I took the survey

And if you’re a web professional (or amateur, for that matter), you should too.  Click here, or on the link below to take it.

Tutorial: Move your Verizon contacts from your deactivated RAZR to your iPhone

So I stood in an utterly unglorious line for 7 hours last Friday. At 9:30, I got in line behind millions thousands hundreds of folks exactly like me in one respect: we all had a pathological fixation on the single goal of attaining a certain kind of phone before the end of the day.  The phone in question, I hardly need to mention, is a new 3G iPhone.

And it’s a great phone.  But over the past couple of years on Verizon Wireless, I have been unable to sync my phone’s contacts with my computer’s contacts.  Verizon has a service called Backup Manager, which I used, and on the few occasions when I needed to restore my phone’s contact list, this worked well.  But I initially had to manually input every entry into that phone (btw, a Motorola RAZR), and I didn’t relish the prospect of doing that again.

Looking for a lazier approach than manual transfer, I asked the twitternets for an answer.  Jonathan Snook (@snookca) pointed me to an iPhone Setting which allows an iPhone user to transfer contacts stored on another SIM card.  But Verizon’s a CDMA carrier, so there’s no SIM card to be had.  Brynn Evans (@bmevans) suggested I use backup manager in conjunction with a mysterious-yet-promising hack cooked up by Chris Messina (@factoryjoe).  An outstanding idea, and Chris was quick to confirm that he did, indeed, have such a hack on hand.  But Verizon stymied this plan by disallowing my login to Backup Assistant.  Despite the fact that I could still log into “My Account” on Verizon, apparently Backup Assistant is tied to discrete phone numbers.  Since my phone number had been taken away from them, they explained, my contacts backup was gone forever.  (Hogwash, I think, but this was the end of this exploration.)

So here’s the thing: even though the lazy options had been exhausted, there’s a not-at-all-difficult way to do move your contacts off your Verizon phone, but it requires you to have a discoverable bluetooth on your computer.  Here’s how it works.  You should be able to follow these steps to accomplish the same result – which is to say: easily move your contacts from your Verizon phone to your iPhone.

1. Turn your computer’s bluetooth on, and make sure it’s discoverable.
2. Turn on your Verizon phone’s bluetooth, and pair it with your computer.  (Never mind the fact that you’ve never found any good reason to do this before, you’ve got a great reason to do it now.)
3. If your computer’s a Mac, it will ask you what, in general, you’d like to do with files sent to it via bluetooth.  Create a folder on your desktop.  Name it something like “Files I Got Via Bluetooth.”
4. Select Contacts on your phone.
5. Select Options.
6. Scroll all the way to the bottom of that ridiculous list.  See the one that says, “Send Name Card.”  Select it.
7. Only one card will have been selected (likely the first on your contacts list).  Hit the “Add” softkey option, and select “Add All.”
8. Press “Send.”  It’s going to ask you where to send them.  You’re going to tell it to send to the computer to which you just paired your phone.
9. On your computer, notice all the activity.  You may need to confirm that it’s okay with you for the transfer to happen.  You may not.  Either way, if you go look inside the folder where your computer accepts bluetooth transfers, you’re going to see a ton of vcards (.vcf files) – one for each contact on your Verizon cell phone.  This is a very good thing.  It means you got that stuff out of the vault that is your now-useless old cell phone.
10. If you’re on a Mac, select all (Command+A) of those vcard files and open them.  I use Address Book, so that’s what I used.  If you use Entourage, fine.  Address Book will lead you through a duplicate removal/merge process, after which your old contacts will officially be part of your Address Book contacts.  Now you can move them onto your iPhone.  If you’re using MobileMe and have Push properly configured, your new contacts will arrive on your iPhone shortly with no further effort from you.  If not, there’s one more step.
11. The next time you sync your iPhone, make sure you’ve got Sync Contacts selected in iTunes.  Your contacts list on your iPhone will update itself, and your once trapped contacts from your old Verizon phone are now happily alive and usable on your iPhone.

