skylarwoodward

I’ll be waking up bright and early this morning to hit the Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference at Moscone West in the city. If you’re going, post a comment, send an IM, or call me – it’d be great to see some familar faces while I’m there.

I’m doing some last minute debating on whether or not to take the Powerbook. Everyone else will have theirs and of course like a good little Apple non-conformist I’ll want to “think different”ly. I’m thinking the iPod and my friend’s Tapwave Zodiac will be sufficent to get me through the note-taking and slow parts of the day. I sure wish the Zodiac had camera though. I either need to get a camera phone or trade up to borrowing a Zire 72 instead.

What toy will Apple give us this year? Any bets? One year it was the optical mouse; last year it was an iSight. I’m hoping for an Airport Express, but traditionally the giveaway is a product announced at the keynote. 30″ displays then?

The email game is officially on. Today, Hotmail and Ask Jeeves (myway, excite, iwon) decided to pony up and start playing the storage game with Yahoo!. Though my first thought is to be discouraged that my friends on Hotmail now have less incentive to finally jump ship, the end result is that the possibilities for innovation sparked by the Gmail buzz are firmly cemented now that a solid round of players have placed their bets at the table.

Three months ago everyone was talking about Search. Ask Jevees was going through the roof on acquisition hopes and Yahoo! and others were showing significant gains from solid new strategies in sponsored and vertical search. Meanwhile, IM and Mail were putzing along, dreaming big dreams but not seeing much support from corporate executives or the marketplace to do much more than gradually monetize services and grow market share.

Enter “Gmail.” Suddenly, the company who strives to do no evil fulfilled prophecies by introducing its email product to the world in a public beta and thus challenged the industry with its interpretation of a “non-evil” free web-based email service. If restricting users to 2 or 10 MB of storage was greedy, then 1 GB was certainly generous. If showing image-based ads and transitional pages was frustrating to users, then showing small text-based ads in the margins was much more pleasant. If auto-loading images from email spammers was irresponsible then auto-blocking images was much more heroic. If chronological archiving and folder fileing was restrictive, then labeling threading and searching was liberating. Gmail suggested a free offering to the marketplace that questioned the earnesty of the free email world.

Add marketplace response. With the Google forray into online messaging and its impending intial public stock offering, analysts, journalists, bloggers, and executives alike became fascinated with the potential impact of email product success among these same major search players. “Is this the end of premium mail?” they pondered. “Beware! Significant user churn will ensue!” some warned. “The rules for direct email marketing will change!” others predicted. Everyone was suddely interested in email and how it was going to change. The company that changed the definition of web search had breathed new life into email by changing the expectations for what an Internet company could, or should, offer for free. Moreover, the usual suspects who were content with their weekly 5/10 hold-em were now being challenged by a familiar young neighbor to play a pot-limit game. Everyone wondered, would the old dogs bite?

Somewhere along the lines the intuitive got the impression that the cowboys shuddered the second the young gun walked into the saloon. I especially like this article where an IronPort exec reports Yahoo! and MSN as officially “freaked out.” Perhaps some folks felt threatened, but only the gunless on the sidelines who couldn’t fireback. The reality is that a good challenge brings out the best in everyone who has the competitive spirit to win. The contender brought to the arena by Google has, prematurely or not, opened the doors for innovation and free thought throught the email industry. The free thinkers and creative are being empowered and savvy strategists are invigorated. Ideas that have been ignored or sidelined for years are now being brought to the forefront as everyone prepares their best hand for the game. No one is sure what anyone else is holding, but those with pockets deep enough have called the blinds and are ready play. What is cool in this game, however, is that no one player will walk away with the table winnings – in the marketplace it is the consumer who benefits from competitive play.

It is a great time to be in the industry. AOL, are you in?

my friend reminded me yesterday of one of my favorite music artists from college… juliana hatfield (aka, the juliana hatfield three). it wasn’t even on my iPod, can you believe!?! Become What You Are was one of my favorite records back in the late 90s but for the last several years the album has escaped me completely. i dug it out of the CD collection and now it is my driving music for Tuesday, June 22.

i’m becoming really frustrated with so many of my friends and coworkers who are predominating the airspace and webspace around me with anti-government sentiments. perhaps part of the problem is that i have been delving deeper into personal webspace lately (e.g.., reading more online journals), but there is a decidedly more proliferate quantity of popular political sarcasm making its way into the conversations, status messages, and bumper stickers around me this season.

