I use a third-party app, Tweetbot, and it’s throwing this error stream. I’m seeing other reports of access issues, so this feels close to the end. 🥺😢



I use a third-party app, Tweetbot, and it’s throwing this error stream. I’m seeing other reports of access issues, so this feels close to the end. 🥺😢
My Facebook feed is about to become much quieter since I’ll be unhooking Twitter from auto-posting into it. I’m doing this to reduce the online surface area that generates notifications for me to attend to.
Those of you that know me know that I’m a pretty crappy correspondent when it comes to responding to anything other than a text or a tweet, and even getting a response out of me on those channels are suspect some (most?) days.
Why that’s the case is a whole other blog post I’ll eventually get to some day, but the nutshell version is that I triage a daily torrent of communications across work and personal accounts that averages about 500 packets of information a day with peaks up to 700.
About 50% of those are informational that require no action other than a quick skim, 25% take me to information I’m required to view for work or are interested in personally viewing, and the remaining 25% necessitate some sort of response.
What I’ve noticed is that the 25% was about 10% a couple of years ago, and it seems to keep increasing. For all of my introversion, social connections are important to me, but they do take a certain type of energy for me to muster. This energy is finite, and in the face of increasing demands, something had to give and Facebook ended up on the chopping block.
My blog will still auto-post to Facebook and you can still find me on Twitter, and email.
Posted in Administrivia, Internet, Life
Tagged communications overload, facebook, Twitter
My team, in conjunction with partners across Microsoft, shipped a new Office Developer Center experience at http://dev.office.com this morning.
I’m incredibly proud of the work we all did. This was a hugely complex project that saw us combine six different developer centers into one, consolidate a little over 200 pages down to 24, re-write every single page, and simultaneously reset the global experience across 11 languages.
This was arguably the most challenging project I’ve worked on here at Microsoft and presented the thorniest information architecture problem I’ve ever encountered.
The Office family of products spans multiple products with their own hierarchies of brands and tasks for developers. At the top level, there is Office, SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync. Within Office alone there is Access, Excel, InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher, Visio, and Word. Microsoft is also asking developers to write apps for Office and for SharePoint, and the development details are a bit different between Office and SharePoint. Add in Office 365 service content, and you have many different pivots you could apply.
Then we had to consider that we’re always balancing between the past, present, and future when we’re talking about development. There is a huge audience of developers who have written code to older versions of Office, a smaller set that’s targeting the current version, and then Microsoft is trying to guide developers to be set up for the future evolution of the platform.
The challenge here boiled down to: what information architecture would expose the breadth and depth of the product offerings, feature current and future development options, and not alienate developers targeting previous versions?
We had many, long discussions around the right pivots here, and in the end we decided to stick with the top-level product names as the main pivots for the navigation, and placed app development messaging on pages where it was product-relevant.
How’d we do?
Posted in Internet, Microsoft, Website Design
Tagged information architecture, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, software development
(I kept a log of my daily activities as I was founding digital.forest. The first few months are a mix of getting a 56K digital circuit installed in my basement, cluelessly bootstrapping systems, trying to keep consulting clients happy, and working up to almost being sued by a bank that doesn’t exist any more because I registered their domain name without authorization. Those were the days. 😉
ForestNet Log
February 27, 1995
February 28, 1995
March 1, 1995
March 2, 1995
March 3, 1995
March 4, 1995
March 6, 1995
March 7, 1995
March 8, 1995
March 9, 1995
March 10, 1995
March 11,1995
March 12, 1995
March 13, 1995
March 14, 1995
March 15, 1995
March 16, 1995
March 17, 1995
March 18, 995
March 19, 1995
March 20, 1995
March 21, 1995
March 22, 1995
March 23, 1995
March 24, 1995
March 26, 1995
March 27, 1995
March 28, 1995
March 29, 1995
March 30, 1995
March 31, 1995
April 1, 1995
April 3, 1995
April 5, 1995
April 6, 1995
April 10, 1995
April 11, 1995
April 12, 1995
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April 14, 1995
April 16, 1995
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April 18, 1995
April 19, 1995
April 20, 1995
April 21, 1995
April 25, 1995
May 4, 1995
May 5, 1995
May 6, 1995
May 7, 1995
May 8, 1995
May 9, 1995
May 11, 1995
May 15, 1995
May 16, 1995
Posted in Computing, digital.forest, Entrepreneurship, Humor, Internet
Tagged diary, digital.forest, Internet history, ISP
In 1994, posting commercial ‘spams’ to USENET was still relatively rare, and would generally elicit quite a spirited response from irate newsgroup readers.
One day an article showed up in alt.tasteless called “Jane Goodall Roots & Shoots” whereby a firm purporting to represent Jane Goodall was selling children’s slippers, with the proceeds going to benefit Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots program.
I took the opportunity of this unsolicited advertisement to mix it around, poke fun at the folks who sent it, a firm claiming to represent Dr. Jane Goodall, and post it back into alt.tasteless.
Well, the world is a funny place, and it turns out that someone saw my ‘edited’ version of this spam and contacted the Roots and Shoots program to tell them of my posting. As it turns out, the Roots and Shoots program had never authorized any firm to sell children’s slippers on their behalf, and not only was the spam a spam, it was using the Roots and Shoots name illegally. In short order, the firm was debunked and cease-and-desisted, and life went on. My article scrolled off into /dev/null on USENET, but I archived it for fun.
Then I received this letter in 1997.
Oy vey!
Tagged alt.tasteless, foreskin, humor, Jane Goodall, lawyers, Michael Jackson, Roots and Shoots, spam, USENET