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2008-06-17 - Download Firefox 3 before 1 pm on Wednesday, June 18th 2008

Download Day

Today’s the day folks. Amber and I have downloaded Firefox 3 onto all three of our machines, and it’s about time you downloaded Firefox. Do it today and help make history in the good kind of way.


2008-06-07 - How I’m Using Twitter vs. Pownce vs. Plurk

While watching Die Hard 4 and a little bored tonight, I stared an experiment. For the most part Twitter is my main method of communicating in the 140 character/microblog world. There comes a time when I want to send out a million messages but I don’t want to destroy anyone’s SMS plans that follow me on their cells. Especially not with the useless drivel the I’m sending out tonight.

So for mini-events like this where I’m not being social, I want to be able to still use these services. I’m not at a conference, this information isn’t very important but I want to put it out. In cases like this where I’m writing down random thoughts while watching Die Hard 4, I’m going to use Pownce.

When Twitter goes down, I plan on using Plurk.

Read up on my thoughts on Die Hard 4 on my Pownce page. Don’t expect a whole lot of updates once this experiment is done until the next one happens.

Rob Blatt on Twitter
Rob Blatt on Pownce
Rob Blatt on Plurk

Jaiku? I don’t have much of a use for it yet. I’m sure I’ll think of something.

How do you use these services? Do you only use one of them? Are you spreading your Tweets to the other services? Are you creating unique content in all cases? Let me know in the comments and friend me on the different services if you have an account.


2008-06-05 - Personal Attention from Pandora FTW

Pandora Desktop App iconEarlier I wrote a post explaining my discontent with what seemed like a form letter from Pandora in regards to their Desktop App. (Where Pandora Stops Being A Group Of People To Me)

In the comments for that post, Johnny from Pandora explained what was up with the cold e-mail:

Hi Rob,

This is Johnny at Pandora. I apologize for the coldness of the e-mail, I definitely didn’t mean to come across as disingenuous. The response for the beta desktop app has been overwhelming, but we wanted to respond to each e-mail so you knew we got your comments.

We are collecting data so that we can address all these issues, and we appreciate every user’s response. The CPU utilization is a known issue and we are working with Adobe to address the problem.

Thanks again for writing in with your comments. Again, I apologize for the cold response.

- Johnny

See that? That’s a company that cares. I imagine that they are scanning Twitter for their name (also, @Pandora_Radio follows me and saw me tweet about the blog post) and this came up.

I have to say that I’m happy for the quick response from Johnny. It took him six hours to respond to my post, and that’s pretty awesome turn around time. It doesn’t mean that the aplication uses less memory, but it certainly makes me feel better about the company.

They also responded to me on Twitter publicly. Tweet from Pandora #1, Tweet from Pandora #2.

I’ll say this though, I would have appreciated this kind of e-mail first. I don’t think that any e-mail they would have sent would have turned me away from the product, just flavored my perception of the company. I sure hope this hasn’t affected my chances of getting a tour of the offices when I’m out on the west coast with the wife in October. She loves Pandora and she’d be pretty pissed if they were upset with me about this whole thing.

In celebration of Pandora’s awesomeness, here’s a link to my station titled “Acoustic Guitar”: Acoustic Guitar on Pandora.com


2008-06-05 - Where Pandora Stops Being A Group of People to Me

Pandora Desktop App iconFirst, I love the Pandora service. It’s powered the music for every party I’ve thrown since the launch of the service. I have a finely tuned Tiki station for those warm and lazy summer days and I’ve got a great Christmas/Chanukka station for the holiday parties as well.

Now that I have that aside, I have a large issue with something Pandora has done. After a public beta release of an Adobe AIR application, Pandora solicited feedback. I noticed that the application was using half of my available processing power, which I deem as unacceptable for a small application like this. I wrote to the correct e-mail address notifying them of this issue. Seeing as I am one of many people who downloaded this application, I was perfectly happy not receiving a response. I had read other people on Twitter complaining of the same memory problem, so I figured they know about this already.

They offer a great service and offering an application to extend the use of the service is great in my mind. But today I got a response from Pandora, and this is where they steered wrong. Here’s the response in full:

Hi Rob

Thanks for checking out out beta Pandora Desktop App, and thanks for the feedback!

These are great suggestions, and our product design team will review then carefully as we figure out what adjustments to make in future releases.

Thanks again for writing and feel free to send more feedback as you continue to use the beta Desktop App!

– Johnny
Pandora Listener Support

It’s clear from this e-mail that they didn’t read my feedback. I offered no suggestion and was informing them that their application is a processor hog. They asked for feedback and I took time to give them feedback. In return, I received a mass mailing. Until now, Pandora has always had a very human image to the company. As a long time user, this comes across as very cold.

I wouldn’t care about the form letter if it wasn’t meant to sound organic. If I had gotten a letter saying that they got a flood of feedback and don’t have the time to respond individually, I would have understood.

It’s not the end of the world, but Pandora seems to be a company that prides itself on how personal they are. This seems to be a sloppy decision coming from an organic company.

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Stripped Wordpress theme by Upstart Blogger, but heavily molested by Rob Blatt. The rotating image code at the top of the page is A Rotator Apart by Matt Mullenweg.