I’m Not a Fan of Pummelvision [and Other Useless Single Purpose Apps]
Some time back – right before the clock turned over for the new year – a service...
I’m Not a Fan of Pummelvision [and Other Useless Single Purpose Apps]
Some time back – right before the clock turned over for the new year – a service called Pummelvision started making the rounds. It didn’t get very far, but a few high profile folks used it. Essentially what it did was take videos from your Facebook albums, compile them into a rapid-fire slideshow, put some funky music behind it, and automatically upload it to YouTube.
Like the early-adopter lemming that I am, I tried out the service. A few of my Facebook friends openly mocked me for allowing a junky looking video hit my timeline, I took the beating, and went on with my life.
Today, though, I caught a brief review of the service from The Next Web, who dubbed the service “beautiful.”
I couldn’t disagree more.
I reshared the post on Google Buzz, which I tagged to also go to Twitter. My exact review was:
These things suck… There were entrants years ago at SxSW that were much better than this.
My Extended (Bad) Review
Pummelvision certainly doesn’t deserve the accolades it has been getting from early adopters or the few reviewers who’ve given it the time of day. There are dozens of services out there for creating a video slideshow of your images on a myriad of services. I’ll talk about one of my favorites (one that I discovered at SxSW ‘09) a little later called Animoto, but I know I’ve seen a handful designed to work with Flickr’s API, and the slideshow maker built into Picasa is truly top-notch.
Pummlvision doesn’t allow any customization of your slideshow, no selection of background music, and doesn’t even have the decency to full-size your images in the video box, let alone offer a 1080p video.
It’s not a good way to create a video slideshow, nor is it a good way to view images. Some people like it, but judging from folks who’ve I shown it to, most don’t.
Why Am I Writing This?
The short reason is that Jake Lodwick is a bit of a smartass.
Here’s the long reason …
I linked to what Pummelvision created for me (which you can see embedded on top of this post).
Sometimes dlvr.it double posts these items. Of the gazillions of posts on Twitter about Pummelvision, the folks at the service decided to respond to my tweet on their company account:
It’s not the worst flame-back I’d ever received by any measure. It is noteworthy, though, because it came directly from the company account, and it was a snide way of insulting my intelligence (“yeah, so you don’t like my service, but you clearly don’t know how to use Twitter”).
Curious to see who this cheeky bastard was, I looked at the about page on Pummelvision’s website:
I don’t have any major beefs with Jakob Lodwick (better known as one of the founders of Vimeo and the ill-fated and ill-managed Muxtape), although I have to imagine he’s a bid of an odd duck, and certainly not someone I’d enjoy hanging out with if even a quarter of the stuff I’ve heard about him (via his personal blog [obeastiality.com] and press clippings) are true.
What I posted on Buzz/Twitter was true. I’d seen much better services years ago – services that continue to exist. I created both the afore-linked Pummelvision video in about 30 seconds … I also created the video embedded below in Animoto in about 30 seconds.
In short, Animoto provides a huge array of customization options, and provides a much more aesthetically pleasing experience for the viewer.
This is Symptomatic of a Larger Problem in the Social Ecosphere
This whole thing hints at what I think may be a larger problem right now in the social ecosphere. I really don’t have the energy (or the time) to give this idea a proper treatment right now in my normal 3000 word style, but what I’m seeing is a lot of one hit wonders riding the coattails of viral nature of social networks.
Because Facebook and Twitter are completely omnipresent, and because the iPhone and Android are such great and growing platforms, one-hit-wonder apps are now viable business models.
Last week when Michael Sean Wright and I were in Times Square, he showed me a list of nearly a dozen ways to share out the photos he took with his EVO out with the world. Of course, there was the obvious ways, like email, Facebook, or Twitter. Then, there were several others that were less obvious – like the Instagram knock-off PlcPlz.
Why do we use these single-purpose apps? Why not upload to Picasa or Flickr? It’s not like those services can’t be configured to auto-share to Twitter or Facebook.
For that matter, why do we love AngryBirds, when it’s clearly a knock-off of dozens of other games we’ve seen on Kongregate before? Why do we continue to use inferior products simply because they’re newer?
People call me a hater, sometimes, because I poo-poo a lot of the technology other early adopters love. The truth, though, is that I’m an early adopter that has been using these technologies long before most of these other folks have.
I was outputting live audio streaming to the web years before TalkShoe and Cinchcast existed using Windows Mobile 5 and Shoutcast. I was doing mobile video distribution for the web long before YouTube with Google Video, RSS and MySpace (and before that with Shoutcast’s video product).
My point isn’t that there are no tools now that are better than WinMo5 and MySpace – rather, the benefits of the new tools need to be demonstrably better than the old tools. In it’s first few iterations, YouTube wasn’t better than Google Video – in fact, I didn’t switch from Google Video to YouTube until Google killed off the predecessor service. The quality on YouTube wasn’t nearly as good, and it didn’t allow you to export your videos back out of the service at the time (not to mention the API was non-existent, whereas the Google Vid API was at least workable).
