I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing.

Everyone’s talking about the Peanut Butter manifesto. It’s so impressive, it’s all over internet news, and it’s now a manifesto.

I’ll accede to it’s status as a manifesto when it manifests itself before me.

Meanwhile it’s still stuck in my mind that Mr Peanut Butter, Sir and Richard Kind could have been twins separated at birth.

It was a pretty significant internet day today, with MSN and Yahoo! becoming Messenger buddies.

It’s been a long time coming. And even though I can’t fathom why anyone would still use MSN Messenger (and Hotmail for that matter) it’s a big deal to have the two largest Instant Messenger Networks interoperate.

In my mind it’s a turning point of sorts, when the two largest players gang up over something like Google. I can’t wait for the fallout.

Here’s a funny joke: MSN!
I never really used MSN in my life. I never started out with Hotmail (found it too cluttered in it’s pre-msn days, so you can imagine what happened to it after), and it wasn’t really a great search engine. And I never had to use MSN Messenger (thank goodness).

This week I decided to give it a whack again. I mean, you can’t really rag on the guys if you’ve never used it. And so far, my original opinions about them still stand.

MSN should just get out of the market, do the honourable thing, have your dramatic seppuku, have Google or Yahoo! chop your head off, and carry on with your operating system thingamagig. Leave the internet to the people who care.

How do you know MSN doesn’t care? It’s in the little details.

Like how, the MSN homepage will pop open 3 separate windows if you try to sign into hotmail from there. This coming from people who built a browser that doesn’t open tabs. What are they trying to do? Window me to death?

Like how, the pages look wonky (overflowing text) or don’t load in Firefox. But fine. Tons of people don’t design for Firefox, I suppose you won’t.

Like how, Hotmail still starts you off with only 25mb, and will bump you up to 250mb if you’re good. For Pete’s sake, hardly anyone is going to use the 1gb of space. So do they *really* want to look like the idiot left standing with just their undies when everyone else at the party is in a suit? Mind you, it’s not like those nerds at MSN are worth a second glance at. Just check Valleywag. No one in the hottie list was from MSN.

Like how, Hotmail still insists on the 30-day inactivity policy – 30 days of inactivity will render your account inactive and your mail will be wiped. Wah lau, please lah. Dun need so giam kana right? Your user’s lives don’t revolve around you, you know.

Like how, when viewing your Hotmail inbox you’ve to click on the sender instead of the subject line of your mail to view your mail. Dudes – fire your UI designer. Either that or get a real one. Those gawky interns don’t count.

Like how, until a month ago, MSN messenger didn’t offer offline messages. Please. That’s so insulting. Offline messages have been available since 1999.

Seriously?

Doink!
I don’t know when it started, but I’ve been using a bunch of sound words to get by. I’m trying to recall if I’ve always been doing it, or if it’s something I do now as I lose bits of my vocabulary.

Instead of saying, I’m back at my desk, I’ve efficiently shortened it to doink!. I like doink immensely. It’s so doinky!

There are other sound words I use, but they’re a little hard to spell. Mostly denoting motion, or speed. Velocity, I guess, is hard to put across. The word itself is so passive, it sounds like a state of mind. But when you whoosh it, you get an idea how quick the thingey is moving, in my mind.

Thingey is also a convenient word. It’s a little more sophisticated than stuff, and don’t get me started with the people who presume that you should stick “s” behind stuff to make it sound like a whole lot of stuff. There are some things you can stick an “s” behind: like model, chicken, time, bigwig.

Words you can’t stick an “s” behind: stuff, staff.

Words you can’t stick “more” in front of: the ones that you’ll stick the “(e)r” behind. Like small, near, close, fast, slow.

Ok. Now we can move on to the next thing: web vocabulary. Will come in handy if you want a job in an internet company.

