The concept of microblogging has been around for a while and is championed (based on userbase?) by Twitter. I for one don’t seem to get why and at the risk of making an ignorant statement like these,  I find micro-blogging in its current form (with exception of a handful scenarios) frivolous and useless. The main argument I hear about it is that twitter (or similar services) are the real-time web and unless Google or others move towards that, you will be losing the game by serving the users content that is not super fresh and real time. I can see that being the case eventually and maybe the current form is just a stop-gap to figure out how to get us there and just maybe that is why Facebook is so obsessed with turning into twitter to the degree that it changes the site to even look like twitter. And then you have Google to some degree drooling over Facebook and certain aspects of its model and Microsoft trying to catch up with Google. We have a full ecosystem right there with these four guys.
Here is a good video summarizing my sentiments on tweeting (thanks to Karina):

PS. I do have a twitter account (curiosity) but I think I have logged into it maybe twice in the last 6 months.

It baffles me how low the Iranian goverment is willing to sink to continue their violation of human rights. For years, they have persecuted Baha’is of Iran, imprisoned and executed them on the same old and lame charges of espionage for Israel. Why? because Baha’is believe in the same God as Islam, want to achieve world peace and because we have our Holy places in Israel, like every other religion of the past.

The UN and rest of the world has passed resolutions one after the other and this has been a thorn in the side of the Iranian goverment that they can’t just continue do as they please.

And here is the goverment’s latest shameless play: they arrest seven of the Baha’is, imprison them and charge them for espionage. After this, the Noble prize winner and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi declares that she will represent the Baha’is and stand up for their human rights. The government then charges Ms. Ebadi with tax evasion and once imprisoned, this is then followed by formally charging these imprisoned Baha’is for espionage.

Further the timing of these events certainly are interesting. In the light of president Obama studying what to do about the relations with Iran, I personally find the timing of these event very interesting and cunning from Iran’s side. Why? because as mentioned violating the rights of Baha’is has been a thorn on the Iranian goverment’s side and now is their chance to see if they can get away with it with the new US president. I.e. is President Obama willing to prioritize this down in favor of starting a dialouge with Iran and instead focus on other matters that also are in contention with US (e.g. nuclear energy development).

Whether this is all one big consipirasy theory or not remains to be seen over time, but one thing is and continues to be clear. Iranian goverment is ready to sink as low as it takes to continue their shameless persecusion of Baha’is.

It used to be back in the days that news sources (and in particular papers) were started and used as propaganda machines for wars or political systems and you would think in this day and age with information so readily avaialbe to us through a host of sources and technologies, things would have changed. Not so much.

What I see happening is that we are either too lazy or overloaded with information that majority seem to want the news to be fully processed/digested so that we do nothing but be fed, be influences and move on to the next piece of information we need to absorb. And media sources are greatly taking advantage of this to the degree that sometimes the reality seen through their eyes is very distorted if you stop for a minute and think about what they serve us critically.

Even the small sources, e.g. blogsphere, be it technology or financial can’t help themselves and stray away from just telling the facts and background and leaving it to the reader to do the digestion.

So really not much has changed since the days of the past and although we can all agree that the media have both a powerful influence on people’s attitudes and perceptions and a weighty responsibility to contribute to social integration, it is not where they are and that is probably more of a reflection on where our society or mankind as a whole is. Sooner or later though this will need change and the future of journalism will have to be impartial, objective and factual, not processed or entertaining.

iPhone 3G is a cool phone on the market but when I finally decided to get a new phone and didn’t choose iPhone, many asked why and here are my reasons. First a few points on what I do with my phone:

• Manage my life.  One look at the home screen and I know what’s up for the day
• Triage (work & personal) emails. Mostly delete and quick/emergency replies
• Access/Manage my contacts which syncs with Outlook which in turn syncs with plaxo.com
• Access the web for quick info, price comparison when standing in a store etc.

Let review each phone (or rather OS) and what I like/dislike about them:

iPhone

I disliked:

