We be takin' Apps OLD SKOOL!

I apologize for what's about to follow:

Maaaan, Apps be the hottest shit yo! You can gettem on yo' iPhone, and now forz your BB, you see? Some whack assholes even be trying to push 'em for the Twitter!...THE TWITTER! But I bet you didn't see this comin' yallll!

APPS FOR YO' COMPUTER!

say whaaat?!

That's right Homes, we takin' it back (waaaay back), right back to when you didn't even call em apps anymore because they's was all like just programs and shit. fer real?

TRUTH!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sorry for that, but when I see this new service called Smish (http://smi.sh/smish/smish/home/ WTF get a better home URL??), that's the only thing that plays in my head to make up for how ridiculous the concept is. I mean seriously, you are making an app store for a computer? Mobile devices? Those are so yesterday, it's time to bring those users home to their PC's because they're just too dumb to use the Internet and download real programs or buy software like we've been doing for the last 30 years. Time to buy a WordPress App on the PC app store because I can't go to Wordpress.com and download the free plugins or extensions or program suggestions. Time to download a million and one small useless apps to clutter up my PC when I can just use a full size browser and my favourites bar! Hmm maybe I'll download some new accelerometer app some guy made to..., oh wait...Damn my useless stationary overpowered full screened fast internet computer with an ever improving user experience and great input devices!

For those who can't figure out how to use anything but their phones, now you can make your full PC act like one! Tweetdeck, Word, Firefox, RSS readers, Email, Facebook, browser bookmarks, embedded web flash games, basic downloads and installs, eCommerce? Who can figure those complicated fuckers out! It's time to bring it all together into one Adobe Air app that uses a 1/4 of your desktop screen! I'm just not sure how they are going to download the Smish app without going to some sort of PC app marketplace, and if they make one, then we'll need another marketplace to download that marketplace, and then we've hit an infinite loop!

If you can figure out how to download the Smish App, you probably don't need Smish. Granted there are a lot of people out there who don't know how to use computers, but if you can use your phone that well, is there no transfer of technical knowledge?

Steam is great, Impulse is a clone with some more desktop software, but obviously those are more game focused and are great for what they do, they make sense, but Smish? Seriously?

The sad thing is that probably a ton of people will download and use it, and the next thing you know we are all asking ourselves why don't we just fashion a Smish OS out of Linux and beat their pants off? We can package it with underpowered notebooks and cool looking but discount PCs!

How the F did they get $4,000,000 in funding? Is it any wonder why they didn't detail where it came from? And now they are making it easy so developers can transfer iPhone apps into PC apps! What a world! What a fucking world! Aren't iPhone apps made to not use Flash, but PCs can easily support it?

Let's see: SmartPhones were made to be like mini-computers, but since they sucked we were forced to make hard to install programs that work with limited processing power, screen size, input functionality, and bandwidth, basically "Apps" that are underpowered versions of what you can already do on your computer. App stores came to be as an easy way to distribute, install and earn revenue from your hard porting and constraining work. Sure you can do some cool new stuff now that you have access to a GPS and accelerometer, but really, why would you then want to port these already gimped apps back onto a fully fledged system where in 95% of the time they would get no value from the GPS or accelerometer because they don't exist on that machine? Why would you want to pay for things that are free and share all your personal information with Smish through their Adobe Air app so they can resell it to marketers and ad firms?

It's like staying in a tiny Japanese hotel room, then going home to your 5 bedroom house, building a replica of that small hotel room in your house, then only living in that, ignoring the rest of your house (and you have to pay for all the renovation and addition of plumbing).

An app store running on a system that lets you freely and easily download and run apps where everyone already knows how to do it, how Meta! It's like the guy who decided to start selling bottled water, perhaps I'll start selling Canned Air!

I don't know what more to say right now other than Wow!

#heweb09 Disaster Fun!

I was lucky enough to be following someone on Twitter who was actually attending #heweb09, and consequently putting out some of the best tweets too!

I first noticed a bunch of snarky tweets, which are always intriguing, and then I noticed the hashtag and decided to check it out. I was very amused to find, in real time, a conversation going on about a really shitty ass keynote speaker! The comments painted a picture of him in my mind, despite the fact I couldn't see him, but then someone streamed it live! I got a few chuckles and was amazed at how this new phenomenon was happening. It wasn't just people tweeting about live shit on TV, or some lame crap like that, nor a stadium of tweeters, it was a conference type room with a bunch of intelligent people meeting to learn, and a majority of them were all feeling the same things and the ability to share it quietly with others there.

Akin to passing notes in class, people would discuss how they'd love to leave, but opposed to notes, anyone in the world could read them! The talk started to pick up more and more, and then the bigwigs noticed, showed up and left comments about lynch mobs and how social media doesn't give us the right to heckle others, blah blah, but all in all if someone wants to put themselves out there, they have to be prepared for the consequences, if it wasn't on twitter, it would have been on everyone's blogs the next day anyways!

I did find a follow up blog here, and it actually mentions something I did to have fun after seeing the following tweet:
I saw this and thought damn, wouldn't this be a fun real time social experiment! I rushed to the nearest website I could remember, cafepress.com, made a store, and booted up paint.NET and make a picture, uploaded it onto a shirt, and put it on sale!


The ability to add to a real time joke from thousands of miles away intrigued me! I was watching the fun anyways, so why not try and participate and see what happens?

I was initially scared people would think I'm some sort of scammer/spammer/opportunist, but I wasn't doing this trying to sell shirts, I just wanted to see some people laugh, and show the power of how quickly some joke of a Keynote at a Higher Education Web conference can turn into a global joke where people can already buy merchandise world wide!

I shared the link with bitly, and you can actually see the stats by going here.
The stats are as follows:
187 Total clicks (at time of writing, 170 were on first day)
8 Tweets (2 were from me, and no one actually retweeted me, but made their own tweets linking to the shirt)
and about 150 of those tweets were in the first hour, and 75ish in the first 5 minutes form what I remember!

Anyways, it was pretty fun to add to something from miles away with only about 5 minutes of input, and it's also pretty cool to see quickly rising click counts in seconds and minutes!

The blog I linked to above had a lot of good points and things learned from the conference. I also like that the comments were all pretty smart, well read, and not the general crap you usually see. I lol at the anonymous comment saying how it was bad, and people were mean and idiots and he's glad to be home, I wonder who wrote that? haha!