Knaegt, blog.

Surprisingly inspiring talk from a man I knew very little about. Cameron’s curiosity and nerdiness has gotten him a long way and I couldn’t be happier for him. It’s so inspiring to see a man satisfying his curiosity with experiences, that will forever keep him inspired.

Cameron on Titanic:

I went and pitch it [Titanic] to the studio as Romeo and Juliet on a ship. It’s going to be this epic romance, passionate film.

Secretly, what I wanted to do was I wanted to dive to the real wreck of Titanic. That’s why I made the movie.

He goes on to end his talk with this bright quote:

Failure is an option. Fear is not.

I just ended up spending my entire morning watching all 18 bits of this Big Think interview with Ricky Gervais. Inspiring and fun. What more do you want?

I particually enjoyed his take on “The Death of Print Newspapers”, because we (us working in the web business) often forget what the actual world is like:

When is that going to happen? [..] What are you talking about? [..] What a strange question…

When Sony said “We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours.” they really were just waiting for the next day to come so that the issue would correct itself.

Hopefully it’ll be the last one.

According to Google, users running IE6 and other old browsers will still be able to watch videos, but will be shown an interstitial, as seen above, to remind them to upgrade every two weeks. Some features will not be available to these users until they upgrade.

Great piece by Seth Godin. It’s all about fear - and knowing so.

I would be worried if I was an iPhone app developer. Apple might decide any day that YOUR apps are breaking some secret internal policy. The Apple App Store is the only legitimate way to get apps to people’s iPhones so if Apple decides to exclude your app, no one can get it. To me, it must be enormously discouraging to know that Apple might remove your app any day, and that your are in the mercy of some Apple App Store reviewer who might just have a bad day. Further, the fact that developers are left guessing what the policies are, is just ridiculous. Some intern at Apple must have decided it was a good idea to enforce a policy which has not been made public yet. Maybe Apple doesn’t even have a real policy for what gets the thumb up?

In contrast to this, the Android Market Place is just the default source of apps for Android devices. It is entirely possible to download apps directly from websites etc. So even if Google decides to be overly restrictive, you will still be able to sell and distribute your apps on your own.

Threadsy wants to combine all of your email accounts and social networks. I like the concept (and UI) behind Threadsy.

It’s just, I like my email client/Gmail because it’s pure email.

Way cool. Safari and Google Gears have had it for a while. The obvious application of this technology is to have working, interactive apps even when you are disconnected. When you reconnect, these apps will synchronize with the cloud. Examples of this already exists: Offline gmail, note apps etc.

However, it seems to have arrived 5 years too late. Flat-rate mobile connectivity is quickly becoming pervasive. In 2-3 years everyone will be always connected.

Web app speed-ups could become another consequence of this tech. Often the interactivity that exists in apps today requires a round-trip to a server - and while server hardware gets cheaper for the minute, the speed of light is not going to change any time soon. In other words, latency is not going to improve significantly.

As browsers become more powerful, more can be done client side, making for less requests to servers and making apps will feel much more responsive, improving the overall web-experience.

If you want anything done, you have to do it yourself.

I haven’t got access to Google Buzz, but I’m pretty sure I second the thoughts of Kevin Rose:

Google announced Buzz today, a photo/videos/link/status sharing service. The big news here isn’t really the functionality of Pownce Buzz, but that Google is boldly integrating this directly into Gmail - essentially taking the product from zero to millions of users in a matter of hours.

He continues:

It sounds stupid, but you need a simple url for public profiles, http://google.com/profiles/kevinrose is a mouthful. Imagine a CNN host trying to plug their profile and having to say “google dot com slash profiles slash larry king”, can we just have google.com/larryking? (side note: /profile/kevinrose should redirect to /profiles/kevinrose not 404)

Speaking of public profiles, this entire page needs to be redesigned. Adding custom backgrounds and a design that feels a little less utilitarian would be a good start.

This auto-friend stuff is just straight confusing.  I get it, but just because I’ve emailed with someone a few times doesn’t mean I want to auto-follow them. Where is the setting to turn this off?

Is there an option to prevent the Buzz(es?, i?) from coming directly into my inbox?  When Buzz starts feeling like a task (email), that bothers me.

Where is the ‘Compose Buzz’ link? Only within the Buzz tab? Can an email be converted to a Buzz? Having Buzz in my inbox but no way to compose a Buzz from my inbox seems odd.

HBO launches series on young entrepreneurs:

If you ever doubted that it’s incredibly hip to be a young entrepreneur these days, consider that HBO is about to launch a new Entouragesque series about the travails of aspiring young business owners.