…and now I don’t feel so bad (via TechCrunch):
Facebook was down for a few hours last night, but they seem to be all right now. I can’t find any signs of “outrage”, just a jaded Internet shrugging its shoulders at Yet Another Outage. This isn’t to say that I don’t take downtime seriously (of course I do) but my growing gallery of outage screenshots is some small comfort.
Update: Skweezer.net DNS came back online around 11 PM last night, as far as I could tell. Was it a mistake? Does the abuse department at eNom have someone on call at night? I still don’t know even this morning. In the meantime, I am investigating DNS monitoring services such as DNS Stuff’s DNSAlert. DNS is as much a part of security as RAID or UPS.
Right now www.skweezer.net is completely down because our registrar BulkRegister/eNom has suspended DNS service, despite communicating with us earlier in the month. The reason? We’ve been reported once again as a phishing site, which we’re not, obviously. I believe the true culprit is Netcraft’s overly zealous anti-phishing service (more details why I think this below), but BulkRegister has not evaluated the claim appropriately. I guess we’re going to have to get this out of the way once a year, but once again, repeat after me: Skweezer is not a phishing site. In the meantime, if you want to access Skweezer, you’ll have to do it via IP address: http://72.1.97.146/, or try our temporary alternate domain: http://www.skweezer.org. The problem with the IP address URL is a new one to me:
I joined Facebook mainly so I could test how it works over Skweezer, even though they already have a mobile interface and no offsite links. To complete the circle, today I created a Skweezer group in Facebook to see if it could be useful, although it’s by no means an official forum. I figure that at some point someone’s going to create a Facebook group about Skweezer, it might as well be one of us.
Do you use Facebook and Skweezer? Join our group and post a note on our wall, or better yet a picture of Skweezer in action. It is extremely gratifying to all of us when we read about how people enjoy using Skweezer, and we’re constantly looking for ways to connect with our users people.
The other day when I posted about Zonbu, I added a few sentences expressing that I’d rather call people who own and use a device as “owners” instead of “users”, if appropriate:
…ownership implies that the possession serves its owner’s needs, whereas the word “user” suggests one who has adapted their own habits to suit their possessions. May we all be owners of our possessions and not merely users.
It seems I’m in good company of others tiring of the word “user”, first of all Josh Bernoff who suggested the pledge: “I promise to avoid the word user whenever possible. I will think of people who use technology as people, customers, and friends. I won’t use them, and they won’t use me.” I agree with this wholeheartedly, and the ensuing discussion in the comments of alternate terms to use besides “people” is interesting. He linked to this well thought out article by Thomas Van Der Wal, who has been thinking about this problem for some time, and also Robert Scoble who thought fixation on “users” was “screwing the long tail” way back in June of 2006. I wonder if he has updated his thoughts on that since then.
I’m left with a conundrum, however: if I can’t call people who use Skweezer (which is our public mobile web browsing service that’s meant to be, well, used) “users”, what do we call them? Jimmy Guterman has the same problem and so do his commenters, it appears.
Update: This topic is officially crunched and meme’d now. Hooray.
Many of our users are also MSN TV (a.k.a. WebTV) customers because Skweezer does a pretty good job of stripping out superfluous data from any web page, especially eBay, and reformatting it for a smaller screen, in this case a low resolution standard TV screen. When this tenuous combination of MSN/eBay/Skweezer doesn’t work, however, our customer service department really hears it, and some of those things bubble up to me.
Why don’t they just buy and use a computer or a high-powered phone/PDA? Obviously MSN TV is supposed to be cheaper than a PC, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. After all, you can pick up a bargain PC at Wal-Mart nowadays for next to nothing. I think I have a partial answer. MSN TV owners don’t want a PC and all that entails; they just want to plug a cheap device into their TV, turn it on and surf the web. They don’t want to fool around with updates and plug-ins and viruses and service packs; they just want something that works like an appliance should. They’re not the most backwards computer users in the world (as if they don’t know there’s an alternative), but they are the most demanding. This is why I call them “owners” and not “users”; ownership implies that the possession serves its owner’s needs, whereas the word “user” suggests one who has adapted their own habits to suit their possessions. May we all be owners of our possessions and not merely users.
There are some that we’ve been in contact that regretfully admit that maybe they’ve been holding out too long and it’s time to consider joining the normal computing public. I ran across an MSN TV alternative today that may fit the bill for some. It’s called Zonbu, and it’s priced competitively and available right now. This article from OSWeekly.com compares Zonbu with WebTV very well. I think there’s a lot to like about a Zonbu box, especially automatic offsite backup and the fact that it’s so energy efficient, and I’d consider it carefully when thinking about upgrading/replacing a home PC or set top box like MSN TV which is only good for browsing the Internet and can’t run office applications or games or play music.
As far as I can tell, you need to get your own separate Internet connection, keyboard, monitor, and mouse in addition to this device. I’m not entirely sure why you can’t just add these things on at the Zonbu store, but maybe they want to keep it simple. Your upfront payment will be $99 for the computer + $160 for a monitor and maybe another $20 for the keyboard and mouse if you don’t already have them; let’s say $280 all together. Then you have the subscription fees, which depends on the amount of storage you want for your Zonbu box, currently between $12.95 and $19.95 a month, and also an Internet plan, like cheap DSL for about $15/month, or free if your city provides a municipal wi-fi cloud or your neighbor lets you share. I doubt that’s an option with MSN TV. Even so, less than $30/month is not bad at all. Worst case, your first year will set you back $640, or about $53/month; best case (you already have some hardware and access to free Internet) your first year will cost you $255, or about $21/month.
