RasterWeb!
(consider it cc:by)
Inspired by a spam subject line. This would have been a drawing of a starship coming up from behind another starship on the attack, but that didn’t work out. I was also inspired by a web site called Spamusement which featured “Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines” which sadly, stopped updating in 2007… I miss that site.
NeighborGoods launched recently, and in their own words, “NeighborGoods.net is a safe online sharing community where you can save money and resources by sharing stuff with your neighbors.” I like that idea… It’s one of those things that’s made easier by using the Internet. I mean, sure you could get to know all of your neighbors, and make lists of what they have, and what you have, and do it all offline, but who’s going to do that? Web site to the rescue!
Here’s some scenarios: “Need a ladder? Borrow it from your neighbor. Have a bike collecting dust in your garage? Earn some extra cash by renting it out! NeighborGoods members can borrow, lend, rent, sell and buy stuff from their neighbors, saving money and getting more value out of the items they already own.”
If you can get past the usual “ZOMG! I’m not telling everyone what I have cuz they’ll ROB ME!!!” hysteria, and try to think that people are generally good and not complete jerks, this seems like a useful utility. So I joined…
I don’t have a huge inventory yet, but I’ve listed a few things I have, that I do not use very often. A ladder, a heat gun, an old wagon… Nothing of great value, but useful if you need it. I borrowed a ladder from Neighbor Micki (Micki Krimmel’s admin account) to see how it all worked, and it works fine. In theory… and then in no time, I had a request to borrow something!
Someone wanted to borrow my wagon. They said they would be in town for a week or so, and didn’t have room to bring a stroller. I should note at this point that the person was not “verified” which is a process of paying $5 to NeighborGoods so they can add you to the list of “verified” people. This was fine, as the site just launched, so most new users were not verified. (Another note: I’ve been waiting over 10 days for my verification package to arrive, so I’m still not verified.)
So, about the wagon… I made arrangements for the person to pick up the wagon, and replied on the site with the information. I ended up having to leave the wagon outside since I couldn’t be home when the person was coming to get it. Because of that, I asked for a phone number and email address. I never got them. I then had a change of plans, and I was going to be home for the pickup, but two days passed without them coming to pick up the wagon.
While this was going on, I took a photo of the wagon, as it was much more beat up and rusty than I remembered. I let the person know this, and posted the photo. It had been raining a lot, and I didn’t feel like leaving the wagon out in the rain, even under a tarp, so I put it back in the garage, and let the person know that I put it away, and if they wanted to get it, to get back to me. (It had been 3 days since I heard anything from the person.)
Finally I heard back from the person. She apologized for not making the pickup, and provided an email address and phone number for her husband, as she was busy at a conference all day. Then I got super-busy, and couldn’t get in touch until the next day… It was either too early or too late (by my standards) to make a phone call to someone I didn’t know, so I emailed, letting him know I would put the wagon outside by our garage. I never got a response.
This was my last response: “Update: Still haven’t heard back… left the wagon outside, and it rained last night. :( The rust is pretty bad, so when I flipped it over to remove the water my hands got all covered in rust. Just letting you know because if you come and get it, you’ll want to not put it directly into a nice vehicle unless you put down and old tarp or blanket or something.”
After that, I never heard back… not from the woman via the web site, nor from her husband via email. I also provided my phone number with my very first communication, so I don’t think I was inaccessible at all. There was really only one time where I didn’t reply within the same day.
So what went wrong?
I’m not sure… I mean, maybe they just got super busy and never got a chance to come get the wagon. (Though they never said that, or canceled the transaction, and during the 11 days, it always seemed as if they were coming to get it.) If it had been a smaller item, I would have considered taking it to work, which is closer to Milwaukee, and said “come any day between 8am and 7pm, and I’ll be here to hand it to you.” Maybe they saw the photo of a rusty wagon and decided not to use it. Maybe they found someone else closer with a stroller or better wagon. Maybe it was all a scam.
I really doubt it was a scam… if it was, it’s the worse “I’m gonna steal your old rusty wagon” scam I’ve ever been involved in.
In all seriousness though, I do look forward to my first real transaction on NeighborGoods.
Update: Oh, one last thing… I ended up canceling the transaction on the day it was to end (as the transaction never too place, and I didn’t want the system to think it did.) After canceling, the thread of messages disappeared! I could still see the messages sent to me in the Notices section of the Inbox, but not the messages I sent. If the messages I sent really are inaccessible, I’d consider this data loss, and a major bug, as I think it would be valuable to have record of all transactions, even if they fail.
I’m told I need to make some arguments to convince people that speed is not everything. I’ll attempt to do that here.
Should I even mention a time when almost all browsers were named after cars? No? OK, good… Let’s talk about cars then. When choosing a car do you typically go to the car dealer, and ask for the fastest car they have? That sounds like a great idea, I mean, you’re in a hurry, you have a need for speed, and you can’t drive 55, so you want the fastest engine they’ve got. It makes sense.
