One more reason to switch from IE to Firefox: Google search results load faster in Firefox.
As this Google Blog entry explains, Google is adding special instructions supported by Firefox that will load the first search result in the background while you check out the first page of results. This only happens if Google thinks the first result is so good that a lot of people are going to click on it. So if you search for “stanford” then the first result is going to be www.stanford.edu, and if you’re using Firefox, the stanford homepage will load in the background while you look at the search results page and click on www.stanford.edu. Google and Firefox are 2 or 3 seconds ahead of you.
So go get Firefox!
Tom Coates at plasticbag.org has a new post about how to make TV more social using Tivo or other PC-based PVRs. He has great ideas about what kind of benefits you can get by adding a buddy list to your TV, and he has thought a lot about the kind of social interaction can be fostered if you add video conferencing into the mix.
But the interaction that I think can be immediately valuable and the most compelling as a springboard to get this type of thing going is something he mentions at the very end: automatically recording the shows that the people in your social circle watch. And I want it, on my Tivo, SOON. It’s basically the best way you could manage to improve the “Tivo Suggestions feature of Tivo. I don’t want to get “Blue’s Clues” or “Meet the Press” automatically recorded because lots of people who watch “Two and a Half Men” have kids and lots of people who watch “The West Wing” are older and watch MSNBC. I want to watch what my friends are watching on a weekly basis. If my buddy list had 15 people, and 12 of them were watching “Lost” and I’d never heard of it, I would definitely want to get with the cool kids.
It’s the way Netflix has started to work with your friends list. If you and your list of Netflix friends choose to share your movie choices and reviews with each other, Netflix will give you ratings and reviews from your friends about what movies they’ve liked recently. At the most extreme (I’m pretty sure they don’t do this), Netflix could potentially add your friends’ favorite movies to your queue. For Netflix that wouldn’t work, but automatically Tivoing your friends favorite shows is free as long as it doesn’t overlap with something you’re already recording.
And it could (almost) be implemented as a Tivo application using the new Tivo SDK. Here’s a feature list: let people set up a buddy list of their friends who also use Tivo. Let people see what the most common Season Passes are among their friends. Let people see what shows their friends are Tivoing that aren’t very commonly recorded by Tivo users. Let people comment on individual episodes so that they can argue with their friends over whether that episode of “The OC” was the best one ever and whether the creepy rocker guy on “American Idol” needs to be voted off.
It’s a start, and it would be social, and I think it could grow from there.
This is a timeline of all the places I’ve lived in my life that I made in about 3 minutes using a beta version of
Bee Documents’ Timeline application for Mac that you can download. It’s a program that just does one thing: makes really nice-looking timelines. I wish there had been something that was this easy to use and created timelines this nice when I was in 8th grade doing class projects.
This program makes me think that timelines should just be one of the standard building blocks for creating documents. Microsoft Word should have had something like this ages ago. Not only that, but it would be a good candidate for an Ajax web application that would let you make, save, and share timelines on the web. Milestone modules in portals and project-tracking websites could be replaced by and edited as online timelines/gantt charts.
What happened to my blogging? The one month off that I took between “school” and “work” came to an abrupt end followed by 2 and a half months involving lots of both “school” and “work.” I only took two normal classes and two 1-unit seminars, but that meant going home after work and watching 3 or 4 hours of lectures a week. I had some free time, but not lots.
But now…I’m done with school. It feels strange, because I’ve been at Stanford for almost 5 years, and I’ve been trickling my way through classes for my M.S. for well over a year. Now I’m living in downtown SF, a move timed almost exactly to keep my bed in Menlo Park just long enough so that I would wake up close to campus the day of my last final and wake up in the same bed in San Francisco the next day.
So now, I’m commuting to Mountain View from Hayes Valley on the Google bus every day (what to do with my car? right now it’s living at work) and I should have more time for this, mixed in with my new urban lifestyle.
