Google’s latest disruptive move, the OpenSocial API, which they are being careful to couch as not being GoogleSocial and instead an open move for the good of users sort of launched last night. It was like attending a fireworks celebration and seeing gigantic rockets in the distance, but a few people coming out in front of a poorly lit campfire holding sparklers saying, “this is all for now.”

Facebook is claiming they weren’t briefed on OpenSocial, says Techcrunch, and yet there were a couple Facebook developers in attendance at last night’s campfire, go figure.

The developer view
I was excited, and still am about OpenSocial but was disappointed this morning to read first thing from the API documentation: “All of the details are subject to change, but this preview should give you a general idea of what the API will be like.”

The SDK is still not available.

I was under the impression — wrong it seems — that this was what was launching last night. What actually launched was the document and a 57 minute video showing what companies are involved with OpenSocial and a few demos of how it works. If it’s working now behind the scenes why not release the SDK?

There will be three main data APIs: People, Activities and Persistence. The last one generates the most questions. It’s a neat idea for me to be able to save user activity at our sites using the Persistence data API, but unless my initial review of the docs is flawed, this still has Google directly involved, managing the Persistence layer, yes/no? Or will it be the provider, meaning we can save this data on other people’s servers?

our site’s user activity (OpenSocial enabled) -> persistance layer -> receiving site

Currently it appears the only sandbox environment for OpenSocial is Orkut, with Ning maybe launching a sandbox tonight. If we can send information to be saved on other servers that will help with the traditional data bottlenecks and scaling, but could present some interesting security challenges. I’m very curious how this part will work and need to study some real world examples.

As you might tell from my admittedly jumbled thoughts, I’m still trying to piece this together. I wish the SDK was available now so I could point out specific code. There are examples in the API documentation but I’m reluctant to quote something Google admits can — and probably will — be changing. Guess I need to play around with the Orkut sandbox.

The non-developer perspective
And now for those of you reading who aren’t developers: should you care about OpenSocial? Short answer: wait and see which sites become OpenSocial enabled that you care about.

In theory OpenSocial should make it easier for developers to produce widgets to run inside other sites without additional code. This should make aggregating activity for services like Friendfeed easier to deploy, which means you might have more Facebook-like widgets to insert into other OpenSocial-enabled websites. For example, let’s say this blog became OpenSocial enabled and each commenter had a Hmm profile you could add these widgets to your profile page or perhaps take your comment activity here — if it was made part of an activity stream — elsewhere.

One of the best real world summaries I’ve read so far comes from the Tim Lee at Techdirt:

The fundamental problem facing Orkut, Friendster, LinkedIn and the other social-networking also-rans is that people don’t want to sign onto a dozen different social networking sites to keep up with all their friends. They want to sign up with a single site and see updates for all their friends in one place. As long as each social networking site is a walled garden, only allowing users to connect with other users on the same site, the largest sites will have a huge advantage because people will naturally gravitate to the site most of their friends use.

Someday I believe everybody will have their own home internet address — a virtual home address — just like your physical home address. Those who have their own personal websites that they host on their own domains already do have this home to some degree. Sure, some people will continue to rent which is the web equivalent of spending a lot of time at any third party website over your own (MySpace, Facebook, Live Spaces), but buying a domain and sharing your social network there makes sense. Having thousands of profiles at different sites seems more like a marketing thing than something practical. When these also-rans, as Tim put it in the quote above go offline you could still save the data and activity from these former sites on your own home site. That to me is one of the most powerful parts of OpenSocial for users in the future.

Time isn’t always on our side when it comes to the web
As shared here before, I’m reluctant to spend too much time at third party sites because I’ve seen so many go by the wayside over the years and my time and activity there, unless they offered an export function, went with them. OpenSocial could help change this if our favorite sites become OpenSocial enabled and share our activity streams. This way new connections you make at some third party also ran site can come with you without having to sign up to be your friend again somewhere else.

Powerful, indeed, if that’s how it works.

Or for the cynical types: not enough of the sites we spend time at will care to do the extra work to be OpenSocial enabled and share the activity stream, thus making it a feature that was a big deal for trendy web pooh point oh sites and little else.

We’ll know the answer in a couple years, looking back. Kind of wish I had a time machine on this one to know which one to put effort into. I’m leaning toward opening up activity streams for users across as many of our sites as possible simply because it seems the right thing to do. The most valuable possession for any human being is time and we should seek to never, ever waste that.

Congratulations to all the people around the world who have contributed to make the Sony PS3 Folding@home project the most powerful distributed computing network in the world! Back in March, I pointed out that the PS3 may have been selling poorly but was doing very well with distributed computing.

The Sony Press release has more details:

The record was initially set on September 16, 2007 as Folding@home surpassed one petaflop(*1), a computing milestone that has never been reached before by a distributed computing network. In addition to this, the collective efforts of our users have enabled PS3 alone to reach the petaflops mark on September 23, 2007.

The record is a testament to the widespread participation of PS3 users from around the world—currently more than 670,000 unique PS3 users have registered to the Folding@home network, bringing the overall computing power of the program to more than a petaflop.

Another exclamation mark for petaflop! So what is all this computing power being used for? This enables scientists to make greater progress studying diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and some forms of cancer. Great cause, I need to join one of these teams and let our PS3 do more folding@home work.

Any readers with PS3 not involved with the Folding@home project?

Let’s embellish on some Quiet Riot: Bang your head. Web sites that will drive you mad!

Face it, neither your websites or ours are perfect. We need help. We need to listen to what visitors are saying aggravates them and do something. One good way to becoming a better listener is being accessible through services like Skype, answering email and replying to comments (instead of claiming you’re too busy), perhaps even [gasp] getting involved in social networking where your site niche is relevant.

