The Far Side of Tech

In an attempt to move in a different direction from the rest of the blogosphere, I was going to write something about how strange it was that the ill-fated search engine Cuil was covered so widely in mainstream press. Unfortunately, it looks like ReadWriteWeb beat me to it.

I encourage you to read their piece, because it pretty much covers everything I had in mind. But I will say this: Cuil was the first story I heard on NPR when I woke up Monday morning, and I was constantly asked about it throughout the day by non-tech folk who had read about it in other mainstream sources. That sort of coverage truly surprised me because, for the most part, Cuil seemed like many other geeky startups that the blogosphere adores, but average internet users generally ignore.

The Trouble with Tech Bloggers…

But enough has been said about Cuil’s fail whale of a launch. Instead, check out this recent post by Sarah Lacy, who uses the Cuil launch to discuss a problematic trend in the technology blogosphere. She believes that the obsessive rush to break news before other sites, coupled with the obcenely short hype-cycle of online tech journalism, is ultimately not very useful readers:

At some point, the tech blogosphere has to break itself from the junky-like addiction of having to get a story two seconds before the competitor. Can it really drive that much traffic when every other blogger got the same pre-brief? Isn’t it better to wait a bit, use the service and write something smarter?

If we’ve got a 20-second hype cycle in the Valley, that’s not Cuil’s fault. And I don’t think it’s serving readers well either. If we write something is amazing in the morning and then total junk in the afternoon, does anyone looking to tech blogs for analysis keep coming back?

Read the rest of this entry »

In the midst of all the Firefox 3 debut insanity, a tweet by blogger Louis Gray got me thinking. At the time everyone was trying to download Firefox 3, but most were failing miserably due to Mozilla’s servers collapsing. Gray casually suggested in his tweet that we download Safari instead. I considered the thought, especially since Safari is also a good escape from Firefox 2’s tiresome memory and CPU hogging, but then quickly realized that it was impossible.

I realized then something I should have noticed long ago: I could never abandon Firefox. This isn’t out of some illogical fanboyism, or a naive belief in the almighty nature of open source code. No, I could never abandon Firefox because of one key feature that no other web browser can compete with: Extensions.

Yes folks, I’m a Firefox extension addict. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve already gushed about Digsby as a potential killer for Trillian’s perpetually delayed Astra release, and now it’s open for everyone to try in public beta. Since I’ve initially written about the IM/email/social network aggregator they’ve updated constantly mostly taking care of connection issues and other bug fixes. You can see their progress over at the Digsby blog.

This latest release for public beta adds Twitter support, something which I’m going to take serious advantage of, support for video/voice chat, and an inline spell checker. You can find the rest of the updates for this release here.

Since I’ve started using Digsby I find that the only thing I truly miss from Trillian was the plentiful skins available at Deviant Art and other sites. Digsby advertises skins on their front page, but I suppose that we haven’t seen any yet because the product was hidden away in private beta. Now that it’s out in the open I suspect the skinning community to have a field day. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been playing around with Digsby today by way of an invite from Ars Technica, and it has quickly become my new favorite IM client. The beauty of Digsby is that it combines the IM aggregation from the likes of Trillian and Pidgin with the social networking aggregation of 8Hands. Oh, and it lets you keep track of all your e-mail accounts as well. Simply put, it’s become my one stop for communicating online.

I’m running it in Vista and overall I’m finding it to be a much more enjoyable experience than Trillian 3 Pro. I’m not sure of the cause, but Trillian 3 has been overwhelmingly sluggish for me in Vista. I would see everything from increasingly long text input delays, to issues with Trillian having trouble with simple tasks like repainting the chat windows when switching between conversations. I’ve tried reinstalling and troubleshooting Trillian many times and nothing seems to have helped.

For me, Digsby certainly couldn’t have picked a better time to launch into beta. I’m tired of waiting for Trillian Astra, Cerulean Studio’s long-awaited upgrade to the Trillian platform which has been hyped up for its IM and social networking aggregation. Honestly, I’m tired of waiting because Astra’s development doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

We first caught word of Astra’s revamped interface and new social features back in November 2006, and its been in private alpha even prior to that announcement. Current word from the Cerulean Studio blog is that there is still no release date for Astra. And of course, the fact that they haven’t even gotten to beta yet is disheartening.

Currently, I’m using Digsby to connect to my AIM, Gtalk, Facebook, and multiple web mail accounts. I’ve been meaning to test it with my work IMAP account to double-check the error reported by Ars, but for some reason it won’t connect to that server. Otherwise, Digsby has been running stably for me and with far less slowdown and headache than Trillian. It doesn’t yet feature Twitter or video chat support, but I’m sure these will come in time.

Digsby also has one of the best auto-updating features of any Windows app I’ve seen. Just before I started writing this post, I launched Digsby and it instantly began fetching and installing an update without my intervention and then proceeded to sign me into my accounts as normal. It didn’t even require a restart of the app! I would describe the upgrade experience as thoroughly Mac-like in its simplicity–a trend Digsby carries over to some of its chat styles which seem to be lifted straight out of Adium.

Overall, I’m impressed with Digsby enough that I’m going to use it as my primary IM application. This marks a deviation from my 7+ year (!) devotion to Trillian. I’ll also start evangelizing it to all of my PC owning friends because, honestly, who wouldn’t want a single app to handle all of their web communication? There isn’t a Mac or Linux client yet, but they have a sign-up form up to let you know when they’ll be available. If you’d like to try Digsby, Ars Technica is sponsoring 5000 invites; just enter arstechnica as the invite code in their registration form.

I’m not sure what’s keeping Cerulean Studios from moving forward with Trillian Astra, but whatever it is I hope they get that sorted out soon. Digsby is here now and has already converted this Trillian devotee. I can only imagine how many more will follow…