Adam-Jackson

I have been using the 17″ MacBook Pro for 31 days now and I felt it was time to share a few thoughts I had on this computer. First, as I do in most of my blog posts, I find it best to spend a few sentences discussing my previous notebook computers in an effort to share where I’m coming from in my post. I’m not a professional journalist so reviewing a product without any bias and with proper investigation is not a strong point of mine.

My first notebook was an Apple iBook 233Mhz (clamshell). It was running OS 9.0.1 and was ridiculously slow but I enjoyed it. From there, I upgraded to the iBook 600Mhz, iBook G4 800Mhz, PowerBook Titanium 867Mhz, PowerBook 12″ 1.5Ghz, MacBook 13″ Core2Duo 2Ghz, MacBook Pro 15″ 2.33Ghz, MacBook Pro 15″ 2.6 Ghz, MacBook Pro 15″ 2.93Ghz and finally my latest machine, the 17″ MacBook Pro 3.06Ghz.

As you can see I was upgrading once every 2 years and the past year I’ve owned 3 machines. I became smarter about my computer investments always selling a computer for a similar price than I purchased it and upgrading to the newer model. Incentives like AppleCare, bags & cases go a long way in resale value for these machines. Let’s discuss my last computer.

My previous computer was purchased in February and it was the 2.93Ghz 15″ MacBook Pro (Unibody) that was released in November of 2008 but received a CPU upgrade at Macworld 2009 in January. This model had 4 gigabytes of ram and a 256GB Solid State Drive. There weren’t any huge issues with the machine but I was left wanting a bit more.

The first complaint of mine was that the display color quality wasn’t good and this was mostly because I hadn’t calibrated it properly. The second issue was the very short battery life and getting only 2.5-3.5 hours on a single charge which was painfully obvious every time I had a long meeting, camped out in front of an Apple Store or went to a cafe that was without power outlets.

My final issue with the 15″ was that since the MacBook Pro was introduced in January of 2006, the PPI (Pixel per inch) density of the 15″ display was unchanged. The PowerBook G4 15″ had a native resolution of 1280×854 which was bumped to 1440×900 in 2006 but has since been unchanged. A majority of mid-range Windows notebooks in the 15-16″ category have resolutions that are 10%-30% higher than Apple’s “professional” 15″ notebook and it bothered me. I believe the PPI of the 15″ model is 113 and the 17″ model is 130. This increased quality does mean windows are smaller but for my young eyes, it’s perfect and I find myself more productive.

The 17″ native screen resolution is 1920×1200 compared to the 15″ 1440×900. This small change has dramatically improved my productivity and I’ll talk more about that later.

So the deciding factor and requirement to upgrade to the 17″ MacBook Pro was based on a few factors which include a small processor bump, 60% improved color quality, 8 hour integrated battery, 3 USB 2.0 ports, larger monitor, more pixels, a $200 price difference over the 15″ model.

Prior to the WWDC 2009 (June update) of Apple’s notebook line,the difference between the top of the line 15″ and 17″ models was a $550 difference. After the update, all of the notebooks received a $300 price difference and the margin between the 15 & 17 inch offerings was only $200. That money is enough to go toward the AppleCare warranty, larger hard drive or software but when you aren’t bothered by the larger footprint and extra weight, it’s a very small price to pay for a better computing experience.

• The 15″ measures 5.5lbs, .95″ thin (14.35″ wide & 9.82″ deep)
• The 17″ measures 5.5lbs, .98″ thin (15.47″ wide & 10.51″ deep)

So this very minuscule addition of weight, width and depth equals 520×300 extra pixels. It seems small but it a completely new experience and an experience I recommend every potential MacBook Pro user should look at before making a decision between 15 or 17.

I personally can’t tell a difference in the color quality of the 15 & 17. I think the 17 has better color accuracy but that’s only because they said the June 2009 model saw a 60% improvement in quality. It’s certainly not any brighter but I enjoy the display more than the previous 15″. Supposedly the 60% improvement is on all 3 June 2009 MacBook models (13, 15 & 17).

The CPU speed is really negligible. The difference between 2.4 & 2.53 might be noticeable just as a 2.53 & 2.6 might be noticeable as well but for most tasks that I do every day. Once you reach the 2.8Ghz, 2.93Ghz and 3.06Ghz ranges, most office tasks won’t feel a difference and you’re better off getting a solid state drive over a $250 upgrade for a 260Mhz speed bump because that’s all you get. That bump may shave 5 minutes off a 25 minute video compression but I haven’t tested this and for games, it’s all about your video card & GPU so save the $250 and save up for a solid state drive.

Why did I go 3.06Ghz? I remember a clip back in 2003-2005 when Steve promised a 3Ghz notebook in 12 months. Finally in 2009, Apple has released a 3Ghz notebook and I wanted to be the first to get one. It’s just cool and that’s my only reasoning.

Let’s talk about SSDs (solid state drives) for just a moment. Personally, I regret not having an SSD in this computer and in fact, I downgraded from SSD to HDD just so I could get the 17″ screen. My plan has been to wait it out. I ordered an SSD in my previous MacBook Pro (the 15″ model) as a built to order option from Apple. It was an extra $650 but the speed difference was noticeable. I did have problems with the SSD though. It would occasionally lock up (common with SSDs), there weren’t any battery life differences with SSDs and at this time the solid state drive technology is still very new. Supposedly SSDs start getting slower the moment you put anything on them. Reports are finding that after a year, today’s SSDs are no faster than hard drives because over time the flash memory, after being written to thousands of times, slows down and becomes inefficient.