The list scene is hot right now. Some days I think maybe that’s all we should do is just sit around and make lists. Would probably increase the traffic to this site tenfold. One interesting list I came across today was from PC World.

Noticeably missing from their 10 Biggest Web Annoyance list is something very annoying:

Unnecessarily spanning pages for articles — almost always to artificially increase page views — that could easily fit on one one page. It’s inconvenient and insults reader’s intelligence. Note that PC World’s list spans four pages instead of one. Shame on them. Why didn’t this make the top 10 aggravation list? Are there people out there who actually like having to click multiple times to read one article?

PC World’s list of 10 aggravations
With that said, let’s check out what is on their list and suggest some possible tips for how to combat aggravating site visitors and readers.

1. Dubious Privacy Policies. Aggravation factor: 69 percent. Privacy concerns continue to abound on the web. Do we need any more evidence that people visiting your site want to know what you’re doing with their information? If your site collects anything from people, what is the site doing with this information? Can they get it back out through an export function or non-crippled API?

How to avoid aggravating tip: Spend some time reading and going through and stripping the legalese in your privacy policy. Shorter is better. We need to do that with our privacy policy at Hmm. Short and straightforward privacy policies are better than long and convoluted.

2. Difficult Online Forms. Aggravation factor: 65 percent. I wonder how much we should thank spammers for this? The need to incorporate CAPTCHA or other less and more complicated techniques to trick the bots has added complexity to online forms. Also, with a growing desire to collect more information at some sites (see #1).

Tip: forms gotchas to avoid:

• illegible CAPTCHA. Offer quick refresh option like we have in the comments below using reCAPTCHA.
• forms with too short timeout. Ticketmaster, anyone? Not everybody is a speed typist.
• should allow entering in secure passwords. Why have a password field if one can’t enter in a secure password? This means allowing for password lengths as much as 12-24 characters, allowing symbols, upper and lowercase as well as digits. If your password doesn’t allow all of these or forces passwords smaller than 12 characters it is insecure.
• let us enter in valid emails with a + in them. A frequent gripe. It’s a handy Gmail filtering technique, although I picked up another one recently using a period in the email address (e.g h.m.m at gmail same as hmm at gmail).
• too many items on a single form. Unlike page spanning articles, I’d rather see page spanning for large forms. Let me go through the process in stages rather than show me a bunch of different things that are wrong.

3. Overcommercialization of the Web. Aggravation factor: 62 percent. I think with popup blockers in the mainstream we’re past that, but publishers and advertisers still have plenty of other annoyances to throw at us. I’m not a fan of those hover over text ads. They always seem to get in the way. The Flash overlays that run across the article you’re trying to read suck. And let’s not forget interstitials — those “skip to next page” full page ads.

Nice bit of honesty from PC World:

At MySpace, Yahoo, and even (we have to admit it) PCWorld.com such advertising has grown more aggressive, increasingly annoying, and impossible to avoid.

Tip: Laser focus about where to put ads and instead of adding more advertising, add more content. Keep the content to ad ratio no less than 70% content to 30% advertising on each page. Shoot for 90% content to 10% ad or better. Your visitors will love you and bookmark. So will the search engines.

4. Need for Standards. Aggravation factor: 58 percent. From the publisher side, trying to design sites that look good in all the major browsers isn’t quite rocket science, but feels like that with all the competing formats. We experienced this recently trying to get the search box CSS in the header in Internet Explorer (thanks again to web designer reader, Mikull).

Tip: Use tools like browsershots.org to see how your website looks in different browsers and work with designers — or do it yourself — to get your site looking good on the most popular browsers. And don’t forget about mobile users.

5. Trolls in Forums. Aggravation factor: 58 percent. Free for all forums aren’t about Free Speech, they are about free abuse. I’m in the crowd that strongly believes in at least some moderation of public areas. I’ve yet to see any completely unmoderated area that hasn’t devolved into a spam, flame and troll infested swamp. Yes, some of the comments from the “anonymous cowards” are funny, but too much and they turn people off.

Tip: moderate public areas and employ policies that keep some level of civility.

6. Buying Event Tickets. Aggravation factor: 54 percent. A whole annoyance devoted to Ticketmaster ticket fee gouging? Guess I don’t buy enough event tickets through Ticketmaster to get upset by this one. I’m thinking there are bigger annoyances than this, although it’s interesting that Pearl Jam thinks TM has a monopoly.

Tip: I don’t have any tips for this one, do you? Use the comment section below to suggest how to get a better deal buying event tickets online.

7. Web 2.0 Help Doesn’t Help. Aggravation factor: 49 percent. This could have been classified better as ‘Unhelpful help.’ I’m not sure who started the whole knowledge base scene, but I cringe when I’m being sent to one of those for help. The more technology employed, the higher the level of possible compatibility problems, I get that, but our browsers and OS can stay caught up.

Tip: don’t send people to a knowledge base or customer support form for support. Try using live help, provide Skype or other IM options. Don’t staff those live support options with people who follow moronic scripts.

8. The Expense of E-Books. Aggravation factor: 41 percent. I wonder if the expense of eBooks (or is it E-books?) have hurt the medium as much as the fact that people don’t want to read books on a computer screen? There is a distraction factor associated with computers. Some people associate — perhaps rightfully so — that the computer is for work, not for pleasure. I’d argue against this perception that the computer can be used for work and pleasure. Work hard, play hard, but I understand those like my wife who would rather relax with an old-fashioned paperback book over an eBook any day of the week.

Tip: If you release an eBook version, make it half the cost of the paperback version, at least.

