Does this mean that Google is about to roll out full Google Voice support for Canada, or just that they forgot to plug a hole in the code that that’s supposed to prevent non-US accounts from using the service?

Google Voice on my Android phone would be fantastic, because I could make unlimited North American phone calls on (say) a 6 GB, $30/month data plan instead of paying the world’s highest cell phone bills for (limited) voice and long distance. I’m sure Rogers and other mobile carriers won’t be happy about that, but I hope their lobbyists can’t stop it.

Java is dead.

A lot of developers have thought they were too hip for Java, but I still liked it. I implemented SAX in Java first of all, and have developed software in Java and encouraged my enterprise customers to use it for many years, sometimes in 9-figure projects at Fortune-500 companies — it’s a great, mature platform, with a lot of tools for managing large projects and development teams, and it has unit-testing and IDE support that is second to none.

But now, Oracle (which recently bought Sun) has decided to sue Google for using Java in Android, even though (a) Sun long ago open sourced Java, and (b) Google built its own VM anyway. I very much hope that Oracle will suffer the same humiliating, crushing, well-deserved defeat that the SCO group suffered when it went after Linux with its own bogus law suits, but it will take years for that to happen. The Android and Blackberry mobile operating systems will be fine, and Java (of a sort) will live on there (though I still recommend web apps instead of phone apps), but the days of Java and Eclipse in the enterprise are finished.

In the meantime, there are lots of open alternatives to Java, and the litigation risks of using Java have suddenly become far too high. In my consulting work, I’ll reluctantly have to advise customers not to use Java for any new projects, and to consider migrating older projects to a different platform. If you’re a big company or government, you just can’t afford the risk that Oracle will come after you, too.

I’m sorry the end was so sudden and messy, but still, it was a great 15 years. Thanks to James Gosling and all the other people in the Java community for the memories and opportunities.

Summary: Mobile web users’ needs differ by more than UI features (small touch screen): they may check information more often, and expect it to be fresher.

Last night, I finally got around to installing Google Analytics on ourairports.mobi, the mobile version (for pre-smartphones) of ourairports.com, and this morning, I got my first stats: all of 3 visits yesterday (vs. 1,677 for the non-mobile site).

I expect that number to climb when the site is collecting stats for a complete 24-hour day, but already, I’ve noticed a significant difference in use:

Of course, the mobile sample is too small to be statistically significant, but it still made me think about how a mobile user will use the site:

• A desktop user at home may check information for an airport once while planning a flight (as pilot or airline passenger).
• A mobile user, at or on the way to the airport, will keep checking for changes (new weather forecast, NOTAMs, etc.), constantly updating the same few pages.

A closer look at the analytics confirms that hypothesis, with a small number of airports updated multiple times (there were four pageviews for Sunbury Airfield in Australia, for example).

Further hypothesis: timely data is important for all web users, but it may be disproportionately important for mobile users. If this is true, it’s probably worth spending less time trying to make your mobile site (or app) look like a fourth-year graphic design college project, and more time making sure that it has the best, and most recent information.

I’ll watch the analytics for ourairports.mobi over the next month to see if this trend continues.

So what happened last week?  Did Google backtrack after getting caught trying to be evil about net neutrality and the mobile internet, or were they a victim of a misunderstanding (gleefully amplified by blood-thirsty Apple and RIM supporters)?

Net neutrality is a crucial issue for those of us who care about open information.  We believe that the Internet is a public thoroughfare, where every information provider has the same access.  Competing web sites shouldn’t have their traffic slowed down because Google or Microsoft paid more money to Verizon, Rogers, or Bell, any more than you should have to pull to the side of the road to let someone in a more expensive car pass you.

Carriers in search of a business plan

For obvious reasons, the Internet providers don’t see it that way. They’ve ended up stuck in the rut of commodity service, with the inevitable race to the bottom for price, and are desperate to find some new revenue.  The mobile Internet providers are a little better off because they can at least lock customers into three-year contracts by giving them subsidized smartphones, but it’s still clear that someone like Verizon would be thrilled be able to take a big bag of money from Google in exchange for letting Google sites load a little faster than anyone else’s.

It turns out, though, that that’s not what Google was trying to do.

