I’m serious, they will soon need to hold meetings for MySpace addicts. People you would never guess to be online have clamored to this site and are junkies and can’t wait to get their next fix. It’s tragic too because that was the big introduction to something more than email to a lot of people.

The brainwashing isn’t the only thing that rubs me the wrong way about MySpace though. As a web designer, it’s a nightmare. A huge, hacked-together, clunky mess of a nightmare; and that’s not to say anything of what the users add to the mix when they get to “coding” their custom profiles. Wow. This huge stew of badness results in loads of “technical difficulties” and slow page loads. It’s just a horrible pollution of the internet.

As I mentioned, I was amazed at the amount of long lost friends I found using MySpace; and that’s the meaning of a social network. But it wasn’t long before the landlord of the sister of a friend of a friend of a friend of the guy I met last Tuesday at a convention for two minutes started requesting to be my friend. And then some girl named Veska wanted me to add her and then go check out her webcam where she promised to do interesting things for me. Soon I had 7.3 billion friend requests for people I never heard of, bands I wouldn’t be interested in and movements I certainly wouldn’t protest with. That isn’t a social network, that’s a race and a huge marketing tool.

Eventually you’ll realize that MySpace is owned by the (evil) News Corp conglomerate and is really only a huge billboard; with a great range of user demographics that advertisers love to try to sell to. It’s really just a huge advertising machine, yet zillions of people are still fascinated with it.

So what to do? There are lots of alternatives; with admittedly a smaller user base, but the one I’m making a plea to is Vox.com.

Vox is pretty new on the street and it’s beautiful. Vox gives users a blog (yourclevername.vox.com) and has a community that you can connect it to, with all the bells and whistles of photo sharing, RSS feeds even the obligatory “what I’m reading/listening to”. The layout is elegantly slick and you can actually read something on the page. Aesthetically there’s no comparison, but since you asked…

Here’s a typical cluttered, headache and seizure inducing, horizontal scrolling disorganized MySpace page (click it to see it full size, if you dare):

And for comparison, here is a beautifully orchestrated, easy-on-the-eyes, organized Vox page:

So where are the hordes of people coming over to this and leaving MySpace behind? Egh, they’re busy arranging their top 8, hacking their CSS to make the playboy bunny blink and trying to figure out “this photobucket” thing. The real reason is that, unfortunately, MySpace did it big and for whatever reason people chose it over the competition. Given this, who would want to abandon their friends? Certainly there would be a few to move with you, but there are those that would rather go down with the ship.

This leaves one question: How can the good people of Vox bring the MySpace crowds who are willing to switch over without them losing contact with their closest pals and the people who they’ve never met but claim them anyway? Portability. It would be simple for Vox, or any other social networking site for that matter, build a tool to harvest the data of profiles on MySpace and bring them into a user profile on their site. That way the more cultured user can claim their friends over at MySpace and still share that connection, just not on MySpace. Then, to reciprocate the bond; the user need only to post one final bulletin with a small snippit of code (to display their profile) wishing everyone well, and asking to place the code on their page so they can still be friends.

So that’s your challenge Vox team, if you build it they will come (probably). And to everyone else, do yourself a favor, drop the MySpace stuff and move over to a better site and take your top 8 (or 16 or whatever they’ve developed a hack for these days) with you.

Here are the four most common answers I can give:

1. Spyware
2. Virus
3. Poor management
4. Outdated system

First spyware.  It lurks in everything.  Big companies want to figure out how to market toward YOU, so they track what you do, similar to putting a security camera in your living room so NBC can watch you watch TV.  Sometimes it’s more menacing; a snotty-nosed kid wants to steal your bank account info, so he sends out a key logger to track it.  Whatever it is that’s putting spyware on your computer, there are ways to prevent it.  The biggest is to avoid shady websites.  Just like there are bad parts of a neighborhood or dark alleys you wouldn’t go down in broad daylight, there are places on the internet that are bad news.  Usually they look illegal.  Stay away.  Next thing to do on your quest to be spyware free is to get a better browser.  By better, I mean something other than Internet explorer.  Firefox is, in my opinion the best, and the newest version comes standard with some Phishing (making you think you’re at one site when you’re really at another) prevention built in.  On top of security, things just look better and work smoother in Firefox.  Next up, stop downloading “free” games and toolbars for your browser and quit downloading random files from P2P services, these are absolutely riddled with spyware.  Yes it might seem cute that you can play poker all day long and add awesome smiley faces to your email; but it isn’t doing anything for the coronary it’s going to give you when it takes 14 hours for your email program to start up.  Lastly and most obviously install some spyware scanning software.  Spybot search and destroy and AdAware are both free (the safe kind of free) so there’s no reason they shouldn’t be installed on your computer and regularly ran and updated.

