Two Slashes

Nope, I didn’t get crickets for Christmas. That’s probably what anyone who actually bothered to visit my blog in the past few months has thought they were hearing, though.

It’s not for lack of trying to fix that, either.  There are quite a few posts that never made it past the draft stage (I’m a picky writer and even more obnoxious when it comes to actually sharing things, but you probably already knew that).

However, despite the dry spell of posts, I’m happy to announce that my daily traffic actually went up.  That’s right, up.  Apparently I’m still something of an important Google search result when it comes to disabling the “taskbar” on Facebook (is there really a better name for it) or people who want to commit suicide (as a result of this April Fool’s post) or even “preteen porn” (I can smell even more unwanted traffic now for mentioning it, but the picture of my watch from this post seems to be particularly popular as of late).

(Oh, and FireStats reports that there are approximately fifty people still requesting new items from my RSS feed once in a while regularly.  Hello to all of you.)

As usual, I’m not going to make any empty promises, or, considering the date, “resolve” to become a better, more regular blogger.  Whatever happens will happen, and it’s up to my schedule and observations to enable me to come up with something I feel passionate enough to post about.  I’m going to do my best to become active once again, but I’m not going to force my hand.  This site isn’t going anywhere, even if I don’t update it for three months at a time.  (The domain itself is a gold mine, right?)  Maybe the random timing is what made it fun for everyone in the first place…

Even so, I’ve regurgitated a few post ideas into Evernote and I’m starting to piece them back into my usual long-winded explorations of whatever catches my interest.  Like the rest of my draft library, they may never see the light of day…but you can stick around and see if they do.  (And in the meantime, I should look into archiving them somewhere.)

Welcome to 2010.  Have a leftover candy cane (they’re still good), sit back, and let’s hope this new year brings plenty of annoyances to write about.

I could be lame and start off yet another post with gripes about how I don’t update this blog enough myself.  (Oh, wait, I just did.)  Suffice it to say that I’ve been busy with school, a bit of work, and some TV shows I’ve become interested in (which is a bit of a surprise, actually).  I recently discovered Fox’s new(ish) series Lie to Me, and I’ve been busy catching up on the previous season over the course of the past few days.

Alright, so maybe my post isn’t really about what I’ve watched recently, but more so how I’ve gone about it.  Actually, I probably don’t even need to mention that, but let’s just say that Hulu hasn’t been all that helpful.  And, if the news that’s just started spreading is true, it probably won’t be helpful to me for much longer, even to catch up on shows I already watch.

According to a few different news outlets, Hulu announced today that they would be transforming into a paid service sometime after the new year in an attempt to build the “Great Paywall of Television.”  While the timing bit is great news for those of us who want to make sure we see the Christmas specials of our favorite shows, it most certainly isn’t a good way to ring in the new year.  And the choice, given broadcast television’s traditional format of ad-supported free-to-watch broadcasts, is quite interesting.  Hulu claims that they’ll be leaving some content available for people who don’t want to break out their wallets, but I find it hard to believe that the new paid system will pull viewers in with the same level of effectiveness.  (But hey, what do I know?  I’m the guy who said Google Wave sucked only to end up with a few well-formulated comments about why it doesn’t.)

I’m a little confused, really, as it’s exactly this sort of behavior that causes people to download their music, movies, television shows, and software from questionable places.

If Hulu is going to go down this route, though, they’ll need to satisfy this list of demands (add any additional suggestions in the comments):

• For any show Hulu carries, the entire catalog must be available at all times.  If I’m able and willing to pay for the service, I had better be able to watch whatever I please.  If I want to make some popcorn and watch “Three Stories,” I’d better not have to wait until Fox decides to let Hulu run through the first season again.Consider it another way:  for the price of a few months, I can get a portable hard drive.  On this portable hard drive, I can store all the TV shows and movies I want and watch them anywhere I happen to have access to a computer.  (Given that my laptops have been following me around almost constantly as of late, this isn’t even a problem anymore.)  And I won’t have to wait for the show to buffer or sit through ads to watch it, either.
• Again, because I’m paying the bandwidth bills in the first place, I’d better be able to use the video in more than just my browser or the resource hog Hulu calls a desktop client.  I’d like to be able to put a few episodes of 24 on my ZEN, if you don’t mind.Nobody said that the downloaded episodes had to come without strings attached (watermark them, for all I care), but, as I pointed out already, any fool can grab a video from the newsgroups and load it onto their iPod.
• I really don’t care if it’s against my cell phone carrier’s data policy or not, but it’s not up to Hulu to decide that my phone (and anything attached to it) are not suitable mediums for watching shows.  If AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or any other carrier has a problem with it, they can deal with it in their own method.  It’s not up to you to decide, and my first reaction to you trying to tell me what I can and cannot do with what I pay for is to tell you to sod off while I go somewhere else.

