I asked on Twitter the other day, if “Rickrolling” was reaching an inflection point of popularity. I have been Rickrolled three times in the past couple of weeks.
I’m thinking I’m correct, as the New York Times has written up the meme. Also, some Google Trends data supports it:
Well, that’s more of a hammock than a hockey stick, but it’s growth nonetheless…
I’m reading around about the iPhone SDK announcement, and I see people making a big deal about ActiveSync and ‘Exchange Push.’
My web-based mail client pings home frequently (a couple of times a minute, perhaps) via AJAX techniques. Phone apps have the same HTTP connection available. If you’re curious, keep Gmail open with the LiveHTTPHeaders addon installed and watch the request/responses stream by. Isn’t frequent pull the same as “push?” I’m having an acid flashback of the Wired hype about Push in the mid-90s…and the PointCast screensaver, which “pushed” a bunch of information to you while you were away from your computer…
I guess I’m just annoyed that “Push Technology,” in 2008, is still being called out as something customers need…
Update: Since Third-party apps appear to be limited in that they have to terminate when the user switches apps, this probably makes a daemon harder to run on the iPhone. I’m starting to understand the announcement.
I really am mesmerized when companies open up their kimonos and reveal some inside info. Last week, Google shared some information on the prediction markets inside Google.
I have Markus Frind’s blog in my feed reader because he feels very comfortable talking about the raw numbers of his business. I believe that he feels that he’s so different from his competitors, and that newcomers will find it impossible to duplicate his success, that he’s comfortable talking about anything and everything to a refreshing degree of transparency. I started reading his blog when I read that he needed a second web server because he was hitting the 64k concurrent IP address limit (!).
His business, Plenty of Fish, was profiled in the New York Times and I noticed this:
A blasé attitude is understandable, given that Plenty of Fish doubled the number of registered customers this past year, to 600,000, Mr. Frind said, despite the fact that each month it purges 30 percent of users for being inactive.
How many businesses will put forth that they purge 1/3 of their member profiles each month? That’s refreshing to read. More often, I’ll read published total user numbers and suspect the business is ruffling its chest feathers and presenting numbers that fold in inactive users. This kind of obfuscation may be advantageous to your everyday business, but Plenty of Fish is definitely not your everyday business.
I have a few articles like this bookmarked, including the great SmugMug post about Amazon S3. SmugMug talks about numbers to a surprising degree, and is worth a read (and a re-read).
I’m starting to better understand the value of Twitter, beyond quick-blogging with a list of friends. KPBS in San Diego, my hometown, is using Twitter to provide fire updates. The platform seems to be benefitting both KPBS (who also puts the feed on their home page) and the Followers.
Twitterer Nate Ritter is doing something similar.
Yahoo ad spotted in center field at AT&T Park in San Francisco:
