Good Technology, Good Sense of Humor


Saddam Jeeves
Originally uploaded by rustedrobot.

It was probably a year-and-a-half ago when I arrived at our New York City office on a business trip. It was the same day of the now-famous toppling of the Hussein statue in Baghdad and upon arriving in the office, I found that someone had taken an old Ask Jeeves bobblehead doll and “re-created” the scene. It was simply too funny not to take a picture, so I snapped one (click it for a larger view).

This picture became even more relevant this week when it was announced at an investor conference that the butler is, uh, leaving the building. Pushing up daisies. Making infinite telephone calls from the horizontal phone booth. Taking a long walk off a short pier. Getting himself a new pair of cement shoes. You get the point. The new name, according to the story, will most likely be just Ask or Ask.com. Cool.

My favorite quote of the story comes from Barry Diller, who runs Interactive Corp, the company that bought us this year:

“Not that I don’t like that fat butler,” Diller said, according to a transcript provided by Thomson Financial.

Then, “the company” issued this:

““This research shows use of the character as the prominent symbol of the brand may inhibit people from recognizing that our search engine has changed,” the company said in a statement.”

Good stuff. I look forward to seeing how our company evolves here in the near future. To me, it’s less about butlers and mascots and more about how we can compete. I’m excited to see where we go now that we have more, uh, capital.

One idea I’ll be submitting to the senior brass soon, though: no reason why we shouldn’t just have David Ortiz as our mascot, right? I mean, they’re naming a plane after him, why not a search engine? I certainly have found everything I am looking for lately through David Ortiz. Go Red Sox!

By the way, major props to Google for this. Let’s hope other large companies rip a page out of that book sooner than later.

Monday’s night’s episode of Arrested Development m…

Monday’s night’s episode of Arrested Development may have contained one of the funniest moments in television I’ve ever seen. Words can do it no justice, but I’m compelled to try.


At one point in the show, Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) is talking with his sister, mother and father when, out of nowhere, his father begins making fun of him for always being scared to ask women out. The father proceeds to begin clucking and motioning like a chicken and his mother and sister (Portia De Rossi) join right in.It wasn’t long before Michael’s brother Gob (pronounced “Jobe,” by the way) walks in the room and shouts “Oh! I have the perfect thing!” and he runs off somewhere. The chicken gyrating comes to an abrupt end and after everything has calmed down a little, Job runs out, now the only one chickening:


Like I said, words probably don’t do it justice. But I haven’t laughed that hard at a TV show in my life, I believe. Steph and I had to rewind and re-watch it no less than ten times and I have designated it a spot in my Tivo Hall of Fame, right there with the Clash concert and the Red Sox World Series Films – all shows I am now incapable of deleting.

Lost In The Foothills Of My Mind

It’s taken some time, but I finally got around to posting some of my pictures toFlickr and the whole thing is just superb. For those of you uninitiated, Flickr is a photo service which enables you to post your photos online and organize them any way you please. You can probably post your photos on any old site, but the organization capabilities with this product are just killer. They operated as a stand along company for like 42 seconds before Yahoo came along and saw what an amazing job they’d done and quickly acquired them and have largely left the service alone, knowing a good thing when they see it.

What really gets me giddy, however, is the ability for me to tag and title my photos and share them with friends, family and the general internet. For example, the current slideshow viewer I’ve been using in the past (skillfully built by my friend Dan), is an excellent vehicle for easily posting a series of photos. What it lacked, though, was the ability for me to comment on certain pictures, which can be a big factor. Certainly some photos speak for themselves, but others may have a small anecdote that is just required for the viewer to understand the context. Flickr allows that. Not only that, but Flickr offers you the ability to search for any photo that has been posted to the site by anyone. So if you want to see a bunch of pictures of panda bears, just type it in and you got it, submitted by people just like you and me. Great stuff.

Oh – one more thing. This isn’t to say that Dan couldn’t have done some tweaking to make me able to comment on my photos in the slideshow template he designed – I’m pretty sure he could have done it in his sleep, in fact, but he’s building real websites! Not Rustedrobot…..heh.

Anyway, check it out. That graphic on the left there is a small sampling. So here’s my Flickr page, which is organized and tagged and commented and everything. It’s in its infancy stages right now, but I’ll be eventually be adding tons and tons more soon.

The next generation web applications continue to blow my mind……there’s so much great stuff out there and the degree of innovation is really spectacular. Bloglines, for instance. I simply cannot live without Bloglines, which every internet user in the world should be using. Simply put, why go from website to website to website to website when you can have all those websites content collected in this single web-based application and updated for you each time those sites get updated? No brainer.

