Scoble explains why he stopped using ICQ:

Why? Everytime I start it up I get a flurry of messages. Unlike Twitter IM has an expectation that you’ll answer it sometime soon. But that’s my problem and I’m an outlier. So why did everyone else stop using ICQ? It got too cluttered and stopped being developed. In 1996 it seemed like there was a new feature every few days. At some point after 2001 it stopped seeing radical improvements.

That really wasn't my problem. My problem was a lot simpler: spam requests for chat. As I recall things, ICQ got flooded with that kind of thing - I'd bring up the client, and I'd get tons of pr0n messages fired at me. I get one or two a month like that on skype, and virtually none on AIM. That's the thing that drove me off ICQ.

Technorati Tags: IM, instant messaging

This talk mentioned in the Product Management View - Product Management in an Agile Environment - is a talk I wish I could attend, but Toronto is a bit out of the way for me, especially in the middle of the week. Sounds like something I'd enjoy.

Normally, I'd call Disney a great marketing firm - but they fall into the same "screw the customer" bucket as everyone else when it comes to video:

Walt Disney's ABC and ESPN are expected to announce Tuesday a deal with cable operator Cox Communications to offer shows on demand, but there's a catch. Cox will have to disable its fast-forward feature that lets viewers skip ads, The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site Tuesday.

Next: Cox will start fielding lots of phone calls claiming that the remote is broken. This breaks expected behavior, and it's a fairly large UI error; the sort that really torques people off. This shouldn't be that hard, actually: cable companies can tell exactly which videos (owned by which entities) have been requested via Video on Demand. Some kind of subscription based revenue sharing plan would be pretty easy to do, and wouldn't piss off customers. But hey - media companies are now all about pissing off customers.

Technorati Tags: marketing

Scoble said something that I couldn't agree with more:

Shipping is a feature. I keep getting reminded of that. Scientific American has a long article on the MyLifeBits research that Microsoft (er, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell) is doing. You can see these two guys in a video series I did while back at Microsoft.

That's very, very much the case. Cool code that stays in the lab is equivalent to code that was never written. Later on, he mentions something else:

This is why I’m scared by what Ray Ozzie is doing. Clearly Ray has bought into the Steve Jobs’ school of “keep it secret, don’t talk, and ship something cool.”

The difference is, Apple ships new stuff all the time, while Microsoft seems to be mired in endless delays. This is a lesson I'm taking forward in my role here at Cincom as Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager.

I find this fascinating. In a Salon interview on his new book, "Dreaming in Code", Scott Rosenberg says:

And programmers, as I quote Larry Constantine in my book, programmers are programmers because they like to code — given a choice between learning someone else’s code and just sitting down and writing their own, they will always do the latter.

Jonathan Rentzsch doesn't like that at all, and retorts:

Rosenberg is wrong. Programmers don’t like coding, they like problem solving

Further down, he says this though:

While there are times we want to ground-up rewrite due to architectural considerations (new runtime, new language, major new functionality) in my experience the common case for wanting to rewrite is to understand.

The thing is, they're both right, and they are talking right past each other. Developers rewrite far more often than Rentzsch would like to think, and not always for the good reasons he speaks of. Consider: How many systems have migrated from language A to language B (pick any A and B you like) over the last 20 years, simply because B was "cool", and the developers really, really wanted to get B on their resumes? It's not always like that, but it's not always as clean as Rentzsch would have us believe, either.

Technorati Tags: development, developers

I gave a "webinar" this morning - the slides and audio will be appearing over here for people who register. I recorded the session (at least my end of it), and I'll be posting the audio from that in a few weeks (I want to give the site an exclusive for awhile).