Jonathan's dashboard

[For the record, I think having a corporate Satisfaction community based on Burning Man is a terrible idea that makes me feel sorta sick to my stomach. But I guess I'll have to get over it, so I'll go ahead and participate.]

Corporate sponsorship is a bit of a strong term for what Burning Man is doing with companies. They've basically invited companies to participate in Black Rock City just like any other participants. Specifically, a bunch of green energy companies are coming out and generating power for the city using their new green-tech stuff. There won't be any logos or other promotion, and the burning man corp isn't making money on it.

To some extent this isn't different from all the corporations that always "participate" whether they like it or not, like UHaul, Camel Back, or Pabst Blue Ribbon. A lot of people I know have gasoline powered generators because of Burning Man, and the hopeful outcome of this is that they'll have solar or wind generators in the future. I'm planning on getting some alternative generator myself. Still, I don't like the idea of corporations or political groups attending as an entity.

Here's one thing to think about: LED's. By the time the media started talking about LED's as a lighting method I'd been seeing them for years at burning man. Some of the great early LED installations/art cars/etc were probably made by the same people who were developing them commercially.

For something like LED's or small green generators Burning Man is possibly a completely unique event. You have thousands of people walking around in a hot/cold dirty atmosphere, carrying their water, food, and many of their possessions with them all the time, trying to avoid dangers like unlit cars and scrap metal laying all over the ground. There are occasional explosions and no good systems for communication. If you've been to the third world or a war zone you might recognize this as the way most people live every day.

The unique thing is that these people are incredibly well educated, wealthy, socially-minded, and technically savvy. It really is like taking a team you could never afford and having them run a user test on extreme poverty. We all tested different types of personal lighting and a certain kind of LED's won in the Burning Man test; it may just be coincidence, but that same technology is now reaching out into the greater world. I think the hope with Green Man is to harness some of that and point it all in a direction that will keep us from destroying ourselves. I like spending a couple weeks in a barren wasteland, but I'd prefer to keep the climate extremes to my vacation time.

What scott says is true. I just tried it. Good work.

The back button is a precious gift from our creator, and when we break the back button it makes baby jesus cry.

A couple cans of spray paint and a belt sander would really break in a bag. Fire would work too, though when ballistic melts and re-hardens it get sorta sharp and pokey.

Somebody actually did this for designer handbags. You could subscribe and get a different one every time you sent one back, just like netflix.

I'm changing my GMail signature to to say "Sent from my iPhone" so everyone will think I actually bought one.

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Sent from my iPhone

Yeah, this is why most companies make them Simpsons yellow, which can't really be confused with any ethnicity. Of course once you start assigning colors to certain emoticons you start digging a much deeper hole, e.g. "why are you implying that all light skinned people are frustrated, confused, and thankful?!?!"

But wait...weren't all those Facebook users over on Myspace just a year or two ago? What's to say that they won't abandon certain aspects of Facebook and use something else instead? I haven't actually used Pownce, and I don't know if it could dethrone MySpace or Facebook or AOL Instant Messenger, but so say that it's dead on arrival is a little silly.

Wouldn't changing the shape/size of the keyboard layout keep you from ever being able to truly touch-type? I make mistakes whenever I switch from one keyboard to another, and switching based on task seems like it would be even worse.

Personally I'm happy to see the site launch without friend relationships.
It reminds me of how LinkedIn has resisted the temptation to add photos to user profiles; they say that the minute they do that it will become a dating site and kill the professional atmosphere. I like the photos here, but I also like that it isn't a contest to see who has the most friends and allows people to be judged on the strength of their content rather than their number of connections.

ashot, I'm guessing you're referring to MySpace here. MySpace clearly dominates its space, but that doesn't mean they cn't be beaten in the long run. It bears constant repeating that every consumer software company beat the company before it, which seemed improbable/impossible at the time. How could anyone ever take out Prodigy, AOL, Yahoo, or Texas Instruments? (Microsoft is the notable exception here.)

MySpace is totally beatable using a few strategies. You can try to beat them at their own game -- general social networking for young people -- which is Facebook's strategy. But you can also beat them one little piece at a time, shaving away some percentage of users by providing a little more functionality, stability, professionalism, style, whatever.

MySpace proved the social networking interaction model but they don't own it and they will see some sort of dropoff at some point, and companies like Pownce are counting on this. They only need a few million users to be a viable company.

I don't trust anyone to compress pages for mobile display -- they just all do a bad job. This would also mean adding yet another proxy between the device and the web server, which would probably slow down the experience.

AT&T has a pretty good iPhone FAQ at http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/iph...

You can certainly use your existing number, but as noted above you might have to pay your way out of your existing contract. The AT&T people should be able to port your number for you at the store or over the phone.