Ultranormal

Category: AOL

  • Bye, Jason

    It’s not as if 99.999% of the world cares, but Jason Calacanis is leaving AOL, and I can’t say I’m upset in the least about it. He’s a voracious self-promoter and polarizing force. Everything he says has to be viewed through the “how does this make Jason look better” lens. He somehow became the “voice of AOL” in Silicon Valley, and that always bothered me. He hadn’t put in the time inside the company, and he took credit for a lot of new features and products here that he had absolutely nothing to do with.\
    For example, he responded to a comment on that same post with this:\
    bq. “…Blogsmith is the best piece of technology inside TW/AOL.”\
    Excuse me? It’s a blogging tool, and not even done yet. He doesn’t know about all the other technology at AOL or what we’ve done, and people believe that he somehow knows what he’s talking about. Jason was never the face or voice of anything but Jason Calacanis.\
    He was the wrong voice at the wrong time for AOL. We’ve still got a lot of work to regain standing in the technology world, in web development in particular, and that takes humility and earnest effort, not grand standing and self-promotion – the two things Jason’s best at.\
    Update: In response to Jason’s comment, I do have to give him credit for one very important thing. He did a great job of opening up the internal debate about the direction of the company and of products. It’s one of the good things about being controversial and polarizing is that you get people talking, which he certainly did, inside and outside the company. If that’s Jason’s legacy at AOL, that’s something to be proud of. Unfortunately, that legacy is tainted by what I felt (and a lot of people who will never say it publicly) was way too much self-promotion along the way.

  • AIM Pages

    We launched a metric ton of new stuff for AIM Pages yesterday morning (started at 2AM and finishing up around 10:30 with tweaks and mad dashes throughout and after). The changes are definitely noticable. If you go to aimcreate.com, you’ll no longer see the super sexy drag and drop editing interface, although it’s still available. The “wizard”, as I like to call it, is a ummm… wizard. So, if you’re not into the drag and droppyness of the other interface, you can fill out this big form, hit Save Changes and voila, you’ve got an AIM Page like mine (well, not like mine exactly, because yours should be like your page and be about you: if it was about me too, that would be creepy).\
    We had no time to completely rebuild the product, faced innumerable technical problems, questions and challenges, and yet we still launched on time. The product included more than twenty-seven individual pieces of software to install, groups on three continents, in four time zones and more moving pieces than I want to remember (although I have to, because I was the tech lead for this round). So, if you were wondering why I haven’t slept in six weeks (five eighty hour weeks in a row, y’all), seemed kind of stressed out and irritable, now you know!\
    It continues to amaze me that we’ve launched this product all based around a microformat, and that it works so well. There are still challenges, but everything around the microformat has been relatively smooth and stable. We even have a cool web service built around it that anyone can use to mash up their own page or other pages. More cool stuff is afoot, so keep your eyes peeled.\
    It’s launched, it’s cool, there are still some issues that we’re working on, but it’s out there and I can get some sleep now.\
    Oh yeah, and this year has been so crazy that I’ve only taken three vacation days so far this year. Yes, three. Since I’ve been at AOL so long, that means I have several weeks of vacation time to use up by the end of the year. Yeah, I won’t be at work much in December.

  • Top Coder

    Top Coder 2006 sponsored by AOL\
    AOL is sponsoring the Top Coder Collegiate Challenge this year as part of the new Developer Network. I’ve been involved in the discussion about the network since the beginning, and it’s gratifying to see it finally bearing fruit. There is still a ton of work to do to make it into something we can all be proud of, but the seed is there, and it’s off to a good start.\
    So, if you’re into watching geeks under pressure (if you live with me, you’ve seen this already this month with AIM Pages), you can watch the live cast this Friday at 4:30EST over on the Developer Network.

