Radiohead – A Whopping 1.2 Million Sold!

Congratulations to Radiohead on their success; 1.2 million in one week! This outsold their previous album launches by a long shot.

If you haven’t heard already, Radiohead decided to cut out their record label for this launch and sell the album on-line for ANY cost the consumer thought it was worth. If you check out their website, you’ll notice they allow you to select your own price. You could even enter $0 if you’re greedy enough.

I myself bought the album. I’m not a huge fan of Radiohead, but I respect their talent and their commitment to this new business approach that our record industry is slowly approaching. This is a big leap in the evolution of how we acquire, listen, and acknowledge today’s popular music. And soon I believe that a large majority of music artists will follow the same distribution model. I had not previewed the album before I purchased it, I just paid $6 and hoped for the best. My reasoning for purchasing was more to promote the cause and the movement; I liked it though, they did a great job with it.

Sort of a bummer that none of the tracks came with album artwork though.

What Happened to Digg’s History Section?!

Okay, so I was looking for a website that was on the front page of Digg a couple months back. I clearly recall the moment I Dugg it… but I cant seem find it in my history!
Am I the only one who remembers Digg having a history that showed everything you Dugg before they revamped it with the social networking stuff?

Digg only seems to show me 3 pages of my history now, dating back to September 27th. My account was created in January of 2007 and I’ve been an active user since that date.

Digg, where’s the rest of my history?! Am I somehow overlooking it?! I love the site and all Digg, but I don’t Digg things just for the hell of it… I Digg them because I may want to come back to them someday!

Someone clarify this for me please, maybe I’m just retarded and can’t find the rest of it. Or maybe I should begin to rely on Stumbleupon for the stuff I want to socially “bookmark”.

What’s up with that!?

An Introduction and a Rant About Facebook.

Great, I didn’t expect “Atechblog” to be available as a username here on WordPress. Score for me.

I was driving home from class today and I realized something… I don’t have a blog. Sure, many people don’t but I’m the type of person you’d expect to have one. Considering that I’m an advocate of the Web 2.0 “movement”, and I will gladly discuss the internet or just computers in general with you. I’m an active reader on several (Techcrunch, Mashable, Gigaom to name a few), but the thought of writing my own hasn’t really ever crossed my mind. So why not? Here it is…

Now where to start? Here is something that has been sort of well, bugging me lately…

Is Facebook really all its has been hyped up to be?
No! Facebook needs better applications! And here is my thoughts on this:

I remember when I first signed up for my Facebook account; it must have been early 2006 I believe. The website was quite bare, and if you weren’t a college student it was ultimately useless from what I recall. Maybe this isn’t how it truly was, but it’s how I remember it because I only logged in a few times after I created the account. Then I noticed more and more people began to talk about Facebook over the next year or so. I noticed this in day to day reality and on blogs and such… so I assumed something must have kicked them up a notch. Upon re-logging into my old dusty Facebook account I noticed big changes. The 3rd party application API stuff wasn’t there yet of course… but get this… I began finding people that I actually knew on the website.

Upon browsing the website for a hour or so Facebook earned the reward of being placed on my Firefox’s bookmarks toolbar. Quite an accomplishment.
I got to hand it to them though, that the user interface of “layouts” is near perfect. You can never go wrong with a drag and drop iface! CSS is missed dearly, and some color schemes are missed even more… but I understand that it keeps the website clean and nice to look at no matter what page you hit. Oh and the beloved “Status Updates”, MySpace’s clone of this simple (yet spiffy and fun) tool cannot compare to the feeling you get when you update your Facebook status. Facebook had it going for them; an easy to use, easy on the eyes, effective, mature, and better social network. It was definitely a leap not a step in the right direction.

Then the”phenomenal” application API was all the rage when developers were granted to work with it. Holy crap did this raise a big bustle in the news and blogosphere for Facebook. By some people, they were even conceived and predicted to be the next Microsoft. I’m personally not so sure about that…

Sure the application API is unique and very innovative, but how will it proceed as it grows older? I have seen very few useful apps on Facebook to this day, and 3rd parties began developing long ago. Now I know it may take some time to create a quality app, but I haven’t even seen anything hinting at it! I must make some exceptions to this though of course, such as the PayPal app. This shows signs of a possible economy flowing through Facebook in the near future, which would definitely be cool. Fmail is great as well, I definitely like this one, but I’d prefer to just go straight to Gmail. Causes is another, it isn’t necessarily an amazing and innovative app, but at least it has a purpose. There are other decent apps as well, but that’s not what is important right now. What is important it that I don’t think Facebook will go anywhere until the majority of it’s users start to use REAL apps. Currently, everyone is just fascinated and dumbfounded by the “popular” apps. Apps such as… BrandME, TopFriends, Super Wall, FunWall, SuperPoke!, Compare People, Zombies, soooo many others. Don’t forget the dozens and dozens of crappy games that I could play all on any Flash arcade website. Why is this? Because the mass portion of the community on Facebook is just college kids, and now even some high school kids.

Just look at this screenshot, I didn’t touch my “Requests” for about a week straight, and this is the result:

It does Facebook no good when all of it’s popular applications are for the most part stupid. Plus, they’re mostly homogeneous and restricting themselves from using outside resources. Facebook needs more applications that use outside resources (such as the PayPal app or Fmail)! Or just something cool. So a message to all developers: PLEASE BUILD SOMETHING USEFUL!

If Facebook follows the correct path, I definitely can imagine it capable of growing into the next Microsoft. As we all are slowly beginning to speculate, browser-based Operating Systems will be quintessential in the near future. Facebook may be worthy of leading us there.

I’ve heard some applications are worth big cash too. I don’t have an idea in mind for one, but it’s something I’ll definitely be thinking about.