Changing Habits: Kindle

I've been a Kindle owner for about a year and a half (I'm on the Kindle 2 now). A few observations about how my reading habits have changed:

* I read more. A lot more. I have 70 titles, which averages out to about 3.5 books a month. There's no lag time waiting to get the next book from the library or bookstore. As soon as I finish one book, I start the next within 24 hours.

* I've become a series snob. What I mean is that I prefer books that are part of a series, at least three but the more the better. The boundaries between one book and the next are almost non-existent. I barely notice the titles of books in a series, and after I read one I'll often buy the rest of the series all at once. Thereafter, I go from one to the next like they're all one book.

* I have little conception for how many pages a book has. Occasionally I'll notice the page count when I'm buying a book, but after that I might only notice that my percentage of completion is going quickly or slowly.

I'm happy with the device, but I do find myself wondering why I'm buying all these books (if I am indeed buying them). I'd rather pay Amazon a monthly fee, or pay much less to just rent a book, like a library. It's a big enough issue that if Amazon doesn't change it's tune, I could see myself moving to a device that does.

Home in the Clouds

There hasn't been much talk about it, but my favorite feature in the new iTunes is Home Sharing. Home Sharing lets you authorize up to 5 computers so they are connected in iTunes, letting you transfer songs between one computer and another. That's right - it lets you drag-and-drop songs between computers! A year ago, that would sound crazy. But the reality is, it's the same as authorizing one iPod for several systems, except now the street goes both ways. It's the same as Apple letting you burn up to 5 CDs of iTunes music (I use DRM-free Amazon MP3s myself).

This is a big deal for me because we have a Mac at home and I use a PC. Because my iPod is formatted to the PC, I often delay song downloads until I'm on my PC, so I can transfer them to my iPod. The Mac has very little music on it (Pandora instead), because I knew that if I wanted to transfer any music, I'd have to burn a CD, rip the CD onto my PC, then transfer those songs to my iPod. In one stroke, Apple has effectively put my music on a mini-cloud, my home cloud.

Now, if only my iPod would sync automatically, from my car, without having to be plugged in. If only all my music were on a cloud, that I never had to download...

- Sansserif

Live Blogging Bandwidth 2009

Indeed, I say, Old Sport. This is a most dignified music conference, albeit lightly attended, but with the most respectable company in attendance at the University Club. After a brief meet-and-greet in the Library where we went round the room to discuss our most memorable experiences with an "album" (wikipedia), the conference is off to a smashing start. I decided not to mention my experience last year of receiving a leaked copy of the Black Keys' Attack and Release from a friend, but...alas, I digress.

So pour yourself a cognac and pull up a chair next to the fire. Bandwidth 2009 is about to begin.

Thursday

2pm - Balls of Steel

Unsurprisingly, women were noticeably absent from this panel. Larry Marcus, a VC with Walden Venture Capital, suggested that a better name would be "balls of glass" given the investment climate.

David Hymen, founder and CEO of MOG, just announced a $5 million round of funding for his company. Though he admitted to some trepidation when learning this week that iLike had been bought for $20 million by MySpace. "It was depressing to see that valuation for a company that had so much momentum," he said. "Exits have been tough," agrees Marcus. "At the end of the day, it's a question of love me or leave me. Either customers will pay for your service or they won't."

Mark Shedletsky, founder and CEO of BlueHaze, had this advice: "Avoid signing any contracts with a label." The consensus of the panel (much to the chagrin of one audience member) is that entrepreneurial start-ups can't afford to work with the Big Four because cost prohibitive licensing fees, seven-figure up front payouts, and annual minimums require too much start-up capital just to get off the ground.

3pm - By the Numbers

Corey Denis, VP of Marketing at reapandsow, jumped in with some hard data. The moral of the story is...marketing musicians is about telling a story.

What we have: listening habit data, traffic data, twitter data, facebook data, bit.ly data, blogger data, youtube data, data data data.

What we don't have: streaming music media data, all things MySpace, internet radio data.

"The point is," says Davis, "that with all this data, artist by artist, you can tell a different story." And she has some (anonymous) success stories to support her data.

So, let me tell my story: I'm in a band. We're really good. We aren't represented by an agent or a label, and we can't afford a publicist. Every week, iLike, ReverbNation, TuneCore and other analytics aggregators send me an email that says, basically, nobody is listening to your songs, nobody is buying your songs, and you don't have any concerts posted. Is that really the kind of useful data that's going to make the D.I.Y. promise of a "musicians middle class" a reality?

One telling bit of data was conspicuously absent from the discussion: sales.

4pm - Convo. with Bob Mould

Didn't make it. I chose instead to have a lager with the chaps in the pool room. Can you blame me? More enlightening conversation tomorrow...



Friday

The coffee's strong. The weather's warm. Totally wired, logged in, and ready for Bandwidth Day 2.



10am - Hindsight is 20/20

Ted Cohen of TAG Strategic set the tone right away: "How many of you have been to a panel I've moderated?" he asked. A smattering of hands. "And you came back?" he jibed.

First qusetion: "Compare and contrast a label licensing deal with a colonoscopy."

Tracing the modern music deal back to the early days of Shawn Fanning's Napster, the message of this panel is a simple one: the labels missed their last best chance to participate in the digital revolution a decade ago. Gerry Kearby of Neurotone remembered his days in the music industry this way: doing deals with the majors "was like talking with buggy whip manufacturers who were sure the automobile was not coming."

11am - Live Music 2.0



"Is live music replacing recorded music as the dominant platform?" asks Dave Rosenheim of JamBase. "The numbers support it."

In 2008, the live music business accounted for $7.2 billion in revenue. $1 billion came in the form of in venue sponsorship, and $500k in merch. Live music also appears to be recession resilient, and the industry is up a total of 140% since 2000.

By contrast, recorded music business is falling to $8 billion, down 40% from 2000. But is live music scalable? Ah, there's the rub.

1pm - Putting Artists Together With Fans

Back in the library for a discussion led by Gracenote VP of Product and Content Management, Stephen White...



(Apologies to jeddeth...I'm not in the main hall. But check out Digital Music News tomorrow, and you'll probably hear all.)

To what extent is the the job of the artist to personally reach out through social media, and to what extent does it rely upon user generated content? If reaching out to fans is the artist's exclusive responsibility, when is there time for creativity, and how to keep up with the myriad competing technologies out there? And if you leave it up to the fans, how do you control the quality of the content and monetize the pipeline?

The key may be in tracking and selling metadata that flows out of content consumption. "There's no limit to the amount of information that can be delivered in content metadata," says White. "Anything can be delivered, but there are standardized containers."

2pm - Business Pricing Models

Steve Grady, co-founder, president and COO for RoyaltyShare brings some depressing statistic statistics to bear on pricing models for music as a product. Currently, the $8 billion industry is crashing to zero.

**Speaking of crashing...due to an unfortunate and rather unexpected computer crash, the last two sessions went unblogged. In an imperfect technological world, sometimes you do just have to be there. Indeed, I say!!**

Peeling Back the Layers

Augmented reality is here, and it doesn't even involve embedded microchips and VR goggles...yet.

MusicTech, The Third (sort of)

It's time for part 3 of the MusicTech trilogy, and it promises to be an exciting one. It's actually the fourth conference, but I must have missed one somewhere along the way. For those in the know, Part 1 and Part 2 were highly regarded by this blog for providing a refreshing dose of realism to discussions of the digital music landscape--the perfect remedy to last year's NARM conference in SF, which turned out to be more of a therapy session for CD enthusiasts.

First impressions: more panels, more sponsors, more schmoozability, and the impressive new addition of an elevator pitch event. The coffee is strong, and the day looks promising. More to come...

9:20am - Music in Audio Video Works

Regardless of your business model, everyone agrees that it takes a long time for artists to get paid online. Zahavah Levine, Chief Counsel for YouTube, still introduces herself as she did last year: she spends most of her time untangling the mess of licensing, rights management and DMCA compliance issues that are a result of YouTube's widespread popularity. Because the interests of various rights holders are so fragmented, and users are able to upload copyrighted material so easily, Levine's job keeps her very busy. And that is unlikely to change anytime soon.

"We have all these digital tools," says Josh Wattles of deviantART, who equates the computer to "the Swiss Army knife of copyright infringement." Even the most unsuspecting of online messages is subject to a number of complicated copyright logistics. With the newfound popularity of Twitter, for instance, Wattles explained that "Aston Kutcher owns all of his twits." I think he meant "tweets," but we got the message.

The lawsuit filed by EFF on behalf of a Pennsylvania mother who was sued by Universal Music Group is just one example of the pitfalls of a digital rights paradigm in which "fair use" is too narrowly defined. I mean, what kind of world do we live in if you can't upload silly baby videos on YouTube because the Super Bowl's on in the background? Isn't that why YouTube was created in the first place?

The problem is that with audio video recordings, there is a synchronization right, but no compulsory mechanical license. "If we want to license the millions of copyright owners on YouTube," says Levine, "we have to contact millions of publishers, and we don't know who they are." She suggests that a blanket license covering all of these copyright considerations would solve the problem, a perspective echoed by a number of panelists.

"Content is fragmented all over the place," says Iain Scholnick of ImageSpan. The company attempts to find a solution to this by automating the process of digital licensing. "Most content companies come into a kind of negative calculus, they hit a wall. The monetization doesn't add up."

"I wish there was a fix to this in sight," adds Levine. "But I think we're going to have to stick with this for the foreseeable future. Pots of money are being left on the table, because this is so complicated people can't pay out."

10:30am - Doing Deals

Cecily Mak of RealNetworks introduced the panel, who then introduced the single resounding theme of the session: Doing deals with the majors is difficult. Very, very difficult.

"There's progress in the types of deals that labels are willing to do," says Larry Kenswil of Loeb & Loeb. "But it's still major tooth surgery getting them to do it."

Leron Rodgers of Hewitt & Rogers believes that a surcharge for internet access to online music content will create a viable revenue stream for the majors that would counteract the effects of piracy. But will users pay $5 per month to ASCAP for free access to online libraries, just to avoid the unlikely event of a RIAA lawsuit? Rodgers claims that the financials do add up, and his Atlanta-based firm plans to release the numbers in an upcoming study.

In theory, I imagine such a plan would work. However, since if it were opt-in, what incentive is there to pay, as opposed to continuing P2P downloads for free? The threat of lawsuit would have to increase for the plan to have any teeth. And what if your favorite band (like the Beatles) refuses to provide any kind of blanket license? How many publishers have to be on board before the idea becomes viable?

Could the answer then be a compulsary payment for internet access? That might anger consumers who have no affinity for downloading free music. But tracking levels of music consumption per user would raise privacy issues. In any case, it's a thorny issue.

It would be great to see a plan that is widely accepted by consumers, coupled with a willingness of rights holders to accept a flat-fee license for all forms of music consumption. Is it likely? We'll have to tune into MusicTech '10 to see if the idea gets traction.

1pm - New Technologies Demonstrations

Shortly after the morning's welcoming remarks by MusicTech Executive Producer, Brian Zisk, we were given a demo of the web portal Zannel, which provides customized aggregation and syndication services. I tried it out (you can log in through Twitter) and found a user friendly platform for multimedia tweets integrated into a customized iPhone app. But it occurred to me that, perhaps, my band isn't quite interesting enough to have our own app. For the unknown artist, it seems rather presumptuous to be hyper-posting to fans (a.k.a. friends and family) with the expectation that someone is actually watching. Still, I like the aggregation of media that Zannel provides--and I'm a sucker for a cool app.

Welcoming us to the 1pm tech demo was moderator Meliza Solan, who introduced herself and launched suddenly into an unaccompanied rendition of the National Anthem. Not knowing exactly what to do, we stood and watched awkwardly while she sang. "Hoooome of the brave" still hung in the air when she downshifted into a breathless description of her Twitter app. Admittedly, I was too dazed to take notes on her pitch. But here's a summary of everything that followed:

LittleShoot - File sharing integrated in your web browser. Adam Fisk gives us a demo, using a generic search term and scrolling through the results. "Let's go for 'Walking in the Sun.'" says Fisk. "No, that's an M4a. It's probably copyrighted." The crowd laughs. He continues to scroll. "Let's see. Hmm. No, that's copyrighted too."

SoundCloud - Collaboration tool and distribution channel for digital music. The widget based distribution and sharing functions are targeted to artists, labels and distributors as a direct-to-fans integrated marketing solution.

drop.io - A tool for privately sharing files and collaborating in real time. Sound familiar? Content aggregators of one kind or another are emerging everywhere, and as an independent musician the prospect of sending all content through one portal sounds enticing. But how are these ideas going to overcome the licensing pitfalls without widespread adoption and monetization by the major labels?

An audience member finally asks: "Do you get a lot of uploaded content that is copyrighted?" It's the question we've all been wondering. "The answer--um, well, there are two answers--" says drop.io's Sam Lessin. "The first answer is, 'we don't know.'" Everyone chuckled knowingly as he went on to explain the arms length policy of his company, while at the same time expecting users to report P2P copyright infringements on their own. It remains to be seen if the RIAA will set their sights on these content aggregators, which seem to be newer and cooler versions of the Pirate Bay. I hope these business models can be legitimized. But it's still going to depend on licensing. Needless to say, there is a radically different tone between the attorneys downstairs and the idea people upstairs.

Band Metrics - Data analysis and aggrigation of massive amounts of data about bands. This back office application provides analytics through a dashboard interface. The demo went through the band metrics for Dave Matthews Band. I have to say, it's great that DMB can check their stats, but most unknown musicians don't want to be reminded in a hundred different ways that nobody's visited their myspace page for two weeks. If that weren't enough, each band's page gives them a "band strength" score that looks like a low credit rating, along with a thermostat reading of your "hotness." It looks like a useful tool if you're making it, but could be bad for self-esteem if not.

The Echo Nest - A music intelligence platform for user-generated reviews. This music discovery tool works interactively with other web platforms such as Spotify to find music recommendations. It looks a lot like Pandora, without the website. Hopefully, it will arrive onshore in the near future, but the outlook is spotty.

2pm - Recording Studio of the Future

Digital or analog? Fader switch or mouse and keyboard? The panel is split on whether artists can be as creative inside of a computer screen as they are with an acoustic guitar. My belief, echoed by Justin Frankel of Cockos, is that computers are just another tool for creativity. But right now, the tactile purists dominate the conversation. I've always regarded a mouse pointer to be a perfectly adequate paintbrush, but I suspect that the tactile purists are also partial to the high margin hardware interfaces they're selling.

The question that's not being asked is how can the average musician afford any of this gear? I sat on my hands, not wanting to ask the question during the panel. But I'll ask it here: how about an open source model? It seems to be the third rail of the software industry. My thought is that a free, open source licensing relationship could have a profit sharing provision included so that if the musician wins, the software provider wins, too, with a percentage of revenues.

3:30pm - The Future of Music

...in 60 minutes or less.