Don’t You See? I Hit You Because I Love You

A recent story in the New York Times reveals that Time-Warner all of a sudden has the warm-and-fuzzies again for AOL (login required to see story). For those of us who have been circulating in this business long enough, we all remember – and now shake our heads in incredulousness – at the fact that AOL actually bought Time-Warner back in the heady days of sock puppets and orange bicyclists.

At the time, I probably had the same opinion as many – that this was the first step into the next world and that would be my generations world, mind you, right there on the internet. Other than pixel sizes and pets being allowed at work, it was no different than the huge swath of disenfranchised kids of the late 1960’s who just knew they could change the world. They just knew it.

Much like those kids, things turned out much differently. AOL, in essence, has become no different than an abused spouse. After the deal fell out of favor, Time Warner tried everything with AOL short of bringing it out back behind the barn and shooting it. I mean, did they really think that dial-up was it? Did they think people were going to pay extra for content? I guess that’s what happens when you almost have a monopoly – you think nothing will ever change and you’re too scared to move off the nipple. In this case, thier nipple was that screeching sound the phone line made when you connected. By the time they realized broadband had lapped them, it was over. Since then, they’ve lost (going on memory) nearly a quarter of their customer base. Ouch.

So the decision to throw up their hands earlier this year and essentially become a cross-dresser is an interesting one and most likely a last desperate move to stay prevalent. I’ll get to that cross-dressing thing in a minute. In case you’re still reading, what AOL has done is this: they’ve opened up the kimono (an ugly corporate adage that I promise to never use again) and are now offering everything up for free, hoping like mad that people will perform the second-most performed act on the internet – search. They’re actually throwing thier hat into the ring and are attempting to go up against Google and Yahoo.

The best part? The company they’re trying to trump is the one who will be providing them with the lions share of their revenue – Google. Yes! Google is the company that provides nearly ALL of AOL.com’s search results, paid or unpaid. Welcome to the wonderful, confounding world of search, people. Come on in and have yourself a seat, won’t you? AOL is now Google with hot red lipstick and pumps! She’s a man, baby!

So, now that AOL is, in effect, Google, what next? Well, first off, most users don’t know or care whose search results are being used, so AOL certainly has that going for them. And since everything Google touches turns to solid gold today, AOL has seen a pretty dramatic increase in revenue, almost entirely due to paid search results, despite the loss in subscribers. Result: Time-Warner goes all public in the newspapers, oohs-and-aahs all over AOL and even goes so far as to say that AOL is back to being a number one priority for Time-Warner. Now would also be a really good time to point out that not so long ago, who was that fighting so valiantly to remove any reference of AOL from their corporate name? Ah, Time-Warner. How we love thee corporate BS!

Don’t buy it. These eyes don’t believe for a single, solitary second that AOL is a again the apple of Time-Warner’s eye. They’re doing what any faceless, nameless corporation would do – they’re trying to pump this thing up to get more other companies interested in buying it, because they know the endgame with AOL. They’ve already been through it and they are living it.

Which brings me to my next amusing piece of news: dag-nammit, it seems to be working! It’s rumored now that Gatesasaurus Rex is poised to strike again and have MSN merge or even outright acquire AOL! Yo ho ho and a bottle of brass monkey! Wouldn’t that be something? Of course, MSN’s agenda is to roar loud and breathe fire like they did when they charred Netscape back in the ’90s – they’re going after Google hardcore, yo, and nabbing AOL would be step one in their attempt to further distribute their new search and paid links products.

At the onset, this even seems like an intelligent and sound strategy. Hit ’em where you can, when you can. But seriously, is AOL relevant? This is the toughest question of all. Is MSN posturing with these rumors in an attempt to get Google or even Yahoo to panic-bid on it? One can imagine BallGates sitting in their offices laughing because they, too, know the cruel fate of AOL. Or do they really think there’s something there? I have no idea. I only have my own opinion and that opinion is that whomever buys them is really in for a heap of dung in the longterm.

As usual, there’s more to this story than what’s above. AOL does own some interesting small technologies and they are really starting to rake in the dough. Microsoft, despite their perception by many as an old battering ram, has some incredibly neat stuff in the queue (check out Robert Scoble’s weblog if you can – this guy works for Microsoft and writes a truckload of a blog about it – sometimes he rips them to shreds and other times he heaps on the praise. My opinion: he’s the best voice they have, even if he doesn’t agree with me about AOL. Screw the public relations department – he’s done more for that company in the last year than the PR department has in the last 10. I wish I could do that for the company I work for!

Anyway, an asterik: my opinion is my opinion and is no way, shape or form a represenation or position of the company I work for. Just want to get that out of the way before anyone goes all nutty.