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Amazon and Google In 10 Years
Yesterday, while at my grandfather's 90th birthday party, I was talking to my cousin once removed, who has been involved in the business world for the past 30 years. He's a smart guy and I respect him.
However, over the course of the night, he talked about a couple technology companies. For some reason, he enjoyed predicting their demise. He said that Google would only be a brand name of a larger company in 10 years. He also said that Amazon.com would not exist in 10 years. When trying to press him for reasons to this, I was unable to get much of any answer. I guess he assumed it would be too much for me to understand or something.
To be honest, I highly doubt these companies will be gone. Sure, Google has only been in existence for less than 10 years, but they are currently one of the biggest companies in the world and are nowhere close to being bankrupt. They're one of the few tech companies that are doing many intriguing things. Plus, they are synonymous with "search".
For me, Amazon.com is the same thing as "shopping". Sure, I price compare a bit, but often I end up at Amazon.com anyways. They may not have the lowest price, but they have a great, low price and don't charge me sales tax. Plus, for almost everything, if I order more than $25 they will ship it for free, and those factors usually make it the cheapest. Plus, they're reliable.
There's an interesting interview with Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos on BusinessWeek's site. The founder of the Internet's largest online store talks about the many things they're doing with their online presence, some of which are not that related to shopping. He explains that most of these are just opening up their internal systems for the benefit of others. Also, he talks about the benefit of their customers providing information that computers cannot compute. The biggest point about their process was that they spent the time to get the backend systems working great. That's important.
A couple years ago I ordered a CD from another large online retailer. After a couple months, the retailer sent me an e-mail saying that they could not get the product so they refunded me my order. With Amazon.com I'm sure they got their stuff together and that won't happen. A couple times it has taken them a while to find a product, but their automated systems kept me updated by e-mail on the status of the product ordered. With the other retailer, I was like, "How am I supposed to get the product now? You seriously let me down."
This Is Premium Joke, No?
Two-thirds of the way through the amazing movie Everything Is Illuminated, this conversation happened soon after Peter walked in:
Peter: This movie doesn't make any sense.
Me: That's because you didn't watch the first part of it.
Peter: That's what people say about every movie.
Me: Yeah, and that's probably why they made the first part of the movie as well as the end -- so it makes sense.
Oh well, I thought it was funny at the time. If you want something better than my jokes, just pick up a copy of Cars this week. I know I did.
Shout-Outs
Just a quick post to mention a couple new blogs on my blogroll. They're both great reads.
First up is Justin Walters. He first commented on my blog when I mentioned People of Praise. A couple weeks ago he introduced himself to me. And then a couple days ago, while working on Emmaus Project, I realized that Justin was in the same industry as I. He fooled me with most of his recent posts being over-my-head philosophy and theology stuff.
My lifelong friend Abe Olson apparently has had a blog for a couple weeks and he didn't even tell me! OK, so I guess I should follow my Technorati a bit more studiously. Abe's got some great insights into technology as well as all the fascinating stuff he has been studying in school. He's come a long way from the FFTV Times.
Just a reminder to the avid reader that this is not the only place that I blog (if I ever actually decide to write something). I have a couple posts rolling around in my head for my inReview.net Blog such as a bit about the new delirious? DVD, a documentary I watched this past weekend, and a Red Bull exhibit. So get that page on your Google Reader too.
A Preview For Your Consideration
If you're a fan of Christopher Guest's movies (A Mighty Wind, Best In Show and Waiting For Guffman), then you gotta check this out. This trailer for For Your Consideration is the preview for his new movie. It looks like a fun bash on Hollywood and all its craziness. I enjoyed it. You should too.
Store Up Your Treasures In Heaven
For me, this weekend is one huge celebration of life. Many of my brothers and sisters in Christ are coming to town for the People of Praise covenent making. Myself and a handful of people are making the covenant, many of which I know well. It's going to be great to have many special people in town to celebrate, including my sister. It's so exciting to have many great friends who I am going to live the rest of my life with.