"Context is king," says Terry McBride of Nettwerk Music Group, playing off the old Sumner Redstone quote. "What's going to happen in the next 18 months is going to change how music is consumed entirely. Cloud based servers will pull content down to your mobile device. That is your future. You can debate everything else you want to. It's moot. The kids are already going there. The music industry gets one more chance to get it right."

But how do artists get paid? Music licensing will have to change, for one thing, but will customers pay? And will the majors play ball?

Moderator Heather Rafter of RafterMarsh USA evoked a provocative quote from Davide Bowie's recent interview with the Times:

"Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity [...] So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen.''

4:45pm - Monetization: Idealism in Practice

Fred Von Lohmann of EFF supports blanket licensing as a path toward monetization, and the idea is finally gaining some traction with the mainstays of the industry. "At least the labels aren't calling us communists any more," Von Lohmann jokes. But the point is salient. Choruss, which recently received backing (in theory) by three major record labels, promises one such pathway to monetization.

As the day has progressed, more and more panelists have been mentioning that nebulous "musician's middle class," but discussion has been light on how the unknown artist actually arrives at such a utopian scenario as quitting the day job. Is there a viable DIY model for writing, rehearsing, recording, promoting and distributing music that truly levels the playing field for grassroots musicians? Clearly not.

For the unknown artist, the only monetization that matters is in winning the attention economy. The economics of finance and accounting will always favor the majors due to economies of scale. But attention is fractured, and those DIY artists who manage to pull the pieces together will be rewarded with wider and wider audiences. Attention alone is not going to pay the bills, but it seems to be the one and only ticket for the DIY artist to become a self-made entrepreneur.

Once the blanket licensing agreements happen sometime in the future, the starving artists who managed to scrape together 50,000 fans will find instant monetization of their attention economy credits. Is it enough to put the kids through college? Probably not. But we're all riding on the hope that we'll we be able to spend more time on music and less time tweeting.

Productive Procrastination

A recent study suggests that college-aged Facebook users get lower grades than everyone else. Conducted by researchers at Ohio State University, the study found that "Facebook user GPAs were in the 3.0 to 3.5 range on average, compared to 3.5 to 4.0 for non-users." Of course, this could simply mean that extreme narcissists feel they have better things to do than keep up with homework. Or perhaps all the other students are just outsourcing their homework to overseas professionals.

Thank goodness I've graduated already, so that Facebook and Twitter can satisfy my self-infatuation and improve my productivity on the job. According to the University of Melbourne, taking "short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet" gives the brain a chance to rest and leads to "a higher total net concentration for a days' work."

Could it possibly be that researchers are so interested in studying Facebook because it gives them a legitimate reason to check their friends' status updates?

Alert!

In addition to having admittedly brilliant products, part of what's led to Google's ubiquitousness is it's openness. What I mean by that is it's willingness to interface with other products in the same field.

For example, Google Calendar acts as the intermediary between all my other calendars, allowing all of them to peacefully coexist. At work we use Thunderbird as our email and calendar client (with the Lightning add-on). I feed my Google Calendar into the Thunderbird on my work computer and also onto my laptop Thunderbird, so I can have my calendar when I'm not at work. I have Google Sync on my phone, so my Google Calendar is on my device calender. When I'm on the go, I can add to or look at my work schedule.

This redundancy does have drawbacks, however. When I'm at work I use my laptop and my desktop and my phone. When a calendar alarm goes off, this is where I get notifications: 1) my phone, 2) my desktop Thunderbird, 3) my laptop Thunderbird, 4) my Google Calendar on my laptop, and last but not least, 5) I get a pop-up notification on Gmail if it's open. That's right - I get five cascading notifications of an event. (My phone is the first.)

It's a wonder I can get anything done on time!

Live Blogging Industry Noise - Noise Pop '09

After a less than impressive morning session with Keynote Speaker Fat Mike (NOFX, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes), the conference has been more noise than industry.



10am - Keynote Conversation with Fat Mike

Maybe I'm just not punk rock enough to get it, but if you say f*ck money, f*ck the internet, and f*ck your fans, why not go one step further and say f*ck it to labels, too? Fat Mike would like you to believe that his label, Fat Wreck Chords, serves as a filter for quality and provides a value add that unsigned bands crave and major labels can't replicate. However, from the perspective of an unknown musician, it's not clear to me why any label (major or indie) adds anything of value that can't be replicated by giving music away for free online. After all, what's the point in making $10 on little round plastic disks if the label is just going to take $9.99 anyway?

11am - The Next Big Thing

The panel asks why, if major labels are such dinosaurs, do they still seem so essential in breaking an artist?

According to Aaron Axelsen (Music Director, Live 105) encouraging listeners to discover new music is like getting a four year old to eat broccoli. "It's good for you," he says, "but you need to sandwich it between two pieces of cheddar cheese." While this perspective serves as an apt justification for his job description, it fails to acknowledge the consumption patterns of most online listening. CD sales are faltering precisely because music discovery is alive and well (and free) in the online sphere.

For now, it is advantageous to most music merchants to maintain the status quo. But what happens when the RIAA starts charging a performance license fee for terestrial radio plays? Perhaps then Live 105 will become the advocate for unknowns. The next big thing for the majors may turn out to be Chapter 11.



1pm - Industry Noise: Hot Topics in the Music Industry

Cory Brown of Absolutely Kosher Records says, "If nobody's paying for anything, it doesn't matter how many people are listening to your music." It should not be surprising that his business model relies upon the sales of those pesky round plastic disks. It's amazing how people talk about music as though it has always been a tangible product, until along came that evil internet that threatened everything. I'd like to remind them that throughout the entire course of human history up to the invention of the phonograph, all music was live music. It was only in the twentieth century that music became a product. We should not lament, therefore, that it has now become a commodity.

The price structure of old media is often defended on the grounds that the artist must get paid. This sounds nice, but when has the artist ever gotten paid? Short of going multi-platinum, it is the labels that have reaped most of the benefits of traditional music sales. Perhaps, it's not an either/or decision. Nancy Miller (Music Editor, Wired) proposes the idea of a "musical middle class," suggesting that internet distribution may lead to a path toward profitability for a number of musicians. If there is a path, it's thorny and largely uncharted. But I applaud the realism.

2pm - If Techies Ruled the World / If Artists Ruled the World

The subject of this panel was a hypothetical exercise exploring what would happen if reasonable people controlled the pipeline for the music industry. The answer? Musicians still wouldn't make much money, but it would be a lot more straightforward, and there would be a lot fewer middle men.

Doctor's Visit

When a technophile takes his computer to the hospital:

 

Confessions of a Phone Hater, Part II

YouAreYou was long enamored of his iPhone, and now that he's come clean I have no choice but to fess up: I hate my BlackBerry Storm.

Here's why:
1. The Accelerometer . When I want the screen to flip, it doesn't flip. I flip it horizontal, I flip it back to vertical, finally I shake it. I hold it vertical. It doesn't flip. Also, when I don't want the screen to flip, it flips. This happens frequently when I'm holding it vertically and I rest it on a table. Then, it flips. Even when it does flip on command, it lags before it flips.

2. The lock button. I'm talking about the one on the top of the device, which isn't actually a button - it's a location that you press. Because there's a delay before the phone locks (and no accompanying noise or button-click), you're never sure whether it's locked or unlocked. Nothing happens, so you hit the lock location again - then it slyly unlocks and re-locks in succession.

3. GPS. If you use Google Maps on your Storm, you've seen this one before: "Your location within 1100 feet. GPS temporarily unavailable." I estimate that the GPS has worked 10% of my attempts to locate myself.

4. The camera. Almost unusable. The lag between the time you press the button and the time the camera takes a photograph - I counted three Mississippis. That is an embarrassing amount of time. Not to mention the color quality of the photo might as well be grayscale.

I've had several updates, and these problems still exist. I gave it a shot, and I'm not a happy or satisfied customer. But the reality is, at this point I couldn't stand a phone without a touchscreen. Using a little ball to navigate a screen? Intolerable.

When they unlock the iPhone, count me in; maybe YouAreYou will get the Storm.

iGroan: The Definition of Modern Annoyance

def:
1 : to utter a deep moan indicitave of pain, grief, or annoyance in relation to an iPhone
2 : to make a harsh sound while waiting (in vain) for the 3G network to register

--

I thought I had dodged the bullet on many of the 3G connectivity issues that have plagued the release of the second generation iPhone. But then I went to Tahoe a couple weeks ago, and my signal dropped out completely. Given the terrain and my exceedingly low expectations of AT&T's service, I wasn't particularly surprised to be without mobile service for the weekend. But I did expect it to come back eventually.

I like to think that my 3G signal is still roaming the valley somewhere around Highway 50 East, trying to find it's way back to me. But recently, I've been forced to admit the truth:

The iPhone is a big, fat piece of crap.

There, I said it. Yes, I used to defend the technology from skeptical friends and snarky colleagues when they reported on one article or another listing all the flaws. No more. Sure, I used to sell the sex appeal of a hot techno-gadget to prospective buyers who were justifiably concerned about entering a two year contract with AT&T. But that was back when the phone actually worked. And apparently, I'm not the only one who has recently reached a boiling point. A new wave of lawsuits has emerged within the last two weeks accusing the company of false advertising and misleading claims about the phone's ability to, say, make phone calls.

It's easy to be mad at AT&T because, frankly, the company has been a PR disaster for the last twenty years. But it's hard to feel anything but betrayed by Apple's nonchalance about its defective hardware, not to mention somewhat wounded by its legal defense that no reasonable person would believe its iPhone 3G ads.

So I'm left with no choice. After making numerous calls (on a land line) to AT&T tech support, manually rebooting all network settings, and replacing the SIM card, I have no alternative but to march down to the Apple store, walk right up to that so-called "Genius Bar," and demand that they give me the shiny, new replacement phone they've promised me so that I can be blissfully ignorant all over again.

And when I have that gorgeous new phone in my hands, there's only one question about what to do with the old one.

It's a Status Thing

The notion of privacy almost seems quaint in the hyper-connected world of social networks, and maintaining the right balance of exposure and anonymity is a tricky combination of art and science. A prudent Facebooker, for instance, will typically want to customize his or her privacy settings for news feeds in order to control what types of stories get published, particularly those relating to changes in relationship status.

Sansserif and I have blogged extensively on this in the past, discussing the varying degrees of seriousness of a particular relationship status, the pitfalls of publicly changing said status, and the sudden ripples that can occur from abrupt transitions between, say, "single" and "married." Indeed, cautionary tales abound on why taking the time to tweak a privacy setting or two is probably a good idea.

Such controls are good for everyday life, but what happens when you want to spread the word far and wide? Well...

...Sansserif and I recently announced our engagement. After telling our families and a handful of close friends, we decided we were ready to go Facebook Official about our big change in status. In our excitement, however, we neglected to make sure our privacy protections were turned off so that word would quickly travel to news feeds far and wide. It took a day of puzzling silence on the airwaves for us to realize our error, whereupon we changed status back to "in a relationship," turned the news feed announcements back on, and got Facebook Official all over again.

Curiously, all of the comments that flooded in after our second announcement appear only on my wall, which strikes me as somewhat old fashioned for a progressive social network like Facebook. I mean, just because we're getting married, does that really mean we have to forfeit our individual comment threads? It seems to be an obvious breach of Netiquette.

Despite the pitfalls of controlling the flow information in your news feed, maintaining an active stance on privacy is still a good idea, especially when the relationship waters run the other way. Consider, for instance, Prince Harry's breakup with longtime girlfriend Chelsy Davy, which only became official when the media discovered her change of Facebook status. Then there was the recent case of Burger King's "Whopper Sacrifice" campaign in which Facebook users were offered a free hamburger for publicly dumping ten of their friends (the program was axed after ending a mere 234,000 friendships).

All I know is that once Sansserif and I set an official wedding date, I'm going to make a pop-up reminder in our shared Google Calendar to change our privacy settings well in advance. After all, when it comes to announcing the big "M" on Facebook, you only get one chance to do it right!

Under the Hood

I've been using Google's browser Chrome for about two months now. I've been a religious Firefox user for several years, and at first I thought, "Firefox has everything I need, what can Chrome offer?" But curiosity got the better of me, and sure enough, about one month ago Chrome became my default laptop browser.

Here's what I like:
1. One box for searching and for entering URLs. (There are privacy implications of this, but I'll put those aside.)

2. It's streamlined. No menu screens as we know them, just tabs at the top of your screen.

3. And my number one favorite thing about it: it's fast. When I click the icon on my task bar, it loads almost instantly.

That final point was what pushed me over the edge with Firefox. Once I tasted Chrome's speed, I couldn't stand waiting several seconds for Firefox to boot up.

Here's what I don't like about Chrome:
1. I like to tweak my settings a lot, and Chrome just doesn't offer that many preferences.

2. No add-ons. Yes, Chrome does have an add-on store, but it's a mess. The organization is terrible and it's brimming with spam. I really, really miss my Firefox themes, Add-Block Plus, and IE Tab.

3. Compatibility. Needs work. For example, I was filling out a survey online and the formatting was a complete mess. Not so on Firefox. Another example: for whatever reason, I couldn't upload a photo for an eBay sale on Chrome, but it worked immediately with Firefox.

Conclusion: If you have simple browser needs, Chrome is the way to go. If you like playing around and can stand to wait, you gotta go Firefox.

At least until Chrome plays catch-up...

Online Lactivism

I'm getting a jump on my new year's resolution to keep up with this blog with something from the truly bizarre category. Apparently, Facebook is banning photos of breastfeeding that contain "a fully exposed breast, as defined by showing the nipple or areola."

A protest of over 80,000 new mothers has been initiated by the Mothers International Lactation Campaign (MILC). You can click here to join their Facebook petition. But first, can someone please tell me: why would you post breastfeeding pictures in the first place?

I agree that breastfeeding is not obscene, but there are some aspects of my classmates' lives that are best left unseen!

Stormy Weather

I was one of those technophilic Verizon customers who refused to switch to AT&T despite the almost insuppressible lure of the iPhone. So of course, I waited in line to get the Storm.

I had a traumatic first day with it (but I should mention it was also the day I found out I passed the CA bar). I've never owned a BlackBerry, so I had to get used to the BB thinking too - the logic behind navigating it. Also, I'm no stranger to the iPhone, (which YouAreYou has), and I had certain preconceptions and expectations as a result.

There was a lot of frustration that first day. The accelerometer often fails to flip the screen upon turning the device. There are often lags when you select things or open menus.

But after a bit, I've grown to appreciate my BB. I learned a million tricks off the BB forums and crackberry.com. These tricks are not documented anywhere officially - it's like getting infinite lives in Nintendo's Contra (A-B-A-B-up-down, etc., you remember!). They make using the device not only easier, it's also like knowing a secret code.

