Tonight’s Top 10

Rick said that his friend Erik Heels said that his, Rick’s, employer, FeedBurner, doesn’t matter. This prompted Rick to write a bit about why FeedBurner does. In conclusion,

Erik and I see a lot of things differently (he’d probably hate Lost and Battlestar Galactica, which is almost as bad as hating TiVo, but whatever).

Erik’s list of the top 10 technologies for which he doesn’t much care is worthy of consideration. I use a number of them: Gmail, del.icio.us, FeedBurner, desktop Linux, the TiVo.

I didn’t understand the attraction of web-based mail until I came to work for a company that limits one’s access to the Internet. And until Gmail, I didn’t use web-based mail because, frankly, the services all paled in comparison to real mail user agents like Claris Emailer. (Then again, I’m writing my website in a textarea.) For me, Gmail works for that snappy one-liner you want to send in a hurry, without getting in my way.

del.icio.us solved a problem I’ve had for years: keeping all of my bookmarks at my fingertips. I use more than one computer. Lots more than one computer. The privacy implications are quite real with any of these publicly viewable services, but I trade that for convenience. Would I run a similar service myself? Sure! But I haven’t made the time to do it.

The same thing with FeedBurner. I like the stats. I like the XML stylesheet. I like not having to pay attention to Dave Winer’s grumblings about perversions of pure RSS. I like not having to do it myself, though I could. It works for me.

And desktop Linux does too, though I would prefer a Mac. But then again, I’m a sysadmin, and not an Average User. In any case, Windows makes me grumpy.

Then there’s the TiVo.

You do not realize how seriously broken the television viewing experience is until you have a TiVo. And there are good, interesting, well-done shows on television, which you can find if you don’t have to sit through the chaff. But they are shows, not channels.

(From a demand perspective, for Erik’s commenter, the TiVo satisfies 80% of the television-on-demand future that’s been talked about for the past 30 years. Netflix satisfies the rest. One day the Apple iTunes Music Store might — it works great in a pinch — but my DSL connection isn’t quite up to the task. As for AOL TV, it has unmet requirements.)

Erik makes an excellent suggestion in his assessment of LinkedIn.

Pick up the phone and call your contacts every once and a while. Or better yet, visit them. Or send them a card. Or a letter. Or an email message. Anything more real and meaningful than LinkedIn.