So my facebook experiment didn’t work out exactly as planned

Shortly after closing my facebook account due to privacy concerns, I got emails from a number of friends who told me they didn’t really use email anymore, or that they were having a party and it was a pain to contact me separately from everyone else.

I decided to remove my tinfoil hat and examine my reasons for leaving facebook more introspectively. While facebook surely shares, uses, stores and transmits our data for their own financial gain there is definitely a benefit to sharing the information.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still leery about what I post to the site and cringe when I see some of the personal information my friends are willing to post for everyone to see. I decided to open a new account to keep in touch with my friends and family; I guess this makes me a hypocrite. Oh well, I better stop thinking about it, I feel a draft on my head and this tinfoil hat could be back in place any minute.

Building your innovation toolkit: why Phil McKinney is awesome

Phil McKinney (philmckinney.com, @philmckinney) is the former CTO of HP (now retired), author,  innovation coach and mentor to many.

I have followed Phil’s Killer Innovations podcast and his blog for a number of years and continue to be impressed by how selflessly he shares a successful career’s worth of knowledge and tools. Phil has always said that early in his career, he was taken in and mentored by a successful executive and that this mentor had a profound effect ion both his career and his life. Phil’s contributions are his way of “paying it forward” and helping the next generation of innovators.

I have listened to almost all of the podcasts but keep coming back to podcast 27: Ranking Your Ideas. When brainstorming or sorting through your ideas book, it can be tough to decide what you should actually work on. Using a series of questions, Phil will help you sort through the pile to find the standouts.

I have mentioned Phil before, but I wanted to expand a bit on why his information is so valuable for your innovation toolkit.

If you are interested in more info on building your innovation toolkit, check out my post here.

This post coming to you from the cloud

After a long period of inactivity here, I decided to get back up and running. I was running a LAMP stack on a home server, but maintenance was taking up all of my blogging time – to the point where I stopped writing. I decided to move everything into EC2 and stop worrying about the infrastructure and focus on content. The move was surprisingly easy. Now, to finish these draft posts and get them published…

Nokia uses crowdsourcing to design the ultimate phone

Looks like I am a bit late to the party, but Nokia is using the knowledge of the crowd to design a new concept phone. Based on user input on the Nokia Conversations site the handset maker will put together a concept that will have the correct mix of style, features and cost, based on customer input. Crowdsourcing is not a new concept but it has shown success in the past at solving tough challenges for a fraction of the cost of internally designed solutions.

So head over to the sight, spend a minute and give Nokia your input on the perfect phone.

Why it’s time to close your Facebook account – Update

Last week I posted about some changes to Facebook’s security policy which could lead to your personal information being shared with 3rd party organizations without your consent or knowledge. At that time I mentioned I would be closing my Facebook account and gave a few reasons why. Since then I have closed my account and am happy to report that I have suffered no adverse effects. I have however gotten questions from a number of people regarding my motivations for leaving Facebook. Most of these people mistook my departure from the service as some sort of a rebellion or a ban – a way to get attention from Facebook so that they may change their policy. This however is not the case.

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IBM vs. TurboHercules… Fight!

First of all a disclosure – I am currently employed by IBM as a software developer (but not in the z/OS group), however I will try to be impartial in my assessment of the situation. As you read this post keep in mind that the opinions expressed are mine alone and not representative of the opinions of IBM or its affiliates.

If you haven’t heard about the recent shots fired between IBM and TurboHercules, Ars Technica has good coverage of the whole situation which can be found here. If you don’t have a few minutes to read the whole thing there I can give you the gist: The Hercules open source project allows applications written for the IBM System Z operating system to run on alternate hardware (including desktop computers) within mainstream operating systems. IBM had no problem with this until recently, when TurboHercules was founded to offer the software commercially – and made a move against IBM accused monopoly of the mainframe space. Now, IBM has asserted a number of its patents against TurboHercules (some of which were pledged to the open source community back in 2005).

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Why it’s time to close your Facebook account

I’ll be closing my Facebook account tomorrow and I think you should too. In fact, you should message all your friends and tell them to close their accounts as well. Since its inception Facebook has constantly and consistently eroded its privacy features to the point that you can no longer keep your personal information secure. Do we care? The overwhelming consensus seems to say no. I am telling you that you should and I’ll give you a few reasons why.
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SCO dealt decisive blow

It seems as though the never-ending battle between SCO and Novell has ended with SCO ending up the loser. The jury ruled that Novell, not SCO owns the copyrights to Unix, ending any possible chance of SCO suing you for using Linux. This should remove the threat of legal action against Linux for the time being – but SCO seems to have a way of bankrolling lawsuits despite a lack of income or cash, so this thing might not be done yet.

Remail acquired, open sourced by Google

So when I first heard about Remail’s acquisition by Google I had expected this would culminate (maybe) with a native GMail app for the iphone sometime next year using some of the newly acquired tech. So, Imagine my surprise when it was announced the client would be open sourced and availale for download on Google code!

Simple network theory to help get your message out

Wondering why twitter isn’t driving the traffic you expected? Can’t figure out why only a small portion of your facebook contacts actually read your site regularly? Valdis Krebs (The Network Thinker) uses network theory and personal experience to give some tips on how Twitter can be used to effectively drive traffic to your site.