Virtualized Comedy - Episode #42 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places; unidentified voices are shown as "Speaker N". Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 42nd episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the first week of May, 2011. This episode is titled, Virtualized Comedy. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, Cloud This episode is titled Virtualized Comedy. Cod Focus Weekly is sponsored by Arcus, Cod Community Experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood, and joining me in the very, very funny self that he is, and always makes me laugh a little bit, is the co-host of this podcast and many other things, Justin Edelstein. Justin, how are you doing today? The brain's behind the operation, obviously. Obviously.

Justin Edelstein: I'm doing well, thank you.

Jason Atwood: We have some cloudy news to talk about. Do we ever? Yes we do. Isn't that always what we talk about? It is true.

Justin Edelstein: One day we're just gonna surprise people. We're gonna talk about IBM, DB2, and just sitting on WebSphere or something or other.

Jason Atwood: Just come out and do a whole podcast about sports or something. Football. That'd be crazy. Some team. Just pick a team. Jets? Nah. No. have a few things on the agenda. We have a new blog post up on Arcus on blog.arkusinc.com written by the partners who shall remain in this. Yes, it's his rotation. Actually, I started reading a book called the Corporate Blogging Book. Really? Yeah. I wonder if anyone

Justin Edelstein: of our listeners has picked up on our rotation. They can figure it out. Yeah. Every other

Jason Atwood: week or every third week. You can't even figure it out. It's every third week. There you go. So talk about that for a second. We have maybe a possible leak to... Say no more. All right. A Google leak. A leakage. All right. We have some chatter and ways to get free money. You can chat some free money. I like free money. Yeah. Pandora does something funny. And we'll end up with a little bit of sad news, but I'm going to spin it into something interesting, maybe interesting talk about Rackspace. So let's kick it off with Larry's blog post. Sure. It's titled...

Justin Edelstein: Flight Check. Preparing for Your First Flight into the Clouds. Nice. I like that title. Take some Dramamine. Yes. Get ready.

Jason Atwood: Basically, we all have our different topics. Again, reading this book, this corporate blogging book, one of the things that she's definitely saying is make sure it's just legitimate. Make sure it's who you are, talking about who you are. So since Larry deals a lot with clients on the first side, on the beginning stages of dealing with Salesforce, we tend to deal with more of them as we're going through the project. But it's sort of that first conversation. So he posted a little roundup, I guess, of the things you should be preparing for, looking at, getting yourself ready for, mainly going into Salesforce. It is the cloud, but it was pretty Salesforce focused. A few things like, give me one of the tips.

Justin Edelstein: Relax and buckle up. Good one? Yeah, I'll just read the headers. Relax and buckle up, right? Get, you know, don't feel like you need to know everything. People are there to help you, whether it be, this really is focused on a Salesforce Quickstart, but you know, a Salesforce account exec, a partner like Arcus, experts in the field, there are many out there, blogs to read, So relax, you're not diving off into the deep abyss all on your lonesome.

03:35 Jason Atwood: I'll spin this into something interesting.

Justin Edelstein: Please do. I'll save us. Please save me from the not interesting

Jason Atwood: banter I was just going through. I'll save everybody else as well. We had a client who used a competitor. I'm not going to mention any names, so remain innocent. They were on a competitor. They looked at Salesforce as one of many. I remember this. Yes. Well, because you were involved in the project. I was. And the product, from all intents and purposes, did most of anything. It did all sort of sales tracking and stuff. The competitor product. The competitor product. Yeah.

Justin Edelstein: So basic CRM stuff.

