Super Jellyfish

Ohmigod, the Sony Connect Store is HORRIBLE!!!!!

I bought a Sony ereader a couple of months ago and the $50 credit I got with purchase is expiring in a week. Since I’m on holiday the next week, I decided to go online and use the credit.

The store is really awful. It is slow. It does not have any books. The books it does have are expensive. The interface sucks. Its just AWFUL!!!

Okay, after my last post, I’ve started to use Remember the Milk much more extensively.

It has only been a week, but so far I LOVE IT!

It is really awesome. I am quite impressed that they built and support the application with only TWO people! And they are self-funded. Very impressive.

So why do I like RTM so far?

• Multiple input methods.
  • I can EMAIL IN my to-do list. This is extremely useful since I can keep the full text of the originating to-do email and refer to it. This has actually been quite killer for me.

    A lot of what I do is email someone a question and wait for a response. Now, I can email the person, then forward the email to RTM and add a due date one week later (using natural language) and add tags to help me remember what this was pertaining to. When I go to RTM, I can see all my items and arrange them in a million different ways: things I’m waiting on, when I last emailed about something, etc.

    Or someone emails me with a question or asks me to look at something. I can just forward that to RTM, add tags, add due dates in my email message and voila it will be all collected in RTM when I need it.

    Basically RTM is like a catch all that I just throw stuff into, without having to open up the web page!

  • Since they’ve integrated with Twitter, I can send an IM to my Google Talk and send my to-do items very quickly. This is awesome and very easy to do. Sometimes I forget all the syntax for tagging, etc. but I think that will come with more time.
• Nice and easy organization of tasks.
  • I love the tags. There is also a tag cloud (which I wish showed up on every page) so I can see which categories have the most stuff. [Duh, there is an option under the settings to change this. I wish it were default though]
  • Smart lists. There is also the ability to save custom searches as individual tabs. So I have tabs for contexts (GTD), tabs for work related things, tabs for stuff I’m waiting on, tabs for personal, and a project tab where I keep a list of all my projects and assorted to-do’s. This is so awesome. Yes, it is true that you could just add a word into a note or something and then do a search for it. But, the fact that you can save the search is awesome. For example, I can put marks like #something in my Google Notebook and then search for that. But, I have to REMEMBER that I had tags with that. And there is no way to get the full list of #whatevers without getting a lot of other garbage, too.
• Responsiveness. It works quickly! Since they’ve made extensive use of Ajax, I can switch back and forth between various categories quickly. I think this is what killed MonkeyGTD for me
• Support for keyboard shortcuts. I love this. I can navigate around, change due dates, change tags, add a URL, add a note, all without picking up the mouse. It is awesome!!!
• Offline integration. Since they support Google Gears, when my internet connection is down (which happens more often than not) I can just go into offline mode and continue to manage my to-do list

Things I wish could be improved:

• I wish I could see both complete and incomplete items for particular project/tag at one time. Sometimes, I just want to see the status of a project and it’s hard to do that when I have to switch back and forth.
• Overdue tasks. I think it would be better if they just showed up under the today tab instead of a separate tab.Otherwise, sometimes I forget about things that are past due (which is really bad!)
• I wish I could see when I added the task. It’s hard to tell if a task is super old and has been forgotten right now.
• I wish I could find orphaned tasks - that is tasks without tags. since I have such a long, long list of to do’s, it’s again hard to figure out what’s been forgotten

But these are just minor complaints, so far, RTM has been great. Let’s just see if I continue to use it when I get back to school.

I am just so impressed that the team keeps such up to date with all the latest applications and builds support so that you can integrate RTM into the other aspects of your life. I really don’t know how the team does it! They must be exhausted.

I think this is hilarious!

There’s a lot of these how-to video sites. I like 5 Min, but, I think they should modify their player so that when you click on it, it takes you to their home page a la You Tube…

There’s so many small details associated with UI that make such a big difference. I keep seeing that over and over.

I just installed two applications from Google - Gmail mobile client and Google Mobile maps. Both are really cool! Google mobile maps is cooler because it’s a standalone app and it is going to be sooo incredibly useful when I am out and lost in Boston. It’s completely awesome.

Unfortunately, Gmail is not supported for Treo 650’s, but there are instructions on the Google site for getting it to work. Hopefully, my Treo will not start crashing all the time. I had to install IBM’s java virtual machine which you can get off the Treo site. I downloaded it to my desktop computer and then synced up my Treo with the PRC file.

Then I pointed my browser at the gmail app page which notes that Treo’s aren’t supported, but it lets you download it anyway. A couple changes to preferences later, I was using gmail on my Treo!

So far, it’s a lot better than using the m.gmail.com with the Blazer browser. I also considered using Versamail to just pop my email out, but I also download my gmail on Outlook, and I wasn’t sure what would happen if I downloaded onto my Treo with Versamail. Would my mail still download into Outlook? Or would I email end up getting split all over the place? I suppose I could’ve tried it but using the Gmail app is more interesting.

