Linkspank TV continues

It's been a while since the last episode of Linkspank TV. After
piloting slightly different concepts, we got feedback that people
liked it, but it didn't need to be so "produced" and it would be
better if it happened more.

So today we're embarking on a new Linkspank TV format: more casual,
more often. Today I'll be shooting with Bice so stay tuned.

Designing skins

One feature coming in version 2 of linkspank is the ability to earn
different "skins" (including color schemes and background images).
You'll get a wider choice of skins as your Level increases through
diligent spanking of your email and Facebook contacts.

In the future I'd like to have skins by graphic designers; maybe there
will be a contest for skin design. But to start things off I'm doing
a couple myself.

1) Darkspank, with a black background and light text. That one is about done.

2) Macspank, which will appear more like the Apple computer
environment. Not sure if I can pull this off.

3) Babespank. Your screen is adorned with babes.

4) Baconspank. Featuring bacon graphics.

5) Zen temple. I'm envisioning a Japanese Buddhist temple in a
mountain forest; may be difficult for me.

6) The cubicle. Your screen resembles a cubicle setting.

Some or all of them may have dynamic components. For example, the
temple may change lighting from morning to night; the cubicle may get
new post-it's throughout the day.

Look for it in Version 2. If you have skin requests fire away. If
you're interested in designing skins just holler and/or stay tuned.

Feature requests welcome for Version 2

Linkspank Version 2 is in production. It will feature:

1) new appearance and navigation, with "skins"
2) a fuller set of Google tools
3) a new toolbar for Firefox 3
4) a search function which you can find NO WHERE ELSE and which is HUGELY SEXY
5) a new way of browsing and getting content based on what you like.

If you have suggestions or requests, smack that "contact me" link at the right.

Spreading yourself thin

Business school convinced me that "strategy" means a lot more than
"having a plan." It is making decisions about trade-offs. You can't
attack all parts of the chess board or Risk board at the same time.
Your product can't be everything to everyone. You can't specialize in
everything.

Nevertheless, I think people apply strategy too strongly in their
personal lives. They think that their interests and pursuits should be
obviously consistent with each other.

But in personal life, strategy is a mere vehicle for the blood and
fuel of what we do: our passion, wherever it comes from. Strategy is
your tack on a sailboat, and passion is the wind. The wind is the
indispensible part.

This aphoristic stuff has been in my head because I've been writing a
book this summer. I'm about half done. I don't think any VC would have
counseled me to write a sci-fi book as a constructive move for
Linkspank. I think it has been good for a periodic stoking of my
passion about my startup, though. And fun.

--
Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com

Some Smack Talk

This fall, Linkspank will do for web browsing what Pandora has done for music.

Minus the digital-rights issues.

Web Navigation

Navigation: the artful balance between guiding a user's web experience and providing a set of alternatives.

If you are short on guidance, your user gets confused, or aborts the experience early due to lack of interest.

Even when you guide users, if you provide too many alternatives, they are also more likely to stray off the path you're guiding them down.

If you are short on alternatives, the user's experience is brittle. It ends whenever they refuse to follow your guidance or face some difficulty in doing so.

--
Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com

The REAL Story Behind the "New Facebook"

If facebook sent you an announcement indicating that Applications were being deleted from the site, how would you feel?

Possibly, a mix of relief, indignation, and apprehension. Relief that your facebook experience wasn't going to be so chaotic anymore. Indignation that the efforts of all the little people out there to build apps were suddenly being shut down. And apprehension that, with apps gone, you might be missing out on something great.... something great that you could have used or played with if apps had been around.

Well, prepare to unleash those feelings. I am sorry to report that the "new facebook" has been introduced primarily to brush Applications under the carpet. Sure enough, applications are still a part of facebook. But they are a hidden part, one that facebook makes you work extra hard to find. And they are harder than ever to receive: all the work you do sending hatching eggs to your friends goes quite unnoticed now.

Consider this: what is so "new" about the new facebook? Here are some of the differences you may have noticed:

+ Some of the stuff that was on the left was moved to the right, and vice versa;
+ Some borders and shadings have been removed or added;
+ Stuff has been moved into "tabs"

These changes, especially the last one, make the site a lot "cleaner." Basically, a lot of junk that you were looking at before (i.e., applications) is back in the invisible tabs now. You click on them sometimes. Sometimes. Kinda like how you click on advertising sometimes :-).

What's in the front tab? It looks kinda like facebook used to look... before the whole applications thing got started.

There are three main ways to interact with facebook applications: through your own mini-feed; on the profile pages of other people; and via emails that you receive. The latter method of communication is restricted almost to the point of making all of the apps worthless. Now, the former two methods have also been hobbled.

There you have it. May the relief, indignation, and apprehension commence. Personally, I feel mostly relief. I liked a lot of the facebook apps, but the quality is "inconsistent" and it's part of a grand strategy of trying to be everything to everyone -- which, as it turns out, is the exact definition of not having a strategy. Of course, now that the apps have been shuffled away, it looks like maybe facebook did have a strategy: the apps were helpful, for a while. If you believe that, you may want to move your "indignation" slider a bit to the right. But maybe it would be wrong to credit them with that idea, since technology companies tend to be short on foresight. And now we are back to the basics of facebook, and the basics are a beautiful thing.

5 Greatest Technology Failures of the Last Year

Here are the five greatest personal technology failures that I have experienced in the last year.

