Friday, October 22, 2010

thoughts on Netflix, Twitter, W, and Juan Williams

First, Netflix.

We were streaming a movie last night when we got the dreaded "your Internet connection has slowed" message. We gave up waiting, after nothing happened for several minutes (while I silently had nasty thoughts about Qwest). This morning, I read this:

"Netflix's streaming service has become so popular that it is now the largest source of U.S. Internet traffic during peak evening hours, according to Sandvine Inc., a Canadian company that supplies traffic-management equipment to Internet service providers.

Streaming by Netflix subscribers accounted for about one-fifth of that peak-time traffic, more than double the volume flowing from Google Inc.'s YouTube, Sandvine said."

Sigh - it was nice for a while. I remember the heady days (circa 1999) when we at Enron Broadband schemed to own the Internet video-streaming universe. Our plan was to divert all that traffic to a private national fiber network, keeping it separate from the 'Internet'. Maybe that was a pretty good model, after all. We'll never know.

Twitter: I was an early adopter, but stopped using it immediately, as I saw it as a total waste of my time. Your mileage may vary, but (see 'Netflix' above) I happened to check Twitter this morning, and all I see is the 'Twitter is over capacity' message. To me, the only Tweet worth following is StephenAtHome.

W in the news. This headline is simply horrifying. Bad ideas never die.

Juan Williams: now has a 2 million dollar contract with Fox News. He's HOME!!!! I have long thought his NPR 'commentaries' were consistently shallow and slanted to the Right - totally infuriating. I agree he should not have been fired for his comments - I have to believe that the pros at Fox suggested this gambit, to get out of his NPR contract. Mission Accomplished.

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