I think one problem with mobile apps is that people always try to port the web to mobile. It just doesn’t work. I think things need to be built FOR mobile phones…

For us to really move forward we’ve gotta get outside the little boxes we all put ourselves in.

I agree!

ShopWiki is a website that I noticed last week.

I think it’s a great idea! The site is essentially a shopping guide / wiki which indexes everything that can be purchased online.

So part of the site is sort of similar to My Simon or Froogle in that it lets you do price comparison. Where I think the site takes off in comparison though is that there are wikis on the site where users can add information/facts on buying something.

When I first came across it, I sort of thought it was neat, but wasn’t sure if I would ever use it. Then today I was thinking about making a purchase, but I wanted to do some research beforehand. Right now there’s not really any single place to look to do research. If ShopWiki can be a kind of content aggregator of some sort, for example, linking to all the product reviews on a certain type of product and collecting information and putting into an easily searchable place, I think it could be really awesome.

Before people make a purchasing decision, they need objective information to figure out what they’re going to buy. There’s tons and tons of reviews and articles on things everywhere on the web, but right now they are sort of all over the place. Having one place to find information is really appealing. Also, the community aspect of sharing and people helping each other out is another awesome characteristic of this site.

Of course, they still need to build up their content, but it looks like team behind the site has pretty impressive Internet credentials. Let’s see what happens with this site! I also think it’s neat the company is based in NYC, home of tons of media/advertising firms.

Sorry if this sounds like a commercial, I don’t know anyone involved with the site and just came across it on the Internet… I just think it sounds like a neat idea.

A9 seems to be using Windows Live as its search engine now and it really sucks!!

When I search I often get 2 or 3 results compared to Google’s thousands, and when I did a search for “time in nyc” they sent me to website squatter rather than a real website!

I wonder why they are using Windows Live? Must be cost/other Microsoft incentives…. at the long-term expense of attracting users to A9… bleh!!

In another weird online shopping experience, I was trying to buy something from drugstore.com last night. Well, it kept saying I only needed to add $15 more to get free shipping, so I took the time to look around and find something else I could buy. They were offering free standard shipping with a $25 purchase.

Right when I went to check-out, I logged in with an existing account.. well several minutes later, my free shipping “evaporated” and suddenly I needed to buy $49 in order to qualify for free shipping!!

It was so annoying.

I thought maybe I was just hallucinating or something about seeing $25 earlier, so then I fired up Firefox, which apparently does not share cookies with Internet Explorer. Well, I went back to drugstore.com and it *again* said free shipping with $25!! What the heck!?

So this time, I added the same items to my cart, didn’t log in to my existing account to sign out and I was able to get the free shipping… Isn’t that unbelievable?!

It seems they could be more straight forward!

Hmm, I’ve been faithfully searching on A9.com every single day and it looks like they’ve permanently turned off my 1.57% discount!!

I wonder why that is?? Supposedly this is how you qualify:

“You can save an additional 1.57% (π/2%) on virtually all your purchases at Amazon.com by simply becoming a regular user of A9.com. Once you join and use A9.com for a few days you will automatically be eligible for the A9 Instant Reward…

While we are not revealing the exact criteria, they are minimal. If this is your first time at A9.com, you will be eligible after a few days of use. If you are already eligible, as little as a few searches a week will keep you eligible. (We reserve the rights to change the eligibility criteria at any time.) The total number of searches is not important; your eligibility depends on your regular use of A9.com.”

Sigh, perhaps I should just go back to Google. I just prefer the interface more.

Okay, I just went back to the sign-up page and it says I need to “enroll” in the program. Even though I enrolled months ago and have had the discount before, I need to re-enroll??? Isn’t that odd?

I’m going to try this for a week, otherwise, it’s back to Google!

P.S. Not to be critical or anything, but I noticed that Amazon gave out a bunch of free subscriptions to Amazon Prime in November. I got one, my friends got offers and a lot of bloggers mentioned it, too. Well on Amazon’s most recent earnings conference call, they noted how subscribers to Amazon Prime have really risen! Well, duh, if you are giving it away for free, of course it will rise! How many of those new subs are paying subscribers?! Isn’t it a bit disingenuous of them to not mention they *gave* away subscriptions on their call or highlight how the service is so popular?

I have been getting a *ton* of track-back spam and comment spam lately, and I finally noticed that my Spam Karma wasn’t updating its blacklist!

Luckily, the unknown genius has released Spam Karma 2 — which was just finalized a week ago. I just installed it and I hope I don’t get any more advertisements for boob implants or anti-wrinkle treatment. Yes, I know I’m getting old, but stop sending me annoying spam!!!

Hopefully this new thing will work.