jessestay, Author at Stay N Alive - Page 29 of 105

Author: jessestay

Is Google Reader Still an RSS Reader?

Posted on by jessestay

2426084610-reader-logo-en-6607753I’ve been following the Buzz about Buzz today (click on the link – get it?), and, wanting to try it (since I’m not of the privileged few bloggers given access at launch), I started browsing on my iPhone where I heard it was available.  Immediately I was presented with a list of people following me that I was not following back, so I went in and clicked follow on about 300 or so people that it said I was not following yet.  Big Mistake.

Later in the day I went to check Google Reader, which until today was my RSS Reader of choice, and lo and behold I had over 400 items from just the last hour sitting in my unread items box.  It turns out when you follow someone on Buzz, it also follows them on Reader, and who knows what else on the various Google properties.  Now, the only way to bring my volume of repeat RSS shares from friends down on Google Reader is to go into each and every one, mark hide, and manually move each into their own separate folders.  All this on an already slow Google Reader interface.  I’m not looking forward to that.

I have been critical ever since the Reader team introduced social features into Google Reader.  Now, rather than being a place where I can just go to ensure I’m getting the latest news from the blogs I want to subscribe to, as a traditional RSS Reader should be, I’m now stuck in a world with hundreds to thousands of shared items from friends, many of those repeat items, getting fed to me over and over again, even when I don’t want them!  Add to that all the likes, comments, ability to post “status updates”, and more, it occurred to me today that Google Reader is no longer an RSS Reader – it is now a Social Network!

I wish Google Reader would just stick to what it’s good at – being an RSS Reader.  I now need a place I can go just to get the news I want and don’t want to miss.  Some say those days are gone, but it’s still a need for me.  Today with the introduction of Buzz, Google Reader became useless to me.  If I want to skim the news I can go to Buzz and get all the features of a social network.  I don’t need Google Reader to do that for me.  But when I just want to read the news I want, Google Reader has lost its use for me.  Maybe some of this is the reason Google Reader’s former team lead just switched to the Youtube team?

I’m first to admit RSS is far from dead, though I think it’s time to find another RSS Reader.  Should I just switch to Mail.app?  Where can one go to get the news these days?

Yahoo Launches SQL Interface to Twitter

Posted on by jessestay

yql128-6333387Every time I switch to jQuery, Yahoo’s YUI libraries seem to keep luring me back.  Just yesterday, Yahoo added one more tool to its arsenal of YQL libraries that actually makes the Twitter API intuitive, giving me another reason yet to switch back to yui, or at least consider using Yahoo a little more as I develop tools for the Social Web.  The new YQL set of tables for Twitter enables any developer to use simple SQL-like queries to retrieve and post Twitter data.

For simple user queries, getting a user’s twitter profile data is as simple as something like “SELECT * FROM twitter.status WHERE id=’8036408424′;“.  To insert data, you simply need to provide the oauth consumer key and secret, along with the user’s oauth tokens and you can do things like post new status updates for the user, all in Javascript!  A subsequent call to post a user’s status would look like:

“INSERT INTO twitter.status (status, oauth_consumer_key, oauth_consumer_secret, oauth_token, oauth_token_secret)
VALUES (‘tweeting from yql!’, ‘@your_consumer_key’, ‘@your_consumer_secret’, ‘@your_access_token’, ‘@your_access_secret’);“

The cool thing about Yahoo’s YQL Twitter interface is I can also choose to only pull specific information out for the user.  I’m not quite sure the benefit this gives you considering Yahoo is probably still retrieving the entire subset of data from Twitter (you can’t pull specific pieces of data out of specific objects in the Twitter API), but at least it’s possible, something I’ve been craving from the Twitter API for quite awhile.  It is unclear if Yahoo is caching this data, and if so, it could provide some significant performance benefits, with Yahoo doing most of the work on their own backend.

Yahoo’s YQL puts them one level above Facebook’s own FQL query language for accessing Facebook data by enabling developers to not only access data like this for Twitter, but also other environments like Facebook as well.  Yahoo has an entire database of “community tables”, where, if specific APIs aren’t provided, the community can create their own tables to that interface and give developers immediate access to those APIs via a simple, standardized SQL interface to those platforms.