Jason Atwood: But ultimately, the project failed. And within a month or two into the project of trying to roll it out, they couldn't do stuff. They ran into brick walls. There were features that weren't working. There were bugs. Some of it, I will say, came from the product itself, meaning it just didn't have the features or it had bugs So they were saying these things work when they didn't really work, part of it. But some of it, I think, came because they tried to do it themselves. And this is a story that we hear a lot. And I'm going to take off my consulting hat, I'm throwing it over there in the corner.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, just got dirty. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: In that every statistic we've read, whether it comes from the foundation, we read about nonprofits moving on to Salesforce or their utilization, to, again, our clients, while you can certainly do this stuff yourself to some degree, very smart people, there is a much bigger uplift, much better success rate, full adoption if you use someone to help you and use an implementation partner. Like Arcus. Like Arcus, but someone in your industry, someone who's doing the exact thing you're doing, they've done it before, they've seen some of the questions, they've dealt with the data, they dealt with training, these are things that you know. So I think the blog post really kind of sets that up and then says it's, you know, there's a lot of stuff you should be looking at. It's not really a sales pitch, but it's saying, there's a lot of things you should be considering. The ultimate thing is you can do it and, you know, you'll get there. I'll just read the headers. All right. Relax and buckle up. Good. We went over that piece. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: Detail your data.

Justin Edelstein: So think about what kind of things are important for you and your business and your process that you're tracking and making decisions around. your visibility. So think about the level of permissions and visibility into data that is going to now be available in a system that, you know, if it's in an Excel spreadsheet, well, what can you do? Well, you can lock the sheet or, you know. Or it sits on someone's desktop. It sits on someone's desktop so no one else can see, right? Automation away. So, you know, that's towards the end. Like, think about some of the things that you do that you can potentially automate and have a computer do for you. And data migration. So think about legacy data from systems or spreadsheets. Generally, we see a lot of spreadsheets. A lot of spreadsheets. That you want to have available in the system. Those are kind of the five high level headers.

06:40 Jason Atwood: So that blog post, as well as all of our blog posts dating back for a while now. There's tons of them, even on our rotation. Available on blog.archising.com. So go there and read that one or the other ones. We actually got some hit off of the permission sets one that went up. Yeah.

Justin Edelstein: The big one we talked about last week on the pod, but wrote about three weeks ago. Got some good action.

Jason Atwood: That's good. Next up, did Google leak its Facebook killer?

Justin Edelstein: First of all, Google's not killing Facebook any times. No. No times. Let me start there.

Jason Atwood: So there's been a long, long rumors for a long, long time, many stars start.

Justin Edelstein: Long, long ago. Far, far away.

Jason Atwood: Far, far away, in a galaxy far, far away. That Google has been working on a social networking competitor to Facebook. Again?

Justin Edelstein: You should say again, because they've tried this a few times.

Jason Atwood: You could say it was Buzz. You could say Orkut. You could say, they've had a lot of social elements in some of the. Their profile. Yeah.

Justin Edelstein: the search thing where you, plus sharing in Google Reader and your account. They've had a lot of forays.

Jason Atwood: So this new one has this new ad for Chrome, which was a very cute ad. Did you watch the ad? No. I actually watched it this morning. It was cute. It's basically a guy chronicling his daughter's life from birth through, I don't know, five or six years old using Google tools. So like sending, basically sending her emails ever since she was born and like sending her photos and pictures and stuff. Like Picasso, Gmail, things like that. It's cute though because it really, he's writing it in a, to her. Right, she can't obviously read, but saying like, and this was the day that we were very worried about you because she was sick in the hospital and the picture. Really cute commercial. Anyways, spin that around to, well interesting that sub-news, interesting that they're doing advertisements, TV advertisements for Chrome. Right? That's interesting news in itself. But why did I- Did they have a commercial, like,

Justin Edelstein: and it was a big deal one time, it was like just a search commercial, it was like three years ago, it was like a big deal. Well they did one about,

Jason Atwood: no I think they did one a couple months ago, which was the, they did one for Super Bowl, which was the typing in- Oh right. And kind of follow things, that was really good. So, you know, but does Google need to advertise? That's sort of crazy. No. So, in the ad, there's one shot of, And of course, someone out there is watching, apparently very closely, of this little icon, of a little plus one icon in the toolbar.

Justin Edelstein: It's like the thing that now shows up in your search results.

Jason Atwood: Yes.

Justin Edelstein: Where you can plus something.

Jason Atwood: So is this Google's idea or fight on liking? I'm liking things.

Justin Edelstein: Well, that plus sign's kind of out there, right? You go to Google and, I don't know, search for Google. And you'll...