  • Web AIM and the Amazing Mr. Chipman

    The Amazing Mr. Chipman has been hard at work on this for the past couple months, and I’ve had a lot of fun walking past his desk and looking over his shoulder at the sheer awesomeness of it. What is it? It’s AIM on the Web! Web AIM allows you to drop visitors’ buddy lists in your site and use it and messaging in all sort of neat mashed up sort of ways. I’m sure we haven’t thought of all of them yet, but I foresee some very interesting applications in the next couple months. Once I get some sleep, look for some fun with it on this site as well.\
    Check it out, let me know what you think, and bow down before the sheer awesomeness of Mr. Chipman!

  • Mashup University Videos Online

    The videos from Mashup Camp are online now. Mine’s near the bottom of the page. You can hear me fly through the demo and hear my jet-lagged explanation of microformats. Good times.

  • Dreams

    You know something is wrong when you can’t get to sleep because you can’t stop thinking about work, and then when you do sleep, you have nightmares about work that wake you up. Just saying… something’s wrong when that happens.\
    Oops: I upgraded to the new version of Movable Type last night and forgot to rename the comments script. It’s fixed now, so comments should work (not saying you’d want to leave a comment, but if you did, they work now).

  • On Modules and Widgets

    I got a couple comments on yesterday’s post about ModuleT and widgets. I don’t post often (another vote against splitting my personal blog, I guess), but all the details about AIM Pages, our microformat or other thoughts on widgets will be over on the Alpha Blog. That’s where Joe, Shawn and I talk about module stuff. We’ve been so busy lately that we haven’t posted as much as we should, but there’s a lot to talk about, so keep your eyes peeled for news.

  • E-Mail Management Tip: Unread Messages Smart Mailbox

    I get a lot of mail. When things are humming, on the order of two hundred to three hundred a day. It’s a little slower now because a lot of people are on vacation, but not much. How to deal with all of it? It’s not easy, and it takes a lot of time, especially if I miss a day.\
    Since I started using Apple Mail (Mail.app for those in the know), I’ve fallen in love with Smart Mailboxes. On top of the 30-40 filters I have to shunt messages into appropriate folders based on listserv or project, I have a couple smart mailboxes, the most important being Unread Messages. I created a new Smart Mailbox with a couple parameters: Message is Unread, and not in my outbox (or various other AOL IMAP folders I don’t care about like “Spam”).\
    Having a single place for all my unread mail that collapses to empty when I’m done, and is sorted by thread, has saved me all kinds of time. I can quickly scan threads, making sure I only respond to the last message (or sometimes only read the last thread because it should have the whole conversation in it) and can take care of things right then, or flag them for later (that’s another smart box).\
    It makes mail more like reading feeds, which makes me happy, and might make you happy too.

  • Wading Through The Inbox Sea

    The final tally was 1,100 unread e-mails this morning. I’m a quarter of the way through, and it’s kind of shocking how many of them are completely useless and not worth reading.

  • Child Scripts Making Child Scripts!

    I’ve been wrestling with a bug in one of my modules for AIM Pages for_ever_, and just found a fix today. I created this well-intentioned module called code snippet that allows you to paste in markup and it’ll get inserted into the DOM. This is really just a stopgap to allow people to add stuff that a module doesn’t exist for yet. I never should have written it. Do you know how bad DOM support is in IE? It’s awful!\
    The big problem is that people wanted/needed to insert script elements with inline script using the code snippet module, and I couldn’t figure out a good way to do it (ok, any way, good or otherwise). Just adding them to the DOM using innerHTML doesn’t work. IE won’t allow you to create a new script element and set the text content to the code.\
    Today, I stumbled on a message board post that hints at the answer. What’s the answer?\
    Create a new script element, and set the text property to the script content and then append it to the body. Voila, actual evaluated javascript! Here’s an example:

    <code>var b=document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];
var txt="function doIt(msg) {alert(msg)}";
var scr=document.createElement("script");
scr.setAttribute("type","text/javascript");
scr.text=txt;
b.appendChild(scr);</code>

    Enjoy! Oh, and the fixed version of the module isn’t live yet. I’m letting the QA guys look at it first before I unleash it on an unsuspecting world.