This type of API is exactly what I was looking for from the likes of Google’s Friend Connect APIs (and Google has still failed to provide) – a standardized platform where one single API gives me access to all the different APIs out there.  Now with standardized SQL I can access almost any API, and if that API doesn’t exist yet I can create my own interfaces into each API that, once created will also have access via that SQL interface.

Yahoo now has my attention with this launch.  The API has a web interface, where a call as simple HTTP GET to http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?[query_params] returns an entire structure of XML data my application can access.  They provide a YUI Javascript interface into the table structure so you don’t need a backend if you don’t want one, and I get all this for all the APIs I interface with.

I will now be looking into the Yahoo APIs as I look to interface the limitless APIs available out there thanks to Yahoo’s focus on cross-platform integration of their YQL interface.  I like that Yahoo isn’t being selfish with this.  With YQL, Yahoo has finally created a glue that lets me access all the APIs I need to access as a Building Block Web brick builder.

Twitter Testing "OAuth Delegation" With Select Partners – Genius

Posted on by jessestay

A common complaint amongst Twitter developers has been that Twitter’s OAuth, the authentication process you see when you click the Twitter login button on a 3rd party website and go to a Twitter-looking page with a “Allow” or “Deny” button, is too complicated.  Mainly, from a user experience perspective, users are required to leave the 3rd party site completely in order to log into Twitter, then get redirected back to the 3rd party site again.  If anything breaks along the way, the user is left wondering what to do, and valuable logins, purchases, or registrations could be lost.  Facebook has solved this by enabling users to do all the login process via Javascript they provide that produces a popup.  Users can log into Facebook without ever leaving the 3rd party site.  It appears, based on a thread on the Twitter developers list, that Twitter is planning to one-up Facebook by allowing users to log in to 3rd party sites without ever even needing a popup or any type of redirect, and they’re already testing it with select partners.

The topic came up when other developers noticed that the site, TwitPic.com, was allowing direct Twitter logins right on their own website and somehow posts from TwitPic were showing up with the TwitPic name and link next to the post on Twitter.  This normally isn’t possible without enabling OAuth login because Twitter has disabled the functionality for any non-OAuth produced Tweet.  In fact they have said in June of 2010 they will be completely removing the ability to login through Twitter on 3rd party sites via plain-text authentication.  So how is TwitPic doing it?

According to Raffi, an Engineer on the Twitter API platform team, Twitter is currently working on a new “OAuth Delegation” standard that will allow applications to allow users to log in via Twitter on their own sites, while still maintaining the control over Apps that OAuth gives providers and users.  So, on TwitPic, for instance, you can log in to TwitPic.com with your own Twitter username and password right on the TwitPic site itself, yet you’ll still have full control on Twitter.com to revoke access to TwitPic at any time you want to.  In addition, Twitter, at any time, can remove TwitPic’s ability to publish or access the Twitter API since they still have to use OAuth to make Twitter API calls.

If the hints in the developers list thread prove true, developers will be able to take the plaintext username and password, still store them somewhere, but in order to make calls through the Twitter API they’ll have to somehow send an OAuth key with their requests to Twitter along with some way of identifying the user.  My guess is, in essence, the app will send a one-time login on behalf of the user to Twitter (most likely via a secure SSL encryption channel or similar), and Twitter will return to the app an OAuth token to make API requests with on behalf of that user in the future.  In my opinion, this is still no different than storing an OAuth Token in a database that would give apps the same access as their Twitter username and password.

Security Concerns

While storage may be no different, I’m sure there will still be those concerned about this approach.  For instance, what happens when users get used to entering their Twitter usernames and passwords on 3rd party websites and decide to do so on a malicious website?  We’ve seen how used to entering Twitter credentials people get with websites that look like Twitter itself with the rampant phishing attacks recently.

Maybe Twitter is feeling comfortable enough that they can be proactive about such misuses and password collection.  The risk is still there though and hopefully the OAuth Delegation Twitter is getting ready to launch will cover this problem.

Partners

Thus far, it seems TwitPic is one of the partners testing this new delegation standard Twitter is working on.  Several others were mentioned in the developer discussions about this as well.  For instance, Seesmic Look is also taking similar credentials without any OAuth redirect, yet still shows the “Look” source in Tweets generated with the app.  One developer pointed out the information that could be retrieved from the new requests, and the security of it all is a little concerning.