5. Google Calendar. I'm still using Google Calendar and I will continue to use it. But I put a text message reminder in the calendar to move my car, the reminder was not delivered to my phone on one occasion, and my car was towed. The text message alerts have worked well otherwise, but that was a big failure. I experienced other Google Calendar issues in the last year. I tried to manage multiple calendars and load public calendars, but it didn't always work so well. I evangelized Google Calendar to a friend to manage and publish a public calendar on her website using a widget, but the widget didn't always update properly and she couldn't change the light blue color inside it. Bummer.

Solution: I still use Google Calendar. It's a lightweight app, it has treated me well most of the time, and I know it's getting some investment and improvement.

4. HP All in One Printer. I love being able to print stuff, and especially to make copies and scan items, in the comfort of my home office. Hence I was extra sad when my HP Printer jammed up and I couldn't fix it. My attempts to fix it were half-hearted because I already hated the HP software on my computer. I wish the whole thing had worked better. Not that the case has been any different for the last ten years or so. Boo.

Solution: I don't have a printer any more.

3. Microsoft Word. Word 3.1, if I am remembering the version correctly, was the first piece of software that I fell in love with. It was fast, simple, and reliable. Microsoft Office 2007 is like a celebration of everything terrible that a piece of software can be. It's slow. It is fascist about a new file format with no obvious benefits to the format. And the menus make no sense. In an attempt to make menus based on pictures, the creators of the software have moved away from the tried-and-true fact of human psychology that we think in terms of nested lists.

Solution: use Google Docs, which has been working awesomely for me for a few months now. For now, it still seems to be necessary to have Word. But I don't use it much.

2. Nokia N95. I really liked this phone, and I've always been happy with Nokia. And maybe I pushed the envelope by buying an unlocked version before it was really ready here. Also, the phone did some great things for me. It gave me a mobile web browsing, good email connectivity, map usage, and a hulking 5 megapixel camera AND videocamera. But the software just really really sucked. It crashed and it was super slow. The camera was embarrassingly slow, for all the megapixels. It was something of a relief when it died.

Maybe the phone is better for some people. Maybe there are sweet phones in the N Series. But after this experience I realized that the primary criterion of a phone is reliability. So I got slightly reduced functionality, but maximum reliability, with a Blackberry. As a bonus, I've found that my Curve plays really well with Google Apps, which are the backbone of my productivity technology. Then I have an iPod Touch for bonus productivity and bonus play.

Solution: Now I'm using a Blackberry Curve and an iPod Touch.

1. Norton Anti-Virus by Symantec. For months, I was trying to figure out what was freezing up my computer and slowing it down. I lost a ton of productivity. Turned out the problem was due to Norton Anti-Virus. Norton, kiss my butt.

Solution: Now I'm using AVG Free. My speedy computer is speedy again. My computer works better and is faster now even when AVG is in the middle of a scan of my hard drive. Plus, as a nice bonus, AVG is free.

Vacations

I'm on vacation. It's the first time that I've been 100% certain that
I've been on vacation in almost two years. I have a bizarre schedule
with lots of free time, but the week I'm in the middle of is the first
time in a while that I've set out to myself not to work. It's not so
much as a personal promise as a personal allowance.

A friend of mine recently had to fight his boss far in advance to get
a two-day vacation, and he was required to bring his work cell phone
and his work computer and be available during those two days. We had
an interesting chat about vacations. I posited that a vacation of
fewer than 7 days is worthless; a vacation of two lengths minimum is
necessary in order actually to relax and clear your mind; but a
vacation of longer than two weeks is dangerous, because you may not
return to work, unless you really like it. (Maybe the test of whether
you like your job is whether you can return to it after a vacation of
3-4 weeks. Management idea: counter the conventional wisdom of
encouraging your staff to take vacation in drips and drabs and instead
send them off on 3 week vacations.)

Reasons to go on vacation (each reason creates a different goal for
your vacation or type of vacation). They are in order of increasing
level of ambition for a vacation:
+ work in a relaxed environment
+ catch up on sleep
+ do anything but your job
+ spend time with people you love
+ have new experiences
+ have lots of fun
+ exist in a mental state that is free from work
+ purge your body and soul
+ achieve some form of enlightenment that is impossible in your daily life

I'm confused by people who appear to think that it's cool to be too
busy to go on vacation. It's certainly good to be vital to your
organization, but if you have authority you can set vacation time for
yourself; if you have competence you can set up the ship to run in
your absence; and if you are wise then wouldn't you want to spend some
time relaxing, thinking, getting perspective? Bill Gates and his
erstwhile trips into the woods are probably the best example of the
latter point.

The main reason I've gone so long without a vacation to date is that
I've been motivated not to go on vacation - I've kept working. But
this summer I ran out of gas on Linkspank and needed a vacation, and
strategically speaking it has been a sensible breaking point. (New
things coming in September, including an update on the site.)

I think vacations are good for Planning. Sometimes I think of humans
as having two work modes, Planning and Executing. Executing is like
jogging or walking - it's semi-involuntary. The more voluntary action
is required of jogging or walking, the more exhausting it becomes, to
a point of quickly becoming unfeasible. Such with execution: the
planning has to be laid out in advance. Good for vacations, when
you're relaxed, you can think, and you are reclining. :-)