The official Google Support page describes the following subsidy tiers:

• Nexus One without service: $529
• Nexus One with new, 2-year T-Mobile US service plan for new customers: $179
• Nexus One with new, 2-year T-Mobile US service plan for qualifying existing T-Mobile customers who are adding data plans: $279
• Nexus One with new, 2-year T-Mobile US service plan for qualifying existing T-Mobile customers who are upgrading their data plans: $379

I’ve been a T-Mobile customer for a little over seven years now, and off-contract for pretty much that entire time. I’m thus now open to what T-Mobile calls their full subsidy. Except with the Google phone, where Google manages the subsidy, not T-Mobile. Since I had a $10/month sad, EDGE-based data plan with TMO, Google informed me after polling the TMO servers that I was eligible for the $150 subsidy, for a Nexus One price of $379. The next subsidy tier up is $100 cheaper for a price of $279.

The only distinction lies in whether you are “upgrading your data plan” or “adding a data plan.” This seemed like a simple enough problem to fix: I called T-Mobile support and asked them to cancel my data plan. They said it would be no problem, since I’m not under contract. I worried briefly that it wouldn’t be visible to the Google-based powers that be until the next billing cycle, but the TMO rep informed me that the change is instant. Since I knew I was buying a Nexus either way, I pulled the trigger.

Wouldn’t you know it, not five minutes later when I went to make the purchase again Google’s web store fetched my data and lo and behold, my Nexus price was now just $279. Easy-peasy, that.

The ironic part is that I’m moderately sure I could re-activate the data plan now without incurring any real additional fees in the day-and-a-half I may have to wait for the overnight shipping to get here, but I don’t use the slow EDGE service enough to warrant wrecking my cool here.

After all the dust settled, I realized how asinine Google had decided to make the checkout process by managing sales and subsidies of the device themselves. They limit you to just one rate plan during your purchase, which is more than a little infuriating as I received different answers from TMO reps over whether upping my minutes would cause Google to come after me for the subsidy. (It appears that you CAN upgrade your account to another Even More plan according to a recently-added note on this Google Support page.) The pricing rates are buried under a Support knowledge base article and not at all transparent. Google says $179 and then pulls an enormous J/K on you as they fetch your account information, seemingly pulling a figure out of thin air as it suits them. The T-Mobile reps can’t do anything about it since the purchase isn’t on their side of the pond at all. And Google is nowhere to be found.

Strange to me that a company so intent on delivering a device with their brand and full-throated support would instantly fawn off users to HTC and T-Mobile so that they don’t need to support their customers in any meaningful way. This isn’t the first time Google has proved shockingly absent with matters of support, but it feels very different when you’re purchasing a product subject to additional cancellation fees.

Further, it seems completely short-sighted to limit the subsidy as they have. Restricting the best price to new T-Mobile customers alone is frustrating, but they make it nearly impossible for anyone with a family plan to switch at the subsidized price. Worse, the subsidy at its lower rates really just amortizes the cost of the phone out over those two years, as the Even More plans cost $10/month more—that’s $240 over two years right there. Let’s be clear: At $379, you’re better off financially buying the unlocked phone and using the Even More Plus plan, which costs $10 less, for a total savings of $90 over the two year term. Even better since you’re not under any contract at the $529 rate.

Creating barriers to entry for new customers is always a bad idea, made all the worse when those barriers seem arbitrary and class-based. Google needs to stop with the silly tiers and subsidize the damn phone like they’re usually subsidized through carriers. They should allow purchases under family plans and not take the data plan into account. And they should allow you to select from any of T-Mobile’s Even More tiers, which would save me a phone call with T-Mobile’s (admittedly friendly and typically knowledgeable) support.

[1/18/2010 Edit: It was reported last week that Google is nixing the $379 rate entirely, so existing T-Mobile subscribers of all (out-of-contract) stripes will now qualify for the $279 offer. Early adopters who got hit with the $379 rate will have a refund check sent to them. Good on Google, but it'd be nice if it were $179 for all.]