Neutral in what sense?

The Google-Verizon kerfuffle draws attention to a different, and trickier part of the debate.  What if, instead of discriminating by provider (Google vs Facebook), carriers discriminated by traffic type? In other words, what if streaming audio and video got priority handling to avoid jerky playback, while e-mail was delayed an extra 2-4 seconds? All streaming video would get the same treatment, whether it comes from YouTube or a student’s dorm-room start-up, and all e-mail would get the same treatment, whether it’s from IBM or a LOL cats fan list.

According to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, this is what Verizon and Google were talking about all along: not favouring one provider over another, but favouring one content type over another.

Is it still evil?

I expect that many people who support net neutrality for providers won’t feel so strongly about net neutrality for content types, because it doesn’t have the same appearance of unfairness.

Going back to the thoroughfare analogy, we have sidewalks where only pedestrians are allowed, paths where only cyclists are allowed, crossings that pedestrians aren’t allowed to use, and superhighways where only motor vehicles are allowed. Buses and carpoolers are sometimes allowed to use a faster lane, trucks are sometimes required to stay in the slower lanes, and so on.  Why can’t we have different lanes for different kinds of network traffic, too?

Net neutrality makes sense for content types, too

There are, however, four compelling arguments in favour of net neutrality by content type as well as provider:

1. Pandora’s Box — it seems straight-forward enough to give streaming video priority over email, but how far might carriers take it? Will carriers throttle IM during the next G8 summit to make it harder for protesters to organize? Will government regulators prefer content types that are more popular among the old than the young?
2. Business/content-type alignment — as the owner of the world’s top video site, Google has a strong interest in making video on the mobile web faster, even if it means that its competitors’ videos are faster too. This kind of thing could turn evil fast — imagine Adobe and Apple in a bidding war to determine whether Flash should be delivered faster or slower than other content types, or the recording industry lobbying to throttle bittorrent so much that it becomes useless.
3. Innovation — the Internet already existed when HTML and HTTP arrived on the scene 20 years ago. If the net hadn’t been neutral then, perhaps priority would have gone to important existing protocols like telnet and FTP, and HTTP (and HTML) might have been slow enough to turn off early adopters. We don’t know what The Next Big Thing will be, but we do know that regulators respond slowly to change. Why shut the door on innovation?
4. Routing around censorship — seriously, how long will it take a few enterprising developers to realize that they can build an “accelerated download” app that allows other traffic to masquerade as video (or whatever has top priority). Seconds? Less? You can make anything look like anything else on the Internet, and everyone thinks that his/her traffic is most important.

It’s OK to be wrong sometimes

Google is a company that embraces failure, which, perhaps, is why it has so many successes: Google puts products out early, lets us play with them, then feeds the ones that succeed (e.g. Gmail) and kills the ones that don’t (e.g. Wave).

Perhaps Google is willing to try the same thing with ideas — they’re not necessarily evil for suggesting dropping net neutrality for content types, but they are wrong. Let’s treat the whole thing as a failed project and move on, concentrating on making the net (mobile or desktop) faster for all providers, and all content types.

The Balisage 2010 conference runs next week in beautiful Montreal, focusing on XML and other markup technologies. I cannot make it this year, unfortunately, but I gave some help (far too little) to Sam Wilmott to organize the silent auction.

The Balisage silent auction will raise money to help students and other young, up-and-coming markup stars to defray the cost of attending the conference: the auction includes O’Reilly books, various enterprise software licenses, and geeky memorabilia. We’re encouraging participants to splurge, and try to outdo each-other by overpaying for things. Most of us can’t afford to blow $20-50M on a bizjet, but we can certainly drop $50 on a $25 O’Reilly book and then brag about it to our friends.

Think of it this way — Montreal, with its Vegas-of-the-North attitude towards sin, offers far less savoury places to stick a few $20 bills. Why not put them somewhere that you won’t have to lie about when you get home?

Now that I’ve had a few weeks to play with my Nexus One, I’m starting to grok the gut-level experience of living with a smart phone. I understand why people download apps, how it feels to have the Internet with me everywhere, and what it’s like to experience the web by touch on a screen that’s only a few centimetres square.

