tudor.totolici

Spymaster, the somewhat controversial and addictive Twitter-based game obviously doesn’t work nearly as well when Twitter is down. In fact, it doesn’t work at all. The creators have made a fun little Fail Whale graphic of their own, indicating the the game will be down until Twitter comes back up.

“The Directorate can’t assassinate the failwhale,” the message on the site reads. Funny, but this is a serious problem for a growing number of services that are built using Twitter as their backbone. Even FriendFeed looks like a ghost-town right now with no Twitter messages coming in.

Did we really get so attached to this service in our day to day lives?

If you think about it, call-to-actions are really a natural result of most human interactions. You call a friend to chit-chat and before you hang up, you ask her to have lunch together tomorrow. She thinks about her schedule for a moment and says “Sure, let’s do that”.

Even in day to day interactions, people react to call to actions that are coherent with what they are currently feeling or thinking. It flows on from an initial encounter: Here is how you can get even more of the same. Here is how you can continue down the path of success. Here is how you can share your love (or hate) for this brand.

If you want someone to spread the word about your content or service, ask them directly. They will do it even if you don’t give them an incentive. This is what I believe from experience.

Modesty and pride are usually the main obstacles. You don’t want to come off as too conceited and you’re too proud to beg. So you publish free content and give away free tools without asking for anything in return. But if you’re interested in reputation or revenue, this won’t help you at all.

If you give away free content, you should not only ask why you are doing so but learn to embed call to actions in some of them. Don’t be too modest or proud to tell someone what you want them to do for you. And never underestimate the power of reciprocity.

The Google Drive, or “GDrive”, could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive. Instead a user’s personal files and operating system could be stored on Google’s own servers and accessed via the internet. Or so i have been readeing the last past weeks.

The long-rumoured GDrive is expected to be launched this year and is beeing described it as “the most anticipated Google product so far”. It is seen as a paradigm shift away from Microsoft’s Windows operating system in favour of “cloud computing”.

The GDrive would follow this logic to its conclusion by shifting the contents of a user’s hard drive to the Google servers. The PC would be a simpler, cheaper device acting as a portal to the web, perhaps via an adaptation of Google’s operating system for mobile phones, Android.

What do you think? Will we get to the point where our computer will be more likely software rather than hardware?

If you get a haircut and you don’t like it, you still pay. If you get a massage, and it was a crappy one, you still pay. If you eat at a restaurant and the food just wasn’t what you were hoping for, you still pay. Hotel rooms, car washes, concerts… The same concept applies for creative services.

I assume the client reviewed my portfolio before he/she hired you.  (If they didn’t, they’re not a smart consumer, which isn’t my fault.) They should know i would produce work in the same style and of the same quality. But whay do i do in case on of the clients doesn’t like my work? How can you, somehow put in the breif a section that helps you find out more about the type of person you are dealing with?

Nobody seems to be talking about the biggest problem of all with Windows 7. Each and every application has a different menu system: messenger, media player, paint/wordpad, calculator, picture viewer etc.

I can’t see how this could be a feature nor a bug. What do you think?

Defining Web 2.0 has been something like a fun parlor game for a few years now. There’s a long history of people trying to come up with a unified definition of Web 2.0. But like the elusive theory of everything in physics, a single, agreed-upon definition of what Web 2.0 really means has been hard to come by.

Probably the most widely accepted definition is Tim O’Reilly’s compact definition: “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

What we generally like to think of as Web 2.0 is “Upgrade your online image,”  joining relevant online social communities like LinkedIn, and Twitter, blogging, and making sure your profiles at other social sites are clean of college party photos.

In reality, Web 2.0 has always been a marketing term. The confusion over Web 2.0 — whatever it means and however it is now being used — has been helpful. The discussion that those terms have prompted have been helpful, I think, in figuring out where the web is going and how we’re going to get there; and that’s what is important.

Apple has just announced that this January’s MacWorld event will be the company’s last, and that Steve Jobs won’t be giving the event’s much-anticipated keynote. I find this fascinating. First there is the opinion that Apple wants to lunch products as they are ready to sell and not wait to make a major announcement in January or July. Also rumors say that this decision has to do with Steve Job’s health.

Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers.

It is because of the trade shows that blogs across the land halt EVERYTHING and dedicate that hour or so for headlining everything Apple announce.  They are a major player in providing the Hype that Apple has received, most in part due to the trade shows, the “secrets”, the skepticism. On the other hand there is nothing stopping Apple hosting their own special events, as they often do. They get the same hype, and cost a  lot less.  So the answer can not be here, in the lack of marketing ROI.

Microsoft runs its developer conference and Apple will no doubt continue to run its WWDC event.  But what can be the motive for this decision that created a lot of rumor among fans all over the internet?

Everybody is making predictions for 2009  (or not). This is always a hot trend for the end of the year. But what about 2010 and beyond? Here is what i think:

• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
• Tribes will be defined by social enclaves on the Internet, rather than by geography or kinship.
• Copyright will be dead in the digital world.
• Most people will have happily traded their privacy for consumer benefits such as increased convenience and lower prices.
• In a reaction to the virtual world we will establish zones (bars, clubs) where reality is not augmented.

What do you think will happen?

The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version.

Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.

One thing i find interesting about this version besides the all talked about auto-update feature is that every screen is customizable. Let’s say you never care about author on your post listings — just click “Screen Options” and uncheck it and it’s instantly gone from the page. The same for any module on the dashboard or write screen.

Here is the official video showing more of the options:

Soon after Tasks and SMSes, Gmail has just added a its own viewer that lets you view PDFs in your Web browser. It’s blazing fast, and it does include a search function, and lets you download or print the PDF if you really need to.

There are two other benefits to this, the first being the updated page view which lets you hop around the document a whole lot faster. The other is the built-in zoom, which scales the text to fit your monitor with a higher degree of detail than the text resizer found in your browser.

However before you try it out yourself you need to know the new PDF viewer doesn’t seem to work in Firefox, but works just fine in Chrome. Is this the beginning of a pattern of Google not playing nice with Mozilla?