Are Good Ideas and Big Business Mutually Exclusive Concepts?

I knew when Intuit purchased the up and coming personal finance site Mint, it was only a matter of time before Mint lost its freshness and became another stale online business. What I didn’t know was that the transformation would begin so quickly. Let’s be honest, trying to up-sell a “free credit report” is one more bad decision away from urging folks to yank out their gold teeth and send them to Cash4Gold. Or, even better, to Cats4Gold.

It just sounds desperate, doesn’t it? I mean, if this is what Intuit brings to the table, why did it even bother? Seriously.

As we talked about yesterday, News Corp, perhaps trying to prove that it can do something even dumber than buying MySpace, is thinking about yanking its books out of the Google card catalog. Microsoft, trying to put the world back in order after a rare PR success with the launch of Windows 7, seems to be willing to pay News Corp to do so. Someone up in that cloud of arrogance and wealth has to know this won’t work. Which means that they are really just using consumers as fodder in a jealousy-induced feud with Google. No thanks. I’ll pass.

Elsewhere, the web is littered with the corpses of abandoned projects and services that were acquired by big companies, only to die on the balance sheet. Over and over, ideas are hatched, nurtured until some bigger fish takes the bait, sold. . . and die. Leaving all the users that created all that alleged value out in the cold.

There seem to be a couple of repeating patterns.

One, someone creates a service that is some combination of really cool or really hyped. Lots of traffic results, and some big company with lots of money gets fooled (again) into thinking all those eyeballs can be monetized. The big company buys the cool/hyped service, tries without success to stuff the free-formed service into a dollar-sized hole, and ends up shuttering it or selling it at a huge discount.

Two, companies realize that they can’t beat the competition on the field by creating and promoting a good product, so they conspire to change the rules. This is kindergarten politics, engaged in by the super-rich, at the expense of the rest of us. Yep, it’s the man getting one over on us. Again.

Even so, none of this is good for the purchasing company. Certainly, none of this is good for the consumer, who gets dragged all over the place and then abandoned. The only ones making any money on these deals are the serial service creators and the early investors who invest a little money in order to get a big chunk of the purchase price. Numbers being what they are, a few hits can finance a lot of misses. And, again, consumers get taken for a ride.

At the end of the day, I don’t see how this does anything other than discourage innovation. With everything being based on either ads, which no one likes, or getting bought by Google, which is becoming more and more of a long shot, there is little incentive to try to create the sort of value that people would- hold your ears- pay for. When did paying for value become so out of fashion?

Or is it that many of these services aren’t as value-producing as some would have us believe?

One thing is for sure- if the developers don’t believe in their product enough to charge for it, then why should users believe in it? This is the root of the problem, because lots of people would happily pay for a good, reliable service that isn’t likely to disappear or get sold to a big, clueless mega-company.

Want an example?

I pay for a premium account at Remember the Milk, solely because it integrates so well with Gmail and Google Calendar.

I would gladly pay for Disqus comments, if they could make the “Reactions” feature work reliably (it doesn’t presently).

There are plenty of others.

We just need to figure out how to make good ideas and big business compatible.

Screwing Over Users Is Not a Business Plan

Let’s all say it together: the way to make money on the internet is not to screw over your users.

Once more: if you have to make things worse for users in order to make money, maybe your business plan sucks.

First, I read a little more about this ad.ly thing. How in the wide world of sports can any portion of the legitimate internet embrace, applaud or permit what looks to me like nothing more than organized, high tech spam? Seriously, if I am going to un-follow someone for tossing another idiotic multi-level marketing scheme in my Twitter feed, why in the world would I accept blatant ads from people? Legitimize an in-Tweet ad-based economy within Twitter and you will be overrun by a horde of eyeball prospectors whose sole or substantial objective is to entice eyeballs inside their tent in the name of money. If the philosophy isn’t enough to make you say “hell no,” then spend about one second considering the impossible logistics. Twitter can’t keep the spammers off the line now. Imagine how bad it will get if in-Tweet ads gets blessed by Twitter. You’ll see a ton of automated links to stuff we’ve already seen, purely as a set-up for the ad-hosting, money seeking Tweet. Spam may kill Twitter as things stand now. Why make it easier?