Past

Device-specific apps are sweet and shiny at first, but after a couple of weeks, it becomes obvious that many of them are the encore of the floppy-based PC shareware world of the 1980s and early 1990s (SEND $5 TO GET RID OF THE ANNOYING ADS! ONLY $10 FOR THE FULL VERSION!).

Discovering an interesting app through Apple’s or Android’s market (or taking a picture of a barcode on your computer screen) is surprisingly awkward compared to just following a link from one web site to another, and as we’ve learned from the postal service, the telegraph, the telephone, email, and the web, connectivity always wins in the end.

Future

Web apps run everywhere and connect to each-other seamlessly, and HTML5 allows a well-written web app to do almost everything a closed, device-specific app can do on a smart phone — many of the mobile web sites I’ve used (hello, Google!) are as good as or better than the corresponding device-specific apps. There are some things, though, that make mobile web apps stand apart:

• The built-in buttons on your smartphone are tied to the browser, not to the app, so the Android menu or search button (for example) brings up a browser menu or search box, not an app one.
• For good security reasons, a web app will probably never have as much access to the filesystem and device hardware as a closed device-specific app (do you want a malicious web app to be able to turn on your video camera when you’re browsing in bed? do you ever consider that when you give a downloaded app access to your camera?).
• While HTML5 supports notifications, you have to actually be on the web page to receive them. That can be fixed by allowing the browser to launch web pages automatically on start/restart, but it’s still more awkward than an autostart app.
• Web app processes need to be managed from inside the browser, not from a device-wide process manager.
• As far as I know, there’s no way for a web app to install its own icon on the device home screen — the user has to install it manually (though it’s pretty easy).

I don’t consider most of these to be a big deal, but they do point to the fact that no matter how much extra functionality HTML5 provides, web apps have a different world view: they’re nodes in a huge network, not standalone silos.

Present

I’ll probably have to continue to use a device-specific app for anything related to playing music or capturing photos/video for a while longer, and I’ll hang onto the Android WiFi analyzer I’m running on my phone. Android has a lot of the same apps that show up in iPhone commercials (like Urban Spoon), but while they’re pretty, they’re limited in the end — there’s way more out there on the web than there will ever be an an app store.

If you’re an person or organization that wants to interact with people on mobile devices, you have two choices:

1. You can develop and maintain separate apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm, and any other smart-phone OS’s that may come along, and let the phone vendors be gatekeepers between you and your users.
2. You can run a single mobile web app on your own server, one that’s only a click away from any other web site that links to it.

The first option lets you force an icon onto the users desktop, but the direct development costs and opportunity costs of losing inbound links and search-engine love just seem too high.

I left this comment on Simon St-Laurent’s interesting and thoughtful post How dare Apple … (which, in turn, was partly a response to Tim Bray’s post Nothing Creative).

I don’t believe that most things, including the iPad, are obviously right or wrong, but I do have serious concerns that go beyond simply not being able to code on an iPad (at least, until there’s an app for that). I’m copying my comment here to give it a more permanent home. If I hadn’t posted this yet, I’d edit it to tone down the emotional language 10% or so, but still, it’s a fair reflection of my thoughts and concerns, not about the iPad itself (it’s just another consumer device), but about the way people are starting to talk and think about issues that are very important to me, like software freedom:

The thing about creativity is that it responds poorly to central planning and central control. I have no problem with the fact that the iPad isn’t developer-friendly — I can buy a Netbook with twice the power for half the price and code on it (and, BTW, that netbook makes just as simple a consumer device).

My problem is the idea that a single Apple politburo controls everything that can appear on the device. Is that the future? Even in the bad old days of TV, before cable, there were 3 1/2 US networks to choose from, not just one – you had to watch TV outside the US to see just how bad things could get with a single, government-controlled broadcaster (I grew up in Canada, but close enough to watch the US stations, thank god).

Apple’s obsession with central control goes beyond software to hardware. There must be some kind of port for the optional keyboard to plug into, but no way it’s going to be USB or Firewire, because that might let someone use an *unplanned* creative device on the iPad, someone creative daring not to give Apple its cut (and veto). If I build something clever for creative people using a USB interface, it will work with desktop towers, notebooks, netbooks, and even some small portable devices, but *not* with the iPad.

