TulsaMJ's Tech Blog

Spotify vs. Rhapsody

2011-09-26T12:28:00.000-05:00

I've been listening to Spotify a lot lately - particularly since they got the whole "social with Facebook" thing happening. It's pretty snazzy to have my tracks automatically coming up on Facebook, and of course being able to instantly play just about any song in creation on my computer whenever I want is pretty awesome. But here's the thing... my wife and I have been sharing a Rhapsody account for several years now. Rhapsody also allows me to play any song in the world on the cheap... plus, Rhapsody also allows me to transfer those songs to our non-Internet-connected portable music players. So I haven't seen a reason to switch to paying Spotify, although frankly Rhapsody has a pretty bad track record as far as their PC music playing software is concerned (frankly, it sucks, especially if you have a lower-powered computer to begin with).

So here's the thing. Today Spotify announced something that they apparently see as a "Great news, this is so cool!" moment, but which I see as an "Oh, I didn't realize that was how it works" moment. Here's the blog post:

http://www.spotify.com/us/blog/archives/2011/09/26/good-news-for-spotify-open-users/

Other Spotify users: did you know that the free all-you-can-eat buffet is only a six-month thing? I didn't realize that. After that time you can still listen to songs for free, but not as many as before. (Rhapsody used to have a similar listen-to-so-many-per-month-for-free policy, but recently I tried to listen to some tracks that way and I got 30-second previews, so that may not be the way it is any more.)

On top of all this, the new social features on Facebook will complicate our Rhapsody situation. Reportedly, soon Rhapsody will have some kind of integration with Facebook that resembles what Spotify has now. The problem is that since my wife and I share an account, if I link it with my Facebook, tracks will get scrobbled to Facebook if she listens to them even if I'm not around. I don't want that.

I also use Last.fm (say hi if you do too: http://www.last.fm/user/TulsaMJ), and Spotify also scrobbles there. Rhapsody does not scrobble to Last.fm natively like Spotify does, although I've found a way to make that happen (usually). My workaround works by scrobbling tracks from the Rhapsody RSS feed, so I have to be on a computer or at least have a computer running in order for it to work. And I still want to scrobble everything to Last.fm - my media player that I use with my own MP3s scrobbles there, and actually, since Spotify doesn't seem to scrobble tracks that aren't on Spotify to Facebook at all (although it does scrobble them to Last.fm) - quite possibly when Last.fm gets their Facebook Open Social application working, I'll turn off the scrobbling in Spotify and just use Last.fm for all of it. It sure would be nice if Rhapsody supported native Last.fm scrobbling like Spotify does!

So let me get to the point. For ten bucks a month, I could get my own separate Rhapsody account going. It won't scrobble natively to Last.fm, so if I play songs on a cell phone they won't scrobble, but it should scrobble to Facebook once they've got that running (should be pretty quick... they're one of the "media partners" Facebook keeps trumpeting about). That would allow me to listen to music on portable devices and on my computer, and it would also eliminate the problem of getting my wife's plays scrobbled to my Last.fm and my Facebook. This would also allow me to downgrade my wife's account, which now supports three portable devices, to the cheaper one-device version:

http://www.rhapsody.com/discover/pricing.html

OR, for ten bucks a month, I can subscribe to Spotify. I can listen on portable devices, scrobble to Facebook and natively to Last.fm, but I don't have the option of using tracks on my non-connected portable device. The added bonus is that the PC client for Spotify works better than the comparable Rhapsody application:

http://www.spotify.com/us/get-spotify/overview/

The services' music offerings are pretty comparable - I haven't run into music on one that I couldn't find on the other, although I know Rhapsody does have exclusive content (interviews and stuff) from time to time and I believe Spotify has their own exclusives of the same nature. I see them as a kind of Coke and Pepsi comparison: they're both dark colas that cost about the same and will quench your thirst, and it's a matter of which one you like better. For me, if Rhapsody had native Last.fm support, it would be the obvious choice; if Spotify had support of downloading music to non-connected devices, it would be the obvious choice. An added benefit of Rhapsody is that if you are on a computer that doesn't have their client software installed, you can still log in and play tracks using their Web interface - try THAT with Spotify!

What do you think? I'm interested in any opinions, differences you notice in the $9.99 plans of the two, advice or comments. If you'd like to visit me on Spotify, here's my public profile:

http://open.spotify.com/user/tulsamj

Facebook's Timeline, Online Privacy, and TMI

2011-09-23T18:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday around noon, my mind was officially being blown. I was watching the keynote presentation at Facebook's f8 Developer Conference, during which Mark Zuckerberg showed this to the world for the first time:

What you see in that video is a rather sentimental look at Facebook's new version of the Profile, which they are calling "Timeline." Timeline will organize all of your past Facebook activity chronologically, selecting the "most important" things via an algorithm (or via your own later editing) so that your profile is (more or less) a look at your entire online life. In fact, you can add things that aren't already present on Facebook, so your offline life (even pre-Internet) can be a part of your Timeline. I was amazed, and a little bit shocked! This is the first time I can remember an update to Facebook that strikes me as a win for the users, as opposed to a ham-handed attempt to bring in more ad revenue for Facebook. This is a way for users to present themselves online so that people who find them actually can know what's important to them. A way to get to know your friends better, or catch up with life events of old friends you'd lost contact with. A truly comprehensive online presence.