Now that you’ve got your really fast car, you might also wonder how safe it is. Will it protect you from harm? What if the locks don’t work, and it’s not very secure, and people can just open the doors, and rummage through all the stuff you leave in your car… your shopping receipts, the playlist on your iPod, you know, stuff you might think is sort of personal, and you’re not OK with sharing.
Many years ago (I know, I start a lot of stories like that) there was a sort of competition between web server software, and this competition often looked at the speed of which a server could serve pages. That made sense to a lot of people, because, you know, you want your pages served fast. The competitors were Microsoft IIS and Apache’s HTTP Server. In many speed tests, IIS was the winner. If you based everything on speed, IIS would have been the clear choice. Now, that would have meant you ran your web serving platform on Windows, because that’s the only place IIS ran. You also would have most likely restricted your code to ASP or maybe ColdFusion, but you probably would not have even considered PHP or Perl, or any of those “weird open source” languages. It sort of made sense that IIS would be really fast on Windows, as both products were developed by Microsoft, and if anyone could make then work together, and run fast, it would be Microsoft. I mean, I’m not suggesting that Microsoft would use undocumented API calls and what not in the development of IIS, right? Right. I’m sure the Apache Software Foundation wanted to put out a fast web server, but they were also very concerned with conforming to the standards and specifications published by the W3C and the IETF and other organizations that were working towards building the web, and they were also putting out web server software that ran on many different platforms, some of which I’d bet you may not have even heard of. There were also a number of great modules you could add to Apache to make it do great things. I worked with Apache and IIS, and I definitely preferred Apache.
Oh, did I mention Apache’s HTTP Server was also open source? While Microsoft could do whatever they wanted to with IIS, including kill it off at any point, or completely re-write it, or force you to pay exorbitant fees for it, Apache was open source. If you didn’t like where it was headed, you were free to take the code and do your own thing. Or hire someone to do it. Open source is like that… it sort of serves as an insurance policy for the future.
The Apache Software Foundation has been a non-profit organization since 1999, and I believe the web has flourished and grown in no small part because of that. I’m not saying that Microsoft IIS or lighttpd don’t have a place in the world, as they surely do, as do other choices, but I’m grateful for the work the Apache folks have done, as they’ve made it possible for myself and others to do so much over the years to help move the web to where it is today.
But I know.. you all want the fastest damn browser your money can buy… regardless of the other features which may matter today, or in the future.
See Also: Firefox, it’s not me… it’s you! and Mozilla Firefox vs. the World.
In our last post, Mozilla Firefox vs. the World, I mentioned that we’d look at the reasons people had for switching away from Firefox. I posed the question on Twitter, which also flows through Facebook. If anyone listed has issue with me reposting your words, let me know and I’ll remove them.
That said, here’s what people told me. I should note that I consider most (but not all) of these people pretty technologically savvy. Most know their way around web development or programming to some degree. None of them are Aunt Tillie.
John Bailey
I switched from Firefox to Chrome. I just couldn’t stand how much slower firefox got with every update. As well as using like 500+MB memory. Chrome is much snappier. Uses less RAM. Each tab is a separately killable process. So no screwy Javascript in a tab can crash the browser.
Samantha Hawley
I gave up Firefox for Google Chrome. For some reason my Firefox would take a long time to load. Once I downloaded Chrome I noticed it was faster. I don’t know why.
Tom Henrich
I dropped Firefox for Chrome months ago. Chrome is lightning fast compared to the bloat of Firefox, even when you have dozens of tabs open. I still use Firefox at work simply because it’s got more developer-related extensions for debugging (and the Firefox versions work… better), but at home it’s nothing but Chrome. I didn’t even bother installing Firefox when I got a new computer. Just wasn’t worth the hassle.
Dossy Shiobara
Speed, mostly. Firefox has gotten sluggish in 3.x, and the only add-ons I had were Firebug and Greasemonkey. I used to miss Firebug’s Net panel once in a while, but Charles.app is 10x more useful and works for any HTTP client – so I don’t miss it any more. WebKit inspector has proven to be a more than adequate replacement for Firebug, too.
Gary Kramlich
Chrome/Chromium until something faster with better integration (good luck) comes out.
Greg Tarnoff
Chrome for speed when I am surfing. Still use Firefox for dev though.
bEx_x3d
Rarely use Firefox now, it’s painful when i do. Poorly rendered embedded fonts/CSS3 elements, my comp go freezepop, ugly interface.
EtherCycle Design
We dumped Firefox for Chrome in our office 7 weeks ago. Separate tab processes. Native Greasemonkey support. Better search integration. Better Javascript performance. Extensions dont crash.