Viruses.  Honestly, I don’t have very much in the way of personal experience with viruses.  Why?  Because I don’t get them.  I must pay an exorbitant amount of money in subscription fees for anti-virus software then right?  Wrong.  AVG has a free edition that I’ve used for a long time and it’s worked like a charm.  It’s also important to actually activate your anti-virus program (you need to have the burner on to boil the water) and turn on the automatic updates so you’ll have the latest virus definitions on your system.

Poor management.  In the tech support world this is known as, “the problem exists between keyboard and chair.“  A computer is a tool, it’s dumb (unless you actually have Johnny Five), so it’s up to you to take care of it.  This means tidying up every now and then.  Here’s a brief and in no way expansive tidying up tutorial.  First clean your desktop.  If you’re growing an icon farm you’re probably contributing the most to your slowness problem.  If those shortcuts are absolutely necessary, create a new folder on your desktop and name it “shortcuts” and then move all of those unnecessary necessary icons into the folder.  After you discover you have a background picture and change it, look down.  Right beside the current time, is your system tray.  There should be a bunch of icons hanging out down there; some are necessary, some aren’t.  Get rid of the one’s that aren’t.  Anything in the system tray is a program that remains open in the background so it can be launched quickly, and this has the side effect of slowing things down.  So, if you’re not using it that often, evict it.  Finally, defrag your hard drive and turn on Windows firewall.

Last on the list of things that are slowing your system down is outdated hardware.  Computers aren’t like wine.  Instead of aging gracefully, computers become crippled and die and develop plague-like symptoms.  If you’re noticing a delay and you’ve already tried all the things mentioned already, it may be time to take old yeller out back.  Computers are becoming more and more affordable, so it shouldn’t be the end of the world.  Also, a new computer gives you a chance to try something new like a better operating system.

So, hopefully I’ve solved one or two of your problems and saved you $300 on a twenty second repair.  Just remember computers are our friends.

I knew that add-on developers hadn’t gotten around to updating a lot of what’s out there, so I totally expected to give up a couple of things I already had installed. So I open up the browser and I do some clicking around; I notice a few interface issues, so I disable this and enable that. Nothing worked. I would pop open a new tab, but I couldn’t load a web page in it, it would only load into the first tab. I also couldn’t close any of the tabs. After trying to do all of this, none of the selectable areas would work such as the URL bar drop-down.

I was in distress. So I look around the Mozilla support page - nothing. I run a google search manually because the search bar in Firefox wasn’t working - nothing. I restart FF, I restarted Windows, still nothing.

Just as I was about to reinstall the previous version, I thought maybe I should just try reinstalling version 2 again. Good idea. It’s now working like a charm and I’m really digging the new features.

So if you had any of the same problems, I figured since I couldn’t find anything about them, I’d post a little tip.

Happy browsing.

Hopefully Leo decides to change his mind. Until then I wait nervously.

Update: The TWiT army has spoken.

Update: All is well, TWiT will continue.  Joe Kelly decided to make his own “mix tape” of the best of TWiT in the interim while the crew gets back together.  Leo mentions in the show opening the promise of many more TWiT’s to come.

There are hundreds of companies now that provide support for offices that choose to use open source tools, and most of all of the original distributors operate on a business model of accruing revenue through paid technical support. With the support, quality and efficiency there in these alternatives; why isn’t the adoption rate higher?