The way I see it, Hulu’s turning into a cute little portable polygraph detector, and all the other ways I can watch TV are like the egg.  They both have their downsides, but one appears to be “technologically superior” (bear with my metaphor) without really getting anything new or exciting done at the same time.  They might want to re-think their position before they end up found guilty of screwing up their business plans to the point where they can’t be recovered.

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It doesn’t take a meteorologist to predict the tsunami that a preview of Google’s new Wave platform would cause.  I can’t click one link without seeing three different remarks referencing the hot new app, though I can’t seem to understand why people are so excited about it.

In case you’ve got a bad memory or hearing loss, I’ll quickly give an overview of Wave to save the sanity of my remaining readers before delving into just what about the platform I don’t like.  For the uninitiated, Wave is a platform Google announced this summer that combines document editing, an e-mail-like environment, live collaborative capabilities, and enhancements provided by “robots” (as opposed to the generally used “bot”) into a single unified experience.  Everything is done in real-time, so modifications you’re in the middle of can be observed by anyone else in that particular thread (referred to as a wave).  It’s an open platform, so anybody can write a “robot” or extend the API, but so far I haven’t seen anything remotely productive beyond a Twitter bot or various games.  (Maybe I’m just ignorant.)

Along with Google’s original announcement, they offered developers early access as they tweaked a few things so that when preview time came about (now, in other words), there would be plenty of examples and enough bragging rights to go around.  It was also a great way to acquaint people with an enhanced interest in the product (like myself), and I was one of the lucky people selected to get in on the sandbox.

I never developed anything for Wave, let alone used it for anything productive, but I did spend a few minutes chatting with a few friends who also found themselves with sandbox access and a little too much boredom in their lives.  I also watched as several people immediately decided to turn their sights towards robots geared to spam ads and utter nonsense (including one bugger that kept embedding YouTube videos of Rick Astley’s hit song…yeah, that one).  All the same, with just a handful of friends and a low signal-to-noise ratio, I really didn’t see a point in regularly checking the site.

When Google finally announced their semi-public preview (read:  everybody sends invitations everywhere), I was unsure of whether I even wanted to bother with it.  It’s not to say that I don’t like Google (I have several domains running Google Apps, a few Gmail accounts, a Google Voice account or three, and some extra paid storage to boot), but the nasty taste from the developer’s preview combined with the fact that I didn’t think too many friends would bother with it left me undecided but leaning towards not bothering to move my account into the preview.

It goes without saying that I got bored and ported the account anyway, and I’ve asked myself why I bothered ever since.

The way I see it, Wave is something of a novelty at this point in time and in its current state.  It’s not useful to anybody (at least, anybody I know), and it doesn’t do anything I find worthwhile that I can’t already implement or find support for, either in another Google app (think Docs and Gmail in particular) or elsewhere.  And the fact that it isn’t integrated with Gmail is a disappointment, as I feel that they could have turned Gmail into a legitimate killer app by adding Wave as a Gmail Labs option (which keeps the opt-in approach for people who decide they want to “catch the Wave”).

In fact, I’m wondering why Google didn’t opt for the b@$*@&d-child approach in the first place, because as-is Gmail just isn’t the innovative utility it was when it first launched.  Yahoo! offers more space (namely, as much as you want for free), and there’s really nothing of note at this point that the Google/Gmail experience offers that can’t be found elsewhere.  Being a plugin for a service that a good number of people use, though, offers a much wider userbase and might pull in some people who otherwise might not even be aware of Wave’s existence.  Google’s always touted Gmail as the “revolutionary” e-mail platform, but there’s nothing revolutionary about being second fiddle overall.  (A free Exchange server?  Seriously, this is the best they can offer?)

