plaxoed!

since I’ve blogged (a week to be exact). Sorry everyone, I’ve been pretty busy :S

But it looks like Terry has picked up the slack in my absence. He’s written more than an entry a day whereas he used to write about one a week

Lots to blog about, stay tuned…

AOL has put out a press release about the next Triton beta release. My colleagues and I are all very excited because it will be the first release that has Plaxo built-in. I’ll post a follow-up with screenshots and everything when it’s actually shipped, stay tuned…

Before I turn in for the night, I wanted to point out Dru’s latest post about the cult following that is a large part of the Mac user base

$1500 seems too low though. The real fan will want every single product they make in every available color (and we all know $1500 won’t even cover half the stuff in a typical Steve Jobs keynote). So they better just hand over the routing and account numbers for their bank accounts to make sure they don’t miss out on anything

I saw a mention of the Microsoft College Puzzle Day event on Scoble’s blog and clicked through. Wow, the program has really grown.

Niraj, Evan, Lee, and I coordinated and ran the first puzzle day at University of Michigan in the fall of 2003. As noted in a blog post by Dan Justin, the first year, we made some mistakes. Last year, we ran the event again with 3 schools teaming up to do a inter-campus event (UMich, U of Toronto, and Carnegie Mellon participated).

Obviously, I’ve since left Microsoft (Niraj wasn’t even @ MSFT for the 2nd annual puzzle day), but the event rolls on!

This year, they have not 3 but 8 schools in the fray. Columbia, Cornell, GA Tech, MIT, UMich, USC, UT, and U of Toronto (sorry Canadians, but Texas gets to be called UT in the states ). Wow, this is going to be quite the event.

Which reminded me of the t-shirts I designed for the previous years events. In puzzle day fashion, the back of each t-shirt included a puzzle. The first year’s puzzle was relatively easy, last year’s puzzle was way too hard (oops). For you puzzle fans, here they are:

(You can click through to Flickr for full resolution photos) The black one on the left is the shirt from 2003 and the one on the right is the shirt from 2004. When you look at the ‘03 shirt from afar, you can see the it says “ALLNIGHTAFFAIR”, the name of the event. But when you look up close, you realize it’s made up of 0s and 1s. The ‘04 shirt actually had a printing error. The dots that are clear were supposed to be completely filled in black. As for the puzzle, it was really hard to solve; I’ll give you a hint though, Puzzle Royale was a casino theme

If you’re a college student at one of the 8 schools listed above, and you like puzzles (and you want a job at Microsoft heh heh), go to the site and sign up a team. If nothing else, you get a free t-shirt and free food - the fundamentals of any successful college event

UPDATE: Check this, they are giving each member of the winning team their very own XBox 360 - a week before it’s released! That’s would motivate me to participate just on the potential ebay value of the system alone…

UPDATE 2: A Canadian friend has told me that they don’t call University of Toronto “UT”; he says they typically say “U of T” or “UTornoto”

UPDATE 3: Oops, the guy who posted about the puzzle day was actually Justin, not Dan.

Saw this on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog…

Taking it one step further than Google Web Accelerator, we have Google Secure Access. Instead of just your browsing through Firefox going through Google, they now have a downloadable that encrypts and routes all your net traffic through Google’s servers.

Upside: if you use an unsecured WiFi network (either completely open or WEP “protected” - can you really call it protected if it can be broken in a matter of minutes?) the Secure Access client would be nice. It’s pretty much VPN-grade security for everyone and of course, it’s free!

Downside? Well… what are they doing with all your net traffic history? Here’s an excerpt from their GSA privacy policy:

Google may log some information from your web page requests as may the websites that you visit. We do this to understand how Google Secure Access is being used and to improve our services.

Ok, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they are hopefully just using aggregate metrics to optimize and improve the service. Worst case though is that “understand how Google Secure Access is being used” means understand how you personally use the Internet. Ok, ok, enough conspiracy theory.

