Five minutes later, I sounded like a grumpy old man with this:

Great. People are connecting their Twitter to Google Buzz. Now I can ready your fucking status message SIX times instead of five.

Yeah, every time I try to type “read you”, it always comes out “ready your”. Ignore that. But here’s the point. We’re all on a bunch of social networks. We have them connected to each other. It’s getting ridiculous. I was checking out a friend’s Facebook page last night. There were actually two status updates of the same Flickr photo that was pumped through Gowalla.

Gowalla. Let’s start there. I don’t give a fuck that you’re at Stop & Shop. All the times that I post about my kids taking a crap? That’s me paying you back for Flickring your tweet of a Gowalla Facebook status that you’re getting milk.

Maybe I’m just jealous that I don’t go anywhere.

But anyway, as a hyperconnected kind of guy, I try my best to keep up with my friends. The duplicate postings make this so much harder and much more irritating. I bitched about this before when Ping.fm was all the rage (what the hell happened to them?). You become tempted to not care what anyone is doing, but then you’re losing out completely.

The truth.

I have my Twitter and Facebook accounts linked. I don’t feel good about it. But I actually don’t have a ton of friend overlap there. Facebook is a mixture of family, high school friends (I apparently had a couple more than I realized), guys from my baseball sim league… and a few folks I keep in touch with on a daily basis via Twitter. So, those folks—the ones I’m probably connected to the most—see my stuff twice. Sometimes that’s okay… you don’t usually get to read EVERYTHING people post to Twitter, so it can be a good safety net.

What Facebook does have is excellent filtering tools. You can easily make lists of people you don’t see updates from on other networks. I do this. I have all of my Facebook friends in at least one list. The ones that tend to post to Twitter I just don’t check as often (even then it is really to make sure I didn’t miss anything).

There has to be a better way.

I thought FriendFeed was going to solve this. I really did. They allowed you to feed all of your public data into one stream. Theoretically (and I’m not sure if they ever did this), they should be able to cut the duplicates out and make life easier. They even had a pretty innovating feature called “imaginary friends” where you could make a fake FriendFeed user stream for your friends that didn’t have accounts. So, if my friend was on Flickr but not anything else, I could add his photos to my stream, for example.

It just didn’t work, though. And I’m not sure why. The imaginary friend feature was a lot of work and wasn’t intuitive. You also couldn’t consume non-open data (like Facebook status messages). That was a pretty big drawback. You still had to check Facebook.

What we need.

Moments after that first tweet/rant, I followed up with:

Someone make a tool that aggregates Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc. and removes the dupes. Make it slick. You’ll be rich.

We’re smart people. Someone should be able to build something that automatically fetches (and updates) your connections to your social networks—Twitter, Facebook. Buzz, Flickr, etc.—and trims the dupes. Bonus points for allowing you to merge the contacts from these different networks so you can tell it they are the same person (which could also help distinguish between real dupes or a friend reposting something by another friend).

Maybe this tool could be Google Buzz. I’d be pretty happy if it was. I’m already a Gmail user. One reason I think Buzz stands a fighting chance is that I don’t have to leave my email app to check my other communications. That’s actually quite compelling.

I wish I had the time to figure this problem out and make an app. But the job keeps me busy and the three kids keep me busier.

That and all my spare time is spent reading that you’re picking up the fucking milk.

Hey, we’ve all been there. I chuckled. Great tweet.

Then my email dings. I get this friend’s Brightkite updates via email because he is local. I checked it. Same message. Throughout the day, I checked Facebook and FriendFeed. The same tweet was over there in the form of status updates.

The kicker was later seeing that tweet as a LinkedIn status update. I’m a pretty laid back guy, but I’m sure not going to post something like that as my “professional” status update.

So, what’s the problem here? This friend of mine uses a service called Ping.fm to update all of his services at once. This leads to two big problems: redundancy and context.

The Redundancy Problem

I follow this person (and many others) on several services. When the same message is broadcast over all of them, there are serious duplication problems. One of the reasons I loved FriendFeed was that it was a potential fix to this problem. You could now follow all of someone’s feeds in one place. But with the redundancy problem, FriendFeed becomes a mess.

Some folks will publish a blog post, tweet about it, digg it, save it to del.icio.us, Stumble it, then roll it and smoke it. So, the same post hits my stream a half dozen times. I know I can hide stuff in FriendFeed, but that involves a lot of per-contact strategy just to make FriendFeed usable again. Usually, I’d rather just skip it.

The Context Problem

Context is a big issue, too. Brightkite is a social network based on your location. So, any messages you post are affiliated with the last place you “checked in”. So, did my friend want to bite people just in that location? I think not, but that message is now affiliated with that place.

And LinkedIn? Are recruiters really into face biters? I’m guessing not.