A 500 GB 7200RPM 2.5″ hard drive is around $150. A 256GB Solid State Drive (half of the capacity) is $650. The price for SSDs is dropping but not fast enough and every month, new drives are released that are more power efficient, faster, more reliable and cheaper. My goal is to wait until winter time before making the plunge to SSD so I can take advantage of new technology and hopefully at a lower entry price. My ultimate plan is to purchase two 265GB SSDs, remove the DVD drive from my MacBook Pro and put it into an external enclosure and have both of the SSDs in my system in RAID0 thus resulting in what some tests have proven, 500 megabyte per second reads. In comparison my hard drive solution can sometimes reach 150 megabytes a second in sequential reads. Multiplying that times 5 would be a worthwhile investment but all parts right now would cost me around $1500 which is the price of a new computer.

The battery life of the 17″ was less amazing than I expected. Apple claims 8 hours and I’ve seen that from time to time but not consistently. Turning off the dedicated graphics card, wi-fi, bluetooth, backlit keyboard and the display all of the way down with minimal applications open can yield me 8 hours. Of course, who’s going to do that. My 15″ MacBook Pro saw 1.5-3 hour battery life with normal use. The 17″ MacBook Pro sees 5-6 hours with Wi-Fi, Email and web surfing. I’m happy with that. I can’t get through a full day of use but it’s good enough for periodic use throughout the day. Until I get a guaranteed 12 hour battery, my MacBook Pro will always leave the house with the power cord. According to my tests I’m using the computer 12-16 hours a day so I can’t imagine not plugging in for a full day but I’m hoping that will change soon.

The difference in size has less noticeable than I thought and the experience of moving from 15 to 17 has been very enjoyable. I have to lug around an additional pound every day which is always in a back pack so I barely notice it and the advantage is that I get thousands of extra pixels to play around with. The size doesn’t feel super big on my lap and it can fit on a table at a cafe just fine. It’s going to be a pain when I travel (which I do once a month) but my long term plan is a cheap 10″ notebook strictly for weekend travel and business travel. Just a notebook with Wi-Fi and EVDO that I can use Gmail and NewsGator while I’m away from my MacBook Pro. The iPhone works great though as a netbook so that’s what I’m doing for now.

I did find some issues with the 17″ MacBook Pro. First of all, the hard drive clicks and I’ve had it replaced twice now and it still happens. Supposedly, the hard drive’s firmware has power saving features that tell it to spin down occasionaly but since my system uses the HDD so often that the click is caused by the HDD spinning right back up as soon as it powers down. The first two drives actually caused my OS to hault. The latest one doesn’t but the clicks are still happening. I can deal with the click, just not the slow down so I’m ignoring this for now.

The next issue is that the bottom case creaks. I tried a friend’s 17″ PowerBook from 2003 and their model does it too as well as the new 17″ models at The Apple Store so it looks like I’m not alone here. I would have liked to have SD  and ExpressCard on the latest 17″ MacBook Pro given it has the space for it but that’s just me being a complainer.

The 17″ has a dent, well it’s more like a bow in the center of the top lid. I explain more about it here.

Overall, I’m glad I upgraded, the speed bump and most features are nice to have but the ultimate beauty of this upgrade was the additional screen resolution that made getting work done a whole lot easier. I can’t imagine going back to a 15″ MacBook Pro now and I’m hoping a used MacBook Air is in my future as my portable computer. I’ll settle for an EeePC simply because of price.

Yep, another 1700 word blog post. i really need to learn how to write shorter posts.

There are two Flickr Sets for this new notebook.

1. New 17″ Macbook Pro
2. Dented MacBook Pro

I’ve been reading the stories lately that discuss the recent suicide of a Chinese Foxconn employee after he was supposedly tortured and given a lot of hell of “misplacing” an iPhone prototype. You can read the entire story in multiple posts on Gizmodo or AppleInsider.

Of course the death of an employee is saddening and an eye-opening incident, I’d like to share something with you. First of all, Gizmodo seems to be the only blog that pulled the, “we only have ourselves to blame” card and I wholeheartedly agree. I encourage you to read their post on the matter.

So this all makes sense. The secrecy of Apple and our demand for leaks, secrets, photos and info on ever upcoming Apple device is fuel that caused Foxxconn to go overboard when this phone went missing. Yes, it’s just a phone.

Of course, what do I see today when I launch my RSS reader. Two stories caught my eye.

1. China Gets the iPhone…Officially
2. Report: Hon Hai to build Apple tablets as soon as September

The first post is talking about China finally getting an official carrier for Apple’s iPhone and the story ends with, “Apple’s global smartphone market share is about to get a lot bigger.” The second post is a report from AppleInsider that pieces clues together (mostly rumors) and they find that Chinese manufacturer Hon Hai will be getting the contract to build Apple’s upcoming tablet computer (which I’m very tired of hearing about).

What did I take from this observation? That Foxconn has quite a contract on their hands building iPhones for Apple and the shroud of secrecy Apple basically demands caused them to go to far, abuse and possibly torture a factory worker which resulted in his suicide. I doubt this was the first death related to Apple’s demands in the manufacturing of their products and is only the first death that became publicized. Of course, less than a week later, we have a post about how awesome it will be for China to get the iPhone and a rumor that Hon Hai is building the next tablet. I’m sure Hon Hai can’t wait to hire minimum wage workers, cram them in a factory and threaten them with abuse and garnished wages if they leak information just so the rest of the world can buy a $1200 shiny Apple tablet computer.

