twitter multiple times per day.

Repeat users means a loyal audience to understand and monetize by CPM. If he keeps it up, he will hit an infection point where these numbers all accelerate.

So maybe it's only surprising to me, but it's still about building a loyal audience.

See this blog in mosaic mode

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:06:48 PDT

Wow - this is really cool. Blogger added a dynamic view mode that allows the user to view a blog in a number of different ways. My favorite is "mosaic" today that I think can provide in a snapshot what a blog is all about. Blogger is just one example of how Google can breathe new life into a product by "rotating" it to a new team and it's great to see that they keep innovating on a product that's been around for so long.

Here's the link to this view: http://steveobd.blogspot.com/view/mosaic

but you can change it to one of the other dynamic views with the menu in the upper right.

So much for blogging regularly again

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:00:48 PDT

Yes, that's right. A post with no substance. Well almost no substance. There's many reasons that I haven't been blogging in "long form" for some time, but I owe it mostly to the "medium form" availability and engagement on Google+ where I guess this is my profile.

But I do have a few posts brewing so this space will not be intentionally left blank for long.

The Loudness War and Remasters (Rush - Moving Pictures)

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 20:38:36 PDT

Recently I've become fascinated by reading about the alleged "Loudness War" going on in the music industry, whereby every time a label issues a "remaster" they are essentially just making the recording louder and more compressed in addition to supposedly making it sound better.

In addition, I presume, to get suckers like me to buy my favorite albums again and again - the reasons listed for doing so is to actually get the songs to be mixed for the iPod - as loud as every new recording released today and downloaded from the iTunes Store so you don't have to mess with the volume switch and be audible outdoors with background noise mixed with the Apple ear buds.

I always assumed these remasters were for audiophiles, but apparently that isn't always the case.

One of the remasters I bought recently was Moving Pictures - Deluxe Edition [CD + Blu-ray], which also comes with a 96kHz/24-bit DVD or Blu-ray (two separate versions) so I thought I'd take a look for myself if this was the case.

I took the remastered version of Red Barchetta and compared it to an older version released on the Chronicles and lo and behold, it's louder!

Throwing both versions into Garage Band, it's pretty easy to compare both MP3s side by side as they both play.

Just looking at the volume meters, you can immediately see the difference. Now if you were born anywhere between 1965 and 1970, you probably spent a good bit of time recording LPs to cassettes, and in doing so, you would have had to fool with the levels so that those meters just barely ever went "into the red", otherwise you would end up with one distorted cassette tape. Basically you were doing the same thing as any sound engineer: make it as loud as possible without distorting it.

Original on top, remaster on bottom

Well, it turns out digital recordings on CDs and MP3s don't distort at the same frequencies as cassettes so you can indeed make them a little louder, but if you make them too loud, you have to start compressing, which is essentially throwing out the outliers on the highs and the lows.

Original

Remaster

These two clips are from the same part of the song (where Geddy Lee sings "Wind in my hair shifting and drifting...") and you can see how the signal is made as loud as possible going to the limits of the digital playback range in the remaster, and it gets nowhere close in the original version that was just dumped to CD way back when.

Here are some close ups from a few beats later.

Original

Remaster

So while I think this remaster sounds pretty darn good, especially the 24 bit versions, it certainly is louder. The drums do indeed sound a little "punchier" in the original master but with a good pair of headphones I'm not really hearing distortion.

I can't wait to look at a few more of these to see what the differences are.

Why Twitter should create their own ad network

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Tue, 31 May 2011 11:04:10 PDT

In the past, I've written a little about why I think Twitter is primarily a protocol, and as we will continue to see innovative applications like Flipboard that make great use of this protocol, embedding links that can be rolled and unrolled to carry more than 140 characters.

Twitter is doing two things with this:

1) Writing their own applications such as the clients on the web, mobile clients on iOS and Android, and I believe a host of other clients for other devices that use the Twitter protocol in the way the company currently envisions their network being used

2) Providing an API for other application developers to create their own applications, that use Twitter data as well as data from other sources (such as Facebook, RSS, photos, videos) to create rich applications.

There's a limited number of #1s and lot of #2s. Though Twitter's own applications will always have a lot of traffic, I think we will see the number of applications in category #2 continue to increase as the ecosystem figures itself out.

There's a lot of speculation that Twitter will start to put ads directly into the stream based on what the user is interested in, placement of which will probably be based largely on which Twitter accounts the user follows. As twitter wraps more data to go through their own redirectors at t.co, I imagine it will also be based on what the user clicks on.

If you go to t.co it says:

Twitter uses the t.co domain as part of a service to protect users from harmful activity, to provide value for the developer ecosystem, and as a quality signal for surfacing relevant, interesting Tweets.

It's the last part that is most relevant. Remember, whenever anyone lists three reasons, the first two are just filler.

So, while I'm sure that Twitter will experiment with putting interest based ads into the stream, I'm somewhat less confident that direct response based advertisers will find the click through rates and conversion rates they would hope for there.

Brand and awareness advertisers may find more success here, but their usual medium is through display advertising such including rich media units with audio and video. Those type of units in-stream where the payload is 140 characters just don't make a lot of sense to the user experience.

Integrated advertising is certainly all the rage, but I think it's difficult to put integrated advertising into a protocol, especially when the applications that use the protocol are myriad and vary greatly in presentation.

I actually think the right approach in the end will be not to monetize the protocol, but the applications that use the protocol.

My hunch comes from looking at a lot of "in-stream" data over the years in RSS feeds that ran through the FeedBurner Ad Network and Google's AdSense for feeds products, which share some of the same characteristics from a user's point of view.

