September 2007

Having attended a bunch of outdoor concerts, festivals, etc across the US and Europe I’m always fascinated by the names of companies that rent porta potties. Is there a union somewhere that requires companies to give themselves (sometimes) ridiculous names? :-)

One of my personal favorites (and local at that) is “Honey Bucket” (see picture) … I mean, don’t sugar coat it or anything.

A quick Google or Flickr search reveals even more:

• A Royal Flush
• Call-a-head
• Jerry on the Job
• Wizards of Ooze

From a comment on Dave Barry’s site I found the following as well:

20. Happy Can Portable Toilets, Atlanta
19. Drop Zone Portable Service Inc., Frankfort, Ill.
18. Blackmas Best Seat In The House Inc., Bradley, Ill.
17. Plop Jon Inc., Port Saint Lucie, Fla.
16. A.S.A.P. Port-A-Pots Inc., Hampstead, Md.
15. Ameri-Can Engineering, Argos, Ind.
14. Bobby’s Pottys, Joppa, Md.
13. Johnny On The Spot Inc., Old Bridge, N.J.
12. LepreCAN Portable Restrooms, Chicago
11. Loader-Up, Inc., Sarasota, Fla.
10. Mister Bob’s Portable Toilets, Vero Beach, Fla.
9. Royal Throne, Washington, D.C.
8. Tanks Alot, Tomball, Tex.
7. Tee Pee Inc, Roseville, Mich.
6. Wizards of Ooze Ltd., Anacortes, Wash.
5. Oui Oui Enterprises Ltd., Chicago
4. Gotta Go Potties, Tobyhanna, Pa.
3. UrinBiz.com, Chicago
2. Willy Make It?, Oregon City, Oreg.
1. Doodie Calls, New Orleans

Wow … this is just fascinating to me and the thought process that goes into this is just too much. Its got to be a this-should-stick-in-your-head kind of thing but then, when do you want to remember a porta potty company?! Dunno.

This interruption has been brought to you by Friday afternoon randomness.

What I’m looking for probably doesn’t exist and is so totally tied to my “personal” workflow that I’ll never find it. I’m hoping that’s not the case but then again if it is, I should probably change my workflow.

There are a few things I’d like to be able to keep track of:

• Manage projects: I’ve got a bunch of threads going at one time (who doesn’t?). OpenID work, MyStrands projects, my garden, etc. I want a tool that will help me track time-lines for those projects, assign to-dos and manage overall targets/goals.
• Tight calendar interaction: I have lots of time and lots of different kinds of time. Maybe “downtime” at an airport or in the hotel. I’d like to get a list of ‘easy’ or ‘repetitive’ tasks fed to me so that I can just knock them out. I’d like to preserve my mornings for “thinking” stuff. As I’m working through projects and to-dos I’d like to have this all tightly integrated with my calendar.
• To-dos: Just a simple list of to-dos for a given day. Ideally these will percolate up from projects as well as give me a really easy way to add new things I need to do. This should also hook into the calendar function (for things that are date related).

On top of all of this, I’d like it to be web-based with the ability to integrate the calendar based events into Google Calendar.

In terms of other features I’d like the following:

• Web-based
• Integration with Google Calendar for date related items
• Ability to tag any item (as well as identify project tags, etc that can span to-dos, etc)
• Searchable (filed in the ‘duh’ category)

I’m not delusional … I don’t expect to get exactly this. However, I’d love to find something that is close. Right now I’m using Journler with pretty good results but its a desktop application (for the Mac even!) and I’m a little nervous about needing some info that won’t be accessible via the web when I need it. Yeah, I’m that important.

Anybody got any ideas?

Was reading the Twitter blog today and they had a post about being able to track actual concepts within Twitter. How freakin’ cool!!

