For some reason I’ve been the target of telemarketers recently, and I think I’ve found the secret to getting them to hang up and stop calling: just say no three times. Three seems to be the magic number. The first two times you say you’re not interested, they continue to pester, but the third time, they thank you for your time and say goodbye. I have had much more success with this method than with simply hanging up on them. First, that makes me feel rude, and a telemarketer is still a person who has a job and there’s no reason for me to be rude to them just because I’m annoyed. But second, and more importantly, simply hanging up seems to increase the likelihood that the same people will call me back with the same offer. Saying no three times seems to reduce that likelihood in my non-scientific experimentation.

George found this article over at SearchVB.com that mentions my MIX ‘07 Session. While I am not quoted directly, my name is mentioned, and the content of the session is referenced a bit:

At Microsoft’s MIX07 conference, Tyler Butler, a program manager for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, pointed out three Web applications built on SharePoint – Hawaiian Airlines, mobile phone game firm Glu Mobile and music and event firm Hed Kandi Radio.

Butler also indicated that, since the SharePoint 2007 platform is built on ASP.NET 2.0, developers can use ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight to provide a rich user interface.

I’ll try not to let the fame go to my head.

Imagine my surprise when I was browsing my feeds at Google Reader today to see the word “Pidgin” in my feeds. And in a Lifehacker post, no less! To understand why I would be surprised, you have to remember that I grew up in Papua New Guinea, where a trade language called Neo-Melanesian Pidgin (Tok Pisin in the vernacular) is spoken by roughly 4 million people there. It is commonly referred to as just “pidgin” by people that live in PNG.

In reality, pidgin is a generic linguistic term that refers to a language that develops as a means to facilitate trade in areas where many different languages are spoken by small people groups. Since ~850 languages are spoken in PNG, it makes some sense that a pidgin would be born to facilitate trade and communication. Neo-Melanesian pidgin is based on English and German. One of the defining characteristics of pidgins is that they are typically just a lingua franca, and not spoken as a first language by any people group. Pidgins sometimes develop into creoles, which means that they then become more full-fledged languages, because people learn to speak them as their first (and sometimes only) language. This is the case with Haitian Creole (originally a French Pidgin, now a French Creole).

Anyhow, the Pidgin Lifehacker was talking about is an IM client, much like Trillian. Not quite what I was expecting, but given what a pidgin is, the name is fitting. :-)

Pidgin 2.0 Beta 7

According to an article over at news.com, the Mono project founder says they’ll be working on a Linux port of Silverlight in the future. Sweet! I was personally annoyed to find out that “cross-platform” only meant Mac and Windows when Silverlight was officially announced. But it’s nice to see Mono committing to filling the Linux gap. Best of luck to them!

I’ve been avoiding services like Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and the like for a long time despite their growing popularity. In the MySpace case, it’s a philosophical choice – MySpace sites are often so bad! They look horrible, music plays when you go to them, the formatting is terrible… This is a natural outcome of pure freedom; when you allow people to customize things and make them look exactly like they want, you give them the freedom to make horrible looking stuff. But I’m getting a bit off topic… Anyway, I avoid MySpace sort of on principal, but I avoid Facebook due to some other reasons that I think finally crystallized in my mind while attending a roundtable discussion at MIX that included folks from Six Apart, Twitter, and Facebook.

The guy from Facebook was talking about how they view Facebook as being not an extension of your identity, but rather a representation of it (my words, not his; I’m trying to paraphrase the conversation). In other words, your Facebook simply reflects the things that are happening to you, what’s going on in your life, etc., and then shortens the gap between those events and occurrences and the people that potentially care about you. Their philosophy as I understand it is to reduce the amount of overhead that comes with keeping track of what’s going on with people.

That’s a noble goal, I suppose, and one I can certainly appreciate given that I have friends strewn all over the world (ever since the great Diaspora that was my high school graduation in PNG). It certainly would be nice to always know what was happening with those folks without ever having to do anything about it. But I think that’s the crux of my opposition to it.

You see, I think there is a great deal of worth in getting an email after a long time from someone who has taken the time to write you and give you a brief update about them. It took time and energy for them to write you and update you on their life – and I believe it shows they care. This type of rich interaction with someone occurs more naturally after a time out of touch.

Imagine a 30-year high-school reunion if everyone was on Facebook the entire time after graduation? Would there be anything to talk about? I suppose the conversation would revolve around politics, religion, and other matters of opinion, because life events would simply be old news. Everyone would already know that Sam got married last summer and Mary got a new job. There’d be no excitement in learning that Joe’s son spoke his first words last week or that Sally was finally able to get that surgery she needed.

If we’re always connected to one another all the time, it removes the excitement and enjoyment that comes from the re-connecting after a disconnect. It’s cliché, to be sure, but absence makes the heart grow fonder, and for that reason, Facebook’s just not for me.