You can preview the book beforehand and regenerate the notebook as many times as you’d like, though for now, you can’t hand-pick tweets for the notebook. The notebook also appears to only have non-ruled pages much to my chagrin, but it sounds like TweetNotebook is planning on beefing up their offering in the near future if this takes off. For now, they have three different covers available, onto which your current avatar and cover tweet appears. Here’s mine:

Suffice to say, I’ve already bought mine. I think it’s a fun conversation piece, and I think that it’s a fun look into what was relevant to you a few days, weeks, or for some of us, even a year or two ago, in a blurb. It’s almost like thumbing through a diary in a sense, a simple snapshot at the bottom of each page that makes you pause and try to remember what context surrounded that tweet.

We’ve seen Threadless make T-shirts out of great tweets, and I think it’s no stretch to imagine other potential products that can be built out of a users’ Twitter feed. Consider a timeline, complete with tag cloud, friend diagrams, statistics, and more. Twitter lends itself to these sort of changes in medium because of their brevity and relevance—no one’s wearing a shirt with excerpts from their blog on it, but a poster that shows off my activity on Twitter is fun enough even if you’re not a raging narcissist.

For now, there’s also nothing to stop you from using someone else’s tweets, like a celebrity. (Or a friend, for a gift.) That situation may change if copyright issues arise. All told, my order was just $14.50, including shipping to Tempe, Arizona. Here’s hoping they’ll offer different sizes, bindings, and rulings in the future.

TweetNotebook | via TechCrunch

What makes Speed Tracer different?

Developers have long used Firebug to identify what AJAX requests were causing bottlenecks and to analyze responses to those requests. Firebug is an extremely powerful tool and does a serviceable job with this approach, but Speed Tracer takes things one step further, analyzing the “sluggishness” of your application by examining how busy or blocked the UI is in your browser. This can help developers analyze why their application feels slow, instead of simply focusing on network-based bottlenecks.

Speed Tracer makes use of specific, unique APIs built into Webkit for this very purpose, which gives it a unique advantage compared to other profiling tools. Instead of simply guessing and checking, developers will now have full visibility into what’s causing their applications to appear slow:

Using Speed Tracer you are able to get a better picture of where time is being spent in your application. This includes problems caused by JavaScript parsing and execution, layout, CSS style recalculation and selector matching, DOM event handling, network resource loading, timer fires, XMLHttpRequest callbacks, painting, and more.

Very cool stuff. What’s more, it’s free, open source, and available for users of Google Chrome right now. Check out their tutorial below:

Google Speed Tracer

Our beloved web analytics tool Clicky blogged about a pretty crucial SEO & analytics issue today: Google is rolling people over to a new AJAX-powered search, that pushes query strings AFTER a hash mark. So: http://www.google.com/search?q=what’s+my+referrer becomes: http://www.google.com/#q=what’s+my+referrer

The problem with this is that browsers don’t send anything after the hash mark (this thing: #) in their referrer string, since they’re used for named anchors. Since analytic tools use the referrer string to parse search keywords, this breaks that functionality for anyone on the “new” Google. Nightmare. It’s as if they’re effectively “commenting out” the rest of the query string from the referrer string–dark pool, that. Learn more about the ramifications here after the jump.

What’s interesting to me is the split opinions on the Clicky blog post. A lot of people seem to be taking a “they can do whatever they want” attitude towards things, with some noting that if it were instead Microsoft making this change, the ranting wouldn’t stop. While I agree that a company has the right to change the way they operate and to change the way their application functions, I think they’re doing everyone a vast disservice by essentially breaking such a useful component. Many, many tracking tools and logging systems will cease to process search keywords properly.

What’s stranger still is that this appears to break even Google Analytics’ own implementation of keyword tracking, based on its use of the referrer string and some preliminary testing by this guy. This leads me to wonder if this was a test concept that got pushed to production inadvertently, and if we’ll be seeing a rollback sometime in the near future when the engineering team realizes what unholy hellfire they’ve released on the analytics community. Worse still, this isn’t a simple tracking-system fix. The browsers themselves govern the data sent in the referrer string. They parse out anything after a hash mark, because it was traditionally used to refer to a section within a page, pointing to a named anchor somewhere on a given page. (Whereas a regular query string is typically calling dynamic content, and thus fundamentally different even if the root file were the same.) No reason to consider index.php#top and index.php as separate pages; in fact, this would further muck up analytics tools.

It will be very interesting to see what develops here. Losing the ability to track incoming keywords for no appreciable reason and with no word from Google seems a bit obtuse, but there’s a fair chance we’ll be hearing something or seeing some changes very soon.