It’s a sick world we live in and we’re to blame for the death of this person. Trust me when I say that this won’t be the last underpaid human being who makes electronics, clothes and comforts that we Americans take for granted. I’m not saying “buy American”. I’m only saying that we should demand the companies we buy from to enforce labor laws and treat their employees with respect that we demand here in The US. If my Logitech Mouse cost $1.50 more because an employee is being treated well, then so be it but I consciously can’t enjoy my computer, iPhone or Taiwanese made bicyle knowing that someone probably suffered to build it for me.

My favorite company in the world has one chance to make it to #1 and be a part of Twiistup which is this SUPER AWESOME event in Los Angeles. Well the final spot is theirs if they can get enough tweets about their company. What do they need? YOU!

I Wrote This Blog Post

Read that and just follow the rules. Starting July 21st at 6AM (PACIFIC TIME) you can send three tweet to Yoono (no more than 3 tweets please) and help them get a seat at Twiistup in Los Angeles! Seriously, it’s so easy to do. three tweets and you’re done. You can send tweets from 6AM-Midnight so please do your part.

You can also click the text below to tweet the text automatically!

“I vote for #Yoono to be the 12th @Twiistup Showoff http://bit.ly/nVpt2″

HDD stands for Hard Disk Drive which, in my opinion, all storage drives are hard but only one uses disks and this is what we’ll be talking about today. Most of the people that read this post know exactly what a hard drive is so I’ll save my breath and simply post this photo.

See that disk and see that little lever? Well the disks spin (usually 2-4 disks per hard drive) and the little lever moves across those disks (AKA Platters) and reads data that is stored magnetically which is why you should never put a magnet on a hard drive. Well moving parts will always have issues just like any moving part, things break, collide into each other and eventually wear out. This is the case with hard drives and the technology was invented in a time when computers were huge and they never moved for sometimes up to 20 years. Now, most of the hard drives sold are going into laptops, netbooks and even portable music players. Desktop is still high on the scale but move hard drives take a beating.

Apple’s most fail-prone music player in the iPod line was the iPod Classic. They’re full-size iPod that resembles the first iPod that was released in 2001 (8 years ago) and had a 5 gigabyte 1.8″ hard drive. The latest model has a 120 gigabyte hard drive but Toshiba makes 1.8″ drives up to 260 Gigabytes and has for a while. Apple hasn’t upgraded the device in a while and many believe the device falls dead last in sales behind all other iPod models.

I saw a video once of a guy that was at the end of his iPod warranty on the classic and decided he wanted a shiny refurbished unit to replace his scratched up model. He sat in his car, banged the iPod against the roof of his car for 5 minutes while continually restarting the iPod forcing the drive to spin up. Eventually, the iPod wouldn’t start and the hard drive was dead. I’m sure he wasn’t the only guy to do this and yeah he got a new model but Apple took a hit on that replacement and thus lost money. Flash memory which is used in every other iPod is less prone to failure and thus more cost effective to build which every company loves doing but flash memory is still very expensive.

There are music buffs like myself who have over 25 thousand songs and want to store as many as possible on our iPods and a 4-32 Gigabyte iPod storage isn’t enough. I love my 160GB iPod classic. It’s a wonderful device and holds all of my songs and even a few movies. The screen isn’t gigantic and the interface is kinda bad compared to the iPhone but the battery life goes for days and days and I know that every song in my library is on this iPod.

I don’t know the fate of the HDD but as SSD (solid state drives) and flash memory goes down in price, so will the sales of hard drives. Toshiba has already said publicly the sale of their 1.8″ drives have dipped very low and given that Apple was their largest purchaser of these drives, it only makes sense. Who knows what’s next and I never call the death of anything but SSD will take over HDDs in the next 10 years, that’s for sure.

SSD is already the storage or choice for netbooks and flash is already the choice storage for cameras, phones, PDAs and other portable consumer devices. Notebooks are slowly seeing an increase in SSD but 500GB HDDs are $150 and 256GB SSDs are over $600. This is a huge price difference. SSDs currently cost over $2 per gigabyte where HDDs are around 30 Cents. That’s a huge price increase.

The benefits of SSDs were touted as improved performance and increased battery life. Well battery life wasn’t improved AT ALL but performance did go up but this isn’t really important for people. SSDs do have the benefit of increased reliability which can mean a lot for normal users. Of course as more data is stored on the cloud, the capacity of drives won’t matter as much so HDDs will just go out of demand if SSDs can become more affordable in the 120GB market.

We’ll see how things pan out of the next 18 months but I’m sure that HDD is going to start dimishing soon and will be completely gone in 10 years. No big deal, at least the big storage makers are already moving to SSD so the companies won’t be dying, just the drives.

With the web, we generally follow the same fast food mentality that things need to be available right now but screw cost, health concerns and the big picture. The Chrome OS would rock if it was backed by reliable and secure applications but the fact that my life is behind a single Google ID is pretty scary and I’d like to simple bring up a few things that has me saying, “slow down!” pretty much every day.

A service like Skype was released in 2003 and enabled you to call anyone anywhere from computers to even land lines with better prices than typical telephone companies allowed. You gave up a few things. The first thing is that you had to own a computer (at the time) and you couldn’t dial 911. Soon, more phones were added (mobile and desktop phones), eBay purchased Skype and they became very competitive about taking a chunk of market share away from traditional telephone companies. It’s 2009 and the site hasn’t exploded but I’d like to mention that it’s been 6 years and you still can’t use Skype for emergency calls.

Box.net was released in 2005 and they currently server over 1 million files a day between users. That means, people are uploading 1 million files a day to a service that, just like any web service, can be hacked. I have no clue what kind of files are being sent but unless they’re being tweeted, I’m fairly certain that these are considered private.