Paul Conigliaro
I’ve moved on to Safari. I use OS X & wanted a more integrated browser. Services are what pushed me to Safari. And there seemed to be less lag. I also do some development and Safari actually has a really good feature set once enabled. Plus webkit is just fun to play with. Plus I got tired of the upgrade cycle. It’s a browser, I don’t want to beta test it. I just want it to be stable.
M. Kelley
I ditched Firefox and use Chrome on Linux/Mac/Windows. It has less bloat than Firefox. Much faster than any of the Mozilla browsers. I do web dev on there.
Chris Jaure
I gave up Firefox for daily browsing, but it’s still my primary development browser. I use Chrome for browsing. I’d switch back if Firefox were faster and had a single search/address bar. And websockets. Websockets didn’t appear to be working in the Firefox beta (with our existing app, not sure if the API is the same).
Vic Wu
I gave up Firefox for Chrome. I just browse. Firefox was giving me login issues with a handful of sites even with saved cookies. I was unable to get a fix for it.
Andy Kant
I switched from Firefox to Safari for general browsing, still use Firefox as my primary debugger though.
senvara
I went back to IE from Firefox about two years ago.
Philip Crawford
I’ve given up Firefox multiple times for Safari, but I keep going back. I mainly prefer Firefox for dev tools, but it’s a memory hog.
Thanks everyone…. There are some great responses in there. A lot of what people seemed to be saying was that Firefox wasn’t as fast as whatever other browser they are using now. (Chrome seemed to be in the lead over Safari, and I’m still not sure that IE comment wasn’t a joke.)
The one area where Firefox seemed to have an edge was with web development tools/add-ons. This has definitely been one of the reasons I’ve stuck with Firefox over the years, as I’ve found an environment that works for me in Firefox, and it didn’t matter if I was using Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux… Firefox (or Iceweasel) worked pretty much the same on each, providing a similar experience and similar tools.
Feel free to leave a comment explaining why you left Firefox for some other browser.
I know, I still didn’t get into why alternatives to Firefox may not be as good as you think they are, but I will… This post on reasons people switched should hold you over for now.
See Also: Cheap Thrills, Speed Kills… and Mozilla Firefox vs. the World.
Mozilla Firefox must defeat 7 deadly opponents in order to win the hearts of users…
Wait… that sounds like some movie!
OK, but really, what I wanted to talk about is Firefox. The once darling browser of the digital elite, and how it may have fallen from grace.
Mozilla was the first popular open source browser, and it stole market share from Internet Explorer. That’s a win. But eventually Safari came along, and then Chrome. Both Safari and Chrome seem to have a mission to simplify things for the user, which, if you know the history of Firefox, is sort of amusing, as it too came about with the idea that the browser needed to be smaller, simpler, and faster. (At least smaller, simpler, and faster than the Mozilla Suite it was replacing.) It succeeded on all counts, and became quite popular. The “smaller, simpler, and faster” formula was a good one.. and others followed it.
I’m pretty sure both Safari and Chrome suggest that they exist to provide their users the best browsing experience possible, and both continue to work towards that goal. It’s a noble goal, and I applaud it… But I don’t blindly believe it.
At a previous job, we used to have this great user experience game, where we could make the point that anything we did could be justified by the idea that it “provided a better user experience.” For instance, we served large banner ads. How could this provide a better user experience? Well, we would say that without the ads, we’d make no money from the sites, and have to shut them down, so obviously a site with ads provides a better user experience than a site that does not exist.
Now in the case of Safari, I’m fine believing that Apple wanted a really fast browser for Mac OS X. Microsoft had abandoned Internet Explorer, and Apple doesn’t always like to rely on others for things, especially something as basic as web browsing. Along came Safari. For Mac OS X. And eventually for Windows. (But not Linux.)
Google used to put a lot of resources into Firefox, but eventually I think they saw that they too could attempt to control the browsing experience, and along came Chrome. Chrome is the easiest way for you to feed almost everything you do online directly into the Google Tracking Machine. Your search history, your browsing history, your bookmarks… everything. If you completely trust Google with all of your data (and I know many of you do, from email to documents to maps to, pretty much everything else!) then I guess you’re fine. Sign it all over to the Google Machine. I mean, they can’t be evil, right?
Now, competition is a good thing… and Safari and Chrome both came along and had some interesting features, and Firefox caught up with some of them, and is still catching up with some of them, but more recently I’m seeing this trend of people switching away from Firefox, as it has me concerned. It has me concerned because I feel like if people are just switching to another browser because it’s “faster” that it’s like saying “I switched to only eating at McDonalds because it’s cheaper!” and really, that’s a steady diet of yuck.
In another post I’ll examine why alternatives to Firefox may not be as good as you think they are, as well as look at the reasons people gave me for switching away from Firefox.
See Also: Cheap Thrills, Speed Kills… and Firefox, it’s not me… it’s you!.