Skweezer has just been updated this evening. For one thing, the home page is quite different. After quite a bit of customer feedback, we’ve backed down from the one-size-fits-all mentality and have left one interface for phones and another for everyone else. The major change is to put the “Skweeze” box back on the home page, which can be used to start browsing or searching.
Another change we’ve made is to de-emphasize the mobile versions of websites, again due to feedback. Mobile purists have argued that if there’s a mobile version of a desktop website, that should be front and center on the mobile device. Mobile versions often have severely reduced functionality, however. That’s why as of today, the mobile version (if we know about it) becomes a link at the top of the page, on par with RSS links. Furthermore, for those sites that force users to view the mobile version based on browser detection (USAToday.com is one example), we’ve given our users the option to appear as a desktop browser if they so choose, by selecting the new “Identify as desktop computer” checkbox in their preferences.
Skweezers appears better on the iPhone in this release, now that we’re constraining the page “viewport” width to 320 pixels using a meta tag.
Finally, it seems that some sites simply don’t support JavaScript-less browsers, most notably PayPal’s desktop version. We are experimenting with a subset of our users to allow JavaScript back in Skweezer, and we plan to detect and expand JavaScript and CSS rendering in the future.
An anonymous commenter left the following message on our feedback form the other day:
Just bought an iPhone and have been very disappointed with the slow speed of the Internet on Edge.
Your site compressed a 50 second navigation down to 10 seconds on a favorite web site.
Unbelievable ! ! !
Thanks for an outstanding tool ! ! !
The user agent and IP address indicates this person left the comment via the iPhone itself. This is incredibly gratifying for us to read. Skweezer makes ordinary websites much faster on the iPhone on EDGE or any phone on any network, no lie. It’s like a free speed upgrade to the EDGE network. I can’t wait to unleash our new upgrades to Skweezing technology which will compress web pages to an astounding degree, up from just unbelievable.
I just posted a list of my favorite mobile alternative sites (sites which are the mobile version of a regular website), and it struck me how few of these sites actually use the .mobi top level domain. It is kind of sad how little .mobi has caught on, just like mobile-specific style sheets in the wild are few and far between. How are mobile users supposed to discover where they can get their mobile content? Some sites automatically sense the mobile browser’s user agent and adjust themselves accordingly, which I think is ideal. For every other site, are we supposed to try to load the “real” site in our mobile browsers, hope it doesn’t crash, then try to find the “mobile verison” link buried in the footer? It would be really nice if there was standard markup or HTTP header standard to redirect mobile clients to a mobile-friendly version. For example, I would love to see something like this embedded in the HEAD of the LA Times homepage:
<link href="http://mobile.latimes.com/" rel="alternate" media="mobile" type="text/xhtml" />
Update (1/18/08): According to Russell Beattie, it’s possible right now. The media type is “handheld”, not “mobile” but it works. Now use it!
Today we found a fix for a strange error experienced while deploying a web project built in Visual Studio 2005 that has a web reference (SOAP), specifically to the Microsoft Live search service. We were using a web deploy project, and although everything compiled all right and ran well on the local development server, on pre-deployment testing the following error stack would be raised: Read more »
I just saw Jeff Atwood’s entry from last week on why you don’t want an iPhone, and his well-reasoned advice boils down to this: EDGE is painfully slow compared to 3G, and you should wait until they iron out the bugs in v2.0. For these reasons, even the Apple faithful are sitting v1.0 out. Sprint is obviously thrilled right now.
As far as I can figure, the difference between EDGE and 3G networks like EVDO is presently 4-5x, accounting for the recent boost. There is a free and easy way to get 4-5x faster downloads on any network, even EDGE: Skweezer. Because content is pre-compressed on our servers before it even starts down the thin invisible tube to your phone, there’s less overall data transmitted, which translates into a faster browsing experience. It is the equivalent of turning your 200 kbit connection into a 1 mbit connection. Basic web surfing will be loads faster with Skweezer than without.
You still don’t believe me? It’s been a while since we did a site comparison, so I ran a few sites through Firebug this evening (July 3, 2007) to compare their total original page weight with the Skweezed versions, with images on and off. Unfortunately the figures aren’t as dramatic as they once were because server-side content compression (gzip and deflate) is more commonplace now, and that used to be an easy win for us. Nevertheless, Skweezer still always brought the page weight down, as follows:
The worst value in each column is in red, and the best value is green. The fastest way to browse is without images, but that’s only useful if you’re just information hunting. Even with images on, the median speedup for browsing sites through Skweezer was 4.7 x, if we assume that the network is the main bottleneck. If you want to run your own tests, be aware that IE reports uncompressed page size in the page properties dialog, while Firefox reports the number of bytes received for the main HTML document, reflecting compression. The best way to compare total page weight accurately is to use a tool like Firebug or a proxy like Fiddler2.
