Philoking.com

MUI, or Multilingual User Interface, is the technology that Microsoft Windows and Office, as well as other applications, use to deal with multiple languages. So what does this have to do with Facebook? If you are the global icon I am (laughs), you obviously communicate with people all over the world. I have been trolling this old internet since the early 90s and my travels on IRC, message boards and usenet to name a few, have made me friendships that cross the entire globe.

These days, many of us manage these friendships with Facebook. Following my friends’ feeds and seeing what they post and comment on allows me to be somehow closer to them, and stay involved in what they are up to. I love it.

The problem comes in when you have many friends who use multiple languages regularly. Facebook knows what language I speak, they obviously know what language my friends speak, why don’t we go ahead and bridge the gap already.

This morning, I took a look at my feed and saw

Not being fluent in Hebrew, and the fact that it was 6am, what I thought I saw was

and are now friends.

But come on, it was 6am, honest mistake right?

Now I know that might not be the most culturally sensitive, and I mockingly apologize, but at any given time, my friend feed is populated with comments in Spanish, Hebrew, Russian and Norwegian, and those are only the common ones.

Working at Microsoft, Language translation is a huge part of our job, at this point in our development stage, many of the bugs we encounter are simply “this doesn’t look right in x language.”

If Facebook is ready to be a global meeting ground, it’s time that they address this.

The title of the article that proves my point? “Is Google’s Chrome the New Internet Explorer?” The gist of the article? Microsoft thinks that bundling Chrome in Windows will give Google a search monopoly because of it’s speed and security.

The Battle for the Box

Let’s make one thing absolutely clear. Microsoft’s concern with the EU case concerning bundling IE has zero to do with Chrome, Firefox, Opera and the like. It should be called “The battle for the box.” Microsoft doesn’t want that little search box you see at the top right of your browser to fall into the hands of Google. Think about it, it’s THE reason that when you do use IE, Google really wants you to install their toolbar, not for the features, for the SEARCH BOX! Don’t get me wrong, Microsoft wants people using IE8. In a perfect world to them, the internet would run on Explorer and they wouldn’t have to worry about all these silly standards (note sarcasm).

The reality, however, is that Microsoft wants to make money, something that Google is very good at. They made all that money by selling ads in their search engine, you might have used it before. If you look at the monopoly numbers that have been used against Microsoft in recent years, you will see that they are quite similar to Google’s dominance in the search market.

Microsoft is David to Google’s Goliath

Microsoft is still trying to get into the search market. The Live Search product isn’t totally mature, but it’s getting better. Right now, the only thing really keeping them in the game is that Windows ships with Internet Explorer 8 and it’s set by default to the MSN.com homepage and the default search engine is Live Search. This, my friends, is the battle ground.

Forget which browser got you there, they money is in the search. Microsoft doesn’t make money when you use Internet Explorer, and they don’t lose money when you use Firefox or Chrome, at least not directly. They lose money when you use the search tools that are set up by default by those browsers.

I know that some of you might have a hard time seeing Microsoft as the underdog, but in the world of search, that is absolutely the case.

Think of it more bluntly. If the EU wins this case, it’s the rough equivalent of the EU forcing Microsoft to just hand money to Google, millions of dollars on a daily basis.

Keep Your Eye On The Ball

I know what you are thinking, and I hear what you have said in the past. “The customer needs choice.” The argument against Windows has been that the market share keeps other OSes like OS X and Linux beat down. Get ready boys, the same game is coming and it’s going to define where and how you search the internet. I use Google too, and I think it’s a great search engine, but it’s all but consumed every other search tool. Yahoo is on it’s last legs and Microsoft is not far behind them in market share. As much as they sing “Don’t be evil.” around the corporate campus’ campfires, Google has an eye on your personal information. The ads they sell are only as valuable as the information they can get about you before they serve them.

Look at this problem closely, and don’t take sides too quickly. Microsoft may have a bad rap over the OS Monopoly issues, but it’s also 100% responsible for building a platform that crossed oceans and united the world through the internet. If you think that you would have the technology at your fingertips without the ground that Windows 95 broke, you are sadly mistaken. Now there is a vast landscape in cyberspace, it will be these types of steps that hand the keys of the internet to Google.