Also, packed into this weekend is also a wedding of a couple friends from the high school days. I hope it's a great celebration, and if you have a chance, pray for Ryan and Anne because they have been sick for the last couple days. It wouldn't be fun to have a wedding when feeling under the weather. Ohh, and praying for good weather is always a good idea too for a wedding.
Learn A New Way To Move
Apparently MetroTransit found some money because there are a handful of new features on the web. The first is a fun new Flash site entitled "Learn A New Way To Move" and located at bustrainrideshare.org. Interesting.
The deisgn is fun and nicely enhanced with Flash. It looks like a well-worn booklet with lots of fun stuff wrote in the margins and hand-written tabs. Fun stuff, and fairly well-deisgned although it could use a non-Flash version.
The other interesting move is a promotion of their busier routes. Routes that come more often then every 15 minutes will be marked as "hi-frequency" routes. The promotional blurbs say that you won't have to check the schedule because you know the bus is coming soon. Of course, thoes doesn't actually reflect any changes in the system, just a promotion of their better-traveled routes. Hopefully it will follow that more routes will be moved up to "hi-frequency" status.
Good Monsters and Community
Today's readings from the Roman Catholic liturgy brought home something I've been thinking about for the past couple days. Here's what Jesus said in Matthew 7:
Hear me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.
From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile.
It reminds me of what Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay said about Tuesday's release, Good Monsters. For the cover story of CCM, he explained:
[Good Monsters is about the process of] maturing in a person's life, coming to grips with incredible good and incredible evil in the same body and being willing to share the bad parts and the good parts with others in the community.
This rings true in my life because the world of Christian community is exactly what I am joining. The past couple days we have been moving into a brand new house. With this move, we have about thirty people living within a block of each other. We're working on bringing "a new way to live" to the University of Minnesota campus. Central to our life is large amounts of common space and having as many daily meals as possible together. We have morning prayer and evening prayer. And we try to keep our lives on a common schedule.
This, I suppose, is a very radical form of community because we keep almost everything in common. But in a couple weeks, I will be joining a larger community. In two weeks I will be giving my life to Christian community. I will say that I love the people in the People of Praise so much that I am willing to bind my life with theirs. There is no fear that I will no like it or not want to be a part of it later in life; its exciting to be a part of the move of God's spirit.
Is there risks? Yes. Is it going to be easy? No. But all of us are "good monsters", are not perfect, but are still OK with that. The editor of CCM said in response to Dan's comments, "I'm certainly not mature enough to intentionally live my life out in community with the kind of humility, gentleness, and risk Dan's talking about. But I aspire to it." I'm not mature in many ways, but I'm deciding to live my life with others for good and bad.
Blogging and "Google Juice"
A book I recently read, Naked Conversations, talks all about the benefits of blogging, and specifically blogging in the corporate world. It was a great read, and maybe someday I'll review the book. But the point I wanted to mention is that the book says blogs get "Google Juice". This "Google Juice" seems to be some brand of magic that makes blogs much more visible on the next and highly ranked by search engines. And, my, do I have an example.
For the past eight years, I've been running cMusicWeb.com, a music review site that I was doing the old-fashioned way. It was just a static site that just looked a lot nicer and more organized than when it was on GeoCities, but technically it wasn't that much better. The site has built a pretty good reputation over those eight years, gathering links from around the web and listed several times on DMOZ. It's gotten pretty well and some artist pages rank well for their respective artists.
In the past four months we've started our transition to inReview.net, our new name and new brand. The site isn't really complete yet, but already its Drupal software and blog-style format have been making waves. A quick look at Yahoo!'s results finds already more links than cMusicWeb.com ever had. Of course, they're not all quality links like cMusicWeb.com had, but links from blog aggregating sites like Technorati and the like are nto bad. I attribute most of it to the pervasiveness of RSS feeds and RSS aggregators.