Where I’m Redundant

I’m a bit guilty on two counts. I have Twitter update my Facebook status. I do this because I used to have very separate groups of contacts on Facebook and Twitter. Also, I wasn’t much of a Facebook fan and that was an easy way to keep that network updated. The truth is, ideally only some of my tweets would go into Facebook, but there’s no good way to manage that from within Twitter (which is where I update).

Also, I’ll occasionally tweet about a blog post I just wrote. I save this for posts I’m particularly proud of and thing more people than my small crew of RSS readers would like.

I’m going to revisit how I update Facebook. The tweeting of blog posts I don’t mind as much because I follow a lot of people on Twitter who’s blog feeds I don’t subscribe to. People seem to be good about really only tweeting links they want a response to.

But folks, for the most part let’s kill the automation and use these services as they were intended to be used

If not, I’ll bite your face.

I love underdogs. This is just one of the many reasons I’ve always loved the Mac. I knew that I wasn’t getting a mass-produced, assembly-line piece of crud computer. The things were workhorses. They lived forever.

My favorite Mac ever was Darcy. I had that PowerBook G3 forever. It was a sad day when she finally kicked it.

At my last job, I had a PowerBook G4 and a MacBook Pro. Both were nice and sexy and all, but they just weren’t as… strong as the old PBG4. The Mac is gaining market share, and I’m sad to see that reflected in the individualism of each unit shipped.

Mac hardware simply ain’t what it used to be.

When I started at BatchBlue, I got a MacBook (white one, no “Pro”). Now THIS was a nice machine. I love the thing. Compact, gorgeous, and just felt stronger than the MacBook Pro. I have had no issues with it. Not a thing. Nothing. Ran like a champ. I use this thing all day every day for everything from working to playing music to dance with Nolan to.

But today—in the middle of our weekly staff meeting—it died. No signs of warning. Nothing. I had actually just sent an email and noticed the wifi was crapping out. It froze. I did a force restart. I got the blinking folder.

Well, Sean called me up an hour or so ago and told me that the Apple Store called it dead on arrival. And for that, I get to scratch my head and wonder yet another “WTF?”

I’ll get to babysit the brand new BatchBlue iMac as my machine is getting fixed, but the hard drive was completely cooked. Nothing could be recovered. The shocking thing to me was that since I’m working on a web app and doing so much with email, Google Docs, and our internal wiki… I really didn’t need anything on that machine. Seriously, all I can think of I’ll miss right now is my instructions to run the Rails app locally.

But man… I’m irked. Seems like everyone’s Mac needs service lately. Give me the 2.5% market share back… when they actually had to fight to keep customers. The iPod has made Macs super cool, and it just feels like the quality is suffering. This is not the first time I’ve heard this. It’s a problem.

Well, hopefully it comes back stronger than ever. It’s a great little machine. I just can’t believe it is toast.

In just this week, Erin and I have experienced some insanely terrible episodes of customer “service”. I just have to rant about them.

AT&T: You’re No Cingular.

So, when word came out that the iPhone would only be provided by AT&T, I thought, “that’s fine… I’m already a Cingular customer and I’m happy with them.” I’ve been with Cingular for years and never had an issue. Never. In like, six years. Enter AT&T. I finally got my first iPhone bill and it was all effed up. It was about twice as much as it should have been. I called.

After waiting on “hold” for 20 minutes with no music at all, I finally figured… hey wait… I’m not on hold. I’ve been hung up on. Apparently, there was no way for the rep to get back to me to apologize for this. Especially since the only piece of information I gave them before being hung up on was my effing phone number.

So, I finally get someone (I’m convinced it is the same woman that hung up on me) and it gets even worse. Why do I have roaming charges when I’m on a national plan? Well, sir… you called from Maine. Yes, I did. But, sir, you don’t have international roaming on your plan.

I was silent for a full ten seconds.

OMGWTF? Maine is in our freakin’ country. I tell her “that’s two hours from my house. It’s in our country.” She fixes that for about a half hour, telling me “it’ll just be a minute” once every five minutes.
She tells me I am charged for my wife’s line because, well, I had two lines on the plan. But, I tell her, the reason I called them three weeks ago was to cancel that line so I could use this plan just for work. But you had the second line still, that’s why you were charged for it. But I didn’t use it, so I’m not going to pay for it. But you did use it. Look at you’re freakin’ paperwork. I called myself last week for one minute because I couldn’t believe it when we happened to turn on my wife’s phone and it still worked.

She passed me off to another person finally. The really nice person that it’s hard to get mad at. The nice grandma that they give all pissed off customers to. You can’t get mad at her. Well, she tried to make it better… she was gonna send me a Razr for my wife’s line (turns out it really makes sense to keep the second line, but I ain’t payin’ for that last month that I didn’t know I had it). Turns out that the Razr she was “giving” me is $19.95 (well, $69.95 with a rebate). Oh, and an $18 activation charge. I freak again. She finally says that she’ll waive the activation charge and it’ll only cost me $19.95 for this far superior phone. Fine, I say.

