I have achieved greatness:

In case you aren’t getting it, I am “The most helpful critical review” for the book  Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL.

A proud day indeed.

The following is a Publice Service Announcement that discusses the dangers of walking and texting. Please watch, then we’ll talk about it.

The video has a cute nature to it, and frankly I am sure someone somewhere might actually stop and text with their back against a wall. However, my guess is that 95% of people who see this will shrug it off and continue texting in any manner they see fit.

I personally think that texting and walking CAN be dangerous, if done improperly (like while crossing streets and intersections), but done properly (not in streets and intersections) is just fine. Sure you may inconvenience other walkers, but for crying out loud they are walking!! They can just side step you, total amount of inconvenience: half a second.

Another favorite are the 4 gentlemen who collide with each other because one random dude stops. I double checked the video and sure enough if the guy who was texting had continued his trajectory, before texting, he would have avoided the collision and only 3 gentlemen would have been involved because they apparently don’t understand spacial awareness (the 3 not texting).

Most interesting to me is the fact that a guy gets hit by a car in the commercial but they didn’t talk about that aspect of texting and walking, only the pedestrian inconveniences… wouldn’t getting hit by a car trump walking into a door like and idiot?

12 in ’12

2012 is coming up quickly, and I am preparing for a busy year. One thing I think would be cool to accomplish is 12 web apps in 12 months. I am not thinking full amazing apps, but simple ( Proof of Concept (POC)) apps that can later be tuned into better and more complete apps. Here is a list of what I am thinking so far:

• Ticket System
• Invoice System
• PingFM Replacement
• Something with Twilio
• Project Manager
• Customer Relation Manager (CRM)
• Linode Management Tools

That’s only 7, so I need to work on some more app ideas, but as of this morning I am stuck, at least I have 7 months worth of POCs to build. I am sure in that time I will come up with 5 more.

Why only POCs

These apps are projected at the POC level only because I have a day job, a family I love and want to be with, and other responsibilities.  However, I think if I limit myself to POC level apps I can easily create 12 apps in 12 the months of 2012 and build a small portfolio of apps to work on in the coming years.

So Why Do It At All?

I strongly believe in learning through doing. I think that building things from scratch can give an appreciation for things that are already pre-built and can lend some insight into the way things are.

Extending the Challenge

Although I would be just as content to do this all alone, I think it would be cool to get a community together of people to push each other to 12 apps in 12 months, so here is the official start of the challenge. Get together your preliminary list of 12 apps to create in 2012. Don’t worry about the details too much, and don’t start on the actual apps until 2012! Leave me a comment with a link to your list of apps you want to create and I will create a page for all of the people participating.

Sidenote: If 167+ people sign up there would be over 2012 new apps in 2012… just saying.

In a previous life I had the pleasure of working for the most insane CEO I have ever come across, Patrick Byrne. Patrick is known in the world for blaming business problems and large losses on Wall Street and Ninjas and Jedis that are trying to ruin his personal business. Patrick was a great guy to work for because he knew exactly how to squeeze every penny out of most deals, and was a very direct person when you got through the absurd back stories that preceded every situation you had to deal with. Today Overstock.com has Jonathan Johnson at the helm, a move that I typically thing is just to keep Patrick from dropping more of his crazy talk on the Wall Street goons.

JJ, as he is called internally at O.co, announced today via the company’s press page that they are “partnering” with Barnes and Noble to sell eBooks. You can read the press release here. The best part of all this is you too can “partner” with BN.com and sell eBooks all day and night, I will show you how later in this article.

What Overstock.com Did

Not much that’s what. If you aren’t familiar with Affiliate Marketing let me give you the run down. You own http://www.awesomestuff.com but you don’t actually own any awesome stuff to sell. Instead you setup a website and partner with sites like Overstock.com to put product links on your site, and for every person that clicks on the product link and buys from Overstock.com you get a cut of the profit. Simple.

Guess what Overstock.com did? They signed up as an affiliate with BN.com to sell eBooks through their site… err rather through affiliate links on http://www.Overstock.com/ebooks

Every single link to a product or category is an affiliate link through LinkShare to BN.com. It gets worse, the links are only on the ebooks landing page, oh no they are on product pages too.

You’re Affiliate Sale Has Been Stolen

So let’s pretend that http://www.awesomestuff.com has a link to Overstock.com’s product page for Hunger Games. Normally I would make 10% (or so) on any purchases through that link. However, now there is a new “Buy ebook on Barnes & Noble” link. An affiliate link that I do NOT have a tracking ID in. Sure technically Overstock.com is the partner with BN.com but had I known you were going to be looking for the eBook I could have just as easily sent you to BN.com instead of OSTK.com, they are both in the same Affiliate Network!

Let’s recap, I did all the selling, I got you to the merchant, and Overstock.com snaked my sell and took my commission.

As the consumer you probably don’t care a lick who gets paid, as long as you get your book, but you should. You should care that Overstock.com has just poisoned the Affiliate Marketing world with their “partnership” with Barnes & Noble. Their partnership is going to literally steal money from the pockets of people who work hard everyday to get ranked in search engines, to place product placements that make sense, to help you get the everyday lowest price, and sometimes pass along the coupons that save you the money.

Rebranding is hard.  It is expensive, and it often causes more heartache than it stops. Netflix renaming their DVD by mail service as Qwikster is no exception.

Netflix’s Reasons

On the Netflix blog Reed Hastings posts:

For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn’t make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business. Eventually these companies realize their error of not focusing enough on the new thing, and then the company fights desperately and hopelessly to recover. Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly.

The strange thing is that their own internal numbers show that they are doing well in the streaming industry already. They are mailing out an all time high of DVDs, and streaming more and more content everyday.  So is their DVD busy really getting left behind? No. Is there streaming business struggling to get started, no, is it struggling to become awesome? No.

One thing that really stood out to my in his blog post as just plain silly was the comment:

We feel we need to focus on rapid improvement as streaming technology and the market evolve, without having to maintain compatibility with our DVD by mail service.

I wasn’t aware that setting up streaming technology would hinder the ability for the company to pack and mail DVDs. That is just an absurd wording to me.

Streaming Deals

Recently Netflix has lost their contract with Starz (a huge collection of their streaming content).  Honestly, I think the reason for the split is that Netflix is losing streaming deals left and right, and the reason is because of the DVD business. So if they separate the two companies they might be able to get more aggressive in their dealings with studios for rights to streaming.  Or possibly the other way around too, since their streaming and DVD businesses are in bed they can’t find a way to fight through the 28 day window.

What’s In a Name?

Qwikster is the name of the new Netflix spin off for DVDs, which doesn’t really get the idea of what they do across. Not that Netflix screamed DVD rentals, but they got the name out there and branded it well. Infact I don’t know many people who don’t know what Netflix does from their name alone.

Qwikster was picked because:

We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery.

Apparently “Quick Delievery” was already taken? What is quickly delivered exactly? Perhaps instead of remaining in the DVD Rental business they are going to starting doing miscellaneous deliveries. Taking on UPS and FedEx maybe?

Poor choice in names, and explanations of the name.

What’s Next?

Reed has already posted to the word his intentions. So I guess we will have to sit back and watch what happens, but I think we will see more confusion and less movement forward from both sides of Netflix is the short term. They are going to have to scramble even more than they already are to retain customers and to grow business.

Their next steps need to be to improving streaming quality and their streaming catalog. They need to take on Blockbuster and get their 28 day window removed.

Good Luck Reed, Good Luck Qwikster.

Update: I told you!