Killer Facebook App: Amazon Share the Love

In the midst of the privacy concerns and backlash over Facebook’s Beacon service, I thought of a great idea for a Facebook application: the Amazon “Share the Love” friend referral program. (Amazon created the Share the Love program in 2002. Whenever you placed an order, Amazon offered to email your friends with a discount offer of 10% for the same items you just bought. If any of your friends used the discount, your account would also be credited with that same amount for a future purchase. You had full control over whom would receive the emails, and which products would…

Continue Reading →

Posted in: Web

Mobile Website Project: New Domain

My 4-year old project to keep an updated list of useful mobile websites continues to draw a decent amount of traffic (somewhere between 1000 and 2000 page views per day). I’ve also managed to reach the top search result for “mobile websites” on both Google and Live.com. (Yahoo and Ask are not keeping up…come on guys!) This week I’m migrating the list from its current home on “www.cantoni.org/palm” to a new domain “cantoni.mobi”. Tonight I have the new domain up and running and tomorrow I’ll start redirecting the old traffic. Hopefully I’ll be able to follow the standard advice for…

Continue Reading →

Amazon Kindle: More of the Same (DRM)

Some good commentary on the Amazon Kindle “wireless reading device”: Daring Fireball: DUM Dive into Mark: The Future of Reading /Message: Another iPod, or Another Newton? Not considering whether they’ve created a good solution for reading eBooks and other online material, it sounds like it’s the same old digital rights management harassment. I’m amazed that no one has tried to come up with a good solution that allows casual sharing (close friends or family), while preventing wholesale pirating. Companies are still approaching it from the viewpoint of complete lockdown to the single customer who bought the product. When I worked…

Continue Reading →

Make Decent (not Shorter) URLs

There are certainly a large number of URL shortening services available today. Tinyurl.com is probably the best known, but there are dozens of clones and competitors that have popped up (just search for “url shortening service”). I recently found a new entry called DecentURL.com whose goal is to make shortened URLs more…decent! The author has implemented two unique steps: First, the original domain name is included in the path (minus any “www.” prefix and the top level domain stripped), so you get an idea of where this link is taking you Second, the link creator can edit the title to…

Continue Reading →

Posted in: Web

Bay Area Mobile Networks Can’t Handle an Earthquake

Yesterday (October 20th), we here in the South end of the San Francisco Bay Area had a moderate 5.6 earthquake (officially designated by the USGS as event nc40204628). We were fine, even if the kids were a little rattled. (I had to explain to them that earthquakes are part of living in California.) I tried to call my parents to see if they felt it, but got the dreaded “all circuits are busy” on our standard AT&T line. Not too surprising. What surprised me was that my Sprint mobile was also not working, but rather than a decent message, it…

Continue Reading →