Meanwhile, if you want to test this yourself, visit Google directly, search for “What’s my referrer” and click the first result. Then try it from a Google Toolbar search; these searches still use the old query string method, as its the toolbar itself formatting the search request and not the site. Search for the same and note that the referrer now contains your search string.

A single bit corrupted in several of these gossips such that they were still intelligible but reflecting inaccurate data about the system state. These propagated through the network (much like a virus, really) and caused most of the servers to spend most of their time gossiping or failing to complete the gossip; if the gossip doesn’t complete, the server can’t/won’t send its data.

While Amazon MD5 checksums data in containers to ensure its integrity as its being transmitted, they weren’t doing this on their gossips. They’ve since established several new practices to attempt to ensure that a problem like this won’t cause a failure across the entire system, including better failure handling with gossips and faster restoration when nodes do go down.

They end their missive simply enough, owning up in a way I give them credit for:

Though we’re proud of our operational performance in operating Amazon S3 for almost 2.5 years, we know that any downtime is unacceptable and we won’t be satisfied until performance is statistically indistinguishable from perfect.

“Statistically indistinguishable from perfect” is a rather poetic phrase, and I’d like to think we strive for that over at Synapse Studios. But my stats-masters programmer would just mock me.

Read their full statement here.

I’ll go into some more detail on what we did to bring things back up and keep the site available in another post, but suffice to say, we moved our background image, subscribe/RSS feed image and Synapse Studios logo over to S3 to help take some of the load off. And of course, S3 went down today.

As of right this moment, here’s where they’re at:

9:05 AM PDT We are currently experiencing elevated error rates with S3. We are investigating.
9:26 AM PDT We’re investigating an issue affecting requests. We’ll continue to post updates here.
9:48 AM PDT Just wanted to provide an update that we are currently pursuing several paths of corrective action.
10:12 AM PDT We are continuing to pursue corrective action.
10:32 AM PDT A quick update that we believe this is an issue with the communication between several Amazon S3 internal components. We do not have an ETA at this time but will continue to keep you updated.
11:01 AM PDT We’re currently in the process of testing a potential solution.
11:22 AM PDT Testing is still in progress. We’re working very hard to restore service to our customers.
11:45 AM PDT We are still in the process of testing a series of configuration changes aimed at bringing the service back online.

Moving data into the cloud and relying on the cloud is a fantastic concept for a lot of reasons. Redundancy, scalability and pay-as-you-need is a tempting system. But when the system still has single points of failure, or chokepoints that can cascade and bring the entire service down, we need to be cautious with what’s hosted there.

Now, we’re a relatively small blog. It’s not a huge deal that our background image isn’t displaying. But photo host SmugMug‘s entire service relies on S3 hosting to store your photos. When S3 goes down, their entire business model fails. And it’s difficult to explain to your clients that your hosting provider is down without looking cheap or like you don’t know how to build for these situations or that you’re not able to handle playing at this level. Even though you’re not, and you do and you are.

Your customers don’t really care about a distributed, cloud-based storage model that allows you to ensure data integrity and availability 99.9% of the time. They see that 0.1% and start to wonder. Because people take availability for granted. When you’re not a web developer or database administrator or scalability engineer, you don’t have to apply the cycles to wonder exactly how, say, Google is delivered billions of times a day without you paying a single cent, and in less than a second.

But the truth is, it’s exceptionally challenging work that relies on hardware components that can fail, software optimizations that can be brought down by edge cases or missed opportunities and humans at every step that are learning as they go here.

So for now, we keep refreshing the status page and know that Amazon is more incentivized than anyone to get their services back up and running. They do, after all, eat their own dog food and use S3 to host their product images.

So it’s fitting that today he announced the creation of the Firebug Working Group to consolidate development on the tool, and that he’d be spending 50% of his Mozilla time on Firebug.

This is great news, as John is very clearly brilliant and has some great ideas for the future of the tool.

[via Ajaxian]

I am about half way through Lawrence Lessig’s book Code 2.0 and it has brought back fond memories of my days writing on e-government and open-source software. If you read only one book about the Internet, please make it The Future of Ideas, also by Lessig. This book was the foundation for my thesis and is, in my opinion, one the most influential books on the Internet and information freedom.