If you still aren’t convinced, then remember that Tweets are short, 140 character posts, most of which are either completely un-newsworthy or link to content elsewhere. If you want to pay people for Tweets, then you better pay them for links. And recommendations. And good karma. Word of mouth is the benefit of a good product, not the product itself. If I tell my friends to watch a particular TV show, I don’t expect to get paid for it. And if I did, the value of my suggestion would be nil.

In sum, this in-Tweet ad business may just be the worst idea ever. Other than this one.

Microsoft has proven that it can’t get its ducks in the same zip code where the internet is concerned. So rather than create something that gets the herd to migrate voluntarily, it is apparently considering trying to buy the herd via some thankfully doomed from the start deal with News Corp, the other big company that doesn’t get the internet. Here’s the thing: people are going to use Google, that’s why it’s a verb. If you take your content out of the Google search results, people won’t see it. Merchants go where the people are, not the other way around.

And if you pay someone else to take their content out of those search results, I, for one, will consciously avoid whatever corral you’re trying to force me into. That’s just not OK. If you want eyeballs, create something people want to see, and make it easy for them to find it. There’s way too much internet content supply to artificially manipulate the demand. So don’t try to gain customers by making things harder. It won’t work.

The things that make money are the ones that are good for users. Not unnecessary obstacles that only serve to leverage off of them.

Mountain Lion Hunting: Who’s the [Kitty] Here?

Let’s start with a few facts. I’m from the rural south. I love to hunt, mostly birds, and I eat what I kill. In fact, I don’t duck hunt much because I don’t like the way ducks taste. I shoot skeet or sporting clays every chance I get. I drive a pickup truck. I have a beard, etc. So even though I’d probably disagree with the typical good ol’ boy on a lot of social and political issues, I’ve been mistaken for a good ol’ boy more than a few times. I am not some animal rights extremist. I have crapped all over PETA here and on Twitter for years for being so absurdly extremist that it has completely lost the power to convince.

Oh, and one last fact: the next to last fistfight I got in was after I called some guy a [synonym for kitty] for going to Africa and shooting lions and elephants and whatnot. It was a long time ago after a few beers and one too many great white hunter story. I proved to be a little tougher adversary than some oblivious lion a hundred or so yards away.

So, while I generally identify with the hunter/camper/outdoorsman culture, I draw a very bright line between those animals that are OK to hunt and those that are not. Dove, ducks and deer are one one side of that line. Lions, elephants and bears are on the other. So it really bummed me out today when I saw some dude on a hunting blog I read proudly retelling how some other dudes killed a mountain lion in central Texas. If I saw a mountain lion that wasn’t about to eat me or my family, I would be really excited. Honored, actually. What I wouldn’t be is inclined to shoot it.

I understand the argument that mountain lions adversely affect the deer population. Well, guess what- so do humans, and I imagine there are a lot more humans out there killing deer than there are mountain lions. I love deer meat and eat it all the time, but I certainly wouldn’t kill a mountain lion just to ensure a few more pounds of deer sausage in my refrigerator. And let’s not overlook the fact that the only reason most of these folks want to keep the deer from being killed by a mountain lion is so they can kill them themselves.

I have heard- and rejected- the argument that mountain lions are dangerous. The fact is that mountain lion attacks are rare. Dogs kill far more people annually than mountain lions do in a century.

And I understand, even if I don’t completely believe, the argument that the mountain lion population is growing, with the decline of pesticides and goat and sheep farming. What I also understand is that in Texas mountain lions are not classified as a game animal, which means anyone can kill as many of them as they can find, any time and without limit. That’s messed up. There are only 30,000 mountain lions in the western United States. There are 30 million deer in the United States, with deer population control becoming a major concern in numerous states. So I’m not buying the argument that there aren’t enough deer to feed a few mountain lions.

So unless there is evidence that this mountain lion was an immediate danger to persons or expensive property and could not be trapped and relocated despite diligent attempts to do so, those dudes should have let that cat go.

