Posts in category "Technology"
alexandrialibrary

Death, permanence and the Web

None of us are Lazarus Long, we will all die. Just as we are born so to will we at some point, either by natural events or by malfeasance, fade away from living memory.

As much as we would all like to be remembered for all of human memory the chances of us being a Churchill, a Martin Luther King, or even a Genghis Kahn are next to nil.

But that was the illusion that the Web has given us – a sense of permanence, that even after our physical bodies have retired to the dirt our thoughts, dreams and opinions will live on.

It’s a nice dream but a dream all the same. It is a dream that two people I respect highly touched on in recent posts.

The first one is from Louis Gray where he talks about whether or not people’s social profiles should live on past their death. This conversation came about because of Facebook suggesting that Louis should think about re-connecting with one of his Facebook contacts – who had passed away in January from cancer.

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mashable

Mashable has jumped the shark – or is that jumped the puff

I honestly couldn’t believe it when I saw this show up as a shared item. I have no problem with sponsored posts as long as they are for products or services within your area of interest and expertise. However can some-one please explain how Cheetos fits in with Mashable subjects?

What makes this even worse though is that 318 people were brain dead enough to think that this piece of shill was worth retweeting.

I am totally dumbfounded.

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square-squirrel-dorsey-iphone

The Square wasn’t “fully baked” .. no freakin kidding

I said from the very beginning that this was a dumb idea that hadn’t been thought out. It seems that I may have been partly right after all.

Jack Dorsey from Square – that silly dongle thing for accepting credit card payments at their work – sent out an email the the early users of the system that the company may have been a little over excited and let this thing loose while it was still half-baked.

And we’re surprised by this how?

Here’s his email in full courtesy of TechCrunch:

Dear Square user,

We announced Square with the phrase: “0 to $60 in under 10 seconds.”

Square’s goal is to enable people to accept payments immediately, everywhere. We realize the amount of time we’ve taken to ship our Square readers has been frustrating, sometimes confusing, and has generated a number of questions. When we announced the company last December, we estimated Square would be ready in the U.S. sometime in early 2010. Since then, we’ve let our excitement get the best of us and have released parts of Square before they were fully baked.

A recent email from our support team to a Square user sums up where we are:

Until recently, we were facing a big hardware shortage, but that is now resolved (we sent our co-founder Jim to China for a couple weeks to arrange better manufacturing, and that did the trick). The problem has transitioned to something we’ve been working on simultaneously, a credit processing and risk issue. We need to strengthen our underwriting infrastructure so that we can handle the huge demand for readers and still manage the risk of chargebacks and fraud. This is the last thing preventing us from shipping readers as fast as we’d like, and we have pretty much the entire team working on it.

The way we are handling the risk of chargebacks and fraud is through transaction limits, but we have received feedback that those limits are too low. We are rethinking and expanding our underwriting infrastructure to address this issue. As soon as we finish, we will send you an email to confirm that you would like us to run a credit check (or you can cancel your request to process cards with Square which will securely remove your personal information). We will then ship your free card reader and activate your account to accept card payments.

We thank you for your continued patience as we work to deliver a utility you can use every day and for allowing us the time to get it right.

Jack Dorsey
Square CEO

Duh!

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Experimenting with embedded Waves in posts

While Google Buzz is getting much of the press when it comes to Google’s attempts at crafting a viable social media platform people seem to have forgotten about Wave. It’s understandable because, really, what is Wave all about anyway?

To be honest I’m not sure if that is a question that anyone, other than the Wave team, can really answer but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of people experimenting with it. Chris Brogan is the one person that I know of that has been experimenting the most with it and strongly recommends it for task management and collaboration.

I know I wrote a post about the idea of using it as a replacement for Facebook but the only problem is that … well … no-one is using Wave. Even though it is obvious that it would take a hellva uptake of Wave in order to even come close to approaching Facebook that doesn’t mean that there still aren’t other uses for it.

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