Facebook and MySpace

In case you're wondering about which social media website to concentrate your efforts upon take a look at this graph comparing Facebook and MySpace usage.

Twitter has arrived

What was an intriguing tool a year ago is now the winner of StartUp of the Year. They doubled from 500,000 monthly users a little over a year ago to 1 million users last May and quadrupled to 4.5 million users last month.

Quoting a post from last May:

Whatever you may think of Twitter, it is here to stay. The time is now to start figuring out how to incorporate Twitter into your marketing strategy.

The End of P2P

Ok, that was a little bit of an exaggeration but two years ago P2P was dominating internet traffic and now, while still dominating the upstream networks, P2P is starting to drop in relation to real-time traffic. I see the time, in the relatively near future, where P2P is a niche market in comparison to real-time traffic. This is not to say that P2P usage will drop in absolute terms, only that gaming, VoIP, online file storage, movie, real time news and sports is going to increase tremendously over the next few years.

What will this do to theNet Neutrality arguments? Real-time communications can be buffered for only so long; a web page can be delayed for 500ms without too much complaint and an email can be delayed for 1000s of milliseconds without notice.

The Importance of Design

How important is design? My designer friends say it’s the most important thing. When I see how they translate my wireframes and HTML mock-ups and turn them into pixel-perfect design I see the difference immediately. It changes what was a good idea into something "PROFESSIONAL."

But look at some of the most important, most influential, most profitable sites and you see terrible design and an irreverent approach to pixel-perfect design: IMDB is an industry standard but it's ugly as hell. Craigslist is ugly; and how about Google, eBay and Amazon? The beauty of those sites is in their functionality.

Great Australian Firewall

In an attempt to combat child pornography the Australian Government is proposing a mandatory filter of all internet traffic! There can be no doubt that sexual slavery needs to be attacked but this proposal is ridiculous. At first I thought this might have been made up but unfortunately it's very real.

For further reading:

Can Labor Implement Clean Feed
Filtering Pilot and ACMA Blacklist
Great Firewall of Australia

WIPA.org.au
GetUp.Org
NoCleanFeed.com
IIA.net

Text Msgs are surpassing Voice

Nielsen Research bears out what many people think - that text messaging is soon going to supplant voice as the primary means of communication.

During the second quarter of 2008, a typical U.S. mobile subscriber placed or received 204 phone calls each month. In comparison, the average mobile customer sent or received 357 text messages per month — a 450% increase over the number of text messages circulated monthly during the same period in 2006.
In U.S., SMS Text Messaging Tops Mobile Phone Calling

At this point text has not supplanted voice as one can't make a one-to-one comparison between text messages and voice phone calls. Still, one needn't be a statistical genius to see that if the rate of growth continues at the present rate that the data transmitted by text will shortly vastly surpass voice.

The Nielsen data shows that phone calls have leveled off at approximately 200/month with texts up to 350/month. Soon text/email msgs will be the primary means of communication and voice messages will become a vestige of the past. Yeah!! No more "call me msgs."

It must be pointed out that the Nielsen data pertains only to cell phone users and not to landlines. Is there still a use for landline phones? Maybe for some, maybe rotary phones are still useful for emergencies, but for day to day use land lines are going the way of answering machines, VCRs, and cassette decks.

What does this mean for you - the business customer? Stop putting out alpha-mnemonics based on the rotary/push-button phone. Soon no one is going to be able to use it - let alone remember that a 2 is ABC and that a 3 is DEF, etc...

The Birth of Computers

If you're interested in the history of technology then this video is for you. If you're a programmer and you're interested in the history of technology you will LOVE this.