Twitter 101
This is very smart.
This is very smart.
It happens to the best of us. We sometimes take our loved ones for granted. We don't remember the thrill of exploring the new relationship, and start to get annoyed when we're forcibly reminded that those days are over. We see others walking around arm in arm with their new love and you think to ourselves “enjoy it while it lasts” or “I bet you just play games on that thing, don't you, chump?” Soon, it seems like everyone has an iPhone. The 12 year old brothers across the aisle from you on the plane – why the hell do they need an iPhone? Your entire crew gets them and you just know they're gonna be borrowing your charger. Yes, I've got my charger with me. Jesus...
You've since moved away from actually programming the thing, since object oriented programming is one giant blob of convoluted shit for a 30 year old bass player with a kid to try and pick up in his spare time. Besides, web development really seems like more bang for the buck. Might not pay as well, but this whole iPhone gold rush is pretty much over anyway. You read all the tech blogs by this point – you've turned your manager onto NetNewsWire before abandoning it yourself to try Google Reader but you'll ditch that soon, too – so you know how annoying it would be to try and get your app through the Apple process were you even capable of coding such a thing. You don't even check out the App Store that much anymore, since there's nothing but a bunch of stupid games over there anyway.
This began in earnest for me about three weeks ago. In fairness, it's not completely the fault of the iPhone. A good bit of the aggravation is due to AT&T's service. It's just not that good. It was really good (or so I thought) when I first got the thing, but I swear since however many millions of people have bought iPhones the network has gotten noticeably slower and spottier. There was a voicemail outage this past weekend that affected nearly everyone on the network whether they knew it or not. I was in St Cloud MN last night with “full bars” and 3G service, but couldn't get a page to load all night.
This is pretty inexcusable to me. AT&T's one and only job – for which they are well paid – is to deliver the services that they promise. At Rothbury and Wakarusa the service was unusable and the 10,000 or so iPhoners that were at Rothbury (not an exaggeration, they were the only phone I saw all weekend, at least half the phones there it seemed) were reduced to communicating via text. Whaa, whaa you might say, and ordinarily I might agree with you, but you know what Verizon did at both of those festivals? They brought in a mobile antenna to provide service to the festival site for their customers. Does AT&T even have such a truck? Could they be bothered to bring it to the festival site in the middle of nowhere where 10,000 of their customers were going to be savaging their shitty network all weekend? Apparently, no, on both counts. Inexcusable. (The upside is that someone had the good sense to put together a Rothbury App which worked great for me all weekend. The schedule was imbedded so I wasn't reliant on the no-cell coverage and I always knew what band I was watching at the time. Very cool.)
The other thing that I've noticed in the last weeks is that the new OS 3.0 is a good bit slower than the previous version. Boot up time and app launch time, both slower. This is ostensibly because there are new features loaded into the new OS, but many of those features aren't even available to 3G and OG iPhoners. So all we get is copy and paste and a dog of a phone. I'll be getting the new one, whatever version it is whenever I get it, but in the meantime I'm left avariciously playing with Stacy's new 3GS.
The iPhone is awesome, but if you don't have one – wait. It will most likely be coming to Verizon sometime in the next year. I will be jumping ship when it does. My advice for the meantime – get an iPod touch and stick with your cell phone that works. There will be a new phase for me after the resolution of this current dark period while AT&T gets their act together (I hope), or it goes over to Verizon, but in the meantime it's #attfail for me.
Here's a link to a techCrunch article that links to yet another cute little video that someone put up on YouTube. The gist is that designers and programmers hate the stupid quirks and security holes that are present in IE6 and have mounted a vigorous campaign to get corporate IT departments to finally get on with the upgrade.
But, I actually work a bit in corporate IT, at a call center full of computers running IE6. They're running that way by necessity, because many of the computers in that place are so old that they won't run an OS newer than Windows 2000. How about that techCrunch? There's a mixture of all kinds of computers in that place and some actually do run XP, but they're all on IE6. IT departments don't want to have to service two different sets of software across their company, and I don't blame them – resources are always tight and are absolutely the reason that IT depts don't upgrade. I know IE8 is free, but what about the 40 computers that we can't afford to replace right now that aren't capable of running it? That and the cold, hard fact that upgrading systems across an entire company brings with it the spectre of having to teach people how to use the new way – repeatedly – and having to listen to everyone from the agents on the floor to the boss at the top complain that “there was nothing wrong with IE6, why did we have to upgrade?” To make some f-ing web designers happy?