If you are interested in learning about mountain lions- as opposed to just killing them, here’s an informative article on their population, age distribution and mortality rates.

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Open Office

open office

Everybody’s talking about the office suite for the next decade. Microsoft Office 2010 is in beta. Google is waging a vaporware offensive, trying to convince people that it is about to engage in some much needed alchemy with Google Docs. Meanwhile, Open Office just plugs along. Being just as free as Google Docs, and, at least, just about as good as the ever-bloating Microsoft Office suite.

I’m all about free, and I live in the cloud. There are free and cloudy apps for just about everything. But the choices for word processing applications are slim, which is odd given that today’s computers are the offspring of yesterday’s typewriters. But fear not. Here’s the bottom line on office suites, with an emphasis on word processors.

Google Docs

I have moved my email and calendaring activity to Google Apps, via the standard (e.g., free) version. With Better Gmail 2, Gmail is a great, free and accessible email application. Google Calendar is far superior to the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. On the other hand, Google Docs, Google’s word processing app, is- to be kind- not ready for prime time. Sure, it’s fine for a light home user who wants to write a letter every now and then. But to try to use it for business purposes is to submit yourself to a digital hell. Among the multitude of problems: no tracked changes feature, which is an absolute must for business users; and formatting chaos when you upload a formatted Word document. In sum, it’s a non-starter. Google wants us to believe that this will all change. In the meantime, though, we have work to do.

Microsoft Office

Microsoft has a deep and valuable franchise in the corporate world. One that became a virtual, if not actual, monopoly when WordPerfect committed suicide at the hands of Novell and Corel. IT managers know Word. More importantly, secretaries and administrative personnel know Word. To monkey around with the status quo on the corporate desktop is to move a whole lot of cheese. In sum, inefficiency and rebellion would result.

Nevertheless, Microsoft is trying to open the door for a competitor. No one- and I mean no one- in a corporate office wants the menu structure he or she has used for years to be replaced by some confusing ribbon or whatnot. As Microsoft continues to force old dogs to learn new tricks, the remote odds of meaningful corporate word processing competition get less remote. The name of the game in 2010 will be simple and easy. Not bloated and complicated.

All of which favors the other alternatives.

In fact, for purely home users, I can’t think of a single reason to pay for Microsoft Office. Fortunately for Microsoft, however, most home users require the ability to open, read and edit work-related documents from time to time. Documents that were almost certainly created in Microsoft Word. I certainly do, and that has complicated my effort to go completely free and cloudy for word processing.

Open Office

So I find myself uninterested in paying for Microsoft Office and unwilling to put myself through the agony of using Google Docs as my exclusive word processing app. Until recently, Open Office was sort of like Bigfoot. I’d heard of it. Maybe I’d seen a purported picture or two, but I was still a little scared of it. Recently, however, my dilemma caused me to read up a little more on it. Then I took a deep breath, downloaded it, and gave it a spin.

And was pretty impressed.

It feels like a slightly stripped down version of Microsoft Word. It opens Word documents without destroying them. There is a way to show and review document revisions. Shoot, it saves documents in Word format. There’s even a plug-in that lets me open from and save to Google Docs.

All the votes aren’t in yet, but I’m about ready to call Open Office a winner.

The Face(book) is Familiar

I’ve spent lots of blog space and podcast time pooping all over Facebook. Saying how it is for kids, that it’s AOL 2.0, that it’s the internet kiddie pool. I was right, and I was wrong. Mostly wrong.

Facebook is all of those things, of course, but perhaps in an evolutionary- and not a pejorative- way. More than anything else, Facebook is like Brawndo: it’s got what people crave. Over time I have mostly capitulated to Facebook, simply because it’s the only path to a lot of people I want to interact with. I create almost all of my content out here on the big, scary web, but I push a lot of it into Facebook. And I visit Facebook several times a week to see what all the non-nerds are talking about. Granted, there’s a lot of talking over each other, but there’s a little interaction. Which is more than you can say for Twitter.

With all that, I started to wonder just what makes Facebook so popular.

It’s partly the ready-made platform to connect with other people. It’s partly momentum. It’s partly that MySpace sucks so completely.