I was on the phone with AT&T for 93 minutes. Good thing I didn’t call from the iPhone. My minutes would be toast.

My wife’s new phone arrived a couple days ago. No rebate inside, but there is a bill for $70. Eff you, AT&T. I get to call you again.

Fisher Price + Toys ‘R Us = Sunnuva…

Last year, we got Ella the Little People Garage from Fisher Price. It was supposed to be for Christmas, but she got so much that we saved it. When we opened it up, it was missing the biggest piece. The freakin’ elevator. Like, when you look at the picture on the box, this is the piece that takes up a third of the picture.

We take it back to Toys ‘R Us. Oh, we don’t take returns anymore.

WTF?

Sir, you have to call Fisher Price and deal with them. Are you kidding me? So I call. The woman was very nice and helpful. BUT, the toy is no longer made and they don’t have the part. So, they’ll send me a voucher to send it back for a refund. But, elevator or not, Ella loves the thing. So, we’ll keep it anyway… just have half a toy.

Oh, and later that day Fisher Price announces that a million toys are being recalled because of lead paint. Good thing I called that morning. I would have been on the phone 94 minutes this time.

Um, that’s not my insurance company

The hospital sends us a bill for $1300 because Blue Cross refused to cover Nolan’s birth.

Of course they didn’t. That’s not our insurance company. Yaaaay, more hold time dealing with this mess.

Oh please, let me pay the interest first

So, the mortgage company takes the extra money that we send them and applies it to interest instead of principal. WhyTF do you think we’re sending extra money? So we can speed up the process of being screwed? No, we want you to take it off the principal so we are screwed less, thank you.

How do you like hockey pucks

We’re tired. Cooking sucks. So, we ordered from the local 99s. Erin got a burger (since she is not consuming milk products right now, that’s pretty much the only thing on the menu she can get). When she asks for medium well, the send her a bloody mess. So, she ordered well done this time. I’m serious—it was a hockey puck. I think it even had the NHL logo on it. I’m not sure, because they burned it off.

If the gave this to someone in the restaurant, the person would freak. They save this “service” for take out customers who can only swear and yell from the comfort of their own homes.

Just stir the damn thing

So, just tonight was literally the last straw. Erin wanted a Strawberry Coolatta from Dunkin’ Donuts. So, I go. While I’m there, I grab one of those new iced teas. I decide to get it sweetened. While I’m there, I’m actually reading the sign to employees that says “stir them with a spoon, don’t shake them”… I’m impressed.

Then I take a big ol’ swig of mine. I think I got diabetes on the spot. Apparently, you squirt in the “sweetener” (whatever it actually is) and pour the tea on top. No stirring happened. After these first two godawful sips, I had an unsweetened iced tea. I literally got all the sweetener in a sip. It nearly killed me.

So, this all happened in the last week. What’s going on? Is it me?

Update: How could I forget? Just the other night when I went to get Erin her Coolatta, they told me they needed to freeze them. They asked me to wait out front. Fifteen minutes later, I went back through the drive through line.

Yeap, they forgot about me.

Ella has been playing the Dora The Explorer: Animal Adventures game for a few months now. The game is supposedly for ages 3 and up, but Ella has pretty much mastered all of the games at the highest level (and she’ll be three on Halloween). If it sounds like I’m bragging, I apologize… but I am.

The one thing Ella hadn’t been doing is clicking on the items herself. She would point and I would click. Now I’m starting to see where the age minimum comes in. Ella has started pointing and clicking by herself with the mouse. However, the software developers made sure to make it as hard as possible for a small child to navigate to and click on the button.

Take the example below. The area that is clickable is so sensitive it is ridiculous. Also, if the “star” cursor is on the corner of the eyes they are trying to click on, it won’t trigger. The middle of the star has to be within the clickable area. Ridiculous. Talk about a guaranteed way to frustrate a little kid. She meticulously tries to center it until it lights up. Then about have the time when she goes to click, she nudges it a bit and loses it again.

It is pretty obvious to me after sitting with this game that—while it is cute—it was never tested with little kids. If so, the hovering and clicking frustration would have been immediately apparent.

So, the lesson is… don’t just test. Test with your actual user base.

So, I opened up the latest Web Standards Group email that provides some good links for the week. In there was a link to Netscape 9.

Whoa, there’s a blast from the past. So, being a sucker for any browser whatsoever, I downloaded it. I opened it up. And yawned.