Whatever it ends up being, the winners will be desktop and mobile client developers.  Right now developing a mobile or desktop app involves deep integration into the browser in order to legally get the user logged into the app.  It is why we see so few native desktop clients and so many AIR apps.  AIR is a browser-based solution.

I’m very interested to see what happens.  The Twitter team is supposed to announce more details very soon and I’d like to find out more about what this means for developers, how secure it is, and how much recoding I’ll have to do to enable it in my app.  Whatever it is, you can bet it will be one step simpler than the currently more-simple solution which Facebook provides.  This is getting very interesting!  Let the API wars begin…

Create for a Cause

Posted on by jessestay

Recently here in Salt Lake City we had the opportunity to have Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google visit. While I didn’t have the chance to see it, reading about it, he seemed to talk about a common worry I hear throughout this State. Here in Salt Lake City and around the area we have a lot of successful businesses! From my Uncle’s Freeservers.com, to Omniture, to Mozy, to Novell, Wordperfect, and many others, there’s no shortage of success in this area. It’s a hotbed of talent and technology the world doesn’t give enough credit for. The problem is that we have no Yahoos or Googles or Facebooks or Microsofts to give us credit for that success. We have no home-grown success story that didn’t eventually sell out for big bucks to one of the big West Coast companies.  I think this is a common problem for many areas.  Why is this?

Eric Schmidt tried to come up with his own reasons in response to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who (Hatch) stated, “We get a corporation going and it has some tremendous ideas and all of the sudden someone comes up from Silicon Valley and buys it and takes it back there.” Schmidt responded, saying, “I don’t know whether [improving the situation means] globalizing the business. I don’t know whether we need more venture capitalist presence in Utah or maybe just more experience building the businesses from the startup. It’s not that businesses aren’t getting started, it’s that once started they aren’t growing the businesses fast enough.” So what is it that keeps the Googles or Microsofts from staying in Utah (and other states) rather than staying here and growing to compete with the big guys?

I’ve suggested the PR problem before. That’s just one problem Utah has – a lack of enough tech bloggers to get the word out to Silicon Valley. One other common problem I see in Utah is we get greedy. I’m not even saying that’s a bad thing. Too many Utah startups are focused on the money rather than an underlying cause that motivates their revenue stream. That’s part of the reason Utah businesses have been successful – we have some of the smartest business people in the world right here. Even Eric Schmidt confirmed that, stating that “Utah is one of the best places to do business.” We know how to make money! Unfortunately that’s what differentiates us from the West Coast companies like Google however.

I argue it all revolves around cause. Let’s look at Eric Schmidt’s company itself, Google. Everything they do centers around one central cause, “Do no evil”. It doesn’t even matter if they have purpose. Everything they do must be done “the right way”, even if they lose money from it. Some even argue this has become a PR pitch for them as well. Google is willing to lose money for their cause, yet they are also making money because of it. It’s an amazing strategy.

Facebook also does this well. I’ve done a lot of work with Facebook with 2 books on the company and several apps written around their platform. When you interact with them and their employees, you get a common theme from them: They are doing all they can to enable people to share in bigger and better ways. Their vision is to help you share without risking privacy. Everything they do revolves around that – their revenue model is built around their cause.

Twitter is building “the pulse of the internet”.  They want to enable better communication between anyone in the world. They’ve forgone revenue to ensure that takes place (yet they’ve been able to raise a ton of capital, I realize, but I argue that’s part due to their cause).

I see the same thing from company to company in the Bay Area and even up in tech hotbeds like Seattle (home of Amazon, Microsoft). These guys all drive revenue based on purpose! While there are currently a few exceptions, I don’t quite see this in Utah and other states, especially amongst the larger startups. It’s all business.

Eric Schmidt also stated that “It’s not an attitude problem, it’s an availability problem. To me, it’s recruiting new talent into the state and growing new talent. It’s really people and expertise and that’s the way to make it happen.” Guess what drives and keeps talent? Motivation. If people have cause to work for they come, and they stay, and they work hard at it.  I remember at BackCountry.com (a Utah company), our mantra was “We use the gear we sell”.  Employees loved that because all kinds of incentives were given to get employees using their cool gear, and the employees loved that!