I was not the only one who wanted to return it that first day. David Pogue of the NY Times gave it a scathing review. Today he posted some messages in response to that post. Here's my response to that:

A lot of the complaints are actually due to ignorance about how to use the device. One user complains, for example, that there's no way to get to a contact by entering a letter. This is untrue - you just need to set your contacts list as the default view and it has a Find box. There are several other complaints that are a result of people not knowing the tricks and tips, like sliding your finger down to make the keyboard go away. Many of those complaints indicate the people had had the device for only several days or even hours - they just didn't take the time to learn it. That's a huge factor in the complaints about the press-screen: you have to get used to it. People had to get used to iPhone touch-screen typing too.

Unfortunately, this is all BB's fault: their device is not nearly as intuitive and dumb-person-accessible as the iPhone. Verizon customers looked at this as their iPhone, but it just isn't. It's still a BlackBerry, geared towards professionals. (I can cut-and-paste, edit Word and Excel docs, transfer files with Bluetooth, remove the battery, add more memory, take video, etc, none of which the iPhone can do.) Its inelegance will remind you of Microsoft Windows: smart but stodgy, powerful but buggy. (A friend of mine called it the Hillary to the iPhone/Obama.)

While I don't love the Storm, I do like it. I know most of the problems are bugs that will eventually get fixed. And this, after all, is the price you pay for being an early adopter.

The Squeaky Wheel

This is an older feedback adventure. I sent an email to the San Francisco parking and transit authority about a dangerous intersection near my law school. A few weeks later, I received this:

Thank you for your inquiry regarding the intersection of Fulton, Parker, and Shrader. We are pleased to inform you that this intersection has been included as part of a traffic signal upgrade project that will install pedestrian countdown signals and also modify the signal timing. As part of the signal timing change, we can also implement the “all red” signal timing phase that you mentioned in your e-mail.

We do not have a schedule yet on when the construction will begin at this intersection but it will most likely be later this summer or early Fall. Assuming no unforeseen delays, activation of the new countdown signals and revised timing should occur by the end of this year or early next year.

The Squeaky Wheel

I'd like to introduce a new blogging segment here on Webbed Footprint. I'm calling it The Squeaky Wheel because these posts will be about successful feedback.

Here's my latest adventure. YouAreYou and I are recent converts to composting. Here in San Francisco we have one option for bags that are compostable, allowing you to throw you kitchen waste into them before transferring them to the large bin for pick-up. These are BioBags. Several things about these bags irked me, including: 1) they compost too fast, 2) they aren't tall enough, and 3) you have to pull out the whole roll to unravel one bag. So, I went on the company website and sent a Contact-Us email. Just a few days later, I got this response:

[Sansserif], Thank you for your feedback. If we put some elastic on the top of the bag, that would not biodegrade, defeating the purpose of the bag. There is a product called the "gripper" which is more or less a large rubber band to hold your bag in place. Our bags have a standard(ASTM D6400) that in order to comply with have to biodegrade within a specified time. Your best suggestion is the more user-friendly box. Why didn't we think of that? I will pass that along to the powers that be. Thank you for your support!

I'll let you know when it happens...

A friendly conversation with 22,250 Obama supporters

UPDATE: It seems somebody at Daily Kos got pretty upset at the email chain, raising questions about a "dirty trick" from the McCain campaign. Fortunately, the comment section came to the rescue (however bluntly).

---

Yesterday, I casually checked mail on my iPhone and did a double-take when the screen message reported that over 50 messages were being downloaded. After all, I'm pretty neurotic about checking my messages, and it had only been an hour or so since my last fix. What could possibly be spamming my inbox like this on a Saturday morning?

That's when I was introduced to "CANeighborhoodTeam5."

I watched the listserv name scroll across my screen 57 times before my phone buzzed to inform me that I had new messages. I punched open one of the messages and started reading:

"Okay, folks,

Please, take a deep breath and relax. Someone made a mistake in how they addressed the original email and that's why 20,000+ of us got it."

Some mistake, indeed! As it turned out, 56 of the 57 emails were "unsubscribe" requests that were inadvertently blasted to the entire listserv. As the thread progressed, the requests became increasingly urgent and sometimes angry: "Please remove me," gradually gave way to a chorus of "TAKE ME OFF OF YOUR STUPID LIST. I ALREADY VOTED FOR OBAMA, OKAY?"

The increased temperature of the responses prompted another wave of messages from helpful people (about 20 of them, to be exact) with detailed instructions on how to unsubscribe from the list, and specific requests to NOT reply all to the message, as it would only generate more spam for everyone. The problem is, the unsubscribe link was broken, provoking another wave of emails reporting on that latest development. "This is not some kind of nefarious spam tactic by McCain," one message promised. "It's just a little glitch, so don't let it affect your enthusiasm. VOTE!"

This did not stop the conspiracy theorists or angry "unsubscribe" requesters from furthering the breech of netiquette with more and more messages. As the day wore on, Sansserif and I took turns announcing the arrival of new messages. Our favorite:



Another responded:

"This is fun! Barack on!"

We concur. Barack on, everyone, and get out the vote!

Digi Art

Below is my first piece of Photoshop digital art, created from photos I took for the band Bloomsday Rising.

 

Technological Leaps

I was amused and proud recently by a distinctly Gen Y moment on the part of my Gen X co-writer.

YouAreYou was trying to purchase some software, and the company wanted him to fax in the order form. After multiple attempts at trying to work the fax machine, he gave up in frustration, cursing it as an archaic form of communication.

He took a photo of the completed form with his iPhone and emailed it to the company. The order went through.

Anachronisms

 

Not too long ago, YouAreYou and I watched the sci-fi flick "Sunshine." It takes place in the future, and I chortled out loud when I saw this scene. My Kindle was on the coffee table in front of me; it amused me to no end thinking about people reading analog books on a spaceship in the year 2057.

News Feed Head Fake

I was shocked to sign on to Facebook the other day and find that two of my friends from school were no longer in a relationship. I actually did a double-take and blinked dumbly at the screen as I re-read the words: "...ended their relationship."

Could it be? I thought. But they seemed to be so good for each other.

Well, today I got the full story:



It was just another news feed head fake. Granted, my friends must have changed their "in a relationship" status to "single" prior to correcting the error. But a moment's lapse in status is all it takes for Facebook to broadcast hot relationship gossip across seven continents.

So let this be a lesson to all you status changing readers out there...save your friends and family the emotional roller coaster and type carefully when you perform this highly sensitive operation! I'm torn between giving Facebook some direct feedback about this or simply penning a new entry into the Book of Netiquette, 9th Edition (revised). They should really do something about these head fakes, but then again it does make such good blog fodder!

The Old and the New

YouAreYou decided to clean out his CD collection. We spend an afternoon recycling CDs he didn't want and the cases of all of them. We were both astounded by the amount of waste generated by CDs. The multitude of cracked and unhinged jewel cases made us curse the inventor of such an inferior product.

I couldn't resist taking a few shots while we listened to my iPod.

 
 

Auto Uncheck

I was mighty pleased to stumble across a long-awaited solution to long-bemoaned Gmail feature: a contact auto-add checkbox. As I've whined about in previous posts, Gmail automatically adds an email address to your contacts if you email someone once or twice. This gets annoying, especially when mixed with the auto-add feature of Gchat.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but the long and short of it is that Gmail finally gives us the option of choosing not to auto-add. It still keeps a list of the contacts it wants to add in the "Suggested Contacts" groups, seen below on the left.

 

Anatomy of an Addiction: Confessions of an iPhone 3G Early Adopter

**A Webbed Footprint Special Report**



Friday, July 11 – 5:00pm

After spending most of the day convincing myself that I was not going to succumb to the widespread iPhone mania, my willpower finally cracked. Before I knew what was happening, I told my roommate I’d be back in an hour and headed out the door. My plan was simple: I’d walk to the quiet, unassuming AT&T store nearby and avoid all the hoopla at the Apple stores in Union Square and the Marina. It was going to be brilliant. It was going to be mine, all mine.

I walked briskly. After six or seven blocks I wondered if I had passed the store, so I pulled out my first generation iPhone and waited for the EDGE network to load the map. As I stood and watched the spinning wheel grind its gears at 48 kilobytes per second, I thought about how much better my life would be when I could finally shave 5 to 12 seconds off the wait time for these darn pages to load. I barely noticed the Google map finally flicker to life. Yes, I thought. I’m on the right track.

Two blocks later, I strolled into the store with a swagger and walked right up to one of the many clerks wearing a black t-shirt that read: “It’s here…the iPhone 3G.”

“Can I help you?”

“Yes,” I said pointing to the young man’s chest. “I’d like one of those 3G’s, please.”

He laughed at me in the way one might laugh at a child who announces loudly to a room full of adults that he wants to be an astronaut when he grows up so that he can fly to Jupiter.

“Riiiight,” he said in his best attempt to not sound condescending. He might as well have patted me on the head. “Unfortunately, we’re all out of those today. But you can come back tomorrow and we’ll have some more.”

“How many more?”

“Well…” he said as his eyes grew distant. “I can’t say exactly, but it will be more than fifty and less than a hundred.”

His coyness irked me, but I managed to ask one final question under the guise of politeness: “What time do you open?”

“Ten o’clock,” he replied. “But I’d get here early because there’s probably going to be a line.”

I pretended to ignore him and turned for the door.

Saturday, July 12 – 9:47am

I had debated over cereal and coffee whether I would actually stand in line for it. In the shower later, I decided that I would just casually stroll by and see how crazy the scene was. And yet, as I grabbed my jacket and headed out the door I found myself announcing to the room, “I’m coming back with an iPhone.”

“You might want to bring a magazine or something,” my roommate suggested. “Just in case you have to wait in line.”

“That’s why I have this,” I said, waving my first generation iPhone at her.

Moments later I was out the door. Again, I walked briskly, but this time not out of enthusiasm. I really didn’t want to stand in line. To my way of thinking, being an early adopter of the iPhone should be like going out to a swanky party on Saturday night and looking good. See, I don’t care if you’re a model or an actor or just an average Shmoe --nobody wants to see all the work that goes into looking good. They just want to see the final product. With the iPhone, standing in line is the equivalent of plucking your eyebrows, picking the corns off your toes, exfoliating, trimming your nose hairs, wearing Crest white strips for an hour, and then finally sucking in your gut to squeeze into that pair of pants that used to fit back in the day when you were actually in shape. It takes all the magic out of it.

Instead, you want to give the impression that the beautiful black and silver microcomputer fell out of the sky and into your waiting hand. You want to pull it out of your pocket in a crowded room and say, “Oh, this old thing? Well, you know, Steve [Jobs] asked me to test drive it back when it was in Beta testing. I just decided not to upgrade to the 16GB model out of nostalgia.”

Suffice it to say, I was practically jogging by the time I got to Geary.

10:05am

Two blocks away, and though I couldn’t see the line, per se, I did detect an unusual gathering of people on the sidewalk ahead. I stopped to grab a copy of the Onion from the newsstand—not because I was in the mood for humorous news parody and social commentary, but so I could hide my face in case anyone I knew happened to pass by. I began to get the sickening feeling that I would be standing in line after all.

10:07am

Yes, it was quite a line. I started counting off in two’s as I passed by. Some had brought their own lawn chairs. Others drank coffee and chatted up their neighbors, while still others touched and tapped away at their first generation iPhones. There was something grotesque about this, kind of like playing fetch with Old Yeller before taking him behind the barn to put him down. I don’t know. It just bothered me.



10:10am

…78…80…82…84…86 people ahead of me in line. The words of the store clerk echoed in my mind. Being number 87 was precariously close to being one hundred, which was precariously close to being S.O.L. The worst part was being at the very end of the line. I can barely describe how relieved I was when 88 and 89 finally approached. But after only a few minutes, 88 muttered to 89 about how he heard they were only letting four people in the store at a time, and how it was taking half an hour to activate each phone. For a moment, I thought he was just trying to dishearten the rest of us so they could move ahead.

“Hell with it,” 89 said after a moment’s consideration. “Let’s get out of here.”

And so, to my dismay, I was at the end of the line again.

10:25am

I was halfway through my paper when a bright faced sales associate named Jeremy came out to greet those of us towards the end of the line. He offered us a one page stat sheet about the 3G touting its features and benefits—as though we’d really be standing in this line if we didn’t already have an inclination that it was the shiz-nit.

A new 88 and 89 have arrived with their daughter, 90, who is playing a never ending game of paper/rock/scissors with dear old dad (“one-two-three! Hahaha. one-two-three! Hahaha. one-two-three!”). Though it sounded like they could go all day, the mother finally said something about an appointment at 11:30, gathered up the daughter’s belongings, and grabbed her hand as they headed out of line.

“Okay, see you later,” 88 said.

The line shifted forward another two paces, and a new 89 and 90 took their place.

10:55am

Having emailed several updates to Sansserif with pictures of the line and my rants about the tribulations of an early adopter, I returned to reading my paper (though very slowly so that I wouldn’t finish too quickly). Jeremy has returned. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him silently counting the remaining crowd, and I breathed a sigh of relief when he passed by me. He stopped around 110 and announced the bad news. They’d have to come back tomorrow, or get on the waiting list for sometime next week.

“You mean, I made it?” 109 exclaimed as though she had won the lottery.

“It looks like it,” Jeremy said. There was something in his voice that I interpreted as being not very reassuring—a hesitancy, perhaps—but the woman nonetheless pumped her fist in a subdued and respectful ceremony of joy.

11:01am

Number 88 answering a call on his flip-up clamshell phone:

"Well, no, I'm still standing in line. Honey... Honey... There's only about ten people ahead of me. Well, Honey... Honey... Look, even if I leave right now, I won't make it by 11:30."

He closed his phone with a slow snap. No goodbye's, or love-you-too's were uttered. He stood perfectly still for a moment, and I could sense my linemates shifting their attention to him. 86 was peering out of the corner of her eyes. 91 and 92 stopped their conversation in mid-sentence and waited. A moment later, 88 sighed heavily and left the line, speedwalking down the sidewalk and around the corner.

The line shifted another pace behind me.

11:22am

After carefully examining the showtimes of movies I had no intention of seeing, I finally gave up on the paper and tucked it in my back pocket. I focused my attention now on peering through the window and sizing up the situation. All was very orderly, but the nervous energy was palpable.

Suddenly a car pulled up to the curb. Two curly haired kids jumped out, plopped a couple of quarters in the meter, and headed for the entrance. Jeremy extended his clipboard to stop them and gave them the bad news. I’m not sure if they had pretended not to notice the line outside the door or if, in their early adopter exuberance, the iPhone had given them tunnel vision to the point where they had zoned everything else out. It’s been known to do that from time to time.

Dejected, they returned to their car and drove off. Many of those who’d stood in line for over an hour shook their heads in amusement, and I began to understand full extent of my naiveté the day before. Theirs had already cost them fifty cents.

11:35am

Jeremy has returned with more bad news. There’s only four black 8GB iPhones left. Everyone else will have to settle for the white 16GB model. We began eyeing each other suspiciously. All was quiet until…



11:41am

I made my way to the counter and spoke with the very same clerk as before. I don’t know if he recognized me, but I wasn’t in the mood to make small talk. I dropped my fist generation iPhone on the counter and told him what I wanted. He asked for my digits and got the transfer account set up for me.