Apple has some smart people working there, but they won’t always have the best ideas, and Apple has thrown up too many barriers to other people with smart ideas. The best apps in the future are going to come from a couple of students coding in a dorm room, and they might just be so annoyed by Apple censorship that they defect to a freer platform. It’s sad that things have gotten to the point that even Windows is a freer platform than Apple.

Safety vs. money

Here’s a simple example: let’s say that you want to go on a two-hour scheduled flight, and that the odds of you dying on the flight come out to about 1 in 1 million (it’s actually lower, but let’s keep the math simple). Your ticket costs $400 with taxes.

Now, I start an airline that adds all kinds of extra safety features and procedures, and over the years, it proves itself twice as safe as the average, so your odds of dying are only 1 in 2 million. However, your ticket would cost $600 with taxes on my airline.

Will you buy the more expensive ticket? If not, then you’ve decided that your life is worth less than $200 million dollars (for every million people who paid the extra $200, one would be saved from death, in the unlikely event that I managed to get the simple math right) — a big number, still, but no longer “priceless”. Decide how much extra you would pay for the ticket ($5? $10? $50?) and multiply by 1 million — that’s what your life’s worth to you.

Safety vs. time and pleasure

Of course, time is as much of a commodity as money. How much time do you save by flying between cities instead of taking the train, or driving across town instead of taking the bus? How much extra risk of death did you assume by making that choice? Again, you can do the math, and decide what value (in saved time) you put on your life. Ditto for your hobbies — downhill skiing is more dangerous than playing Wii, but you’ve decided that the value of your life is less than the extra enjoyment divided by the extra risk of dying (where risk is < 1.0).

It’s perfectly normal

Risk taking is normal for humans, and most of the time we don’t actually do the math — we just make a snap judgement of the value of our lives and the effects of our choices based on instinct. This matters, though, because we (where “we” = American, Canadian, British, Australian, etc) are now electing governments that promise to spend more money to make us safer, and much of that money ends up going into blowing up central Asian villages, spying on our communications, and groping us at airports.

Valuing lives

Is it helping? If we’d spent the same amount of money building better flu clinics, fast intercity trains or even better-lit intersections, could we have saved more lives in our own countries? If we’d invested even one percent of that money into sewers, clean water or earthquake-resistant hospitals for the developing world, how many lives could we have saved there?

Putting a dollar value on a life isn’t a crass, corporate, conservative thing — it’s a way of deciding where to spend money most effectively. If I could save one life for every $2 million spent on road improvements, and one life for every $200 million spent on improved airport security, where should I spend that money?

Where are people dying?

Let’s end with fatality numbers for the U.S. in 2001, the worst year for terrorism on U.S. soil:

Influenza and pneumonia: 63,730

Traffic accidents: 42,196

Terrorist attacks: 2,973

If you’d had billions of dollars to spend to save lives nine years ago, where would you have spent it first? Where would you spend it now? That depends not only on the overall numbers, of course, but the amount you have to spend to save each life. I’m not sure we know that, but I suspect that it’s much higher for anti-terrorism efforts than for basic road or healthcare improvements.

Case in point: in the information technology world, the greatest accomplishment of the most talented coders and business people in GenX was replacing the Baby Boomers’ nasty old platform-dependent shrink-wrapped computer applications with open web applications that could run anywhere, from a Windows desktop to a Linux cell phone. Write once, run all over the place on any hardware/OS you want. GMail instead of Eudora. Wikipedia instead of Encarta. Cool, eh?

So GenY comes along and says “hey: instead of encouraging people to browse the web with open standards, let’s build proprietary applications that run on only one type of mobile phone. And we’ll allow only one store to sell those applications for each type of phone, and every proprietary, platform-specific app will have to be preapproved and precensored by the phone manufacturer, who will extort^H^H^H^H^H^H be gladly offered a cut of sales.” Even Microsoft in its monopolistic hey-day — before it became the toothless lion it is today — never had the balls to try anything like that with Windows apps.

Who, ten years ago, would have predicted an IT catastrophe like this after so much progress and hope? It’s enough to make a person cry. Let’s encourage those GenY’ers who taken up the torch and continue to work on the dream of an open web.

