This is a question I pondered during my six hour drive home from Anaheim yesterday. While I was there my smartphone (Motorola Droid-X) kept me connected and gave me sufficient features to fully work online. There are restrictions but I’m wondering how close we are go just dumping the desktop. This is not the same NO-PC initiative that some companies are backing for developing countries (or is it)?

Do you have thoughts on this?

What do you see as challenges? I think if I could generate a mostly-complete list of my challenges, and identify solutions (or potential solutions), it may be something I can work with.

• Video
  • Watching Video
    • For limiting eye strain, I would need an HDMI television and to carry my HDMI (with a mini adapter) around, so I could output to that device.
  • Editing Video
  • Video upload (web)
    • Requires WiFi connection, which I setup in the room but on in the park
  • Transferring photos/video from my camera to my media server
    • Use the computer as an intermediary, to connect to camera and transfer to Raid device
• Photo
  • Editing
  • Transferring photos/video from my camera to my media server
    • Use the computer as an intermediary, to connect to camera and transfer to Raid device
• Typing
  • Yes, even with swype, I still end up using the wrong word, and get in such a rush I don’t spell reread before post
  • On second read, this is really a human issue, not a tool issue
• Printing documents

• Photo (take, edit, post)
• Contact Management
• Navigation (map and turn-by-turn)
  • Motorola has a nifty dock, which makes it nice to just drop and use while driving
  • Replaced my separate GPS for our last trip
  • Also used to stream music (with Pandora), while traveling to Mexico2
• Web Browsing
  • Buy/Sell items (ebay)
  • Email
  • News
  • Social Networks
  • Plane tracking, reservations, pre-boarding
• Social Media (chat, blog, stream)
• Phone (so simple, but overlooked when compared to a PC)

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Rain falling in my backyard

Storms are disruptive to our lives. Storms cause change.

Everyone needs to remember that even damage caused by a storm brings things of beauty, things needed. Plants grow and wounds heal.

Keep love in your heart and all will come as God promised.

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Watch the past disappear

If you fee strongly about something you read, then go ahead and comment.
Think I missed something? Add it.

1. Mobile (rolling) hotspot using inter-car connected wi-fi. One car subscribes then using bridging, all are connected.
2. Flexible phone with at least a 5″ multi-touch screen. Names such as “Roll-and-Go” or “Flexiform” will start to be sold.
3. Twitter partners with ATM companies to allow updating twitter status for those without devices. Banking updates = fad.
4. Highly viral application connects all social networks and is used by travel agents to notify friends when traveling.
5. First self-aware garbage can tracks consumption and generates list for grocery store. Partnered with RFID companies.
6. Worlds first “real” neighborhood becomes 100% Facebook connected, delivers community meeting with all in attendance.
7. You will be hollered at by a live Ad (billboard), using your online moniker, while in an airport (Twitter enabled spam).
8. First high school graduation live blogging by students draws more online attendance than at the event.
9. Quad-core Netbook with 3 Gb of memory, 250 Gb SSD running Moblin/Win7 dual-boot for under $400.
10. IE6 is still being ran on more desktops than Google Chrome.

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There is also a real cost for friending someone.

The term friending comes in many flavors:

…the action of adding somebody as a friend for social networking sites or social community sites etc. (1)

…just want to communicate more efficiently with your closest handful of “real-world” friends… (2)

The concept of meeting people and collecting friends online… (3)

…the display of these friends and the messages they send to others relates to their place in the social hierarchies… (4)

Basically, the act of friending, as a verb, is connecting to people (friends, family, peers or strangers) on a social networking site. The purpose varies, but the core desire is our need to stay connected with a community of people considered as friends. The trends seems to be leaning a bit over the line of friends in order to build up the kingdom of friended people.  As described within Designing Social Interfaces (pp.472), “Teens may choose to accept request from peers they know but do not feel close to, if only to avoid offending them.” This reluctance to offend is not limited to the teen population. There is a certain amount of prestige associated with your number of followers (or who you follow). This is where the true cost of friending starts to impact.

The normal person writes around 20 wpm, transcribes at 33 wpm, types at 60 wpm and reads at 275 wpm (5). Which means you could read this specific post in around two minutes of time (although it took me considerably longer to write). There is/was a real-cost for you to read my article.

Overloaded!

What is that cost?

If we think about it in terms of time we should be able to measure what the impact is of friending someone. This impact will be based upon the historical average of the number of articles, tweets, stream or wall updates that any single individual publishes. If we consider that most people will go no more than two layers deep (the immediate post and to follow the included hyperlink), the math may seem complex but is rather simple.