“And how many text messages would you like? You can have two hundred, fifteen hundred, or unlimited.”

“Text messages?” I wondered out loud why anyone would pay for unlimited text messages on a phone that sends emails, but then I told him to just sign me up for two hundred. We were wasting valuable time.

He went to the back room, and moments later came back with a little black box.

“You’re lucky,” he said waving it to me. “You got the last one.”

Feedback, Feedback

I'm very excited about a new change on Facebook. I discussed this problem previously here in December. Basically:

Facebook allows you to set the type of news you broadcast. I propose something more nuanced: we should be allowed to explain ourselves.

I just noticed that Facebook now lets you do just that! See below.

The Great Wall

As Sansserif and others attend BarBri classes in preparation for the California bar, rumor has it that the Wall is near...as in, the kind of wall you hit when you study for twice as many hours as you sleep.

All this talk of walls got me thinking about Facebook again. Not that I wouldn't have anyway, mind you, but that's another story.

I've blogged before about some of the amusing exchanges displayed for all to see, but the most recent wall-to-wall experience beats them all.

It all started after my cousin announced to the world that she had gotten married simply by changing her status from "single" to "married" and waiting for the news feed to hit the airwaves. I looked at her profile's mini-feed that morning and saw that, in addition to having been "offered a pet Hottie" at 2:36am and changing her status message to announce that she was "going swimming" at 6:13am, she had also become "listed as married." Subsequently, I received an email from my uncle formally announcing that the event had taken place, and that a formal ceremony would occur next year in Mongolia. I'm not making this up.

So I figured it would be perfectly natural for me to congratulate her via wall posting and, facing the familiar impulse to be witty and/or sarcastic in the semi-public forum, I mentioned that I happen to visit Mongolia every other week or so, and I might make it by for the wedding. Little did I know this would set off a chain of wall post rumors and misunderstandings among her online friends, not unlike that game of "operator" we all played as kids. Here's a visual representation of the end result (the red line is the Great Wall of China):

Can't...fight...early...adopter...syndrome...

I'm trying, I swear.

Really, I am. I even wrote a post about how unimpressed I was with the second generation iPhone on AT&T's 3G network. Look, it's not my fault, okay? I've been diagnosed with early adopter syndrome.

I was doing just fine, you see, until my friend dropped his stupid phone into the ocean. When it became clear he'd need a replacement, he asked me if I knew when the next iPhone release was going to be. And that's when I relapsed.

See, the thing is, it doesn't even matter to me that I could care less about 90% of the new applications on the phone. Nor am I really affected by the advent of the 3G network, because I spend most of my time in a free wireless cloud anyway. But none of that matters.

I have to have it. Oh yes, I will be in Union Square on July 11, I can guarantee you that much. I'm not asking for your sympathy. Just please understand that it's hard for me to say "no."

And if you really want to know the truth, the hardest part was when Sansserif casually asked me when I was going to get the new phone, as if it were a matter of course that I'd eventually buy it. I mean, when you put it like that--it just seems so obvious. I have to accept who I am.

Unfortunately, it is by its very nature a contagious condition. Don't worry. I will keep myself in isolation while I play with my new smart phone. If you need to reach me, you know my number. Or just send me an email, or post a comment to this blog for that matter because I'll be checking on the connection speeds pretty regularly. Just please remember that it's hands free in California after July 1, so if I'm driving you may just want to text me and I'll ping you back.

So if the first step to recovery really is admitting that you have a problem, then let me proclaim far and wide: My name is Youareyou. And I am an early adopter.

My Kindle Feedback

For graduation I was ecstatic to receive the Amazon Kindle from a certain beloved friend. I've had it for about a month, so I'm finally ready to give my review. (Despite studying for the bar this summer, I've probably read my Kindle 5 days a week since I got it.)

Likes:
Wireless downloading. The e-books cost a few dollars less than the print versions. The Whispernet network is "free;" like a GPS navigator, you basically pay for it in the price of the device. Every book I've searched for, Amazon has available as an e-book. Getting a book immediately fulfills all my Gen-Y instant gratification needs. I'm reading a fantasy series by Robin Hobb at the moment, and it's delicious being able to download the next book instantly.

The scroll wheel selector. The scroll wheel controls the selector, which runs along a channel on the right side. It's a beautiful cluster of 4 giant, shiny silver pixels that bubble around in a circle when it's 'thinking.' I adore it.

Quality of the print. Brilliant. It gets clearer in bright light, which is fantastically eerie in this laptop-screen age. Personally I'm completely comfortable reading on my computer screen, but it's undeniably wonderful. I wish they would backlight it with a green glow for the darkness. Understandably, they were trying to make it as book-like as possible, but a backlight would be sweet.

Issues:
Buttons. Speaking of book-like, they erred with the page turning buttons. Like a real book, the Kindle has page turners (next page and previous page) along both edges of the device. I'm constantly bumping these buttons (which have a soft 'snick' type click) and accidentally turning the page. I'd like to see buttons that are inlaid, preferably with a sharp and definite click, and which don't extend the entire edge.

Relatedly, the space to actually hold the device while reading is very limited because of the page turners and keyboard. The page turners also contribute to a certain awkwardness in the device. It doesn't rest well in my hands because the edges are sharp and beveled, so that they press uncomfortably against the webbing between my thumb and pointer finger.

DRMS. The Kindle uses its own file format, which functions as a DRM system. The idea that such a system will last is laughable to me. That's what iTunes has, and it's gotten them into device/format wars and is easy to decode. E-books are in their infancy but I think that like MP3s, there will soon be a brisk market of free e-books. Until then the price will be high. It's like ringtones: absurdly priced now ($2.99 for a 30 second snippet of a song I already own?!), but when the markets mature they won't be able to charge that much.

You can also get subscriptions to blogs and newspapers, delivered automatically. That's nice, but I get those free online, so I don't feel a need to pay even 99 cents a month for them.

You can get a document sent to your Kindle in the Kindle format for 10 cents, which is ok, but really, I should be able to do that myself, for free. If Amazon were smart they'd launch a subscription model: pay X dollars a month to download X number of books, at varying levels.

What I love about the Kindle is the software, and most of what I dislike is about the physical aesthetics. Rather than make it a palatable crossover from a book, they should redesign it with the actual needs of a e-book reader in mind.

Other Comments:
The Kindle has "experimental" features, such as the ability to listen to music (in a continuous playlist, like a Shuffle) and a clumsy sort of internet access. I think they should abandon these projects. The audio feature might be OK for audio books, but personally if I want music or an audio book I'll use my iPod. (Speaking of which, only MP3s can be added, not iTunes' AAC format, which has led me to flirt, for the very first time, with other music player possibilities. But that's another post unto itself.)

While it would be awesome to check my email, it's definitely not practical to write an email on the Kindle. If you want a computer in your pocket, use your smart phone, which is made for those purposes. The Kindle's scroll wheel is extraordinarily ill-suited to browsing the internet (you can only select a line of type, not an individual word or link).

I think Amazon would do better to stop trying to make the Kindle satisfy every need, and focus on what the Kindle really is: a good read.

A Slight Margin of Error

After once being wooed by both Microsoft and News Corp, it looked like Yahoo was going to be the big winner in a tale of two futures. But their algorithm for playing one bid off the other was apparently a bit flawed (they thought they could get $37 per share out of Microsoft's initial $33 offer).

Today, Yahoo faced a 13 percent drop in share price over the news that Microsoft "unequivocally" wants nothing to do with the company. Ironically, Yahoo now finds itself paired up with an unlikely partner for ad revenue sharing--Google.

It may not be the dream deal they were hoping for, but at least it should help improve their algorithm.

Mixed Messages

YouAreYou and I had an odd experience the other day. We were heading to dinner at rush hour to a place we'd never been, so we both checked directions on Google Maps. I looked it up on my laptop, while he searched on his iPhone. Both had the same destination and origin. We were given different directions!

YouAreYou: "Maybe they're trying to protect their trade secret algorithm by confusing us?"

Mine said to take Van Ness, while his said to take Divisadero. If you live in San Francisco, you'd probably do what we did: obviously, take Divis.

It's all about the apps

The Mac Developer Conference is happening just a few miles away from me, and yet I'm not important enough to get my foot in the door (rumor has it that Al Gore's in attendance), so I must get my iPhone fix from MacRumors like everyone else. It's kind of like sipping a milkshake through a ten thousand foot straw...lots of anticipation, but not much substance.

I am still hoping that there's a big, tasty chunk of cookie dough or something (like the much anticipated 3G network) waiting at the end of the line, but here's all the news that has trickled in so far:

-they're opening the doors for developers to create new apps and user interfaces
-Loopt, the location-aware social network, will be an integrated app that works with the phone's GPS
-an eBay integrated app will allow users to participate in auctions (and spend money we don't have)
-there will be lots of new games and a 3-D fantasy adventure app (for all that free time we don't have)
-lots of web 2.0 apps to synch calendars, mail, transfer docs, and do pretty much everything you would normally do through a .mac account (too bad I use Google for all that)

And now, the moment we've all been waiting for:

(drum roll)
11:32 am - Introducing the iPhone 3G.

Yes, coming in at speeds 2.8 times faster than the EDGE network, the 3G is still slightly slower than a WiFi connection...but not much. The biggest development is in battery life (which had inhibited the introduction of 3G on the first iPhone release), which is a whopping 300 hours of standby and 5 hours of continual talk time.

Well, it turns out that my anticipation for something delicious was not in vain. Though I wasn't there to actually see the demo, the pictures on MacRumors tell me it was probably pretty cool. But ultimately, until they decide to unlock it and rid themselves of AT&T once and for all, there's nothing here to make me feel like my iPhone version 1.0 is approaching obsolescence.

It is, however, getting rather beat up after many months in my pocket. So while it may not be time to replace the phone, it's definitely time to get myself some gelaskins.

Even as a Mac guy...

...I gotta admit this is pretty sweet.



Hat tip to Tapan (and congratulations!).

A King of Infinite Space

I just got one of those text messages that you save forever--or, at least, for the life of your existing cellphone. The problem is that this particular phone happens to be an iPhone, which means that I automatically save all of my messages, regardless of how trivial or profound they may be.

This got me thinking that, perhaps, unlimited storage is not always a good thing. After all, there used to be a time when my SMS mailbox would fill up and the decision was thrust upon me whether a particular message was worthy of salvation. A select few would progress through multiple mailbox cleanings, but it required the most genuinely sincere expression from a friend or loved one to make it for the long haul.

And now I have one that fits the bill, but it is part of a never ending chain of messages including such deep thoughts as "Don't forget street cleaning," "Come over when u can," "Getting hungry?'"and my personal favorite, "K."

The same holds true for sent messages as well. Back when I had my $30 Samsung clamshell, I chose my words carefully. No predictive text. No QWERTY keyboard layout. Just the impassioned punching of 444 (space) 555 666 888 33 (space) 999 666 88 (exclamation point). These days, I'm nearly as wordy on my phone as I am in this blog. Punctuation is a must. I even capitalize proper nouns. And forget about abbreviations (excepting "WTF" and "OMG," which I've been known to use in ordinary conversation).

Eventually, we will all become kings of infinite space, though I suspect I won't be the only one who remembers back fondly to the time when we were bounded in our nutshells and our inboxes were nice and tidy.

Searching for Cash

Apparently I'm not the only one who has no idea about Microsoft's "Live Search" search engine. SiliconValley.com reports that MS is offering cash back rewards for using their search engine, redeemable for items like cameras.

One expert said, "The issue for Microsoft still remains in that will they be able to deliver enough scale in clicks for the top lucrative keywords, since that's a function of search market share which they have a very small share of right now."

SF Musictech Redux

It's been a long week of music and technology conferences in San Francisco. It began Sunday with a meet-and-greet "speed dating" session at NARM, and has not let up for three days of action packed panel after action packed panel assessing the state of the music industry in 2008. Well, that's not entirely true...there were a few low spots in the action, but more on that later. In any event, I will fight through the conference fatigue to bring you the latest from SF MusicTech (back by popular demand).




Morning Sessions: Digital Thought Leaders, Online Video, Artist Activism, and Copyright Issues in Music Law

The great thing about version 2.0 of MusicTech is that this time around I brought a colleague with me, which means that I get to be two places at once.

I was introduced to an interesting start-up called Plugged In, which provides high definition video streams for musicians. While YouTube offers an average of 700kbps streaming speeds, Plugged In claims to provide 1.5mbps which, for the uninitiated, is staggeringly fast. The most compelling aspect of what Plugged In offers, however, is an adaptive streaming technology that (in theory) sidesteps the frustrations of buffering and packet loss by automatically adjusting the quality of video based on the fluctuations in bandwidth in the user's endpoint. I haven't tested this theory yet on my own, but the prospects are tantalizing.

In short, I can summarize everything else we've heard over five days of music industry conferences in one sentence: any revenue model that relies on the sale of little round plastic disks will soon be completely, unequivocally, 100% worthless.

Nobody is actually saying this, of course, but it is easy enough to read between the lines. As the commoditzation of recorded music pushes prices closer and closer to zero, the old school players in the music industry are being motivated primarily by fear.

Everyone has a different way of expressing this truth, and in the case of the major labels this expression comes in the form of transparent denial. And that's a-okay with me. The most commonly asked question in terms of digital and other so-called 'alternative' revenue streams is, "How do we monetize this?" If you work for a major label, the short answer is: you don't. The second most frequently asked question is, "How to we stop people from stealing our music on P2P sites?" And to that the answer is the same: you don't.

The major labels all have eloquent representatives who are very good at framing the debate around the types of questions they want to ask and answer. But ultimately this amounts to arguing over the best way to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

This is not to say that you can't make money anymore in the music industry. But lifeboats tend to be much more maneuverable than sinking ships.

Three Reasons I Use LinkedIn

A professor of mine recently asked me if I think LinkedIn is useful. Here's why I like LinkedIn:

Resume distributor. I use it to look up people I'm going to meet (for an interview, for example). It's a subtle way of essentially giving someone my resume, and seeing someone else's resume. If I meet someone at a networking event and exchange emails, by becoming my contact on LinkedIn they look at my profile - which has the same content as my resume.

Rolodex. After I meet someone, connecting to them on LinkedIn gives me a chance to reinforce the connection and keep the connection alive ("It was nice meeting you the other day..."). Down the road, if I ever want to contact that person, we each have enough information about each other to remember one another. It's an automatic rolodex in that way as well - I have someone's contact info immediately instead of having to hunt around for a business card. It's Facebook for professionals, and it looks impressive to have a bulging rolodex.

Connecting. Last reason - it actually is useful for it's core purpose, which is to connect you to the people who are two and three degrees away. Here's an example: a friend of mine wanted to talk to an attorney at a law firm to see what firm life was like. But he didn't know anyone at that firm. I looked up the firm on LinkedIn and discovered that a LinkedIn contact of mine had a LinkedIn contact at the firm. I asked my contact to email his contact at the firm, and my friend got connected. Don't get me wrong - I'd never use the LinkedIn "In Mail" to connect to someone through the site. But I definitely use it to connect to people in more traditional off-site ways.

