Give me a more relevant web please!

The web is a great source of information and ideas but if you spend a lot of time on it you might sometimes feel overwhelmed from the noise you are exposed too. At least I feel. It is not the problem of knowing that you will not be able to read everything that is out there and could potentially be of interest to you, but more the fact that with this noise you know you might well miss some of the gems that you should instead be able to find.

Search (and especially Google) have been revolutionary to the way we use the web and
continue to be "the way" you find things you are looking for at any particular point in time. However, what about things you are not actively looking for but you should still notice? And what about the things that you should know about immediately when they surface? There are many of those like a great job opening you should apply to or freshly released news about a company you have invested in. Although we are constantly connected and information spreads very fast across the world thanks to the interenet, the noise is so significant that we miss lots of things we should not miss.

Many people have a browsing behaviour that drives them to news sites and portals as the first thing they do once they open the browser. Next thing they do is check into their webmail. I guess that is why traditional webportals such as Yahoo.com are that popular. There is some degree of personalization on those portals, but basically users are exposed to a one-size-fits-it-all collection of information like they get in traditional media. In order to get more relevant information, users are then forced to go and visit multiple sites (read magazines), typically niche sources of the information one is possibly interested in. It's a time consuming and expensive exercise to do every day. Some users (I assume that's a small minority of web users) subscribe to RSS feeds so to get an aggregated view of the sources they normally check. RSS works OK, it's still too geeky I think and still does not really solve the problem. You get some of the noise out, but you still have plenty of it in the feeds you subscribe to.

So how do you increase relevance in your web experience? You can use your friends and/or like minded people to help you with the filtering. That's what services such as FriendFeed can help you with. They aggregate activities you and other people perform across the web and generate a feed out of it that users can consume. Services such as FriendFeed are repackaging certain concepts like RSS into a more understandable product that the masses can digest. Example: you subscribe first and foremost to a person, not to a feed. I think FriendFeed has a lot's of the basic in place to make the web more relevant but they still have a big challenge ahead of building the most amazing recommendation/relevance engine. And for what I can tell, it sounds like they are working on it.

Note: FriendFeed recently added "realtime" feature so that new items are posted to the user as soon as they become available and made the realtime API available to developers. I will write about the realtime web in the next post.

Sonera and iPhone: why esclusivity is not good for consumers

Sonera Finland is the only operator with rights to distribute the new Apple iPhone 3G in Finland. And this is not good for Finnish consumers.

Sonera is offering 3 different pricing levels (small, medium, large) for the iPhone+service combination. They also offer an extra option that gives people the chance to personalize more the subscription package they are buying from. As part of the deal the customer gets an iPhone at a certain price that depends on the package and the model (8 or 16 GB), but in all cases the phone will be operator locked so will not work with any other operator service than Sonera.

The agreement is 24-month long and with an iPhone 16Gb the basic level (called Small) it costs 31.69 Euro a month plus 245 Euro for the device. Over the entire duration of the deal the total cost will be 1005.56 Euro. The customer isforced to use Sonera cellular service as long as she wants to use the iPhone that came with it.

The basic package is pretty lame. It includes 100 minutes of voice calls, 100 SMSs and a ridiculously low 100 MB of data transfer. Maybe that is OK for browsing but once one starts streaming video or downloading podcasts, the data cap will be easily reached. The extra charge for the data over the limit will be 1.49 Euro/MB. Sonera offers free access to their WiFi service in Finland but with a 3G device supporting high speed downloads, one just wants to feel free to use it anyplace and anytime.
There is an option to go for the more expensive packages. The package "Large" includes 1GB a month of data transfer but comes at a 89.99 euro a month + 85 Euro for the iPhone. Total over 24 month period: 2244.76 euro!

When considering that operators in Finland are already offering unlimited data plans starting at 9.99Euro, I wonder why Sonera did not offer that at least on the more expensive packages. Asking customers to make a 24-month commitment on these conditions just to get an operator locked device seems quite unreasonable to me.

Operator locked means also that all people who are not Sonera customers will be left out of the possibility of using an iPhone in Finland. I guess non-sonera customers account for at least 50% of the Finnish population of cellphone users, and that is quite a big group.

