Beachballin’

Please don’t leave a message after the tone

So after reading a rant from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame, I’m glad to know I’m not alone. In fact, not only does he express my opinions on the matter, but he quotes someone else who does (and I suspect I know who the mystery quotee is as well).

Unlike Mystery VC and Michael, however, I don’t get nearly as much communication. Let’s face it, I’m not that busy and not that interesting, and yet I still get enough junk to frustrate me.

My current voicemail greeting goes like this:

Hi, you’ve reached Dan. I can’t answer the phone right now, so leave me a message and I’ll call you back.

This is, at best, disingenuous, and at worst, an outright lie. It says what voicemail greetings are supposed to say, without any pretence of honesty or practicality. The fact of the matter is, I hate phones. I hate talking on phones, I hate answering phones, I hate remembering phone numbers or writing them down, I hate punching them into the keypad (not least of all because it generally takes me five to seven tries to get the number right, more if it’s international). I hate that it’s analog, but I hate even more that it’s a digital system pretending to be an analog system.

Imagine if e-mail only came once a day, usually some time in the morning, and that it took two to ten days to arrive. Imagine that people had to pay extra to send attachments, and that if you weren’t around when the postman came, you’d have to go to your ISP’s office to download them. Imagine if you typed ‘.com’ as ‘.cmo’ and you didn’t realize until it was returned to you after spending three weeks in a sorting station in Azerbaijan. Imagine if whenever someone sent you something from outside the country, UPS charged you $40 in taxes and handling, and $50 in customs brokerage, even though they didn’t actually DO anything, the bastards.

My point is, what we actually have is a completely telephone digital system kneecapped by pretending to be a completely analog system that sucked.

Michael makes the (accurate) point that text is faster to read than voice is to listen to, and even if you’re a lunatic motormouth, it’s far, far more effective because if you’re too slow I get bored and delete your message halfway through, but if you’re too fast I miss half your message anyway and delete it regardless.

If you call me and I recognize the number, if and you’re not a friend of mine or my mother (or your mother, har har) then I’ll ignore you, and you’ll leave me a voicemail which I’ll also ignore. If I don’t recognize the number, I’ll answer out of curiosity, but I’ll probably be phenomenally uninterested in whatever you’re saying (assuming I can even hear you, i.e. I’m not on the bus, on the street, at Starbucks, or any other place I spend 99% of my time) and tune you out. Remember, I have an iPhone, which means I can turn your volume down and play Dots or Aurora Feint while pretending to listen to whatever you have to say.

If you send me an e-mail, on the other hand, I’ll generally read it immediately and reply right away, unless it’s staggeringly boring or I need to attach a file to it, in which case I’ll do it when I get to my apartment/office. Oftentimes, I’ll send a quick message with whatever information I have at the moment, then follow it up with more detail later. Remember, I have an iPhone, so I can do this from the bus, Starbucks, the Skytrain, the office, meetings, Stanley Park, taxis, the airport, or anywhere else where electromagnetic radiation is plentiful.

A special kind of hell is reserved for any voicemail that references any e-mails you’ve sent or intend to send, because hey, here’s a thought, send me the e-mail. It’s not going to take weeks, I won’t have to be home to get it, and Homeland Security won’t get on my case if you talk about how your party was ‘the bomb’.

I suppose in the end, I have no real grounds for complaint. I am, after all, asking people to leave a message, and asserting I will get back to them. Perhaps my message should read something like this:

Hi, you’ve reached Dan’s phone. Please feel free to send me an SMS or e-mail. You may also contact me on Twitter, or Facebook if you’re desperate. You may even google my name for a dozen other methods of contacting me. Whatever you choose though, please don’t leave a message after the tone.

What Twitter is to me

The other day I had a long conversation on IRC about Twitter with a few people who claimed Twitter was silly, useless, or ego-stroking. My argument, as it tends to be, is that Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of people, and the beauty of it is that it is up to you, as the user, to decide what Twitter will be to you. There are a lot of things I use Twitter for, some similar, some different, and maybe some of these will interest you.