Google who deserves the most criticism here has a suite of tools that they charge for that should help businesses save money and get going faster that were just recently taken out of beta. Beta means not yet ready for primetime but Google had the balls to charge $50 a year per user for Google Apps. Of course the services were full featured but Google decided to keep this tag because it essentially freed them of having to take responsibility for the product or provide support for it. If your data was hacked and sent to TechCrunch, they weren’t responsible even if you were a paying user.

I’ve only picked on three services that may or may not have deserved this but these are not the only three offenders or innovate now, reliability later. Every time Gmail, Yahoo! Messenger or Google Docs is down for maintenance, the entire web freaks out and then if Twitter has downtime at the same time, things really go to Hell. What’s remarkable about this culture of web based technology is that it’s very unreliable yet people embrace it so much. Gmail is down pretty often where Yahoo! Mail is rock solid and I use Google Apps just like most users but it does frustrate me when email isn’t available. Of course, I’m one of the few that hasn’t adopted the web revolution. I’d like to introduce you to a few services that are desktop based, require a hard drive to store and that I even installed using a Compact Disk (gasp!)

1. Apple iWork (Pages+Numbers+Keynote) [OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY]
2. Microsoft Office 2008 [OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY]
3. Apple iLife ’09 [DIGITAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT & CONTENT CREATION]
4. NewsGator’s NetNewsWire [RSS READER]
5. Apple Mail / Microsoft Entourage [DESKTOP BASED EMAIL MANAGEMENT]
6. Tweetie / Yoono / Seesmic Desktop [TWITTER MANAGEMENT]
7. Things [GET THINGS DONE / TASK LIST]
8. OmniFocus [PROJECT MANAGEMENT]
9. iTunes [DIGITAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT / MEDIA STORE]
10. Fetch [FTP MANAGEMENT]
11. Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign [ADOBE DESIGN SOFTWARE]
12. iCal [EVENTS / TO DO MANAGEMENT]
13. Calculator [CALCULATING THINGS]

What’s amazing about this list is that all of these apps can be replaced by web-based applications offered by Yahoo!, Google and a few other small startups. I’ve paid good money for these apps where most of the web services are free and if my hard drive dies, I lose this data and cloud based computing is reliable and available on any computer in the world with an Internet Connection.

The last part of this statement being “Internet Connection.” I work from a cafe’ in San Francisco and it’s amazing to see people closing their laptops when the Internet goes down. The entire place is empty because they can’t access Twitter, Gmail, Google Docs or even play music because all of these services are now web-based. I know people who don’t even have music stored on their phones and rely on Pandora or Last.FM for music and do all of their photo editing on Picnik (via Flickr). The Internet does go down and it goes down often. Sugar Cafe has Internet issues twice a week, my apartment Internet is down once a week and there are even issues at my office where Internet goes down. I’ve also had to find an email while on the bus or schedule an appointment at a cafe with only my laptop, iPhone and no free wi-fi and I could do it with no problem. My Chrome OS netbook would be completely worthless with no Internet connection.

Let’s not forget the impending collapse of humanity (no I’m not going biblical on you) when nothing works. Internet is down, power is out and phones don’t work but there’s contact info of someone that I have to get so I can make it to their safehouse in Montana and that info is stored on Google Contacts. Well I’m just shit out of luck.

Do yourself a favor, to those of you who disagree with me. Unplug your Ethernet cord and turn off wi-fi on your computer and put your iPhone in airplane mode and now try to do everything you need to get done for the day including sending emails (even if they just go into a queue for later sending) and let me know just how long you last.

Everyday before I leave the house, I launch all of my apps, download RSS feeds, email, to-do lists from friends and sync my iPhone and check appointments. Then I can open up my computer any time during the day, read RSS feeds, reply to emails and even get things done all without an Internet connection. It’s not a crazy idea to work with no Internet but we’ve become so dependent on giving a lot up for zero in return other than being able to access the data from any computer and how often do you really do that?

Just so you know, by using Google’s services you’re giving them access and rights to store and analyze that data for years after you’ve closed your account. They can deliver ads to you, track your habits and own your life just because you wanted to save a few bucks on software or have flexibility of accessing information anywhere. That whole portable information thing? Well it was defeated when we started having 2.5 pound laptops available to us. The laptop weighs less than a text book so store some freaking data on it and don’t rely on Google to store everything.

Don’t get me wrong, I store a ton of data online but I’m constantly mindful about what I store and always ensure I’m going to be just fine in the event of a power failure or loss of Internet. I have 45 days of music, 200 movies and every email sent to me in the past 10 years on a computer that goes with me everywhere and is backed up to two seperate hard drives, all of which are secured by very complex passwords. It’s my data and I keep it with me. That’s how I work.

When I can access my “cloud documents” when the Internet goes down or power goes out then I’ll switch but reliability wins over innovation and I guess I’ll be in the dark ages when everyone is running around with Chrome OS. For the record, to those tech bay area geeks that are reading this, My father runs a computer on Windows 98 with IE 6 and uses Yahoo! Mail. You cringe but he’s perfectly happy so before you call Chrome OS the next big thing, just know it’ll be 20 years before everyone is using it including me.

When I began working on a project that taught Twitter to the masses, the service was still small with only a couple of celebrities and American mainstream media didn’t know the definition of tweet. My project is still going strong but there was a phrase I coined that, “Twitter is The Gateway Drug to Social Networking.” I still feel Twitter has that potential but honestly, this is no longer the case in Twitter’s current form.