E-government is revolutionizing the business of government. It has the potential to single handedly bring citizens closer to their governments in a time when government mistrust and mismanagement has run rampant. By allowing citizens the opportunity to gather information, conduct online transactions, and more easily interact with their government, the e-government phenomena has begun to cement itself into the fabric of American culture.

We still have a ways to go. Not every government has the resources to implement such innovative services, just as not every citizen has the resources to access those services. The digital divide is large and we as a nation must resolve to bring the benefits of Internet and computer technology to those who otherwise would not have such opportunities. In a strange way, development of e-government services can help. By choosing effective and efficient technological platforms described in this thesis, governments can cut costs and divert those savings to public technological welfare.

A large part of this cost savings can be had with the adoption of open-source software in government. While open-source adoption is slowly gaining ground in public agencies, truth of knowledge must be spread regarding the values of open-source alternatives. Capitalism has no place in public government business. The profit motive of corporate America is degenerative to the democratic principals on which this nation was founded. Government has become a puppet of corporations who foster greed and inseminate corruption in our public institutions. Gone are the days of true public service where men and women sacrificed for the public good.

Fortunately, there exists an alternative to the moral stagnation of our political officials; the hacker philosophy, as symbolized in the open-source software movement. This is not to say that open-source software will cure our political misfortunes, far from it. However, I do see it as a start to changing the mindset of the American people into that of a bygone era when greed was not motivation and sacrifice and humanity were in abundance.

The open-source philosophy teaches that when a problem arises, those with the ability to help should help, with no other motivation than the satisfaction of helping.
Attributed to the world of technology, this philosophy has enabled what are now the Internet and the World Wide Web. Without those pioneering free spirited individuals of the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, who choose to give away their creations instead of profiting from them, there would be no Internet as it exists today. This fact often escapes Capitalist minded individuals who attempt to treat digital and intellectual property as if they were real world rivalrous resources.

Seeking to profit from the expected use of a given technology based on the generosity of previous innovators, these digital robber barons are stifling innovation for future generations. In an attempt to maintain the status quo and thus their efficacious positions, these individuals and corporations are unrightfully attempting to control the Internet: incipiently conceived as a free and uncontrolled entity. This blatant protraction of control and manipulation has the potential to collapse the independent pillars of the Internet thus destroying the most effectual communication and social medium in history.

Thankfully, there exist individuals who are poised and ready to fight such methods of control and degradation. Individuals like Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, along with millions of independent programmers and businesses are silently contributing to the open-standards and open-source model. Developments like the Linux operating system are gaining ground not through monetary assertion, but rather through proven results and first hand realization of their superior performance, security, and efficiency.

It is thanks to these open-source programs that a low cost yet highly effective option for e-government services exists. With continually shrinking budgets and citizens not willing to pay for ineffective government services, many reformers are turning to open-source software. A worldwide support community, open-standards base, and limitless licensing options are just some of the benefits of adopting open-source alternatives for e-government services.

The founders of our nation believed in the freedom of information and the correctness of the knowledge to which that information begets. Proprietary software models capitalize on the secrecy of information. There exists no motivation to share information because proprietary software is driven by profit not freedom. The open-source model promotes just the opposite; transparency of information. With open code and open standards, there is no place for secrets; trust and freedom of information prevail. That is why the open-source software model is the best model for government IT systems.

(In fact, HTML 4.01 has presented us with the longest gap in HTML revisions—it’s been 10 years since it was released; HTML 3.2 only lasted about a year, from 1997 to 1998.) There are some great things we have to look forward to that will make life a lot easier for us developers and designers. We’ll take a look at a few of them after the jump.

To start with, we’ll be able to cut out some of the fluffy JavaScripts and hacked stylesheets that we’ve used to create custom elements and small usability features like autofocusing form fields.

The spec document is a bit rough to navigate so I’ve put together a few of the more exciting elements for now:

Form Upgrades:

There are a whole slew of cool things that we’ll be seeing with forms: new elements, new attributes, and new and better ways to solve previously tedious problems. There are several new input types that will increase the semantics of our forms: datetime, date, month, week, time, number, range, email and url. In theory, the user agent (browser) itself can actually use these fields to render a calendar object, though an implementation like that would need to be consistent across the browsers to be of any practical use.

