A number of times in the recent past I’ve read either in a blog post or on Buzz/Twitter or via an aggregation site like Digg, that this social site has failed or that social site is dead. Sure, from the point of view of the poster, that site has failed to perform – but I contend that it’s all the more likely the only real failure is that of expectation failure.

It seems to be that lately a site can only be a success if it reaches tens of millions of users, heck even Google pulled Wave because of the fact that it required more engineers per user than usual and it had not reached some magical user size. My hunch is that Google has gotten large enough of an organization that it now has the problem of team politics and it may have died due to a lack of internal power or will, because for sure it wasn’t a failure of technology that brought it down. (ok, sure, maybe a lack of UX vision – but that is solvable and the reason you have beta tests.)

This expectation failure is in both directions. We as users approach a site with a given level of anticipation and it’s a rare site that doesn’t do something that makes you sit back in your chair and go “ouch, wasn’t expecting that“. But now, with the continuous development cycle and the need for a certain churn in the media, a site doesn’t have three or four months to test out interfaces or feature sets – it is assumed it will deliver on those features now. And heaven help you if a Scoble or a Leo find your site before it’s ready and has it’s feature focus stable and ready, because nothing can prepare you for that ;)

So when your reading about how this site has failed (or heck, has EPIC FAILED) please do remember that for the most part we are all traveling in the same echo chamber that is the early adopter scene. That some folks are broadcasters, some are analysts and some are consumers and that a viable ecosystem needs all three to thrive. Within this ecosystem you will always find the struggle to maintain balance between the forces and often the “top of the food chain” folks will sometimes seem to be acting out of step with the others.

It is my contention, and what I have been badly striving to make as a point (just remember i’m a behind-the-scene dev type, not a words-smith) that often, in order for growth to happen, something needs to shake up the status quo – be it something new or one of the more mature/stable pieces to do something different so as to give a chance to one of the up-and-coming pieces. You can’t have growth without change.

I would also like to point out in my ecosystem analogy above I don’t mention the sites themselves and where they fit. That is because, to continue the analogy, the echo chamber is like that little bird (a Plover IIRC) that alligators allow to walk around their heads and in their mouths. The echo chamber and the social media industry are symbiotic and exist in the realm of, heck exist for the use of, us normal users – not the other way around.

Not sure exactly where I found the link, but I ran across an article pointing to the artwork of Andrew Bell and his “the CREATURES in my head” site the other day and was enjoying his unusual slant on things when I saw them:

Just as quickly as my hopes were raised at the chance of adding such a cool and lovable android mini to my shelf, multiple boots-to-the-head smushed them back down as I saw that his Series 01 of them had sold out! :(

Still considering myself lucky to have found his site, I decided to followed him on Twitter in case he posted of anything new arriving in his store. Days later he announced that he was going to do another manufacturing , but this time instead of putting them on the store all at once he would ration them out across multiple days. So instead of now me needing to have fast data-entry skillz I also needed to have good timing *and* fast data-entry skillz!

Well, technology to the rescue – after missing the first two offereings I quickly downloaded an addon for Firefox that monitors pages, set it to scan every 2 minutes and then waited. Wasn’t long till the buzzer went off and I was able to enter my order! Score!

So now, like every good geek/nerd I now have some Android love on my shelf :)

I’m not a “pro” reviewer by anyone’s viewpoint, but I do use a number of Android devices and I use daily my N800 as a remote tablet so I was looking forward to getting a portable tablet running Android. I will be checking out pretty much all of the new tablets just to find a replacement for my N800 which is showing it’s age :(

Pros

• Android 2.1 Eclair pre-installed
• Nice USB cable selection in that it comes with a USB <-> USBmini cable but also a conversion cable in case your laptop/netbook only sports a USBmini connection
• The 800×480 screen is decent and looked great when viewing YouTube videos and Flickr photos
• Came with a protective case

Cons

• Keyboard almost useless without a stylus (or skinny people fingers)
• WiFi had issues connecting to some of my devices (like the Apple gear) but worked well with my Netgear AP
• Resistive screen sits above the display in a very visible manner and even after using it for an hour I couldn’t stop noticing it.
• Back of device got noticeable warm when charging and when using the WiFi
• The Android status bar shows the phone service level bars even with no phone hardware present
• Android Marketplace seems borked out of the box, i’m waiting to see if a patch will help

I’m finding that the device is going to be useful for folks who are using one or two Android apps on their phones while sitting at the couch. Because you can sync apps via sdcard or (as soon as they fix it) the Marketplace, you should be able to keep it as a non-phone copy of what your phone has :)

Overall the sticking points, IMO, are what you would expect for a very low cost device but at the same time it is a functional Android 2.1 device that is comfortable in your hands. Some of the glitches means that I wouldn’t get this if your not comfortable with sdcard swapping or the ADB toolset.

So if your looking for an iPad experiance at a clone price point, then your wasting your money and time. But if you want to test your Android apps on something other than a phone or if, like me, you have personal productivity tools that are just *screaming* for more screen space then it’s a win – even tho I know I will be replacing it in a year.

Update 1: I added a photo at the bottom of the Tablet and my Nexus One so you can get an impression of the size of the Tablet

Update 2: I’m actually syncing it to my normal gmail account so I can test the Google Apps and I saw this on the registration wizard:

Welcome to Android for Telechips TCC8900 Evaluation Board (US)

This makes me wonder what other “dev only” items are lurking behind the scenes!

Shot of the front:

Shot of the ports:

From Left to Right: power, on/off button, mini USB, earphone, microSD

Shot of the product info:

Shot of the back side:

The Tablet and my Nexus One:

I was sitting at my desk going thru a mental checklist of things that need doing in the final couple of days before I travel to the 2010 Mozilla Summit (wow it’s like 4 days away!) and I read on one of the Moz Forums about someone asking for an .ics file of the schedule…

Hmm, I know VCALENDAR and can hack-parse html …

So 3 hours later and I have a very basic program that reads the Schedule wiki page, sucks out all of the tables that represent the daily schedules and generates a .ics ready for importing into your favourite calendar program.

Requires Python 2.6 or 2.5 with ElementTree installed: generate_summit_calendar.py

enjoy!

With a lot of help from Aki, Ben (heck the entire RelEng team) and the Mozilla Mobile team, my work to enable nightly signed builds of Fennec for Android were landed.

\o/

This was an interesting task because it involved a little bit of each job in the RelEng world at Mozilla:

I had to update the puppet manifest which we use to distribute files and manage configurations for the build farm so the signing keystore and configuration file would get to all of the production build servers. I also had to write a small Python program to make the actual call to Jarsigner because if we just called it from within the Buildbot step, the output would include the keystore passwords and that appears on the build server’s web page – not good.

I also had to drill deep into the various parts of the Mozilla Buildbot configuration and custom code because the Android build was new and just different enough from the other mobile builds that it wasn’t just a cut-n-paste solution.

And all of this I was doing the Mozilla way for the first time and let’s just say they have some unique custom code :)

But today the first half of the task was completed and that allows the nightly signed builds to be made public. What remains is to remove some work-arounds (for the packaging and tests) and then to start building the steps required to generate a release version of Fennec for Android.