I’ll go at this at greater length, and I don’t necessarily think this is a new problem … I do think it’s a good time to point out that our entrepreneurs and early adopters have gotten really lazy. Back during the last bubble, if something like PicPlz or Pummelvision crossed my desk at Mashable, I would have thrown out the email, since it was likely created by some jackass looking to sell the site a week later on Flippa.com.
Instead, we have to pay attention to these useless services because Robert Scoble pimps them, or they’re run by Jakob Lodwick.
Isn’t There Some Oil Spill Or Something? [Calacanis-gate]
All I’m saying is that there are probably much more important things for us to all give a shit about at the moment.
SxSWi Day One Wrap-Up: In Which I Meet Leo Laporte
As is my custom, I try to put together a wrap up video for each day I’m here at SxSWi. Today was an interesting day, since I spent so much of it in the studio (and the time I spent at the convention center, most things appeared to still be under construction).
I had a great time speaking to a good lineup of guests on the live stream (available over at SiliconANGLE during the days of the festival), but of course spring break for Silicon Valley geeks is nothing if not about the parties. I spent a large portion of the evening with Paul Terry Walhus of Texas Coworking (along with my cohost on the stream, Michael Sean Wright) just surveying the party landscape. We did the usual stuff, picking up crowd shots to use as B-Roll for our videos and a few interviews here and there.
At one point I got swept up into the Robert Scoble aura, and Michael and I wound up on a bus with Tony Hsieh (founder of Zappos) and Frank (from @comcastcares fame).
Then something strange happened.
I had a fanboy moment.
I’m not particularly easily phased by these sorts of things. I’m realistic about the bubble in which I work. When I go out into the meatspace world, no one knows who John Furrier, Robert Scoble, Mike Arrington or Pete Cashmore are (and certainly not me). I’m the furthest thing from ego-inflated over what I do for a living, in reality.
But I had a chance to meet Leo Laporte and shake his hand. This is a big moment for me, even though it shouldn’t be. He and I work in the same industry doing similar things. Both he and I have been involved in podcasting about the same length of time. I’ve referenced him, and he’s referenced me in the past, and we’ve exchanged emails.
Heck, we’re sharing the same studio this week for our broadcasts.
Something about meeting the guy who inspired you to do what you do for a career, though, really made my day. Perhaps even my week.
Leo Laporte is a stand up guy, and role model for almost every indie content producer, and I’m genuinely not ashamed to admit that I was thrilled to meet Leo Laporte today.
Below is me talking a bit more about it. I go fanboy in it, about an hour after it happened. Be prepared.
Robert Scoble Feels Bad that Twitter’s Lists Make Chris Brogan Feel Bad [I Think That’s Right]
Chris Brogan wrote Friday, I think it was, about how Twitter’s Lists are a way of resurrecting the “A-List,” and while they’re cool and useful have an exclusionary effect on people.
I just took a look into creating my first ever Twitter list. I’m listed on over 1500 at this writing, so I figured I’d give it a go. Immediately, I realized what I’m not going to like about them: they will exclude people. Sure, on the one hand, they’re a great way to group people and information together. For instance, I might make a list for news feeds. I might make a list about travel, like hotels and airlines.
But the minute you move into the people department, things get sketchy quick.
In talking with friends about it on Twitter, people immediately started DM-ing me, telling me that they felt left out or even LESS important because they weren’t on any lists. Lists are exclusionary by nature. They’re static. There’s a lot of reasons why they might not be all that pleasant for people.
Robert Scoble, who has pretty much turned into Twitter’s biggest evangelist again since the rollout of lists, immediately hit back at Brogan.
Here, look at my list of programmers. It excludes me.
That makes me feel bad, according to Chris Brogan.
Except, well, I’m NOT a programmer so why should I be on a list of programmers?
Sorry Chris, but life isn’t fair. Steve Gillmor tells me all the time I’m not in control of how people view me. That’s why I don’t feel bad about lists I’m not on.
I CAN control my own lists, though, and even when I do my own lists I leave myself off of most of them. That does NOT make me feel bad.
Chris: I think you just got included on my list of people who have bad opinions about lists.
I think it’s pretty clear that Robert may have missed the point of Chris’s post. It’s not that people who aren’t programmers will feel excluded from a list of cool programmers – it’s people who are cool programmers feeling excluded from a list of cool programmers.
For instance – did you know that I created the world’s first free podcast hosting company? It was, at one point, host to two thirds of the world’s podcast producers. I programmed that thing all by myself. Top to bottom. Host to something like 6000-7000 podcasters.
Doesn’t that qualify me as a cool programmer? See, now I feel all excluded and stuff. Maybe miffed. A little sad. I may cry a little.
Actually, I exaggerate. It doesn’t bother me much – I don’t necessarily agree with Chris or Robert on this one. Creating lists is just something we as humans do. We all discriminate as a part of daily life.
By choosing my wife, I chose to discriminate against participating with all other women for certain activities.
By choosing a technology to use publicly or choosing a community to belong to, I choose to publicly discriminate against other competing tech or communities.
I’m all about some discrimination and exclusion.
