Chris Charabaruk

What's missing from the social web?

Chris Charabaruk — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:03:30 -0700

What's missing from the social web? The ability to just hang out and throw back a few. Really. The missing element from the new, social media driven internet is quite ironically the ability to socialize with people directly, rather than mediated through various services online. And why is this important? Because no matter how much we can expand our social lives online, what matters most is our social lives offline.

You see, we all have a need to have friends, people we can hang out with for no reason at all. The story of social networking services has been "we can let you find new friends and have lots of fun with them". But how often is it that said fun gets translated from the internet into real life? After all, a few games on Facebook does not match throwing a few darts at the pub. Or battling it out in paintball. Meeting someone on FriendFeed is not the same as an encounter with an attractive stranger at the local nightclub. What we get online are digital analogues (no joke intended) to the activities we look forward to online, but they aren't really replacements for those activities, no matter how much they seem to be.

I'd love to get to simply hang out with friends and meet strangers in the real world. But I don't get that online. Sure, I get to hang out with people. I get to meet real people. But I never get the same satisfaction, the same thrill, as doing so off of the net.

If you find that for all the interaction and social behaviour you enjoy online, there's still something missing, perhaps you should get off the computer for a while, head out to the bar, and enjoy some real, face-to-face socialization.

First Scientology, now Ahmadinejad

Chris Charabaruk — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:04:29 -0700

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Anonymous strikes again! Once again, some anon has created a warning video directed at an enemy of Anonymous and stuck it up on YouTube. This time, the enemy is not Scientology but rather Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government is currently cracking down on pro-democracy protests and killing people who only want freedom and fair elections.

Question is, is this for the lulz, or does Anonymous actually care about democracy in Iran?

MG Siegler, you owe the hungry an apology

Chris Charabaruk — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:43:29 -0700

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I’m pissed off right now. MG Siegler, currently a writer over at well-known Web2.0 news site TechCrunch, has decided to use people who rely on food assistance as ammunition for a poorly researched and certainly misguided attack on Microsoft. And as someone who has had to rely on the services of food banks in the past just to have enough to eat, I am personally insulted by the gall and brazenness of MG’s attack.

Now, I don’t like that Microsoft’s campaign to donate to Feeding America for each IE8 download is capped at only $1,000,000. That’s pretty lame, especially for a company that has donated almost half a billion dollars in 2008 alone. But to see the misinformation being passed off by MG over at TechCrunch, like the laughable claim that the donation per download is supposed to cover 8 meals (actually, Feeding America reports each $1 donated gets them 10lbs of food for the hungry), what’s really happening in this article are that the people who will eventually receive the food are being used just to gain page hits and knock a few blows at Microsoft.

I strongly believe that MG Siegler owes an apology to the beneficiaries of Feeding America, and in fact, to every person who relies or has relied on charitable support just to keep from starving in the developed world. This was an absurdly low blow that insults the people who need this help every bit as much as it insults Microsoft.

MG, I’m waiting for that apology.

Just when I thought Blip.fm could solve my music woes, it too starts to hate non-Americans

Chris Charabaruk — Fri, 15 May 2009 09:04:39 -0700

Image via CrunchBase

I was recently introduced to Blip.fm, a service TechCrunch proclaimed a "Twitter for music" – find songs you want to hear, and play them with a short message. After Last.fm decided to hate on anyone not in the US, UK, or Germany, I thought that Blip.fm would be a better way to find new music to enjoy. But nope!

Blip.fm just recently announced that they're going to be changing some things due to the "perfect storm" through which the company is navigating. And these changes aren't very good at all for anyone who doesn't live in the USA. To begin, they're going to be cutting back on providing URLs to music they themselves are getting from all over the internet, and will be using imeem to provide a lot of the music now.

Of course, the imeem decision means that most international users will only get 30 seconds of a song, not the entire song. So, if you're not in the USA, expect Blip.fm to become practically useless for you. They state that they'll add an option to skip the 30 second clips, but that won't leave international users with much music at all.

While the guys behind Blip.fm won't say it, it's pretty clear where the real blame for all this trouble lies: With the music industry. It's like those idiots at the RIAA and their international counterparts want people to download music instead. These fools and their spiteful behaviour are screwing over decent online services and making it impossible for people to legally and easily access music they can get easily enough with a stereo and a tape deck.

Unfortunately, though, the net result is that those good online services have to start hating on anyone who doesn't live in the USA. And that totally sucks.