Jason Atwood: You know, I so rarely search for Google on Google. On Google? I search for ASDF a lot.

09:44 Justin Edelstein: It's odd, because sometimes it's there and sometimes it's not. There it is. The little plus one thing that was in the ad. It's right next to the result, or the name of the result, and you can click it and that recommends the page, right? I imagine it goes into PageRank and does something. Maybe it feeds to your friends in the future.

Jason Atwood: So here's where I think that we can all poo-poo Google saying, eh, you're not going to be able to get away Facebook. But they've got a couple things going for them. One is their browser. Well, first one is their search in that they've already sort of connected in Facebook and Twitter into search where it'll say, these come from your social network, and it does some interesting things. So that's a powerful thing. Second of all, they own a browser. When you own a browser, as Microsoft has proven over and again, you can do some powerful stuff. If you build things into the browser, you can make it work a certain way and you can make things really kind of stand out. They also have an operating system that runs on a lot of smartphones, Android. And Facebook doesn't. Facebook doesn't have search, but they do have a search engine in their own thing. They don't have their own devices, they don't have their own operating system, they don't have their own browser. So you could see where Google could come in and say, well, we're going to really tie these things together and we're going to make a big stand.

Justin Edelstein: You could also see how Google has never been able to do that before. Oh, true. They just always fall on their face when they try and do this stuff.

Jason Atwood: I think the way that it'll work, just because all other social networking has for me, has sort of grown, is if it extends Facebook. If it's something that connects to Facebook and extends Facebook, allows me to use it either with or without Facebook and kind of connect it up, that's when I'm in.

Justin Edelstein: Well the thing that, I mean, Buzz was kind of a novel idea, but the reason why these things for me get used is because other people are using them. So like I started trying to use Buzz and no one else was really using it, so then I stopped. And it was like, alright, this is kind of useless if nobody else is using it. And the only thing that I seemed to see people doing was connecting their Twitter up to it. And it was like, all right, well, I can just go on Twitter. It just didn't seem to feel like it had that network effect of my friends or people I cared about connecting with actually being there.

Jason Atwood: They have to be there. That's what Facebook has now, but Facebook didn't have that to start. When we first went on Facebook, when I tried Facebook by going back to my college and getting an alumni email from them just so I could get into Facebook, there was no one there. It was like, OK, this is great. So I think it's interesting, but Google has people. They have people logged into Gmail. They have enough platform that I think if they built something very smart and very compelling, that if you could tie in the maps, you could tie in the Gmail, you could tie in places, you could tie in Chrome, and you could make it all work in a way that no one felt invaded by that and search, I think you could do some interesting stuff. Whether they're going to do that, I don't know. But anyway, so it was a small leak. We don't even know if it was a leak. But always an interesting thing to talk about, because when this thing comes, we'll be thrilled. On to some chatter news. Chatter. Two pieces of chatter news.

13:09 Jason Atwood: Chatter. One is Chatter has a new blog, blog.chatter.com. Yeah. So I assume they're going to talk about chatter stuff. Yeah, probably. That's neat. And the second is that they're giving away gift certificates if you can refer three friends. So refer three people and get $20 in a gift certificate to Amazon.

Justin Edelstein: I don't really understand how this, I was the one who put this on our agenda in our Google Wave. Nice.

Jason Atwood: Well done.

Justin Edelstein: I'm not really sure exactly how this works, right? You put in your name, and then you put in your email. And then you can refer people by sending them an email. But what if you put in Justin at Gmail.com?

Jason Atwood: One of your other 17 emails. Well, I mean. I think they have to click on it.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, but I mean, and then I sign up with Justin at Gmail.com is not going to work for a Chatter edition. I can't sign up for Chatter.com with Justin at Gmail.com and then invite people from at me.com, at AOL, at whatever.com. Doesn't work. I'm interested to see how this will fly. Anyway, refer three friends, and if they sign up, you get $20 from Amazon or iTunes.

Jason Atwood: It's a little odd. Little odd. I got to admit.

Justin Edelstein: It's a little odd.