< rant >

Top 5 faux paus:
5. Online and cyber: don’t use this when you mean “relating to the internet” or “on the web” like Yeah, in my last job I was in charge of ‘online’ (or ‘cyber’). ATMs are ‘online’. When you log onto messenger you’re ‘online’. Some sex is ‘cyber’. Some space is ‘cyber’. Getting on the internet, doing business on the internet, being in charge of a web product, aren’t ‘online’ or ‘cyber’.

4. MSN, Yahoo! and Google: are company names, not products. Even though I’m sure Google is thrilled to bits when anyone says, I’ll ‘google’ this, the fact of the matter is, Google is essentially a one product company. So it makes sense. But do you really mean to say you’re ‘searching’ for something? Cos that’s a good word for it. Refrain from saying I’ll ‘MSN’ you later or ‘Yahoo!’ you later when you mean you’re going to get on whichever Messenger later, cos even though you only use 1 web product, MSN does offer other (albeit sucky) services. That term is completely lost on Yahoo!. What’re you going to do when you ‘Yahoo!’ me? Be rude and borish?

3. Upload/download: are specific actions. Don’t use it to mean reading your email, unless you’re really downloading your email from your email provider/server back to your local hard drive, it could really cause a lot of confusion if you need to get technical support. A simple ‘I’ll go check my email” will suffice, really. Don’t use ‘upload’ to mean sending email. That just sounds dumb.

2. Hits: are songs that have made it big. It’s also a really flaky web (not ‘online’, not ‘cyber’) statistical measure. According to wikipedia, in web analytics, a hit is any request for a file from a web server. It’s really crap because each page may generate a gazillion hits, depending on how many file requests someone has on the page. Hits lived out their purpose in 2000. If you now sell inventory on your website based on hits, you’re a lucky ducky. If you still buy inventory on sites based on hits, you shouldn’t be doing anything on the internet. If you’re trying to land a job in a web company, you better not even breathe the word “hit” unless the suffix to it is “song” or “single”.

1. Yahoo! page: there are a gazillion Yahoo! pages, tons of Yahoo! sites, a truckload of Yahoo! products. Saying Yahoo! page is as good as not saying anything at all, since being that vague will cause someone to doubt you actually do use the internet and therefore will not know when it’s not really a ‘Yahoo! page’ but some page/site you found off Yahoo! Search. Your alternatives? Yahoo! Home (or Front) page, Yahoo! Search Page, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! < insert product name here, thats the thing on the top left of the page in gray font, after the red Yahoo! logo >.

< /rant >

This is how I know I’m getting old and jaded. I’m cranky, I’m irritable and I sound like my dad.

Will end it with the best line I’ve heard today – Nick from Season 1 of the Apprentice (on his teammate Erica)
~ She’s trying to tell me how to sell? It’s like trying to tell the Pope how to pray!

I don’t know how or when it happened
But the internet has never been so fun. And addictive. And in an instant gratification world, it really doesn’t take too long for the next best thing to come along.

I remember all those years ago I thought Rocketmail was the epitome of smarts. No more crap ntu.edu.sg email, no more ISP email addys. Something I could check from anywhere (not that I used that feature too much).

Then Yahoo! sunk their fingers into it, and I moved from My Excite to My Yahoo! because the latter just had more content.

And along came Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo! Photos – complete time suckers, like everything else on dial-up.

Though none of these could compare with the time-sucking dedication I devoted to Napster. I loved Napster. It even sounded cute. Even my dad used it.

Fast forward five years (and truly like dog years, it really did feel like 35 years) and we’ve the Web 2.0 versions of everything (well almost except for Messenger).

Rocketmail morphed into a spanking version of Yahoo! Mail, which hung in there for two more years until the now-termed “classic” version made its debut, bumped its storage to 250mb and then 1gb (thank you Gmail!). To up the ante, two years back Yahoo! bought a pretty cool mail product called Oddpost, which is now their Beta Mail product. It’s an outlook like interface, with the freedom of being a web product. Now how cool is that?

