Category Archives: Internet

Reviews that aren’t

You know what I really hate?

Googling for “product X review” and finding bazillions of web sites that purport to be reviews of product X, but which in fact are just shopping web sites which have manufacturer’s information, or possibly a “story” written word-for-word from a press release, and nothing else.

Oh sure, some of them might have space for a product review, if some hapless customer wants to donate their time and effort into writing one. But if it’s [obscure shopping site] then why would anybody bother?

And some might have comparative price listings from various retail and online shops. With reviews… of the shops.

No wonder I end up looking on amazon.com (where there’s enough customers who actually care about writing reviews to make it worthwhile) or epinions.com, but both being US-based means they don’t cover some models available in other countries.

Can we get Google to somehow sort the wheat from the chaff here? Or will some non-US sites rise from the rest and get a critical mass of reviewers?

Oh, and can anybody tell me if the Epson C59 printer offered today on Zazz is a cheap and cheerful (if ugly) bargain, or a foul demon waste of my hard-earned $50?

Real Estate Websites Suck: Part 2

Everytime, every single time I’ve tried to use Real Estate Websites for real-world stuff they come up short.

Searching, the basic function of the Real Estate Website, just doesn’t work.

I want to buy a house in a suburb. Not a unit, not a duplex, not an apartment.

So I search for houses, and blocks of land. And included in the result set is a semi-detached home. How the hell am I meant to bulldoze one of those? Is this ability to call a semi-detached house a free-standing house unique to only one website?

One site, Domain, doesn’t let you specify that you don’t want semis, so, of a fashion they can be excused. Except they’re missing a feature the other sites give you. So, Domain sucks.

The other two sites, RealEstateView and RealEstate.com.au both suck because they include properties I specifically told them to exclude. “Oh,” I hear you say, “it’s not their fault. The agent put in dud data.” This would be an excuse if the listing fees were a few bucks. But for hundreds of dollars, they can afford to have someone on minimum wage spend a few minutes sanity checking each listing, or they can have text matching algorithms running over the listing looking for words like “detached” and flagging that entry for review because “house” listings ought not include the word “detached”. For example. Or, heaven forbid, allow the users of the site to report misleading listings for subsequent correction. That would be nice. No more million dollar homes turning up in my sub-$600K search.

Part 1 of this (rather long) series of rants was sent to all three websites. None responded, other than with auto-responders. They all suck so much!

Real Estate Websites Suck: Part 1

Oh God, Real Estate Websites Suck harder than an Electrolux. One little thing after another, they just suck. Today’s example: Search. Senario: I’ve decided to move closer to Daniel, so I want to live in a particular street in a particular suburb.

RealEstateView
I went to www.RealEstateView.com.au, and that worked, of a fashion. I searched for a keyword (the street name) for my desired suburb. No results. Which is fine, it’s a big place and a small street. But how to stay on top of the market – I know, get emailed when a new property turns up. Unfortunately, if there are no results you can’t get emailed in the future. If you get no hits, rather than being offered the chance to be told about this stuff when it comes up, you get told to search again. EBay deals with this problem just fine; you get to save the search and get emails if anything shows up. RealEstateView doesn’t.

I thought I’d outsmarted the website. I signed up for a search that did succeed, with an intention of editing it. I got the email, it said

If you did not request, or do not want, a membership in the
ViewALERT email system, please accept our apologies and
ignore this message. You will be able to de-activate your
membership by clicking the de-activation link on your first
ViewALERT email.

Great, so I can’t edit the search until the search finds something new. Garh!

Defeated, I moved on to:

RealEstate.com.au
Which failed horribly. I couldn’t even do a keyword search. Can’t limit my searches to a single street.

I could get it to email me alerts, with the same crude search terms as on their website (price, bedrooms, suburb). The confirmation email included my username and password. Great. Ten years we’ve been doing this shit, we’ve managed to figure out that’s not how confirmation emails ought to be done, you’re meant to email a link – click on it and it’s clear you’re a human. But no, here’s your details in cleartext. What dickheads.

Next:

Domain
Same problem.

YouTube goes international

Google just launched a number of YouTube international sites: “Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Ireland, and the UK.”

Given Australia has its own Google, can we expect a YouTube Australia any time soon? Maybe. But it looks like first they’ll have to kick off the domain squatter that owns youtube.com.au — some guy called Aaron whose contact address is a Hotmail account. Which is interesting, because normally to own a .com.au address you have to have a registered company or business name that is related to the domain.

NZ is more liberal, and similarly youtube.co.nz is owned by someone on an india.com account.

No doubt there will be similar issues in other territories. Which makes you wonder why these companies don’t nab their domains around the world when they get their first million or two in venture capital (like Amazon has; they’ve owned amazon.com.au for years). It’d save heartache later.

More on Safari for Windows

Safari logoWired’s benchmarks show Safari is slower than IE7 and Firefox. And within a day of its release, 6 security holes were found in it. ArsTechnica was similarly uncomplimentary.

Does it matter? Perhaps not. Jobs is obviously doing two things here: The first is continuing to get Apple’s applications onto Windows desktops, following the path of iTunes and Quicktime. Mind you, Safari is several zillion times less compelling at present; maybe that will improve… and if not, hey chuck them all together into one big bloated mega-package. “Click here to install iTunes 8 + QuickTime + Safari (a billion Mb download; a zillion Mb hard disk space required)”.

(Seriously, iTunes used to be a 20Mb download. Chucking in QuickTime blew it out to 33Mb.)