What inspired this quote was when I compared Twitter to other social networks and realized that Twitter has the easiest point of entry and is really that easy compared to other networks. Facebook & Myspace are the top two US social networks and joining these can be a bit of a challenge for people who weren’t born in after 1980. The issue isn’t that 30 and over web users don’t understand social networking, it’s that the amount of people they relate to and interact with aren’t on social networks. Why join a network to connect with friends when there aren’t any friends there to connect with. Twitter is different.

In the most extreme case, my grandmother would join Twitter and experience something so basic that involves updating her status. What seems like a completely idiotic thing to do at 71 years old, it’s easy to do and requires no more than a text message or dial up Internet connection. I’m sure that if she saw it on television enough, she’d try it out. The beauty of Twitter is that so many people are searching it every day and right below my grandmother’s info is a link to search Twitter or, “What people are doing right now.” She can search knitting, bbq, fishing, farming and even sweet potato pie and instantly find other people with interests or performing those actions RIGHT NOW. With as little as two clicks, she’s following someone with at least one similar interest as her and this become something fun to her.

Soon, she may connect with family members and build up more followers. 1 year later, my grandmother has heard so much mention of Facebook on Twitter.com that she decides to sign up. She’s not web-savvy yet but she knows copy and paste so she posts a link on Twitter to her facebook.com/cool-granny profile. Soon, she has 10 friend requests and she’s successfully joined Facebook and found some people to connect with.

Do you see what just happened? My grandmother, who is not the ideal member of Facebook.com and would never join because she has no one to talk to has successfully transitioned to Facebook.com after simply joining Twitter and talking about what she’s doing. It’s a truly beautiful thing and completely possible with Twitter but never would have happened if she joined Facebook.com a year ago with no contacts.

The reason why this story and my idea of Twitter and its title of “The Gateway Drug to Social Networking” is because the system is flawed now and I blame The API+Simplicity of the system.

Twitter has done an amazing job at creating a web standards system that allows ANYONE to develop applications for it that can pretty much do anything. I’ve seen amazing things performed with the Twitter API and this is part of the reason they’re successful. I’ve heard that 90% of Twitter’s traffic comes from The API which is a testament of this simplicity. Why does the API get the poor rating?

The Twitter API & Search API can be completely pwn3d meaning you can use them to your advantage to cause really annoying things to happen. Now when grandma joins Twitter and talks about knitting, she gets replies from companies trying to sell her things. These are auto-replies when she simply mentions knitting. She also now gets about 20 followers a day from accounts of naked woman asking her to check out their cam-site. The worst of all, as if that wasn’t bad enough is that she might follower a spammer back by accident and now her phone or inbox notifies her with direct messages from these spammers.

This is something the Internet Generation is used to but my 71 year old grandmother will see it as advertisements, pornography and more advertisements and she’ll leave. She needed a simple system to help her find new friends on the web and now she’s confused and overwhelmed which is exactly what happens when you first join Facebook or Myspace. This issue is only getting worse and for over 6 months, Twitter has done nothing to combat these issues.

Let’s also briefly touch on trending topics. These were pretty awesome up until around 4 months ago when more API goodness was used to hack these trends. Now there are bots that have bios linking to sex camera sites and free auction houses that simply tweet out what topics are currently trending. Why is this bad? Well it’s ok if you follow one of these that once an hour tweets out the topic but these systems tweet out every minute or more what topics are trending and thus make the trending topic completely useless and impossible for you to find out why the topic was originally trending. It also keeps something trending. Taco Bell starts trending and then 5,000 spam accounts start tweeting every minute that the topic is trending and now everyone has stopped talking about it but that topic continues to stay on top for quite a while! This problem isn’t going away.

Going back to my grandmother for a second, now she always sees a ton of topics that are confusing and when she clicks them, she sees a ton of spam. Is this advertising too? She probably doesn’t know how to collapse this sidebar and it’s just an annoyance. At the end of 48 hours, my grandmother leaves Twitter and decides that The Internet isn’t for her and that’s that.

What’s unfortunate is that this horrible truth will ultimately lead to Twitter’s failure. As more and more networks see that 80% of their followers are photos of nude woman and trending topics are full of spam it will cause media networks and celebs to also give up on Twitter which have accounted for most of the site’s growth in the past 8 months.

By fixing these API hijack tools, they ruin functionality of honest and awesome sites built around Twitter. It will be a sad day in Twitter history but I see no other solution.

My Twitter eco-system is fine aside from the fact my last 500 followers were spammers and I get 10 replies a day from companies trying to sell me things. i deal with this but most users won’t. This patience will eventually wear out and Twitter will not get those users back. Until further notice, Twitter is not, “The Gateway Drug to Social Networking” but it can redeem itself. I hope this title will be re-enacted soon because right now, it’s not looking like a very bright future.

There’s a report from Morgan Stanley that’s circulating the inter-webs today about teens and there’s a line that focuses on Twitter.

Teens don’t use Twitter because no one is reading their tweets. Twitter is totally different when you have thousands of people following you versus only a handful of your co-workers.

Twitter is very popular right now to pretty much everyone in the world. Seriously, because if you listen to the radio, browse the web or watch TV, it’s there in your face. This is because organizations that have something to say, promote, market or sell love Twitter because it is an enabler for promotion! Let’s take a step back because this is very important.

Twitter’s value has two levels. The first is information from the collective. The collective group of people, devices and companies that are “twittering” can be indexed, searched and tested to analyze trends. Things like current events, freak occurrences and opinions. I love data where I can analyze how many 21 year old boys in the 94102 area code saw Transformers 2 and what they thought about it and then take it one step further and see if they thought Megan Fox was hot or not. This is valuable to me and very valuable to large corporations.