I hope this works for you.  It worked for me like a charm.  But one little footnote: As I write this, it’s 11:00 PM.  I devised this method at 6:00 PM.  In the 5 hours since then, I’ve had hours of unrelated conversation over a big meal, and I re-stained a 150-year old dresser. My RAZR is sitting in my desk drawer at work, so my terminology might be slightly off. This tutorial was revised and now accurately reflects the Verizon OS’s language.

If you use this approach, I’d love your feedback.

A farewell letter to myspace

From: friend of Larry
Date: Apr 30, 2008 2:01 PM

I’ll start by admitting I’m not all that wild about Facebook either, though I know it’s all the rage in comparison to myspace. Truth be told, I kind of hate them both. I liked them as social experiments, but I dislike them as enduring entities competing for my attention.

The question myspace doesn’t answer for me is: Why should myspace matter to me? You folks on my friends list are important to me. Some of you are my closest friends. Some are fun acquaintances or net-friends I barely know or have never met. In a strange way, social networks equalize the value of those relationships. I talk with my friend Mike less because I see his myspace updates and go away with the illusion that we’re connected. Truth be told though, I haven’t talked to Mike in months. I have no idea what he’s up to. I don’t even know if he still lives in Atlanta, how is dad is, if he’s got a girl these days, etc. In short, myspace is partially responsible for the actual deterioration of some of my relationships.

Now, that’s not universally true. I met my girlfriend on myspace. MET HER. That’s a powerful testimonial. But with few, rare exceptions, myspace has not enhanced my social life.

So I’m thinking about canning my membership and profile here. Friends, I don’t want to lose contact with you over that. And if myspace messages have been the strongest contact we’ve had, then I want to make sure to replace it – get your email addresses, phone numbers, other social network names, etc – before I go. To those of you with whom I talk more regularly – you wouldn’t miss my presence on myspace anyway.

So drop me a note, give me your email. Make sure we’re current.

Lots of love,
Geoff
(http://www.myspace.com/emailgeoff)

Elliance Pittsburgh2050 Party webcast

The Elliance Pittsburgh2050 party – broadcasting live now on ustream.  If you’re in the area, come on down. 

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/elliancelive 

Pownce goes public

No longer in private Beta, Pownce opened its virtual doors to the whole wide world last night. The desktop app is revised and improved, even though it sports a bug or two to be squashed. Congrats to Pownce developer Leah Culver and all three cofounders (Leah, Daniel, and Kevin) on the successful launch of a great service. Now, with my fingers crossed that it scales gracefully…

Mobile pownce pounces twitter turf

The showdown has been brewing for months.  And ladies and germs, it’s finally upon us.With the release of its mobile version, Pownce smacks down its Davidian challenge to Twitter’s Goliath.

vs.

There has been debating, hemming, even – I imagine – silent hawing. Pownce has more features, more control. Twitter loves mobile. Pownce has better personal network definition. Twitter has a massive user base. Pownce has themes, file sharing, more than 140 characters. Twitter has Biz Stone. Pownce has Leah, Kevin, and Daniel! Twitter has 40404. End of debate.

Enter m.pownce.com. It’s not quite an SMS gateway, but then again it allows file sharing. It works great on iPhones and the 4-y.o. RAZR alike. It’s fast and, even though it’s still an alpha, quite solid.  Usable.  In fact, for anyone inclined to interact with such a service in a manner other than SMS, it’s downright killer.  Ratings, reply tracking, links, files, and calendar events.  What it doesn’t have (and twitter does) is profile management.  But that’s a minor and temporary annoyance.  The only marked shortfall against its more established competitor is lack of SMS gateway.  Having followed the development of Pownce since its inception, I’ll make a gentleman’s bet that SMS or MMS is in the offing.

Check it out, use it, weigh in. If you are not already on Pownce, you might need an invitation to get started. I have a good chunk I can give out right now, so if you need one let me know.