Woah, People Really Don't Like IE6
edit : I love web design. We all do. I'm envious of knowledgeable web designers. We all are. It is beyond argument that the world would be better off if IE6 were banished forever from all computers. In addition to being a security risk for everyone (not just IE6 users), countless hours of otherwise productive programming and design are wasted trying to support it's dumb ass. It is, however, a larger and more complex issue than you may realize.
I've been killing time the past couple of weeks with Digg and Reddit. Yes, I just recently discovered them. The Digg experience is more polished, but Reddit feels a little bit more real. They're both essentially services where people submit links to interesting articles that are then voted on by the crowd – up or down – and the ones that the crowd finds more interesting naturally float to the top. Reddit's edge for me though is that users can submit their own essays for display/storage on the site – sorta like the rants and raves section on Craigslist. The health care debate has been raging (literally) for the the past couple of weeks, and I find the discussion on articles and essays to be as good as the articles themselves.
Here's a nice rant on the Blue Cross. I can certainly identify.
The beauty of Reddit is that it has a great iPhone app. It's functionally just like the normal website, which is to say a little spartan in terms of design. The fantastico part of the app is it's integration with InstaPaper. I discovered all of these services at the same time, since they basically feast off of each other (much like the tech press). InstaPaper is totally made for somebody like me. What it does is let you save stuff you want to read on the web, but don't necessarily have the time for right then. You install a little bookmark in your browser which send the page to InstaPaper's server. Their server then downloads the page (I think) and pulls it up for you when you go to the site later.
This is where it gets really good. Say you're on the plane getting ready to pull back from the gate, about to lose cell service for however long. InstaPaper also has a great iPhone app that will pull the article off the server and cache it on your phone, meaning you don't need access to the web to read the article. It even formats it for the iPhone by pulling the stuff from between the “content” div tags, which is presumably the article that you want to read, and does away with all the bells and whistles and CSS and ads and all that. The end result isn't perfect, but it'll keep you busy on the plane for a while.
So the process for me last week was this : Reddit –> find interesting article –> click Save to InstaPaper. Before I got on the plane –> open up InstaPaper and download everything I had marked for later. Kept me busy for most of the flight. Enjoy, news geeks...
Well, friends, I asked for it. Yesterday I put up a post about Facebook's new SMS fan feature. This lets RRE fans (or whomever) text “fan RailroadEarth” to FBOOK and they're automatically added to our fan roster on Facebook. This sounds like an extremely convenient way to sign up new fans at a show or whenever the feeling hits them, yet there are a few hurtles from an effective marketing perspective that I wanted some feedback on. For instance, the best way to get the word out would probably be to make an announcement from the stage during the show, but RRE isn't going to be doing that. Whatever the vibe is that we're trying to project from stage, it ain't the one where we stop in the middle of a set and put in a plug for our Facebook page.
Other alternatives are placing info at the merch booth, the ubiquitous (and potentially ineffective) email blast, but obviously a coordinated effort on all fronts would be the most effective means of getting those numbers up. A coordinated effort is what Allan came up with. I'd love to hog this as proprietary information given to us, and only us, by a seasoned marketing vet for the purpose of blowing Railroad Earth up just a little bit more. However, that would be against the stated mission of ignoredByDinosaurs. What I present here is either something that he'd been working on for months and waiting for the right opportunity to fire off or a 30 minute rough draft of a brainstorm. You never know with that guy. Either way, he's an impassioned student of the biz and this is good stuff. If you promote bands you should read this.
The funny part is, I was just kidding when I asked him to make me a diagram.
