From the Tumblr staff blog:
Marc gets email. A lot of email.
As Community Director, Marc manages Tumblr’s entire support infrastructure. From tackling general community issues to solving technical support requests, he’s personally read and responded to thousands upon thousands of email messages regarding browser cookies, forgotten passwords, and more.
Marc is special. And I don’t mean that as a euphemism for any sort of handicap or personality flaw. I mean that he possesses admirable and rare qualities.
Marc’s job is to deal with hundreds of support emails every day.
To most people in our industry, that sounds like hell. I can’t blame anyone for assuming that someone who handles support email as gracefully as Marc does couldn’t possibly exist in reality:
Yet, Marc wants to emphasize that he is, in fact, an actual human being. You see, a common misconception he encounters is that he’s a fake persona we created to make Support more personable. Emails addressed to “Whoever Really Reads This” and “Marc, Yeah Right” are a surprisingly regular occurrence.
He actually asked for this job, because he truly enjoys doing it. In person, he’s just as pleasant as you’d expect from his email responses. It’s not an act. He’s genuine.
Support is behind the scenes and underappreciated by most, but it’s a necessity, and there can be serious repercussions if it’s not done properly. And support for free web services is rarely done well.
In addition to the polite inquiries, Marc gets many emails every day from people who are angry about something, none of which is likely to be his fault. Often, he needs to deal with problems for which there’s no good solution, such as personal disputes or copyright issues, and he needs to be the bearer of bad news to at least one party.
His actions and demeanor help disarm people’s frustrations — with their passwords, their themes, their browsers, their phone company, their workplace’s IT staff, their content, other people’s content, politics1, religion2, or society as a whole3 — and make everyone’s day a little bit nicer. And as Tumblr’s support needs have grown past his (rather impressive) capacity, Marc has instilled the same positive attitude and guidelines in the other members of Tumblr’s support staff.
Tumblr is truly lucky to have such a pleasant, resilient, and talented person running our support and community management department4.
The Talk Show #6: The Kids Are Gonna Love This
Dan Benjamin and John Gruber discuss the outcome of today’s Apple event.
This show is so good that I sponsored it for Instapaper. I like how John interpreted it: “If you’re not using Instapaper, shame on you.”
Why, yes, I was doing some testing.
Wow.
(That is what I was looking for.)
Tiff wrote up a great report of our first backpacking trip.
I’ve been at a loss of what to say about it. The hostile trail kicked our asses much more than any of us anticipated, and there were some pretty miserable times on the hikes, but the trip overall was such a great time with our friends that we’d definitely do it again… on a more hiker-friendly trail.
I feel different after having done this, but I can’t put my finger on why. It’s a good thing. I’ve never pushed myself this hard, physically, and I’ve never been in a situation like this in which the only reasonable way out is to use my own (hurting, blistered) feet to descend 3,000 feet of altitude over five miles of slippery, steep rocks before nightfall.
It certainly gave me some perspective.
Google’s AdSense [click solicitation] policy of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell is hypocritical, but then so too are most of Google’s other opaque policies. Everything with Google is algorithmic yet the algorithm is never defined. Enforcement, too, follows yet another unpublished algorithm. Google seems open to the idea of its partners being a little bad while never defining exactly how much bad is too much bad. Presumably we’re deemed not smart enough to understand.
Google benefits from click fraud so it tolerates it to some degree, with that degree never being fully defined, either.
FaceTime adoption
Dan Moren, for Macworld, doubts FaceTime’s usefulness:
Honestly, the real question isn’t whether or not the iPod touch will get support for FaceTime, but whether or not the touch’s adoption of the technology will actually bolster FaceTime’s usefulness and popularity.
With a few exceptions, FaceTime seems to largely be confined to the realm of novelty at present. I’ve used the feature a handful of times myself, but mainly for the sake of trying it out.
I’ve used FaceTime once, with my wife while she was out of town. It was great. But most of the time, I don’t use it. This is largely for two reasons:
- For any given call, the likelihood that the person on the other end has an iPhone 4 and that we’re both on Wi-Fi is low. This problem will probably solve itself over the next two years.
- I forget I can do it. This one’s more interesting.
When iPhone OS 3.0 was released a year ago, it took me a while to reliably remember that I could copy and paste. I’d still transfer data between apps as if I couldn’t, using the old workarounds that I had grown accustomed to.
Now, a few months after iOS 4, I still barely multitask at all because I usually forget that I can — sure, the phone is doing it for me, but I still use apps as if they don’t multitask, again using the old workarounds.
With every new iPhone1 hardware or software release, we get a bunch of new capabilities. But because we grew accustomed to our iPhones’ prior feature-sets as the limits of what the platform was at the time we got to know the platform, we often forget about or completely miss new functionality that arrived afterward.
For instance, did you know that iOS 4 added Bluetooth-keyboard support? Do you still avoid Apple’s Notes app because you think it doesn’t sync your notes? Do you ever use shake-to-undo? Did you know that you can send someone a Contact over SMS? Have you ever written down a phone number from another app onto a piece of paper, then switched to Phone to dial it while referring to the paper, because you didn’t know that you can Paste into the Phone dialer?
We, the long-time iPhone owners, won’t be the first ones to use FaceTime regularly.
But the next generation of iPhone owners will.
FaceTime is the sort of technology that we “old” people will promptly forget that we can do, and then be shocked when we learn that young people are doing it en masse.