80% of Utah’s population is in the Salt Lake City area. Schmidt suggested this was an incredible opportunity for people to connect. I think we just need motivation to encourage that connectedness. Motivation is what makes the Googles and Facebooks and Microsofts of the world.

If you’re a startup, anywhere, what are you building on top of? Where are your foundations? Are you building for money or for purpose? I know as I build my business I’m going to be thinking much, much more about changing the world and less about the money I make as a result of that. The money will come naturally. That is how you build Google, and keep it there.

What’s your cause? What businesses do you think do this well? Please share in the comments.

EDITORS NOTE: 2 Companies in Utah that I think are doing really well at this are Phil Windley’s Kynetx and Paul Allen’s FamilyLink.  When you interact with them you can sense their cause.  It bleeds through the company.  People are sacrificing time and money just to be sure their cause is getting through.  As a result, Paul Allen’s company was recently ranked one of the fastest growing companies on COMScore, and recently, according to Compete.com, surpassed his old company, Ancestry.com in traffic.  Cause eventually pays off!  I encourage you to learn what they do – they won’t be going away any time soon.

Source of Eric Schmidt Comments: http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_13630231

Twitter, The New Micro-Spammer and the Need to Fix CAN-SPAM

Posted on by jessestay

Marketers seem to never learn.  Time and time again they have tried to sacrifice loyal relationships with customers in order to take the easy road in hopes to get the small percentage out of millions that might convert into one-time sales.  Affiliate marketing is ripe with these people hoping to “get rich quick”, without regard to how it is done.  I some times wonder if these people would sacrifice their own souls in order to gain a quick buck.  It would certainly seem so as we have been inundated with junk mail and e-mail spam, viruses, worms, porn, and other tools intended to spread what they’re selling to mass audiences in as fast a manner as possible.

Technology has sought hard to stop such problems.  We have anti-virus solutions that stop the malware, but evidently it’s not good enough, because viruses and worms and malware still spread.  Google’s Gmail has excellent spam filtering software for e-mail, as do other services such as Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.  Yet, I still get spam e-mail.  There are even services which try to stop the amount of junk mail you receive, yet even that isn’t fool proof.  It seems no matter how much technology we throw at it, the spammers will always find a way to circumvent the process.

Government is doing all they can do as well.  Here in the United States, CAN SPAM act makes it easy for government to prosecute against spammers.  The act was meant to thwart the problem in the early 00’s where e-mail spam was running rampant.  The marketers all complained, claiming it would reduce the amount of money they could make, worries of economic crisis ensued.  But after the act went into place, marketers began to realize they were actually seeing more money than before because they were actually focusing on people that were interested in their product, rather than people that weren’t.  I admit a lot of my spam went down at that time.

Enter 2010.  Twitter is almost a standard.  Facebook is almost a standard.  We are seeing the era of micro-messaging take form, and it doesn’t seem this era is going away any time soon.  As with any new communications technology, so come the spammers that come along with it.  As I can attest from my own company, the spammers are now out of control on Facebook and Twitter and almost any other service that enables micro-messaging, and they’re fighting their best to stay on top of it all.  I admit they’re probably doing all they can, too.

On SocialToo in just the last month, we have already automatically marked near 3,500 DM messages as spam out of a total of 3,500 users that utilize the service. Since we implemented the service just a few months ago we’ve marked near 8,500 DM messages as spam. And that’s just DMs on Twitter! Considering there are in the 10s of millions on the service and DMs aren’t the only means of spam, you can see the problem Twitter and Facebook are facing.

It was this reason I added these spam filtering services on top of SocialToo.  I too want to do what I can to help kill these problems.  I’ve seen it all – even people abusing my own service to increase their numbers and in return spam those followers with things their followers never intended to receive.  It was this reason we complied with Twitter’s request to remove automatic unfollow of those who unfollow you recently, and frankly I agree with Twitter on the move – they’re doing the best they can to thwart spammers, and I want to support them in that process.  Look at this video I found on Youtube recently – in it, a man is demoing software that uses a combination of your desktop and outsourced workers in India (likely through services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) to quickly create accounts, send a few tweets each to increase, gain, and grow followers, and spam those followers with affiliate links. It’s appalling the way he says this is a “secret” only a “select few” marketers know about – the fact is I already knew about it – it’s no secret:

Source: http://www.boblallyblog.net/?p=776 (http://twitter.com/boblally and http://twitter.com/successtoolme)

This guy’s software is just one of many, and I argue it does this the hard way.  Now we have the ability for applications to sit on top of the browser and completely control  the context which a user views the web.  Applications like GreaseMonkey, extensions and plugins, and even Kynetx, while they can be used for good, could all be used in this way with just simple HTML and Javascript to create accounts and spam with them.  There’s not much Twitter or Facebook or even the makers of GreaseMonkey, Firefox, Chrome, IE, or Kynetx can do about them (although Kynetx at least has a controlled user directory through which they can at monitor these things).  There are already tools like Hummingbird out there that do this for relatively cheap, and there will be more.

It’s time Government step in and put an end to this.  CAN-SPAM was written for long-form communications, but it needs to be modified to allow for the short-form. It specifically mentions e-mail and cell phone communications, not micro-messaging services.  Recipients should still have the opportunity to opt-out of the messages they receive. Perhaps the enablers of such communication such as Facebook and Twitter need to provide a means for message senders to provide an opt-out location that attaches to their messages.  That’s just one idea – I’m sure there are many other ways of doing this.

CAN-SPAM needs a provision which specifically targets the micro-messaging space.  It needs communication which specifically says what marketers can do on these services, and how people can opt out.  As I know very well, this will not stop all messages, but it will cut off a large majority of messages, which I know are being used by legit Lawyers and Doctors and business owners everywhere in the US to cost Twitter thousands of dollars and waste the time of countless people.

We need to do all we can to stop this nonsense. I want to see these micro-messaging spammers prosecuted.  It won’t happen unless the US Government modifies CAN-SPAM.  How can we do this effectively in the micro-messaging space?

The Real Solution to Fix the "Twitter Game"

Posted on by jessestay

twitter-game-8901477Twitter has been initiating a crackdown of sorts on sites that offer “automated unfollow” services such as my own SocialToo.com.  Since we announced we were removing it on SocialToo, at least 3 other services have also been asked to remove the functionality, which enables people to automatically unfollow others that unfollow them on Twitter.  I have also noticed Twitter is now cracking down on Twitter accounts that perform this practice.  When chatting with Twitter, their reasoning is that auto-unfollow “perpetuates the idea that Twitter is about follower counts”.  Assuming that this is the real reasoning behind the request, I’d like to suggest a more effective means of killing that idea: kill services that allow proactive follow in the first place and follower churn will go away.

Let me first explain what proactive follow is.  There are many services out there right now that enable you to find new followers based on keywords.  You specify search terms, perhaps based on your brand, and these services then go out and find people Tweeting with these keywords, and the service follows those people.  Some will even send a public @mention or DM if they meet your search criteria.  The entire hope is that those people will follow back (note that not everyone does this automatically), increasing your follower count and potential reach.

The problem with this method is that Twitter has limits in place.  As people unfollow you as you are increasing your numbers in this way, soon you will be following way more people than are following you back.  Twitter has a limit right now, in which if you’re following around 10% more of the people that are following you on Twitter, you will not be able to follow any more.  So what happens is these people using these “get more follower” services then use legit services like my SocialToo to unfollow all of the people that have stopped following them, bringing their ratio back in check.  It’s a direct rebellion against Twitter’s rules and regulations, and I don’t blame Twitter for being concerned about it.  In fact, I refuse to allow proactive follow on SocialToo just for this reason – we are not a “get more followers fast” site.  We’re a utility that enables you to manage your Twitter stream better and easier.

So Twitter has come up with the best solution they can come up with – “let’s kill the sites that are providing automatic unfollow and the follower churn will go away”.  The idea being if users can’t unfollow those users that have unfollowed them after they proactively went out and followed everyone, it’s a lot harder to game the system and break Twitter’s rules.  Based on my experience with what users are telling me on SocialToo, this breaks Twitter for many big brands using the service in a legit manner though.  Let me share a few use-cases people are telling me about after we removed it on SocialToo:

Legit Use-Cases for Auto-Unfollow

Some Brands Just Have Big Numbers — On SocialToo we service some really big brands.  Let’s face it: these brands have a lot of followers.  Following those followers back gives their followers a sense that the brand is listening to them.  It’s a PR move, as well as a customer service move because their followers can now DM them.  For instance, I followed @PCSki the other day, hoping to be able to get a spot in for my wife’s and my Ski Vacation to Park City Utah.  Because they followed me back, I was able to keep our conversation private.  This reciprocal follow is an important piece for Brands looking to communicate better with their followers and customers.  @PCSki got a sale (and future blog post) out of me because of that relationship.