What if we started a theme around the three letter codes for airports? In my case, I’d love to be able to track anything with PDX in it … I’d love to know (when I’m in town and free) what folks are up to especially in the evening. Doing something cool? Twitter it with the keyword PDX … then those tracking that will see it. Genius! One love!! All that! :-)

Hope to see you on Twitter everybody and if you haven’t added me yet, I’m kveton on Twitter (filed in the ‘duh’ category).

Just wrapped up a really good week at Digital ID World. Phil Becker and crew did a great job with this conference this year.

There were quite a few meetings and announcements around OpenID that I thought I’d mention in a blog post.

• Orange (aka France Telecom) announced that they are enabling OpenID’s for all 40 million of their customers. They cover a wide-range of mobile, internet and traditional phone customers and they have taken a very interesting slant on doing identity. They are leveraging the physical nature of the mobile devices and DSL modems in their customers homes to further secure the identities they are provisioning. Very interesting. They also announced that in the near future (they had a screen shot) they will enable consumption of third-party OpenID’s. This is in addition to supporting Yahoo! BBAuth and Google’s Gauth as well.
• I saw the first screen shots of the new OpenID website. The folks at Vidoop have been helping us with this and David and I will head out to Tulsa in a few weeks to finalize this sucker and get it live. This is going to really simplify the OpenID site and make it easier for users and developers to get what they want/need.
• We had another IPR meeting over lunch at the conference and David also sent out the first public draft of the proposal to the OpenID general list. The ramifications of this are huge as it will allow larger entities that have been interested in OpenID be able to participate in a much more formal way. I’m really excited that David and Bill Washburn (and everybody else) have been able to get so far so fast.
• There are some very exciting announcements on tap in the coming weeks. We’re shooting for mid-November to make some formal announcements around what’s happening at the Foundation … keep an eye on this space (and many, many others) for more information.

It was a great week and I’m glad I made it out for the conference. The best is yet to come and things are really starting to heat up folks … :-)

I just finished paying of the last of my student loans from college this month (yes, that’s right - 10 years baby). One of the loans was with Direct Loans which is part of the Department of Education. Now, if you’ve ever seen their website you’ll probably understand the following story.

I got this letter in the mail yesterday saying “Electronic Debit Account - Debit Suspended” with a bunch of wording on it that is confusing at best. I called the number on the back of the letter and went through 5 menus of confirmation of who I was (and it was actually pretty painless) only to be directed to a customer representative that then asked me the exact same questions. The dialog went something like this:

Me: “What does this letter mean?”
Direct Loans CS: “Well, we’ve stopped charging your account.”
Me: “I believe I’ve paid off the account. Is there anything else I need to do?”
Direct Loans CS: “Yes, your balance is showing as zero.”
Me: “So why not send me a letter saying, ‘hey, you’re done! way to go!’ After 10 years, I could use a little love.”
Direct Loans CS: “Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

Ha! Alright, I know the guy is just doing his job but it just seems like that letter could have been a little clearer on what it was trying to tell me. Instead of “you’re paid in full” I get a cryptic message about debit accounts being suspended which sets off an alarm in my head that “I did something wrong”.

I read the news today (oh boy … Beatles anyone?) and was excited to see that Mozilla has spun out MailCo:

Mozilla will provide an initial $3 million in seed funding to launch MailCo. This is expected to be spent mostly on building a small team of people who are passionate about e-mail and Internet communications. As MailCo develops it and the Mozilla Foundation will evaluate what’s the best model for long-term sustainability. Mozilla may well invest additional funds; we also hope that there are other paths for sustainability.

This is the result of months of discussion among Mozilla and its community on what the fate of Thunderbird should be. Thinking more about this, I’m left wondering how the launch of MailCo is such a good thing for Thunderbird, email messaging and Mozilla.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been under the distinct impression that Mozilla’s “main thing” is helping make the “open web” a reality. Mitchell has been blogging about it. Heck, I even have the Lance Armstrong “LiveStrong” bracelet that I got from Mozilla at OSCON that says “support the open web” on it. Great. I’m all for it. I’m drinking the Koolaid. But how does spinning out a company to do email and communication help the ‘open web’, Mozilla and its community?