But mostly I think it’s the names. You know, those things beside the users’ photographs. One thing Facebook got totally right is the absence of anonymity. Anonymity is like cars- it brings out the inner asshole in people. It has killed before, and given the chance would do so again.

Anonymity, with a helping hand from Google, killed newsgroups. Those of us who have been on the internet long enough to remember when news readers were for reading Usenet posts, as opposed to RSS feeds, miss the days of the old-school newsgroup. It was all kinds of good, until anonymous assholes and spammers killed it. I haven’t read a Usenet newsgroup in years, and don’t even have a news(group) reader on my computer.

Then came the message boards. For a decade or so, message boards proudly carried the banner of online interactivity. The combination of better technology and community moderation generally kept the spam under control. But a large population of anonymous users first diluted the perceived content value of message board sites to the point that advertisers stopped buying ads, and ultimately destroyed the entire message board culture, via bad information, bad behavior and general mayhem. All of which could be doled out at will without fear of reprisal because of anonymity. Sissies grow giant stones behind the safety of a windshield or a message board handle. It’s gotten so bad that I don’t even frequent the message board sites I founded. Rather, I create Google alerts or FriendFeed pages for topics I’m interested in. It’s not as fun as the old message board days, but it’s better than watching a revolving group of anonymous jerks litter my screen with nonsense.

Meanwhile, over at Facebook, people are sharing information under their real names. Sure, you can create a fake identity and set up a Facebook account, but users who are prudent with their Friends lists can easily avoid most screen clutter. You generally know who you are talking to. With a name comes accountability, and there is a direct correlation between accountability and behavior. All of which creates a better experience for the users. Which draws more users and, in turn, more advertisers. Ultimately you have digital high tide that raises all ships.

Which is why I ended up with the rest of the world on Facebook. Even if I still find it vaguely embarrassing.

Delaney’s Swim Meet

Delaney has been a competitive swimmer for most of her 8 years. Currently, she swims for Rice Aquatics. She had a swim meet today at the University of Houston. She swam the individual medley, the freestyle and the backstroke, and did great.

Here are her IM and freestyle swims.

She ran out of gas a little at the end of the IM, but she still had a great time. She swam a beautiful freestyle.

Compute Easily and Cheaply With Cloudy, Free Software Alternatives

My computer was getting a little long in the tooth, so when Windows 7 was released, I decided to buy a new one. I also decided, following my earlier move to Google Apps, to create my application toolbox with as many cloud applications and free software alternatives as reasonably possible. Here’s what I did, for those who want to simplify their computer toolbox and put some extra money in their pockets.

The Computer

I bought an HP Pavilion Elite e9280t. I’ve had good luck with HP computers, both laptops and desktops, so I decided to stay with what was working. Plus, it seems to me that you get more bang for your buck from HP than other PC makers. I went with the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional, because it will give the computer a longer lifespan and I’ve only rarely had problems getting my software and hardware to work under the 64-bit versions. I also bought 9GB of RAM, because I do a fair amount of video editing and music mixing and the extra memory will make the computer faster at that sort of resource intensive activity.

When the computer arrived, the first thing I did was to remove the bloatware. HP has gotten a lot better about bloatware, but there is still some clean up required. I would rather bathe in computer viruses than use anything Symantec/Norton related, so I immediately uninstalled Norton Internet Security and Norton Online Backup. Rather, I’ll use the free Microsoft Security Essentials and my HP MediaSmart server. I was a beta tester for Microsoft Security Essentials, and I think it works very well. Plus, it’s free. I deleted the screen litter for eBay (which I use, but I don’t need a shortcut on my desktop), and the various online services. Finally, I deleted all those HP games. It’s absurd that HP makes you manually check every one separately during the uninstall process. I interpret that to mean that some of these game developers are paying HP to pre-install this junk. Regardless, they’re gone.

My Data

Next, I copied over the data I need from my old computer, via an HP Personal Media Drive. Photos, MP3s, videos, in process song mixes, and some, but not all, of decades worth of Word files I have accumulated. My new documents are created via Google Docs, but I have some old documents I want to save, just in case. I like the Libraries feature in Windows 7, which basically lets you use multiple folders for your music, photos, etc.

