Pyroblogg

#1) No excuses

#2) Recap

I heard back from from Kelsey, my recruiter.  She informed me that Microsoft would not be pursuing an offer.  She suggested applying again at a later date to see if it would work better with a different part of the company.  I tried asking for some feedback from the interview so I could apply it to my other ones, but she wasn’t able to give me anything.  Oh well, I’ve got a number of other prospects, here is the overview of my trip.

My plane left at 9am on Thursday, I didn’t have a ride so I was up at 5 to get ready and head out on public transportation to get to the airport.  It was fairly warm and rainy that morning and I figured it would probably be about the same when I landed in Seattle.  The flight wasn’t too bad, a nice 3.5 hr flight that turnes out to only be 1.5 hr because of traveling through time zones.  There wasn’t too much to see throughout the flight because of the cloud cover.  I did occasionally see some impressive clouds.  I slept through about the second half of the flight after I rand out of things to read (I need to remember book next time).  As we approached Seattle we dropped below the cloud cover and I could make out Lake Washington and Mercer Island was we came in for landing.

(continue reading…)

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Jott has finally broken free of the perpetual beta state that a large number of web 2.0 apps find themselves in.  They are sill offering a free service “Jott Basic”, which doesn’t allow any functionality to interface Jott with other on-line productivity applications (what made it useful to me).  To get Jott to play nicely with those apps, you you have to pay $3.95/mo. for the “Jott” service or $12.95/mo. for “Jott Pro”.  Both of those plans offer the ability to connect to the full range of productivity apps, and also enable the user to send voice-to-text emails to other contacts.  Jott Pro also allows messages up to 30 seconds long, while the others are caped at 15 seconds.

I fully understand that the Jott team needs to make a useful business product and that the perpetual beta state is a fantasy.  Unfortunately, for someone who really liked the service but only used it occassionaly I can’t at this time justify paying te $3.95/mo. for the features that made me want to use the service.  Jott Basic, has no appeal to me as I had always viewed Jott as my gateway to other applications.

Three ninety-five really isn’t a steep asking price so perhaps I will miss it enough and come back around to actually become a paying customer, but right now it’s back to writing reminders down on scratch paper….

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It must be that time of year again when Facebook decides to upset the status quo and roll out something new.  They’ve released their redesign so that users can opt in to checking it out before it becomes the new standard.  I’ve been playing around with the new site for a few hours and I have a number of mixed feelings.

Home Page

The only thing that has really changed here is the look.  Not much content has changed over the old layout, the News Feed is still the dominant feature.

Profile

This is where all the change is happening, what was once a single page that held all of your information has now been split into different tabs, dominated by the Wall.  The new Wall contains everything that you post including Notes, Posted Items and Status updates instead of just traditional wall posts.  Your basic, personal, contact, and work information which used to be displayed on the top of your profile have been moved to the “second” tab.  Facebook Photos also get their own tab, and any other applications you had on your profile that weren’t on the left bar have been removed to the Boxes tab.  You can also create whole tabs for specific applications.

The biggest impact is that Facebook has geared the Wall to dominate your Profile, whether you like it or not.  It’s the default page that people see when they go to your profile, and essentially the only thing they see.  Since the Wall now also carries anything that you post it is obviously the most “social” aspect to your profile, and also the most frequently checked thing anyway.  To get at the other information that used to be at the top of your profile you now have to click through to a second page.  And most of your applications that you had situated nicely between the two are moved even farther off into oblivion.

Social

The main goal of the redesign seems to be keeping things focused on being social by expanding and forcing the prevalence of the Wall, where nearly all of the day to day action happens in the first place.  But in the past year or so with the explosion of third party applications many users have centered their social attention on other applications.  Most of these are the ____Wall replacements that offered capabilities that the default doesn’t, or applications like Bumper stickers where people can share iconic images.  Now that users are being forced to have the official Wall as the default view of their profile, their favorite applications are moved off to another tab, where they have to be sought out to be seen.  Most applications were designed to be seen in passing and not have to be sought out be viewers in the first place.  This has upset not only many of the users, but the application developers as well.  On a single page layout it was more of a level playing field for Facebook itself and applications to fight over how users could be social, now Facebook as taken the upper hand and some are sure to cry foul.

Overall

As a Facebook user who didn’t have many 3rd party apps to start with I think the redesign is ok and that most users will come to accept it quick enough.  Of course there will still be a vocal number that will violently oppose it.  As someone who was close to but not directly involved with 3rd party application development it is a little disappointing to see the solid profile unit get broken up and for dominance to be once again given to the Wall.  Application developers now face an entirely different challenge to capture the attention of Facebook users.

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