They don’t know that iPhones (or just phones, for that matter) can’t do video chat. Because theirs can. Young people and first-time mobile-phone owners pioneered mass usage of SMS while the old people were making fun of slowly typing poorly spelled messages on a device that allowed you to just call the person with far less perceived effort. Then the young people started sending around MMS pictures while we made fun of crappy phone cameras.
I eventually came around to SMS and MMS. You probably did, too. And I bet we’ll all come around to FaceTime in a few years when the from-this-point-forward iPhone buyers remind us that it’s great.
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This applies to many technologies. But I’ll keep this post iPhone-specific. ↩
Charging an iPhone with AA batteries
I got a Tekkeon TekCharge MP1550 AA-battery-to-USB1 charger for a backpacking trip. (Know what’s really useful pretty much anywhere? An iPhone.)
AA batteries are much more versatile than common lithium-ion battery-extender packs. You can buy AA batteries nearly anywhere that sells anything, and they hold a surprising amount of power. And as long as you can keep feeding them AAs, they’ll keep going, letting you carry quite a bit of charging capacity if you’re willing to bring a lot of batteries.
There are three common types of AA batteries today:
- Standard alkalines: “Normal” batteries, not rechargeable. They provide good power, but only under ideal conditions. In cold temperatures, or in applications that draw a lot of power quickly (like charging an iPhone), their capacity diminishes severely. They’re great for applications that draw little power over long timespans, like in remote controls.
- Lithiums: Similar to alkalines, and also not rechargeable. They cost much more and perform no better in slow-drain applications. But they perform much better in high-drain applications and cold temperatures, and they’re extremely lightweight.
- NiMH rechargeables: They’re extremely heavy and don’t hold as much power, but they’re rechargeable. Older NiMH batteries lost their charge quickly, even when not in use, but the new low-self-discharge type (including Eneloops and the AccuEvolutions2 I tested) solves that problem. They’re also much heavier than alkaline or lithium cells.
To test them in my iPhone 4, I discharged it to 20% (when the low-battery warning dialog pops up), then charged it back up to 100% or as far as it would go until the voltage was too low to keep charging the iPhone.3 This was not perfectly isolated, since I left the radios on and occasionally used the phone lightly during the tests. The numbers are meant to be estimates.
So here’s each battery type and the number of 20-100% charges they were able to achieve in the TekCharge MP1550, plus a popular traditional-style iPhone extended battery, the generic Monoprice lithium-ion iPhone extended battery4.
| Battery type | 20-100% charges |
|---|---|
| Energizer Ultimate Lithium, 4 AAs | 2.20 |
| AccuEvolution NiMH, 4 AAs | 1.21 |
| Monoprice iPhone battery, lithium-ion | 0.96 |
| Energizer alkaline, 4 AAs | 0.70 |
Two options seem to make the most sense: iPhone-specific lithium-ion batteries like the Monoprice or the more popular 3GJuice, Richard Solo, or Mophie products are best for rechargeable use, especially in situations in which you can recharge them often and only need an occasional boost.
But for long trips5 away from power sources, non-rechargeable lithium AAs are by far the best — as long as you don’t mind spending money on each set and throwing them away afterward, which are admittedly two major downsides.
It’s hard to make a case for using NiMH rechargeables to charge an iPhone, especially for backpacking, where weight is important: seven lithiums weigh just under what four NiMHs weigh. So you can get about 3.6 times the iPhone-charging capacity per gram from lithiums than from NiMHs — but you can’t recharge them.
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The TekCharge MP1550 would not charge the iPad, regardless of battery type. ↩
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These are just like Eneloops. Please don’t email me and suggest that I try Eneloops. I know what they are. Two of my LSD NiMH cells are Eneloops, but I didn’t use them in this test because I don’t have four of them and they’ve historically performed exactly like two AccuEvolutions.
Generally, identical battery types from different manufacturers (in this case, NiMH LSDs) perform nearly identically. ↩
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A full charge took the same amount of time — about 151 minutes — regardless of battery type, probably because it’s limited by the rate at which the iPhone draws power. ↩
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Formerly found here, but it looks like they’ve stopped selling it. Google’s cache. These ended up being a worse deal than expected because my credit card number was stolen from them. I didn’t lose any money over it, but it cost me a lot of time. ↩
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By the way, the trip starts tomorrow morning. See you in a week. ↩
A smartphone retrospective
This is what high-end smartphones looked like in 2007:
Smartphones were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws.
Then this happened:
Other manufacturers had neglected touchscreens for years, but Apple figured out how to do a touchscreen well, and did.
Fans of the former types of smartphones and much of the tech press declared this smartphone useless or not capable enough because of its lack of a keyboard, its non-removable battery, its lack of expansion slots or ports, and other hardware features in which Apple chose differently from what most other manufacturers were doing.
That ended up not mattering. Now, most high-end smartphones look like this:
In early 2010, subcompact, inexpensive computers (a.k.a. “netbooks”) looked like this:
Netbooks were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws.
Then this happened:
Other manufacturers had neglected tablets for years, but Apple figured out how to do a tablet well, and did.
Fans of netbooks and much of the tech press declared this subcompact, inexpensive computer useless or not capable enough because of its lack of a keyboard, its non-removable battery, its lack of expansion slots or ports, and other hardware features in which Apple chose differently from what most other manufacturers were doing.
That ended up not mattering. And now, other manufacturers are scrambling to build tablet products as quickly as possible.
How do you think the subcompact, inexpensive computer category will look in three years?
SXSW panel pimping
I’m trying to be on a panel. If you’re going to SXSW 2011 and think this is a cool idea, please vote for it.
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