the tindog coffeehouse

Like millions of other techy folks, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on an invite to Google’s new Facebook wannabe, Google+. Now that I’m on, however, I can’t think of a single reason to actually use it.

Way to go, Google.

It’s not that Google+ is a bad product, although while it’s still in its early stages, it’s extremely bare in functionality. Rather, the problem as I see it is that it’s completely unnecessary. There’s nothing it does that other, more established social networks don’t already do, the biggest of course being Facebook. And this redundancy provides absolutely no value whatsoever.

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Source.

Previously:
It’s the end of the Internet as we know it (and I feel fine)
Welcome to the future
Can you hear me now?
Vanity Fair’s history of the Internet

A couple of days ago, I was looking through Outlook and came across some emails from 2004 when I was doing some freelance web design work for a small ministry in Nacogdoches. The lady who ran the ministry had had a website built but couldn’t afford to keep paying the designer to maintain it. I heard about her through my wife and offered to take it over for practically nothing. Now, I should preface this by saying that I don’t consider myself in any way to be a web designer. But at the time, I had aspirations of building a web design business, so I was eager to get a real (paying!) client.

The existing site was a mess. The designer had used Flash to build all the navigation menus (almost a dozen of of them), so simply creating a new page required editing multiple Flash files. And the HTML was so convoluted, any significant changes to the existing pages were next to impossible without redoing the whole thing.

I hated that website.

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Gizmodo has a post out about what Microsoft’s successor to Windows 7 will look like. Pretty much anyone you talk to will mention the same things: more cloud integration, better hardware management, better security, faster boot time, expanded use of virtualization, etc. All good answers, and I think accurate ones.

But my gut tells me that if you really want to know what Windows 8 will look like, just look at an iPad. Forget Windows XP, Vista, or even Windows 7. Windows 8 will more closely resemble Apple’s iOS or Google’s Chrome OS than any of its predecessors.

Why? Several reasons:

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As a fan of Google, Billy Joel, history, ’80s music, and awesome stuff in general, I have to say this is quite possibly the greatest use of the Internet ever.

This is me eating my words.

After stating my preference for Firefox and saying that Google’s Chrome browser “doesn’t really feel complete”, I’m ready to admit I was wrong. In fact, I would even go so far as to say I love it. As much as a person can love a web browser anyway.

The migration from Firefox to Chrome wasn’t planned and it wasn’t really a voluntary move. Firefox forced me out after multiple add-ons started giving me problems on two different computers. I could disable one or two and be fine for a while, but eventually it would crash again or freeze up or just refuse to open in the first place.  The more problems I encountered, the clearer my decision became: I had to move on. And no, I don’t fully blame Mozilla; after all, these were third-party add-ons. But after several days of troubleshooting, it simply was no longer worth the effort.

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