YouTube comments suck, someone should fix that.

Intellectual heights known only to YouTube

YouTube’s comments really suck. In fact, most of the videos suck too, but every comment is pretty much awful. This is problem most likely came around because of the size of the community just exploded, there’s no reason to be held with any respect.

Places like reddit are still in that point where they don’t have too many users, so the quality of comments is still pretty high. Talk in text speak and you’ll be down voted to oblivion. Whereas on YouTube that seems an okay thing to do.

Each video – even really obscure videos – always seems to have a new comment thread made within the last day or so, making it impossible to have an actual, productive conversation.

There’s also a problem with threads… If you click “reply” to most threads, you just start another thread… Sometimes it works as a nested comment, like expected.

So, to fix the problems we need a smaller community, with more power for each user to vote on the smarts of each comment… We obviously can’t get rid of 90% of the YouTube community, but why can’t we just ignore it?

I was thinking someone should make a Greasemonkey script which removes all the comments on videos, and replaces it with comments maintained by someone else’s service. The new service obviously won’t be adopted by 99% of the current YouTube raff so we’ll get a smaller, more sophisticated society of people commenting on videos.

I like this idea. Someone should do it, or maybe I should.

Edit: Looking into this more, you can probably use the Disqus API.

NoClassDefFoundError error, and a note on Bing

Playing with Java and for some reason I’m getting this error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: AddingMachine (wrong
name: sum/AddingMachine)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(Unknown Source)
 at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
 at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
 at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
 at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
 at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(Unknown Source)
Could not find the main class: AddingMachine.  Program will exit.

I decided to Google it, like I do when ever I get an error of any kind. Then I remembered bing, and thought this is an ideal moment to try it out.

Bing being new isn’t an excuse that they can use to defend it; Microsoft has has years experimenting with search and should know just about as much as Google now, but they’re still making school boy errors. For instance,  this forum post is listed second in the results.

Bing should know it’s a forum, it’s pretty obvious. Then by that it could deduce that the person starting the thread is asking a question, likely my question. But there are no replies, so it’s clear that no one has answered it. Giving me that link is completely pointless. Google learnt that lesson years ago.

Back to the Java problem, I tried doing java -classpath . AddingMachine rather than just java AddingMachine and I get the same error…

Fix’d: I just copy-pasted the source from the java notes page I’m looking at. And the problem lied in it have a package sum; line. Just remove it.

Edit for protip: This is an error you’re running into because of packages, used to make java source files easier to manage. You should definitely check out this tutorial on packages if you’re having problems; Java Package Tutorial.

Firefox 3.5b4: Storing data for offline use fuxxored.

Good idea, that doesn't work.

For me at least anyway, and I’ve only tried it on two WordPress installations running bleeding edge 2.8. I get this message, click allow, and then all pages work once. Caching on the first load.

Then, if I refresh the page, or go back to it later, everything loads without the style sheet and JavaScript – the cached stuff. To fix it, I had to go into Options > Advance > Network and then remove my websites from the list.

I guess they’re for some reason competing with Google Gears, which makes little sense. Why compete? Why not just advertise Gears? They do exactly the same thing from what I can see.

Update: A lot of people are getting here to find out how to use Gears in the Firefox beta. You can use all your extensions (even if Firefox says they’re not compatible) by editing a single option. Of course, if you do that you could end up crashing Firefox or something, but you can just start in safe mode and disable it again.

Type about:config into Firefox’s address bar and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.

Right-click anywhere. Choose New>Boolean. Make the name of your new config value extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.

Make another new boolean pair called extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set the value to false.

Restart Firefox.

The state of my market

After doing a few hours of market research (not exactly in depth, but a quick glance over my market) it turns out there is a definite gap. I’ve found a few websites (two) that offer exactly what I’m offering, and a few more that offer close to my service.

After playing with the former two (they give out two week free trails) it looks like they both designed fairly badly. They’re definitely not easy to navigate and both use confusing terminology. I’m not sure if they’re trying to avoid Microsoft’s names that have been used in their offline solution, but if they are they’re doing so needlessly. They’re not trademarked terms – they’re everyday words in the field – and changing them causes confusion for everyone. Especially when they use one term that’s already used within the field, but they’re using it for a completely different thing!