My Yahoo! hasn’t really moved along too much, compared to stuff like Netvibes and Protopage. Protopage is cute, it lets you move the modules around the page almost like a widget – even has the transparent background going.

Yahoo! Photos has pretty much stayed the way it is, but last year Yahoo! bought Flickr which has blown anything photo-related out of the water. Storage + community, how cool is that? Flickr isn’t something you can really describe, Flickr is best experienced. It’s a complete time sucker, and you really can’t help yourself.

And the best thing since Napster – not free, but legal – is iTunes. I love that I don’t have to buy the whole damn album. I love that I get videos along with my downloads sometimes, and I love that I can search for the song without going around HMV in circles. So totally love. The only thing that iTunes could do better is to do a lyric search to present results, cos how many times have you heard parts of a song on the way to work or on tv and not been able to find it?

So there we are. Five years on, and things are still exciting. It’s still a great place to be.

You know the internet is a great place when…
You check on interestingness and they’re ALL cats.

MEOW!!!

In other news, today I realise I enjoy getting people to do stuff. That might explain why I like my job, and why I’m getting fat.

What is web 2.0?
A typical day at the office features a few Itchy and Scratchy shows. We cover a wide variety of topics, including what to do with the Boss’s cube while he’s away next week, what kind of person should we hire, what the heck did Google do this time, what movies we caught on the plane, how our vacations went, and which site should the company buy this time.

Last week, we had the Web 2.0 special.

So what is web 2.0? We started talking about it, and how all these non-industry folks talk about it, but didn’t really know what it was either. Then suddenly something snapped in my head.

Did I know what web 2.0 is?

It was pretty telling, when I answered that it was all the fun Flickr thingamajigs vs something old like Yahoo! Photos.

Yes, lame I know.

The Boss brought up a good point, that people completely miss the point of web 2.0, mostly because they get all caught up in the Ajax part of it. But then he completely lost me when he went on some rhetoric about how web 2.0 would make the web a meritocracy. Or something. Or another.

So now what do I think web 2.0 is?

Everything that every internet company wanted to do in 1998 but was unable to. Hahaha.

At the end of the day, it makes little difference what I think it is or not, or what I think it should be or not. All I want for the internet to do for me is to be more personalisable, easier to use, faster to use, and let me know what people with similar interests and friends are up to. And if it gets there it’s good, and if it doesn’t it should be catching up – it certainly looks that way.

Ok, off to watching totally flaky tv – nothing’s flakier than Hot or Not – and Mr C’s special prata.

Youth is intoxicating
One of those times where Ross manages to talk us into something – KF and I attended this Entrepreneurship 27 thingey this evening at (*gasp* of all places) NUS. Little did we know that the 27 wasn’t like an arbitrary number. It the average age of participants (minus, Ross, KF and a few other chaperones – but not me. I fit right in. Really) minus 5.

You say Ha ha now, but it sure wasn’t that funny there.

Nonetheless, it was good fun. It’s always fun to be in a place where people have a healthy opinion, and an intellectual appetite for everything. And more. The energy was great. And it’s heartening to know that there are corners in our sunny island where people dream the dream. And shoot for the stars.

Now if only I could have psychically sapped a few business ideas…

What’s in a blog?
That which, by any other word, would be as inconsequential?

It’s amusing to read everyone else’s blog. I used to feel a little bad about it, it’s kind of like snooping. But suddenly everyone had an opinion, and an undying lust to be heard (and in my case, with comments turned off, uncontradicted). And it’s funny to see these people put themselves out there.

Then there are the blogs which are glorified diaries on the internet. Those are funner to read, but I can’t help but feel guilty about having the details about someone else’s I otherwise wouldn’t have bothered to elicit or pay attention to. In those cases it’s more fun to read about someone you don’t know. That way you don’t have to really pretend to know/not. There really is less baggage to deal with, especially if you’re a snoop like me.