For any other concerns, it refers you to the standard Google Privacy Policy. So I clicked through and started reading it. I got to this part:

Google collects limited non-personally identifying information your browser makes available whenever you visit a website. This log information includes your Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your query and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser. We use this information to operate, develop and improve our services.

Ok, I guess my IP address and a unique browser cookie aren’t specifically personally identifying, but what if I log in to a Google Account and have the credentials cached? Does that get tracked along with these other stats?

Either way, it makes me feel like I’m being watched… oh well, if GMail taught us anything, we’ll trade privacy for convenience any day

UPDATE: I see Nathan Weinberg over at InsideGoogle picked this up too. Methinks we have a similar read on the service, but I’m willing to give them benefit of the doubt while he says “follow the money”.

John Wehr, creator of Tagalag, IMed me today to tell me about the service (if you’re a geek, you can see that he has the coveted user ID of 1). It’s a cool concept, one that I hope will evolve over the next few weeks.

Basically, it’s del.icio.us, but for e-mail addresses. John’s taken a few steps to prevent scraping of the site for e-mails, but I’m a little bit concerned about the security on the site - we’ll see how it fares after the community gets ahold of it. Speaking of the community, I’m very interested in seeing how the community ends up using it.

From what I can tell, John has just put up a basic infrastructure and is waiting to see how people use it. He’s built some of the geeky “must haves” including an API, integration with Y! Mail and GMail through Greasemonkey, and support for the XFN vocabulary.

And yes, if this site catches on, it may be something we can integrate with Plaxo. Being able to tag and look up tags for your contacts natively in Outlook? Maybe… we’ll see

I was a panelist at a PR conference about blogs today and I had a chat with Eric Rice and Michael Butler about podcasting. I’m not a big believer in the medium yet, mostly because the podcasts I’ve heard so far have been either mindless droning about random topics or long winded tech opinions I could’ve absorbed much faster through skimming blog entries. Sure, I can up the playback speed of podcasts, but I’m pretty sure I can skim my entire blogroll faster than I can skip through a hour long podcast without missing what they’re talking about.

Eric and Michael brought up good points about podcasting though, namely:

1. Podcasting is like Tivo for radio - Yes, I see this angle. I’ve downloaded recordings off of NPR for consumption later and on the music side, downloading mp3s allows me to time shift my listening as well.
2. Podcasting has a different dynamic than blogging - Most people subscribe to blogs because they like the author’s content. Eric says he doesn’t really subscribe to any podcast feeds, instead, he searches for podcasts that have interesting content (or ones that are recommended to him) and he grabs those. Eric’s usage seems like a fundamentally different model than what most people who subscribe to blog feeds are used to.

Either way, I told them I’d give podcasts another shot. I’ve got a 1.5 hour commute everyday from San Francisco to Mountain View anyways; they’ve recommended a few that I’ll probably grab and listen to in my car (fortunately, my head unit plays mp3s). Anyone out there have specific podcasts to recommend?

I was scanning through my feeds today and I saw that Mini-Microsoft got interviewed by BusinessWeek. His posts are oftentimes controversial and there is quite the following on his comments. I’ve read through most of his stuff and generally agree that there are some problems with the operation of Microsoft - as far as if the answer is to cut off all the middle management and implement a rigorous firing of below average performers, I’m not sure if it’s that easy.

All in all, I think it’s great for Microsoft to have a blogger like Mini that can hold a public discussion about radical ideas that could positively affect the company. One point that many people reference again and again is that Mini oftentimes has logical suggestions to accompany his rants on stuff that’s broken.

Now if only decision makers (like Steve Ballmer) would open up a dialogue with Mini Microsoft and listen to the concerns out there, maybe we’d be getting somewhere. Unfortunately, according to this interview, Steve doesn’t read Mini and continues to dodge hard questions Don’t take my word for it, check out his latest interview with BusinessWeek.