6
LeapFish
I came across LeapFish this morning. It’s a new search engine that promises to aggregate everything that’s touted about the new web, web 2.0, real-time web, whatever you like to call it. While they have “an introductory video that can only be described as epic,” I think that LeapFish has a fundamental problem.
It’s not that it’s slow (it is, even when typing in the search box). The problem is that the term that comes to mind to describe it is not “search engine” but “distraction engine.” The front page is littered with News, Celebrity News, Mashable, Popular Videos, Facebook, Twitter, Weather, and Deal of the Day. Ultimately, LeapFish shows me a bunch of things I don’t care about, but will probably get distracted by anyway. I know where to find the things that I want, and at present I’m not interested in finding more things to do online just for the sake of doing things online.
The LeapFish video quotes Charles Darwin in observing that the organisms which survive are those that adapt fastest to change. I take a much more Boyd-like approach when it comes to people: he who makes the change survives. If businesses are trying to keep up, they’ve already lost. This is why no one has yet become a Google-killer: Google changes the game faster than others do; that’s how they stay on top. I remember watching Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail play catch-up with GMail’s storage and archiving capabilities. Google constantly innovates, changing the game, not playing catch-up. If LeapFish thinks it’s ahead of the curve because it adapts fast, it’s already lost to those who are creating the change it’s adapting to.
15
Episode #2
Pointless Rants – Episode #2
In this episode we had a guest, Eric Shull who is nearing completion of his math degree. Eric also has strong interests in programming and technology as well, which is why I picked him to post and guest on the blog.
Speakers: Tom, Trevor, Steve, Eric
The topics for this episode were…
- Trevor and Tom’s laptops came! Dell Stuido 1537 and Lenovo R500
- IBM Sequoia ( Physorg )
- Hotmail POP3 availability ( LifeHacker )
- nVidia CUDA ( nVidia.com )
- Malware Bytes ( http://malwarebytes.org )
- Don’t attempt to replace your ipod screen
- Facebook 25 random things
28
Episode #0
This is the zeroth episode of Pointless Rants (of course it’s zero-indexed, it’s a technology podcast).
In this episode of Pointless Rants we did the following:
- Introduced ourselves – where we’re from, who we are.
- Tom talked about Linux distributions coordinating their distribution schedules so that people will take Linux more seriously.
- Tom introduced us to the amazing, searchable repository of http://koders.com
- Trevor confessed about how he cheats at Facebook games using GreaseMonkey (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748)
- Steve droned on about functional programming languages and got distracted by chat messages. (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html) (http://www.lisp.org)
- We all discussed our different philosophies on laptop selection.
- Trevor introduced us to some of the new features of Windows 7 (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/)
- Tom informed us that it usually isn’t a good idea to pretend to be 10 years old.
- Tom and Steve griped about the many shortcomings of Hotmail (http://v3.izymail.com/Default.aspx)