I began to wonder today, what master recipe would “the new office” follow to address all of its tech needs without the gigantic expenditure; this culminated in the following list:

Operating System
Switching to an “open” office would first involve moving employees who are most likely very familiar with Windows over to an alternative. This alternative would obviously have to be Linux, and lately it’s become clear that the front runner in ease of use is Ubuntu Linux.

Positives: It’s free, stable (worlds better than Windows), loaded with free software, easy to install and use, short learning curve, decreased risk of viruses and did I mention stable?
Negatives: Certain business specific software probably won’t have Linux support, but all that could change if more people adopted Linux

Productivity Software
OpenOffice is the alternative to Microsoft Office, has all the features you need with a minor few left out. Features a word processor, slide, spreadsheet, database and drawing program. OpenOffice reads Office program files like .doc, and also has the ability to save in those formats.

Positives: Free, mimics the functionality of MS Office and matches most features, also has some bonus tools like the built in PDF function to convert any document into PDF format.
Negatives: Small items were left out of the details like the robust reviewing features of Word, and OpenOffice is very lacking in easy-on-the-eyes clip art (if you’re into that sort of thing) and templates for slide presentations.

Email
The top three things I hate from Microsoft are 1) Internet Explorer, 2) Windows OS and 3) Microsoft Outlook. Outlook, though, has unfortunately been engrained in the business world as the best. And really, it is unique, and has a huge range of features which businesses love. That’s why when I heard of a project called Zimbra, I thought it to be a godsend. Zimbra is a mail server system, with a slick, skinnable browser based interface similar to Gmail. It has a huge amount of functionality, and reviews are great. Unfortunately I haven’t tried it myself yet because I have avoided altogether the task of running my own mail server choosing to rely on Gmail for that; but I have played with the demo, and have to say it looks and feels nice.

So those are just some of the, literally, thousands of open source alternatives that businesses have the option of adopting in place of the pricey (lesser quality) commercial products available.

In the end, it is up to the end-user at a company to decide what’s best to use. Some may never be able to “convert”, and some may not be able to get past the idea that something you pay for isn’t necessarily better than something you can get for free. But if you are looking for options, open-source is waiting.

1. They’re funny. This is often overlooked in business. From their about page down to the bordering-on-the-edge of psychotic monthly newsletter, they make it seem like the company is operated by people instead of robots.
2. Transparency. When a server crashes or a catastrophic power outage disrupts service, they’re quick to post to their status blog. The only time I heard from any of my previous hosting providers was when I owed them money. Dreamhost isn’t afraid to flaunt it’s faults, it embraces them.
3. Value. With most other providers you’ll pay for everything. Subdomains, additional domains on the same account, more email addresses… DH gives that stuff away like candy. Unlimited subdomains and domains, more email addresses than I will ever need, they’ve increased my storage and pretty much done everything short of hosting my pages for free.
4. Rewards. Referrals to DH equal $97 in your pocket or a percentage of every dollar spent by that person. You even get a cut of the cash from the people that they refer.
5. Custom control panel. I loath cpanel. DH, I suppose, does too. They built their own control panel that’s much more robust than anything I’ve ever used. Though it does slow down from time to time, it really is much more useful.
6. Suggestions. An entire area of the control panel is dedicated to accepting user suggestions and voting on those suggestions in a digg’esque kind of way. The best part is, they actually implement them.
7. Support. Finding the answers yourself is handled by a pretty extensive dreamhost wiki, but when you need to email someone in support via the panel, they really respond. Because they’re so efficient through email, I have never had to call, therefore I can’t comment on their phone support.
8. Excellent blog. This goes back to the transparency thing. Never have I felt a sense of camaradeire with a company like I do with DH. In the company blog, they dish the dirt on what’s really going on in the company from their encounters with trying to buy extra storage to funny stories about the wife of the company president falling victim to a phishing scam.
9. Goodies. Want a wordpress blog, phpBB, Joomla or ZenCart? Well they’re just a few of the one-click installs.
10. Domestic. Sorry, I think Indians have a right to a job just as much as the next guy, but unlike my previous hosting providers, Dreamhost keeps it in house.

So if you’re in the market, or looking for a change of scenery, I fully recommend Dreamhost.

So, here it is. And, yes, I’ve already scheduled routine backups.