A year and a half ago, I made the stupid mistake of trying out a cut-rate domain registar/hosting provider: Host Department. For the low price of something like $80, I got my domain registered plus hosting, and it was far less expensive than the host I've been with for years. What did I learn? You get what you pay for.

After a couple of unexplained outages and a slower-than-molasses-in-January server, I decided my experiment had failed, and that's when the fun began. First, I wanted to simply continue with my domains registered there, but hosted at my regular host. Oops; they cancelled my whole account, and I lost my business domain (fourlittlebees.com). It was being held for $30, during which time I could pay $200 to get it back. Who's squatting on it and has been since the second they "deleted" my account? ENOM.

Once I saw that mess, I started the process to transfer my remaining three domains out of there. Six months later, I got one domain, but the .com domain? The one I've PAID to transfer TWICE because Host Department has failed to release it each time? Now squatted on. By ENOM.

At what point is ICANN going to grow a pair and force registrars to abide by the terms they agree to as registrars? If I look on the control panel for my "new" registrar, you can see the transfer, still active. Still waiting for the EPP key that never comes. ICANN is nothing but a toothless figurehead setting out policies that never seem to be followed with no repercussions. Complain to them? They send you back to the registrar who tells you they can't "fix" it since the domain was sold. TO THEMSELVES.

As long as Google continues to allow squatters to run Adsense (and why shouldn't they... they make money on them, right?) and ICANN continues to turn a blind eye to predatory squatting by registrars, the practice will continue. But I'd avoid Host Department like the plague. The money I thought I would save didn't even come close to paying for my time and aggravation.
 

There is too much socializing and not enough doing.

I'm frustrated by the amount of conversation that centers around Twitter. And how Twitter doesn't work. And how it should be fixed. And how it should be distributed. And open-sourced. And we should form a committee. On groups. And then decide what to do.

And then there's Plurk, the new meme. And how it should be used. And how it shouldn't. And whether you should.

And let's not forget FriendFeed, and how to use it. And how to filter it. And why it's important. And the philosophy of.

Is anyone actually DOING anything anymore? You can't even consider it navel-gazing when everyone is so far into the collective navel that they've turned into some Beetlejuice-esque grotesquery.

Does Twitter need to be distributed to scale? No. This isn't rocket science. Far larger apps are working all day every day, and it's a darn good thing, or else the stock exchanges would collapse and our medical records would get lost and our credit card billing would be COMPLETELY out of whack.

So rather than forming a new group to discuss features that should be added/subtracted/modified and the design of a new distributed system, more people should get off their butts and build something, ANYTHING. Because I'm bored as hell of reading this stuff. And if anyone thinks it's taking Twitter too long to fix something, how long do they really think redesign by committee is going to take?

My husband will be releasing a new app in a couple of weeks, with the formal announcement coming at The Server Side Symposium in Prague. I really thought after the bubble burst that we were done with this start-up mentality of him up until all hours coding something and taking trips everywhere in the world and leaving me home with kids. It's going to be recital week for my two oldest, which means I'll have four kids to wrangle getting to the auditorium, getting make-up on, etc. Alone.

I've learned, however, that you can't keep a good developer down, especially when he's not working in a start-up full-time. He wants to build things and design them and if he's in a job where he's not doing that, then he's doing it on his own.

His first little side project was the Open Spaces Developer Challenge, and he had so much fun doing that he decided to keep going and build something else. Since he's working with GigaSpaces on that project too, I'll no longer be covering them for Profy, and will instead turn any story ideas over to my co-authors if they arise. It's a bummer, because I think they are a great company and I've been interested in their platform ever since Jason first told me what they were all about, but I'm all about making sure I don't appear to have any conflict of interest. With some of the things I see online every day in my reading, it seems like I'm one of a dying breed of bloggers who doesn't like even a whiff of conflict of interest. When I'm talking to other people looking for a platform for EC2, I include GigaSpaces competitors as well, including Appistry. I evangelze products I love with no worries in most cases, but when there is even a tangential personal involvement, I want to steer clear. Aside from future mentions of Jason's projects, which I will of course be pimping with bells on, confetti tossing, and a full disclaimer of who he is, this is probably the last time I'll tell anyone how much I think the folks at GigaSpaces rock, so enjoy it. :)

I'm very sorry if you left a comment or replied to a comment I left you and it's missing.

You see, I deleted a bunch.

The deletions were not malicious or in a fit of temper or anything else; I was simply not in "Profy" mode, must have thought that I was in my email (since I use Gmail nearly exclusively, a delete is never a real delete unless I'm in my Junk or Trash tags), and just hit delete several times over until I realized what I had done. A few emails back and forth with our CTO here at Profy later, I discovered that the comments were really, most sincerely, deleted.