I really like Fred Wilson's blog. He's a tech VC (venture capitalist) based in New York. He's steady, and often I fall behind since he puts out some good stuff on a daily basis. Following the tack of this post, Facebook just added an SMS friend feature to their business pages. All you do if you're not already a fan is text “fan RailroadEarth” to whatever the number is. The question I could use your assistance with is how best to get the word out about this. Seems to me like getting folks at the show would be the best way to capitalize on this, but obviously we're not going to announce it from the stage. Any ideas?
Don't Ignore The Least Common Denominator
Edit: We have a winner, folks! Allan Ronquillo has sent a complete battle plan – a work that deserves intensive study. If he doesn't mind I'll put it up here...
The day that I knew I'd found the one was July 12, 2008. The 3G and the OS 2.0 software update had come out the day before. I'd updated as soon as I could, playing my part in the server issues that Apple had that day. I was fascinated by the prospect of adding apps, though I didn't really know what I would want to add to the thing that wasn't already there.
Had a nice loooong road trip down I-81 to contemplate such matters. I spent most of the ride and all of the battery perusing the app store. By the time I got to wherever we were going, my life was changed forever. “My God, this is going to change everything! RRE needs an app! Everybody needs an app!, if for no other reason that to format the information that's already on our website for the mobile screen. Everybody in the future is going to be carrying these things around, so if you're not with it, you're a friggin Dinosaur! I wonder how you write these things? It must not be that hard – the experience is so smooth, it must be really easy! I need to do some research.”
So I'll spare the details of what I found about programming iPhone apps, since that's basically the theme of this entire blog, but let's just say it's a bit more involved than I thought.
My involvement with Facebook only really began after the installation of their iPhone app. Same with Twitter. Or Wordpress. Or jogging. Or blogging. And on and on. So in a way, you could say that everything I've gotten interested in, or re-interested in, over the last year and a half – programming, design, marketing, my band – has been because of that little doo-hicky. Thanks Steve! On the other hand, the recent dearth of LiveDownloads is also partially attributable to that thing, also, since engineering and production have kinda lost a bit of their luster as a serious career path for me. Sorry, guys. Net positive, though, to be sure.
I lost my original iPhone. I won't go into where, or when, or how, but it was a major bummer. I'd already bought a Mac by that point, since iPhone and Mac development doesn't happen on a Windows machine. Oh well, twist my arm. Besides, in the year that I'd been an iPhoner, my life had slowly but surely realigned itself around being in touch and on top of things, so even if I hadn't decided on development as a future career path I was certainly not going back to the “old way”.
Luckily, at the Rockaway Mall Apple store, they gave me the AT&T subsidy, so that my 3G didn't cost me a million bucks. Only half a million. The 3G, of course, has GPS, which I didn't think was really going to be that big a deal. I was already a good navigator and always had a map in my pocket. I was wrong.
GPS went hand in hand with a cool app that I'd gotten just after that called iMapMyRun, which tracks your runs, your training progress, and just happens to run on that little doo-hicky that you already had in your hand since you like to listen to tunes while you jog, which, by the way, neither did you jog nor did you listen to tunes a year prior to that. Goodness. So you could definitely say that loosing my original phone turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
For me, it began in December of 2007. Anyone who reads this blog or has stumbled across it (as a surprising number have, unless there's a bot out there relentlessly searching for my post on the Best App Ever) knows that I'm a fan. I started off as a casual appreciator of the iPhone, and have since proceeded to jettison a lifetime of loyal MS-DOS/Windows computing in favor of being a blogging, Mac toting dork. I'm not ashamed. My personal productivity has skyrocketed over the last 18 months, due almost exclusively to the tectonic shift in mindset brought about by my consumer relationship with the House of Jobs. And now, for your enjoyment (I hope), I present the emotional cycle of iPhone ownership.
It started off for me simply enough. I'd been a Cingular customer-cum AT&T customer since the dawn of cell phone use (for me). I'd been through a few phones over the years, most notably the old bricky Nokia that worked great and only did that one thing. I was perfectly happy for a number of years, but eventually I was seduced. I wanted something with a bit more style, more pizazz. I'd been reading the Motorola Razr PR for a while, and thought that perhaps it'd make me happier, what with it's flippy coolness and it's camera. It even held the promise of being a music player, though a cursory glance could've shown a lack of a headphone jack or any real internal storage. I didn't care!! I was leaving the droll stability of the good thing I'd had with Nokia.