To make Timeline even more personal, Facebook also announced some enhancements to the "social graph" which will make sharing content even more comprehensive, personal, and immediate. Last night I was able to get Spotify to start "scrobbling" tracks to Facebook. "Scrobbling" is a concept that originated (if I understand it correctly) with social music site last.fm. What it means in concept is that every track you listen to is automatically recorded somewhere. In practice that doesn't actually happen (what if you hear it on the radio? A speaker at the grocery store? Using a portable player with no Internet connection? Using software that does not support scrobbling?) but with a little bit of work, long ago I managed to get most of the music I listen to during my work day to scrobble to last.fm. Getting Spotify to work with Facebook, by contrast, was actually very easy; I had already linked them back when I got my Spotify account, and it just started working... suddenly I got a comment on a track I was listening to right on Facebook, without me even actively mentioning it. According to Facebook, although I haven't had occasion to try this yet, you're supposed to actually be able to listen to the same song a friend is listening to, as they listen to it, synched up with their player. So they hear the same part of the song I hear. Now that's a social music experience!

The same thing is supposed to be coming to more music services, and also to video-on-demand services Netflix and hulu (among others). Over time, all of this information will be aggregated to your Timeline, so people will be able to find out, for example, which movies you watched on Netflix in September of 2011, or which album or artist you listened to the most in October. It will also function as a sort of social recommendation service, automatically endorsing the things you enjoy for all of your friends, who presumably have similar tastes to yours.

This all will have a few effects that people in general may not have thought of. For one thing, your Timeline/Social Graph will be an absolute bonanza for Facebook's advertisers. Is there a new Johnny Depp movie coming out? The people who've watched all of Depp's recent movies will be easily targetable by Facebook, because it will be chronicled in their Timelines. What about when an artist - let's go with someone a bit obscure, not a Lady Gaga or Eminiem - with a new CD coming out. The artist is relatively unknown, so the record label may not have the money to run a bunch of blanket advertising, but the people who have listened to that artist will be easily findable and targetable via Facebook, likely for much cheaper than it would be otherwise. And with the low barrier to listening to those tracks via Facebook + Spotify, those people who see the ads and then listen to the new tracks will automatically generate advertising for the music too, and for free! This is a marketer's dream coming true! Did you think Facebook was "free"? It's not. You're paying for it by giving it more and more information about yourself, every time you log in or do anything.

Another effect, when Timelines become available for everyone, is that everything you've ever done on Facebook will potentially be available to view, handily indexed in reverse-chronological order. This is going to be great if you've been judicious in what you've posted online, but if you have a habit of posting drunken beer-bash photos of yourself, you're going to want to get in there with the privacy and editing tools and make sure people see only what you want to see.

But what about privacy? you may ask. Well, I reply, what about it? What if things come up on your time line that you don't want people to see, or that you don't want to remember yourself? I'll quote a friend of mine on this topic: "What I didn't want to remember, I didn't post as a status update." If you don't want people to know it, was it really a good idea to put it on the Internet? Social networking has, for some people, created an atmosphere where oversharing is OK. "TMI" is what my friends and I call this: "Too Much Information." And this TMI factor gets worse when you figure in those "scrobbling" applications.

What if I listen to something on Spotify that I don't want to broadcast to my friends? What if I watch a movie that I don't want everyone to know about? And what if I forget to turn off the social sharing aspects of those applications before I do my watching or listening? Or, what if my daughter watches ten episodes of Hello Kitty on Netflix and I don't want that on my Facebook? Currently I don't see any tools for "un-scrobbling" my Spotify tracks - not that I intend to listen to or watch anything I wouldn't want to share, but occasionally I've been known to clear a track from my last.fm history if I didn't want it in my "library," and it would be nice to see those kinds of tools here. As it is currently, once you enable those social apps, the firehose is open... and once it's on the Internet, you can't really ever take it back. You can't un-shoot a gun or un-throw a rock, and even if you retrieve the bullet or the rock, if it hit someone on the way, you can't take that back.

That concern aside, I think people are going to dig this stuff. Personally, I already share all kinds of information online anyway: I scrobble my track plays on last.fm here, record what movies I watch here, record what books I read here and here, and keep a list of all those links here. You probably keep online records of some of the things you already do somewhere too; you may have online records of your cooking or your diet, your running or your vacationing, your family or your friends. All Facebook is really doing here is centralizing all of that information in one place. It's a masterstroke of genius, and I think it's going to be successful.