9. Disappointing Web Video - Aggravation factor: 38 percent. No, they’re not talking about Scoble’s seemingly endless raw footage … or are they? It’s criticism of not enough top shelf tier content. Projects like NBC’s Hulu might help which bring more of the shows we see on TV to the computer screen. The subpar resolution and bandwidth constraints are a real issue. I’d like to see more HD quality video being released over the web. People are shooting HD video but then compressing the hell out of it so that it looks like pixelated crap when shown on a larger monitor or TV screen.

Tip: Shoot and share more high quality video using sites like blip.tv (better quality videos than YouTube). Use the medium (edit, edit, edit!). Don’t waste people’s time.

10. Boring Virtual Worlds. Aggravation factor: 9 percent. Since being active in virtual worlds since December 2005, I’m convinced those who label virtual worlds “boring” just aren’t trying hard enough. Go spend some time and really, really try to have a good time in virtual worlds. There are tons of things happening covering thousands of different interests. To say virtual worlds are “boring” is a statement about one’s own ability and effort, not about virtual worlds. The 9% aggravated need to be more creative.

Tip: the group blog I’m part of, VTOReality, is having a Halloween Avatar Contest tonight at 6:36pm PST. Dress up as your favorite avatar, create one from scratch, buy one from one of the virtual stores, and stop on by. Maybe we’ll judge yours as the best and you’ll win some L$.

Parting thought on the importance of listening
Stop a minute and ask yourself how good a listener you really are? Lately I’ve been trying to increase my listening skills by getting much more involved with a few third party sites/services that focus on social networks. I hope if you enjoyed or disliked this post you’ll take a second and either rate it above and/or leave a comment. Give me something to listen to, good, bad or indifferent.

My wife came in the office this afternoon and asked me if I wanted to go buy Guitar Hero III and Leopard. Didn’t have to ask me twice, where are the keys?

She went out with a girlfriend tonight so maybe it was some sort of quid pro quo. I’ve been staring at the Leopard box for awhile and am becoming increasingly impressed. Haven’t removed the shrink wrap yet, just looking at it and the faint holographic glow behind the black X.

I started to think about some of the other operating system box art I’ve seen and bought over the years. I remembered the red from Red Hat and the green from SuSE and of course the boring Microsoft Windows boxes through the years. Must admit the box style for Vista is attractive. It isn’t really a box, it’s sort of a cross between a clamshell and container with rounded edges. I like the shape of the Vista box better than the square OS X Leopard box, but that’s where the designers left at Microsoft and the Apple ones got busy.

That purple space looming behind the X — I’m transfixed. Maybe I’ll just leave it up there for the whole work week and keep staring at it. Or is it staring at me? I can’t be the only person who bought Leopard who is so fascinated by the box that they don’t … open … it. This box is the kind you don’t throw away, it’s kind of like the Apple store bags. Apple designers are brilliant. Haven’t even gotten into the OS and I’m visually impressed.

And with that, the pillowgate to dreams beckons. Night.

As games are a favorite hobby of mine, I’m always on the lookout for new and different games. From role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons to online MMORPG to puzzle games and thinking games like Chess. Card games are something I enjoy playing too and I’ve even coded a few card games in my time. Something I hadn’t tried playing before is a card game played on a mat with a webcam that acts out the results of different player/computer moves.

Until buying and playing the PS3 Eye of Judgment.

Quick thoughts? intriguing use of a camera. To date, eye camera type games have seemed more like gimmicks than fun games but Judgment is somewhat unique and I can see why people were having fun playing it at PAX (Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle recently). Here’s one where a game camera is used as an active participant in a card game that can’t be played without the PS3 (maybe it can, but it’s not meant to be played that way). I was able to beat the computer solo on the Beginner and Amateur settings but have not yet been victorious on Normal mode. Haven’t tried playing against others online yet. Not quite ready to take my skills to the masses. Soon.

The Eye of Judgment bundle comes packaged in finger slicing bubble wrap — be careful cutting the outside with a razor blade — and then you can pull the contents out which look like the picture shown at the top of this post. The package contains the following:

- starter deck of 30 cards
- booster pack containing 8 additional cards
- PSEye USB camera
- PSEye tower (assembly required)
- PS3 Eye of Judgment game
- player mat

PSEye video
While you are setting up PSEye camera tower, yes, some assembly is required, you might want to download from the Playstation store the free video camera software called EyeCreate.

You can use EyeCreate to make videos on your PS3. I’ll cover this functionality in a separate post.

Setting up the PSEye tower
As mentioned above, you do need to assemble the PSEye tower, but no tools are required. The instructions are inside the Eye of Judgment instruction manual, but you can probably assemble without them. Here are step-by-step instructions with pictures.

STEP 1. Open the box and bag inside containing the four plastic pylons.

STEP 2. Attach two of the pylons into each side of the base.

STEP 3. Attach the center black base support to the top of the two pylons. Note the notch in the back for the wires. It should be on the opposite side of the writing on the bottom base.

STEP 4. Attach the two other pylons to the center black base support.

STEP 5. Attach the camera black top support so it’s facing up at an angle.

STEP 6. Now slide the PSEye camera into the support so it’s facing down. It should slide easily into place.

STEP 7. Gently pust the wire from the back of the PSEye camera into the notches in the center of the plastic base. I found that not inserting in the bottom base made it more stable, but your mileage may vary.

STEP 8. Lay out the mat on a flat surface and place the PSEye base in middle of the edge. There are spots along the edge to line up the PSEye base. I put the PS3 Eye of Judgment game box in the center of the playing mat to show scale in the next picture.