first, some examples. ever since messenger started allowing custom clickable status messages (evidently, a feature that is currently undocumented on Yahoo! Help) people have been using this for all sorts of quick and witty satire, particularly the struggling LA Lakers team and, of course, the US government and its failures. today, one of my coworkers decided to display the phrase “SpaceShipOne. GovernementZero.” with a link to an article about today’s completion of the first privitized manned space flight. at first i took it as a knock on all the recent shuttle failures and disappointing results for the International Space Station, but then I imagined you could take it several different ways (“zero funding”, etc.), so i asked him about it and sure enough, my intuition was correct. why so down on NASA? those mars rovers were pretty cool. true, it is a shame that we are still trying to putz around in those dated shuttles but if it wasn’t for our committment to the ISS we’d have little need to keep sending orbiters up and we could concentrate on more ambitious goals like reaching Mars or just building our own next-generation spacecraft. don’t get me wrong, i’m completely estatic about today’s accomplishment but i don’t understand why we need to use it to springboard ridicule on the well established fact that government space programs all over the world are suffering. if we are going to be manipulative, why don’t we phrase it “Microsoft Billionaires One. NASA Space Flight Division Zero.”

so maybe that response seems a little extreme – you’re thinking, “Skylar, why get so bent out of shape about jab at the national space program? Besides, you can’t seriously have any respect for your friends that work for NASA or fly supersonic aircraft for a living?” i must admit, that specific case was the tipping point for this entry. let’s move to more proliferate examples.

reagan. wow. the most beloved president of my lifetime dies and every liberal has it out for this guy. of course he wasn’t perfect but i’m completely depressed by the opportunity taken by folks to elaborate on his faults and use him as subject of tasteless humor. i really wish someone could explain this to me. a great man (and even if you don’t see him as great, a man dearly loved by his family, millions of americans, and a respectable international audience) dies, yet because of his political background (and its obvious yet somewhat removed relation to the current executive administration) jealousy and bitterness overcome compassionate intuitions so that humiliation and shame can be brought to bear lest any political gain be reflected on any surviving institutions? when did courtesy and reverence become so unfashionable? perhaps when we started making heros out of wreakless artists instead of truly honorable men and women characterized by selflessness, love, service, and grace.

i could continue with examples but if you live in the Bay Area, you should have a pretty good idea of what I’m talking about. be it SUVs, foreign policy, or formal patriotic oaths it seems there aren’t enough opportunities in the day for folks to vent their frustrations with our imperfect society and governmental leadership. perhaps that is the rub? are we incapable of being comfortable with imperfection? it seems so many folks here are driven with a self-assuming intellectual pride that anyone who thinks conservatively is ignorant and, in most cases, laughable. do we criticize the world in hopes of righting its wrongs or because this helps us justify living under failable leaders and corrupt institutions while we quietly and peacefully reap the benefits in the world’s wealthiest and most privilaged metropolis?

it wouldn’t be so exhausting if it weren’t all so predictable (as are most things which are political) and trendy. it is like the kids in high school that decide to dress “differently” or “self-expressively” in an attempt to garner attention and to conform to the Avril-type mantra “it’s cool to be uncool.” all i really want is to see more positive spirit and encouragement of others in the world. we spend way too much time tearing people down – especially people we don’t even know – rather than serving the people we do know, or encouraging and helping the people that live in our communities.

if you are reading this and do find yourself somehow targeted or perhaps offended by this entry, i think that’s healthy. many folks are offended and challenged by the things you say every day and I’m encouraged if this can do the same for you. feel free to comment, but rather than rant, I encourage you to try being positive in your social and political reflections this week. discuss and humor the good being done, not the evils. clearly, i’m challenging myself now to do the same.

now i have a Photoblog! kudos to eric’s blog for the tip. i kinda always wanted a way to put recent photos on my site but was too lazy (busy?) to implement it myself. buzznet syndications just prove that i wait long enough for the features i want on my blog, someone else will eventually do it for me! unfortunately, buzznet has had some performance issues as of late, so we’ll have to monitor how much this has an effect on my front page. hopefully, isolating to the right margin won’t affect much of the rest of the page layout. let me know if you experience problems.

by the way, can we call them phoblogs instead of photoblogs? hmmm maybe phoblogs is reserved for weblogs about vietnamese noodle passion.

Wow, today marks a monumental discovery for me. Microsoft has finally fixed their WMP plug-in for non-IE browsers. Wow. We’ve been waiting on this for well over two years and knew it was coming but I can’t believe it actually happened. I wonder when they actually released the fix? I don’t even remember downloading an update.

For those of you who might be wondering what was wrong before, the WMP plug-in didn’t properly follow the Netscape Plug-in API. They had a couple of bugs in their implementation but luckly Internet Explorer seemed to be able to manage using the plug-in anyway. Unfortunately for all other browsers, including Safari and Gecko-based clients, the WMP plug-in was unusable. The fix is a huge victory for Mac users wanting to access content on sites that don’t support Quicktime.

today i got the driving shoes i won on eBay last week. i’m super psyched. they are SO cool… I tested them out on the way in to work this morning and I don’t think I’ve ever switched gears faster. i’m sure there is a huge psychological factor here but a lot has to do with the shape of the heel in making it easy to switch pedels precisely without fatiguing the ankle. besides, they are super comfy too.

i’ll have to update this after i’ve had more time with them, but so far so good. oh yeah, i did realize the model i have has heat-resistent lining. that mght be a little extreme for my needs, but sweet nonetheless.

(what? buy them just because they look cool? noooooo…. not me!!)