Now, assuming we’re dealing with millions of followers, or hundreds of thousands of followers, or even thousands of followers it is absolutely impossible to continue following back the people that follow you based on Twitter’s 10% ratio limit.  If I want to follow everyone back, the fact is about 1/3 to 1/2 of those people I follow back will unfollow me at some point, and my ratio breaks.  I’m then stuck waiting until more people follow me before I can follow back more.  This is bad for brands, especially those with bigger numbers.  If you think numbers aren’t important for a brand, you’re flat out wrong.

Auto Unfollow Kills the Churners — The main reason I created automatic unfollow on SocialToo was because it’s another effective technique at combating spammers if you do auto follow (see above for some good reasons to auto follow as a brand ).  For a good auto follow service to occur, it’s the natural thing to do to offer auto unfollow services as well in order to keep out the spammers you might follow unintentionally.  This is also the reason we offer DM filters and other filtering services on SocialToo.  For those gaming the system, the minute they unfollow me to hope their numbers stay up, I immediately unfollow them as well, and their numbers don’t increase at all.

Auto Unfollow Enables Steady Growth, Despite Friends Unfollowing — if auto unfollow were not available, a typical brand or person wanting to enable auto follow on their account would go as follows: Number of friends increase. Number of friends stay stagnant until ratio is met.  Number of friends increase again.  Steady growth is not attainable with Twitter’s current ratio limit and the lack of auto unfollow.

The Solution

So what can Twitter do?  I understand they’re between a rock and a hard place here.  They could remove the ratio limits, but then the churners (or gamers) would take over again.  They could kill automated unfollow services, but other services will still take over – I can already think of  a good way to create a browser extension that does it on a user-by-user basis if we wanted to.  Also, killing automated unfollow removes the ability for users to defend themselves against the churners.  Twitter could just let the churning happen, but then jealousy happens and people complain (not sure that’s a bad thing as I think people can see through the fakes, but I understand their viewpoint).  Twitter could remove the numbers, only enabling them in private for each individual, but that would remove some of the fun and competition of Twitter.

The only decent solution is to kill the services that are enabling proactive follow.  Disable those enabling the ability to search by keyword and follow based on that keyword.  This is a pure API-based service that Twitter can shut off at the source pretty easily.  Once these are gone, churning, and the “Twitter Game” will be over for those abusing the system.

The Fact is Twitter is About Numbers

While I don’t think Twitter wants people gaming the system to create more numbers, I think Twitter knows that the only way to grow the service is to enable people to increase their number of followers and grow an audience.  If you don’t think that, you’re lying to yourself.  Everyone wants more followers, especially if you’re a brand or business.

Twitter prominently displays follower counts on each user’s page, along with a list of who’s following them, the number of lists they’re on, the number of lists they’ve created, and the list goes on.  Twitter has a Suggested User List  – the entire goal being to give people a larger number of people those people can follow and find interesting things from.  Users get higher prominence in Google if their numbers are higher on Twitter.  Numbers are everything to Twitter, let’s not kid ourselves.

Twitter Needs to Kill the Proactive Follow

The only way Twitter is going to fix the problem they see at hand is to kill services enabling users and brands to go out and proactively find new followers.  Killing the unfollow isn’t going to fix this.  Killing the proactive follow will.  My hope is that, assuming this is the real reason Twitter wants to kill it, Twitter will realize this and give freedom back to their users to continue maintaining their accounts.

As I said on the SocialToo blog – in the meantime, we’re in Twitter’s world and we’re subject to their rules, so until then I’ll do what they tell me.  Let’s hope they’re listening though.  SocialToo provides many more services than just this though, so I’m not worried – I am worried about our users however.

Are there use-cases I’m missing?  How were you using auto-unfollow?

