Category Archives: Net Culture

Now They Just Laugh

I’ve been meeting a lot of new people in New York, some socially, others through the painful urban raindance known as the apartment search. When the question comes up of what I do for a living, I’m painfully reminded of the state of our industry. Where once a new acquaintance might have been impressed, now he or she just laughs. Ha ha. Sigh.

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ActiveBuddy

ActiveBuddyThe thing about the Internet is that sometimes things sitting right below your nose day-in and day-out just reach out and slap you across the face. Take instant messaging, for example — I’m a habitual user of AOL Instant Messenger. I’m rarely ever online and not logged onto that service, which is to say that I depend on it heavily to communicate with a lot of the people in my professional and personal lives. And yet, I never really thought through all of the potential that the instant messaging medium offers.

The engineers over at ActiveBuddy have. They’ve developed an amazing product that allows anyone with an IM client to retrieve information from a bot (send an instant message to the screen name “SmarterCousin” on AIM to see for yourself). You can get the usual portal stuff: news, weather, sports, stocks, movie listings etc. That alone is kind of impressive, though also weirdly reminiscent of command-line interfacing with remote servers through a dumb terminal. What’s really cool though is to think about combining this with some really kick-ass AI. Wow…

Thanks to Eddie at The OFP for the tip.

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Reboot

The Web design community — typified by the hotshots featured at Kaliber 10000 — inspires ambivalence in me. On the one hand, it’s a loose collective that’s capable of incredibly diverse expression and experimentation. I’m regularly amazed by what these design jockeys are capable of accomplishing without even a hint of monetary compensation. The community’s existence would almost be enough to refute the idea that lone geniuses are a thing of the past, if it weren’t for the fact that it can also seem mired in a kind of premature (and often immature) dogma — a male-centric sense of bravado and one-upmanship. Both sides are at play in the Reboot effort, being hosted by THREE.OH — an impressive and frankly ingenious organized intiative that aims to relaunch a host of redesigned personal Web sites on 01 May 01.

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The Flying Web

MaxMilesI’ve just spent a few hours trying to book a ticket for a trip in March. After entering my travel dates at least two dozen times on various travel sites, I can say that the American Airlines site is the probable best of a pretty sorry lot — anyway, that’s where I ended up spending my money.

Microsoft’s Expedia isn’t bad when taken strictly for its design and usability, but better fares can be found if you hunt directly on each airline’s own site, which kind of obviates its whole existence. The one bright spot I came across, MaxMiles.com, won’t help you book a flight, but it will allow you to manage all of your frequent flyer accounts from a single place — which is a delight to anyone who travels as much as I do.

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A List of Things I Consumed

This is a little late, but in December, the lists came out—‘best of’ lists, what’s in and what’s out lists, lists of New Year’s resolutions etc. So I figured, what the heck, I may as well make a list. I mean, that’s kind of what Internet content is all about— realizing the compulsion to express an opinion, regardless of intrinsic value — right?

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