The “Airport” tab has bold text, and a white background that runs smoothly into the rest of the page, while the other tabs have a light-blue background, blue text, and a line at the bottom separating them from the page — that should make it obvious to everyone that “Airport” represents the current page, while the others represent alternative pages that you can view by clicking on them.

Right?

Err, maybe not. Even though it doesn’t look linky, the active tab is still, by a lucky coincidence, a link, so I was able to track it using the Google Analytics Site Overlay out-link tracker (note that it’s not actually a click tracker, even if it looks like one). I have over 40,000 airport pages like this, so I can’t check every one, but the few dozen I looked at all told the same, sad story…

People don’t get tabbed interfaces

On most airport pages, the majority of user clicks were on the active “Airport” tab. In other words, people go to the page, see the word “Airport” in bold in a prominent position, and click on it. They don’t notice that it’s the active tab — maybe they don’t know that it’s a tab at all. They just figure that it must have more information about the airport they’re looking at.

For example, on the Heathrow Airport page over the past month, Google Analytics tracked 17 outlinks to the same page (via the active “Airport” tab), 5 to airport arrivals, 4 to airport departures, and 0-2 for every other link.

Once they click on what I thought they’d recognize as the active airport tab, the same page just reloads. Blech. I assume that’s when they get sick of the site, and go back to their Google search results to find a better page about the airport.

Tabs encourage information clutter

So the tabbed interface just leads to confusion and frustration from many of the visitors to my web site. But there’s another problem evident from the the outlink stats: tabs encourage a designer to present too many options in too many contexts. The tabs are all visible on every page they cover, but most of the time, they represent information that the users don’t actually need, and there’s no clear visual cue that some of the tabs (e.g. arrivals and departures) are a lot more interesting than others (e.g. the airport page’s change history).

Here, for example, are the last month’s outlink counts for each of the tabs on the Myrtle Beach International Airport page:

For reasons I don’t understand, this was the most-visited airport page on OurAirports last month, with 371 pageviews (300 uniques). It’s a little atypical, in that the active tab is not the most clicked (though it’s still unacceptably high), but otherwise, it shows the picture well. The “Pilot info” tab has existed for only a few days, so we can leave it out, but in general, it’s clear that the main thing accomplished by the tabs is showing a lot of links at the top of every page that no one actually wants to use. I suspect that even the four clicks on the “Visitors” tab were accidental — instead of trying to see what OurAirports members have visited the airport, people were probably just looking for visitor information.

How to redesign?

So if (a) tabs aren’t actually intuitive for most of my visitors, and (b) they fail to distinguish useful/popular information from more esoteric information, then they have to go. It’s going to take me a while to redesign the site, but what I think I’ll do is highlight the 3-5 most useful actions for each type of page in a side bar beside the map, like this:

Show me…

• arrivals or departures
• visitor comments
• pilot information
• nearby airports
• points of interest
• more…

A list like this, as opposed to tabs, provides a clear call to action for a page visitor, providing more detailed options in language that will make sense to them. It highlights useful information they might have missed in a tab (e.g. pilot info) or a section lower on the page (e.g. Visitor comments), and hides stuff they rarely need in a menu that appears only on demand, when they click “More…”.

Farewell, tabs. Even if you weren’t helpful, you were fun to design with CSS and rounded-corner images.