Twitter and Telus, friends again?

Chris Charabaruk — Thu, 07 May 2009 04:22:38 -0700

Image via CrunchBase

Image via Wikipedia

So, I just found out that my mobile service provider, Telus, is now on Twitter! Not only that, but they're asking Telus users on Twitter if they want full SMS support again, like Bell customers have. The only problem is that if you want to say yes, you need to be followed by Telus. Why? Because they want responses via direct message.

You know, it'd be great to get this back. On the other hand, what's the cost going to be? When Twitter returned to Bell, there was a lot of fuss about Bell deciding to charge users 15¢ per incoming tweet. Bell backpedalled, and let it all go for free. Rogers, now that it is working to send tweets to clients, is doing it gratis from the get-go, but brought in the tweet charge that Bell and Telus have for regular users without a text plan.

I certainly hope that Telus does this the right way, too, and offers them free. It'd be nice to get direct messages and replies straight to my phone, for when I'm on the move. It might mean I'll keep using Twitter directly, instead of moving over completely to FriendFeed and just use Twitter for broadcasting anything I post there (or on other services).

If you're a Telus user, start following @telus and pester them to follow you back. Then you can DM them and let them know you want to get Twitter back on your phone.

I'm not dead, just really busy

Chris Charabaruk — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:26:06 -0700

I've not abandoned coldacid.net either, despite how things appear. There will be new content coming over the next week or so. I just need to clear out a lot of what I'm working on first. Sorry for any inconvenience!

Will Oracle embrace or extinguish MySQL?

Chris Charabaruk — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:47:23 -0700

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By now you've certainly heard the news about Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems. But what does this mean for MySQL, which Sun has owned since 2008?

Let's look at some simple facts. Oracle is first and foremost a database company. A database which is sold and maintained by the company in a way that probably brings back memories of IBM in the sixties and seventies, for programmers who have been around that long. Oracle is not who you think of when you think about open source software (although they do own a few companies that produce some, namely the groups behind InnoDB and Berkeley DB).

No matter how you look at it, MySQL is a direct, and powerful, competitor to Oracle's flagship product, at least in terms of mindshare. As such, Oracle might want to strangle it. That'd be a difficult move, however; since MySQL is open source, it could be forked quite easily, with development continued under a different name. Or, Oracle could support it, developing improvements and turning them to the community. As the owners of the top two storage engines underneath MySQL, this would be an excellent opportunity for developers and users of the open-source database.

Honestly, though, I don't see much good for MySQL coming out of this. Oracle is more interested in producing big blocks of hardware and software with which to force their clients to become ever more reliant on Oracle's service in order to operate. Supporting MySQL wouldn't be in their best interests, since a client could turn to someone else for service, or developing a needed feature, etc. And that's why I predict that Oracle will probably try to kill it off.

Good luck, Ellison. MySQL project founder Michael Widenius has already mentioned on his blog that MySQL developers at Sun are planning to jump ship, that at least one has already contacted him to work as part of Widenius' Monty Program Ab venture. Widenius takes a more optimistic view to the purchase than I do, but it's evident that he's preparing for the worst.

Where do you stand on this? Is this the best thing that's happened to MySQL or the worst? What do you think Oracle will do to the popular open source product?

Twitter's celebrity storm: Which social network is next?

Chris Charabaruk — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:07:18 -0700

Image via CrunchBase

If you're involved in social networking and you've not heard about the Ashton Kutcher/CNN showdown, you should probably check yourself for a pulse. In a nutshell, Kutcher has promised to prank Ted Turner if his Twitter account, @aplusk, makes it to 1 million followers before @cnnbrk (which, prior to this week, wasn't even owned by CNN). Even with the stuff Kutcher is promising if he wins, this is still rank stupidity.

But it's not the only big celebrity news hitting Twitter. It turns out that afternoon TV show diva Oprah is now getting into the whole Twitter mess, with the @oprah account (no less). Her account is there, and scuttlebutt (well, a @scobleizer tweet) has it that she'll be sending her first tweet tomorrow on her show.

This brings up the question: With Twitter becoming so mainstream now, what with the storm of celebrity taking place, what will be the next social networking coup be for them? Will they invade FriendFeed? Start their own networks? Bring Friendster back from obscurity?

In any case, they're doing their jobs well. As annoying as these attention freaks are, they are helping bring new technologies mainstream through their use and promotion of them. And in the end, this betters us all! As distasteful as I find all this, in the end it really is for the best.