Here comes another bubble

Having recently declared to a few colleagues that we may well be already in the midst of a recession, how can I resist posting this video discovered today?

Microsoft Paint – Freelove’s future (is in the past)

Sometimes it seems this way, don’t it? Lately, I’ve felt like even the venerable Google has started down the same path with its Google Docs. Can you make that line any thinner? (no.)

Special thanks to Carolyn Sonnek for the video link on Pownce.

iPromise

How’s your iLife going?

I’m asking because I’m curious. I’m curious about whether or not your iLife is what you’d imagined – what you’ve been promised.

Mine isn’t, but I’m not surprised. Consumer advertising, after all, promises us far more in regards to products and services than what any product or service is capable of delivering. Deep spiritual satisfaction from a walkman? Social fulfillment and a permagrin from a hard drive full of jpgs? Become the toast of your friends (which of course, number in the scores and consist of supermodel geniuses and dapper playboys) thanks to your German engineered car? I learned fairly well to look through the veneer of consumer advertising when I was a freshman in college and read Ways of Seeing, by John Berger. But consumer advertising is an adaptive beast, relentless and ever more persuasive.

In a world where massive, empty promises are routinely made, what are the consequences for our expectations of the world – most specifically and critically of the other people in our lives? After all, people make and keep (or don’t keep) promises. Implicit, explicit, marriage, work, etc. If any number of 1,000’s of things in the world can be promoted as panaceas for a yearning in us (a yearning I’d say has been amplified and manipulated to respond to the promises of advertising), what kind of fulfillment expectations arise? Am I likely to work through a difficult stretch in a relationship when I’m pretty well conditioned to believe there’s a newer, better one out there that will require less work and will provide greater – if not complete – fulfillment?

iWonder, if we stripped our world of the context of accepted empty promises of fulfillment, would we re-adapt and learn to nurture our relationships better? Would we still have a 50% divorce rate? Consider this passage from an article on Askmen.com, wherein the author plainly argues that women and men change after marriage (for the worse) and that doing so is fundamentally unfair:

Why shouldn’t one have a say if their wife or husband puts on too much weight from sitting on the couch and eating nachos all day? When you buy a car, a BMW for instance, you expect it to remain a BMW. The car won’t become a GoodYear blimp with time, it will inevitably get old but will always remain a BMW.

This, from an article categorized under “marriage advice.” Complete article on Askmen.com. Would anyone else read this and wonder why, oh why, anyone would compare a person to a product and expect a human being to behave like a car? Yet, I find this way of “philosophy” prevalent. And seeing its prevalence turns me away from marriage. It’s not the changing spouse I’m afraid of – it’s the likely expectation in her that I’ll be like that car. It’s the shameful recognition that, in me, there’s the same expectation of her.

It’s the knowledge that we all judge one another against the expectations made by impossible promises – iPromises, if you will.

iPoddy Training

It’s official: the “touch” revolution is expanding beyond iPhone. No longer the stuff of UI geek wet dreams, having moved beyond the Microsoft propaganda for “surface” (and all its satirical variants), beyond the Treo’s broken “keypad,” the “touch” interface made popular by iPhone in June has spawned a sibling. Or a cousin.

The question is not whether the touch interface is extremely cool, or whether or not the iPod Touch is a good product. The question is how fast user adoption of a touch-based interface paradigm is likely to spread based on the product expansion rate Apple’s apparently set to pursue. Your music is still just music. Your iLife is still just marketing. This is all about flash and glitz, but Apple’s moves in this area have consistently been indicators of broader market trends to come. Causal ones.

I do not want an iPhone or iPod Touch, yet I salivate over them. I do so not because I think they will do anything at all for me or my happiness, but because I recognize them as industry-shaping, paradigm-shifting, advances worthy of anthropological consideration.

That said, I sure do love them Nanos. If you want to send me one, I’ll use it every day – I promise. Silver or black preferred.