I can see the problem from Chris’s perspective – there is something very limitiing about lists, too, particularly someone from the PR side of things – they’re all about bringing people into communities, and creating lists is a good way to irritate people who otherwise enjoy what you do and think they’re part of your community. It’s Dunbar’s number head-butting community curation, and Twitter’s lists are, as Chris says, very static and difficult to manage.
Robert needs to pause and re-read Chris’s post and respond to it again – and I think Chris maybe ought to clarify that for some people Lists might be a great feature, just not for him (Chris said that, actually, but is not obvious enough, hence Robert’s confusion).
I Am Not an Earthling
Political neophytes Dave Winer and Robert Scoble have been once again inflicting their beliefs upon the public. This is not particularly new stuff from them. Ever since the primary campaigns, Dave and Robert have been showing the world why they should stick to pontificating on technology rather than politics.
Dave Winer’s post was entitled “I Am Not a Liberal,” and revolved around the mistaken concept that ‘Obama is a conservative, and so is Dave.’ Robert Scoble, never one to pass up an opportunity to alienate anyone with an ounce of conservatism, takes the “concept a step further” and proudly declares that he is “Not an American.”
Judging by the responses in their comment section, both Dave and Robert have already alienated everyone from his audience who could have a different opinion than him.
If you read both of the blog posts and don’t understand what’s wrong with what they said, then this post isn’t for you. Go read a couple of books on political ideology, maybe a history book or two, and come back and perhaps we can talk.
For the rest of you that barely made it through Dave’s post and then halfway through Robert’s post and were either laughing or crying from stream of pseudo-facts and straight up ignorant beliefs and statements, you know what I mean.
Need more insight as to what I mean? Robert’s post is sentence fragment after sentence fragment, each followed by the refrain “I am not an American.” Most of what he says are straw men arguements. No one has alleged that marrying a Muslim woman doesn’t make you American.
I mean seriously: Robert doesn’t understand the difference between Fascism and Socialism, despite the fact that he drops his holocaust credentials every chance he gets (for those of you playing the game at home, President Bush’s nationalized banking is a positive move for Fascism, Senator Obama’s plan for socialised medicine and socialized insurance is a positive move for Socialism).
On the spectrum of human political ideals, socialism is a left ideology. That isn’t some sort of uninformed, uneducated opinion… that’s a simple fact. I didn’t make it up, and you can find a number of scholars and informed opinions that agree with me.
So when Dave Winer tries to tell me that because I consider his plans for socialized medicine “liberal,” I must be ignorant, I have to wonder what planet he’s hailing from. I furthermore resent the implication that I need to change my opinion of Obama, get on board for the big win and vote for him, or I’m somehow not playing on the side of “Team America.”
Rob Diana wrote an excellent article for Mashable a couple weeks ago, and it was entitled: “Are Politics Damaging Your Brand?” I didn’t chime in on it because I very obviously participate in political discussions, but I can’t deny the effect that political opinions have on my regard of social media pundits.
I think that, two weeks of pondering, I’ve finally arrived at an opinion, and if you think about it, I’m sure you’ll agree:
Political opinions don’t necessarily damage your brand. Everything you say on a big enough stage will attract passionate detractors. When you very obviously will have problems passing Economic 101 and Intro to American Political Opinion, then you proceed to opine to thousands of Americans on politics and the economy, you very rightly deserve to have your brand damaged.
Robert Scoble and Dave Winer have been venturing forth into political punditry for a while now (Dave much longer than Robert). I almost never agree with either one of them, but as they’ve spent more time illustrating the nature and sources of their beliefs, it’s become glaringly obvious that they only have a very knee-jerk and superficial understanding of the principles they espouse. Thus, I don’t respect their opinions, and think a lot less of the rest of their opinion.
If they can’t be bothered to understand what they’re talking about when it comes to politics and the economy (and feel no remorse for propagating flawed opinions to the masses), why should I respect their opinions on the rest of their established domain of expertise?
What’s the lesson here?
If you can’t speak intelligently about something, and everything you write on your blog is read by thousands of people, it may be best to keep your opinions to yourself.
It isn’t because your opinions aren’t valid. Heck, even the numbnuts who were at that Sarah Palin rally a couple weeks ago who called for the death of Senator Obama had valid opinions (and this is America, where every opinion, no matter how stupid or offensive it may be, is valid).
You will, however, undermine your credibility if you speak on topics as if you were an expert when you very clearly aren’t.
Isn’t There Some Oil Spill Or Something? [Calacanis-gate]
Remember that time Scoble got his account jacked up by Facebook? Do you remember what was...
SxSWi Day One Wrap-Up: In Which I Meet Leo Laporte
As is my custom, I try to put together a wrap up video for each day I’m here at SxSWi....
Robert Scoble Feels Bad that Twitter’s Lists Make Chris Brogan Feel Bad [I Think That’s Right]
Chris Brogan wrote Friday, I think it was, about how Twitter’s Lists are a way of...
I Am Not an Earthling
Political neophytes Dave Winer and Robert Scoble have been once again inflicting their...