And, rather than forcing the user to keep two tabs or windows open so they can monitor both their incoming messages and Wave updates, the integration would be a step in the right direction.  (I really think they should look into developing Google Insight, the Google-powered, web-based alternative to Outlook with one-click access to everything.  Outlook…Insight…get it?  Bah!)

And I know I’m not the only person thinking that Wave is really over-hyped.  I’ve talked with several friends who were excited to get their invites, only to have their hopes and dreams wipe out, and the people who start threads with me seem to abandon them after just a few minutes.

Like the beach, Wave is just one more thing I don’t see myself visiting regularly.  It’s not to say that I won’t try to check it (on occasion), but there’s really no compelling reason for me to do so.  If I really had a need for a collaborative environment where the features Google provides are exactly what I’m looking for, maybe I’d feel differently.  But, as of now, I can’t see this taking off until someone finds a better use for it.  I’d sooner pay for an Evernote subscription than have to deal with any more water metaphors.

This really sums it up.

As a very select few of you might know, I’m a (very) casual user of Qik.  For the uninitiated, Qik is a popular (especially now, thanks to the iPhone 3GS) video streaming application similar to Ustream or Justin.tv, the difference being that Qik requires a cell phone instead of a webcam and a computer.

My experience with Qik has been hit-or-miss, but generally it’s been a positive one, which is why I continued to use the service in the first place.  However, the events of the past hour or so have made me reconsider that position, especially now that I have a netbook I could use instead with my Justin.tv account.  Let me additionally point out the fact that the previous version of the Qik client I had on my phone worked perfectly.  It was familiar, it functioned as advertised, and I didn’t have any complaints with the way it worked on my phone.

Anyway, I generally consider it a polite gesture when a service decides to let me know that there’s something on my end I need to do to continue my use of the service.  I think that makes things feel a little more personal when you let the customer know that the latest and greatest is out and that there’s a tangible benefit to upgrading.  Qik, on the other hand, sent me this rather sparse e-mail this evening with the air of making it sound like something was broken.  Alright, stuff breaks, and I can understand that, but the unclear meaning of this e-mail was my first clue that I shouldn’t have bothered.

Given that it’s Labor Day, I’m taking a break from some of my schoolwork for the moment, and updating Qik shouldn’t take more than a few seconds, I decided to oblige the e-mail’s request and update.  That was my mistake.  Oops.

In contrast to my previous experiences with Qik, this “update” seems more like a leap backward than it does a step forward.  If you’ll take a look at the picture I’ve included, there are two things I would like you to notice.  First, if you’ll examine the screen on my phone for a moment, you’ll notice that my Treo Pro appears to be capturing the episode of House I was watching as well as it possibly can…but that it’s doing so with the user interface rotated clockwise.  Unfortunately, something between the client and the website isn’t properly functioning, because, while I should be seeing Hugh Laurie’s face on my 22” LCD, instead I’m seeing severe artifacting and the vague suggestion that it might be the fifth season of Fox’s hit show I’m watching.  I’ve tested this multiple times (on both a cellular 3G connection and Wi-Fi), and I get the same results all the way around each time.  And, while I’m not going to point fingers, I think I know where the problem is because there are plenty of people still broadcasting as you read this.

There’s a huge difference between releasing a test version of your software with the expectation that these bugs are present and that they will be reported and sending e-mails trumpeting end-user updates to your legion of users, updates that should be devoid of functionality quirks like this.  What am I supposed to do with Qik now that I can’t actually use it for the one function it’s designed to perform?  I’m currently slogging back trying to find the CAB for the previous version of the client, the one that actually works, in hopes of moving forward and fixing this mess, but I’m not entirely concerned given that it’s not something I use on a daily basis anyway.

All the same, let this be a lesson to the rest of you, one that you can probably apply regardless of the industry you’re in and regardless of whether you’re technically inclined or not.  If you’re going to ask that your users (or customers, or whatever term you use for the people you deal with in your line of work) should take action in some form or another, make sure that they don’t get screwed for obliging you.  Do your homework, run your test cases, follow through on your research and quality assurance; in other words, make sure that you’re not asking people to make the jump from a Ferrari to a station wagon.