Geek Travel – Circus Circus in Las Vegas, Nevada

Posted on by jessestay

thickbox_circuscircus-6045455I’m starting a new series on this blog. I occasionally travel places that I really like, and others I don’t. As a Geek I’m a bit picky on the places I visit – whether that be they have sketchy internet, plugs in the wrong places, or just plain, normal annoyances a geek might have, I decided these things needed to be shared. This thought came to me last week as I stayed at Circus Circus during CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, so I thought I’d begin sharing these adventures as a travelling geek with you, hopefully either inspiring you to visit, or warning you in the event you are visiting and you need to know where to stay. Consider this my first post in the series. We’ll see how this goes.

Circus Circus, Las Vegas, Nevada

Las Vegas is filled with places to stay.  This time of year, many of those places are actually quite cheap.  But when staying during an event such as the Consumer Electronics Show, finding an affordable hotel, especially at the last minute, can be quite an adventure!

Circus Circus saved my day at CES.  Starting at a price tag of around $29 minimum per night, and $45 maximum per night, I was able to find an affordable place to stay on the strip within just a week from the start of CES.  Other hotels on the strip were selling for around $400/night!

The place I stayed was in their newly renovated West Tower building.  Previous visits to the hotel landed me and my family in an old, musty hotel room, leaving us wanting.  Not this time!  My hotel room was brand new almost everything, had a big screen, flat LCD TV, a great view of Las Vegas, comfortable, clean beds.  It was an entirely new experience for me at the hotel!

Atmosphere

The atmosphere of the hotel you can tell is targeted towards families.  The interior is the same old interior you’re used to if you have been at the hotel before, and I admit could probably use a bit of renovation itself.  You see the Casino right near the entrance, but if you have kids you can mostly avoid the Casino, ride the roller coaster rides at the AdventureDome, go shopping, and more, all without exposing kids to too much gambling or alcohol or cigarette smoke.  If you opt to take them around the Casino, you can also take them up to the second floor where they can play Midway games and win stuffed animals or see the Circus acts and clowns.  Even going by myself without the family, this always ends up being much more rewarding than the Casino hall down below, and I get stuff to take home to the kids when I’m done!  There’s even a McDonalds on the second floor.

Proximity

The best part about Circus Circus is its proximity to the Las Vegas Convention Center.  If you wanted, you could walk there.  As a geek, since often a lot of events happen at the Wynn, you can also walk over to the Wynn, and I found myself doing that a few times.  If walking is too much, the monorail also stops somewhere near the Circus Circus (I admit I have not been), so you can always take that as well.

Of course, Circus Circus is still at the end of the strip, meaning if you want to go to the Bellagio or Paris or any of the more traditional hotels further down the strip it’s probably going to be a Taxi or shuttle ride over, or maybe even a Monorail trip.  I was driving my own car though so it didn’t matter.  One thing to note if you do bring your own car – Valet parking at all the hotels is free, and the expected tip is usually between $1-2, unless you’re feeling generous.

The Internet

One important part of staying at any hotel for me, as a geek, is the internet, how fast it is, how easy it is to get set up, and how expensive it costs.  I plan to include this in each of my future Geek Travel reviews.  At Circus Circus, the internet is all wireless.  Therefore, if you want to set up more than one computer, it’s going to be around $10 per night, per computer (MAC Address).  Unless you have a router that can bridge pretty easily, you’re probably going to be paying if you’re sharing the room with another person.  Speed for the internet was acceptable, although not fast enough for my tastes.  I was however able to upload about 5 3-5 minute HD videos to Youtube overnight.

The Plug Test

One annoyance of mine at hotels is the proximity of the plugs to the bed, where I often do my work.  There were a couple of plugs on the desk, which is fine when I need to sit at the desk. (one on the lamp, and another on the wall)  To get a plug for the bed, I had to disconnect the alarm clock to have a place to plug in my laptop.  While it works, I think it’s a hack.  I don’t understand why hotels don’t just put more plugs on the nightstand!

The Website and Twitter Test

From what I can tell, Circus Circus has no Twitter account.  Communicating with them should you have an issue or question during an event will require a (gasp!) phone call or in-person visit.  They do have a website at http://www.circuscircus.com, but visiting the site without “www” returns an error.  It seems they don’t put much focus in their marketing on the web, which is a bit of a bummer.