Jason Atwood: Also smells a little desperate. A little bit. It's like, now we're going to pay you to use our service. Funny, because we should have put this on the blog. Yammer just released a new client that does a lot of the stuff that Chatter does. It has the new Air Client. It allows you to do mentions. It allows you to do drag and drop. So Yammer is now kind of saying, oh, well, because Chatter made a big headway because it did a lot of stuff that Yammer did, but had clients, had these offline clients, or not offline, but has the Air Client, which I rarely use, although I found and tweeted about the one thing I like about the desktop client, which is that things float to the top. Actual posts bubble up.

Justin Edelstein: Right, the replies bubble to the top.

Jason Atwood: Someone, the get chatter, I guess, the Twitter person for Chatter, responded to me and said, oh, don't you see that in your normal Chatter? And I'm like, no. They're like, oh, yeah, that's in GA. That's not out yet. That's not gone GA. So clearly it's coming, which I think is great. Because one of the things I don't like is I have to kind of scroll down to see if you commented on something I posted. The kind of discussion we had last week about with all these new social networking communication tools, how do I keep up with them? I've learned for however many years I've been using email, way too many. I've learned some really good habits. And I've trained myself, read books about email. But now it's like there's all these other ones, and you sort of have to treat them in different ways to keep up with them.

Justin Edelstein: People just tuned out because you said you read books about email. I have. Productivity books.

Jason Atwood: I mean, not specifically. tuned out. Well when when Merlin comes out with his book what we just may well get him on here. Let's get Merlin on our podcast. You think so? No. It would be like a four

16:13 Justin Edelstein: hour podcast. We wouldn't be able to get him to stop talking. He talks a lot.

Jason Atwood: Anyway Merlin man just wrote a book called Inbox Zero. Google him. He's a he's pretty smart. Second to last piece of news is Pandora Goes Comedy. So they now have a comedy channel on Pandora. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. I'll say this, I

Justin Edelstein: love me some Pandora. I know you do. I listen to Pandora often in the office particularly. Yep. We get the Wi-Fi and it's good for Pandora. It is. Subway not too good for Pandora. But I do not believe I will be tuning into any comedy on Pandora just like I have a Sirius Radio subscription.

Jason Atwood: Yes you do.

Justin Edelstein: I use Sirius Radio...

Jason Atwood: Do you have the iPhone version or do you have the regular version? I just have it in my car. Oh, in your car, that's right. Just in my car.

Justin Edelstein: And I would say 90 to 95% of the time it's on one of the Howard Stern channels. Which I guess is comedy. But they have... They have... But it's more of a talk show format, right? There goes your argument. No, it's more of a talk show format. But they have a couple of these comedy channels where it's all just stand up. And I have never even, I don't even know what channel that's on. I've never even turned those things on. I never would. I just don't find sitting there listening to stand up comedy like that at all entertaining. But I'm sure there are folks that do.

Jason Atwood: And now it's on Megawrite.

Justin Edelstein: I wonder how it, honestly I do wonder how it works. Because if you're listening to Richard Pryor, and you give it a thumbs up.

Jason Atwood: You get more Richard Pryor. You get Eddie Murphy.

Justin Edelstein: You get some Eddie Murphy. Dick Sankanison. How does that work? Other dead ones?

Jason Atwood: I don't know.

Justin Edelstein: I wonder if it'll work like the music algorithms where, I mean, that's part of the reason I love Pandora is because it knows me so well now, because I've been using it for so long. And it knows all my thumbs up, thumbs down. And it really streams me some good stuff, stuff I don't own, stuff i would never think of it even if they don't put it on i love it that's for that i wonder if it does that comedy if it can do that with com just when you look at it a song that you like or song that comes on you can see like why it shows that for you like melodic themes and harmonies or whatever uh... i wonder you like cursing and erasing racial jokes I was like, ooh, what is this saying about me?

Jason Atwood: Thumbs up to Chris Rock. And then I really, yeah, no, that's interesting. I mean, you like Christian rock or something. Yeah, it could be interesting.

Justin Edelstein: You just went from Chris Rock to Christian Rock.