Inblognito

Last month Cubans won the right to own personal computers. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Only foreigners (at hotels) and government officials and academics are allowed to access the internet, as the Washington Post reports.

But people are blogging about their experiences and criticisms of the government in Cuba; this blogger dresses like a tourist and sneaks into hotels to blog.

The government is blogging too - to improve Cuba's image worldwide, naturally.

Searching

I recently attended a conference on online advertising. A woman from Microsoft was seated at my table and we made friendly conversation. Around lunchtime, she asked if I knew of any local coffee shops. I didn't, but I had my laptop open so I offered, "Do you want me to Google it for you?" She let out a strained laugh and said, "Or you could Live Search it."
I laughed too, but I was confused. I'm pretty plugged in, but it took me a full two seconds to have any idea what she was talking about. Finally it clicked: Live Search is Microsoft's search engine.

When I got home that night, I decided to compare Live Search to Google. (And I had to Google it to get the URL...) I was looking for a Thai restaurant, so I entered "Thai near 94118." Here are the screen shots of the results:




To be fair, they're both similar content-wise. Google's was more helpful primarily because the map was provided on the search results page. When I clicked into Live Search's results, the map they provided didn't have zoom functionality, a real disadvantage if you live in a city and need a cross street.

Off The Wall

Every once in a while, I hear about one of those phone calls that goes something like this:

"Hello, Joe? Hi, it's me, Jim. You remember...from high school? Well I just wanted to call because I'm feeling really bad about that mean trick I played on you at the tailgate party senior year. That was really dumb of me, and even though it's been fifteen years I can't stop thinking about what an jerk I was. I hope you'll accept my apology."

But these days, the mea culpa doesn't even need to come by way of telephone. Consider this recent Facebook wall post from one high school friend to another:


Now, when I saw this in my news feed the other day I naturally wondered what my friend could have possibly done to her that was so bad before homecoming in '93. After all, we went to the same school and I hadn't remembered hearing about any earth-shaking drama surrounding that particular dance.

The answer came a couple days later:



It's good to see that Facebook can not only reunite friends from the past, but also atone for the sins of youth--and publicly at that!

A Modern Take on Mass-Emails

After being on the receiving end of a recent mass-emailing, I got into a discussion with a good friend of mine about mass-email etiquette. YouAreYou's comment to this was: "How quaint!" It does seem a bit quaint to have an email etiquette conversation; after all, everyone is claiming email is old-school. But I soon realized that my reluctance over being included on a mass-email was actually fairly modern:

With Gmail, the other people on the email will end up in your contact list. That causes trouble when you use sites that scan your contacts for friends (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) or when Gchat updates your buddy list. You end up having all these people in your contact and buddy list that you don't actually know.

Of course I also feel a little hesitant when people I don't know have my email. Who knows how careful strangers are with their data?

However, my biggest beef with mass-emailing is actually pretty old-school: Snarky comments, inside jokes, people trying to be funny...who wants to get tangled in a reply-all thread like that?

Time Travel

All my prayers have been answered. Once again, those clever folks at Google have defied the laws of the universe to bring a top notch product to market: custom time. Just make sure you don't read their terms of use.

Okay, so maybe they aren't quite up to the standards of The Onion, but I give them a grudging smile for the effort.

The Loop Grows

It looks like I was a little hasty in referring to Loopt as an "early adopter" technology in my last post because the company just signed a deal with Verizon, which opens the GPS-enabled social networking device to approximately 65 million customers.

Naturally, we should prepare ourselves for the next round of discussions about our dwindling privacy and how this surely must be the end of the world (again). A fellow blogger, Ben Wright, made an interesting comment about the possibility of end-users publishing their own terms of service that impose privacy rules. I'm not sure how this would work in practice, especially in cases of lost or stolen cell phones where legal notices are not likely to deter stalkers and other such bad guys, but it's good to see innovative ideas applied to the question of privacy.

I just hope we don't have to endure a new era of commercials featuring the Verizon Wireless Guy: "Can you see where I'm at now? Good!"

OMG ...1GB!?!

Just got back from a trip to the Midwest with Sansserif, and I finally got around to downloading Picasa's web album uploader software on my home computer so that I could share the photos. As I waited for the program to download, I browsed some of the new Google products under development and found a new YouTube video uploader (along with an interesting 3D drawing program called SketchUp, but that's the subject of an entirely different post).

Coincidentally, I had spent much of the flight home making a "to do" list, and one of the items on said list had been to find the best software for compressing large video files to meet the 100MB file size limit on YouTube. I wondered if they had finally developed an application to automatically restrict video file size to meet these meager limits.

But what I found out was so, so much better: they didn't need to.

I blinked and looked again at the words written in bold. Could there really be a full gigabyte of delicious storage space available for each video I upload? Had I missed a memo or something? Granted, being on a ranch in Nebraska isn't exactly the best way to stay on top of the latest tech news, but I felt like I'd emerged from a black hole or something.

I really have to tip my (cowboy) hat to Google on this one. As Sansserif says, the best part of making a "to do" list is being able to cross off the completed tasks when you finish them. But the best part of my discovery is that I got to cross something off my list and I didn't have to do anything at all.

Divide

YouAreYou is only a few years older than me, but he technically falls under Generation X while I technically fall under the Gen-Y age bracket. While there is much teasing along these lines, occasionally the divide does indeed become evident, as the following example demonstrates:

YouAreYou is currently working on the interior design of his new office. He drew a floor plan of the space dimensions on graph paper. (As an aside, the software for that purpose that I found online didn't seem to capture his interest.) He scanned the floor plan and sent me a PDF copy to look at.

A few days later he said, "I'll make a bunch of photocopies so we can sketch out ideas." I looked at him quizzically and with perfect Gen-Y innocence asked, "Why don't you just print the PDF?"

In the Loop

I recently added the Loopt application to my Facebook account after a friend got a new cell phone featuring the GPS tracking software. Essentially, the lines between social networking and mobile devices are getting blurred. This, in turn, blurs a more important line between our semi-anonymous online personas and our so-called "real world" identities.

Now, before anyone gets all paranoid about their privacy, don't worry. This is nothing like that pesky illegal government wiretapping and/or other undisclosed terrorist surveillance activities that the telecoms can neither confirm nor deny the existence of. No, no, no. This much simpler.

Having Loopt on a cell phone just eliminates the need for the most commonly texted question in the world: where u at? You only invite your friends to be able to see your location, and you can always lie about where you really are if you want to go off the radar for a bit.

I am here, btw: (or am I???)



Of course, I could zoom the Google map to my exact location but, frankly, I don't know you that well.

While this type of technology is certainly the trend of the future, it does not necessarily simplify the social nuances of online living. Consider, for instance, a house party that starts at 9pm. You have ten friends who are going, and none of you wants to be the first one to show up. It's easy to see how staring at your Loopt phone all night could result in a stalemate while everyone waits for someone else to make the first move.

For now, anyway, there is time to puzzle over this newest chapter in the Book of Netiquette (7th Edition) as Loopt is currently an early adopter technology. But don't be surprised if you someday find yourself in a social network that involves interacting in the so-called "real world" we're hearing so much about these days. I know...scary, right?

Landscapes, pt. 2

Per Sansserif's recent post on the landscape along the Pacific Coast Highway, I couldn't resist looking up the google earth image of our approximate location. Had I paid for the full version, I'm sure the two photos would be all but indistinguishable. Of course, they haven't yet figured out how to digitally replicate the sea breeze, or the sun.


Yes, I know...it's so Gen-X of me to tout the merits of the "real" world, but I can't help it. I guess you just had to be there.

Landscapes

 

When I was at my childhood home this winter, my father encouraged me to take a book about cameras home with me. The book is from the 1970s and explains f-stops, aperture values, etc. I resisted at first, insisting I could find all that information online, but to please him I took it with me. I finally cracked it open and found it very accessible. The other day I told this story to YouAreYou, inviting him to sample the old book smell.

"You can't get that on the internet!" He teased. I had to agree.

***************************

Driving along the Pacific Coast Highway this week, I admired the terrain of the land.
"It looks like a topographical map," I said. YouAreYou glanced at me sideways.
"That's very Gen-X of you," he commented, meaning not techospeak, Gen-Y.
"Sorry!" I said. "I meant, 'It looks like Google Terrain View.'" We laughed.

But still - you just can't get that on the internet.

(Nearly) Live Blog - SF Music Tech 2008

Two things you learn early on at an event with over 50 panelists: first, you will have to make decisions about which events to attend (I'm still torn between the 10:30am presentations of "Artists, Copyrights & Technologies" and "Issues in Music - Tech Licensing"); and secondly, anyone who seems overly friendly at the reception breakfast is probably going to hand you a glossy pamphlet introducing their business after about 2 minutes of idle chatter (and will be off to the next target before the 5 minute mark). Click here for the Twitter feed.

Session 1: Recommendation and Discovery

The central topic of this first panel was the question of how to discover new music in an era of almost overwhelming choices, a discussion quickly framed as a battle of “man vs. machine.” On one side, there were the techies in search of that magical formula that would make the process of collaborative filtering on the internet more accurate and useful for the end user. On the other side were the humanists who lamented the digitization and automation of subjective musical tastes.

I have a friend who recommends good music to me almost weekly, and we joke that my responses to her selections will be entered into her algorithm for future picks. So far, so good. I’ve found myself exposed to an increasingly diverse and sometimes challenging palate of music, with only a few misses here and there.

The real issue of recommendation seems to be one of trust—regardless of whether you are inclined to listen to a computer or human algorithm for selecting “good” music, there must be a high level of credibility from the source. Personally, I’ve had enough off the wall recommendations from amazon.com that my policy is to never take advice from any machine that wants to sell me something. Besides, my human recommender burns me the songs I want for free. (Note for our friends out there at Sony BMG, EMI, Universal, Warner, ASCAP and BMI...I'm just kidding!! Sheesh...take a joke, will you?)

Session 2 – Licensing (or, "How To Slice the Royalty Pie Into 1000 Worthless Pieces")

Listening to representatives from Real Networks and Sony Computer Entertainment lament the difficulties of licensing and computing royalty payments for digital downloads, on-demand streams and internet radio did not immediately evoke my sympathies. After all, it’s supposed to be difficult. They’re applying 20th century business metrics to 21st century technologies.

In most cases, the copyright owners and distribution companies have tenuous agreements not to sue each other until the CRB finally makes a determination of the appropriate royalty rates for new technologies. Originally, the determination was set to come out in 2001, but has been delayed indefinitely as more and more special interests enter the discussion of who is to be paid what, and when. Of course, there is one group of people that has been cut out of the debate entirely: the artist.

Apparently, the best way to slice the royalty pie is by inviting too many cooks in the kitchen.

Session 3 - The History of Everything - John Perry Barlow

The highlight of my day so far was definitely shaking hands with John Perry Barlow and telling him that his discussion was a breath of fresh air. His response was too colorful for print, but here are some of the most quoteworthy highlights from his presentation:

On becoming a songwriter:

“You just have to find yourself in the middle of an argument at the right time.”

On the value of recorded music:

“If I have a diamond the size of a softball, it is no less valuable if nobody knows about it. But if I have a song that is the equivalent of a softball-sized diamond, it is valueless unless other people know about it.”

On bootleg taping of live shows:

“It’s bad for your karma to be mean to a Deadhead.”

On the value of art:

“The value lies in the relationship between the creator and the audience. Art for me is a verb, not a noun.”

On co-founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

“At this stage, I’m like John the Baptist. In the beginning Mitch and I didn’t think we needed an organization at all, but we didn’t realize that in cyberspace the first amendment was a local ordinance.“

On the value of copyright:

“The first thing that we have to get rid of is this idea that we own ideas.”

On change:

“Most of the people who feel the same way about these things are younger than me. Most of the people who disagree with me are about my age. And some day, the people my age will die. That’s pretty much how change happens.”

Well Said

From someecards.com, hat tip to my friend B.

I don't want to play Scrabulous with you.

Look, we’re friends, right? And not just on Facebook. I mean, we’re pretty tight in real life, you and I, aren’t we? So there’s something I’ve been meaning to say, and it’s kind of gotten to the point where we should talk it out. You see, I really don’t want to play Scrabulous with you. Not even a little bit.

And yet you keep inviting me to add the application to my profile in spite of the fact that I continually ignore your requests. At first I thought you might have forgotten you had already sent the invitation multiple times. But now I realize that you just really want to play Scrabulous with me, and I feel it’s my duty to tell you right here and now that it’s never going to happen. I hope this doesn’t affect our friendship.

Now, listen—don’t get all pouty on me. I’m not saying that I support Hasbro’s attempts to remove Scrabulous from Facebook. In my opinion, that’s just another example of big corporations trying to limit the definitions of “fair use” on the net in order to put more money in their pockets. And for the record, I did notice that you’ve already joined the Facebook petition to save Scrabulous, and I totally respect that. It’s your right to free speech and, really, it’s beside the point.

I just don’t want to play Scrabulous with you. Period.

If you must know, my objections are twofold. First, I already have enough internet-based addictions, and I see no need to stoke the fires with yet another Facebook app. But the deeper issue for me is that it just doesn’t look very fun. No offense, but I’ve played a little Scrabble in my day, and the only thing that made that any fun was the competition derived from having to come up with good words under extreme time constraints without the use of a dictionary. I mean, what’s the point of wondering if “quixotry” is a word if you can simply google it on your lunch break? Where’s the sport in that?

Anyway, not to belabor the point, but I just want to say that I really am firm on this. I know that Scrabulous is all the rage these days, and that it has even spawned music videos touting its penetration into popular culture. Fair enough. But sometimes, you’ve just got to sit one out.

I’m glad we had this talk. There was this other friend of mine once who always wanted to post Super Poke messages to me. I didn’t say anything at first, until sometime around Halloween when this person started throwing vampires, ghosts and goblins at me like every day. I knew then that it would never end until I said something, but I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t handle it very well. We still keep in touch, but somehow I feel that things will never be quite the same.

So I hope you know it’s only because I value our friendship so much that I tell you, once again, that I will never play Scrabulous with you. Ever. But don’t worry, we can still test our movie knowledge together sometimes, and maybe even write on each other’s Super Walls from time to time. But unfortunately, that’s where I’m going to have to draw the line. I hope you understand.

Scents and Subtle Sounds

Much fuss has been made of the seriousness or frivolty or inadequacy of Facebook relationship status changes.

Commentators ignore, however, other more subtle signs of the intertwining of two people that fall short of status changes. Examples:

1. Wall writing. Writing on someone's Wall is probably the simplest way to publicly flirt. One can even quietly mark one's territory, such as by referring to time spent together ("The show last night was awesome, it was fun hanging out").

2. Friending the Friends. Spending time with someone leads to the inevitable intermixing of social groups in RL. Eventually, you become FB Friends with his/her Friends. This can even lead to friending the boyfriend/girlfriend of the Friends, in addition to writing on the Walls of Friends, often with references to the targeted person that s/he is bound to see.