Exclusivity agreements are not good for consumers. Like in this case, they often end-up with customers paying more or being left out from the possibility of getting something they would want.

Twitter drops feature, becomes less mobile.

Twitter has communicated that they have disabled their sms notification service for users outside of North America and India. This is obviously bad news for people like me who have been relying on sms as the way of giving more visibility to some people I follow on the service by getting their updates and direct messages delivered instantly and directly to my mobile.

I have been wondering for a while how long they would have been able to pick up the sms costs as no new agreements with operators were announced since last year and no revenue generating features were added to the service.

Twitter has justified this change with costs (up to 1,000 USD per user per year). I think that is understandable and acceptable, but it is a cold shower for users who found value in this feature. It is always hard to remove free features from services, almost as hard as changing the business model and making users pay for that feature.

Maybe twitter could have tried (and maybe they have tried) to find ways to monetize this feature indirectly by attaching adverts to the SMS notifications the same way as full RSS feeds are nowadays distributed. How would have users reacted to it? And would advertisers go with it? How would that have impacted the cost structure and level?
Another option they could have tried is making users pay for it, but again that is easier said than done.

Anyway, I will keep using twitter and I am still looking for a replacement solution to this feature. Checking the m.twitter.com on regular basis does not work too well, you cannot access direct messages via it and you cannot select specific friends you follow and look them up their feed. Mobile email is a partial replacement (I have gmail inbox configured on my E71, twitter forwards direct messages to my email inbox). I also tried twibble (a java app for mobile) but did not particulary like it as it is an overkill compared to what I need...so I am still without instant mobile twitter notifications.

Beginners golf: online videos as best training solution

I have started to play golf last year and since then tried to learn the basics so to feel comfortable on the course. I did not find it easy and requiring a lot of practice and learning. On the other hand golf is nowadays one of the activities I like the most. It is simply a great experience.

I did attend a "golf for beginners" course at Tammergolf in Tampere (Finland) right at the start. The course lasted about 2 weeks with 5 sessions. It provided some basic introduction to the rules and basics of golf but I must say that it did not really teach me much. I don't think it was good value for the money. At the end of the course I could swing pretty much as well (or as poorly) as at the beginning but at least it gave me the chance to understand that I liked it.

I then went into the internet and looked for books and other material that I could use to learn more. I picked up a couple of books that turned out quite difficult to use for basic technique training. I turned then to videos.Videos are the best solution for me.

There is plenty of videos online that aim at giving basic golf training, some are good and some are not. The good ones are quite valuable as you can watch them when you want, at the speed you want and as many time as you need. You can concentrate on the different aspect of things like the swing, learn them and then go and put them into practice.

After some amount of searching and screening, I have been consistently following the videos from Shawn Clement on Youtube. He has posted more than 100 of them and they are all of excellent quality, covering most of the aspects of playing golf. I do certainly recommend those videos to anyone who has recently started playing and to people who are looking for things to improve in their game.

Most recently I have purchased Shawn's DVD series and I am now in the process again of going through my game to reach the next development level. This is really fun! More on this process soon on new posts.

08.08.08 A day to remember

08.08.08. Many say today is a day to remember mostly because of the opening of Beijing Olympic Games. I watched some of the opening ceremony today and I must say it really impressed me. A great show that I believe created even more interest in the Chinese culture. I felt like China is really a place I should go to sooner or later.

Today is also the day when I finally decided to start blogging. Given the amount of blogs already existing I guess I should consider myself a late adopter. Better late then never though. I have been pondering over the possibility for quite some time and found always good excuses for not starting. The main reason has been the fact that I did not have a good topic to write about or enough time to write. At least I though I had not. Now I figured that I could be writing mostly about things I experience during my daily life. The idea is to share with others good and bad experiences, recommendations and hints I come up with or collect from other sources. So that if you keep reading my blog you might actually find out new things or help me finding them out with your comments.

I will keep the posts hopefully interesting and short enough. I don't like reading long posts myself either.

So thanks for stopping by and come back for more interesting posts in the future.
And if you ended up here while searching for news on the olympics, jump over to twitter to hear more of what people are saying about it.