They’re missing out blatantly obvious features that seem simple to program in my head. I’m not going to mention them here, but I’ve done so in a OneNotebook. (Which is an awesome and under rated piece of software, by the way.) The feature I’m most excited about, and the one that I think business most need, is completely missed out.

One of the competitors I looked into even completely misses out on a vital feature for their service. And they’re the business that’s charging $250 a month for their lowest package, which could explain why my possible customer projections was so low for them.

They’re also imposing limits on their service which are totally wrong. I like to think that a forte of mine is knowing how to monetise services (in fact, it’s a consultancy job I’d love to do, and I plan to do more blog posts on my views for large, net properties), and I definitely disagree with how both these businesses are charging.

I couldn’t really find any other companies that do exactly what I want to offer.  Other companies I did find though are hoping to completely remove the need for my service for their customers. I can see why that’s a massively attractive prospect for the customer. This is a service where a business would just outsource this aspect of their activities. However, there’s absolutely no reason why (so long as I make my product awesome enough) these companies that I see as competition at the moment shouldn’t become my customers.

Sorry about this all being vague. I just don’t want my idea to be stolen so early in the game.

I mentioned Microsoft having a software based application that does what my service does, and I should probably talk about why they aren’t currently competing with me. Microsoft’s version is software based, where as mine would be cloud based. In the future I truly believe software will be completely removed from out computers, in place of a browser (not even a browser, probably) where we do everyone of our activities online. We can already do almost everything (*winkwink*) from Office in Google Docs, and that trend is only going to intensify.

Businesses like the portability of being able to do their processes without being locked into their offices at their desktops, or having to buy separate software licenses for their laptops, desktops, home desktops, etc, etc. The fact that they can access all their data wherever in the world is awesome too, in fact why not even have employees that live on the opposite side of the world? Presentation and meeting applications have been revolutionised by the Internet and web apps and can happen any where. They also don’t have to worry about the hardware, that’d be my job. They don’t have to worry about scalability either! My servers should be able to handle ten times more data than they want me to store and still run perfectly. Tonnes of reasons why web apps trump applications, and I’ve barely started talking about it.

It’s true that Microsoft are moving into that area though. So area Google. So are other companies. That doesn’t worry me. They’re not working on what I’m doing at the moment. Which is integral; why would they start working on their own products if they can just buy business? I’m not saying I want to run this business for a year and then drop it for a quick sum of cash – I’d request to stay on in the company in some influential point (not just “founder”) – I’m just saying that’s an opportunity that I’m not ignoring.

More and more software giants are starting to give a shit about web apps because they can’t be pirated. You can’t crack serial codes for an online account to something like you can for Spore. That means a sustainable score of revenue for them, rather than a short jolt of revenue on release, and then that stopping as you watch the seeder count increase on The Pirate Bay.

How Google should make money

Ages ago I did a post on how ad-funded services were likely to die off, and other methods of monetization that people could use. I didn’t even think about how all that would affect Google until I just noticed a post on valleywag regarding them making more of their services paid for.

That really doesn’t surprise me though; Google is the prefect company to be making money through freemium services. At the moment they’re focusing mainly on the business markets, which makes sense since they have more motivation to pay for a service and they’ll also need better customer support which comes at a price, and they know it. No feathers are ruffled there.

It just makes sense to charge those guys.

How about making money from us individuals using freemium revenue sources?

I’d be pretty pissed if Google Reader started limiting the number of feeds I can subscribe to, unless I paid $5 a month. It’s not that the service isn’t worth paying for – I love it, it’s been my  homepage for the past few years – but there are alternatives out there that I could easily switch to. If all else fails, I could just program my own. I wouldn’t put up with having to pay for it.

So how can Google make money from it, that isn’t advertising (which they don’t)?