You can tell where this is headed. The camera sucked. The phone dropped calls all the time. The flip thing bothered me as much as I always knew it would. It wouldn't even let you set your own ringtones from your own music that you already freaking owned. It was extremely uncomfortable against your ear. It would connect to the crap ringtone store spontaneously and download the new NeYo tune for me. Repeatedly. Finally after less than 6 months, the thing just died altogether. Actually, I snapped it in half one night, so I guess you could say I terminated it, with extreme prejudice. This was about two weeks before Noah was due, so obviously I needed a new phone pronto.
I'd already seen Jimmy hanging out with it. He sent me an email with the signature at the bottom reading Sent from my iPhone. What a dork. I was intrigued...
It was a rainy December day. I had a notion that since I'd just re-upped my Cingular contract months before, the new contract discount wouldn't be applying to me on this day. The suspicion was confirmed by the (very cool and helpful) dude at the store. A new Razr would cost me $379.
Or I could just get an iPhone for $20 more.
The first week was a revelation. The mere act of checking my email and being done with it in less time than it took my POSVRPC (Piece of $h!t, Vista-running PC) to even reach the first splash screen on booting up was like a dream come true. I immediately regretted my purchase of the POSVRPC only two weeks earlier, as the iPhone could easily get me through the relatively gig-light winter. I wrote a blog on the iPhone within days on MySpace – old-school – praising Apple as the “Barry Bonds of product design – every swing, out of the park”. This was before the steroid allegations really came to light, but the comparison is probably still apropos.
I'd never bought an iPod, so having music to listen to was another big one. I'm sorry if I've written about all this before, but the real winner was when Noah was born and I had pictures emailed to the family within minutes.
The contacts and the calendar? I'd actually bought a Palm Pilot in college, deep in my freelance gigger days, but couldn't make myself carry it around all the time, which seriously negated it's effectiveness. In short, I started to see that if I couldn't get my life together with an iPhone, I was hopeless.
It feels like ages since my last post, even though I've tried to keep it up with some links to some good dorkery. Today is spent in the bus, driving the 735 miles from Denver to Columbia, MO. We left at 9 this morning and have made a small dent in Kansas, but we'll most likely be rolling in around midnight or so tonight. So here goes...
Yesterday was spent at the Mile High Music Festival in Denver, one of our hometowns. It was kind of a strange lineup – us, Ani, Ben Harper, Tool, Panic, Black Keys, India Arie. Sort of like a festival we do all the time, but not exactly. I can't explain it without sounding like I'm getting down on the festival, but it was sorta like Rothbury without all the vibe. Now, Rothbury, there's a festival. My friend Laura has a great blog about her involvement with the copious vibe-ification that took place. Check it out here. It's not kosher for me to be proclaiming any festival the “best”, but if it were...
Festival season aside, I've pretty much just been at work on Railroad Earth's next website. After months of research, I've pretty well settled on WordPress as the platform and have been building for the last few weeks, talking to numerous developers and designers that can help with the look – the backend and build-out has pretty much become my baby. I'm very excited about it. I'd tell you where it's stashed, but not only do I want it to be a surprise to as many people as possible, the metrics tell me that perhaps a few of you have already found it.
Pardon my lack of anything interesting to say, but my creative fire seems to go in cycles. I've had to venture into the woods for more firewood lately, and will hopefully have more to say one of these days.
I don't know why it took me so long to bop on over to the app store and search Wordpress, but of course there's an iPhone app! I'll use it now to distract myself while Sheaffer drives us to the airport.
We're headed to the Mile High music festival in Denver tonight. We're playing tomorrow afternoon at the exact same time as Ani DiFranco, which is a real bummer because she was the best set of music I saw all weekend at Rothbury. I'd never seen her play before, and all I can say is Holy Crap. She played the Sherwood stage, which faces that forest you might have heard about. She played her song Napolean, which I'd never heard before. Sitting there on the side of the stage with her voice echoing off the forest was the best way to hear a tune like that for the first time. I'm kind of in love with her now. Anyway...