Note the picture above shows placing the PSEye tower base on a bed, which isn’t advised because you will need to setup the camera settings new each time you play the game if it’s not in the same spot. If you don’t mind spending a couple minutes setting up the camera placement each time you want to play, it does work when placed on a soft surface like a bed, but a desk or table is better. That’s where we moved it to after the first night of playing.

STEP 9. You’re ready to turn on the game and do the initial camera setup. There is a (too) long cinematic introduction that you can bypass by clicking the start (>) button.

STEP 10. The first time you load Eye of Judgment you’ll automatically be taken step-by-step through the camear configuration, but after that if you move the camera as we did then you can reach it from the ‘Options’ in the main menu. During this phase you need to choose where of the four spots you placed the camera. The configuration wizard is easy to follow and shows pictures of each setup.

Once you’re done setting up the camera you need to place a card on the playing mat. If the PSEye camera recognizes the card, a white image will appear over the card. This part confused me a bit, I expected it to show something a little more obvious, so hopefully that helps others.

There are different lighting settings you can use depending on the brightness of the room. We used the ‘automatic’ setting with overhead lighting and it seemed to be fine.

Woohoo, now we can play!

Time to play solo match against computer
I’d recommend playing against the computer to get the hang of the game. So far that’s all we’ve done, taking turns since Eye of Judgment only comes with one starter deck and 8 booster cards. Additional decks aren’t available in any stores yet — at least in our area — and Amazon shows 1-2 months before any new decks will ship. Come on, Sony, why aren’t you selling additional starter decks so people can play against other people locally? I realize you can play it online against other players.

As for how to play the game, there is an option in the main menu to view some videos of how to play the game. The videos do a decent job explaining the basics of the game and taking you through a hypothetical game.

How to play Eye of Judgment
Here’s my brief and hopefully easy to understand explanation of how to play. Strategy is a whole different matter. We can cover strategy in the comments section.

Shuffle the starter deck of 30 cards. Start by drawing five cards. You can look over your cards and if they aren’t good replace them with five additional cards which is called a mulligan. Press the start (>) button when you are ready to start the game against the computer. The object of the game is to be the first player to have creatures occupy five of the nine spots on the player mat. You can only place one creature card on the map — this is called “summoning” — each turn and your opponent can attack and kill your creatures to thwart your progress, so a game could last 7, 10, 15 or more turns, although an average game seems to last around 10 minutes or less.

There are a few events that can prevent you from being able to lay down a creature card (summon a creature, remember) every turn:

1. You don’t have any creature cards. Each turn you start by drawing a new card with the exception being if you start the game out on the first turn first (a slight advantage). You can have the computer randomly assign who starts first to even out the advantage. The second number beneath your mana on the game screen shows the number of cards you should have in your hand at any given time. Also the computer will remind you to draw a new card at the start of each turn.
2. Not enough Mana to summon the creature. This is more common than #1. If you only have high mana creature cards in your hand, your only move might be to wait until next turn. Each turn you get +2 mana points and if any of your creatures are killed you will gain back some mana, but I found several times I didn’t have enough mana to place a creature on the map. Kind of frustrating, but common.
3. A summoning lock. Some of the more powerful creatures can only be placed if summoning is unlocked. You can tell by the big padlock at the top of the screen. If that’s on, even if you have enough mana, you can’t summon these creatures.
4. You run out of time. Although this one is a bit more unlikely, a timer can be set on the length of each player’s turn to choose what cards to play (default: 5 minutes). I found myself up against the five minute timer in my first game.

Spell cards
You can perform spells with some cards and will want to play these before summoning a creature. Important: the direction you place the creature card on the board determines how they interact with other creature cards on the player mat. Before setting down any card pay attention to which way the creature attacks, which is shown at the bottom of each card. It’s recommended to study what each card looks like and what it does. This will help. The Eye of Judgment instruction manual does a good job of showing what each attritube on the card means.

Tip: Creatures can gain or lose points by being placed in the wrong environment (known as element fields). Of the nine spots on the player map they are randomly placed by the computer earth (2), wood (2), water (2), fire (2) and Biolith (1). If you place a creature on the map in the opposite element — say water instead of fire — they will suffer a penalty and can be killed easier.

Hopefully these instructions reduce the number of times you see this:

Unstick the discard
Sekerah in the Playstation forums has the answer to a problem with the PSEye acknowledging your discards:

You need to “offer” it to the eye, meaning you hold above the mat in your hand.

Any good Eye of Judgment strategy tips to share?

The vast majority of popular internet sites don’t give me the privacy creeps. Amazon? I’m more troubled by their patent obsessions. eBay/Skype/Stumbleupon? Nope. Yahoo and Google? Still own stock in both. One popular site that gives me the privacy willies:

Facebook.

Yes, it’s suspect using Valleywag as a source because they seem to delight in stirring up dust that isn’t there (National Enquirer of Silicon Valley), but yesterday’s post on Facebook employees profile activities rang true to me:

Turns out Facebook employees can (and do) check out anyone’s profile. Not only that, but they also see which profiles a user has viewed — a major privacy violation. If you’ve been obsessed with a workmate or classmate, Facebook employees know. If Barack Obama’s intern has been using the campaign account to troll for hotties, Facebook employees know. Within the company, it’s considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun.

Again this is Valleywag and thus could be completely bogus, but I could see a group of FB employees gossiping about what profiles people are looking at and that creeps me out. Why don’t they have a company policy that forbids this type of behavior? They should get one — ASAP. Even a gossip rag like Valleywag can make a good point once in awhile.

Facebook has a chance to react by beefing up their privacy policy.