An <output> element will exist for returning information from scripts. Combo boxes will be created as a combination of <input> and a (new) <datalist> element as shown:

<input list=fruits>

<datalist id=fruits>

 <option value="Apples">

 <option value="Oranges">

 <option value="Bananas">

 <option value="Mangos">

</datalist>

There will also be a slew of cool attributes for form elements that will greatly reduce the work put into creating secure and usable forms. Some of these will be: autofocus, form, required, autocomplete, min, max, pattern, step, list, inputmode and template. You can get a good idea of what each of these will be used for from their names. Autofocus and required are going to be very useful. Inputmode allows the the page author to provide a hint about the input of the form element to the user. The list attribute is used in conjunction with a datalist element
as shown above.

Lists:

I’m so happy that they have decided to keep the value attribute of the li element and the start attribute of the ol element. These useful attributes were previously marked deprecated, but since there is no CSS equivalent way to perform these functions, we get to keep them. Also, they are adding a reverse attribute to the ol in case you want to show your numbered list starting from the highest number. A new type of list called dialog will be added for displaying dialogs and conversations in a semantic way. the dt and dd tags will be borrowed from the dl element to show who said what and what they said.

New Elements:

There are going to be many new elements that increase semantics and functionality. Some of these elements are: section, article, aside, header, footer, nav, figure, audio, video, time, meter, canvas, command, progress and menu. The section element will define sections of a page and will serve a semantic purpose similar to div except it will be more encompassing. Each section will have its own set of h1-h6 header elements. The article, header and footer elements will be used to describe different parts of the page as indicated by their names. Navigation menus will now be constructed using the nav element and menu element. This will finally make navigation menus more semantic. The menu element is not new, but it is now something totally different and semantically useful. Elements like video and audio will be used instead of embed or object for presenting those kinds of media. For full descriptions and information about more of the elements and attributes, read the W3C specifications for yourself.

Goodbyes:

We can say goodbye to many of our old elements including basefont, big, center, font, s, strike, tt, u, frame, frameset, noframes, acronym, applet, isindex and dir. All these things can be accomplished by CSS or by another element. These elements have been removed for reasons of redundancy, accessibility, and semantics. Many attributes have also been removed from certain elements.

Concepts and Conclusions:

There are also a few new elements and attributes that I haven’t discussed that will change the way we write HTML and our scripts. Many of these new features will allow us to do things like trigger events, create data-dependent parts of our page, create elements in loop structures and aid in the creation of templates. These are some exciting things to look forward to. (Though arguments abound on their place in a simple markup language.)

Remember that HTML 5 is still in draft form and many of these things may or may not be in the final spec. I’ve only scratched the surface of HTML 5 in this post, so check out the specs for yourself and start waiting.

Finally, take a look at A List Apart’s similar look into some of HTML 5′s new featureset:
A Preview of HTML 5 [A List Apart]

Domain Tasting
Any time you’ve ended up at a domain name that just appeared to be a bunch of similar search terms and ads, chances are, it’s held by a squatter. Squatters are people who register thousands of domain names just to run those pages and make money on the ad revenue.

Unfortunately, ICANN has up until now allowed users to register a domain name and hold it for the five day grace period that exists on domain registrations. During this period, they can publish their ads and see if it generates any sort of traffic. If it’s viable, they register it. Otherwise, they drop it. They voted to squash the practice today and open up TLD registration. Check the jump for figures on tasting and more on the TLDs.

The numbers behind this are staggering. In February 2007, GoDaddy reported:

55.1 million domain names were registered. Of those, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept.

The end result of this practice is that viable, useful domain names go to squatters who just use them as ad havens, instead of to users with may grander plans for them.

ICANN’s voting to squash the tasting grace period.

.* TLDs
In their meeting, ICANN also voted to allow companies to register any TLD (the place where .com goes) that they choose. The process isn’t like a normal domain name. No, you have to pay between $100,000-$500,000 and prove your willingness/ability to maintain the TLD registry, since it’s an entire registry you’re managing. They claim it’s opening up entire swaths of internet real estate; I question if the TLD will ever matter that much given how reliant we’ve become on search engines and bookmarks to navigate the web—who’s going to remember .net much less .synapse?

ICANN Votes To Squash Domain Tasting And Allow New Top Level Domains [Consumerist.com]