We can just go back to the idea of charging businesses, or power users. I know that some of the blog author’s that I read use Google Reader for research and second-hand-news purposes (which most of it is on the internet, like this post for instance). I’m sure if Google paneled them they’d find a whole host of features that reports need and are willing to pay for in order for their job to be easier or for them to produce better content, finding news quicker.

There could be a feature for paid users only which gives links and citation data to other websites and even news papers which Google have archived. They have all the known internet at their finger tips, why not tell the people looking for it about it? They could order these links by the sentiments of the pages; are you looking for pages pro-, or anti-Apple? is the author liberal or conservative? Those kinds of things would help authors do their job, and I’m sure Gawker or Wired wouldn’t mind paying for it. Hell, if I could afford it, I’d get it for when I (very occasionally) do reviews on here.

So, again I’ve come to the conclusion that service providers should charge their business and pro-users, becuase they aren’t willing to leave. Give them a few nicher features and you’re good to go.

Where did I get this reputation from?

Google seems to think that my blog is porn centric...

Was just checking today’s search results that found their way to my blog and find these…

Where did I get this reputation from?

Google seems to think that my blog is porn centric...

Was just checking today’s search results that found their way to my blog and find these…

Products I Can't Live Without

Michael Arrington did a post on the web services he couldn’t live without, and I thought it’d be cool for me to do the same. I’m not a super-internet user like Arrington – it’s his job to be testing these services, and he needs some of them for work which I don’t. I only really use the internet to kill time and for fun, if I’m totally honest.

It’ll be interesting to see what this looks like next year.

Onwards. In 2008, I frequently used the following websites or services:

• digg.com
• WordPress
• Google Talk
• GMail
• YouTube
• last.fm
• 4chan (though, permaban ftl)
• Google Reader
• Google Notebook
• Wikipedia

That’s pretty much the websites I bounce around…

I’d be okay with AdSense in my Google Talk

I was using MSN and thinking “that advertisement for The Sun is insulting, but it doesn’t bother me”. That got me thinking, would I be bothered if Google Talk had adverts? The problem is that the reason the MSN ads don’t bother me is most likely because they’ve always been there and now I have ad-blindness for them, but either way I thought I’d see what it’d look like with Google Talk having ads.

Here’s how a normal conversation looks at the moment:

Gtalk normal chat window

Here’s how I’d figure it’d look with adverts. I decided that, since Google already has a huge ad infrastructure with thousands of clients, they’d definitely go with AdSense and make it contextual to your conversation.

Google Talk with adverts

Obviously, it’d look much nicer if Google did it.

Some people may be a bit worried about it being contextual with Google “reading” there conversations, but it’s really only the same as they do with the adverts in Gmail. It’s not like there’s a human reading and picking which advert for each conversation.

Also, like I said in that image, it’d be annoying and would slow down the lightweightness of the chat if the adverts updated every few seconds. In that image I said maybe every ten minutes it could update, but I’d expect it to be around half an hour, to be honest.

Plus, I’d only want the adverts to be useful. It’s annoying when you search for “telnet help” and the ads are “Get your telnet help from Ebay!”.

I’d only want the URL (so I know where I’m going) and the name for the link on the window, because the description would really just be too long. Even in my example, I’d say that two lines would be pushing it. I like Gtalk because it’s not bulky like MSN has gotten (take a look at an MSN conversation and see how much wasted whitespace there is).

Doesn’t just have to be adverts either, Google could chuck in a few info boxes. If someone mentions an address, the box could change to a link to the Google Map for it.

Of course, I don’t want them going over board with this. I hate how MSN added the search functionality to chat. And so long as the ads were below the textbox and not above it I’d be happy.

Google's stalking me

I’ve been intentionally avoiding linking to this blog on other sites (and if I have, I’ve made sure that Google can’t see the link), but still they found me! I guess when you ping Google’s blog service it actually does listen and comes to check out your blog. Who’da guessed, eh?

It’d be very interesting to see if I get any hits from people searching for legal help and stuff, and they found my revision. Heh.

Update: I took this screen shot a few minutes after I posted this entery. That’s pretty damn fast.