• The OpenWave browser is horrendous, ignoring character encoding, randomly skipping some simple CSS, etc., but it’s one of the most common on small cell phones, so you have to live with it.
• Some Nokia browsers will accept a 302 redirect but consider a 303 to be an HTTP error.
• Cell phone browsers all seem to display the title element at the top of the screen, so if you have the same text in title and h1, it will appear twice, probably filling the whole first page. If I leave it out, though, what happens on bigger screens like the iPhone or Blackberry?
• Breadcrumbs are a bad idea for mobile pages, because they use a lot of screen real-estate on a cell phone. I might move mine to the bottom.
• Making too many things into links is a bad idea, because it takes a long time to scroll though them.
• Even small graphics take a long time to load. If there’s no good reason, don’t make people download any. Including your corporate logo is not a good reason. Use colors instead of graphics when you can.
• OpenWave (and, I assume, other browsers) do not choose intelligent default font sizes for h1, etc. — they’ll fill the whole screen if you don’t change them with CSS.
• When only a couple of dozen words fit on a screen at once, verbosity is a bad thing. Ask yourself “can I say it with fewer words”? Then do the same thing four or five times more. I’m still working on that.
• Short previews are a good idea for things like comment lists, to save scrolling time. Leave out as much as possible (for example, I don’t give the date of a comment unless the user views the full comment).
• Always including “jump to” links at the top of every page to save scrolling.
• Extra stuff you’d normally put at the top of a web page, like a search box, login info, home link, etc., belongs at the bottom of a mobile web page, so that users don’t have to scroll past it to get to the content.

I’ll add more as I discover it.

The Google App Engine (GAE) is the newest of the major cloud computing platforms for hosting web applications. I’ve been experimenting with it for a couple of days, and will post my impressions later. For now, I thought it might be interesting to try to make sense of the pricing.

Unlike many of the other platforms, GAE starts out free. Only when you pass the built-in quotas do you start paying for infrastructure usage.

Google has designed its free quotas to allow approximately 5 million pageviews per month. Before we look at what Google charges for passing that limit, let’s look at this number from a business perspective. (Obviously, it will vary wildly depending on what a site does: a well-designed, read-intensive site might be able to get 10 million pageviews or more without passing the quota, while a poorly-designed, write-intensive site might struggle to fit in 1 million. We’ll just stick with Google’s estimate for now.)

Dual-licensing is a popular Open Source business model, especially using the (very restrictive) Gnu General Public License (GPL). Popular opinion, as reflected (for example) in the comments on this blog posting, says that it’s either forbidden or highly questionable to do things like linking non-GPL things with GPL things, so enterprises will have to buy a dual-licensed version (instead of using the free GPL version of the software) to take advantage of closed-source enterprise components.

I run a community airport website named OurAirports, so it’s not unusual for me to get e-mail from smaller airports and flying clubs with updates, but big airports have never bothered with me.

As one would expect, O’Hare Airport’s existing web site makes no mention of a new, updated site. In this scam the scammer is not phishing for personal information or trying to scam money, but instead, is trying to get pagerank over the official O’Hare site by tricking thousands of sites into providing links.

What are they looking for? Given that the e-mail traces back to a site called huntparking.com, I’ll guess that they want to use the web traffic either to sell ads for airport parking or to sell their own parking.

The e-mail and whois info are below. Nicely done, by the way — the fake site is much better designed than O’Hare’s real site, and even the markup snippet in the e-mail is XHTML-compatible. Perhaps O’Hare Airport should consider hiring the designer instead of bringing charges.

The message

Message-ID:
From: "Chicago O'Hare Airport"
To: [removed]
Subject: New Chicago O'Hare International Airport website
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-Mailer: Microsoft Windows Mail 6.0.6001.18000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.0.6001.18049
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - host.huntparking.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - ourairports.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [47 12] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - ohare-airport.org

To whom it may concern:

We are proud to announce the launch of the new Chicago O'Hare =
International Airport website www.ohare-airport.org. It provides =
comprehensive real time flight information on arrivals, departures and =
delays, terminals and maps, parking, transportation, directions, food =
and shopping, hotels, etc.

If you find our website to be of value to you and your readers, we would =
appreciate it if you could add a link to us at your URL =
http://www.ourairports.com/airports/KORD/ where, in our opinion, it =
would be the most relevant.=20

Alternatively, you can utilize the customized link code provided below =
(just cut and paste):

Chicago O'Hare =
airport
If you have any questions, please, do not hesitate to contact us. Thank =
you for your time and consideration.