Jason Atwood: It's right there, see? Wow. At the Segui for you. Very few people can Segui like Chris Segui.

Justin Edelstein: You're the master of Segui.

Jason Atwood: I'm in the same boat as you in terms of, I don't even know if Sirius is considered cloud technology, because it's really above the clouds. It's above the clouds. It's stratosphere.

19:16 Justin Edelstein: It's stratosphere technology. We look down on the clouds. We spit on the clouds.

Jason Atwood: And I am the same way. I have one channel, the NFL Network. And I listen to the NFL Network. If I'm in the car, I'm listening to the NFL Network until my wife or daughter yells at me for about a good hour and a half. And after I've used my complaint of, or my argument that, hey, listen, there's four other devices in this car, probably two iPhones, an iPad, and maybe an iPod Touch in the car, right, that someone's brought in. I cannot use any of them, because I'm driving. I can only look out the window and back, right? I have to pay attention. I can only listen. I can't do anything else. You guys can read magazines, watch movies, play Sudoku, play Scrabble, Angled Birds. You guys can do a million things. I can only do one thing. So I get to choose what's coming out of these speakers. You wanna put on your headphones and listen to the other 50,000 things? Go for it.

Justin Edelstein: They just changed the channels around. They did? Yeah, they just moved them all around.

Jason Atwood: So it's not 124?

Justin Edelstein: I don't know if they moved that. Like I said, I listened to one channel, and that one didn't move. So all the other channels have moved, apparently, to align them with XM. So they're now the same across both platforms.

Jason Atwood: Oh, yeah, because they combined.

Justin Edelstein: They combined, but I'll never know. I'll have to Google the channel.

Jason Atwood: I must say, I do like Pandora. And now they have ads. It's kind of interesting. So if you haven't tried Pandora, you have to try it. Oh, you have to. It's extremely fun. It's amazing.

Justin Edelstein: the iPhone, on the iPad, I'm sure it's on all the other Android rim what have you, log into Pandora.com, it's fantastic.

Jason Atwood: I don't know how they get away with it license wise, but... Me neither. I mean... Somehow they must pay for it.

Justin Edelstein: I have no idea how they get away with that, but they do, they get away with it. Well, that's good.

Jason Atwood: We'll see, again, I'm hoping that iTunes does this whole cloud, Apple does this whole cloud iTunes thing and then basically I can have what I think is fun about Pandora, but I basically have all the music, so I just want to listen to it wherever I am. Anyway.

Justin Edelstein: By the way, channel 124 is now POTUS Politics. Oh, wow. Unfiltered political talk. If you're looking for the NFL network, it's on 88. Oh. Kind of strange one. So you're going to have to change that.

Jason Atwood: So last story is a little interesting in that Rackspace, it started many, many years ago as just a dedicated server place. We've talked about it before. We've talked about it in terms of service and support. I've been a customer of theirs for 10 years. They-

Justin Edelstein: This is our website.

Jason Atwood: Our website is hosted off of Rackspace. They used to be very dedicated hardware. You had a server. It was your server. so much processors and memory and whatever, and ray-to-rays. They've been in over the last three or four years getting into the cloud. They bought a company called Slicehost, which I actually used. Started by a couple guys up in, I think they were in St. Louis.

Justin Edelstein: That would be down from here.

Jason Atwood: I was thinking about from Rackspace. Rackspace is in Texas. I know, odd, but it's where I was at. I was down in Texas with Rackspace. And they bought them, and they bought a bunch of others. They bought Jungle Disc, which we actually also use, so we're pretty big fans. Anyway, they're shutting Slice Host down because they're basically migrating everybody off to their new cloud servers product, which I was, I spent some time the other day, probably bored on a Sunday, Saturday. I love trying out the chat, like the customer service chat or the like, you know, I just love it because I like to see how bad they are. Of course, because Rackspace is good. The guy was great. We went on this like 20, 30 minute conversation and he knew exactly what he was talking about. He was quick. He looked my data up. He knew I was a customer. We're having this whole thing doing comparisons between, this is gonna sound geeky, ready for it, between dedicated hardware and cloud servers in terms of IO and how much speed you could get and what kind of bandwidth you could span to. So, but it was a good conversation.