Edit (9/9/2009): Apparently Qik is now aware of the issue and suggests that users experiencing issues like this backpedal to an alternate version of the software that wasn’t designed for the phone.  Great job, guys!

Alright, so the title of this post is a complete and utter lie.  Read even half of the post and it might make sense.

Rather than bore you to death with the usual tirade about the poor quality of a video game or rant about the status of things on the Internet, I wanted to take a few seconds to point out some of the obvious flaws in our health education system, as revealed by HealthBase.  HealthBase, according to TechCrunch, is a medical content aggregator (I call their approach a search engine, mind you) designed to help you drill through the muck and straight to an answer.  Think WebMD, but with answers supplied by the Internet at large.

I decided that, given the nature of some of the answers I received to my queries, as well as the popularity that this particular Yahoo! Answers post (about how babies are formed, you bum) reached with some of my friends at school last year, I should answer that time-old question first.  And, as I might have hinted at with the title, HealthBase thoughtfully suggested that children are caused by secondhand smoke.  Discussing this answer with a friend, we came up with the explanation that this makes sense when you consider a drunk college girl at a smoky bar leaving with a guy she doesn’t know.  Given an image like that, I’m not surprised at all at the confusion.  I’m glad that HealthBase was able to answer that question for me.

Moving along, I decided that it was also imperative that I brush up on my profession-related injuries, so I decided to look up treatments for carpal-tunnel syndrome.  If you ignore the fact that the suggestion is based upon another name for CTS, blackberries are a suggested treatment.  If I do end up suffering from carpal-tunnel at some point in the future, I’ll make sure to stock the fridge up with as many as I can.

HealthBase also does an excellent job of educating you on the cons of insanity, which include brain dysfunction, the killing of blood relatives, and the ever-detailed “so horrific.”  I can’t wait for people who kill their families to start using this information for insanity pleas at their trials.  On the positive side, however, being classified as insane means that you have achieved your goals, which makes me wonder just how bad insanity really is.

Additionally, being a fan of House, I was curious about how HealthBase would hold up as an aid while watching episodes of the show.  Hulu (which is running through the fifth season as of this posting) sounded like a good place to pick a test episode from, and so I ended up watching “The Social Contract” (Hulu link, episode recap) through.  Borrowing from diagnoses made throughout the show, we learn that a “valid” treatment for peripheral nerve damage is manipulation (Wait, is that a House reference itself? ) and that Weil’s disease can be caused by philosophy through appropriate searches performed using the service.  So there is a reason for House’s character development to have taken the path it has, after all…

While this website may just be the ticket to confirming that snorting vinegar cures hiccups when you’re trying to impress friends, I think I’ll leave my medical opinions to a licensed professional, and I suggest that you do the same.  Frankly, I’m a little terrified that one day it might suggest that the best treatment for dandruff is something more terrifying than responsibility, like amputation or open-heart surgery, and seeing as we can’t trust people with simple things like GPS, it’s only a matter of time before we get to hear stories revolving around the use of this site unless its quality is improved.  On the other hand, though, I didn’t know that stupidity went hand-in-hand with the contents of your wallet.

In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned that insanity query.  I’m undoubtedly going to have even more fun watching my incoming search terms now.

It’s been three months since I last reviewed a game for my BGS “series” (I put it in quotes because you can’t really call something a series if you’ve neglected to do it for a quarter of a year).  Oops.

Anyway, I found Snapshot Adventures:  Secret of Bird Island at Big Lots and decided that, with a price tag of just $4, it would be something reasonable to review and then set aside, and that I really wouldn’t be wasting anything in doing so.  When I posted a picture of the game box to Twitter, the responses I got (all two of them) were mixed.

When I finally opened and installed the game, I was expecting something along the lines of a Pokémon Snap game.  I wasn’t disappointed in that respect from a concept standpoint, though the implementation is far from fun.

The game itself is rather wacky in that it only runs at an 800×600 resolution, which caused a few problems for me with the game being weirdly cropped (until I managed to come across a “widescreen” option in the options menu; this is the first time I’ve seen a game get cropped rather than scaled) and blank screens happening from time to time.  Despite the fact that I’m running a PC that can churn through Team Fortress 2 without breaking a sweat, I was also a little concerned that the game startup took much longer despite the game itself being tiny and designed to run on the PCs of yester-decade.