Kind regards,

Natalia Klimovich
Website Administrator
www.ohare-airport.org

Whois Information for ohare-airport.org

Domain ID:D155295366-LROR
Domain Name:OHARE-AIRPORT.ORG
Created On:07-Feb-2009 08:45:01 UTC
Last Updated On:09-Apr-2009 03:54:26 UTC
Expiration Date:07-Feb-2010 08:45:01 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:GoDaddy.com, Inc. (R91-LROR)
Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT RENEW PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:GODA-059235088
Registrant Name:Alexei Pavlovitch
Registrant Street1:240 E Illinois
Registrant Street2:apt 1202
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Chicago
Registrant State/Province:Illinois
Registrant Postal Code:60611
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.3125936015
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:alex.pavlovitch@gmail.com
Admin ID:GODA-259235088
Admin Name:Alexei Pavlovitch
Admin Street1:240 E Illinois
Admin Street2:apt 1202
Admin Street3:
Admin City:Chicago
Admin State/Province:Illinois
Admin Postal Code:60611
Admin Country:US
Admin Phone:+1.3125936015
Admin Phone Ext.:
Admin FAX:
Admin FAX Ext.:
Admin Email:alex.pavlovitch@gmail.com
Tech ID:GODA-159235088
Tech Name:Alexei Pavlovitch
Tech Street1:240 E Illinois
Tech Street2:apt 1202
Tech Street3:
Tech City:Chicago
Tech State/Province:Illinois
Tech Postal Code:60611
Tech Country:US
Tech Phone:+1.3125936015
Tech Phone Ext.:
Tech FAX:
Tech FAX Ext.:
Tech Email:alex.pavlovitch@gmail.com
Name Server:NS07.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server:NS08.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:

Nepotism aside …

I think I would have included a link to this blog even if it weren’t my brother’s, because of passages like this:

Branding accesses our very nature as social animals, taking advantage of the good feelings we get out of loyalty and admiration towards other human beings in our tribe. But in the case of companies and products, the personality traits are conjured up in an anthropomorphic emotional construct. We “like” favourite brands. We “trust” them. And most importantly, we make them part of our tribal identity.

and this:

Traditional marketers consider setting up a Facebook presence as something you DO. The problem is, the presence is all about who you ARE.

(From Social Media: Brand, don’t sell.)

Why the disparity? Calgary is an oil city. When the recession hit and resource prices tanked, Calgary was the centre of a huge housing bubble because of high oil prices, and Vancouver was in a major real-estate bubble of its own because of the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics, so both had further to fall — they’re just adjusting back to realistic market prices.

Toronto is the financial centre of Canada, and we all know what happened to the finance industry, but it has a very wide employment base outside of finance, and vibrant immigrant community, and a lot of pent-up housing demand, so I’m not surprised to see a more moderate fall there.

Ottawa is the capital, so it has government jobs as a cushion, but it’s also one of Canada’s leading tech centres. While big companies like Nortel and Corel are in terminal decline, small tech companies around Ottawa are doing very well. I live here, and as far as I can tell, for-sale signs on lawns still don’t stay up too long.

Montreal. Montreal? It was the awkward poor sibling of big Canadian cities for a couple decades after the whole separatism thing started (and people and head offices fled to Ottawa and Toronto), but it’s been coming back recently — the streets aren’t as dirty, the heroin addicts are panhandling more politely, and after all, it’s still Montreal. Just like Manhattan in the 1970s at its dirtiest and most dysfunctional was still more fun than any other U.S. city, Montreal will always be the coolest Canadian city to visit. The suburban (and English-speaking) west end of the island is a huge centre for pharmaceutical companies, and perhaps they’re doing well in the recession (I haven’t checked).

Not much to say about Halifax, which is a much smaller city than the others, except that it’s a nice place, and I’m glad to see they’re doing well.

Perhaps when I find February or March figures, the news will be worse; then again, as a measurement tool, CHPI can make things look a lot worse than RSPI, so it’s just as likely that things are better than these number suggest.

Basically, we’ve slipped back to between 2004 and 2007, depending on which indicator you look at (a little further, probably, if I included stock market indices). That’s not great (and our population is a bit larger), but ask yourself this: how did you feel in 2004? Were you as worried as you are now? Did it feel like a depression then?

I know things aren’t great — especially for people who’ve been laid off and/or lost their retirement savings or homes — but I think the (mainly left-wing) pundits (journalists, bloggers, and politicians) who keep screaming words like “depression” are just exploiting fear to try to get more attention for themselves, just like the (mainly right-wing) pundits did with anti-terrorism fears after 2001-09-11.