23:17 Justin Edelstein: Do you have a transcript of it? Cause the good ones send you a transcript in an email after the fact.

Jason Atwood: This was actually a sales call one, because I was looking at the cloud servers.

Justin Edelstein: That's too bad, because we could have posted that as a blog post.

Jason Atwood: That would have been funny. Me discussing literally I.O. That would have been good. Saying what servers I have. So they have a lot of cloud offerings. If you have not gone and checked out Rockspace, you think, oh, they're just dedicated hosting. They got a lot of stuff. And they do crowds files, which I looked at to compete with CacheFly. But they don't allow direct access. But it's good. They have cloud servers. They have a lot of services now. They have that mail service I use too. I use their mail, which is a Gmail competitor. It's like a dollar a month. I use it as well. Yep. Very reliable. I would say even say more reliable than Gmail. It's very good. Pretty much. Although I don't think we ever use the web interface. Do you ever use the web interface? Never. Never. All right. So.

Justin Edelstein: I've logged into it before to look at it. It's fine. It works. It works. It's better than GoDaddy's web email. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: I literally have an email wherever I go. I don't need it. I just want it to be fast, and I want it to work. And when I send an email, I just want it to send. I don't want to think about it. All right, so that's it for the news. Kind of a light week in cloud. Maybe next week will be crazy. But we have two cloud focus picks of the week. One from you, one from me. Why don't you start off?

Justin Edelstein: I'm really considering changing mine on the fly because of something that-

Jason Atwood: I see what you have written here in Google Wave.

Justin Edelstein: What do you think of what I have written there? I can change it on the fly. I think it's okay. You haven't used it yet. No, I haven't. You haven't even tried it. You haven't even installed it. I haven't. Where's the beta? All right. Let me go do something that I've used.

Jason Atwood: Fact, you should install this and then you should write a blog post about it next week and then re-stress it next week. You're probably right. I should do that.

Justin Edelstein: Let me change it to this.

Jason Atwood: Want me to go? No. Okay.

Justin Edelstein: actually talked about Chatter.com and Yammer putting out a new desktop client for Yammer I'm gonna talk about Seesmic Desktop. Excellent. So I've been playing with Seesmic Desktop for the last three four weeks or so and it's a really nice product. You can download it on the Mac or on the PC and it allows you to connect up all of your social networks and see them in one window right so you have one window this is Seesmic Desktop 2 which allows you to log into it allows you to log into chatter it allows you to log into Twitter it allows you to log into LinkedIn Foursquare Facebook the cool part is you can log into like I said chatter but you can log into multiple chatters. That's nice. So as... Although scary. Scary but nice. You know as consultants we have lots of logins and

26:21 Justin Edelstein: you can you know go across and log into a few different chatter orgs if you'd like and have it all on your Seesmic desktop and have it you know right next to your Twitter or right next to your Facebook which could potentially be be rather interesting. So I have Seesmic running right now. You can post an update on the Seesmic desktop and choose where you want it to post from. If you want to post from your Twitter account, from your Facebook account, from your Chatter account, etc. Include links, includes images, what have you. You can set up all these accounts. It's a really interesting window into your social world in one app, one place.

Jason Atwood: There was TweetDeck, I think was rumored to be bought by someone recently, which is another one of these. But yeah, SeesMake, they've been at Salesforce.

Justin Edelstein: They've been at the things at the conferences because they're one of the few that have done it, have invested in doing it.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, using the API.

Justin Edelstein: They go right in. I have our chatter right here, right in front of me.

Jason Atwood: No, it's very cool. The one thing I've used, I've used the one on the iPhone, they have a Seesmic Desk. I don't think it connects up the chatter, but I've used it for, because you can post to Facebook and all at the same time.

Justin Edelstein: Sort of ping out to all the different services.