The back-story the game provides is as perplexing as why I thought this would be a good game in the first place.  The game asks you for your name, then quickly tries to lure you in by saying that your grandfather died and that you eventually happen across his old camera and a mysterious journal entry that you (well, the “you” in the game) want to investigate.

She looks thoroughly convinced that I'm a great photographer, doesn't she?

In order to solve the mystery, you have to take pictures for some of your grandfather’s friends that all seem to end up on the covers of regional ornithology journals.  For someone who happened upon the camera only a few minutes ago, that’s quite a feat.

Of course, the game also takes a draw from Ian Fleming’s James Bond series and coughs up random gadgets for you along the way, including “magic” bird seed, a model airplane that seems to cause birds to fly, and (my favorite) the “electronic satellite-based bird identification system” (which simply tells you what bird you’re about to take a picture of, even though the game will tell you what to look for in the corner of the screen).

To go along with the questionable story (which I left halfway through because I couldn’t tolerate it) and the overuse of Comic Sans is the create-a-bird mode, which the game won’t even let you check out until after you’ve played through some of the story.  I was confused as to the presence of create-a-bird mode, especially the fact that you can upload your designs to the Internet (and download others, obviously), as the game seems quite adept at making what you design look more like a winged fish than a bird.

If birdwatching is one of your interests and you would love nothing better than to spend all day “taking pictures” of birds, I suggest you go find yourself a cheap digital camera and actually go out and do it.  This game is a poor substitute for anything, including entertainment, and I highly suggest mass burnings (of the fire kind, not the CD-R kind) of this game.

Now to go find a cure for my boredom…

For everyone else, there are prank calls.

Alright, so maybe I don’t have the cleanest record when it comes to telephony.  I’ve been the silent listener in a few prank calls (though I’ve never placed one myself, and if you’ve ever met me you can probably figure out why), and I’ve done a bit of manual wardialing.  Technically, that doesn’t make me a troublemaker, at least no more than most of the people I’ve met.  And at no point did I overstep past slight annoyance into genuine mischief.

On the other hand, there are always people willing to cross that boundary without any thought at all.  Usually it’s for a laugh, but there will always be times where there seems to be some further motive driving these people, a reason you know they’re going through the trouble to mess with your head.

If you thought that I was giving you just such an example, you won’t be disappointed.

Last Saturday, I got a phone call around 2 A.M. from one of my friends.  Such late phone calls themselves aren’t unusual or even unexpected, but when the first words you hear are inquiring about whether you’re contemplating suicide, you know something is up.

After I reassured my friend that I was not dangling from the ceiling, he proceeded to tell me that someone had called his home only a few minutes before, and that one of his parents had answered.  This unknown caller (who I have no way of identifying) proceeded to tell my friend’s parents that it was me calling them, and hinted that I was in a depressed state and considering suicide, or at least something around those lines.  Naturally, as soon as they hung up, they did what any responsible parent would do:  flipped out.

My friend was out and returned home minutes after the phone call, at which point he immediately called me to verify that the story was, as he believed, false.

Between the two of us, we took what little information we could put together and realized that someone (we don’t know who) was trying to screw with both of us, and that it had to be someone with the resources and enough brains to use fake caller ID information (or use this…*ahem*).  After all, who else would think to spoof their phone number as 212-666-1337?  (For the uninitiated, 212 is an area code in New York, 666 should be instantly recognizable, and 1337 is a “hacker” designation for someone with “elite” or “advanced” (a truly skilled person wouldn’t brag) skills.)

I’m not writing this because I have a guilty conscience for my past actions and thought a story would be a fun way to clear them, or even because the events that transpired over the weekend are weighing on my mind.  This post is, like so many others, a reminder that there are people willing to screw with your thoughts, willing to overstep social boundaries simply because they’re bored one Saturday night.

Sure, there are times where we want to break from the mold, times we want to be just the slightest bit darker than we usually are.  While indulging these desires isn’t a problem, just make sure you do it in a manner that doesn’t hurt other people.  There are constructive ways to channel that energy; I suggest you find one.  Especially if you’re the mystery caller.