3. Friending the family. Becoming Friends with siblings is a high indicator of a budding relationship, especially if those siblings live out of town.

4. Status removal. Changing one's status to "In a relationship" and linking to another person requires approval by the other person. As many have noted, going Facebook Official is a big and often intimidating step. A more subtle move is simply removing your status from your profile, so that nothing appears. Facebook needs to work on the News Feed for removal of the field. Currently your Feed will broadcast "Jane D. is no longer listed as single," (with the full heart icon!) when it would more properly read "Jane D. is no longer listing her relationship status." Facebook robs status removal of some of its subtlety, but perhaps it also forces more honesty?

Nevertheless, it should be noted that removing one's status can also be a polite and elegant way of avoiding unwanted advances from other Facebook Friends.

On Paper

I recently attended at a show at a small San Francisco venue. After purchasing the tickets online, I received this confirmation email:

You have bought ticket(s) to an event at Rickshaw Stop. There are no physical tickets; your name will simply be on the prepaid list. If you are the sort of person who likes to print things out, you may print this confirmation. But it is not necessary.

YouAreYou commented that this was kindness on the part of a Type B person for the needs of a Type A person.
On further thought, however, I think it's actually kindness on the part of a digital person for the needs of a hardcopy person...


The band, Bedouin Soundclash, from Canada:
 

Continental Drift

Follow me here:

Plate tectonics is based on the notion that the Earth is composed of seven or so large masses of crust floating atop layers of magma. Over time, the various points of tension between the land masses change due to the degree of volatility in the layers below, until at last the tension is released through a kind of awkward sputtering forward of the plates (better known as earthquakes). Then the process of gradual accumulation and release begins anew. We refer to this process politely as "continental drift" because, frankly, we don't know where or when or how it's going to happen next. In spite of all our knowledge and understanding, we're just drifting.

Now, by analogy:

The business world has its own version of "continental drift," specifically among large, multinational, public companies. To illustrate this, we could look at companies such as...hmm, let's say...Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and News Corp. The magma in this scenario is the volatility of market forces, and the tension is created by the need for these companies to not only "stay afloat" amid changing conditions, but also to deliver reliable, recurring profits to shareholders every quarter of every year into supposed perpetuity. Mergers and acquisitions tend to be one way that large public companies sustain this growth, often with unfortunate results. But every so often, the "continental drift" focuses into a highly acute tension that is intricate, fascinating and totally unpredictable. Consider our four case studies.

A tale of two futures:

The tech economy was rocked by Microsoft's announcement of an unsolicited (a.k.a. "hostile") bid to acquire Yahoo on February 1. As Google's shares fell, the company released this statement to argue (not unreasonably) that the Microsoft/Yahoo merger would raise "troubling questions" about the openness of internet search engines and the ability of users to make a choice. Rumors began to circulate that Google would make its own bid just to raise the stakes on Microsoft. Amid this tension, Yahoo watched its stock price appreciate dramatically, making the February 1 bid by Microsoft (which was locked into the end-of-day trading price on January 31) seem less and less attractive.

Enter News Corp. We now have a situation in which Yahoo's future could go either way, and each of the potential alternatives (though radically different) would make a lot of sense. On the one hand, a strong bid by News Corp may simply encourage Microsoft to make a more charitable offer to Yahoo in pushing the deal forward. Assuming that the regulators allowed the deal to pass, we would see the first real competitor to Google, and competition tends to spur innovation. On the other hand, it might make a lot of sense for Rupert Murdoch to merge his Myspace assets with Yahoo's search and infrastructure assets to form a truly dynamic information and content distribution portal. You can bet that something big is brewing beneath the surface. Behind the closed doors of boardrooms, there are numbers being crunched, scenarios gamed, meetings scheduled, announcements leaked to the press. These geysers serve as the prelude to a big finish.

So what does it all mean?

I know that I'm not qualified to know, and that's enough. But the bigger question is, Who cares? To me, this is the kind of drama that makes business fascinating. Ultimately, it will come down to a simple number, but that number will represent the dueling of ideologies about what the future of the internet will look like. So, as the WGA writers finally put down their picket signs and dust off their pencils, this real world drama is a safe alternative to reality TV. For my money, I'd take "continental drift" over Celebrity Apprentice anytime.

Warrantless wiretapping? What warrantless wiretapping?

We don't got no stinking warrantless wiretapping!

iReuse

A friend of mine gutted his second gen iPod and turned it into a cigarette case:

 

If you see me wearing this shirt...

...please don't take my picture. And if you do take my picture, please don't post it on Facebook.

September 16, 2007

I currently have 36 pictures in my profile, and I am wearing this shirt in no less than 20 of them. I kid you not. I mean, it's not like I only wear this shirt when I go out. I've got lots of shirts, and I also have a rotation method that has served me very well over the years, thank you very much. But somehow I've gotten into this weird spin cycle where all my friends post pictures of me on nights when I happened to wear this particular shirt.

Sometime in October, 2007

I wonder, is it proper netiquette to request photo removal on the grounds of creating the false impression that I only wear one shirt when I go out? Or, if I simply remove my name from the tags, will that remove the offending photos from my profile? But which ones to remove? This could get political.

November 17, 2007

Look--I mean, seriously--it's not my fault it's a comfortable shirt. It's 100% polyester, form fitting, and an actual vintage store find that's not one of those semi-replicated trying to be vintage sorts of things.

January 26, 2008

Please...I'm begging you. The only conclusion that a reasonable person can draw from my profile is that a) I went on one hell of a bender one night, or b) I don't change and/or wash my clothes all that often. So if you see me wearing this shirt--and especially if you see me wearing this shirt and the brown jacket--do not, I repeat, do not take my picture. And if you do, for godsakes keep it off of Facebook, okay?

Inherent Ettiquette

I had a strange experience with a robot the other day. I called UPS to have them hold a package for me instead of trying to deliver it. Like most large corporations these days, they have an automated voice-recognition system when you call. (Eg., "If you would like to check the location of your package, say, 'Location.'") I obediently spoke my tracking number for the female robot, but I was pleasantly surprised when she didn't repeat it back to me for confirmation.

In fact, during the entire transaction, she understood my words perfectly at every stage, never repeated anything, and was unfailingly polite. She flawlessly guided me through setting up my will-call pick up. The process went so smoothly ("Is there anything else I can help you with?"), and her personality and (dare I say?) etiquette were so well-designed that, when the conversation completed, I actually had to suppress the urge to thank her!

But to the designers and engineers of voice-recognition software, I don't need to suppress it: Thanks!

Post-Symposium Q&A

During the Net Neutrality Symposium, I had a lot of questions in mind for the panelists just in case there was a lull in the action. Well, there wasn't. In fact, the Q&A sessions were full of fireworks that were frankly more fun to watch than participate in, but since then I've had one question in particular running through my head.

So here goes:

The debate about net neutrality is largely framed around the limitations of bandwidth in distributing large files such as video. But instead of dreaming about bigger pipelines, why is the discussion not framed around providing greater levels of compression for these files, such as the H.264 video codec which provides near high definition quality at a fraction of the file size?

I have a bit of experience working with this method of compression, and I've been very impressed with the results. It seems to me that if Sony or Apple (or Google or Microsoft, for that matter) were to develop a codec that takes this high quality compression to a new level, they could not only bundle it with their proprietary software at a nice profit, but also make much of the debate about bandwidth restrictions an academic exercise.

Gchat Status Messages, Part II

This is the second of two-part post on Gchat status messages. In the first, I discussed the major categories of status messages. In this post, I'll address some of the dos-and-don'ts of a proper status message.

1. Recycling. I know this is asking a lot, but I really find it tiresome when someone recycles an old status message. In the case of "class" or "work," yes, that's appropriate. But your friends will thank you for giving them something new. I took the time to read that long quote a week ago; I won't do it again.

2. Fishing. This is a sensitive one. When someone makes a cry for help on his/her status message - "This sucks!" - s/he is asking you to message them. I know we all cave to this impulse from time to time, but if you want to talk about something - chat someone. That's what IM is all about, right?

3. Never changing your status. Feed me! Your status message has read "dingleberry" the entire time we've been chat friends (over two years). I'm ready to move on.

4. Ever changing your status. Some people scroll through messages constantly, sometimes several times in one chat conversation. When you're chatting with someone, they receive the changed status as a line of IM. I find this distracting and confusing. Is our conversation not enough for you? It's like watching someone else channel surf.

Conclusions: Give your friends a good reason to mouse-over your name and read your status. Value their time and net-attention span by giving them something fresh and creative.

If you can't think of something that fits the bill, leave it at Available. As far as status goes, there are worse things to be!

Live Blog - Net Neutrality 2008

Visit the conference webpage, www.netneutrality2008.org, for full information and schedules.

You can also click HERE for a live video stream of the event. Updates will be posted below the post-modern, self-referential photo:

Session 1:

AT&T's Richard Clarke began by stating that one's definition of fairness "depends heavily on where one sits in the Internet ecosystem." While this may sound reasonable, I can't help but believe that there is an objective notion of what is fair in terms of net neutrality. After discussing (briefly) his opposition to the proposed Dorgan-Snowe legislation, Clarke abruptly ended his presentation by stating the following: "By trying to satisfy all sides, as politicians often do, they end up taking the most extreme position."

I was glad that Tim Wu challenged this "classic framing technique" employed by Clarke which made AT&T's stance seem reasonable while making proponents of net neutrality seem more fringe.

It's easy enough to say that "fairness" is a matter of perspective, but that's a cop out. Clarke should consider reading up on his John Rawls (and specifically the "veil of ignorance") before imposing his (company's) take on what is "fair."

Final note: Lawrence Spiwak seems to think that commoditization of the internet will lead to fewer carriers and, therefore, higher costs. I challenge him to present a single economic model in which commoditization encourages anything other than lower prices and increased market competition.

Session 2:

The rock star here was clearly Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America. Overall, I thought the panel was a bit lopsided, with three libertarian-minded, anti-regulation economists taking most of the spotlight. But their PowerPoint presentations could not match up with Mr. Cooper's informal remarks about the history of a regulated telecommunications industry and the importance of providing correct incentives for companies like AT&T to open up their networks to non-discriminatory practices.

Mr. Cooper also wins the award so far for best extension of the toll road analogy: "It's appropriate for a toll road cashier to count the wheels on your truck, not what you're carrying."

What I don't understand yet is why nobody is talking about the fact that ISP's and content providers are often one and the same entity, or subsidiaries of a parent company, or so deeply entwined in content distribution agreements that they cannot be trusted to police themselves. The anti-regulation crowd would have you gloss over this little detail and ask you to believe that companies like Time Warner, AT&T and Comcast would willingly cannibalize their revenue streams in the interest of public welfare.

Keynote:

Rachelle Chong wins the award for quote of the day (so far): "You've heard of serial killers? Well, I'm a serial regulator."

Session 3:

Richard Bennett introduced his discussion by saying, "I'm against net neutrality because my job depends upon it." Enough said.

Fred von Lohmann put the smack dab on Comcast and AT&T for controlling innovation (a la BitTorrent) and invading privacy (a la copyright enforcement). I hope that someone produces a rough transcript of his remarks because they were that spot on. A new blog entry will be necessary for Fred's analysis of this little gem alone.

I would be remiss if I didn't commend one of the few female voices on today's panels, Colette Vogele, who illustrated beautifully the importance of net neutrality in stimulating innovation from upstart content producers such as Alive in Baghdad and Political Lunch.

The biggest takeaway from this session is the reinforcement of something I've long suspected: innovation comes from the fringe...always. Even in large corporations, it is the self-motivated "intrapreneur" who breaks from the pack. If we are not willing to support and defend innovation from the fringes, then we might as well be overt about our complacency and love of corporate mediocrity.

UPDATE: Maybe the highlight of this session (though for reasons not intended) was the fiery teleconference by Scott Cleland in which he basically concluded that proponents of net neutrality are all "naive and potentially disasterous" in their thinking. The best part was looking at the larger-than-life portrait of a smiling Mr. Cleland as he referred to Fred von Lohmann as a "two-year-old tantrum thrower." Had Mr. Cleland actually been here in person, he might have noticed the subtle but important difference between people laughing with him and laughing at him.

Session 4:

Well, since I still need to pack for a trip to London tomorrow, I will leave it to my colleague to summarize the highlights of this session. (I'm sure this is profoundly disappointing to the two people out there who are reading this blog!)

Residuals

Now that the WGA and AMPTP are resuming informal discussions, I thought this was a curious app to find on Facebook today. Note that the description explicitly states "this is not an official app of Comedy Central." And yet it allows you to "watch the latest nightly episode or any older clips tv-commercial free."



Hmm...I wonder what the odds are that "tv-commercial free" is the same thing as plain old "commercial free." But if there are web-commercials embedded in the app, and it's not an official app of Comedy Central, then how do you suppose they'll calculate those residuals?

Gchat Status Messages, Part I

In Gmail's chat feature (or independent chat client Google Talk or "Gtalk"), users have the option of creating a status message that appears below your name. In traditional IM programs like AIM or YIM, this would be the Away Message. In Gmail, however, the status is constantly there and has taken on some of the qualities of Twitter ("What are you doing right now?") and of social network "headlines" (as in MySpace).

I present the categories of Gmail status messages:

1. Strictly Utilitarian
The person's status reads "class" or "at work." Technically, there's nothing offensive about these status messages, except that they're pretty boring. They did get interesting around the holidays, however; I saw quite a few indicating the person's location (Austin, TX or Detroit, MI), which led to new insights on where people come from.

2. Quotes
These can be either stuffy (philosophers writing before Christ) or irreverent (TV shows). Entertaining, but the quote better be good. Otherwise you're forced to roll over their name to expand the quote to read it, and feel dissatisfied, having wasted precious internet surfing seconds. You also have to be careful using these because friends may read deeper into them than you anticipate. Avoid any quotes about love!

3. Inside Jokes
Totally incomprehensible except to another person. These are wholly annoying, unless you're in on the joke, in which case they're delightful and flattering. My friend's status the other day: "Let me put my poems in you." Thought-provoking, anyway.

4. Shout Outs
These reference another person and are cousins to Inside Jokes. Often, however, at least some fellow friends will understand the reference. For example, my friend's status read "Katz cheats," and I knew he was referring to an ongoing Scrabulous game on Facebook with our friend Katz.

5. Blanks
No status message at all, so it reads "Available." Boring! Occasionally indicating laziness, but there are worse things. I'd rather leave mine blank than bring an offensive status message into the world.

6. Busy
Coupled with the red dot with the white line, like a Do Not Enter/Wrong Way sign, this status conveys real foreboding. Sometimes combined with #1, which may help alleviate the curiosity of others.

This is Part I of a two-part post on Gchat status message protocols. Part II.