While reading about this a friend forwarded me a gushy piece by Alfresco’s Matt Asay. Quoting from the article:

Mozilla has an excellent track record of taking Microsoft head-on, and winning

Which he mentions in the context of hoping MailCo will tackle Microsoft and their dominance in the email space. Now, last time I checked they were 0-1-1 against Microsoft. If you’ll recall Netscape competed against Microsoft in Browser Wars v1.0 and Microsoft absolutely crushed them into non-existence. As far as the success of Firefox, yeah, its been a great product but they weren’t competing against Microsoft, they were in a one-horse race. Microsoft had won so there was no need for innovation in that space. Now I love Firefox as much as the next guy (I’m authoring this post in Firefox) but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. By many accounts they have 20, 25%, maybe even 30% of the browser market share; this is by no means “a huge swath of the market” as Matt puts. Finally, Matt mentions:

To be truly disruptive I believe that Mozilla (or, rather, MailCo) will need to focus on both the e-mail server and client.

Gah?! Really? The last project I heard that was going to do that was called Chandler. I don’t even want to comment further but I will say this; simple works, simple wins. Client/server is about as simple as an Anna Nicole Smith paternity case.

Alright, alright … I’m being a little hard on Matt but I’m trying to make a point. The world wants to love Mozilla and for lots of reasons. Its a great group of people with a noble cause. However, I’m afraid they lack the ability to make hard decisions because of fear of ticking off their “community”. Sometimes you need to make hard decisions and sometimes that angers people. IMHO its better to make a hard decision for the sake of the community (and focus and mission and vision) than to skirt the issue by spinning out a company.

My advice to Mozilla? Do one thing and do it well. Ditch Thunderbird as a product and MailCo as a company. Its not your “main thing” and will only serve to bifurcate Mozilla’s focus. Thunderbird will survive if its meant to. Its an open source project. Focus on your main thing. You do that by encouraging instigators and thinking beyond the browser. Protocols, standards, web services and platforms. Not another answer to email and messaging.

Speaking of “subversive” … let’s not forget that Firefox was built by a couple of renegade (smart) punks that just did it. They said “we’re going this way, fuck process”. It was a small team that made decisions outside of the “best practices” in place at the time. There were other rogue elements that were doing things for the sake of the community outside of the control of the then fledgling MoFo. They all pissed off a lot of the folks at Mozilla/Netscape by going against the grain … and guess what? It worked. For MailCo to succeed they will need to do this too and that may mean biting the hand that feeds … will that be possible? I just don’t know.

My sole hope for success here lies in the fact that David Ascher (the head of MailCo) is a smart, no-nonsense and extremely capable guy. If he can really build an organization that is unique, truly separate from the mother ship and with the ability to quickly get to market, iterate even faster and build a passionate community then they have a fighting chance. The last thing we need is another “Chandler”. If your first goal is to reach out to the Thunderbird community to seek advice on the next best steps you’ve already failed. Whatever it is that changes messaging will be light, easy-to-use, easy to integrate with current workflows and leverage open standards and oodles of existing work. If it starts off with platform or consensus building its doomed.

I really do mean this when I say it; best of luck David and company.

OpenID according to Dave … No, not Dave Recordon … :-) This is from the Vidoop folks.

The OpenID community is full of people that are helping to develop and promote the technology. Its the passion of these individuals out there every single day blogging, talking to people and doing their best to make the proliferation of OpenID a reality.

Snorri Giorgetti is one such individual. Snorri has been working tirelessly in Europe to help consolidate efforts around the OpenID Foundation in Europe. He’s invested his time and personal money to help make OpenID a reality as well as start the work of navigating the complicated IP and trademark landscape in Europe to help protect the communities assets.

