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Best Live Performance of all time – Eagles “New York Minute”

Found this on Youtube, had forgotten about it for a couple of years, but this still stands up to me as the best live performance of all time.

There’s a reason people are all a’twitter about Twitter.

comic courtesy of : aphexddb.com

Everyone is always talking about how they are sick of hearing about Twitter, and how they don’t understand why people would use it. Of course these are always comments by those who DO NOT use it. Pretty much EVERYONE I know has the same opinon of Twitter. It generally goes like this, ” Wait, so it’s just like my away message, that’s it?”, “Doesn’t Facebook already do that?”, or “Well, that’s just STUPID.” this goes on ad naseum.

Until they start using it.

And then it is a slow steady climb into a crack-like addiction to the service. Twitter is the well-distilled, purest form of the drug of social networking, plain and simple. It eschews all of the silly conventions that social networking sites have formed over the past few years, instead focusing on a simple and arguably beautiful fusion of IM, email, message boards, and RSS feeds. There are no photo galleries, there is no sheep-throwing, no profiles full of 50 megs worth of animated gifs, there is just the stream of information from the people that you choose to follow.

This is why a lot of people don’t “get it”. Twitter is completely useless until you get a group of around 20 to 30 people following you, and you start to follow about double that number. Once you do, there is an interesting interplay of planning, conversation, news, and all sorts of interesting and different things.

There are some people who undoubtedly find the simplistic nature of it just TOO simple, but for people who are tired of the endless stupid Facebook applications and HTML filled Myspace profiles, it’s perfect.

But all is NOT perfect in Twitter land. There have been resignations and seeming layoffs at the company which is trying to find new talent able to scale the site so that it will be able to handle the strain of tons of new users as the site gets more popular. This has to be done soon, as of now, the general user base is more or less tech geeks. Mostly from New York and San Francisco. But like with many internet properties, we set the trends. And we’re all talking, so here comes the trend.

If someone like Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan decides to join and talk up the site in the party scene, you’ll start going from having a couple million users and the bigshots having 20-30,000 followers, to having tens of millions of users with the bigshots having hundreds of thousands or millions of users follow them. This would cause the site in it’s current incarnation to crash and burn.

If Twitter wants to avoid that fate, which is what caused Friendster to lose out to Myspace, they need to update their codebase soon. A full rewrite might be in order since it’s pretty well known that Ruby doesn’t scale incredibly well.

Though with the recent news that they have recieved $15-20 million dollars in venture funding, you can bet they are going to spend a great deal of that on coders and engineers. As long as the management is sound, I think one could expect that we are looking at the next great internet property growing up before our very eyes. You know you have a good product when 6 of the 8 podcasts i subscribe to discuss Twitter in nearly every episode. As long as they work on the problems, this is going to be big. Really big.

Family Guy – Former Life of Brian

Courtesy of FOX and Hulu

Metallica does 180 on file sharing – Still looks stupid.

Metallica, former awesome hard-rockers, turned rehab-going, touchy-feely talentless hacks, have disovered they just MIGHT have been wrong about the whole Napster thing back in the day. According to a post on Slashdot, they are considering going “free” in the vein of Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead, siting the success they have had in that space.

I’m sorry Metallicrap. But you hosed yourselves already. This strategy worked for Radiohead and NIN because they understood and EMBRACED the online community. We haven’t forgotten the crap you spewed in the 90s. Whereas people bought the cd’s from Radiohead and NIN because they appreciated the band, people will just steal your music and never pay you for it.

Not to mention that your last album was a total piece of crap, and your new album will likely be the same. Here’s a tip. You are a Heavy Metal band. Act like one! Get off of your rehab stints and listen to Ride the Lightning again and try to recapture what people liked about you before. Stop worrying so much about what people are doing with your music and try to write music people will actually like.

Just a thought.

Cool Site of the Day: Popurls

Found this one a few months ago, but haven’t posted about it yet. Popurls.com is a great site for getting a bunch of great news sources and other sources of information all in one place. It collects posts from the most popular sites like Digg, reddit, newsvine, flickr, etc. and posts them in a clean and easy to read fashion. Highly recommended!

Sorry for the lack of posting by the way, It’s been a fairly slow news week.

Who’s getting Netflix support?

The recent quarterly conference call with investors to Netflix revealed some new interesting facts!  We already knew that they were partnering with LG for a set-top box (and rumor has it that a few are in beta testing around the country already), but they also revealed that they will be working with some other companies as well:

At this point, I can tell you we have LG plus three additional partners actively working on integrating our technology into their products. Three of the four partners are major companies which each sell millions of devices per year and will enable the Netflix functionality in some of those devices likely in Q4 of this year. The fourth partner is a small company with which — which will likely launch sooner than Q4.

So who are these mystery companies.  Well I can guarantee one of them is Microsoft.  That’s the easy one!  Chances are they will be putting Netflix watch-now support into the Xbox 360.  It’s a no-brainer.  The Xbox 360 has the processing power, the HD outputs, and the internet connectivity all set up, not to mention that it already has windows media DRM streaming ability built in (which is what Netflix streaming solution uses).

I’ll also speculate that it will be going to Sony’s playstation 3 as well, seeing as it similarly has the built in internet and HD support.  Though they will have to code a custom player for that since I believe it doesn’t support Windows Media out of the box.

So who’s left?  Who’s the mystery company?  Some people have been speculating that it’s Apple.  Though I have an extremely hard time believing that.  As of right now, you can’t even run Netflix streaming on a Mac, and I doubt that Apple would cannibalize it’s fairly lucrative iTunes movie rental sales to partner up with Netflix.  As much as I’d love to stream Netflix movies to an AppleTV I just don’t see it happening.  Ever.

Who I DO see getting into bed with Netflix is someone who could enjoy having some streaming movie support,  perhaps Tivo, or Slingbox.  These companies are both trying to really break into the media mainstream and bring a killer-app type product to market.  Personally I’d think Tivo is the best shot here.  The combo of a Netflix streaming set-top box included with your cable guide and DVR is definetly a killer app, especially if more of Netflix’s catalog moves over to streaming.

Time will tell!