Grammar 2.0

Perhaps it's just the residual English major coming through here, but does it bother anyone else when software apps are blatantly lazy about grammar? Consider a recent Facebook news feed:




Sure, it may seem innocent enough. After all, it's merely the substitution of a third-person plural possessive pronoun where a more gender-specific and singular "his" or "her" would have been the grammatically correct alternative. But where does it end?

It may be a computer geek's world out there, but let's not forget that a good copy editor is also useful when writing code, and it just so happens that there are a lot of talented writers looking for some non-union work these days.

Does That Ring a Bell?

After more than three years, I finally got a new cell phone. It's my first phone with video/camera functions and a QWERTY keyboard. It does not, however, contain the more than 200 contacts I'd acquired over the years.

[Quick story: I went to Tahoe with a friend and his girlfriend, who doesn't snowboard. While we were on the slopes, she borrowed my phone, because she'd lost hers the week before. She did some slipping on the ice...and my cell didn't leave Tahoe.]

I forgot how disorienting it used to be to pick up a phone without caller ID! There's a mix of anxiety and anticipation particular to picking up a mystery phone call.

It got especially interesting a few days ago on my birthday when the anonymous text messages flowed in. I found myself wondering things like, 'Who calls me cutie? And kiddo? Where's an 858 area code?' I realized that I had exactly one cell phone number memorized: my own.

The new phone came with a free app from Verizon that automatically syncs my contact list to their network every night.

iBugs iStand Corrected

UPDATE: Sansserif has pointed out that iPhone's failure to notify Gmail users that their messages would be deleted is technically not a "bug," per se, as the software update still does exactly what it was intended to do. However, the damage control statement issued by Gmail indicates, at the least, an iGaffe on the part of Apple for not disclosing the change.

I was glad to see that Apple's software update 1.1.3 for the iPhone has implemented the new application which cleverly substitutes for a true GPS system. However, the first round of iBugs has arrived. In case you missed Gmail's public service announcement to iPhone users, I bring it to you in full:

Attention iPhone POP users

If you configured Gmail access on your iPhone by tapping the large 'Gmail' icon in mail setup, please note that installing software update 1.1.3 will automatically convert Gmail on your iPhone from POP access to IMAP access. This means that actions you take on your iPhone will now sync with actions in your Gmail web interface (i.e. messages you read on your iPhone will show up as 'Read' in the web interface). This also means that messages you delete on your iPhone will be moved to the Trash folder in the Gmail web interface, and thus deleted after 30 days. Please exercise caution when deleting messages, as this behavior is markedly different from POP access.

For more information regarding IMAP, visit our IMAP Access topic.

For additional information regarding this change, please visit Apple Support.

If you wish to use Gmail IMAP access without deleting messages on your iPhone, please follow these instructions.

If you wish to continue using POP access on your iPhone, please follow these instructions to manually configure POP.

DWT

Welcome to the 21st century. From the makers of Driving Under the Influence (DUI) and Driving While Intoxicated (DWI), we proudly present: Driving While Texting (DWT).

The Washington Post reports that Virginia's General Assembly "is considering a pair of bills that would ban texting while driving a car, bicycle, motorcycle, moped or even an electric wheelchair."

If this sounds absurd, consider the fact that six states have already considered anti-texting laws in 2007, with New Jersey, Washington and the city of Phoenix passing resolutions outlawing the practice.

I'm no fan of texting drivers, but this trend in lawmaking sounds more like a post-modern fad than an actual public service. After all, have you seen some of the things people do while driving? Just because it's technically not illegal to eat with chopsticks while operating your vehicle at 70MPH, that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

So remember, if you're walking down the sidewalk and see someone in an electric wheelchair trying to multitask with their cellphone, don't be afraid to make a citizen's arrest. Together, we can keep the streets safe from efficiency.

A Welcome Return...

I'll just say it: strike or no strike, I'm glad to see Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert back on TV.

I think they both handled the awkwardness very well by making it explicit that they were ad-libbing the entire show. Colbert was brilliant, even without the use of his teleprompter. And Stewart, true to form, was able to make fun of both sides of the issue. Just as he would normally be pointing out the idiocy of Republicans and Democrats alike, Stewart managed to walk the tightrope by ribbing his executive bosses and pot-smoking peers equally.

(NB: It's ironic that the links above take you to a Comedy Central owned page with internet advertising, which is exactly the dispute in question with the WGA writers).

The "A" Word

In case you missed it, the Bay Area got hit with the fiercest storm in over five years on Friday, leading to over 1 million power outages throughout Northern California. Around noon, the lights flickered valiantly as the power lines fought against hurricane-force winds, but ultimately I was left in the dark.

My first reaction was, of course, to grab my iPhone.

I looked on the list of available wi-fi networks and, finding none, deduced that the entire neighborhood was affected by the outage. It was then that I knew it would be a long day alone with AT&T's lackluster EDGE data network.

Hours passed, and I eventually stopped trying to be productive. It was nice (for a while) to read by the window, but as twilight settled in and the battery on my phone reached 20%, I knew that I had to take some serious action.

Fortunately, my brother's friend had invited us over for dinner. We forgot to ask if we could bring a bottle of wine or anything, but we did bring our laptops and cell phone chargers to plug in once we got there. While our host cooked, we would periodically check email or idly surf our favorite sites just because we could. At that point, I was just calling it a "guilty pleasure."

It was only when we went to a movie later in the evening that my brother mentioned the "A" word. I contend that it was his fault.

Two minutes before showtime, he said he didn't believe me when I told him that both Michael Cera and Jason Bateman (of Arrested Development fame) were starring in the film we were about to see. Clearly, I had to pull out the iPhone to correct him before the opening credits rolled. So once again, I found myself slogging through the EDGE network, searching IMDB for the cast of Juno (very good movie, BTW).

"I think you might have a slight internet addiction," my brother said. I didn't bother to look up as the Safari taskbar edged ever so slowly across the screen.

The verdict: I was right, but I had to wait for the opening credits to prove it.

Picking Scabs

Contrary to popular belief, the first great political event of 2008 is not happening tonight at the Iowa caucuses--it already happened last night on Jay Leno. A number of blogs sympathetic with the WGA strike are suggesting that Leno broke strike rules when he admitted that he wrote his own monologue.

"That's a huge problem," according to Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood Daily, "because it violates the strike rules of one of his unions." As a WGA member, this makes Leno a "scab."

This is not only a potential problem for Leno, but also for Republican Presidential Candidate, Mike Huckabee, who similarly crossed picket lines to appear on the show. Though I suspect he was willing to sacrifice the union vote for the free publicity. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, performed a pre-taped appearance on Letterman. Unlike Huckabee and Leno, Clinton and Letterman come out on the right side of this argument. Letterman's own company, Nation Wide Pants, owns the rights to both the Late Show and the Late Late Show and was therefore able to strike a deal with the WGA.

This demonstrates the true value of owning your own company in this volatile environment. As Letterman climbs from #2 to #1, the Writer's Guild of America gains leverage against NBC to strike a deal, or watch their bread and butter Tonight Show fade into the background as new late night options arise (umm...Daily Show, anyone?).

Apparently, Hillary's appearance on Dave didn't have quite the desired effect in terms of poll numbers. But the ratings will speak for themselves. The first great political battle of 2008 has begun, and it's NBC's move.

The Great Debate

You might have noticed a new application on your Facebook homepage announcing the upcoming ABC News-Facebook Presidential Debates. Erick Schonfeld at the TechCrunch blog has some interesting analysis of the debate format, which apparently will not be similar to the CNN-YouTube Debates. "The exact tie-in details to the televised debate are in development," Schonfeld quotes an unnamed Facebook spokesperson as saying. "But this will not be a case where there will be direct questions from users like you've seen in other debates."

So what's the point?

Well, from a marketing standpoint it's sheer genius. After all, ABC will gather real-time data on how many people are watching the live debates from the Facebook demographic--which just happens to be the prized mid-20's, highly educated, young professional. Not a bad day's work, really. At a time when many young people are abandoning the reruns on TV for streaming content online, I'm sure that ABC was able to sell some nice ads for that little Facebook partnership.

But that still doesn't answer the question, what's the point?

I'm torn. In spite of the highly public nature of adding and dropping apps on Facebook, I am planning to add the "New Hampshire Debates" application in the name of social science. In my view, the real question is whether television executives actually have the stomach to utilize the internet for what it's worth. My hunch is that they're too worried about cannibalizing their traditional revenue streams to view the web as anything more than a means to an end. In the meantime, the question of when and how truly convergent content will reach our TV screens remains the great debate.

UPDATE: I suffered through a portion of the Republican debate, and there was no tie-in with Facebook other than branding. Same is true for the ABC News page on Facebook. There's no obvious reason why the partnership really matters to anyone other than the corporations.

RTFMS

My first conversation with my dad in 2008, and the subject was none other than how he really, seriously, honestly and truly, no joke, was going to take a shotgun and blow up his Mac. His language was a little more colorful, but it would certainly make this blog NSFW.

Speaking of acronyms, when I realized that all he really wanted was free tech support, my courteous response was RTFMS.

iModest Proposal

As the proud owner of an iPhone, I will be the first to admit that its capabilities are somewhat limited. For instance, the camera is a big disappointment. AT&T's EDGE network is an utter disgrace. The lackluster battery life is frustrating when you aren't afforded the luxury of re-charging every night. And, although the Google maps feature is quite handy, the lack of a GPS system on the phone itself makes it impractical for navigating unfamiliar roads while driving.

The thing is, all of these problems have easy fixes.

In fact, many hacker sites have popped up with innovative solutions to the shortcomings of the first generation iPhone. For instance, did you know that you can actually record video directly to your phone? Although the first generation application can only record approximately 5 seconds of video, the developer anticipates that second generation apps will be able to record at 15-30 fps for as long as the hard drive will allow. And for those who are sick of AT&T's EDGE network, did you know that you can access Skype directly through your iPhone's web browser? If you do install 3rd party software, you might experience decreased battery life (beyond the already limited scope of the unhacked phone). But never worry, there's a hack for that, too. And for those who have wondered why there is no GPS function installed on the iPhone, look no further: Navizon provides you with a pinpointed location in relation to Google maps based on your distance from cell stations.

Many of these hacker solutions will likely be resolved with the 2G iPhone to be released sometime in 2008. But the prevalence of these innovations to counteract present day limitations illustrates an important point, which leads me to my iModest Proposal.

Crack the iPhone. Allow for open source applications in the same way that Facebook licenses 3rd party vendors to develop solutions to unsatisfied customer needs. Embrace the fact that geeks will be geeks, which means that if there is a way to work around the limitations of a certain product, somebody will figure out how to do it. Help them be entrepreneurs. Exploit this potential and create the first open source platform for software developers to create 3G, 4G, and InfinityG applications specifically for a superior piece of hardware.

When Steve Jobs announced at the 1997 Mac Expo that he was opening the Mac OS to Microsoft Office, the news was met with a resounding chorus of gasps. It looked like the last, desperate act of a failing company. But it turned out to be a genius move that allowed Apple to focus on its core competency. Similarly, an open source iPhone could be the next big thing to revolutionize the cellular and mobile industry.

Mass-Slighting

Now I know this is a bit off-topic, but only slightly. I'm here to complain about mass-text-messaging. During the holidays, these mass-texts are especially prevalent: "Merry Christmas!" from someone you don't speak with all that often, or even from someone you speak to rather often. It's vague enough to make me wonder, is it a mass-text? I feel torn: do I text back in thanks, or do I feel slighted for the impersonality of a mass-message?

My Cromagnum cell phone allows me to send to multiple recipients, but not to mass-text. When I send a text to, say, two of my friends, I write, "Do you guys wanna go to the Elbo Room for reggae tonight?" I make it explicit that I've sent it to both of them ("you guys"). However I know other people have the mass-text capability. I propose that it's good etiquette to indicate when you're mass-texting through such contextual cues.

In the email context, you can tell when something has been sent to "undisclosed recipients." Is my phone too ancient? Do other phones manifest a mass-text? If other phones make mass-texting obvious, I wouldn't feel like someone was trying to pull one over on me.

Friendly Maneuvers

From Urban Dictionary:

"Facebook Limbo":

The electronic space between accepting and rejecting a Facebook friendship. In Facebook limbo, the user fails to accept or reject friend requests from would-be Facebook friends from a variety of sources (e.g., random annoying classmates, despised work associates, ex-girlfriends, etc), because the user is uncertain if he or she will have to interact with these individuals in the future.

Picture This

I have a Flickr stream, and I take a lot of photos of people, my friends in particular. It seems natural to tag their names in the photos - but I stopped doing that.

There are a few services out there working on facial recognition; one of them is Polar Rose (a Swedish company with $5.1 mill in funding). PR relies on users to tag the faces of people; the software can recognize that a face is depicted and, I believe, first relies on users to tag them. After some tagging, the software seems capable of matching a name to the face on its own.

I entered the name of a friend of mine; they didn't have him in the database, but they did refer me to an external website of a company he once worked for, where they speculated a photo of him might exist. They were right - there was a photo of him there. The majority of the photos in their database appeared to be celebrities. (Google Image Search, anyone?)

Anyway, I've decided to stop tagging photos on Flickr with my friends as a part of good netiquette. If people want their names attached to their faces where public search engines can tag them, I guess they should be able to choose it. (I need to think a little more about Facebook, but you can de-tag yourself there.) Could Polar Rose use Flickr title and tags as a shortcut? Will you be able to opt out of PR? Robot.txt for your face?

Despite my privacy apprehensions, I could imagine getting sucked into tagging like you get hooked to a game. What's that bar game with the half-naked people? Photo Hunt!

UPDATE:
I discovered this today from EPIC:

In September of 2007, Facebook introduced public search listings. Previously, only Facebook members could search Facebook for other users. Now, non-members will be able to search. Further, major search engines such as yahoo and Goggle will index the public search listings. The listing shows a limited amount of information such as name, profile picture, and Friends.

Mile High WI-FI

It was probably inevitable, but the internet is reaching new heights--literally. Soon you will be able to surf from 30,000 feet through a number of services that will start popping up on American Airlines, Virgin America, JetBlue, Alaska Airlines and a number of international carriers. For selfish reasons, I am interested in this development because it will raise a whole new set of web-based social dynamics and, of course, another chapter in the ever-evolving Book of Netiquette.

From the AP via the Denver Post:

"Technology providers and airlines are already making decisions. Some will block services like Internet phone calls altogether while others will set limits and install filters on content. And traffic-management tools that are frowned upon on terra firma could become commonplace in the air."

I'm trying to imagine what air travel would be like if everyone around me were chatting away on Skype while surfing their favorite websites and sending off emails to their friends back home. Would this really make a long flight more bearable? And what of censorship? We've heard the stories of Southwest Airlines asking people to de-plane for dressing too provocatively. So is it proper netiquette to tattle on your neighbor for streaming porn? Only time will tell.

One thing is for certain: I will be investing in a pair of noise canceling headphones (and keeping my eyes on my own screen).

...And I Feel Fine

This cover song is always a hit at parties. From BoingBoing:




Hat tip to Americablog.