News

The first thing, and the simplest, is a sort of ‘live feed’ of various sorts. I follow some organizations like the Associated Press, CBC News, TechCrunch, Techvibes, The Vancouver Sun, and so on. These are generally news organizations or interesting blogs that tweet when there are updates.

Why not just subscribe to RSS feeds? Well, one of the issues I’ve had in the past with RSS feeds is that if I don’t check them for a while, they pile up. Eventually (sometimes even just over a weekend) they’ll build up to unmanageable numbers, at which point I just start ignoring them. Let’s face it, I don’t have the inclination to catch up on 200 news stories.

I’ve also seen some RSS/Atom feeds that are inherently broken. Penny Arcade’s feed, for example, would tend to suddenly show 10-15 new posts (sometimes far, far more), when in reality all that was happening was old stories were getting re-published. I’d get to work and see 30 updates from Penny Arcade, only to find out that there were, in fact, no updates at all. With Twitter, I either see an update as it happens, or I don’t. In the mornings, I can scroll back through the morning’s updates, but I’m not overwhelmed trying to sort through 40 new articles from every site. If I want to do that, I may as well go to the site itself.

Local Legends

I have subscribed to a lot of interesting local people on Twitter. Among the more well-known:

• Rick Yaeger, founder of MacMerc.com and friend of Greg Grunberg (who plays Matt Parkman from Heroes);
• The iPhoneinCanada blog (actually, it’s the man behind the blog);
• Local reporter Gillian Shaw, ‘digital life writer’ for The Vancouver Sun;
• Local 95 Crave DJ, 24 Hours tech columnist, and all-around interesting guy Buzz Bishop;
• Tech journalist, broadcaster, author, and former dot-com startup CEO Tod Maffin (who I originally met in line for the iPhone on launch day);
• Writer, social media evangelist, and actress Monica Hamburg;
• Online luxury condo realtor Ian Watt, through whom I see all the condos I wish I could afford;
• Last, but not least, local blogger, writer, entrepreneur, and social media empress Rebecca Bollwitt.

I follow these people, not because they are influential or ‘famous’, but because they are involved. Especially being relatively new to Vancouver, I don’t really know much about what’s going on in a general sense. Following these people gives me insights into local news and events. I learn about events, charities, parties, sales, and so on from these people, because they tend to be the first on the scene, as it were. By following people who are involved in local events, I become aware of local events and of how I can contribute to and take part in my community.

Friends

It goes largely without saying that I follow my friends and coworkers on Twitter. It’s a quick and easy way of seeing what people are up to in brief. There’ve been a few occasions where I’ve met people for lunch or coffee because I happened to see they were in the neighbourhood. In another example, a neighbour asked me to check his mail while on vacation - via Twitter. In this case, Twitter is just one of many ways to stay connected with my friends.

Locals

I’ve also found a lot of people through Twitter Search who are in my local area. I like to follow other random (or not-so-random) people from my area so as to stay up-to-date with what’s going on. This is the sort of thing that’s led me to visit (and document) the Gastown Snowball Fight, which was largely organized via Twitter by people who work here in Gastown.

A Good Laugh

A lot of people are both Twitter users and intensely funny. My favourite recent example is The Bloggess, author of one of the most hilarious blogs I’ve ever read in my life. Others:

• Fake Sarah Palin, who provided the funniest running commentary for the 2008 US presidential election (especially during Sarah Palin’s debate with Joe Biden);
• Greg Grunberg, who is hilarious both on Twitter and in the commentary he’s done on the Heroes DVDs;
• Wil Shipley, author of Delicious Library, and his Delicious Librarians (whom you can see at the Delicious Library booth at Macworld 2009); it’s especially amusing to follow all three and watch as Wil’s often-risqué comments about Jessie and Terry rapidly inflate their follower count;

Lots of other reasons

There are as many reasons to use Twitter as there are reasons to read a book – just as it’s up to you to find the type of book you like, it’s likewise up to you to find the people or feeds that interest you. You can post whatever randomness comes to mind – what you had for dinner, what’s on your desk, etc. – or you can choose a topic or style that you excel at and focus on that. How you use Twitter is up to you, and while it’s not for everyone (nothing is, except oxygen), you can’t judge a book by its cover.

