R. Francis Smith

Member since: Sep 14th, 2006

R. Francis Smith's Latest Comments

Blog Activity

Blog	# of Comments
Download Squad	5 Comments

Recent Comments:

Virb - MySpace done right, and we have 100 invites to give away! (Download Squad)

Mar 19th 2007 6:50PM Well, whether it's worth an invite or not: I've been waiting for a social networking site to truly go for the networking -- that is, to give each user a way to draw together all of the special-purpose social "selves" they have into one central point to represent themselves as a "net whole." Flickr, Livejournal, Twitter, 42things, del.icio.us, LibraryThing -- if I can easily list what all it can draw together, it's not doing enough.

I've seen some feints taken in this direction, and they've been just that -- feints; no real attack at the problem at all. Personally, I've got a list of links on the sidebar of my Livejournal and I wave people in that direction as often as not, but that's not a GOOD solution.

Something like this would hearken back to when everyone had a "home page" that told people about themselves. Except cooler, much cooler.

The suggestions about an open API probably mesh nicely with this one. Otherwise someone's in for a whole lot of work if the community can't help.

Enso Launcher - the keyboard launcher I wanted to love (Download Squad)

Feb 25th 2007 2:41PM You know, it's weird -- I never see anyone talk about Find and Run Robot off the DonationCoder website, and yet for me it's blown the other Windows Quicksilvery things out of the water consistently. The most recent updates to it have increased its performance substantially and it's just amazingly flexible (and easy on the graphics processing, but not ugly as such.)

I can't operate without FRR anymore -- it goes on every Windows machine I have to use.

Random

Google Calendar update adds web content, 17 new languages (Download Squad)

Sep 26th 2006 2:10PM Most mystifying to me remains the inability to add to non-default calendars from the Quick Add box. I continually wind up quick adding stuff, then copying it to another calendar, then deleting the original, which kind of sucks the joy out of it.

Universal Music vs. YouTube and MySpace (Download Squad)

Sep 15th 2006 9:49AM Well, color me shocking, because I can't imagine music being used as the background for a video on youtube having much of anything to do with sales of the music, except possibly to _promote_ sales by bringing attention to the music in question. I am unable to make myself imagine someone saying "eh, I really like the song, but since I can just watch that video of teenagers dancing to it on youtube at my computer, I don't really want the CD."

Of course, I agree that the studios' main interest is their fans' money. And if that money follows the fans elsewhere, then just perhaps they'll consider improving their value instead of using litigation as their primary market tool.

Universal Music vs. YouTube and MySpace (Download Squad)

Sep 14th 2006 5:19PM In Universals Chief Executives speech to investors, he did state that record companies are keen at avoiding the mistakes that were made when MTV was set up, by letting artist's music to be aired for free, creating a multi-billion dollar company in the process.

In the recording industry, it's always called a "mistake" when music enthusiasts get to actually enjoy music, yeah.