Wednesday, November 9th, 2005
This bloke started out in july with a red paperclip that he swapped for a pen. He swapped the pen for a door handle. He plans to continue this chain of trades until he can acquire a house or an island. He�s documenting it on this blog.
What a great example of wealth-building through trade. This should be mandatory reading for all Econ 101 students around the country. By simply making individual mutually-beneficial trades, this dude hopes to eventually turn a red paperclip into a house. He’ll be able to do it too, and so could you… except trading in currency is normally a bit easier than the barter system. Microeconomics rocks.
read more | digg story
Posted in Finance, Internet | 3 Comments »
Thursday, October 6th, 2005
Future Evite crusher Upcoming.org is the lastest in a seemingly endless suply of Ajax powered web pages to be scooped up by search giant Yahoo.
In July of 2004 Yahoo purchased Oddpost, a future-looking web-based email provider whose features far outweighed that of the status quo Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. Oddpost is the foundation of what will be the next iteration of Yahoo mail with features to peer-pressure even the innovative Gmail to advance. Add the new Yahoo mail to the queue of advanced web applications coming soon.
March of 2005 brought Yahoo’s next purchase of a fast growing web app, Flickr. The online photo sharing, storage, and social networking tool has continued to flourish under the rule of Yahoo. Users can share their photos with the world and participate in communtiy driven groups and tag their way to a better experience.
Upcoming.org is more like Evite meets Washington Post Online meets Flickr. They have embraced the ever-popular folksonomy paradigm, allowing social tagging of events and creation of groups. Upcoming has the idea of a “metro”, or a geographic metropolitan area for which you are interested in events. The first thing I thought of was Andrea when I saw this site, because its a great place to announce all those little events that may normally only be announced in the City Paper.
Like the Netflix website or LiveJournal, there is a community-centric theme on Upcoming.org where you set people as friends, join groups, and actually enjoy using the site. Rather than rude information-squeezing or bombarding the user with ads, the site embraces a more open feel that we’re starting to see more of on the web. They make use of popular and open technologies like RSS and iCalendar and put the information back in the hands of the users with an open API like Flickr, Craig’s List, and Paypal.
On the surface it seems that this site is geared toward more public events, but in my testing it seems quite capable for personal events. Upcoming allows you to create personal venues (like your house) and personal events (like a dinner party). You can simply enter in email addresses of people you would like to invite and off goes the message. Unlike Evite, you actually see details of the event in the email message rather than being cat-herded onto a banner ad viewing site. For those (like me) that often need a gentle reminder of where they need to be and when, Upcoming offers SMS event reminders for free. In fact, free is the norm on Upcoming.org, both monetarily and philosophically. I created my account without even giving them my name!
All in all, I’d recommend adding Upcoming.org to your online toolbox. The community will ultimately drive this site and I can see a lot of improvement on the horizon. Check it out. Tell me what you think. Avoid evite like a disease.
Posted in Dorkness, Internet | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, August 30th, 2005
This GMail thing sure seems to be popular, doesn’t it? The kids are raving about it, and I say for good reason. A few years ago people were mostly using yahoo mail, hotmail, and aol for their personal accounts – and to be honest, it wasn’t difficult to put together a system that beat the pants off of those ad filled monsters with their 5MB limits. I did. My system had essentially unlimited size and I could integrate it however and with whatever I wanted. The same web-based features that yahoo had at the time were available using Squirrelmail. I could write my own fun scripts and use my own kick-ass email address. Times have changed though – today there is GMail.
Lets look at the primary reasons to use an account on muppethouse:
unlimited storage space – well Gmail essentially has unlimited space
advertisements on yahoo and hotmail suck – well, they still do, but Gmail ads are quite acceptable
cool email address at muppethouse or your own domain – well, google solved that a week or two ago
privacy – well I think I still have an edge on this one
Hotmail, AOL, and Yahoo reek of evil – Google doesn’t seem to be effected by the stank
Portability – if you have your own domain with me, you are the ultimate owner… more on the solution in a moment
I know several of you out there have gmail and muppethouse mail, but I would like to show you how you can use your GMail account with muppethouse… (more…)
Posted in Dorkness, Internet | 2 Comments »