In case anybody is curious, I’m not worried if FB employees know what FB profiles I’m looking at, heck, those that interested in what I’m up to online can already follow services like Friendfeed which provide a running stream of my daily online activity at some popular sites. I’ve been thinking about pulling all these services together plus Friendfeed and putting it on my personal site which is in need of an update.

Remember AOL offering up data that violated their own privacy policy? They quickly apologized after being hammered over it, but it planted seeds of doubt. I’d put that type of carelessness into privacy that concerns me. In defense of Facebook they do offer many tools to specifically set what types of information you are willing to share with applications, friends and others — except employees can bypass all these settings.

That should change. Let us encrypt our Facebook data even from the prying eyes of employees.

Recently we had one of our bank accounts breached. A real pain that we had to change to a new account, order new checks, change the account that was hooked in different online places. This breach wasn’t because of identity theft online. It was because an employee of a vendor used by a retail store sold our data along with some others. The FBI is still investigating the matter. Moral of the story: a company’s hands are only as clean as their employees.

Must admit it’s real events like this that have prevented me from putting too much information into Facebook. That and Facebook seems a little too closed to me. Are these employee-related concerns valid?

What major sites privacy handling give you the creeps? And does it impact how much time you spend at these sites?

Hope I don’t lose my geek badge but instead of buying one of many available copies of Leopard floating around the area tonight at 6pm PST, I went with the last copy — the store actually held it for us — of Sony’s intriguing PS3 Eye of Judgment game.

It comes with the new Playstation Eye camera and there is a free download in the Playstation store. It’s the card + computer game that was a hit at the Penny Arcade Expo here in Seattle recently.

Why didn’t I buy Leopard too?
Two reasons:

1. I need to upgrade my eMac memory. Why didn’t I do that sooner? I know, I know, slacker! Leopard requires 512MB RAM minimum and I’m still running in the dark ages (but happily, I might add with the apps I use) with the 256MB RAM that came with the machine in 2004.

According to Crucial 512MB will only cost me $32.99. $66 to upgrade to 1GB? Think I might go all the way. Who knows, maybe I’ll emulate Marc Orchant and spring for the new iMac instead. I’ve had my eyes on the Intel Macs for awhile to replace or supplement my eMac. Honestly, the eMac has served me very well the last three years for how it’s been used and still works fine.

2. There will be plenty of time to buy Leopard over the next week and it will take me at least a few days after buying to review it in detail. I kind of like the idea of reviewing installing Leopard on an older machine as I’m guessing there won’t be as many of those reviews. This timing still puts me behind the cutting edge Mac fans, but I can live with that. We didn’t buy Vista the day it came out either (but a couple days later bought this machine with Vista on it). And it wasn’t until the last week that I regularly started using Vista.

The existing Leopard reviews like Walt Mossberg saying it’s “evolutionary, not revolutionary” and the 300+ features have solidified me as a buyer, but even if the two lame excuses above weren’t there, I didn’t feel the absolute, craving need to buy it when I was at the store tonight. Thought I would be sweaty palmed and reaching for my wallet at the store but it just didn’t happen. I did, however, get that feeling with Eye of Judgment (and yes my spelling is correct, there is no ‘e’ in the game title).

Was disappointed that I couldn’t play around with the Leopard demo in store for a bit tonight. About 50 minutes after the official launch the Tacoma Best Buy was still loading Leopard on their machines (huh?!). I wonder if we’ll see some customers moaning about long install/upgrade times?

Anyway, more details on Eye of Judgment and the Playstation Eye camera will be coming soon. If you have a copy of Judgment, holler in the comments and maybe we can play a game together over the PS3 network.

Before getting into Microsoft’s newest list, it seemed prudent to briefly recap my Windows Vista history and experience to date. If none of that backstory matters to you, then skip down to the next bolded section. A link is there to get to the list and you can follow through what one real customer, namely me, thought was worth getting excited about with Windows Vista to date.

As someone who switched his main machine to Vista literally within the last few days, I’m getting a greater appreciation and understanding of the Windows Vista experience. Is the response ‘wow’ as they had promised? Umm, not really. It’s not a moan and groan though either. There are some things I do like better about Vista than its predecessors.

We’ve owned a Windows Vista machine since February 2, 2007 (pictured above) which was unpacked and the Gateway GT5405E specs detailed. It was originally planned as a bedroom computer and backup if something should go wrong with our other two systems in our home office (three if you count the Mac, but that’s another story). Also planned to use it to test what software I used regularly would work and for gaming/entertainment. The graphics card was the first to demonstrate problems as shown in Hmmcast #57.

Didn’t take long to realize that the games I wanted to play required a higher Windows Experience Index. How does one do that with a new machine? Spend more $$ on RAM and graphics card. The graphics card and memory manufacturers must a serious love-hate relationship with Microsoft.

Unfortunately the computer came with two 512MB RAM sticks instead of a single 1GB DDR2 RAM so I needed to buy 2x 1GB RAM DDR2 to upgrade to 2GB. The graphics card it came with wasn’t powerful enough, so I upgraded that to the Ge-Force 8500 GT with 512MB of RAM. This drove our Windows Experience up to 4.7 where it currently sits at a cost of nearly $250 additional.

Played a couple times casually and then we got new furniture in our bedroom and moved things around. Never even plugged in the Vista machine or used it for over three months. It gathered some dust in the corner of the bedroom pretty much until a wind storm knocked out power last Thursday 10/18/07. Even though we’re using UPS with surge protection my existing Windows XP has been acting a little strangely for awhile and whatever happened during the storm, it didn’t come back the same.

An error message appeared during bootup saying something to the fact that the system fan wasn’t working properly and the machine could overheat. Decided instead of replacing the fan — for better or worse — to give a serious attempt to moving to Vista.