Performance of ads varies greatly from application to application and it's naive to think that a one size fits all approach in the stream is going to give user or advertisers exactly what they want.

A lot of this has to do with user intent at the time they are interacting with the content, as well as the mode and mobility of the user. So an ad you put in the stream better be different on the desktop than it is in the mobile client which must also be different in a third party application such as Flipboard if you want advertisers to keep coming back for more.

I think ads in the stream will just be part of the story.

So back to the title of this post which is "Why Twitter should create their own ad network" and what I mean by that.

I think for Twitter the right approach to monetization should be to look at all the different use cases of client applications that use the Twitter protocol, and build appropriate ad units for ALL those specific types of applications. They should of course use these units in their own applications but then also allow developers to embed the best ad unit for the developer's application with a revenue share.

So for instance, I would slice up the ecosystem into Web Stream Readers, Tablet Magazine Applications, Small Screen Phone apps, Television Applications, Vertical News Aggregators, Curation Applications, Photo Sharing Applications and everything else that the Twitter Business Development team has seen come through the office - and then build appropriate ad units for those applications with the right offerings for advertisers on the back end.

There should be something for mobile local transactional advertisers, as well brand display advertisers. but it shouldn't be one size fits all.

Specialized advertising networks always outperform generalized advertising networks. This is why at Google, each particular advertising product that exists in it's own medium and mode has it's own full time product manager (sometimes many!) whose job it is to analyze the specific data for their product and then tune and optimize the heck out of it with their engineering team(s) to optimize revenue and performance.

Twitter should organize the same way and on the back end of this all should be their own relevance engine, which uses all the available signals, such as the aforementioned list of subscription topics and click data, to create the best advertising product for each specific application use case.

There's nothing stopping a third party from creating this network, but I believe Twitter's strategy should be to simply create the best ad network that outperform's any potential competitor.

They are in the best position to be able to create this network as they have the most complete view of all the data and applications that are in the pipeline. Their own applications will serve as a proxy to performance for each type of unit, and then they will also have data signals from all their developer's applications that use the network.

If they can start to pump advertiser money back into the ecosystem, it will fuel development and innovation even further in that same ecosystem. Not to mention silence the pundits.

Streaming Netflix in the car

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Sun, 29 May 2011 16:27:02 PDT

Fred Wilson posted today on the evolving model of using you mobile as your "primary" device, and this is the model his family uses for audio.

In fact, in my family we've been using this model for video for quite some time. Our Acura MDX has a DVD player and a screen for the kids to watch on their commute, and although for many years we primarily used the DVD player, more and more, we are now just plugging in an iPhone or iPad into the AUX jacks and playing video that way.

The key is this cable from Apple:

In fact, we've actually been using this to stream Netflix into the car as well. It works pretty well. Luckily I have a grandfathered unlimited AT&T data plan.

This same cable I carry with me when I travel as well. It plugs into most hotel TVs and provides a great way to use your mobile as your "primary."

No interest in the Nintendo 3DS in my house

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 06:37:30 PDT

I think it was Matt Shobe who first said to me a few days after the first iPhone came out something to the tune of "Wow, this is going to kill the Nintendo DS, my kids are playing Super Monkeyball non-stop."

I was a bit more skeptical. "Ah, there's no D-Pad, how far can the iPhone get with games without a D-Pad?" As a die-hard portable sports gamer who doesn't leave home without a way to play FIFA or NCAA, I couldn't see a virtual D-Pad ever providing the same tactile experience as a hardware button. At least I was right about that. Virtual D-Pads all suck. But I digress.

The Nintendo DS used to be a staple of every family vacation, long car ride, and even (gasp!) a restaurant trip with the kids where my wife and I wanted to enjoy some normal adult conversation.

But those days are long gone. I can't remember the last trip we took where we even packed a DS.

But curious as I always am about new products, I gave the Nintendo 3DS a good half hour or so of play at the Game Developers Conference this year, and just came away with. "eh, that makes me sick" - I couldn't play the 3D games.

On a recent trip to Target, the kids tried the 3DS for a couple minutes. I asked "What do you guys think? Is that something you want to put on your list?"

"It's cool, but nah - I want my own iPhone"

And that was that. The snackable, immediate gratification laden format of the games on the iPad and iPhone won the day, D-Pad or no D-Pad.

Note to gadget manufacturers: rules for designing chargers

noreply@blogger.com (steve olechowski) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 22:25:31 PDT

Is anyone else getting tired of carrying 3 or 4 chargers around with them? I'm not an electrical engineer and I guess I'm not really talking about laptops here, but if you are a manufacturer creating a phone, tablet, or some other similarly sized gadget, I'd love to know why you would choose anything but Micro USB as your charging interface. I understand that some batteries are bigger than others. I understand that some batteries mothers are bigger than other batteries mothers....but surely this is a solvable problem.

Okay, if you are Apple, you have a bazillion other accessories that are already out there in consumers' hands that use your special iPhone connector pinout...and we all have an iPhone and probably an iPad charger...and ahem, why are those different? So that's okay.

If you are Sony, I will let it slide that you chose Mini USB before Micro USB was popular or existed and so the PS3 accessories and PSP (kinda) will charge with Mini USB. And I have a Mini to Micro USB adaptor. It's small enough to not be a bother.

If you aren't Sony or Apple, please make your device charge by Micro USB so I don't have to carry yet another charger. It's okay if it charges slower than a second dedicated power source, but just make it charge through Micro USB.

Android tablet manufacturers I am looking at you.