Just so long as they keep out of my hair.

Do any of us really know what we're doing?

Chris Charabaruk — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:57:08 -0700

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Who here actually has a real clue about what they're doing in social media? I'm not talking about that ado from months ago about people claiming to be social media experts when they were no such thing. I'm talking about us folk who are starting social media ventures, the people who fund us, etc. Who knows where this crazy ride is leading us?

To be perfectly honest, I don't know what I'm doing with Taskerrific (as a business). I've never run a business before. I'm learning new stuff, and that's both fun and informative. But that's just about setting up a business, not so much about actually running it. Figuring out how much money will come in and whether or not things will be profitable or if it's a financial black hole.

Looking at a lot of the Web 2.0, social media services out there, I sometimes think if the people behind them think that business and web hosting and all else run on pixie dust. The really infuriating ones are those that seem to live on VC handout after handout, without any concept whatsoever about actually making money and surviving. Perhaps its a failure of my generation, perhaps we're more prone to believing that we can all live happily on the shoulders of rich market players.

Guess what, guys? That's such incredible bullshit. I can't believe it myself, and the thought that others believe it is likewise hard to swallow. For one things, most venture capitalists aren't in this to let everyone and their dog run their own business for free. They're here to make money, and they believe it's there. So where is it? How do you plan to actually make it?

With Taskerrific, I have to start making money, right away. The program I'm currently in to help me get things started has certain income quotas which must be met, and within six months of starting (and they're counting from the start of March). Besides advertising (which we all know is a crap way of making money on these kinds of services) I'm not seeing any way to hit my first target, at least. Nor am I seeing any possible investment which would allow me to successfully remove Taskerrific from the program. So I'm in a tighter spot than a lot of other startup founders (quite a few of which seem to have a decent amount of money themselves to start with).

Perhaps if more startups approached things from the same position I'm in, more thought would be put to actually building a business with income, rather than business-like parasites on the back end of investors. Perhaps then social media wouldn't appear to be such an overly optimistic bubble industry.

So, my question to the people running startups, advising startups, funding startups: Are you guys sure you know what you're doing? Are you sure the people you're working with know what they're doing? Are things going to work out well, or are we all going to hell in a handbasket, slowly?

The numbers game and asocial media

Chris Charabaruk — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:03:04 -0700

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

When is social media no longer social? When you're playing it for the numbers. It seems the great promises of social media have fallen by the wayside, as users play a game of one-upmanship with each other, trying to have the most followers, tweets, comments, what-have-you. You know what? That's not social media. That's asocial media.

Social networking and media began as a great idea. Connect to friends and family, and anyone of similar interest over the internet! Build relationships, ideas, and projects with people you might never have met. And be heard by even more people. Unfortunately, the promises of the social web introduced its own metrics and statistics. And once these become visible to users, natural human greed took over. Once, where people looked to connect with others, they now only care about the numbers. It's become quantity, not quality. And the social aspects of all these services are dying.

These days, social media isn't about being social at all. Companies look to social media as a way to make more sales, not as a way of connecting to customers. Bloggers and other mindshare leaders use it to measure their value, how many ears they hold on to. (Well, not all of them do that, but…) No matter how you look at it, it has become just one more way to turn a quick buck. And people are recognizing this.

I'm not immune to this either, although I wish I were. I can't help but stare at my Twitter statistics on various services which provide them. I peek at how my posts on FriendFeed are liked or commented upon. I panic every time I hear of some problem with FeedBurner, concerned with how it might report how many people follow this site's RSS feed. I'm ashamed about that, because I'm on these services to connect with people, not to measure up against the big fish.

Is it possible to turn back from this asocial media, and return to the promises of proper social media? Perhaps. For all the asocial changes in the field, there are still many, myself included, who are simply looking to share ourselves. While it'll be impossible to rid ourselves of the numbers game, so long as we concentrate on those values which can't be measured with statistics and metrics, but rather with feelings and ideas, social media can still deliver on its promises.

As long as we concentrate on quality, not quantity, social media will not die. It will not be totally replaced by asocial media. And we'll be able to keep on truly connecting with one another.

Chris Charabaruk

What's missing from the social web?

First Scientology, now Ahmadinejad

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MG Siegler, you owe the hungry an apology

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Just when I thought Blip.fm could solve my music woes, it too starts to hate non-Americans

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