It really shouldn't be that big a deal, right? After all, it wasn't like I deleted TONS of them; it was only a few. But as I discovered during the process of writing an article about comments and intellectual property definitions on the web, I realized that as Netizens, we are very attached to our comments and posts. I love going back in time on my personal blog to see what I was thinking 5 and 6 years ago; when life was different. I also like going back and reading the comment threads. I don't think (aside from spammers) that we take the time to leave comments on something unless we truly care about the subject and the conversation. It may be merely vanity, but I LIKE knowing what people are saying about something that I've written. Does it provoke a new line of thinking in someone? Do people think I don't have a clue in the world? Humans are communal creatures, and we want to know that our thoughts have value, whether it's receiving comments on a blog piece or replies to comments that we've left for an author. Beyond the idea of physical ownership of those comments is the emotional attachment.

Doesn't everyone say that? I just feel like I am constantly behind.

Every second, more feeds flow into my reader and I feel panicked. I have comments on blog articles I really need to reply to, but I don't want to just slap something up there quickly; people respond with well-though-out comments, and I want to give them the same attention that they gave whatever I wrote. And the worst is the pitches from PR people. Unlike many of the bloggers who have complained, I welcome each and every pitch I get. I know how tough it is to work that side of the desk and I wish I had the bandwidth to cover each and every company, or at the very least, reply to each and every email with some type of response. For the Profy blog, we just don't have time to cover everything since we  try to give things we do cover a more in-depth analysis. I wonder sometimes if it's more offensive to not reply or if it would be okay to reply with a boilerplate response along the lines of "I'm so sorry I don't have room in the schedule to cover your launch/announcement at this time. Please keep us in the loop for further developments, because we truly are interested."

Even with the companies I've completely raked over the coals in a review, I'm still interested to see if they've made changes to improve their product or fixed the things I thought were broken.

This morning I went to the Rochester Open Coffee Club meet-up, and while it was great meeting people here in my own town I've been talking to online, it's also horrifyingly depressing how much of the conversation still centered on Silicon Valley.

When I first set out on the Web nearly 14 years ago, we were told it was the future of business; that we would be able to do everything online and be part of a truly global economy. People would be freed from cube farms and able to work wherever they were and location would be completely irrelevant. And yet the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Profy is a truly global company. The writers live all over the U.S. The company headquarters are in San Francisco. The development team is in Siberia. I think we've made it work; up until Web 2.0 Expo last month, I'd never met Svetlana in person. It was amazing to have worked with someone for over a year, consider that person a friend, and yet never have met. And yet, I realized hearing about the companies here in Rochester, that we need to cultivate the area as a tech community much more.

The reason that Silicon Valley is so much at the forefront of the industry has absolutely nothing to do with the concentration of people there or the environment. It has to do with the fact that people are constantly tripping over each other, moving from company to company, and making contacts that lead to other contacts. There is no reason why things HAVE to be there, only that they have fostered a culture where it's not only acceptable, but also recommended to jump companies every couple of years. It's the incidental meet-ups that lead you to that next contact that facilitate development and foster the interconnected atmosphere that tech thrives on.

But for all its "tech hub" reputation, Silicon Valley is no different than anyplace else on earth. The reliance is still on meeting those people face-to-face in order to keep the industry alive there. And if more areas fostered that sort of community, I think we would see little mushrooms of activity springing up all over the U.S. and other parts of the world, and help everyone out in the end. Rochester has one of the fastest-growing housing markets in the country. We are moving out of the far-too-extended era where we relied almost exclusively on manufacturing to support the local economy. And we are ripe to foster a start-up culture of our own, only different. The mindset here isn't the constant migration to the newest, shiniest thing. Rochester is known for stressing company loyalty and quality products, and I wonder what companies could do here with a workforce unaccustomed to waiting for options to vest before moving on to the next possibility, and committing to building something and sticking with it.  

I spent my afternoon playing outside with my kids, only to come back inside, check my feeds, and see that HP is almost certainly buying EDS. HP. Buying. EDS.

I can't even wrap my head around that.

I've already wondered what's going through HP's collective head when it comes to marketing themselves in the Web 2.0 space, but this one is boggling.

I did five years at EDS. Five. Years. With a company that seemed lost in a post-Perot world with vestiges of the quasi-military Perot culture. And now HP wants to gain their own ready-made family to compete with IBM services. I'd like to know how those meetings went. Xerox just resigned their contract with EDS for $263 million LAST MONTH. Does HP really think Xerox will happily allow the newly minted HP employees on the premise to continue providing services?

