Domination of the web

Just read an article on techcrunch that Sean Parker thinks that the web will be dominated by Facebook/Twitter and not google:

To be clear, he thinks Google will stay huge and relevant, but it’s dominance will go down because collecting data is less valuable than connecting people, he said.

I have to disagree with this.

1. I still believe that Facebook and Twitter (and any other major social service) is currently over-hyped. In the future the hype will disappear and the dying process will start.
   As long as google delivers the best search experience, it will never die. Finding information on the net is an essential part of surfing the web.
   
   
2. It is also a matter of time until the success of social website will hurt itself. People are still not aware of the privacy issues involved with it; every day I see more and more FAIL pictures of facebook updates. When the users realize that everything they say/post/publish is stored forever with the possibility that it can be used against you, the frequency of use will become less.
   
   
3. If you want to spot the next big thing for the future, you need to look at the teenagers, as they are the future. I remember that these social sites are not very strongly presented in this age category. This is also correct when I look around me. I believe the current social sites are focused on the 25+ to 45 age range. This means either when the teenager become older they will start using the current social sites or they will laugh at it and invent/continue with their own technology. (see also point 6)
   
   
4. As this guy mentions, Connecting people is the future relevance of being dominant, I don't think so. Connecting people has always existed during the existence of the internet. In my youth it was something called IRC. Great tool to chat and meet people. In my time and area I think it was even more popular then the current social sites. It still exists and is used widely I guess, but as mentioned in point 1 the hypes goes over and it gets into coma.Other old examples are ICQ, MSN, Skype, etc.... All still exist and all do their work but they were never able to dominate the web. This brings us to point 5.
   
   
5. I think this guy doesnt understand the web. The web is much much more than a way of communication between people. Just of because of this social sites can not dominate. They are trends of the internet, like trends of color. Suppose the most trendy color currently is red (eg. 80% of cars/dresses/etc are red), I believe you cannot say that all important things in the future will be of the color red. It will be for a time, but then the next color will come...etc. But google is the freaking color spectrum itself... no matter what the trend is, it will always be on top of that.
   
   
6. The future is the mobile web and google/apple understand this. Teenagers mostly use mobile devices to communicate directly (mostly with SMS messages in europe). It is just a matter of time until the internet connectivity speeds and costs will be low enough for people to massively use it. Once this happens, the usage of internet will shift to the mobile world. Collecting data and presenting it (as this guy mentions what google does) will become even more bigger then now. People will want to have information anywhere at any time. I think Augmented reality is a good example of a future technology which will be very big. No matter how social a human is, at the end the world evolves around its self. Finding the information to help him/her a step further will always overrule the social aspect.

As a conclusion I would expect that the current social sites will still be big and can only stay big if they become part of the cloud, allowing future users to integrate their services with other services. This is also where google expels and will unless it doesnt become evil, will dominate the future :)

FileList Version 1.0 Release

I mentioned in my previous post, I was planning to develop a tool to easily generate a list of files in a folder for further processing. Well, last night I put something together and I am now releasing it to the public.

I am calling is FileList and it is a portable application. Unzip to a folder where you have read/write access. All settings are saved in the application folder.

Some features:

• Unicode support for multilingual use
• Drag and drop support, you can drop folders/files to the application and it will list the files of the folder
• Command line argument supported (for right click event in explorer)
• Settings to change font and customize output
  

Screenshots:

Original Location

Mirror



 


Some disclaimers (just to make things clear)
You are free to use this application for personal, business or any other use. The application is provided as is and use it at your own risk. The application is not evil and has no ET functionality (call home). I cannot be put responsible for any damages what so ever.By downloading and using this application you confirm this. I have tried to make the application as bug free as possible, however if you encounter any issues, do let me know. If you would like to distribute this application, please let me know. In no case can you ask any money for this application.

Files list

Today I have been in need of a tool which could easily generate a list of files in a folder which I can easily copy and paste for further editing. Normally I do this by issuing a dir command in the command prompt and redirecting output to a file, etc. This works fine if it is occasional, but if you need to do it on a regular basis (like me in this case), a tool might help.

Searching on the net I have found the "5 Ways to Print Folder and Directory Contents in Windows", which listed some apps, which I tried. None of the application met my criteria (easy to use, small, multilingual, drag and drop), so I have decided to create my own app which I will share soon.

If you have any suggestions on a file lister tool, please let me know.

Maintenance of Sharepoint Web Parts

For some reason, all the web parts ever added to a page in Sharepoint are actually never really removed when you delete them from the page. You can see this for example when you edit the page in Sharepoint Designer. Actually it is a good feature which allows you to retrieve webparts which could have been accidently removed by a user.

You can also remove or clean up the not used web parts in a page by using the Web Part Maintenance page.

It also allows you to remove buggy web parts which prevent your page to load.

You can access this maintenance page by going to the following page:

http(s)://[site-collection-root]/_layouts/spcontnt.aspx?url=[relative path to the page]

Vista, svchost.exe and my CPU

Last week I started to have issues with my Vista Laptop. Until now Vista has been great with me, I never understood why people complained about it anyway. After each boot and login my cpu maxed out. Initially with taskmanager I was not able to see which process was eating my processor, so got the tool Process Explorer (Sysinternals ... now Microsoft) and watched what happened.

It seemed that the svchost.exe was eating all my cpu cycles. Hovering with the mouse on it showed the services which it involved.

There was definitely a service which was doing something terribly wrong. Right click - Properties and then the Threads tab showed me that the dnsrslvr.dll!Reg_DoRegisterAdapter+0x501 was the cause. After googling for this I found only 1 entry, which luckily was the entry which helped me.

Summary on how to resolve this is as follows:

There seems to be a network adapter definition in the registry which is incorrectly referenced. In order to find this you need to use the Process Monitor tool and filter on the registery changes only and you will see a lot of entries like:

RegOpenKey HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\DNSRegisteredAdapters\{0751F0D9-4F38-4FCB-8EA8-2E05F05FC711} SUCCESS Desired Access: Read

What you now need to do is to get the GUID of the adapter, in the example above it is:
0751F0D9-4F38-4FCB-8EA8-2E05F05FC711

and use the registry editor and navigate to the following path:

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\DNSRegisteredAdapters\{0751F0D9-4F38-4FCB-8EA8-2E05F05FC711}

and remove this entry. The moment I removed it from the registry, my issue was solved.

Note: If you are more careful it would be better to create a backup of your registry and/or create a restore point.

It seems that the adapter was an vmware adapter (I do have vmware installed), and for some reason it got corrupted. I didnt test vmware yet, so I dont know what the impact of this would be on vmware.

Probably another solution would be to uninstall vmware.