Here is some sample data, based on merely one of my social network accounts.

• Twitter
  
  • Tweets
    • 431 tweets, 5624 words over 620 days, avg 9 words a day at 275 wpm reading
    • ~ 2 seconds per day
  • Twitter-Links (links posted in Twitter)
    • 71 links, 66409 words over 620 days, avg 107 words a day at 275 wpm reading
    • ~ 23 seconds a day
  • Total: ~25 seconds per day to follow my Twitter account
    It also means that with my current 80 followers, my tweets are consuming:  33 minutes per day (on average)

Basic architecture of a solution

The analysis I did is pretty accurate considering it contained all my tweets since I started posting on March 20, 2008. The data was first extracted using Tweetake (7), then cut up to perform word count. I then extracted all the URL’s from the data and performed a manual analysis using the Kwintessential website word counting tool (6). Using the average reading speed data I referenced earlier, and averaging over each day (versus only the number of days I posted), a value was arrived at.

You start to see what type of impact, or fee, that could be applied to an individual based upon their posting patterns. In order to complete the analysis like I did, a real-time solution needs to be created that can be connected to each social networking system of major coincidence. Access to sufficient historical data would also be required in order to build a relatively accurate profile of that accounts activity. Additionally, the ability to bridge multiple social sites in order to build a full picture of not only an individual stream but the full picture of that individuals social postings.

There are tools that do this in part, throughout the web, but nothing that does a full-blown calculation on how much it would cost to become a friend of someone. What a wonderful idea? Know how much of your time will be sunk before subscribing to the tweeting spammer (twammer?). Understand that this person posts blog articles re-posted from every RSS subscription they have. Before I go off and start doing more work on this I was wondering if anyone else thinks this is a good idea with value?

References

1. Urban Dictionary (link)
2. MySpace for dummies By Ryan Hupfer, Mitch Maxson, Ryan Williams (link)
3. Social Networking Communities and E-Dating Services: Concepts and Implications By Celia Romm-Livermore, Kristina Setzekorn (link)
4. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience By Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone (link)
5. Wiki: Words per minute (link)
6. Kwintessential: The Website Word Count Tool (link)
7. Tweetake: Back Up your Twitterings! (link)

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What is software development?

This is the act of taking the needs (requirements) of a customer, designing a solution and developing the program to fit the need. Most people will stop there, however, the process continues through testing and implementation. The end-goal is really to solve a problem. This is what I do for a living, this is what I live to do!

Plan, validate and adjust (refactoring)

It sometimes becomes necessary to step outside of the “get it done at any cost” approach and do some planning. I am not proposing that you spend six months thinking and re-thinking, rather, it is necessary to look at contingencies, critical paths and personnel limitations. Walk through use-cases and give them virtual test runs. Document the misses and adjust your plans.

Design for the win!

No one is good enough to take the requirements, step into coding, and come out with a fully functional, multi-tiered, expandable software application. Even with the best personnel, it is hard to keep everything in focus while hoping that every member of the team follows along same path towards the goal. Your design becomes that goal. Whatever method you use for designing your solution, ensure that you share it in a place where all team-members can gain access to it.

Store your source, then back it up

I have lost everything on my hard-drive in the past, which included six years worth of photographs. Would you like to lose six months worth of work and perhaps your job? Back-ups are worth the time and expense in order to give you the ability to restore your work with minimal loss. Of course, that also means you have some system in place to allow for collaborative code use. These source-control systems allows you to control your flow of development and prevent the loss of work when someone is working the same physical file that you are.

Test early and often

There are many automated testing systems out there that can help identify interface, database and other problems before you release code to your customers. Of course, the best and most reliable automated testing approach is something called test-driven-development. This concept has you create a test, implement it in code, then write the code to pass the test. You run all your tests before you check in code and deploy it. If something breaks, your test breaks and you fix it. Good stuff.

Did you know?

That software bugs are so prevalent that even the car you drive today may have one? Back in 2005, Wired magazine ran an article chronicling the top 10 software bugs of all time (link). Sure glad I didn’t need radiation treatment in Panama City.

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The maps are great, the gameplay is exciting and there have been many write-ups on the web doing a detailed analysis on both Tombstone and Desolation.

My problem is that out of the gate, I can’t download them to my XBox 360. I get an interesting error screen and nothing happens, however, I WAS BILLED FOR THE DOWNLOAD. One would think you know whether a download occured, whether an error occured and bill accordingly. Now this is only $4 — but it’s my $4.

Fix the problem, do an update, how about DO SOME TESTING before you release?

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