clear.your.mind

We are almost there people.. hang on…

This is extremely dangerous, but effective. You can turn a normal pencil into a light with your car battery and two cables. I have to say, I’m amazed of this! and a normal pencil can give up to 20 minutes of light! This is extremely dangerous and unnecesary, flashlights are better than this! but it’s amazing just for the record how well can this work! If you are captured by an insurgent group and during your escape the car you and your fellow prisoners have stolen gets broken, this method could save your life! I will not use it in any other cases. This could lead into some kind injuries for sure. I don’t want to even think on what would happen if the two cables touch together.

ok, I was keeping this one for myself, but I’m getting tired of this Web 2.0 thing going on right now. It seems like a lot of people out there can’t get it right. Web 2.0 isn’t about a cool developer who had a job at some web company when the bubble was alive selling his new web application to Yahoo or Google for a couple of millions, Web 2.0 is about how we can use the learned lessons to improve the user experience. We came a long way since the web was just a grey, horrible page; why do we get so greedy every 5 years?

Money Talks

Yes, you can make a bunch of money today if you start your own web application. Search engines are gone man, now the goal is building anything that crosses your mind, put a tag sign on it and that’s it, there you have; a Web 2.0 company. Here are some ideas for all of you, bounty hunters:

• A Social Bookmark….oh no wait, that’s already done.
• A word process…oh no, sorry; taken too.
• A photo gallery were users can… oh sorry. Taken. Oh no wait! maybe if we add an “intelligent” feature, like face recognition we could… oh no, taken too. Damn.
• Did I said Social Bookmarking and Word Processor? did I? well, let’s do one of those two, who will tell the difference anyway?

Come one people you can be smarter than that. We can be smarter than that, I’m human too you know. We all get greedy at some point, all of us. You, me, the guy behind you who is looking at your screen right now over your shoulder, everyone. Maybe that’s the problem, maybe that’s why we have to create a discipline over something so natural like thinking on the small guy who is going to end up using the damn thing.

Google and Yahoo are buying, hide your apps

If you have an ongoing pet project, google may buy it. Even if you didn’t put it on paper yet, Yahoo will take a look at it. They don’t care what it does or if they can do it forty times better with the people they already are paying; it doesn’t care! they just want to buy it. Nobody is investing in user research, nobody wants to know if you find Google Calendar easy to find, or if you don’t use the Yahoo webmail because of the damn flash banners. No, that’s too hard to do. Let’s give a developer 30 million bucks to ask him how to do it, after all, he should know better, he has a shiny book written and a weblog.

I think the reason why companies are buying apps and their creators, is because they have finally lost connection with the user. No more user research, no more learning. Let’s pay some guy who IS WITH the community and find out what he has to say about our company, our apps and our image. If we buy someone really popular, with a leather jacket and a hot blog, we may be buying all those readers too. They aren’t buying just an app, they are buying a “cool image”, a “we read blogs too” image.

Is really that bad?

Of course not, is evolution. The funny thing is that if you take a look at the Internet history; you will find the same “famous” guys at the first Internet bubble saying “man, those fellows really screwed it up”; but they were right over there, screwing it up too! that was the funny part. Laugh.

Now, if we take a look at some of the most wanted web 2.0 apps, we will find the same guys saying exactly the same thing: “don’t say Web 2.0, that is just a media invention. A pretty name for some Ajax-based web app which won’t last in time. Damn rookies. oh, I almost forgot, take a look at my new Social Bookmark web app”. Yeah right.

So what to do?

I’m going with the flow baby, nothing more to do. Don’t cover yourself if it start raining, just look at the sky and enjoy. There is another bubble growing right here, so if you can grab a bite of that cake, go for it. Green light, come one.

Only one thing: learn about your own mistakes. Like I’m trying to do, every day (some days I have more things to learn than others, but that’s ok.) Let’s keep the good practices working, evolving; let’s build something cool for the user. If we sell it or not, that isn’t really what matters here. If we enjoy working in our app, and we find something really interesting to make things easier for all of us; we will prevail even if the so called second Internet bubble explodes again. At least we will had evolved as developers, and as a community.