Jason Atwood: It is a little scary because I have multiple accounts, multiple personalities, I'm a Gemini. So you know, there's sometimes you're talking about stuff that you don't really want to go on one social networking site like LinkedIn. Maybe I don't want my LinkedIn to cross over with my internal Arcus chatter. But yeah, it's nice. I mean, I like it. I must say I'm usually using Tweety, which I know you use as well. Have you given up Tweety?

Justin Edelstein: I don't use Tweety at all. Twitter, sorry. I use the Twitter app, and I use the Seesmic desktop. Why use one or the other? Well, Seesmic gets me everything else. Okay. Twitter only gets me Twitter.

Jason Atwood: But do you use one or the other, or do you just whatever you remember?

Justin Edelstein: I like using the Twitter app for Twitter. Okay. And SeesMake for other things.

Jason Atwood: For everything including chatter. Mm-hmm. Does it support the new stuff that chatter supports? What the at and the and and all that?

Justin Edelstein: Um, you know, I don't know. I generally don't post chatter from it. So I mean, I just read it.

Jason Atwood: Sounds like, okay, just read it.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I mean, I can now that I can enjoy right now.

Jason Atwood: Well I'm gonna, I have two picks. Which I know is against the rules but I'm gonna do it anyway. I know it's against the rules.

Justin Edelstein: I changed mine so that I could only, you know.

Jason Atwood: Yes, well I have two picks. One I'm gonna talk about because I think it's funny, and one actually I'm gonna make a pick on. The funny one is a new service called Gigwalk. Have you heard of this? No. So this could have been a news story. I kind of forgot about it. So, not, because I actually went to test it. So Gigwalk is a, it's an iPhone app where you, I think it was on Engadget today. So I downloaded it and installed it. What it is, it's a iPhone app that you install, you then sign up for it, you give it your PayPal address, and then you can, there are jobs posted for you to go around with your iPhone and the camera attached to your phone and take pictures. And the jobs range in price from like two to three dollars or to up to 30, 40 dollars or 80 dollars. And so you literally go to a place on the map. It says there's these jobs around you. You go to one of the jobs. You then answer questions, because usually asking you

30:00 Jason Atwood: to take pictures of a competitor or like, does this business still exist? Do they still have specials? So it's like someone is posting you to try to find information, but they're hiring you to go do it. So I went to do it today. I wanted to try it because I thought this was fun. The two that were closest to us were trying to get information on street vendors. They were like, is Sammy's salads still on the corner of 44th and 8th? And so I wandered over there. I started up the thing. And I was starting to take the pictures. Then I got all freaked out that I'm taking pictures of someone and they're going to try to kill me with a knife. I didn't do it. But it's kind of a cool concept. I like it. Maybe not for the competitor stuff. Maybe for those taking pictures of something else, like birds or.

Justin Edelstein: It's kind of like Mechanical Turk, but photos of people are taken.

Jason Atwood: And you have to get to a certain reputation to take the big job. There's one right down the street for 30 bucks. I'm trying to figure out how to get to the rep to go do it. Because I was doing some smaller jobs first.

Justin Edelstein: You're not made yet.

Jason Atwood: I'm not made yet. It's too funny. So I don't know, sometimes people come up with this stuff. So I had to mention it. That's a good pick. Isn't that a good pick? But it's not really a pick. But it's called Gigwalk, G-I-G-walk. My real pick of the week was something we've already tweeted about.

Justin Edelstein: Which I disagree with.

Jason Atwood: Which I can't disagree with.

Justin Edelstein: I will read you back our Twitter exchange.

Jason Atwood: Go on. Is Google Chrome Canary. So this is not a big deal because Google Chrome puts out betas, because Google Chrome does put out betas. This beta is the first beta that sits outside of the other ones. So you can sit and use this and the other one. It'll sync your bookmarks back and forth. It syncs your preferences back and forth, because you can do that through Google Sync. But you can use a really cutting edge browser. And all the new cutting edge features are going to come to it first, get tested, because people will be testing it, because that's what you do as part of the community, is you test things. And then it sends back the reports of whether it's working or not. And then those features will then eventually get moved into Google Chrome. So this version, in essence, is always going to be two to three versions ahead. So if you want to test out what's coming down the pike of Chrome, and we've talked about Chrome before. It's a little bit different than the other browsers. Although Firefox started this, I think. We're having the in updates, updates itself. Chrome updates every day.

