O (b LOG N)

Hulu

Hulu gave me butterflies in my belly, but will they last? I have my doubts.

Hulu means “cease” and “desist” in Swahili and in case you missed it, Hulu.com is a new site that’s a joint venture of NBC and News Corp. Here’s what the Hulu About page says:

Hulu’s ambitious and never-ending mission is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premium content when, where and how you want it. We hope to provide you with the web’s most comprehensive selection from more than 50 content providers including FOX, NBC, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, and more to deliver premium programming across all genres and formats, television shows, feature films, and clips. Watch full-length episodes of current primetime TV shows such as The Simpsons and The Office the morning after they air, classics like Miami Vice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and clips from Saturday Night Live, Nip/Tuck, and others. Hulu also offers full-length feature films like The Usual Suspects, Ice Age, Three Amigos!, and The Big Lebowski as well as clips from films such as Napoleon Dynamite, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Devil Wears Prada and many more. Hulu is free and ad-supported — available anytime in the U.S.

Hulu was founded in March 2007 and is a joint venture owned by NBC Universal and News Corp. In addition, Hulu has closed a $100 million investment from private equity firm Providence Equity Partners.

Hulu’s small, but growing team is headquartered in Los Angeles, California with a Research and Development team in Beijing, China.

Hulu launched publicly in the last week (or two). The site’s user interface is fantastic, the video quality is good enough for me, and the content is remarkably sparse. In fact, the lack of content is down right disappointing. When I heard of the site’s impending launch several months back I had high hopes. Tonight I visited the site for the first time hoping I could watch "Heroes"; unfortunately, only Season 2 is available. Another complaint: Why can’t I embed videos? They’re running ads periodically in the video, they’re getting their money. Why not allow me to embed videos?

Even with the disappointing lack of content the site got me excited. Maybe the TV networks are waking up. There can be no doubt the future of TV distribution is the Internet. I hope the networks embrace this sooner rather than later and provide us with the content we want, on our terms. Hulu hasn’t realized this, but it’s got promise. More than any other implementation, I’ve seen thus far.  I hope they don’t lose interest or steam, but I’m realistic about these things. Check it out yourself, it’s free if you don’t count the commercials every ~10 minutes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Roy just pissed his pants

Hello Kitty turns attention to young men - Yahoo News
The cute cuddly white cat from Japans Sanrio Co., usually seen on toys and jewelry for girls and young women, will soon don T-shirts, bags, watches and other products targeting young men, company spokesman Kazuo Tohmatsu said Friday.

“We think Hello Kitty is accepted by young men as a design statement in fashion,” he said.

The feline for-men products will go on sale in Japan next month, and will be sold soon in the U.S. and other Asian nations, according to Sanrio.

The usual bubble-headed shape of Hello Kitty was slightly changed for a more rugged, cool look to appeal to men in their teens and early 20s.

For example, a picture of the cat on a $36 black T-shirt has the words, “hello kitty,” instead of the usual dots for the eyes and nose.

Wiki.ObLogN.com, a Christmas wiki

As you might suspect, given my affinity for wikis, I’ve a personal wiki. This is running at the un-announced shared hosted site that I won’t mention by name, but I will provide a link to it. I plan to do a complete write-up about this at the work blog in the new year when we announce the service, but by then this gorgeous Christmas theme Damien built will be obsolete. I’m using the Pro version of this service, which gives me 10GB of storage, a custom domain, and custom HTML regions that allow me to injects ads, widgets, Google analytics, whatever into the site. It’s a killer service. I use it a lot for taking notes, sharing files, aggregating content in one view from all over and for keeping private communications. The Pro version is only $60/year. The free version is ad-free and limited to 100MB of storage, but I think we’re going to drop that down to 15MB of storage. I suspect this service will cut into some of the competitors’ market in the shared hosted/software as a service wiki offerings that are charging several thousands of dollars for a weaker feature set, user limitations, and quite frankly an inferior wiki. This is the best damn wiki you can find, you can do mashups, you can run your own ads, and you’ve got the richest enterprise wiki feature set available. For free…or $60/year.