Going through the list of 100 reasons
That brings us current to today yesterday and news that Microsoft is running out a new promotion showing the 100 reasons why everyone’s so speechless about Windows Vista.

Speechless, really? They must not be covering the tech blogs which show exactly the opposite about Vista.

I decided it would be worthwhile to read through the list and match against my own customer experience and decide how many of these 100 items truly left me speechless and barring that, left me at least interested.

Since Microsoft breaks the list into groups of 10 reasons, I’ll do the same in sections that follow. If the reason is in red, I strongly disagree as it being a good selling point and in green I strongly agree. When there are missing numbers, it means the feature didn’t mean enough to me to comment and didn’t feel it was a Vista selling point. Readers will probably feel differently about certain features that I skipped over so feel free to use the comment section as always to bring anything noteworthy to my attention.

Reasons #1-10
What Microsoft says is bolded, BTW, my comments aren’t. Legend:

Green = strongly agree
Black = neutral but noteworthy
Red = strongly disagree

1. It makes using your PC a breeze. Not my experience so far. Maybe this should come with caveat: if you get everything configured and installed that you actually use? I spent several hours finally getting the Zune software to work on Vista. The onboard microphone and line-in jacks didn’t work and ditched the config and installed a Soundblaster Audigy card instead. Do I blame these issues on Gateway or Vista? Not at all a selling point.

2. Because all of your music is just a remote control click away. — unless you use Zune and have trouble getting the Zune software to install. Not a selling point.

3. It’s the safest version of Windows ever.. Too early to tell for this customer. Not a selling point yet.

4. See your world in a whole new light.. Windows Aero is mostly eye candy, not really a feature that would make me buy the OS. So far Microsoft is 0 for 4.

5. It can find your stuff. Remember the old Microsoft search dog? Somebody call PETA because that’s cruelty to animals. Prior Windows search was that bad. Vista search is improved but there are still some searches that don’t work well. For example, I needed to use the Windows Task Manager. Try putting “task manager” into the Windows search. It doesn’t find it on my machine. Does it work on yours? If I put in the file name however, ‘taskmgr’ it works.

Who is going to remember the filename? Ok, I just did — but that was one, real world experience where I had to open a browser and hit Google to get the answer. BTW, you can launch the Task Manager with the keyboard combination: CTRL+SHIFT+ESCAPE.

No, not a selling point.

6. Because you’re always on the run.. Finally, something I can color positively. The mobile features, particularly what used to be ActiveSync is a big improvement. I didn’t need to do anything special with my Pocket PC beyond visiting the built-in Mobile Center to make it work with Vista. Huge selling point for mobile users.

7. Because you can freeze time.. Being able to tag photos locally in Vista is something I haven’t tried yet. Does it write the tag data into the photo headers or is it something if I head over to the Mac with these photos the tag and rating data doesn’t go with me? If that’s the case, it’s not a feature. I’m not criticizing here, just need to do more research on this one. This could be a good selling point if it includes the tag data in each picture so competing OS can read.

8. Your PC can take care of itself. I can’t wait to see this happen. I’ll be back in a few months to answer this one. Let’s just say I’m more than a little bit skeptical here. Not a selling point.

10. Surf more safely. I’ve already switched to Firefox as my regular browser. The few times I’ve used IE7, it has seemed OK. Not a huge improvement over IE6 and I miss the plugins. I know IE7 has a plugin structure now but it feels like too little too late. Not a selling point.

Reasons #11-20
A number of things involving television in these 10 items which, since we gave up TV in our household some 489 days ago don’t apply to me. These TV features might be selling points for you, so again, check out what’s missing here.

13. Because you need to know who the bad guys are. Of course the first thing I did was install Firefox and McAfee SiteAdvisor, third party products. Neither of which mean I’m relying on IE7 and their Phising Filter IE7. Not a selling point.

15. Because your PC remembers to back up for you. I like the idea behind these features. I need to spend some more time with this one. Backing up is extremely important. It’s the reason I didn’t have any data loss after that wind storm. Awhile back I switched to a workflow that doesn’t hold me hostage to what’s installed on the built-in hard drive of any of our machines. Still, this IS a selling point to me.

17. It’s like having your own personal anchorman. I like the Windows sidebar gadgets but have found that my preferred screen orientation with the new HD monitor is portrait, which leaves less room for stuff on the side where I prefer gadgets. I realize they can be relocated to anywhere on the screen, but gadgets are better on the side for me. However, like #15, this IS a selling point.

18. Create your own personal archive, scheduled and network backup.. Wait, didn’t we cover this in #15?

20. Set up your home network in a flash with Network and Sharing Center. Found it a bit annoying that the external hard drives I attached needed to have sharing setup for me to be able to access from the same machine. It didn’t take very long but the third party program I was using, Notetab++, wasn’t giving me a “no permission” error. Not quite Vista’s fault, but not exactly in a “flash.” The network itself, however, process was fairly smooth. I’m leaning toward this being a selling point over not being one.

Reasons 21-30
These start out in a place close to my heart: games.

21. Put more playtime in family time.. There is much better emphasis on gaming in Windows Vista particularly the way it comes with a number of fun casual games and the whole Windows Experience Index which is a useful system for determining how a game will work on Vista. Definite selling point.

22. See everything you’re working on at a glance. Windows Flip 3D is not in the Home Basic version, but since I have Home Premium it can be activated how? The search, grrrr, doesn’t tell me the magic key strokes. Fortunately this Windows Flip 3D how-to page does, in summary:

CTRL + WINDOWS KEY + TAB
or
Click on the button with 3D windows next to the start window

Man, I didn’t even know that button was there — doh! This looks neat, but, it’s not a selling feature.

