Andy Chase

I re-joined Friendster a couple of days ago at a friend's invitation. The last time I signed up I thought it was interesting, but never really knew what to do with it.

This time around there's some new functionality, but there's also at least one big huge flash ad on EVERY SINGLE PAGE. Multiple ads on most.

One thing that's already driving me nuts is the means of communication; when somebody on Friendster sends me a message, I get a big, bloated html email (with a big ad at the bottom, of course) telling me somebody sent me a message.

They have my email address.

They have the message that somebody left for me.

They could save me the trouble and just send the actual message to my email address. I know they're not going to do that because they want me to go to the Friendster web site and look at their crappy advertising.

I've been spoiled by Flickr, where they understand that the best way to keep people coming back to the site is to make it clean, easy to use, and a pleasure to surf around.

Tagged:

• friendster
• webapps
• flickr

The amusing pseudonym for today is Bramlet Abercrombie, as provided by The Colbert Report.

I should also take this opportunity to mention the previous amusing pseudonym that Bramlet displaced, Clem Brulée. That one came from Kim.

It has been played to death, yes, but Stairway to Heaven is a damned good song. The trick is to not listen to it more than once per year (or even less, if you've been critically overexposed in the past.)

It's actually not very often that I find myself wishing I had had the internet when I was a kid, but while playing guitar tonight it occurred to me to do a Google search for The Rain Song, one of my favorite Led Zeppelin tunes.

When I was an aspiring Rock Guitar God 16 years ago, I had a Led Zeppelin song book. It had tablature and chords, but I can't remember ever being able to learn anything from it. The notes were mostly right, but the arrangements were unplayable.

Especially The Rain Song, which was one of the reasons I pestered my parents into buying that particular book. The book had an arrangement in EADGBE tuning, and it just didn't sound right, no matter how slowly and cleanly I tried to play it. I remember impossible fingerings, and chords that just didn't have the right color. I remember asking my guitar teacher about it, and him mentioning that he was pretty sure the song was played in a non-standard tuning, but not seeming very interested in pursuing it. I remember giving up on that song.

Tonight, within 10 seconds of my initial search I learned that the song is played in DGCGCD tuning, and that it practically falls right off the fretboard; I would have been able to nail that song hands down back then had I known the tuning and had all this free tablature at my fingertips.

What must it be like to be an aspiring Rock Guitar God nowadays?

Blogger cred
Originally uploaded by Usonian.

Five years ago, before anyone knew what the hell a "Blog" was, I carried my trusty HandSpring Visor Deluxe with me everywhere I went, full of content from AvantGo.

AvantGo was a proto-aggregator, delivering content to a Palm/PocketPC reader application via "mobile friendly" web sites set up by various media companies. Mostly is was sites like Salon and ABC news, but one day a coworker at Stan Lee Media, knowing I used AvantGo daily, referred me to an "AvantGo Blogger Client". If memory serves, somebody had created a tool that would format a Blogger weblog for friendly consumption by AvantGo. I don't remember if Blogger offered automated RSS feeds back then, or whether it worked by just scraping Blogger pages.

I signed up for a free Blogger account, made one post, and never touched it again. At the time, the notion of an online service to sign up and post nuggets of content in chronological order was puzzling, and I was much more of a He-Man about Doing Everything Myself when it came to all things web-site related.

I recently dug up my account and was surprised to find it still active. I think it's about to be pressed back into service, and it's kind of neat to have that "member since 2000" geek cred there... like I was hip to this blogging stuff before it was cool.