iPhone MySpace Preview Vid

Here's a quick vid demoing my new iPhone MySpace web application. (Make sure you click the fullscreen button in the top-right to see everything best)

Why I Hate MySpace

Okay, for a long time now, I've had this love/hate relationship with MySpace. I love that fact that I know every time I meet someone there's a 99.9% chance I can find them on MySpace and keep in touch and such. I HATE the fact that they don't seem to be able to do ANYTHING right.

Case and Point:

• Event A: They decided to steal Facebook's features. I'm fine with this, I mean its not surprising, and at least they're stealing good great ideas.
• Event B: They do a terrible job of re-implementing said stolen features.
• Event C: They end up with an even worse user experience afterwards.

A good example of this is in two distinct and relatively new features. "Friend Status" and "Friend Subscriptions." Two features that are clearly COMPLETE rip-offs of Facebook's "Status Updates" and "News Feed." Again, I'm fine with this, as most of my friends haven't made the jump to Facebook yet, so I'd love to stay updated on them using these types of features. However, on Facebook, the news feed is compiled automatically and put together for you based on who you talk to most and you can even configure what types of stories and people you'd like to hear more or less about. On MySpace, "Friend Subscriptions" forces you to subscribe to friends one-by-one. And they don't even put a button on the profile pages to do this. So you're forced to search through hundreds of pages to find the person you'd like updates on and then click a check box then click save. Then when you view your updates, you see stories about them uploading pictures, videos, etc. You DO NOT see stories such as "Person A posted a comment on Person B's page." MySpace could NOT pull off stories like this because their databases and code base are just too convoluted. There's tons more small problems with this feature, but I'm already rambling. Moving on to "Friend Status." On Facebook, I can click my "Friends" tab, and see a paged out list of my friends with the most recent status updates at the top. I can also filter, search, etc. (BTW: Facebook's site layout/organization/feature set/etc is LIGHT YEARS ahead of anything MySpace has ever and most-likely will ever do). Anyways, back to "Friend Status." I can update my status on my Home Page. Pretty much a direct feature rip from Facebook, but again, I'm fine with it, because its a good feature. However, when I click to "View All" of my friend's status updates. It shows me ALL of my friends on ONE page. Are you kidding me? As of this post, I have 22,319 friends on MySpace. I know not everyone has this many but most people have at least 500. And listing out 500 users on one page with no apparent order to the list is the web application equivalent of telling someone to go to hell.

I have to digress so I can work on my iPhone MySpace web application, but please, if anyone reading knows anyone at MySpace, tell them to read what I've posted here, and feel free to get in touch with me as I have about a million other simple, small fixes that would make the site be a MUCH better place.

Thanks for reading.

Top 10 All Time Most Influential Artists Of My Generation (IMHO)

These wold have been in a particular order, but I'm an indecisive little boy. And to be clear, this is not a list of my favorite bands or a list of people that were influential to me, but rather a list of artists that once popular, inspired other people to become musicians.

Without further ado,

1. The Ramones
2. The Cure
3. NOFX
4. N.W.A.
5. Eminem
6. Bad Religion
7. The Ataris
8. Green Day
9. Blink 182
10. Bon Jovi

How To Not Go Crazy As An IT Guy

I work in an office. I am the "computer guy". I built the system we use to manage our information so I get a lot of "Why doesn't this work?" and "My so-and-so isn't doing so-and-so like it used to!" phone calls. Sometimes I just like to mess with them, so here's some good lines to use if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.

Conversation usually goes something like this:

Office-Lame-Guy: Uhmm, dude my computer, like. It won't. Like. See my email used to... Me (Awesome Tech Guy): *Clears Throat*, Ok, What exactly is the problem? Office-Lame-Guy: Basically I think my email has some spyware or virus or something. This thing keeps popping up when I try to upload this animated picture of my friends cat to my myspace as the background of the page. Me (Awesome Tech Guy): INSERT ONE OF THE FOLLOWING:

• "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?"
• "Do you have a sledgehammer or a brick handy?"
• "Ok first I want you to go to http://apple.com/store..."
• "Let me put it this way: Have you ever seen McGuyver?"
• "So... what are you wearing?"
• "Duuuuuude! Bummer!"
• "Oh your MySpace must have gotten hacked, just give me your email and password and I'll take care of it."
• "Looks like you’re gonna need some new dilithium crystals there, Cap’n."
• "Sounds like you may need a new flux capacitor."
• "Press 1 for Support. Press 2 if you’re with Fox News. Press 3 if you’re with the FTC."
• "We can fix this, but you’re gonna need a butter knife, a roll of duct tape, and a car battery."
• "In layman’s terms, we call that the YouSuq™ Effect."
• "Okay, turn to page 523 in your copy of libro de los muertos."
• "Please hold for Mr. Gates’ attorney."

