So, Comcast’s latest commercials are aimed directly at U-Verse customers… Perhaps they are only running them on U-Verse… but it seemed like a rip off of Verizon’s Droid Does campaign and was enough to get me interested to click on through to their website listed in the ad.

I’d love to get some of the data they used to make these claims because they really seem outrageous and some cursory searching around on Comcast’s site to “learn more about xfinity” didn’t even mention any of these points.

More HD

Xfinity has over 3,000 HD choices. U-verse has only 254

First off.. 254 HD channels on U-Verse seems very high. Checked my channel lineup (easily accessible, not so much for comcast’s), went to the largest package and Chrome tells me that there are 289 “HD”‘s on the page. And there’s generally an HD in the channel abbreviation and in the description so each channel gets counted twice. So rough guess is 145 HD channels are available. I have a hard time believing that comcast even can offer 3000 channels.. let alone all of them in High Definition. Something definately isn’t right there.

Better HD^*

Xfinity has better HD picture quality than U-verse.

That sounds very subjective… but somehow it sounds fishy. Notice that “*” in the heading. Here’s the fine print from that page:

^*HD picture quality rating based on September though December 2008 study of the top HD channels by Frank N. Magid Associates.

A quick google search turns up magid.com with a suspicious sounding mission statement:

Our Mission

Frank N. Magid Associates, Inc. helps our clients become more profitable by solving their business problems and helping them take advantage of opportunities.

And their page on what they can offer the Cable and Satellite Distribution Industry is also fluffy and reeks of astroturf. I’d love to review how they reviewed and analysed HD picture quality.

Much faster Internet^**

Xfinity’s fastest Internet speeds are more than twice as fast as those of U-verse (50 Mbps vs. 24 Mbps).
And if you’re watching two HD shows at the same time and try to go online, U-verse’s fastest Internet speeds will not be reached.

Again with the asterisks… this refers to “Sand Cherry Associates” equally fluffy. Can’t argue with the 50Mbps to 24Mbps caps, but I wonder how often you actually get the full 50Mbps since you’re sharing your bandwidth with your neighbors. Also, the asterisks admit that the reduction in speed only applies to U-Verse speeds above 18Mbps, and that’s only when you need the bandwidth for HDTV or Phone. Personally, I’d rather see my internet slow down a bit then see my TV picture break up or phone calls interrupted.

More On Demand entertainment

Xfinity has 13,000 more On Demand choices than U-verse.

This one may not surprise me that much. AT&T’s On Demand offering always seems limited.. but I am not a big consumer of On Demand content… When I had Comcast, they had a better selection, but 13,000 more seems very outlandish to me.

The ability to stream multiple HD channels

With U-verse, only two HD channels can be streamed to one household at the same time.

Last I checked, two HD streams is multiple… as in.. more then one. But yeah, one DVR can record two HD shows at once, and two additional non-HD shows. Its never been an issue for me since I don’t record THAT much TV… and if I ever had to make a choice, chances are one of the shows is something like Seinfeld that I wouldn’t mind recording in Standard Definition because it wasn’t even recorded in HD!

The ability to pause any TV with a DVR box

With U-verse, only one TV showing live content can be paused at any time.

And finally… I only have one DVR box, but I find this limitation hard to believe. If I had 2 DVR boxes why can’t both pause live TV? I’ve never heard anyone complain of this.. is this really a problem for anyone?

In the 3-4 years I’ve had Comcast’s premiere offering.. I’ve never been impressed. Their systems are slow.. menus are cumbersome… and the service was unreliable. I’ve been a U-Verse customer for well over a year now and I’ve been happy with it!

Yesterday, I launched my blog series on Twitter and Part 2 continues with the early days of Twitter.

Originally, Mobile access to the web was not as ubiquitous as it is today. Twitter existed as a website to be accessed from your computer, or you could link your cell phone number and use SMS to send text messages to Twitter. There were not many people on Twitter so you tended to follow your real life friends and would have device updates on. This feature is still available today, but with the exception of an important person that’s very low volume… most people will find the device update feature to be disruptive and find that mobile clients are far more effective at getting these notifications. There’s also an option to get your direct messages sent directly to your phone as well. I find that to be useful as I rarely get or send DMs and sometimes my phone won’t have data service but can receive SMS.

My Main Twitter Stream

With the onset and widespread adoption of Android (and I suppose I can give some credit to the iPhone as well), the SMS interface to twitter has largely faded away and has been replaced with mobile applications and desktop clients but I’ll save that for a later discussion on the Twitter API. Twitter’s major defining characteristic is the 140 character limit since SMS was designed to be the main interface. SMS messages are limited to 160 characters… leaving 20 characters for Twitter to include the username in the Tweet. I wonder how many people are not aware that and perceive it as an artificial limit.