I surfed on by a bunch of blogs today, just idling reading whatever that was there. A selection of local blogs, some from tomorrow.sg, a few I found on friend of friends’ profiles, a few phlogs I used to visit, and am hereby distilling my findings:

Why Blogger is the de-facto blog product out there in the face of more functional products.

• Probably not because it was the first mover (was it?) but it was certainly around the area
• It’s a neater name than “livejournal”
• It had cooler templates
• It’s dumbed-down and mostly idiot-proof
• It’s free, wasn’t a beta, and it didn’t have a silly invitation-only attitude

Which proves once again, you don’t have to be the best to garner mass appeal. The winning formula is distribution.

Why blogs are so popular in Singapore

• The community serves to cater to the love and belonging need
• Being featured or read serves to assuage the esteem need
• In a culture so steeped in restrictions and rules, running wild on the internet is cool
• Blogger dumbed everything down enough for blogs to be a convenient outlet
• The media thinks they stumbled on the best thing since sliced bread
• Governmental agencies think the media is right
• Local TV is crap, and the news is too depressing

Yet there are distinct types of blogs:

1. Gen-Y blogs: where these young ‘uns talk about life, school, their hopes, their dreams, their friends, their loves, their hates, their this, their that. It’s like reading Growing Up in sTrAngE wriTinG StYLe aNd LoTz oF PiNc aND fLaSHinG ThINgEyS aNd aLSO pRetTy pHOtoS or the slightly more angst-y versions feature lots of hokkien, swear words, and hokkien swear words. Occasionally you get a few who are Gen-X blog wannabes, they voice strong opinions, make a few edgey statements and throw in a few swear words, as if hoping for the cathartic experience that will define their lives. Large 4 syllable words and fancy sentence structure populate these blogs full of sound and fury.
2. Gen-X blogs: where these in-between ‘uns talk about life, grad/postgrad/work, their hopes, their dreams, their friends, their hates, their ideas, their opinions, their take on how things should be done. It’s a bunch of financially independant, technically competitive, highly strung people who blog about coping with life and trying to make a stand. The format of some of these blogs tend to be lighter, airier, more non-sequiturish. TV and movie references pepper these blogs in a campy kind of way. You get the distinct feel that nothings happening, and no one’s getting anywhere.
3. Gen-W blogs: where these old ‘uns talk about life, work, their kids, their lottery purchases, their co-workers, their spouses, their bosses, their cars, their mortgages… They tend to be less fervent, more serious, less dramatic, more cautious; but there usually is a point at the end they’re trying to make or a moral of the story. Sometimes they throw you a lesson or two in finance, motivation, management and the like. There are far fewer of these.
4. Phlogs: I like these. Just fly on the wall observation of life.
5. Functional blogs: for products, services, people with products and services. B-O-R-I-N-G.

And at the end of this all I can think of is why Google bought Blogger and did nothing useful with it.

Ear we go
While meditating on the incessant ring in my infected right ear, I thought of a great way to clean out ears. Of course, it sounded a heap better in my head – kind of like some of the things I write in birthday/christmas/thankyou cards that end awkwardly – and now as I attempt to put it down I’m cringing.

But anyway – if you ever had to make a cast of your teeth at the dentist, you’ll probably remember this paste they slabbed onto a tray and shoved into your mouth. Your dentist would hold it there for a minute or two until the paste dried into this latexy resin that’s a perfect mold of your teeth.

So imagine a similar paste, except it sticks onto wax. You mix it, drip it into your ear until your entire ear canal is full and you wait in an uncomfortable position with your head cocked to a side for a minute or two, and then when the resin hardens you slowly manoeuvre it out, with the wax steadfastly absorbed into the resin.

The paste they use at the dentist is peppermint flavoured, so if they can flavour or scent the ear resin, that’d be great too. It’d be nice to know my ears smell good. Even on the inside.

Yeah, I know I’m just full of these great ideas.