The other level of Twitter that people experience or use more is the ability to receive things that they’ve subscribed to (similar to RSS but with a little less commitment). I can subscribe to 5 celebrities, 5 blogs, a news service and the CEO of Zappos and loading Twitter.com shows me exactly what all of those entities are up to. I can then reply, retweet or share those posts with people that follow me. This is the 2nd level of value but wait, no one follows me. Now what?

Well, this is where we go back to the article about teens not using Twitter. Let me first address something. Ever applied for a job, internship, college or group and get denied? Our egos get a little hurt but looking back I realize things I didn’t get accepted for usually were because I wasn’t qualified. Without meeting this “teen” at Morgan Stanley, I have to pose the question, “Why in the hell is a 15 year old boy working at a highly respected firm like Morgan Stanley and why in the hell did someone at MS decide his report was something the company endorsed?” He may be a prodigy and maybe 5 other associates looked over and checked it but I’m a bit ticked off that this made it to The Internet and had the Morgan Stanley seal of approval. Ok, back to my original point.

My friend, @DanielBru wrote this post on TechCrunch. He makes the argument that teens aren’t using the network because they feel unsafe. Here’s a quote:

Anyone can follow your status updates. It’s a completely open network that makes teenagers feel “unsafe” about posting their content there, because who knows who will read it.

I disagree. There may be some percentage of 13-19 year old kids that feel that way but there’s also a percentage of kids who don’t have a cell phone, don’t actually like technology, don’t browse the web and don’t have any other friends that are on Twitter (a standard catalyst for social network growth is having a friend invite you). I actually feel it’s something completely different and yes I think that teens, who are usually very quick on adopting the hottest networks actually aren’t using Twitter as the 15 year old from MS reports.

I was very lucky to have first hand experience with all of this. I’ve always been a shareaholic or over-sharing kind of person. I started blogging at 12, starting using Myspace in August of 2003 (when it came out) and adopted Facebook as soon as it was open to the public in 2006/2007. I joined Twitter in December of 2006 (when it was only 7 months old and I was only 20 years old. Looking back I wasn’t interested in current events, financial markets or what companies were up to. I had no clue who was the CEO of AT&T or GE or that GE owned 70% of Universal Media Group which owns Universal Studios and NBC. I was too young to remember ENRON and didn’t notice rising gas prices until i turned 16 and started driving.

I was a typical southern teenager except I had a few extra passions like technology, blogging and social networking but I was a minority in my school and 1 of three kids who carried a laptop to school. Twitter was odd to me because I was following people I knew from the Internet but had never met, there wasn’t much other value in it then simply knowing what a person had for lunch (back in 2006) but I was still drawn to it. Teens are generally more concerned with getting school work done, passing classes, making it to football practice and getting laid. I think they’d like to maybe make some money with a part time job and get accepted to a good college, well some of them want that. My point is, Twitter doesn’t fit the conventional social networking formula which is:

1. Add tons of info about yourself
2. Add a bunch of friends you know from school
3. Upload more stuff about yourself (photos, info, data, contact info).
4. Chat with friends and check out their stuff
5. Upload more stuff about yourself.

On the exterior, Twitter seems to meet that formula but tweets don’t really count as “stuff about yourself” like photos, AIM or MSN handles, blog posts or emails. It’s very simple and almost too simple to the point where teens just don’t see the value in it and maybe find it as a big time sync. Sure you can simply SMS your updates into Twitter but you’d be surprised how many kids in middle-America or the southern states don’t have cell phones until they can pay their own bills (16+) and many more who don’t have a data coverage or text message plan to afford messages like that. Where I come from, kids do pre-pay plans for their phones and texts are 10-30 cents a piece and that adds up when you’re spending $1.50 a day just to Twitter to 3 people who follow you from Science class.

At what point does Twitter become relevant to young people? It becomes relevant when shit starts to matter to you. Sure stuff matters when you’re young but not “adult stuff” If you’re 14, it’s not apparent to you that 10% of America being unemployed affects you or that car companies are going under or that print-media publications are folding and going under. Hell, you probably only knew one Michael Jackson song from when the DJ played it at your school dance. Yeah that’s just how it is when you’re young. I love reading tweets from CEOs are large companies or getting Dell Outlet coupon codes via Twitter but what 14 year old gives a crap about that?

If I was 16 and growing up as a normal kid in Kansas and I had a Facebook account with 50 friends I go to school with, that would be all that I needed and every time Facebook added a “Twitter-Like feature” like status updates, replies and more that would only keep me more happy with Facebook because it’s a compliment to the larger picture. Twitter, to a new user is just like Facebook status updates and if I, as a kid, already have that in Facebook why should I switch?

Teens don’t need Twitter yet and that’s okay but one day they will and I’d rather run a company that interests people between the ages of 21-65 than a network like Myspace that loses its audience as soon as they turn 18. The Backstreet boys weren’t popular as their audience grew older and I feel Myspace may experience the same fate.

I’m in awe after my friend sent me a link to a video of a man who is truly making a difference. It’s amazing how we tend to boost our ego or make ourselves feel better by saying that we’re charitable or “green” or care about our Earth and its inhabitants but we’re doing the bare minimum. I donate money & time once a month to help people in my community. It’s not as much as I used to do before truly becoming incredibly busy but I can say that I’m not ignoring the state of our world and little things do make a difference. There’s a man who is doing something that I’ve only dreamed of and he’s proved to me that big change is possible even on a small level. Please watch the video below.