I saved my old Outlook emails, now uploaded to Gmail, as PST files, and copied them to my new computer’s “Old Files” Library, just in case.

Software and Applications

Now for the fun part. Here’s what I elected to use in lieu of software I used to pay for.

My first download, of course, was Firefox. A quick install of Xmarks allowed me to import my bookmarks. I’m trying to go relatively light on add-ons. So far I have installed the mandatory Adblock Plus, Better Gmail 2, PhotoBucket Uploader, Read it Later and Xmarks. All of the foregoing are free.

No more Microsoft Office. I now use Google Apps (the “standard” or free version) for my email, calendar and documents. The Gmail interface, with (but not without) Better Gmail 2 is an excellent email application. Google Calendar is far superior to the Outlook calendar. And of course, I can now access all of my data from almost anywhere. And, again, for free.

For my task list, I use Remember the Milk. It works flawlessly within Gmail and Google calendar via a gadget. I have a premium account, but there is a free version.

Next, I installed my beloved Windows Live Writer, for blog posts. Yep, free.

In lieu of the bloated Nero, I installed CDBurnerXP. It works great, and it costs nada.

For photo management, I couldn’t decide between Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery. So installed both. Both are free.

Photo editing may be a challenge. I use Picnik for basic (read easy) photo editing. I may try Gimp as a Photoshop replacement, but I am a long-time Photoshop user, and I have a license already. So at the end of the day the one expensive software program that finds its way only my computer may be Photoshop. We’ll see. If anyone has a recommendation, please send it along via a Comment.

For video editing, I installed Windows Live Movie Maker. I’m a long-time Ulead VideoStudio fan. Corel bought it, though, so it’s only a matter of time until it dies a painful, bloated death. Since I have a license for the current version (VSX2), I may install it on my new computer. I doubt, however, that I’ll buy any upgrades. Hopefully, Windows Live Movie Maker or some other free or open source program will work for the long haul. If anyone has a recommend
at
ion, please send it along via a Comment.

Of course, I installed Evernote. I am a huge Evernote fan, but the developers’ failure to add folders- or to even respond to my repeated inquiries about the possibility- are dampening my devotion. Either they need to listen to my good advice or I need to move on. Let me take a moment to digress. I have written about issues with HP and Microsoft products in blog posts, and been contacted within hours with offers of help or information. I have written to Evernote at least twice and asked about the plans, or lack thereof, for folders, and have never received a reply. That is simply bad customer management. For now, there are no better alternatives, but at some point there may be. We’ll see, but for now, Evernote remains one of my most used apps.

For FTP, I use FileZilla, which is free and superior to every paid app I have ever tried.

For radio, I use Pandora and Slacker Radio.

Web site development and HTML editing proved to be a problem. I installed the free and wonderful Notepad++, which is great for text editing. I read good things about WYSIWYG editor KompoZer, but I hated the way it reformatted the text in my HTML files when I opened them. I uninstalled it immediately. I may not need a WYSIWYG editor, but if I do, I don’t know of a free and powerful option.

The Cloud

For backups and large data storage and redundancy, I use my HP MediaSmart server. While I was immensely frustrated with my old server, the newer models have more memory and a much better GUI. I love the media collector feature, that automatically grabs media files from the various network computers, backs them up and allows network access to them. While I have not done it, you can easily configure your server to allow remote access over the internet. There’s even an iPhone app.

For general cloud cover, I use Dropbox for most of my needs. I also have a Box.Net and a DivShare account that I use from time to time. If today’s Google news is any indication, all of our cloud needs may eventually float over to Google. I want GDrive and I want it bad.

For online photos, I use Flickr for my family photos, etc., PhotoBucket for other image files I want to save, and Picasa for reference-related graphics (e.g., maps, reference cards, etc.). For online videos, I use YouTube, Qik and Vimeo. All are free, though I pay for a Vimeo premium account so I can upload larger, HD videos.