I was shocked to sit down at my computer this morning only to find that AT&T had gone above and beyond the call of duty with their self-imposed 4chan ban.  Now, I’m not a fan or visitor of the site in any way, but I am still a little irked that they thought it was necessary to restrict access to (parts of) the site.  I’m not a fan of censorship, especially because anything “blocked” because it “could be used for ill intent” could also be used for good.  (Of course, the good uses of 4chan are up in the air, but I digress…)

However, having just heard about a new VPN service promising unlimited and unfiltered anonymized access to the Internet at the awesome price of free, I figured it might be good to get an account and look into the service before AT&T decided that there were any more sites they wanted to block access to.

ItsHidden may not be the most creative name I’ve heard for a VPN provider, and the website could use some retooling (and perhaps a proofreader), but they do function exactly as promised, and without requiring the installation of any software to get online.

Taking into account a comparison in performance between my raw DSL line, a tethered connection with my cell phone, and the VPN through both, there is a noticeable loss in the amount of available bandwidth.  Of course, this is expected when the traffic is going to the Netherlands and back (I ran all speed tests against the same server in Chicago), but it’s not unbearably slow.  Of course, this could change once the public gets its hands on it and the word spreads a little (not unlike ImageShack’s torrent downloader).

I do have a slight concern with the privacy you “gain” by using this service, and whether it might be worth looking into, though.  ItsHidden seems to meter your VPN usage.  I don’t know if this is the first hint at a freemium model they might be looking to pursue, or whether they simply think it’s a numbers game, but I question the meaning of its existence.  Furthermore, any user of the VPN should be worried about the decrypted traffic on ItsHidden’s end.  It would be trivial for them to sniff any data off the wire before they pass it along, and, even though they claim they don’t collect any information, I can’t help but wonder whether they’re actually doing so.

Realistically, I can’t say I trust a company that doesn’t run spell-check on their own site enough to think they would be a good idea for any mission critical data (and why you would be allowing yourself to tunnel through something you can’t verify the setup of anyway is beyond me), but if you need a VPN to get at anything unimportant or for your file downloading needs, this might be a reasonable solution for you to look into.  (Read:  This might be a good idea if you’re heading to DEFCON but don’t have any other means available to secure yourself.)

Update (7/29): According to a bunch of news outlets, AT&T was acting on behalf of customers they thought were being targeted by a denial-of-service attack.  While the thought of protecting your customers is a nice one, a heads-up might have made things a little happier and calmer for everyone.  Heck, maybe communicating through the proper channels could have picked up some help from moot and the 4chan crew.  So, AT&T, the gesture was nice, but you really can’t go around trying to pull stunts like that without letting people know.  One giant secret is enough.

I don’t know when, exactly, but a thought came to me at some point this weekend, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since.

I find it highly unlikely that anyone has noticed (or, if they have, they haven’t bothered to say anything) that the software on my projects page hasn’t been touched in at least a year, in some cases quite a bit longer than that.

Considering my interests as a computer scientist, I guess I find it kind of funny that I could let such a thing happen.  I must admit that I myself am using some of the current “active” projects less and less.  Since I started using the Windows 7 beta (and now the release candidate), I have little use for SkipTo as I can simply press the Windows key, type a few characters, and away I go with the same application I would have launched with my own tool.  (Admittedly, I could have done this in Vista, too, but I won’t bother beating a dead horse, especially one I refuse to ride.)

Alright, maybe I caused this particular bug. I guarantee that you don't know what the solution was, though.

At heart, my best guess is that this is something of a motivation issue.  After hammering away at code for hours on end at my summer job, and after all of the work I’ve put in over the previous school year, it’s been a little hard as of late for me to come home, sit down, and find the desire to stare at monospaced fonts and locate misplaced semicolons for a few hours in hopes of doing anything productive.