Shawn left his middle-class American lifestyle and didn’t start a blog or picking up trash in his neighborhood and he didn’t petition for homeless programs in his area which, in my opinion is easy work that every single person should do. Shawn actually purchased a one-way ticket to Bangladesh and used his savings to truly make a difference. His project is called “Uncultured” and it’s not a non-profit, it’s not a corporation. It’s a project started by one guy and supported by one guy with donations from people like us. Instead of our donations going to a huge non-profit where 75% of the money goes to “operating expenses” and the other 25% is diluted and spread around the world, the donations to Uncultured go to people and Shawn posts video online of your donations going to buy food and supplies for real people.

What an amazing concept brought to us by The Internet. I give $50 and Shawn films that money being converted into relief supplies for people affected by natural disasters & poverty and puts it on the web. This concept is powerful, beautiful and extraordinary. Shawn, hat-tip to you and I’m sending you a virtual pat on the back for starting something amazing.

Below are links to learn more about Uncultured and I hope you can find $10 a month to donate as a recurring payment. Teachers in Bangladesh make no more than $13 US Dollars teaching kids so every dollar can go a long way!

• Twitter
• About
• Homepage
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Facebook
• DONATE

Every day, I put more of my life online and less of my life is offline. I don’t keep a diary and I don’t have physical photos or video of my memories. Everything is stored on hard drives and on servers located across the world. When I die, the data I’ve created will be my legacy and this is why an Internet Will is important.

Laura has a copy of this will and I will be sending a copy to my father as well. In the event of my death, they will open the envelope to reveal a thumb drive. This drive has a partition readable by Windows & Mac and password protected with a code that only my family knows. I’d like to share the contents of this drive.

• A video that needs to be uploaded to YouTube or the popular video site of the time.
• A few photos to be used in my memorial (if I have one)
• A letter announcing my death with my final goodbyes
• Password to my blog, Twitter, Facebook, Google and other accounts to send my last “updates” of my death
• Bank account & financial logins
• Passwords to nearly every single website. I generate this 25 page PDF once a month that contains passwords to every site I’m a member of. I try to keep this as up to date as possible.
• A document that says which of my electronics goes to which family member.

The only things I own in life are my bicycle, clothing, kitchen utensils and my firearms. The rest of my belongings require electricity. I have computer, hard drives, speakers, monitors, phones & more that are all considered “electronics” and I have all of these made out to someone in the event that I die. For example, my father gets my laptop and Laura gets my 30″ Monitor and RAID Array of LaCie Drives.

I’m surprised that more people don’t do this. On average, I have friends spend 4 hours a day online. I spend about 10 hours a day physically in front of a computer so it makes sense that all of my memories and data I’ve generated online mean something to me even after death. I don’t want my Flickr album, Facebook status or blog to sit dormant after my death. It’s appropriate to have one last update, post or upload to have a bit of closure and I leave it to my family to carry out this act.

If you have a Twitter profile or Flickr account, you already should have one of these Internet Wills and I hope one day there’s a service that lets me put all of this into an account (passwords, last blog post and video) so when I do die, a family member can click one button and announce my death. To those of you reading this that are confused and surprised, you’re probably in a different generation or you haven’t embraced “The Matrix” Internet lifestyle that I have.

if you disagree keep your comments to yourself.

Expression is hard and writing things down is also difficult especially when it’s public but blogging is a very healthy habit and something that I hope continues to grow more and more as my generation matures. A blog is more respected than traditional media these days and consumers are more likely to read a blog over a newspaper, magazine or press release. It’s the human voice that truly captivates people and I’d like to see more of it.

I’m not saying people should follow this method but I don’t edit my blog posts and I don’t modify them later. There’s thought word and deed which is exactly how my blog posts are written. I actually didn’t truly see the power of blogging until two things simultaneously happened to me that, without blogging, would have adversely affected my life, career and reputation. I’ll tell these two tales seperately.

I began blogging at a very young age. To show just how young I was I’ve copied one of my best and well-written posts

Well, i am back. I have to leave in two hours to go teach a martial arts class. I am going to rest and hit some chat rooms before i go. Oh and get something to eat, also. Thinking of getting a veggie/turkey wrap. Today I slept till 9, washed dad’s car., then cleaned house a little bit.
At 1-3, had to do some personal martial art training with an army reserve guy. Dad is the teacher, but I help a lot. this guy has been stationed in Georgia, so can only train every few weeks, for private classes. It does pay well though, and I enhoy it. We went all out, he is bloodied, and my necks is still killing me.
I got home about 3:30, grabbed a snack and finally finished watching a movie, with dad. He left for work again, at 5. I am now here online, checking in with my peeps. Feel free to drop me a message; . I still need some WWII questions for history class,.that is all for now, c ya later. Adios.

That was in March of 2000 which was 9 years ago which means I was 13. I began blogging in early ’99 when I was only 12. It wasn’t even a generational thing at the time but I found this site LiveJournal and started writing things down. I have every blog entry in HTML form so I can look at them when I’m 50 and laugh my ass off. Along those lines, I also have CSV files of all of my tweets so I can index and save them one day (like a diary).

Until I moved to San Francisco in 2008, I kept creating new blogs for specific things. Right, what does a guy between the age of 15-21 have to write about that requires more than one blog? Well, in retrospect, not much but this management actually helped me a great deal with managing blogs, maintaining a voice and subject for each blog and catering to different audiences. In late 2008, I decided to basically kill off all of those blogs and bring it down to 1. The reason was two-fold. The first is that I realized it’s difficult to scatter your audience. This has proven useless in two mediums that I know of. Keep in mind I’m not an expert in either of these subjects but television and religion have followed this practice and it causes, “500 channels with nothing on” and “holy wars”. Since I’m not a fan of either of those, I decided to simplify. Another reason was that I have started ghost-writing for a few people and spreading my work out. Don’t worry, I save the best for this blog but I found myself posting other places for companies and individuals and having 5 blogs myself just wasn’t needed. I posted this final post on my most popular blog and said goodbye. It’s been the best decision I’ve ever made for my personal brand.