Now get the hell out of my blog!
Cheers
Javier Cabrera

This week I was looking for a way of build my network through the web; of course, I cannot travel to the united states every week to make contacts so I have to relay on the Internet. I’ve meet very interesting people, like Liz from Successful-blog and couple of guys, including current and past clients; but I want more (I always want more, I’m fat, don’t blame me!)
So I came across with this terrific, amazingly easy to read article write by Guy Kawasaki called The ARt of Schmoozing. WOW, I can say just that.

For some of you folks this may seem common sense because you know everything (why you people aren’t for president? can’t understand…) but for me, is a true eye opener and I intend to yell about that very loud, so cover your ears.

The Art of Schmoozing sounds even like a book title; it’s great piece of reading. I will list some of the points Guy described for you:

• Ask good questions, then shut up. The mark of a good conversationalist is not that you can talk a lot. The mark is that you can get others to talk a lot. Thus, good schmoozers are good listeners, not good talkers. Ask softball questions like, “What do you do?” “Where are you from?” “What brings you to this event?” Then listen. Ironically, you’ll be remembered as an interesting person.
• Read voraciously. In order to be a good schmoozer, you need to read voraciously–and not just the EE Times, PC Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal. You need a broad base of knowledge so that you can access a vast array of information during conversations. Even if you are a pathetic passionless person, you can at least be a well-read one who can talk about a variety of topics.
• Give favors. One of my great pleasures in life is helping other people; I believe there’s a big Karmic scoreboard in the sky. God is keeping track of the good that you do, and She is particularly pleased when you give favors without the expectation of return from the recipient. The scoreboard always pays back. You can also guess that I strongly believe in returning favors for people who have helped you.

Excellent article Mr Kawasaki, maybe you need to consider writing a book or something ;-)

Safari is the award winning MacOS browser that ships with every apple computer; it’s light, it’s good looking and it has some interesting features other browsers don’t have. One of them is the address bar that doubles as a page-download progress bar. Fission (for Firefox win/mac) is an extension that duplicates that functionality; it’s very light and it looks awesome!
You can even use the about:config to change the progress color or switch to text or graphic mode. It’s very easy to install and it’s a cool add-on. Give it a try!
Related Links
Fusion extension for Firefox (Mac or Win)

I was felling a little bit blue about CYM design with my new projects going on (CSSelite) so I decided to move on and make some changes to CYM; and it looks great!. More clean, more simple, more space, more colorful, more emaginacion ;) Hope you like it!

I know Internet can be very dangerous for teenagers; we all know that (no doubt about it). I just read this Newsweek Article: Predator’s Playground by Susanna Schrobsdorff and it’s pretty amazing. Apparently, the sexual predators are browsing MySpace.com for fresh “meat”!!! My god, they are everywhere! Here, give it a serious read:

an. 27, 2006 - In League City, Texas, it would be unusual to make one arrest of a suspected online sexual predator in a month. But in the last two weeks, detectives there have tracked down two men whom they’ve charged with sexual assault of a minor.
Both of the accused men found or conversed with their victims via the social-networking Web site MySpace.com, according to League City police.

I’m working on something similar…

Yes, I’m. With a couple of mates we are building right now a web service that could be used for sexual predators (I guess)… but the problem is, all web services that involves communities (forums, chats, blogs, etc) are exposed to this kind of sick people. It’s a shame.

What we are going to do about it

This article is making us think all over again our web app. We need to make it secure for everyone, not just for teenagers; but for all people out there. Handling user private info it’s one of the most difficult aspects of building an application; and we know it.

Problem is, they are out there looking for fresh meat. Best thing to do, its to be ready and in touch with authorities.

Read the full Newsweek story at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11065951/site/newsweek/

Howdy!

We just launched our new redesign at Emaginacion! oh gosh, how proud we are! the design is new and fresh, the layout too! more user friendly, more easy to navigate, more beautiful! more! more! ;)

And, we are also featuring a new site called CSSelite where we are going to show, every day only the best of the best CSS designs from around the world! The best part is you can submit sites if you want! so, if you are a web designer with something to show us, just use the form at “submit site” and we’ll take a look at your site!

Right now we have six amazing examples of what we are going to start showing there from now one; enjoy!

The address is

http://www.csselite.com.ar

Pass it on to your friends!

Cheers
Javier Cabrera