And of course, I share certain things with friends via Facebook and Twitter. Both free.

The Result

I have a lean, mean new computer with mostly free, web accessible, organized applications. It feels really good- and the change in my pocket jingles when I surf.

Sunday Mashup: Camping, Sporting Clays and Shotgun Shells

This weekend we spent a lot of time outside, enjoying the beautiful weather.

Saturday morning Delaney and I drove north for a little over an hour to attend an Indian Princess campout. Delaney had a blast hanging out with her friends, and I had fun meeting some of the other daddies.

This morning we had breakfast and a closing ceremony, and headed back home.

We got home around 10:30 a.m., so I decided to try to beat the coming rain and shoot some sporting clays.

It was windy and it felt like it was going to start raining any moment- though it didn’t. Still, I felt a little rushed, and didn’t have my best day. I shot 61 of 72, for an 84% mark. That’s a decent percentage, but it was on the easier South Course.

Station 10 killed me, and it’s not particularly hard.

If you’re wondering (and I guess even if you’re not), the iPhone program I use to score sporting clays is ClayTracker (iTunes link). It’s a $20 program, which blew my mind at first, until I thought about it. There’s probably a pretty small market for a sporting clays scoring app, so if we want developers to write for a niche market, we have to be willing to pay a little more. On the whole I am pleased with ClayTracker. It is well designed and graphically pleasing. If the developers continue to add features, it will remain one of my favorite apps.

Among the features I’d like to see added are:

1. Skeet scoring, which the developers say is coming.

2. A “Notes” feature where you can quickly add notes about the various stations. This would be extremely helpful when you’re scouting a new course.

3. More stats, easily accessible. For example, when I arrive at a station I shoot a lot, I’d like to be able to easily access my recent or lifetime stats for that station. Historical graphs would also be helpful. That would let me see my rabbit percentage approaching 30%. OK, 25%.

4. The ability to snap a photo of a station for future reference.

5. An online service, where your stats would be automatically uploaded and available for review or sharing. You could even create and link tutorials on YouTube or some other video repository. It would be cool to be able to access a rabbit tutorial while whiffing at a rabbit station (though miraculously I hit 2 out of 3 rabbit shots today, including the first half of a double).

Afterwards, Delaney and I went to Academy Sports to buy some gun-cleaning patches and a little Hoppe’s No. 9. While there, I made an important discovery. As all shooters know, finding cheap shotgun shells is a never-ending quest. Generally, I alternate between Carter Country and Academy, based on who has what on sale. Recently, I have been frustrated at the local Academy to find that the shells I want are not on sale, when other similar shells are. For example, the last two times I have been there I found a big stack of 20 gauge cases on sale, intermingled among the identical cases of 12 gauge shells which were not on sale. Today, after telling Delaney we weren’t going to buy any shells because they were too expensive, we wandered over to the camping aisle. There, far away from the hunting and shooting gear, were cases of Remington 12 gauge shells for $59. That’s not the best price you can find, but it’s close enough. So if you’re going to Academy in search of shells, look around. They may have cheap shells in an unusual location. And based on my experience, they may not tell you they’re over there.

So I stocked up on shotgun shells, came home and cleaned my guns, and put them away in the (locked) gun cabinet.

With any luck, Cassidy and I can prevail upon the rest of the family to finish off a great weekend with a sushi dinner.

Sporting Clays, Volume 3

After shooting Volume 1 and Volume 2 from a behind the shooter, stationary camera, I shot this round with a gun mounted camera. It works OK with high, arching shots where there is a lot of blue sky to provide contrast. It works less well on low, fast shots, where bushes or trees are in the background. I also learned on editing that I need to start shooting only after I have loaded and am ready to shoot. This video is pretty sloppy, but it taught me what I need to know for future videos.

It would also be really, really helpful to have a remote control for my JVC GC-FM1A HD camcorder. That would allow me to easily stop and start between shots while reloading.

I shot OK today, particularly considering that the pull delay wasn’t working on several of the stations and I was shooting alone. But I still gave away too many easy points. I should be hitting at least 85% on the south course.

It’s been slow going on the videos, but I’m getting there.