April 1, 2007 Archive Entries: Gmail Paper, What's Wrong With MySpace..., The Moon,

« Sunday, April 1, 2007 »

The Moon

So all of a sudden you look out the window and you realize that somehow you, and the building you are in, just got transported to the Moon. Do you:

Start running, screaming and freaking out
OR
Do you think something like "how cool is this!?!"
I'm all for the second choice! Getting home and lack of oxygen are potential problems, but let's look around in case you get transported back to plain ol' boring Earth, okay?

It's the Moon!!! How cool would that be?!?

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Posted by Gary on Sunday at 12:14 AM on April 1, 2007.
Related categories: general, television
Thanks for the 1 comments/trackbacks from: kazza
Gary Said... http://garysaid.com/

What's Wrong With MySpace...

Forget that it lets you create awful looking pages and that it's ultra slow (partially due to the large quantities of photos and slideshows). We're just talking about normal software problems that would probably save them bandwidth if they fixed/tweaked things (and make our MySpace lives easier and faster). Let's get everyone to stop wasting clicks and using it better (which will stop wasting bandwidth!). I might even spend more time there if it wasn't for all the wasted time...
So here we go (I hope Tom is listening):

If I'm looking at an event it should tell me if I've added it to my calendar already when I'm looking at it. It should not make me click it and then add it twice. It should know this already.

I need a way to get the calendar out of MySpace. I've already got a calendar on my computer, it's on my phone, it's every where I go (and it's all the same calendar). I need a way to get those events from MySpace to my other synchronized calendars. There are standardized protocols for this, if they really want me to see these performers (they really don't care, IMHO) they need to make sure I know about them.

If I add a calendar item from someone's page it should remember when I got the event from with a link back to the original page.

If someone is my friend already say that on the page don't say "I'm in their extended network", it says that for everyone. You go to add a band (or someone) and you can't remember if they're in your list already and it's got to go to another page. It should know this already.

Artists can set their page to let you download some of their songs (or none) but the filenames are awful (like 89SAD09G89SD0FSDF089SDFS8D00S.mp3) and the songs have none of the tags so you can see who it is when you play it later (on the computer or your mp3 player). Once again, they aren't helping the artists, it's whatever they can do to get you to come back to the site for unnecessary things. If you're hooked your coming back, just let me download something useful.

MySpace will send me e-mail reminders and alerts but you can't choose which ones and it's hard to get them past your spam filter since they change their e-mail address with every message. If you use some form of disposable address now your friends can't search for you since they don't know that address (I only send friends to MySpace to find the links to my bands, I have no real content there).

If I go to someone's page for the first time, I'll click play if I want to hear their favorite song, don't start streaming me music I don't want to hear. I almost want to say the same about a musician's page too but I can understand that they want it to play (how about a 10 second delay so the page will stop loading first?).

They don't let you subscribe via RSS/Atom to a persons blog, once again, no info unless you go to theirSpace. They could at least let you view an excerpt so then you'd want to come back...

If someone has no pics (or videos) it shouldn't give me an option to view them. There aren't any there!!

There should be a limit of 15 slideshows or 1500 photos per page. That's sarcasm, have you seen how many photos and slideshows people put on their page? It takes 5 minutes to download them all on a high speed connection!

Why can't I rotate my favorite song? Or my Avatar? Oops, wait those aren't aesthetic complaints, they're user wishes. I've been spending too much time in theirSpace....

I really hope I'm not missing an easy calendar solution, I'll feel kinda silly if I did. If I'm complaining, I suppose it begs the question why am I using MySpace? Because they've got my local bands convinced it's the only place to list their calendars. And occasionally I follow a few other clicks while I'm there...

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Posted by Gary on Sunday at 12:41 PM on April 1, 2007.
Related categories: blogging, music, reviews, web sites
Thanks for the 1 comments/trackbacks from: nadine
Gary Said... http://garysaid.com/

Gmail Paper

So this is a great idea, some have e-mail (gMail) accounts but don't have printers. They access at internet cafes, off their cell phone or at work (where it's not appropriate to print personal mail). But how do you get a hardcopy of your messages? This was a problem the first week or two when my Mom got her computer, she didn't have any way to print.

Gpaper Solution: gMail paper. You click the "paper archive" button and they'll mail you copies of the messages. "You can read it, sort it, search it, touch it. Or even move it to the trash—the real trash. (Recycling is encouraged)". Of course it's free, it's from Google but I don't see how they can afford the postage, they say that "The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints". Here's the FAQs. Obviously I haven't seen printouts yet (I wish they had some in the FAQ) but I'll be ordering a few samples later and I'll post what they look like (although printing an e-mail, then scanning it back in to post it electronically seems a little absurd).