Originally, you saw every single tweet from the people you follow. Originally where twitter currently asks “What’s happening?” was “What are you doing now?” and tweets were supposed to answer that question. Most people are confused at what you’re supposed to tweet and the original question led people to initially share what they were eating, bodily functions, or other minutia of our daily lives. Eventually the novelty wears off or they realize that people just don’t care about the details of their lives, but twitter is most useful when you share interesting things in your tweets.

Twitter’s first big splash was at South By Southwest, a technology oriented conference in Austin, Texas, when people could keep in touch with their friends and find out where friends were meeting for food or drinks… or sharing key points from an interesting talk. And that’s when the lightbulb turned on for people and Twitter began to take off. You can’t really explain to people the magic of Twitter; they need to experience for themselves.

Me being mentioned in a Tweet

As Twitter grew in popularity, the open ended nature of twitter allowed the community to innovate and establish standards. The first idea was a way to refer to another user on Twitter. Some clever person decided to use an “@” before a username to indicate that the following text was another user on Twitter. Soon after, it seemed natural to direct a tweet “at” someone by starting your message by mentioning their username (@username).

Eventually, the Twitter team realized this was a good convention and it became a de facto standard. They began linking these mentions to the users twitter page where you could read their tweets and decide to follow them. This was the primary way that people found interesting and influential people on twitter. And its also when people began using Twitter as an ubiquitous messaging platform. And was the first feature twitter implemented to allow you to control your twitter stream. At first, this was an optional feature you can change in the settings, but now… its on for everyone.

Since social circles never completely overlap, Twitter streams were becoming increasingly polluted with tweets that were directed at other users. You were offered three settings to limit tweets from entering your stream: View all tweets from your followers (original behavior), Filter out all tweets that are directed at another user (restrictive, but you won’t be distracted by conversations), or a balanced approach that filters out tweets directed at people you don’t follow (today’s behavior). This lead to a new way to use twitter as a communication platform. You could direct tweets at people without worrying about annoying people who aren’t already friends with that person, but still get the benefits of being able to see that a group of your friends are communicating.

The Fail Whale as seen on Twitter

Oh, and the initial design of twitter and the computing power required to processing the growing load and increasing complexity lead to the birth of the Fail Whale. Of course, back then… twitter just stopped responding rather then providing the well known image of failure. Twitter wasn’t designed to grow as quickly. Twitter’s in much better shape now, but there’s still hashtags, search and retweets to cover, but those will wait until the next installation of this blog series.

I plan to be writing a bit more here about my thoughts on Social Networking, so I thought I’d start by getting some of the basics down. And of course, when I saw Social Networks, I mean the only one that means anything at all to me… Twitter. I’ve often said “If you’re not on Twitter, you are dead to me”… and while it sounds funny, its very true. I’ll elaborate on that further in a future post, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Facebook is worthless to me and I’ve considered many times deleting it.

First off, I’ve been around Twitter for a while. Since 1/25/2007, to be exact. To put that in context, Twitter opened to the public on 6/15/2006 and the first big wave of attention was at South by Southwest around 3/12/2007. I don’t think of myself as elitist (my 320ish followers will attest to that), but I’ve been around long enough to see some major changes in Twitter. Also, Klout seems to think I know what I’m talking about. Sadly, I’m not aware of a good Guide to Twitter that explains how some things work and share some annoying habits I often see on Twitter. Hopefully, I’ll be able to collect enough of my thoughts here in one place in a coherent way that is actually interesting to some people

I’m hopeful that some people will find some of these posts useful and that it may help them to become more interesting Twitter Users and maybe avoid inadvertently annoying your followers and perhaps some real life friends. If any of my complaining describes what you do on Twitter… take it as constructive criticism, rather then an insult.

My Main Twitter Stream

With all that said, it may shock to know that I read every single tweet that shows up in my main timeline. That’s right, every single tweet. This means that on the rare occasion that I’m away from my phone for more then 8 hours or so… I actually spend upwards of 30 minutes reading and looking at pictures or links that may appear to interest me.

As a result of this, I try to choose carefully whom I follow. I started with people I knew and have actually met in person. Then I included people who ran projects I used or wrote code I used. Once hashtags were adopted and Twitter Search evolved, I befriended other Twitter users who shared a similar interest. At some point, the decision to follow someone had to be weighed against the cost (in terms of my time) to read every message.  This meant that once my Follower count approached 100 people, I became selective when deciding whom to follow and much more likely to unfollow someone who’s tweets were getting on my nerves.

I’ve explored many twitter clients, but they really don’t offer me anything I really need. So, if I’m at a computer, I use twitter.com… and on my phone I use the official Twitter for Android app. I have a wishlist of features I’d like to see either implemented natively in twitter or what my ideal client would offer. I may even give in and just start writing my own… if that happens, expect more details here.

Next up, I’ll be talking about what the early days were like on Twitter… Hopefully, I’ve managed to whet your appetite that you’ll want to read that. (You do use Google Reader to keep track of interesting blogs and websites… right? leave a comment or ping me on Twitter if you’d want to hear me ramble on about that!)