25. It works with the software, hardware, and services you want. So far I’ve been able to get every piece of software — that has Vista software — to work. Not easily in every case which is disappointing, but work, yes. There were more software problems, perhaps a bit understandably, when Vista first came out. But we’re a good nine months past that now, no more excuses for Microsoft and vendors not to be on the same page.

As for hardware? Printer? Yes. Pocket PC? Yes. Zune? Yes. Cameras? Yes. D-Link Skype Adapter? Not yet, still working on it. I think it has something to do with the problems with the microphone and line-in jacks. As mentioned above, today I installed a sound card. Will see how Vista behaves with this tomorrow. Bottom line: this would be a selling point if completely true, but it’s not for me.

27. Because your computer can keep up with you while you’re on the go. Another mention for the Windows Mobility Center. One feature, three different mentions, and counting.

29. Take the handwritten approach. A huge selling point for Tablet PC fans, but if you don’t have a tablet screen or device this feature is a non-event.

30. Restore your PC in an instant. Another mention of the backup and restore option. Starting to see some repeats, the list is getting lamer.

Reasons 31-40

31. Because your PC lets you know if something’s wrong—and helps you fix it. Vista has added some alert features which are supposed teoll you when resources are low. Here’s the good news since I’ve been using it regularly, two business days now (weekend doesn’t count, limited usage then), I’ve seen no notices of resources being low. In fact, Vista is running very snappy. I’m impressed on this front. Is this a selling point that they will tell me when something is wrong and how to fix it? Yes, but I found the Zune installation error a bit vague and still needed to use Google to find the solution. Overall, not a selling point for me — yet. Need to come back later.

33. Preserve a lifetime of memories. Another backup mention (#4).

35. Because you’ll know it when you see it. Faster search results. For some search results, yes there are more immediate results like on the Mac. Selling point? Yes, if only there weren’t third party search services that have been offering better search on Windows for awhile.

37. Keep your info under lock and key. This would be a handy selling feature, but it’s only in the Vista Ultimate Edition. This is the only feature so far that makes me wish we had Ultimate edition.

40. Because you love what you do. This isn’t subjective at all, is it — not! I think this is a half-hearted attempt to make the Vista experience seem like the cult of Mac. Using a Mac and using Vista are still different from an aesthetic standpoint. Not a selling point.

Reasons 41-50

41. Because your PC will stay up to date, automatically. I like what Vista has done with the Windows Update feature. It gives you more information — still not enough in some cases — but is a better interface than in past Windows version. Updates are a major factor with software so this is a good selling point.

44. Because you have a need for speed. This was of the most anticipated features for me, the ability to supercharge Windows with extra memory using a thumb drive. Oddly, I’ve never used the feature yet to see how well it works, but it remains a strong selling point.

49. Take your workspace with you. I’m already using the Sync Center with my Pocket PC and love it. Great feature. If you need to share and sync data, it works good. Strong selling point

50. Get more out of the web Tabbed Browsing. Not to sound elitist, but the 30-45% of the rest of the world already using Firefox has had this for years and it didn’t require paying to upgrade an OS. Not a selling point.

Reasons 51-60

51. Because you live to play. Another mention of the Windows Games features, this one specifically targeting Windows Games Explorer which neatly lists games and their suggested and required Windows Experience Indexes. Repeat.

52. Take control of game time.. There is a lot of focus on parental controls that I’ve skipped over. Our kids are all teens now and don’t use the computers as much as their Xbox 360 so not a lot of need for parental controls on the computers any more. Only one of our three teens is a regular computer user at home and he’ll be 18 in March. If we were going to use parental controls on his computing now, it’s probably a bit too late. He’s getting A’s and B’s and looks to be on track to graduate so I don’t see this as much use. Parents with younger children may find these features good selling points. Not for us.

53. Because you can get more done when you work together. Windows Meeting Space is another feature I need to try out. Allowing friends or colleagues to work on projects over internet assuming we both don’t need Windows Vista Premium or higher (yes/no?) is a good idea. There are a number of web collaboration programs I’d likely use first instead of this option. Seems a little late to be adding this feature.

57. Because you don’t need a PC to watch your home movies. As a test I just inserted a DVD to see if it played without asking me to buy a codec like past versions of Windows and it did. This feature is toting the built-in (Vista Premium and Ultimate only) Windows DVD Maker program. Not sure how much I’ll use this feature. Not a selling point although I like that it plays DVDs.

60. Because you want your video memories to stay true to life. An upgraded version of Windows Movie Maker that supports HD cameras, but will it support mine? I already bought Sony Vegas. I need to test this feature out but generally speaking I like Windows Movie Maker. Is Vegas more powerful? This is a selling point

Reasons 61-70

62. Because it remembers what you like to do—and helps you do it faster. Another mention for Windows SuperFetch, the innovative technology that uses the memory on the USB drive as swap space. Give them a pass for mentioning this one twice, it’s a unique feature.

63. Help is always available. Takes all the way to #63 to mention the upgraded help system? Must say the Mac help system seems better designed, although I think what Vista has done is an improvement. Selling point? Not for me. You expect that software you pay for should have a good help system but sadly a lot of it out there doesn’t.

64. Keep your files confidential. Another benefit for only those with Windows Vista Ultimate edition. This is one of the biggest problems with Vista, too many versions. The Mac is coming out with Leopard this Friday. How many versions? One. Multiple versions are not a selling point. Make it one price in the middle of the highest and lowest and stick with it, now that would be a great selling point. Microsoft marketing doesn’t seem to understand these simple things.