Jason Atwood: It literally could put out a new little mini release every day. They do it behind the scenes, and they don't really tell you, you wake up, and you're on a new version. And generally, you don't even notice, right? Something happened. Maybe the icon changes.

Justin Edelstein: When the icon changes a couple times. To be clear, though, this is new just for the Mac.

Jason Atwood: It's been out for the PC, but it's now available on the Mac. It's called Google Chrome Canary. And again, the reason you would use this, because I knew you were going to be like, why would you use a browser that could?

Justin Edelstein: That was my tweet. Why would you use a browser that you know is going to crash on you?

Jason Atwood: Because you want to use something that is to see how it works in the future. I'm a time traveler. I'm Doc. I get my door in, and I time travel out like six months, and I use a browser. I'm like, look at this browser, so fast. It does all these cool things. And it crashes. Then I go back and I use regular Chrome.

33:11 Justin Edelstein: That sounds like a blast.

Jason Atwood: Listen, there's stuff that's broken in some of our favorite websites, and it's because it's using some neat stuff. Flash doesn't work very well on it. So I tried it in about two days, made it my full-time browser. But it's nice, because you can literally run it side by side. So you don't have to give up anything. Because of the syncing, it all just works. All passwords, everything just works. So it's so easy that it's like, why not try it? And you're actually helping them make a better browser, which is really why you do it. So mine is Google Chrome Canary for the Mac or PC. Try it out. It's kind of fun to see what, I mean didn't you usually like going again the newest version of Firefox, like Firefox release whatever, get the release candidate or something, the beta just to test it?

Justin Edelstein: Once in a while. I like to have things that work and I know are going to work.

Jason Atwood: Then you use Safari. That's what I do. Yeah.

Justin Edelstein: I use Safari and sometimes Chrome and extremely rarely Firefox. For some reason they've fallen off for me. They're better. It really works really, really well and Chrome's really, really good too.

Jason Atwood: Chrome has some really good extensions. Firefox has much, much better extensions.

Justin Edelstein: I used to just love extensions. Now I really don't care.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, there's some really good ones in Firefox I can't even out.

Justin Edelstein: I used to like go into the Firefox extension gallery like once a day and be like, what's new? I want something. And then you realize it was browser browser. And then my browser's just dying. Like, oh, I'm going to get rid of these.

Jason Atwood: All right, so that's our pick of the week and this podcast. So if you want to read any of the blog posts, including the ones from the past week, you can figure out our posting schedule. You go to blog.arkasinc.com. I actually just tried to get us picked up by Technorati. I spent a while, dude. Really? Yeah. How can we not be on Technorati?

Justin Edelstein: Isn't it just pretty simple?

Jason Atwood: You have to jump through a few hoops. Including posting a code in a blog post.

Justin Edelstein: It used to be pretty simple. Nope. They're still verifying.

Jason Atwood: code in the title of a blog post.

Justin Edelstein: Honestly, I didn't even know Tech N'Rally was still around. They're pretty big. Pretty big deal. Well, they used to be a really big deal.

Jason Atwood: Not like a sales person, VP, but they're a pretty big deal. If you want to follow the company, it's twitter.com slash arkasinc. You want to follow me on twitter.com slash jasonmattwood and Justin here is twitter.com slash justetelstein. We're also on Facebook, facebook.com slash arkasinc. We post our blog posts up there. We post our, maybe some funny photos. I know we have a picture of Arky, our pet rock. So that's there. And the best way to really want to keep up with the podcast is to go to iTunes. Go to iTunes. We post the link in the podcast notes. We post it on Twitter. But you can go to iTunes, type in Cloud Focus Weekly, subscribe, and then any time we do a new episode, you'll literally get it faster than anybody else because it just instantly comes down. Faster than a speeding bullet. Faster than a speeding cash fly. But until next week, if it gets warmer and warmer here in New York City, which is nice, shorts weather. Until then, enjoy those cloudy, maybe a little bit sunny days.