The tendency to acquire instead of build is fast becoming the new way of the world. You have to wonder, however, if these companies think through how well merging companies will work in the end. My guess is Xerox is already on the phone with Perot Systems or IBM to replace EDS.   

I haven't forgotten my blog. I'm just trying to fix all the damage that I did at Web 2.0 Expo demonstrating the Profy platform. Maybe I should have thought about that beforehand and created a dummy account before I went all FUBAR with my own blog.

It was great getting to meet people, putting faces with names, talking without trying to interpret the intent behind the words on the screen. And Expo had such a wide range of people there, from people there to learn about Web 2.0 to see how their business fit into the space to industry leaders. Great swag, fun time, and best of all, no Norovirus.

But boy, is it taking me forever to catch back up!

I will admit that I have a daily struggle with being online. I've been online for longer than I care to think about at this point as it shows my age, but I realize it is very easy to get me down when it comes to online interactions. I started out on IRC and Usenet and those of you old enough to actually remember the Time Before Web know how nasty it could get, and most likely still does.

When I first saw Gary Vaynerchuk's entreaty to participate in Good People Day, I really didn't think I could participate. My world has gotten very small writing primarily about Web 2.0, a community which is at risk of exploding like the sun and turning into a huge black hole if the infighting continues. And while Gary insists that the people out there who have attracted a lot of haters have a good side too, I'm not seeing their Frosted MiniWheats sweet side at all.

I've been reading others' contributions to the day and had to do a lot of soul searching to think about my time online and the people I have met along the way who have made my experiences online a better one. In no particular order:

my husband, Jason Carreira. While he no longer blogs and generally scoffs at anything with the terms "social" or "2.0" in them, he is generally able to tamp down his impatience when I quiz him on a development issue or architecture question. He's forgotten more about web development than I ever knew, and I'm grateful to have him as a sounding board when I think I'm getting in over my head when I'm writing.

Sundry. I think most of her readers know her real name by now, but in the realm of the "mommy blogger" she's a stand-out. While her reader base has grown over the years that I've been reading her blog, I have NEVER seen her tire of replying to comments, engaging her community, or replying to individual emails, unlike many other bloggers I've seen who have gotten too big for their britches. Every time I feel like I can't reply to people, especially detractors, I'm reminded of her example of how to truly build an online community.

Drama 2.0. I know it probably seems like an odd choice, but this industry needs a healthy injection of humor. The timing is probably coincidental, but every time I'm seriously ready to pack it all in and toss my laptop out the closest window, there is a new post about Kool Aid drinkers that reminds me that in the overall scheme of life as we know it, the bitchmemes really aren't very important.

Svetlana, who took a chance on someone shifting career gears for about the eleventy-hundredth time. She's encouraging, trusting, and allows me to log in every single day to rant away, even when it's a controversial topic and it may end up biting the hand that feeds us.

Every single person who has commented or linked back to me, or emailed me about a post. I have a terrible time with email debt, where I see a trackback or a comment or an email and want to sit on it for a little while before responding with whatever blather comes out of my mouth, and lose it in the sea of communications. I have appreciated each and every one, whether it was a compliment or a put-down. The compliments are what keep me going, and the put-downs always make me think.

Lastly, my eight-year-old daughter, who begs me regularly to let her spend more time online, and who already wants to learn Java and Ruby. I watch her and I remember myself and the first time I ever wrote a BASIC program  on a TRS-80. It's girls like her who will be the future of women in tech, and I hope each and every day that she has a brighter future in tech than I did.

So today is what I like to call Give Gifts Day. Technically, I quit having birthdays when I was 21, because I no longer had a use for them after I could vote and drink.

In the gifts received so far (which are, admittedly, less than usual since I'm quarantined in the house with whatever plague the children brought home from school) are Amazon gift certificates. The need for instant gratification has me hovering over the "download now" button next to the newest Mike Doughty album, but the other part of me wants to horde them.

You see, I'm one of those crazy people who wants a Kindle.

I know. They are expensive, and the content only adds more. And there's the whole DRM/tied to Kindle issue. And I can't pass the books on when I'm done. And, and, and.

But I love books. I'm the person who reads favorite books over and over and over again. I also burn through books fairly quickly, meaning that any time I'm going away, odds are I'll have to pack several books if I'm actually going to have some time to read.

The Kindle can hold 200 books. In my bag. At any time. I could conceivably have 200 of my most favorite books to keep me company. It's like carrying a library. Sure, it's pretty and appears to have a cool design, but it's the main idea that I could have all my favorite books with me at all times that just makes me want one so badly. It would take me a while to be able to replace my 200 favorites as eBooks, but oh, it would be so worth it.