Category: Uncategorized

Dow Jones MarketWatch Goes Social

Dow Jones MarketWatch Goes Social
The MarketWatch financial news web site is getting a fresh coat of web 2.0 paint today with the official beta release of the MarketWatch Community. The community site adds commenting, tagging, and rating to every article offered by MarketWatch. The site also ties in standard social network features, such as bios, avatars, and friends lists.

The community features will be rolled out to the MarketWatch at large site conservatively via a sidebar widget. The widget will allow any member of the community site to rate, tag, or comment on articles throughout the site. Other new features will only be available via the dedicated community area.

Fresh coat indeed. Fresh coat of incompetence. Isn’t this pleasant, ‘Exceptional’ programming.

Marketwatch's New Community

Slashdot | Microsoft Should Abandon Vista?

Slashdot | Microsoft Should Abandon Vista?
“An editorial written by Don Reisinger over at CNet’s News.com takes Microsoft to task for the outright failure of Vista. He suggests that Vista may be the downfall of the company as, despite years in development, Vista was delivered to market too early. His suggestion? Support those who are running it, but otherwise ditch Vista and move on. ‘Never before have I seen such an abysmal start to an operating system release. For almost a year, people have been adopting Vista and becoming incensed by how poorly it operates. Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support … With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around. If Microsoft continues down this path, it will be Vista that will bring the software giant to its knees–not Bill Gates’ departure.'”

I’m posting a reference to a post that references the original article with good reason. The comments on this /. post are so damn hilarious, you’ve got to read them.

How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Vista after all it has been through?

…

LEAVE IT ALONE! You are lucky it even boots you bastards! LEAVE VISTA ALONE!

…

LEAVE VISTA ALONE RIGHT NOW. I MEAN IT.

Anyone that has a problem with it you deal with me, because it is not well right now.

LEAVE IT ALONE!

Oh, and the C|Net piece hurts. Hurts bad. If I were Microsoft. Also, I think it’s probably correct; although, I’m not sure this approach would be in the best interest of Microsoft.

Wiki panel on Usability

I was in Fremont yesterday speaking on a panel hosted by the Silicon Valley Webbuilder group on wikis and usability. Jeffrey Walker, the President of of Atlassian, was there. Jeffrey has this unusual quality. I don’t know how to describe it other than the dude’s so damn like-able you just want to give him a hug. The panel moderator was LukeW. I don’t recall his last name. He’s a usability and user experience (UeX) dude who’s currently working at Yahoo!. He seemed like he might be new to wikis, but it was clear he’s a smart dude and during his, albeit a tad long, 😉 introduction to UeX he made some really good points about web forms and usability. I actually wrote down a couple things Luke said. He has a book coming out on UeX and web form design. This is his second book. I will be buying it. Like I said, smart dude. Maybe someone can post an URL to it in the comments for all of us. Bess Ho, the organizer was a trip. Very energetic, fun, and memorably dressed. She was dressed straight out of an anime, down to the sneakers. She has a fabulously original business card that she proudly declared she had designed herself. Finally, Zoli helped Bess find speakers for the event and was in attendance. Hungarians are cool. Zoli is no exception.