I fell into marketing. You know when you were a kid and you had dreams of being an astronaut when you grew up? I had that dream too but, like many young adults, it changed constantly but I didn’t know I’d be marketing anything even after I stepped off the plane upon moving to San Francisco. I moved to San Francisco with very different plans but what never occurred to me was the fact that the move to SF, my work at Apple and my years of travel were all due to the fact that my personal brand was very strong. How did I do that? I failed A LOT but with each failure came a lesson in success and I applied this knowledge and never gave up.

Years of cultivating my personal brand, trying and trying again turned me into a marketer. Sure it was marketing of myself but these strategies paired with my knowledge of the web teamed up and I became someone who could actually help companies or people market themselves or products. It was crazy to me at first so I did something unique. I did it all for free. I committed to 1 year of consulting, speaking, marketing and branding to ANYONE that wanted it. I worked my ass off, pulled 16 hour days and even weekends to help as many people as possible without charging them a dime. Yes it sucked but I can tell you that this is month 13 of living in San Francisco and it paid off more than I could have ever imagined. Let’s get back to blogging though.

What I saw time and time again is that Twitter or micro-blogging in general weren’t the answer to company messaging or branding and neither is a press release or word of mouth. In fact all of those are totally crap for getting your message across. Personally, I can’t read press releases. They’re about as boring as reading a romance novel and Twitter is wonderful for RIGHT NOW but it’s not the answer due to its character limitations and that your message (tweet) is buried in as little as 10 seconds from the moment you click update. If your company is under fire for something and you’re using Twitter to reply to everyone and set the record straight, it’s not going to work and I’ve tried!

Blogging is powerful, long-form, short-f0rm, can contain rich media and is more respected than a tweet or status update. Blog about it and now it’s law. Twitter as a service is very valuable and it CAN be more powerful than blogging but it’s not Twitter’s fault or the product’s fault. The fault is in the human mind and how we are trained to perceive information and process it. Just as 85% of people that re-tweet something never click the link, people will make assumptions before finishing the 140 character sentence. Reading a blog puts the mind in a wait and see mode as opposed to, “what’s this? Meh.” Trust me. Next time there’s a company that you absolutely HATE, check their twitter feed and try to believe them. IT’s hard but when a VP posts a blog entry explaining why they were wrong and apologizing, you’ll hear them out because you want to believe that they can do better and they will do better.

What I learned from blogging is that you’re telling a story. Telling a story 0ver Twitter can be done but it takes a long time. We tell stories every day and before you call me out by saying that a story can be told in 140 characters, I’d like to better explain this.

This blog post had a few key elements that I included and maybe you’ll notice them as I write them out below.

• Childhood Memories
• Self Reflection
• Honesty
• Story Telling
• Knowledge and Tips
• Personal Experiences in Marketing
• Dreams that failed or became a reality

I’m not a scholar so don’t quote my key elements above but these combined makes for a pretty interesting pitch. It’s very very hard for a company to align with these elements but they can sort of do this by sharing early days of the company, admitting defeat and reflecting on mistakes made. It’s about the story and the message and people aren’t doing that. The masters of blogging and self-promotion have told an epic story and this is what I’ve been doing. The story can be real or it can be fabricated but what’s important is that you tell A STORY. Twitter is remarkable for storytelling but it takes time. I’ve posted almost 45 thousand tweets in the past 2.5 years but my story changes and unfolds every day but what I have shared has brought in quite a few fans, friends and colleagues that have become a part of this or have checked-in along the way.

When I started AdamsBlock / OurBlock.TV in the Fall of 2008, I never envisioned it would turn into a company but it did and things are going very well for the guys that are working on it. I made a big mistake which the new owner of this company mentioned in a blog post. I really respect that post because he’s exactly right. I’ve copied a part of it below but you can read the full post HERE.

Communication from Adam was not very good. His weekly community chats were great but ensuring everyone saw the video wasn’t followed through. OurBlock will have weekly updates on our blog with traffic info, donations, new signups and more really cool stats. I want everyone to know what’s going on with OurBlock on a week to week basis and I’m going to make it very easy to give feedback. I’m creating an OurBlock social networking space for broadcasters and fans to communicate and collaborate, there will be weekly YouTube videos from me where you can spread news virally as well. Finally, this blog will be here to answer common questions on a global level. Before, complaints and feedback were answered one email at a time. If I sense a trend, I’ll post my response to the blog so everyone can be educated and it will also help me manage emails a lot better.

He makes a great point. Blog posts that answer common questions and set a tone / message for the entire organization. This is key. Gossip and speculation will always happen and OurBlock will have a chat room, social network component and fan pages on Facebook but the company word & rules will be posted on the blog and I think this is the key to not having the problems that I had with the site. The chat room was a mess, rumors were started about me and without a blog, I never had a chance to address those clearly. This is my fault and part of the reason the site failed. Blogging is very important for everyone.

Your brand is at stake and blogging strengthens this brand. everyone has a brand to maintain and yours is stagnant without a voice. You don’t have to talk about technology or social media to have a blog. Just talk about your interests, experiences, loves and hates and people will follow. Do it for yourself and for your career but just do it.

*Jeez. Another 1900 word blog post. I really need to trim these down! *