66. Because everyone goofs sometimes. The Shadow Copy feature is also only for Vista Ultimate edition. Bummer, because I like the idea of saving restore points along the way but I don’t see myself going out and paying to upgrade to the ultimate version just to get that feature. Am I looking at this wrong?

Reasons 71-80

71. Keep your favorite things at your fingertips. With Search Folders you can save searches based on frequenly used keywords and file will automatically show up. This is handy to hold say one master file for any .mp3 file anywhere on the system. Yes, this is very similar to smart folders on the Mac. Both OS copy each other, we should be used to that now. Good selling point.

79. Let your music collection grow with you. It’s puzzling to me, one of the growing number of fans of the Zune why so much emphasis in this list of 100 is put on Windows Media Player and nothing in the list on the Zune in the first 80 items. Should those of us not in the Microsoft collective read anything into this?

Reasons 81-90

83. It makes your desktop come alive. Does Windows DreamScene come with my machine or not? I just searched and received nothing. Following what the footnote ‘c’ says, I’m still confused:

Not all Windows Vista features will be available for use on all Windows Vista Capable PCs. All Windows Vista Capable PCs upgraded to Windows Vista will be able to run the core experiences of Windows Vista, such as innovations in organizing and finding information, security, and reliability. Some features—such as the new Windows Aero user interface—available in certain editions of Windows Vista require advanced or additional hardware.

Why don’t you have built-in search results for the features? Maybe it’s because some of these features weren’t actually given names before the Vista shipped maybe? Or am I just not searching in the right place? Somebody throw me a bone.

86. Archive your media library. Sheesh, another mention of the scheduled and network backup feature. And #87-89 are game repeats.

90. Check your e-mail without booting up your PC. This sounds like a great feature and is part of the Windows slideshow but it’s only for portable computers with a secondary screen, it’s not for desktop boxes. Bummer.

Reasons 91-100

96. Access your desktop wherever you go. I’d like to be able to use the Remote Desktop but it’s only for Windows Business edition and Ultimate, not Vista Premium. Drats.

Summary: 6 out of 100
After the first 30 or so reasons that I would be speechless, I was getting bored with the list. The only reason I finished it, in fact, was to write this blog post. Why didn’t Microsoft split the list up into categories and list the features within each category? The javascript page got screwed up every time I clicked back on the browser. And in the list there seemed to be an inordinate amount of reasons that were duplicated at worst and very similar at best which makes it look like they didn’t think this list through very well.

You can just count up the greens to see how many out of 100 this customer saw as selling points. Real world reasons that I would consider buying Windows Vista totalled 6 out of 100. If I had television and Windows Ulitmate version, you could probably kick that number up to 15. It’s a far cry from the total 100 reasons.

And of all these features only one leaves me even remotely close to speechless: SuperFetch. I think that feature is probably the coolest thing to come out of Vista and the most innovative. Certain to be duplicated by the Mac in the future, unless it is patented (and probably is).

How about you? How many of the 100 are reasons you’d want to buy Windows Vista?

The heavily advertised *$0 stock trading site Zecco has added something new in beta that allows sharing investment data across members they’re calling Zeccoshare.

It’s open and getting involved requires free registration or, if you’re already trading on Zecco, activating your profile.

In the announcement email sent to all community members, they are claiming to have 70,000 members. This is an optional service that those with Zecco accounts must activate their profiles to use. If you choose to elect to share trading (pictured below), which again is completely optional, the actual dollar amounts of your trades are not disclosed, only what investments you’re buying and selling and the percentage to your overall Zecco portfolio are shared.

Also, the Motley Fool CAPS rating is next to each stock. You can check out what my Zeccoshare profile looks like:

My wife and I have already been sharing the Google spreadsheet with the dollar amounts and additional details as part of our friendly stock competition we started a couple months ago. For those new, here’s what we’re doing: we started with $500 USD and are making trades through Zecco and tracking the trades using Google spreadsheets so others can follow along in near real time. Understanding this history, I don’t mind sharing this information at Zecco too, as third party verified data showing I’m actually making the trades indicated in the Google spreadsheet I’m making add credibility. Or perhaps, when your overall portfolio is -11.10% like mine currently is, take some away.

My wife who is roundly kicking my butt in the competition, with a current portfolio +20.72% as of his writing, doesn’t seem interested in Zeccoshare yet. But when I first mentioned Zeccoshare to her it was three o’clock in the morning. Later today or in the coming days when she’s more awake she might be more receptive to activating her profile. Her decision, of course.

*As of January 1, 2007, the Zecco free trades will be going away unless one or both of us add more money to our accounts, or get on an extraordinary streak. The minimum account balance for 10 free trades a month at Zecco will be changed to $2,500 USD for existing members and is already there for new members.

Now if only Zecco would add some sort of API to let us get to this shared data programmatically … (hint, hint).

Man, if only I’d waited for a first generation Zune until today, I’d have saved 60% off the price at the site Woot, which offers one day limited supply offers.

Check that, these are refurbished Zune players, not brand new, so not quite the same deal. Still, might be a good way to get the brown Zune first generation player that is reportedly being discontinued. Think I’ll pass on this deal, but maybe some readers have been thinking about buying the Zune and this is a good deal. You can get a brand new one, not refurbished, for another $50-75.

Remember, the Zune first generation will get the firmware upgrade and completely redesigned software for free when the Zune 2.0 model come out next month.

Copy what’s on your iPod hard drive to your Mac
Speaking of portable music players, darkmoon points to Senuti (Mac OS X 10.3+) which lets you copy what’s on your iPod to your Mac. It’s fun to razz my friend darkmoon who doesn’t like the Zune. Being a Zune hater is bad karma

Hat tip to Techmeme -> On10.net.