Conclusion

Overall, due to the new room, I was quite impressed with Circus Circus!   It had all the amenities I needed (Circus Circus, unlike most hotels on the strip, even has vending machines on each floor! ($2 for a Coke)).  The rooms were clean.  Internet was pretty acceptable.  The low prices make it appealing.  The proximity to the Convention Center sealed the deal.

If you’re on a trip for a convention in Vegas this year, I highly recommend trying out Circus Circus – bring the wife and kids if you feel like it, but even as a geek on your own I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.  I’ll be considering it for my next stay.

This weekend I’m visiting the Wasatch Back in Utah with my wife, swimming in Geothermal craters, Cross Country skiing, visiting 2002 Winter Olympics sites, and more – the next few articles I write in this series I hope to share some of the wonders that are in Utah where I live should you consider visiting here in the future.

MovieClips: A Little "Spoon Full of Sugar" to Help Spice Up My Content

Posted on by jessestay

screen-shot-2010-01-16-at-1-24-18-am-2125017When I write articles I often look for media – videos, audio, etc. to support the content I write.  The additional content provides some entertainment value, while still driving the point home for others to remember.  I’ve seen this similar technique used by other bloggers such as MG Siegler, Chris Messina, and others.  While at CES last week, I had the opportunity to meet with the founders of MovieClips, a company that makes it easy to share these little quotes in video form in a nice, legal, and searchable format.  Check out what they do in their Intro video below:

MovieClips is such an easy service to find any clip you like and share it with friends.  The most significant use for me though is the ability to add a little “Pizazz” to my blog posts.  I can’t wait to start diving in as I write future blog posts to add a little “spice” with entertainment using their service.

Of note, the reason I was holding my iPhone was because I was recording the interview on CinchCast.com to upload immediately after the interview.  It turned out to be a great way to get an additional, high quality MP3 of the interview, as well as a close-to-live upload of the interview shortly after it occured.

Disclosure: I have consulted for MovieClips in the past

SocialToo is Proud to Launch With OneForty’s New App Store

Posted on by jessestay

Oneforty_logoIn an unprecedented move, Laura Fitton’s OneForty.com launched their own app store for Twitter today, enabling Twitter developers to finally have a platform to sell and promote their apps in a single location, to a large audience.  The company, with apps that you can purchase for Twitter, will become like iTunes or even Amazon, in enabling developers to sell, and Twitter app seekers to find and purchase, in a virtual Twitter marketplace.  My startup, SocialToo, is proud to be one of the companies launching with OneForty in this effort.

We know with the launch of the iTunes app store that bringing developers to a single location that others can search, find, and purchase apps, has proven to be a lucrative business for developers.  This launch will make Twitter itself a similar breeding ground for new entrepreneurial ideas and business opportunities that were previously not thought of.  The completion of an app store is the icing on the already baking Twitter ecosystem cake that should seal the deal for many entrepreneurs and developers in why they should write Twitter apps.

What can you purchase from SocialToo?

Until now you have already been able to purchase several features on the SocialToo website – those include the ability to unfollow everyone you’ve followed on Twitter at once, catching up those who followed you before joining SocialToo that you want to follow back, along with a powerful daily e-mail that includes stats as to who followed you and stopped following you the previous day on Twitter.  In fact, we just announced an affiliate program which enables anyone with a Twitter account to gain a cut of the revenues just by sharing with their friends on Twitter!

With today’s launch with OneForty, we are starting by allowing users to purchase our daily stats e-mail that sends you a digest of who followed you and who stopped following you the previous day on Twitter.  Because our current services are one-time for life, it gives us a unique opportunity to offer one-time purchases like this on 3rd party sites like OneForty.  The specific stats e-mail we’re offering on OneForty sells for just $20, and you get it for life.  In fact, because you’ve already given your e-mail address to OneForty, once you’ve purchased, you don’t even have to ever visit SocialToo.com (although we always appreciate the visit!) – you’ll start receiving stats e-mails the very next day.

I’m excited for this new development.  OneForty has already proven to be one of the best ways to find apps in the Twitter ecosystem.  It can only get better now as developers are able to now start monetizing their offerings through the directory.

So if you get a chance, go on over to OneForty and try out the SocialToo stats e-mail.  Be sure to leave us a review!  This is an incredible opportunity I’m proud to be a part of.