Linux, finance, rants, politics

I’ve noticed more and more lately that there seems to be an air-conditioning problem nearly everywhere I go. Businesses for some reason think that their customers want to be kept at a frosty 68 degrees while they shop. Office buildings think that the computers and inhabitants will melt if the temperature leaps beyond the 70 mark. At the offices I’ve worked at, it’s typically so cold that people bring sweaters or fleeces to wear during the day!

The Department of Energy says that HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) account for 40-60% of the energy use in buildings. Given that it’s expensive, inefficient, environmentally harmful and just plain uncomfortable, why not just turn the thermostat up a few degrees!

I have a ton of photos that I’ve taken over the years, and managing them is a constant challenge. Part of the problem is simply the fact that there are so many great things you can do with digital photos — view them online, make cool photobooks, create collages, order prints, send them to friends and family, etc. There are many different applications that are useful for photos, and while some of them come close to doing it all, there still isn’t one solution that works for everything.

Of all the recent trends in online computing, the one most game-changing is the trend toward developing platforms and allowing users to build applications on top of them. The greatest example of a platform on the web is Facebook, which started as a simple social network, but by opening up to third party apps, has become the most important web development since Google. Platforms allow downstream developers to wield the entire power of the “parent” to create interesting and valuable applications without requiring massive resources to lay the groundwork for the basic functionality.

The reason platforms are so important is that they allow developers to use massive technological leverage. To illustrate this point, lets use the example of Dropbox, an outstanding online backup application.

I just got off the phone with 1-800-Flowers.com. I had tried to get flowers sent to the hospital yesterday, but they failed to deliver them, so I canceled the order. I called back today to try to re-enter the order with a different address, and finally gave up after speaking to several apathetic employees and getting left on permanent hold. The pivoting issue was a minor one related to a gift code, but their seeming unwillingness to even attempt to solve my problem ultimately caused me to go elsewhere.

Any site on the internet requires visitors to be successful. For social networks, this is even more important, because the quality of the site is defined largely by the quality of user interactions and contributions on that site. About 6 weeks ago, I started up a site, The Free Agents which caters to people between jobs. Its a social network where people can share their experiences and meet others in the same situation.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working hard to promote the site. I have no formal training in marketing, so my efforts have come mainly from trial and error and also from advice from marketing professionals, both through their blogs and from actually speaking with them. There are other guides on the internet about generating buzz for your website, but most of them are long on generalities (“Know your goals”) and short on details. This guide is an attempt to nail down some of the strategies that have worked for me, and help others that are getting involved in the social marketing landscape.

Disclaimer: this is a work in progress, so I have inevitable missed some key points or approached some things in an unusual way. I welcome your comments below!

In his latest article called Phone Revolution, Tony Lawrence talks about Google Voice and his excitement about the new features. Its been blogged to death in the last week, but some of the highlights of this cool new service include:

• One number that rings all your phones
• The ability to direct certain callers to certain phones
• The ability to add and remove phone numbers from the list
• Advanced voicemail capabilities like transcription-to-email and web access
• Different greetings based on caller
• Switch phones on the fly, mid call
• Record and store calls
• …etc

What struck me about this post wasn’t anything about Google Voice specifically, since I’ve heard all those features discussed ad nauseum. It was the last line:

This is the kind of stuff our telephone companies (land and wireless) should have been doing for us already.