Of course, hopefully soon it will get us listed in Google. I don't know if this is what people refer to as the "sandbox," but it seems we have to get mroe quality links to gain any ranking in Google. Or maybe we just have to be out there for a while. We'll see.
A Terrible Commute
Tonight it took me over two hours to get home.
As most know, I usually take the MetroTransit Hiawatha Light Rail line to and from work. Today was no exception, although I was very disconcerted when no trains showed up between 5:20 and 5:40 at my stop (not even going in the other direction).
Finally, about then, they said that the trains were not travelling down the middle section of the line. I've seen trains be shutdown before, and usually they are fairly quick to bring buses in to reroute people, but for some reason the official word on the platform is terribly slow to get out. I mean, whenever there is a problem, I always have to wait at least 20 minutes before they even tell me why a train isn't coming.
After a train finally came and took us northbound, we got to the part where the buses were to come. And sure enough, there were three buses there within 10 minutes, which was a great response. The MetroTransit employee who was there told us that someone had been killed while trying to cross in front of a train. That's too bad. Twenty minutes later, the bus drove by the scene of the accident, and there was certainly a ton of emergency vehicles. If i could see better, I would tell you about the scene, and although I couldn't see anything terribly wrong (just all blocked off), most of the other passengers could.
Now that I'm home, I now read that a 30-something man on a bike was hit by the train while trying to cross the intersection. As the MetroTransit employee said to us a Fort Snelling, it's another reminder not to try to race the train. This is the third fatal accident on MetroTransit's only light rail line, the first one not involving a motor vehicle, I believe.
My FireFox Plugin Essentials
I just told Jeremy that someday I might list off my current FireFox plugins, and I guess today is just as good as any other. So here they are:
- Gmail Notifier - If you have Gmail and your own Windows account, it automatically checks how much Gmail you have. I have mine set so that when I click on the Gmail icon in my FireFox statusbar, it opens my Gmail (already logged in) in another tab.
- FoxyTunes - If you listen to music on your computer, like I do during every minute I'm on my computer, then you need FoxyTunes. It'll take the song information and give you player controls for your favorite music player right in your statusbar. I usually have my iTunes minimized to the Windows Taskbar, so the player controls are there, but it's great to have a display of what song is playing scrolling right above the controls while browsing.
- IE Tab - That's right, don't open that pesky Internet Explorer ever again. While browsing with this plugin, you can right-click on any link and it select to "Open in IE Tab" which is a FireFox tab running Internet Explorer. Also, at any time, click the FireFox logo to toggle the current page to IE vieweing. Great for seeing how your website will look in the competitor's browser.
- Web Developer Toolbar - If you work on websites at all (like I do), then you definitely need this one. It gives you a whole toolbar to debug websites with. You can easily disable JavaScript, disable CSS, and much, much more. Some of my favorites are the CSS it uses to display the class and ID names or the outlines of every block-level element. It's a lifesaver for figuring out the pesky CSS spacing problems (and much more).
- HTML Validator - If you make websites (again), you need this. It validates your page and shows you if it passed or not right on your statusbar. It also gives the validation errors right in the "View Source" window too. Great stuff.
- ColorZilla - Need a color palette but don't want to open PhotoShop? Want to get that color right off the page? No more need to take a screenshot, this little utility in the bottom left corner of your FireFox window is a full-featured color picker. Click on it and then anywhere on the webpage to pull the color. Double-click on it to get a full, PhotoShop-style picker.
- MeasureIt - This one may not be needed because the Web Developer Toolbar (mentioned above) has a ruler built in the latest version, but this one is more handy. That is, it sits in the bottom-left of your browser window and is activated with just one click. Select a square of web page real estate and find find out how many pixels it occupies.
So there you have it. Use these powers well and use them wisely. And if you have some extension you think I really need to check out, put it in the comments.