Cell Phone? More Like Hell Phone…

So I've been a T-Mobile customer since 2002. Call me stupid if you want but I've never had a single problem with them. Well, sort of. See about four months ago I started getting really annoyed about my Sidekick 3. Even though I have developer access to the device (after a long and grueling screening process mind you), I still felt like it wasn't an open enough platform. If I wanted custom ringtones or applications on my phone, I had to go through this REALLY clunky command line interface to get them. And if I wanted to give the applications I wrote to my friends or to the public, forget it. There's no way unless you are one of the VERY lucky few to get your application into Danger's "Catalog" which is only viewable on Sidekick devices. So I decided to switch to Windows Mobile.

I know this goes against all that is good and holy, but I couldn't take not being in control of my mobile world. Anyways, it serves me right for trying to actually use a Microsoft product because after four solid months of torture, I'm back to my Sidekick 3. I tried the T-Mobile Dash, and the T-Mobile MDA. Both phones were absolutely great form factors, to the credit of their designers. However, their software was purely ridiculous. I can't even begin to explain how simply idiodic I felt trying to use it for even normal day-to-day operations.

This brings me to the point of this writing. Why can't anyone just get it right?! Even the all powerful iPhone has a laundry list of things consumers and geeks alike agree are missing or done incorrectly. The only real difference here is that I know Apple, Inc. is a good enough company to listen to its masses and fix these problems. But even then, the phone will still be locked to AT&T. Now, I'm a businessman. I understand you need to maximize profits to all those shareholders whose not-so-hard-earned dollars paid for the R & D to make the iPhone as good as it is. But C'mon Apple, at least give me an unlocked super-duper-change-my-life device!

This isn't an iPhone bashing post by any means. To be fair (and honest) its actually an everything bashing post. I'm sick and tired of waiting for somebody in some board room to have the guts to suggest making a product with the consumer's real interests in mind. Now, I say this knowing that Apple has come the absolute closest to getting it right. And an iPhone would make my Christmas list any year. But, I still feel like there's so much missing.

I could go into detail, but this is an insanely long post already, so basically, give me an unlocked phone with enough RAM to do what I want that won't burn a hole in my pocket (literally). Also, Microsoft, please work on making your Mobile OS not freeze when it receives a call. Thanks.

Open Letter To The Entertainment Industry

I watch a lot of television. I've seen the trends come and go, but recently it seems that we are building towards something. And its my opinion that that "something" is not good.

It's hard to pinpoint when it began, but to be honest, I think I began noticing it sometime around 9/11/2001. I know that TV isn't exactly what people remember about that day, but think about it. Every news organization in the world had their busiest day of the decade that day. Every single one of them tried their hardest to get people to watch their coverage rather than their competitors, and it showed.

Now I'm not saying that the networks shouldn't have extensively covered the event, I'm actually asking this question: "What the hell happened to us?" What I mean is that ever since that day it seems that news networks and mass media in general have been in the middle of a downward spiral of stupidity. I know that sounds harsh, and I'm trying to be as constructive as possible.

Basically, (and I know I'm rambling here, but bear with me, I swear I have a point), I think that we need to focus more on actual information. It is a sad day when I get more comprehensive political and world news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than I ever do from CNN or MSNBC. You know why? The "normal" news networks are too busy trying to figure out what Paris Hilton ate for lunch yesterday instead of trying to figure out why Paris spent more time in jail for a probation violation than Scooter Libby will for four felony convictions... This country's credibility has been slowly declining over the last 6 years, and mass media has been riding right down there next to it. I'm actually afraid for us. What will become of a nation fixated on false idols? A nation that is apparently too stupid to even ask questions loudly enough to be heard? Why are we still in Iraq? Why do we have such a problem with Iran? Why does our president attach signing statements to half the bills he signs in to law? Why does our vice president feel that he has all the power yet none of the blame? When is mass media going to take its responsibility seriously and ask the REAL questions?

I guess for the foreseeable future we'll never know, but here's hoping something changes soon, otherwise we can all look forward to watching things like MSNBC's prime-time special "Paris Hilton's special wrap-up-of-why-dick-cheney-is-a-sexy-bitch" for the rest of our lives...

All Your Stuff Are Belong To Me

Welcome to my new blog. I was using tumblr, but their DNS A record crap for custom domains was making me pull my hair out. (To be fair, it could have been Dreamhost's fault, but that's doubtful.) Anyways here's the new blog, I'm going to try to get my twitter hooked up to it so I can post stuff a little easier. Anyways give me some time to get everything together, but in the meantime, find my RSS link and subscribe! p.s. - here it is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/thejakemarsh

Until next time-

- jm