My advice to everyone is that, as with everything, you should consider it before rejecting it – especially for reasons that. One of the reasons given in the aforementioned IRC conversation was that ‘people on Twitter are liars’, specifically that they lie about who they are, what they’re doing, and so on. When I dug into this assertion a little deeper, I found that the person making the claim knew a few people, and read their tweets, and saw that they were not only lying about themselves, but also seemed to believe them.

My rebuttal? Just because her friends are delusional doesn’t mean they all are. Likewise, just because some people I follow like pumpkin pie doesn’t mean that Twitter is full of pie fanatics. There are a myriad of people on Twitter, each with their own reasons for being there. Don’t be afraid to search for topics that interest you, follow people that sound interesting, and unfollow people that don’t turn out to be.

There’s lots out there for everyone – it’s up to you to find it.

Tags: twitter

Gastown Snowball Fight

What happens when it snows in Vancouver, and the tech sector gets bored? Here’s M2O’s contribution, via Tris Hussey:

Some photos I took from the front lines:

Add some Facebook pics and a Qik video to boot, and you’ve got a Vancouver social media meetup for the ages.

Links via Tris Hussey and Gus (and Twitter).

Tags: gastown, snowball

Possibly the funniest blog post ever

Hilarious take on The Blogess’s Android experience.

Jenny: Wait. This thing doesn’t have a positronic brain. Just a bunch of wires. Also, it’s very hard to take apart.
Jenny: This phone is not waterproof and does not float at all.

If you are lol-inclined, this will lol you.

Yahoo’s incompetence is astounding

The other day I was looking at our webserver logs and noticed something odd - someone was requesting our robots.txt file (the file that tells sites like Google, Yahoo, or any other automated system, what not to index) a lot. And by a lot I don’t mean once a day, which is kind of a lot, and I don’t mean once an hour, which is far too many times for my tastes.

I mean four times a second.

Given that this is a file that is very, very unlikely to change, requesting it four times a second seems like lunacy. It also puts unnecessary load on our servers, as they have to handle these requests which seem to come in as fast as our server will complete them.

I, of course, did The Right Thing and e-mailed Yahoo about it. My message included all the relevant information, timeframes, hostnames, and so on. All the information I had, I sent, thinking that it would help them find the problem. A day later, I got an e-mail back, which I thought was pretty good until I read it. The (automated) e-mail was from Yahoo! Domains (which is the group that the server apparently belongs to), asking what domain I was having a problem with, and could I please explain my problem.

I sent a reply back saying I don’t know, it’s not my domain, it’s your server that’s causing the problem, and I’ve already included all the information there is, so what more do you want? At this point I was surprised, but ok, this stuff happens.

Today, I received another reply back, this time from Yahoo! Search. Search tells me that my site (what site? they don’t say) is in violation of the Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines. This tells me two things:

1. No one is actually reading these e-mails
2. Yahoo is incompetent

I’m willing to cut them some slack. I kind of like Yahoo!, despite their stupid punctuation-as-brand idea and the fact that nothing they do is really worth the time they’ve put into it. Still, this is preposterous. All I have to do is firewall off their IP address and then my problems are solved. I e-mailed them so that they could help themselves. I wanted them to know that something, somewhere was misbehaving, and then hopefully fix it (and maybe help other websites that were getting hit but didn’t notice it).

What happens instead? I end up in a run-around, where they pass the buck around and I get to sample all of their automated e-mail fine dining, which wastes my time and theirs. You’d think that with the dire straights they’re in, the employees would want to do things properly so that they won’t be the ones on the chopping block, but I guess if you can blame the computer and get the programmers fired instead, that’s even safer.

I’m sad to say that I’ll be glad when they’re gone, and if this is how they handle things, I hope it won’t be a long time coming.