We’ve intentionally kept this service quiet since the Holidays crept up on us while we were still working out some last minute kinks in the service. Announcing it now would be pointless because it would just get lost in the Holidays. Moreover, we’ve still got some minor kinks to get around and we’re already getting a lot of traffic to the site just through the word of mouth of the community. In fact, we’re all pleasantly surprised by the number of Pro registrations we’re getting a day. I’ve seen lots of churches, schools, Universities, orgs, and some businesses going Pro in the last few weeks.

This wiki service is a great extension to a blog because it provides a fully customizable, persistent and collaborative authoring tool. For example, let’s assume you blog about online marketing. Well, your blog is a tool for you to publish time sensitive information on the subject. However, frequently there is the need for a more persistent information architecture. Also, the wiki can provide a medium for building a community around your blog by which you allow your audience to participate in the conversation in a more meaningful way than allowed by comments. It’s important to note that this particular service also allows you to easily and automatically aggregate content from all over the Internet on particular topics. Moreover, you can easily create rich application mashups to serve as interactive extensions to your blog posts. These can include interactive maps, charts, graphs, forms, countless widgets, flickr, news feeds, video, search tools, and more… I’m certain it will soon be the case that all bloggers with a community they’re looking to engage will have a wiki extension to their blog sites to facilitate a richer engagement with their audience and to provide persistent and more robust information sharing.

Microsoft Gatineau you dirty whore

Since Google “Upgraded” Google Analytics, or as I like to call it “google anal”, I’ve been dissatisfied with the service. To be sure, I was not overly thrilled about the the previous implementation, but as soon as the service went 100% Flash I really was disappointed. Common tasks take me more clicks. The map overlay sucks because you can’t get an overview as easily, and I can’t use the service from my iPhone. In general, the site usability of the site has suffered severely from the upgrade. Also, since the upgrade I’ve been unable to get the site overlay to work so I have no way of analyzing, visually, visitors traffic patterns.

I want a better web analytics package! Don’t tell me that Google’s “free”. It’s not free. I’m giving Google incredibly detailed and valuable information about visitors to my web properties. That’s worth a lot of money when you consider the traffic. This is why when I heard of Microsoft’s upcoming web analytics service code named: “Gatineau” I signed up for the beta and waited for an invite. This invite arrived today. It reads:

Thanks for expressing interest in our new web analytics service, code named: Microsoft “Gatineau.”

Get started today
Follow these instructions to get started with the Gatineau beta today.

1. Go to: http://adcenter.microsoft.com/?key=cb6ad37b-fcf3-4c69-8c89-5b0e19adef7c
Invite code: cb6ad37b-fcf3-4c69-8c89-5b0e19adef7c
2. Click Sign Up Today and create an adCenter account using this e-mail address.* You’ll be charged a one-time, non-refundable $5 fee to set up an adCenter account.
3. After your account is created, you’ll be directed to the Gatineau beta invite sign up page. Follow the instructions to begin using the beta.

Wait. What? Let me read this again:

* You’ll be charged a one-time, non-refundable $5 fee to set up an adCenter account.

You want me to pay YOU to test your undoubtedly buggy software? I’ll be running your script on my web properties, slowing down my visitors experience because I’ll surely not drop my Urchin script from Google, and you want me to pay you? Even though I’m going to be giving you incredibly detailed information about my visitors. Moreover, you ask me for a lot information about me and my company including a credit card, which gives you access to all kinds of interesting information. Isn’t this payment enough for me to gain the privilege of testing your buggy software? WTF? You should be paying me $5.

Gatineau, you dirty whore, I shall pass.

50 Photos | Are You Interested?

50 Photos | Are You Interested?
Nate has come up with this fantastic idea to print a photo book of 50 carefully selected photos from various talented photographers whom have released their photos under permissive Creative Commons licenses.

