Stop Playing Video Automatically on Your Website

If you go to espn.com a lot you probably understand my pain. The moment you go to espn.com they got some guy providing the same commentary over and over on another ball game (i.e. too much pressure flustered the quarterback, you can't make mistakes in the playoffs)

I am now forced to mute my speaker on my computer and once I go to youtube or find another interesting video and click the play button I have three or four browser tabs contributing different sounds. If you have 10 - 12 tabs open on Firefox it is a pain in the butt to find out which sites are causing the issue.

If you own a website and you have video on it please do not play it automatically. Let the user click on the play button.

What is Apple Going to Do Next Week

Apple released some major improvements to their Mac Pro and Server lines. I do not follow their server market too much, but judging by the covering on gizmodo, and others I think a lot of people do.

I think the image from Gizmodo depicts next week best:
The CES updates as of now have been pretty much a bore. I have heard about a TV that is going to support 2 - 3 times the resolution of current TV sets but it is estimated that no one will broadcast in that resolution for 4 - 5 years, you can see a bunch of souped up cars with LCD TV's in 30 inch grills. No matter how much money you have or how much you love gadgets, I would have to agree with anyone that says that is a waste of money. The most interesting announcement in my opinion is Comcast's announcement to support 100 Mbps in the future. That is going to kick ass especially when services such as Hulu start serving HD Content beyond basic trailers.

I hope Apple's announcement next week is going to make January exciting again. If the rumors about the ultraportable, multi-touch macbook are true it is going to be amazing. It is going to be even better if Apple puts them on their store an hour after the conference is over. Keep your fingers crossed.

Yahoo's Cool MP3 Player

Yahoo released a new browser based mp3 player and I wanted to give it a whirl. Rather than creating a special site to host it I thought I would just use this blog. Below are a couple of songs and the player should pick up the song and let the user scroll through them. Let's see if it is as good as advertised.

Maroon 5: This Love
Kanye West: Hey Mama




So what are the use cases for this app. My guess is people probably send a lot of mp3's via yahoo mail so yahoo can put this widget in your mailbox and you get a playlist of all the songs you have sent or your friends have sent you. Then you may be given the option to share those songs with friends provided there are no legal issues.

By the way, if you are looking for an online media player with a great song library checkout seeqpod. I have noticed a lot of people using it and the tool is pretty impressive. I think it uses the special search capabilities of the major search engines and adds nice playlist functionality.

Not the Best Headline

Disclaimer: I am not the most environment concious individual and should definitely do a better job to minimize my impact on the environment.

However, the Business Week article titled "How to Cash in on a Warming Planet" is a bit disturbing. The content is fine since it looks at just another variable that could influence your purchasing decision. However, the title is just a bit of a turn off. If you read the comments you can see there is a good mix of extremely negative and positive commentary.

It may be the strategy of online magazines or newspapers to use controversial titles nowadays to attrack eyeballs. However, at a certain point you risk offending your user base and with your competitors now just a click away a lot of risk versus reward analysis needs to be done.

Preview of Upcoming iPhone Update

The folks at gearlive posted a preview of the upcoming software update. It looks fricken' awesome. Things just keep getting better and better.

Best Graphic RE: Twitter Downtime

It is amazing how many people have posted about Twitter being down for an equivalent of 6 days since February. I have seen comments about people recommending a change in infrastructure, or moving to another service. Pretty high maintenance end users. I think 98% downtime is pretty commendable for an up and coming company. I have talked to folks whose Corporate email systems are down on average a couple of hours a week or key internal tools go down for days at a time. That is a serious issue where 99.999% uptime is a must.

I just hope the people complaining about the downtime are the individual's actually using twitter. It seems like more and more people like to jump on the bandwagon of broadcasting bad news. The geekandpoke blog illustrates the side effects of the "catastrophic" downtime best.

Social Network Contacts = New Currency

I was going through my FB feed today and noticed one of my buddies had installed the "My Files" application from Box.net. I thought it looked interesting so I installed it as well. Then I got the following image:
I got 60 MB in additional storage since 3 of my buddies had installed the app. I could "spam" my buddies and hopefully get them to install the app so I could get more storage, but I was pretty sure that would piss some of them off.

Is this the future of software? The more # of users you have = the more eyeballs = the more potential to make money off of advertising.