• When replying to a work (exchange) email on the iPhone, it doesn’t show up as replied to in Outlook on the PC.
• You can’t flag messages like follow-up etc.
• Have to tell the mail client which account to send the message “from”. No default send account can be set.
• Switching between mail accounts required ~5 taps
• It syncs mail whenever it wants to.  I had personal mail set to sync manually.  It syncs when you open the mail client.  (I didn’t tell it to do that!)
• In contacts, the search wasn’t anchored at the top.  If I happened to be at Zach Zimmerman, I would have to scroll to the top to search for Buck Brown.  Not cool.
• It syncs ALL contacts folders in your mailbox – specifically it sync’d the folder I didn’t want on my phone, and I had no way to control it.
• Calendar – you can’t:
  • Create a request and invite others
  • Create a recurring meeting
  • Color things based on type (personal, etc)
  • Do free/busy
  • Change time zone of meetings
• Tasks – doesn’t sync from Exchange – not that I use them.
• Notes – doesn’t sync Notes folder from Exchange. Don’t really use those either.
• No Home Screen!  Looking at the home screen shows a ton of cool things to do: Facebook-which rules, iTunes, Safari-a browser that actually works well on a mobile device, and so many more.  Problem is the clock is miniscule and I had no idea what time my next meeting was unless I clicked into the calendar.
• Battery life – horrible – not even 1 full day.
• No Picture Text Messaging (MMS)
• No tactile keyboard – touching the screen keyboard was decent for typing.  I am way faster on WM keyboard devices.
• No video cam – not that important, but sometimes useful for a good joke or a concert clip.
• No copy/paste.
• No SD slot – makes transferring data more difficult.

Things I LOVED about the iPhone:

• INTERFACE – if you haven’t played with an iPhone, you are missing out.  The touch screen simply rules.  Nothing in WM comes close in my opinion. (Not even the Touch which has a cool home screen, then switches out to the standard WM interface inside an app.)
• Safari – their web browser actually allowed you turn surf the web. Interesting concept – WM take notice! (ps-we are making IE6 available to WM devices later this year.. should be a HUGE help)
• Built in GPS – very nice.  Google maps works perfectly and is very smooth and easy to use. (I realize we have Live for WM)
• Accelerometor – when you flip the device, the screen flips into landscape/portrait.  That’s nice.  (WM requires you to open the keyboard to do this.)
• Applications – the social aspect of the device simply rocks.  facebook, youtube, and so many other cool/useful tools (for social/personal use)
• I could tell it to always use First Last when creating/sorting Contacts.
• I never had to reboot the device once because it flaked out.
• It never ran out of memory
• Coolness factor

Nokia E71

Dislikes:

• Small non touch screen
• you can’t reply-all to everyone on an exchange appointment (if you are late) – same as iphone
• Very basic exchange features (worse than iphone in some areas)
• Symbian can be as user friendly as unix, menu system is not always friendly or intuitive.

Likes:

• Radio
• Podcast over 3G – awesome and can’t get it on iphone
• Very slim profile – I have to feel which pocket I have it in sometimes since its so slim and light
• Battery – goes without the need for charge for 2-3 days with moderate surfing and regular email download.
• Good GPS – that is not picky and get signal even in pretty covered areas (like driving in a car)
• Stable – have not had to reboot.
• Nice tactile keyboard – makes life easier when typing

Overall, very happy with my E71 and no regrets so far, although lack of good integration with exchange does sometimes make me start considering going back to windows mobile device, but until I find something that is good enough (HTC HD is the only possible candidate so far), I am not going to bother.

In my ongoing series about life in the States and how it differs from previous countries I lived in, I have recently pondered about how life here has changed me (temporary or permanently remains to be seen) and a couple of points came to mind.

There is an ongoing debate on how Europeans do work hard (occasionally) but often stop to smell the roses along the way vs. Americans who are too focused to waste time on such things in their quest for consumerism. Of course, this is generalization and even within Europe people make jokes about other less efficient countries who do not but, oh say, drink wine and go on strikes…the point ultimately being that one side sees their way being superior to the other’s.

From my observations though, this does ring a bell in many aspects. A simple thing like vacation, when living in Sweden for instance I had 5 weeks vacation each year and during yearly reviews I (like others) would negotiate for additional vacation days or weeks rather than focus on salary (maybe because after certain level you pay 55%  income tax anyways); here in the States two weeks is the standard with more generous companies giving three.

At work here in the States, most people are not interested in your life, or to get to know you on a personal level, not necessarily because they don’t care (although that is the case many times) but because there is just no time to waste on those things. Or maybe this is just limited to the tech industry here? Anyways outside of my non-work friends, the concept of having lunch, coffee or phone chat for the sake of getting to know someone is rare here so unless there is a (work related) purpose to it what you will see is an initial small talk (usually short and somewhat awkward/abrupt) followed by getting to the point/topic at hand.

And in Rome you do as Romans, so I have realized I am doing just that, i.e. either avoid small talk altogether and go to the point from the start ( to avoid the whole awkwardness) or simply avoid talking to people about life outside of work even if I am interested so that they don’t feel like their time is being wasted or ask me politely “what’s up?” to stop the non-work related talk.

Maybe it’s the cultural in this fast paced industry where effeciency and results (followed by performance- and midyear reviews) is all that matters and there is just no room for much else  as there is not enough time in a day. Either way, I like to get to know people beyond their professional capabilities, so I have started swiming upstream, let’s see if I can make it last.

Had to look up binding adjustments for my skis ahead of  a trip and found this page useful.