Details:

• Price: about $80 or so.
• Photos/Photographers: There’s a list of them on the photographers page
• The Beauty: Each photo was chosen specifically for this issue’s theme, “Old”. These photographers are outstanding, and typically charge nothing to use their photos.
• The Cause: Each photographer will, for probably the first time, receive $1 per photo per book. The limited-run of printing only 50 books guarantees a rarity. The idea behind this project is to simply give credit and validation to these brilliant photographers.
• Sharing (The Story): These books will hopefully be a talking point around your coffee tables. Share the story of how these books were created and behind each photograph.

Excellent! $80. Ok. This might be a hard sell for Tara, my wife. What’s the details on the book? Binding, etc? Will this be unique too?

Netflix, get it together

In three years of using Netflix the service seems to be getting crappier. The recommendation engine still sucks, the new “smart” rating is awful, the video streaming service still has no selection, and I still can’t find movies to watch.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve recommended Netflix to dozens of people since I started using it. It’s convenient. Also, Netflix has done some alright things. They’ve slowly improved the queue. It works well now. You can reorder by dragging and drop. Also, when you mouse-over a movie you’re presented a useful pop-up that gives you the nice summary of the video that makes it mostly unnecessary to click through to the video’s page. Also, the interim view presented when a video is added to queue isn’t completely annoying anymore. Finally, in general, the site is aesthetically pleasing and fairly usable.

When I did go to brick and motor video rental stores it was really easy to find movies. You walk down the new release wall and grab vids that jumped out. Also, I could always rely on the independent and documentary vid section for regular choice picks. And in a pinch, you just ask the dude at the counter. After you get a feel for their tastes they’re always helpful. Lastly, the video rental store would always have a board that listed the new releases from the current week and the last week. Sure those would always be the big budget Hollywood flicks, but those make my wife happy.

My Top 5 Suggestions to Netflix

1). Replicate the video store experience as much as possible. Let me see New Releases from this week and make it possible to walk backward in time by weekly releases. Show the box covers! This would, at least, keep my wife happy by helping me to blend in those big budget flicks. Also, you could have an employees’ picks corner. I always checked these out in the video store. Moreover, it would give a face to your company and create an emotional connection.

2). Stop wasting your time on that useless closed social network site you’ve been developing. I don’t give a damn about this. Nor does anyone else I know. If you want to help me share ratings and be social make it possible for me to export my ratings to hReview formatted blog posts and/or give me an RSS feed of the movies I rate! Simple. You could even slap in a little “Netflix” logo in the post/feed. I would expect it! I don’t need to tell you how much this would improve the visibility of your service. Also, more folks would want to use your service because you’re helping your users to share with their friends. This would be awesome.

3). Launch a wiki! Make it public. Not anonymously editable, but public. Each movie in inventory should have a wiki page pre-seeded it with content. Maybe only allow subscribers to edit and registered non-subscribers comment. Create an incentive to register. Key point: anyone can view.

4). I hate that stupid “smart” rating where you think you know how I’ll rate a movie. You’re always wrong. Let me turn that crap off in my settings. It’s awful and it just wastes my time because it forces me to mouse-over everytime to see what everyone else has rated the movie.

5). Let me share information with friends that aren’t Netflix users! It’s so lame you’re only letting me share stuff with other Netflix subscribers. Open up! It’s in your own best interest. In addition to suggestion #2 make it 1-click for me to email my friends info about a movie and my rating of it. This too is another way for you to advertise your service and the drive traffic to the wiki site.

Finally, develop a decent recommendation algorithm! I guess that $1 Million contest Netflix ran to develop a better algorithm was never paid out.

Netflix Hacks
It’s always bothered me that Netflix only gives you the ability to rate 1-5. I want to be able to rate 3.5 or whatever. Now I can. Also, I want to see the box covers in my queue. Now I can. There are greasemonkey scripts that enables both of these and much more. Go to www.userscripts.com, install greasemonkey, and search for Netflix. You’ll find a bunch of wonderful Netflix scripts that make the service better.