It’s a vicious circle, because they have to keep upping the ante to stand out from the others, until we’re all convinced we’ll be standing in soup lines tomorrow (assuming anyone can afford to supply us with soup).

Truscott’s initial wrongful conviction took place 40 years ago, but if anything, he’s better known now than any time before. Three men with more recentky-overturned convictions — Robert Baltovich, Bill Mullins-Johnson, and James Driskell — are also getting on-going press coverage, TV documentaries, etc.

I had never thought anything unusual about this phenomenon, until the Mullins-Johnson article was suddenly deleted from Wikipedia, with no debate — the Wikipedia editor had assumed that a wrongful conviction was so obviously unnotable that no discussion was required, but when I objected, he did restore the article and start a proper RFD debate.

When Wikipedia has articles about minor, imaginary videogame characters, it seemed unimaginable to me at first that editors would try to delete an article about a real, famous person, but so far, there seems little support for keeping the article. Thinking about it, I suddenly realized that the wrongfully-convicted aren’t famous in the U.S. Sure, I could Google around and find a few names, but in the U.S., serving 10 years for a murder you didn’t commit does not automatically make you a household name — in fact, it might not even result in a national news story.

Perhaps there’s a strong feeling of discomfort around the issue in a country that still executes so many of its citizens. Or perhaps, because the wrongly-convicted often have prior criminal records, Americans don’t feel that their convictions were such a serious injustice. Many U.S. jurisdictions (all?) have very small limits on the compensation you can receive for a wrongful conviction, while in Canada, someone who has been in jail for years could receive well over $1M — a big news story in itself.

I have a conflict of interest with the RFD for the Bill Mullins-Johnson article because I was the original author (though many others have since contributed), but if the article is going to be deleted, I’d hate it to be simply from lack of debate. So, Wikipedia users, whether you agree or disagree with me, please visit the RFD page and have your say.

Frankly, the majority of customer problem descriptions I’ve seen and heard — including those I’ve been involved in — have been either poorly thought out or complete B.S. I know I won’t always be allowed to use this, but as a consultant and as a poor fool who still dreams of his own startup, I’ve written a checklist of six criteria that a real customer problem must meet:

1. It uses the customer’s language, not yours — if any words or ideas need to be defined or explained, then it’s probably not really a customer problem.
2. It describes a business need — it should not mention the proposed technical solution (such as a social network, CMS, etc.).
3. It is recognizable — the customer is already familiar with the problem or with a very similar one, and doesn’t need to be convinced that the problem exists (though she might not be aware of its severity).
4. It is quantifiable — even if you can’t assign a number yet, it is the kind of problem that has a cost expressed in concrete units such as money, time, subscriptions, support calls, page views, etc.
5. It is compelling — you can demonstrate potential benefits, savings, etc. that justify the time, cost, and effort for the customer to try to solve it.
6. It is succinct — you can describe summarize the problem meaningfully in a single, short sentence (of course, you’re always free to elaborate it somewhere else).

The passing grade on this checklist is 100%. If only one checklist item is missing, the problem is likely just wishful thinking — if your product or project succeeds, it will be despite your idea of the problem, not because of it.

Note: It’s actually easy to come up with problem descriptions that meet all six criteria; what’s hard is coming up with problem descriptions that meet all six criteria and have credible technical solutions.

Facebook and other US sites have no problem sending SMS messages to my Canadian cell phone, but Twitter hasn’t had as much luck — maybe they’ve been looking for ways to avoid paying bulk SMS charges. However, they recently announced that customers of Bell Mobility (one of Canada’s big two wireless providers) can now send and receive tweets again, with “no limits and no added fees (beyond your normal texting plan).”

Not so, says Bell. According to this story, Bell Mobility is treating Twitter as a “premium service”, and will charge CAD 0.15 for every tweet sent or received, no matter what text plan you have.

That’s actually worse than the status quo. On my Canadian Rogers cell phone, I can’t receive tweets right now, but I don’t pay anything extra to send them with my current text plan.

I guess I’ll stick with Facebook status updates instead. They work fine with Canadian phones, and Rogers hasn’t (yet) decided that they’re a premium service.