It was so subtle, most people didn’t notice. Those who did complained at the top of their lungs. I for one, welcome the change and think it’s the first step in making Twitter more usable.

In case you don’t know, here is the deal. Until yesterday, when someone you follow, replied to anyone, you saw “@soandso this is probably a reply but you don’t know what to, so don’t you won’t get it.”

It was such a problem that a few sites crept up, like TweetConvo that you could paste the url to the Tweet into and it displays the entire conversation in a threaded fashion so you could figure out the context around the Tweet. It’s actually a pretty cool site that is most likely crushed by this development.

Personally I get it. I do understand that it will make it more difficult to find new people to follow based on who your friends talk to, but I am also part of the group that think people “Friend” way too many people as it is.

So as of now, on the web and in 3rd party apps like Tweet Deck, you will no longer see @replies unless you also follow the person being replied to. This should take major strain off the network and make your feed quite a bit cleaner to see. Even if you hate it, get used to it, it’s a change for the better. And tell your friends to #FollowFriday people that they think you should follow!

If you are not following the current trends in Internet Service Providers (ISPs) closely, you might wake up surprised one day. On the tail end of an un-successful, but not over,  fight against net-neutrality, ISPs have decided to take another stab and killing the blistering growth of internet video to save the flailing cable industry.

This time it’s called Metered Bandwidth. With big hitters like Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner on-board and actively testing in markets, I find myself concerned and considering a pre-emptive change to how I get internet access currently.

The problem is simple. Cable companies exist to sell you TV. If you have internet and television through cable, simply examine your bill. If you have something similar to mine you will probably find something like this:

So basically if you count the cable boxes and cable service itself, it accounts for 82% of my already monstrous bill. It’s obvious that they have good reason to be shaking in their boots. With services like Hulu and Netflix providing compelling alternatives at free or close to it ($8.99 for Netflix to stream all you want) it’s a changing world. My father recently sent his cable box back to watch all his basic cable on a Windows Vista Media Center PC and all of his on-demand content on Netflix.

So how do they try to make it up? Let’s look at this AT&T alternative. Your internet fee provides 5GB of bandwidth per month. A single HD quality movie is 7GB. They charge you $1 per Gigabyte when you go over. Let’s look into my mom and dad in this future. They watch a lot of TV. Usually two are on in the house for I would guess 4 hours a day. If both were getting video content online at HD quality, this quickly becomes a problem. If you take the 7GB HD movie, assume it’s two hours long, you can come up to about 3.5GB per hour per TV. So in one evening they could consume 28GB of bandwidth. Extrapolate that for a month, and you come up with something shocking. Do the math, $835 in overage charges.

I may be a cynic, but it sounds like direct approach to try and kill internet delivered video in it’s tracks. The scary part is that the government does not declare internet a utility, so the regulations that were put in place against telephone and cable providers regarding television pricing, do not have any power to protect the consumer.

The end to this horrifying alternate reality is that cable companies protect their dying model, innovation gets crushed, and customers suffer a trifecta of Quality, Value and Choice.

I want to end saying I definitely understand that if they don’t make the money with Cable anymore, they have to come up with an alternate business model. I, for one, do not mind paying more than I pay now for pure internet access. (not more total, more than the internet service portion of my bill) If I was able to get all of my video entertainment online, I would gladly pay $100 a month for fast, reliable and un-metered bandwidth.

I need a brush up on some .net coding against web services and decided to play around with Twitter a little bit.

I decided to take a somewhat nefarious route and game Twitter a little bit. I sat at my computer last night for a few hours, by this morning I had the Follower Farmer (no I won’t release it, that’s not the point.)

What does it do you ask? Well it pings the public time-line, it get’s the latest 20 screen names, it follows all of them under my account, and then it waits two whole minutes and then un-follows them. Amazingly enough upwards of 20% of the random strangers follow me back!

I don’t know them, they don’t know me. They have no interest in my content and have really no clue what I write about. Regardless I picked up over 100 followers in a few hours.

It’s this little experiment that makes me wonder if there is any hope for Twitter after it attempts to monetize itself.

I know I won’t pay anything to use it. Many of my friends and colleagues agree. Have you ever followed someone who randomly invited you? Someone you knew nothing about? Interesting….