To quote my brother, “so who did all this work for no money and when it wasn’t needed?” So, let me get this straight. This is Firefox, with a different toolbar, no plug-ins, and a feature to “share” sites on Netscape.com? What even IS Netscape.com? Shouldn’t there be a feature to share with other sites as well? Or do you really want to limit your market to Firefox users that want one click integration with Netscape.com? What’s that… four people?

What is different about this? Camino at least is Firefox with the true Mac OS X aqua interface. What does Netscape give us to differentiate it? The retro feeling you get for using Netscape? Pretty green buttons? A share button that has minimal functionality that looks so out of place that I suspect someone’s kid added it with MS Paint?

And the search box. It defaults to searching Netscape. I’m sorry, raise your hand if you thought Netscape was still a search engine.

So, you released a browser with the sole purpose of being a marketing tool towards Netscape.com and the Netscape search engine. Wow. How much can I seriously NOT CARE?

Yawn.

So, Apple just released the new Safari beta. It runs on Windows now, too. While I don’t think it will have the same effect as iTunes on Windows, it can’t hurt. So, I’ve installed it on both systems (Windows via Parallels). I installed on Windows first. It was a breeze. Then I installed it on the Mac.

First of all, why the eff do I have to restart… to install a web browser? You didn’t make me restart on Windows, why on the Mac? Firefox doesn’t make me restart. Shiira doesn’t make me restart. Hell, I don’t think OFFICE made me restart. Why do I have to restart? I normally wouldn’t care, but I’m running Rails locally for testing. When I restart my Mac, I have to restart the local database, restart Rails, and do a bunch of other stuff I don’t really know how to do. Luckily, Sean gave me a step by step “so you’re a Terminal noob and you are still trying to run Rails locally” cheat sheet. But sheesh. I haven’t restarted in weeks. Why restart to install a browser?

Second… when did Safari become Internet Explorer. Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. But where the heck did Safari 2 go? Why did you replace it? I need to test in both! So now, I get to UNinstall Safari 3… no doubt I’ll have to restart again (gah!) then test in Safari 2. If I want to test in Safari 3… guess what… install again… restart… curse…

Come on, Apple. You do this stuff right. I know it’s just a beta, but come on…

Update: Here’s a workaround.

After the panel, Tantek was swarmed by his numerous fans. After a while, I saw him (gasp) by himself. So what else to do but bug him? I just said hey and I admire his work… mentioned I did some questioning of “rel=hcard” on the Microformats list. After GTalking with new pal Nick Peters, I found out that Tantek would have known of that as “The Darowski Problem” (Nick talked about it in those terms with Tantek before). Should have dropped my own name! Next time, I’m totally getting a shirt that reads I AM THE DAROWSKI PROBLEM.

So, the thing that sucks is I’m pretty far away from the hotel. I mentioned I took a $25 cab ride to the convention center, but was going to try public transportation on the way back. The new Google Transit (still in Google Labs) mapped my path. The actual bus itself was fine. Where Google dropped me off and told me to walk was the problem.

Um. Am I Superman? How the hell am I expected to pull that off? I was stumped. Here I am behind some warehouses in the pitch dark, trying to find out how to get over/under that highway. It’s a tangled mess of high speed lanes. I come across train tracks. Of course, I look to my left and a train is coming (of course, I was at a safe distance). But are you kidding me? I’m trudging all over the place. I finally call my hotel (which I can SEE but can’t get to), and they walk me through the way to get there. Which was very long. I think I have a permanent crater in my shoulder from my laptop bag and the huge SXSW bag. I was walking for about 90 minutes when it was all said and done.

Here’s the path they gave me. You can click through to Flickr to see notes on the image. Or, the gist is that I had to go all the way down Spicewood Springs Road, cross an overpass, and work my way back.

Rid.iculo.us.

The sad part is, I get back to my room, see Chris Messina left me a comment telling me BarCamp is tonight. I had heard something about BarCamp, but I had no idea it was tonight. I blew it. I would have loved to be there. I’m sure Brian, Tara, and maybe Dan were there. Instead, I’m sweaty from my trek, eating Starburst, trying to re-motivate myself to do some work for a project at Aptima I need to catch up on. Perhaps I should just sleep and try it all again tomorrow.

I shall rawk SXSW. Just apparently not today.

Update: Man, Google came through, in a BIG way.

http://www.amazon.com/Bulletproof-Ajax-Voices-That-Matter/
dp/0321472667/sr=8-1/qid=1163432376/ref=sr_1_1/
002-5462670-3965612?ie=UTF8&s=books

I was like… wow! The title’s actually in there! The rest of the URL is probably some sort of session-related junk. I bet you can type the below URL in and go right to the page, right?

http://www.amazon.com/Bulletproof-Ajax-Voices-That-Matter/

AAAAAANNNNTTTT! Wrong. Man, they *almost* had it…