I had the chance to meet with Snorri here in Corvallis a couple of weeks ago (he flew out to see me) and it was clear to me that he really gets OpenID. He’s passionate about what OpenID means and is really working hard to get the world out all over Europe.

I took the chance to share this with the OpenID Foundation board last week and wanted to see if there was something we could do to help endorse his work in Europe. After our call last week, we agreed to make Snorri our OpenID Foundation European Representative. Snorri was already active on the board mailing list and we’ll use this relationship as a means to continue to align the work that the US and EU foundations are doing.

This is great news and I hope this opens the door for representatives in other regions across the globe. Thanks Snorri for all of your hard work and keep it up … the best is yet to come … :-)

Its amazing what you can accomplish with a bunch of people in a room … :-) I’m at the Data Sharing Summit and I just led a discussion on “What is the (stinkin’) problem?” The gist is this; what is the problem we’re trying to solve with all of these formats, protocols and solutions we’re hacking up and presenting here this weekend.

Fortunately, we had a great group and got a nice list of use cases that we think describe the problems we’re trying to solve:

• Profile and registration data: How do we quantify and manage profile data across lots of different sites. This is your first/last name, email address, avatar, etc. All of these create your profile.
• Profile update push: I’ve updated something in my profile and now I would like to push it to all of the sites that use this data. New email address? Great, push it out to all of the sites (or IMHO - get it from on place all the time).
• New friend on A, update on B: If I have a new friend in my entire social network, it should now be available to me on any site I visit. New friend on site A, it should update that onto site B. Yes, there are oodles of issues with this; what if I only want to be friends with this user in the context of site A … well, we don’t have an answer for that yet … you’ll have to wait for v2.0 … :-)
• eVite problem: In what can only be deemed really poor brand mojo, we have the eVite problem. Let’s say I want to invite a friend to an event. I have to give the event site, let’s say eVite, the email address of my friend. My friend might not want me to do that or trust the site I’ve given it to but its out of their control. This falls under management of your personal assets and quite honestly, would be like your friend posting your phone number to a sex chat discussion room … you might not want all of *those* calls.
• Share resources once, available everywhere: When I post a video on one site, my friends should see that where ever they are. I shouldn’t have to post on YouTube, Blip or Yahoo! … post it once and people should see it where ever you are. The same is for basic status information (Twitter, Pownce), birthday notices, etc … any resource you might want to share.
• Where did I put that?: The majority of users just use the Internet. Its a mash of a whole bunch of sites and users put content all over the place. How do I quickly and easily see where I put what that I touched, edited, added, uploaded or modified? This is a toughy in my opinion but there was general consensus its a good one.
• Consolidated messaging: This could possibly fall under the ’share once, share everwhere’ category but I do think this merits a separate entry. I don’t want a gazillion messaging systems on every site. I have a Flickr inbox, Yahoo, Gmail, Zooomr, you name it. I don’t want to visit every one. Let me get to a site, any site, and see my messages. This is akin to my belief that you shouldn’t go to social networking sites; social networking (the one that you have) should be a function of every site.
• Friend decay: I dated this girl once … it was a one night stand. She added me as a friend on Facebook. Years later, we don’t talk and probably never will.* How do I decay that relationship so it doesn’t show up as prominent or even valid in my social network? * - I made up that bit about the one night stand and Facebook but you get the idea.

Alright, so its not much but its definitely a start. Lots and lots of work to be done here folks but clearly once we know the problem, its that much easier to start working on the solution … :-)

We launched MyStrands.tv today (blog post) and even Techcrunch picked it up. If you have an account on MyStrands already you can log right into the site and it will give you recommendations on what you might want to watch. This is very cool stuff that leverages our recommender technologies to their fullest extent.

Props go out to the Spanish side of the house that worked hard to get this done in record time. Lots and lots of things coming down the line with MyStrands and I’m excited about what’s up next … :-)