I’ve also noticed that whatever efforts I’ve put into any form of development (outside of work) as of late have been for personal use with no intent of making them public, or helping other people with their own unique problems.  I’ve hacked together a tool to help me rename and reorganize my MP3 library, butchered the Last.fm plugin I use for WordPress into something that displays my application-usage statistics from Wakoopa, and made minor tweaks to various tools to enhance my own productivity.  I’ve modified WordPress themes, helped design a new one from scratch, and experimented lightly with Blogger (for 20SB, of course, as I have no intention of leaving WordPress anytime soon).  This lack of sharing and public utility isn’t something I’m completely proud of, and I hope to rectify it at some point, but (as any regular well knows) I have an odd habit of promising things here and then not delivering, so a promise this is not.

The best way I see to motivate myself at this point is to scrap the “crap” I’ve got sitting in my projects page (honestly, Visual Basic 6 is dying, anyway), and start working on a few fresh projects.  What I need, however, are the ideas for the replacement projects, things people like you might actually have a use for or that might be useful as a proof-of-concept.  I’ve picked up a few decent suggestions over the past few days from a handful of people, but I’d be more interested in working on things that more than one or two people would ever find useful.

If you have a suggestion, leave a comment.  In the meantime, I’ll be staring at that blinking line trying to decide what I’ll be making it run away from.

Caution:  This post includes gratuitous amounts of speculation about web services and the Internet in general.  If you prefer to deal in the world of concretes, I suggest you read yesterday’s newspaper instead.  Or send me a cement mixer.

Almost a year ago, we had Cuil.  Claiming to be an instant success over Google, and even grabbing up some of the behemoth’s staff, Cuil ultimately did exactly what most people expected to happen:  it flopped.  Earlier this year, Wolfram released Alpha and came to the realization that, while people are looking for the facts, their approach isn’t one that applies universally.  And at the beginning of June, Microsoft decided that they wanted to “Bing it on” and found that renaming your search engine might earn them a place above Yahoo!, but it doesn’t really get anywhere near the top, especially when marketed as a “decision engine.”  And now, I think someone’s going to try again.

To be honest, none of the major tech outlets have anything to say about them (yet), and the only reason I know of their plan is through their increasingly-common spidering of this blog.  Bear with me a moment, because I’m sure you’re just as confused as I was.

A quick glance at Apnoti’s home page doesn’t tell you much about their intentions.  In fact, all you really find out is that they seem to have been playing a variation of the product search game for more than a year, and they’ve differentiated themselves by offering the ability to watch prices on Amazon for the things you want.  To the best of my knowledge and examination, there’s no explanation for or mention of any other projects they’re working on available for consumption.

Beneath the shopping lies hopes and dreams of being something more, though.  The page hosted on the subdomain that keeps showing up in my statistics (smart.apnoti.com) is simple enough, bearing only a countdown to August and the suggestion that real-time search is coming.  But what’s left to search in real time?  My guess:  blogs and other sites refreshed with new content at semi-regular rates.  Think about it.  Google Blog Search might exist, but it’s far from showing you what’s happening in real time (unless you enjoy hitting refresh repeatedly, that is), and scraping Twitter only gets you so far, especially when there are already so many variants.

If what I envision is true, imagine being able to type in a recent event, like Michael Jackson’s death, and watch as the blogosphere fills up with reports and commentaries about the event.  Not trivial-length blurbs and “I can’t believe this happened!”-type posts, but posts of a reasonable length and with some backing to them.  It’s a niche that I have yet to see filled, and I think it has the potential to be a great service, provided the sites they index maintain some level of credibility.  (If you need a description, imagine something along the lines of Twitter Search, Facebook’s timeline, or Profilactic as your search results page, sorted with the newest posts first, and the ability to click a link and have any new results that have shown up populate into your present view.

Whether there’s a market for this sort of thing is another question altogether.  There’s no doubt that everyone and everything is moving toward real-time information sharing, so it makes sense to me that this is a logical step along that route.  On the other hand, such a move is a costly risk; one false move, one mistake, and all that hard work becomes a black hole for money.  There’s also the massive resource requirement to consider, as it’s no easy task to index the countless blogs available online and come away with even a decent index of all the content they offer.  Add to that the load required to keep their results fresh and relevant, and the requirement shoots up even further.

Of course, I’ve proven that I have a mediocre track record when it comes to predictions, so I might just be further cementing myself as a crackpot when Apnoti decides to open up the site as some sort of gadget guide.  However, even if I’m far off, I would still like to see this idea.  One day.