The other is making it easier for developers (some of whom don’t particularly want to buy Macs) make their web apps work on both Macs and the iPhone. That’s ultimately good for sales of Apple hardware, since more apps will work better with it, further moving away from the crazy “You must have IE on Windows to run this web page properly” thing that some people seem to think is sensible. (Those people really get my goat up. Yeah, sure, take a universal platform like the web and mangle it.)

From the reaction of some people though (Tony: “Wow, Safari really is a beta. Crashing all over the place.”) it’s got a way to go before it can even be used for that. If and when I try it, I’ll be quarantining it in a virtual machine for sure.

Scott “Lazycoder” sarcastically notes his blog is now iPhone-enabled, as it displays properly in Safari. heh.

Safari for Windows

Apple announces a version of the Safari web browser for Windows. A public beta is already available. Jobs claims it’s twice as fast as IE. Hmm.

A lot of Windows users certainly have and use iTunes, but is that because they’re locked-in by their iPod, or because they actually like it more than Windows Media Player or WinAmp or the many alternatives? My problem with it is it actively breaks some of the Windows interface standards, and tries to pretend you’re using a Mac. Will Safari do the same? Judging from the video demo, yes.

And what syncing software will ship with the iPhone? Will it be something that tries to encroach on the contacts and calendar territory of Outlook/Outlook Express, perhaps?

PS. Perhaps iTunes users will not have a choice but to install Safari, just like they’re forced into installing QuickTime now: Mary Jo Foley notes: “Jobs said that Apple plans to use iTunes as a distribution vehicle for Safari for Windows. He noted that there are a million downloads of iTunes a day, with 500 million of those going to Windows machines.”

PS. Midday. Joel Spolsky rips into it: “…it takes an insane amount of time to launch: 57 seconds… By comparison, Firefox takes about 3 seconds and Internet Explorer takes about 2.”

The out-of-control Inbox

I’m one of those people whose Inbox slowly gets out of control. Here’s a good article on dealing with it: How to crank through your Gmail. (via Scoble) Of course, the trick for me is finding the time to do the initial cleanup.

I’ve actually almost managed it on my work Inbox. I got it to the stage where there is usually less than a screenful of emails. Virtually everything else goes into a folder called Inbox Archive, which is my Outlook equivalent of GMail’s archive. Of course, if I leave it unchecked for a day or two, the Inbox fills up again.

Got to keep at it constantly.

Firefox Spellcheck dictionary

A couple of times now I’ve had to hunt down the location of the dictionary for Firefox because in the popup for a misspelled word has ‘Add to dictionary’ too close to the word I want to change to (and now I’ve inserted a misspelling into my personal dictionary).

The location of the dictionary for Firefox (under Windows) is: somewhere under Documents and Settings is the file persdict.dat.

Maybe this time I’ll remember it. I suggest this behaviour shows a usability problem.

More broadband in Crikey and the ABC

Economist Joshua Gans has taken up my cause of “what the hell do we need fast broadband for?” in CoreEcon More broadband in Crikey and the ABC – he asks, “why should we give money/monopoly rights/subsidization to Telstra to create a higher speed network? If there was some economic benefit in it then it would fund itself.”

Would someone please ask Kevin Rudd that same question? Please don’t spend $10b of my taxes so that pimply-faced teenagers can download porn faster.

Japan and Korea has pervasive 100Mb networks. Has there been a big business uptake? No, they’re using that bandwidth for gaming. Don’t get me wrong, gaming’s great and all, but I’d rather you spent my tax dollars on… I dunno… stopping global warming. If I want to game, let me spend my money on it, not the taxpayers’.

It used to be that TV was the opiate of the masses. Now it appears to be downloadable video is.

Waste of time

Complete waste of time: Swatch Internet Time. What a stupid concept that was. Centred on Biel, Switzerland (Swatch’s headquarters). Accuracy to only 1 minute 26.4 seconds. I remember for a while CNN.com displayed Internet timestamps. Totally meaningless to almost everybody. Just stick to UTC fellas, at least people have a chance of understanding that.

Beware of the trolls

Why do people reply to trolls on Usenet? You diligently set up your killfiles to filter-out the morons, but some (apparently otherwise sensible) people keep replying to them, and so their caustic stupid waste-of-time posts appear back in the threads.

Maybe I need to try a decent newsreader, like one that doesn’t just hide posts from the nominated morons, but also hides posts in reply to them. Something better than Outlook Express. (But am I likely to be motivated enough to find and install something, for occasional use?)

I’ve also dabbled with Google Groups. Love the search, but the functionality is a bit lacking. Why is it that Google Groups includes no killfile/filter at all? And then there’s the insanity of it posting your Real Live Undisguised Email address in every post when there’s so many spambots about. Lucky I use a GMail address for that; if Google made the problem, they can deal with filtering the spam that results.

Youtube duped

A teenager from Western Australia claimed to YouTube that a whole bunch of Australian Broadcasting Corporation clips from their show “The Chaser’s War On Everything” were in breach of copyright, and had to be taken down. YouTube duly did so, but then discovered that the kid wasn’t representing the ABC at all — it was a hoax. Indeed, the ABC then told YouTube to put the content back up; that they wanted to get it “out there” as much as they could.

An investigation showed the form sent into YouTube, which was filled-in by hand, and claimed to be acting on behalf of the “Australian Broddcasting Corperation“, with a Hotmail address given as a contact point. John Beohm writes that YouTube then apologised to the individual posters whose videos had been pulled.

In these days of the DMCA, it certainly makes a nice change for the copyright-holder to recognise that the more people see their content, the better, and I suppose it’s not surprising that YouTube is skittish, but a little basic checking of the facts wouldn’t go astray.