Shutter

Having been out of the Bay Area for a few days, a certain unnamed friend of mind was sending me emails via his iPhone that included photos of his location. Knowing his opinions on over-twittering, I couldn't help but tease him a bit about the frequency at which I was receiving these photo updates. This got me wondering whether there was a service for that, a Twitter for photos (I wanted it to be called "Shutter").

After a minimal amount of googling I found a blog entry by this blogger Fred Wilson on how to enable your Twitter account to sync with Flickr ("Twittr?"). I haven't tried it out; my phone doesn't have a camera (hard to believe, I know) and it seems a bit silly in the regular camera context.

You can sign up for this experimental service here. It looks to me like you post a twitter that includes a link to a photo in your Flickr stream (here's Wilson's Twitter page to see an example). I wish it was more integrated - it would be cooler to have the photo appear in your Twitter stream.

Of course, you could always take a photo on your cell and email it to your friends instead.

Clever Buggers

Stumbled upon this little gem. Could it be the future of social networking?

The Tightrope

It's official. Stewart and Colbert are back on with new shows as of 01/07/08. But there remains a great deal of speculation about what, exactly, they will be able to do on air. Both Stewart and Colbert are WGA members, which creates a very thin line to toe.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

"The 'Daily Show' the (sic) opening segment, in which Stewart riffs on the day's headlines with a set of scripted jokes, is unlikely to pass muster with the WGA. Guest interviews, on the other hand, are thought to be fair game."

In a previous post, I suggested that the WGA strike isn't ending anytime soon. I still suspect that the studios and writers are a long way off due to the sticking point of internet residuals. If Stewart and Colbert do return to the scripted portions of their shows (i.e. "Daily Show" correspondent reports and the infamous Colbert segment, "The Word") I have faith that they will do their best to draw attention to the strike in an ironic and incisive way.

For selfish reasons, I'm glad they're coming back. In the coming election year, there is too much at stake for the mainstream news media to dominate the information pipeline. Whatever happens, Stewart and Colbert will shake things up a bit, which is always a good thing. But they'll have to do so while walking a tightrope.

The good news is, they've been here before. Consider Stewart's performance on CNN's now defunct shout-fest, Crossfire, as well as Colbert's masterful delivery at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

How Fast Are You?

Speedtest.net allows you to check your upload and download speeds for free, and they've got a pretty slick interface to boot. Here were my stats:



As a little experiment, I opened a Bittorrent (Phish at the IT Festival in Limestone, Maine - 08-02-03) and was dismayed but not surprised to watch my download speed bottom out at 3kbps. And that's with five seeders. At this rate, my 592 MB file will be transfered in about 8 days.

No thanks, Comcast. I'll just get my friends to burn me the CD. Maybe those stupid turtles in the commercials (a.k.a. "The Slowsky's") just need to open up their own P2P file sharing network.

On second thought,the turtles aren't stupid. I'm just not feeling very Comcastic at the moment.

Ghost Towns and Migrations

I like to have the Planet Earth DVD's playing somewhere in the background while I work. I realized that it is both more interesting and less distracting than CNN, and it makes for an excellent compliment to loud music. The Emmy-winning series, narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Alastair Fothergill, is just like every other nature documentary you've likely seen--except for the fact that the videography is so visually stunning that it creates an epic sense of adventure out of ordinary elements in nature.

The transitions from one scene to another are dictated simply by the migrations of a certain breed of animal, or the changing of the seasons, or how the battles for territory and breeding rights of a certain species create a ripple effect in some faraway land. Because the BBC invested in a full-on next generation kit that would still be the envy of any indie production company twenty years from now, the story of Planet Earth just tells itself. The producers are afforded the luxury of stepping back (like, ten miles back) and letting the drama unfold in high definition.

It just so happens that the DVD was playing as I decided to clean up my Myspace page, and I began thinking about the migrations that we make online.

The only reason why I even returned to Myspace is because I heard that they had revamped their layout to look more like Facebook. So I logged in and, sure enough, I was pleased to see the toned down look and feel of the new site. But then I noticed how deplorably out of date my page was. I mean, a lot has happened since I was a regular visitor. Was it really time to revamp my delightfully irreverent and lo-fi Myspace presence to come up with something a little more....mature?

I was stumped, so I posted a couple comments and caught up with some friends who still aren't on Facebook--and thought I would leave it at that. Then it began to occur to me that several of my friends managed to maintain multiple pages at a time, and perhaps it would be a good idea to at least take down the animated gif's.

Well, I still haven't.

Instead, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and logged into my Friendster account (Surprise #1: I still remembered the password). The site loaded very quickly (Surprise #2) and looked nearly identical to ...::drum roll please::... that's right, Facebook (Surprise #3).

But unlike Myspace, Friendster was an utter ghost town. All of my friends' profiles were exactly as they had left them many months and years ago. In fact, I was surprised by some of the faces that appeared in my "Top Friends" list. Had I actually selected these people at one time in my life? Or did the webmasters simply need to select somebody to put in there when they created the feature? All I remember is that sometime prior to 2005, I decided that I had waited for my page to load for the last time. And, apparently, I never looked back.

I can see how there may be something like a seasonal migration from one social networking site to another, depending on which cutting edge features they can develop. Now that Facebook promises not to invade my privacy, I think I'll stick around for a while and see what develops. As for Myspace and Friendster, the quarries have gone dry. If I go back at all, it will be like a scientific expedition to Antarctica. Just passing through...

* * *

Postscript: The Facebookification of other social networking sites raises another question: is it really wise for all of these heavily financed companies to look and feel the same? The story of nature dictates that too many species occupying the same space is typically a bad thing.

Update

Two interesting things to note from my Facebook newsfeed (redacted for privacy).

First, someone has left the Six Degrees group (mentioned here)...I don't believe that requires any further remark!

Secondly, a couple has formed (discussion here). I can't help but wonder: they must have had a conversation specifically about changing their status, right? Did they change it simultaneously? Is Henry going to get some wall comments about this? Should I congratulate him?

I can't answer many of my questions because Karen isn't my friend. I propose that when a new couple is formed, their friends should have a one-week window to access the profile of the new significant other. Similar to when you poke someone - s/he gets a grace period to view your profile.

 

::laugh?::

"That email made me LOL. Actually LOL, I mean."

Have you heard people say that? There's LOL'ing and then there's actually laughing out loud. Like any language, emoticons and internet slang have evolved into an increasingly subtle and complex lexicon.

Here's an example of the nuances of laughing during an IM conversation. This is the reality behind what I write anyway.


Haha! - Like a guffaw, often to indicate I'm just joking around; in reality, I'm smiling.
HAH - Begrudging, as when someone is teasing me; in reality, I'm smiling.
lol - A little funny. Again, I'm still only smiling.
bahahaha - Someone has said something quite funny that was, in fact, meant to be a joke. I'm grinning in real life.
LOL - Clever and funny; in RL a "hah!" comes out of my mouth.
::laughing:: - Very funny. Actually laughing out loud, repeatedly.


And everyone knows that :-) is not the same as :) or =) or =D or :-D !

::wink::

StumbleUpon... (I like it!)

As my wipers smeared greasy raindrops back and forth on my windshield, a friend in the passenger seat recommended that I use Coca-Cola to clean off the glass.

"Something about the acid and carbonation," she said. "Supposedly it can dissolve nails in a couple of days." Then she looked at me suspiciously. "You haven't been using your Stumble much, have you? The Coca-Cola remedy comes up a lot."

Busted.

I tried to explain that I had been using the StumbleUpon application to rate websites I've visited in the past week or so (you can download the app to your web browser toolbar here). But now I realize that I had been missing the whole point.

While search engines are designed to take you exactly where you want to go, StumbleUpon is designed to take you to a random webpage that has been rated highly by others. There's still an algorithm, but it is composed of humans voicing opinions rather than computers crunching numbers. After each visit, you get to say "I like it!" or "I don't like it!" and your vote will be tallied with the rest.

I still haven't found that page on Coca-Cola cleaning remedies, but I've stumbled upon some amazing content. (e.g. from Esplanade)


http://view.break.com/347555 - Watch more free videos

Whenever it stops raining here, I'll probably grab a can of soda from the fridge and start scrubbing. I'm sure I could probably do a search for the page with proper instructions on how to do it, but that would be missing the point once again. I prefer the anecdotal randomness to my Coca-Cola remedy, as opposed to a search-and-destroy mentality. Truth is, I don't really care if my wipers continue to be referred to as "smearers" by my friend and, besides, the blurry streaks tend to create a nice effect under the streetlights.

If it works, it works. In the meantime, I have to admit that I'm quite impressed with the mechanics of stumbling. It gives me hope that we can actually democratize the music and video industries by applying similar human algorithms relying on unbiased ratings. Maybe someday we'll even get around to elections.

Fundamentally Flawed

I have started noticing a group on Facebook called "6 Degrees of Separation - The Experiment"

No, it's not about Kevin Bacon. According to the group's creator, Steve Jackson, it is the "most ambitious facebook experiment ever." I don't think I could explain the purpose of the group quite like Steve himself, so I am reproducing the original description for full comic effect:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You are invited to take part in the most ambitious facebook experiment ever...

Using the Six Degrees of Separation theory, I want to see if it's possible to contact every single person on facebook. The theory states that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. (it could be argued that we're all only six degrees from Larry Page and Sergey Brin - "The Google Guys"... although I'm guessing it's a lot less than that! LOL).

To take part all you have to do is:

1 Join this group.
2 Click on "Invite People to Join" from the menu on the right.
3 Select all your friends (for the experiment to work, you need to do this).
4 Click on "Send invitation"

It's that simple.

All the best,
Steve
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Is this some kind of joke? This "experiment" will only work if every single Facebook user agrees to join a group in the "Just For Fun" category. But if one single Facebook user decides that it would actually be more fun to make the group fail simply by not joining, then the whole endeavor was a flop. All I can say is that registry of the "Facebook Users Boycotting 6 Degrees of Separation" will commence momentarily.

Think I'm bluffing? Well then....jest on, ye skeptics! The "6 Degrees Group" now has 2,692,713 members in several countries, and after 22 days of existence is currently the single largest Facebook group out there.

-Youareyou

WGA - Won't Go Away

The Writers Guild of America is, admittedly, a hodge-podge organization composed of both starving artists (a.k.a. "waiters") and millionaires who've already established themselves in the cogs of the Hollywood machine. And yet, the very existence of the strike serves to level the playing field for independent content producers, especially those who prefer an internet based distribution model.

Forget commercials. What we need is eyeballs.

Take, for example, the model of Clark and Michael.

People are starting to realize that it's fun to take your laptop to bed. Until Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are back on with fresh commentary (especially in the midst of this election madness) people will learn to be content with the inefficiencies of online content. Although it is sometimes frustrating to constantly see the words "buffering..." in the middle of your favorite programs, it's better than commercials....and way better than reruns.

It will be interesting to see what happens to late night telly in 2008. Until then, all ye content producers, it's time to get busy! My prediction: this WGA business won't go away any time soon.

-Youareyou

Political Commentary

No doubt you've seen the MySpace page of a friend who has been the victim of comment-chaining by one person. I do my best to interrupt these chains. When one person comments continuously on someone's page, it looks bad. It looks like 1) s/he has no other friends who care, 2) s/he has been very remiss in commenting for other people, or 3) s/he is being stalked.

Proper netiquette requires that, after you make a comment on someone's page, wait for two or three other people to comment before you add another yourself.

Then there's the sensitive issue of comment removal. The most politically correct way to remove a friend's comment from your page is to give him/her apologetic notice, either just before or very soon after you remove it.

This leads me to a final issue: don't leave snarky comments suggesting that your friend is a player. These will probably be removed, apologetically, because "you're blowing up my game."

UPDATE: This blog comment affirms my rule on player comments.

- Sansserif

"Dude, quit Twittering my Facebook!"

A friend of mine (who shall remain nameless) is a bit of a Twitterhead. While this term may not yet sound familiar, I can guarantee that it will soon enter the lexicon of many frustrated Facebook users, for it is a clear violation of Rule #1 of Netiquette Decorum: Thou Shalt Not Spam.

Twitter describes itself as "a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" Random thoughts are the norm on Twitter, as registered users jot down the little things throughout their day that would otherwise go unremembered. Good enough.

The problem is that some genius created a Facebook application that syndicates the RSS feed automatically to all of the offending Twitterhead's friends.

Facebook provides a similar function with its "status updates," which allow users to post short messages to their friends. These tend to be along the lines of "Frank is partying in SF tonight!" or "Jenn is pretending to be busy at work," etc. These messages are typically somewhat interesting, humorous, and relevant (particularly if you are actually friends with the person who is posting). And--most importantly--these messages usually have a shelf life of at least one day, sometimes more.

But what happens when these Twittering RSS feeds go awry? Say, for instance, that I don't want an update every 45 minutes to learn more about my friend's thoughts about his cat, or approximate blood level of caffeine, or length of facial stubble on Monday as opposed to Tuesday. Or, suppose I don't want to spend time deciphering the meaning of the following entry: "XXXXX is twittering: Hello 1:31 am. You look a bit worn around the edges. have you shaved lately? here, let me make you some overpowered coffee."

Yesterday alone, there were 14 entries. The day before, 22. And the worst part is that I, as a Facebook user, cannot opt out of this Twittering madness. You either have to opt out of status updates altogether, or just suck it up and deal.

But I ask you this: what if everyone started synching their Twitter and Facebook accounts? It would be utter chaos--that's what. And the post-modern gentleman never adopts manners that cannot be universalized.

My wikipedia entry on Twitterheads will be forthcoming. In the meantime, I will just have to fight the urge to say, "Dude, quit Twittering my Facebook!"

-Youareyou

Leaving the Building

You've seen it on your Facebook news feed:

"Robin has left the group 'I Love My Pet.'"
"Ryan has removed 'the Rolling Stones' from his music."
And most potent: the broken heart with the line "Jason is now single."

And so it is that the casual adding and dropping of groups, interests, and activities becomes a statement of great and frequently unwarranted significance. You find yourself wondering, What happened to Robin's pet? The change in relationship status is particularly tricky and poses more fundamental questions: Is it meant to be a statement, announcing to everyone that you're back on the market?

I had an uncomfortable IM conversation with a friend who apparently noticed when my relationship status went from "It's Complicated" to "Single." He tiptoed around the issues for a bit: "I'm sorry if this is a privacy invasion...It's none of my business...I was just wondering..." When I realized where he was headed, I admitted it was a statement of sorts.
"I used 'It's Complicated' to avoid unwanted attention," I told him. "Then I met this guy I'm interested in and I wanted to advertise my availability."

But I had wanted it to be more subtle! After I made the status change I "hid" that news because I wanted him to check on my profile and see the change. I learned my lesson: when you "hide" your changes, it only becomes invisible on your own profile. Your news is still broadcast publicly.

Facebook allows you to set the type of news you broadcast. I propose something more nuanced: we should be allowed to explain ourselves.

Robin still loves her pet; she just wanted to clean up her group list.

- Sansserif

Status