But again... what about privacy? What about the privacy of someone who doesn't want everyone in the world to know everything they do, so they never get on Facebook, or maybe never even use a computer? Well, I've got news for you: in 2011, "privacy" is just short of a myth anyway. If you use a checking account, debit card, or credit card, there are records somewhere of every time and place that you used them to pay for something. If you bought a house or a car, if you went to college or got a driver's license, there are records somewhere of all of it, handily indexed (if you live in the United States) by your Social Security Number. There are security cameras in most public places, and there are satellites with who-knows-what resolution of surveillance up in the sky, maybe looking at you and maybe looking at me. If you carry a cell phone, some computer somewhere knows exactly where you are, probably to within a few feet. The cell phone company potentially has a record of every phone call you make and every text message you send. Your email provider probably has logs of every email you send; on top of that, there are records of that email on the recipients' mail servers, and on every piece of equipment on the Internet that the message traveled through on the way from server to server. Your Web browser has, and probably your Internet provider also has, a record that you've visited my blog today and read this post. There are millions of datapoints of information about you out there right now, and you have control over very few of them. In actuality, though, just making your way through life, even in pre-computer days, you left a trail of information behind. Ask anyone who enjoys researching ancestry about the kinds of records that still exist for almost anyone... birth and death certificates, tombstones and land ownership records, journals and diaries and photographs and newspaper announcements. It's just that nowadays, that information is accessible and able to be cross-referenced in mind-boggling ways. If you'd like to see an imaginary but plausible account of how that data might be able to be used to aggressively control people, take a look at this fictional novel... or if you'd like a real-world example, pull down a copy of your own credit report and see how much it knows about you.

So privacy, as many people see it, is an imaginary thing. Somebody's always watching you; get used to it. But that doesn't mean you should do just any old thing online. Don't post things publicly that will allow someone who would like to hurt you, to easily find you (although your address is probably in the telephone book anyway). Don't broadcast information that will make it easy for someone to commit identity theft on you (although with information that most everybody has on their profiles, someone could probably call your place of business and convince a coworker that they are related to you). It's the same common sense you use when you're in an unfamiliar place: keep your eyes open, think about what's going on around you, pay attention if anything looks suspicious, and don't walk into trouble.

BUT: do enjoy yourself while you're there. Use social networking to enhance your life. But just be aware that sometimes when you're using a social network, that social network is also using you.

Google Plus

2011-09-16T17:04:00.001-05:00

My first post on Google+ was made on July 1 at 9:06am. My boss had scored an account over the weekend, and was wondering if I was using it too. I actually hadn't heard of it until he told me; I had been a little bit out of the tech news loop because of a big project at work, but when I heard, certainly I was interested! He had "shared" something with me - at the time this was the only way to get an account - and so I was in. The post was a link, shared only with him, to this Mashable article about the then-upcoming Gmail update.

I was immediately hooked! This was like Facebook, minus all of the things about Facebook that constantly annoyed me! This was awesome! This was... this was... well, sort of empty. It was like arriving at a party at the newest, coolest venue in town, but nobody had arrived yet. The primary attraction of Facebook is that everybody is there. All your friends. Everyone you've ever met, it seems, is on Facebook. The only people on Google+ at the time were you and the person who shared something with you, and the other guy who you shared something with and talked into trying it out. All the coolness, but none of the people.

On those counts, things haven't changed too much 2½ months later. It's a little easier to get an invitation (in fact, if you need one, feel free to use one of mine), but so far the general public hasn't particularly seen a reason to jump ship on Facebook, or even bother to try out another social networking service. And heck, after Google Wave in 2009 and Google Buzz in 2010, who could blame anyone for not jumping on a Google social networking site right away? I think Google is getting it right this time, though. The interface is Facebook-like enough that it's not too hard to understand what's happening, but it's different enough in good ways that the experience is much nicer. I have several friends who actually have jumped ship on Facebook for G+ (although I doubt most people will completely abandon Facebook any time soon... too much history there). I'm not deleting my Facebook account, but I'd love to go all-Google+. Problem is that there are a few things that are making that difficult at the moment... and there are a few more things that, should they happen, would make a move to G+ almost a no-brainer for me. Keep in mind that G+ is really still officially "in wide beta-testing" which means that the public has access, but it's not to be considered a complete product yet. It's entirely possible that some of the things I'm going to mention are in the works. I think it's probable that a few of them are on the drawing board. Let's see how prescient I am!

I'm so impatient about the lack of an API for programmers. At this writing Google has released a very minimal, first-iteration API limited to only reading public profile information and public posts. I can't wait for the release of something more substantial; I use TweetDeck for posting to Facebook and Twitter, and I would love to be able to use it (or Hootsuite, or whatever) to post to all three. Right now it seems the only way to post to G+ is using the Web interface or one of the mobile apps. I have a mobile phone, but it's a Java-only "messaging" phone, a free feature phone from several years ago; it doesn't run Android or iOS.

That leads me to another thing I'd like to see: better SMS support. I have G+ set up to forward status updates from several of my friends to me vis text message, but I can't respond to those messages via text, and I can't send posts of my own via text. I text posts into Twitter and Facebook several times a day most days; I'd love to be able to do the same with Google Plus. Even just sending new posts that way to a default bunch of circles that I specify ahead of time would be useful. I'll be getting an Android phone when my contract runs out on this phone, and at that point I'll install the G+ app, but even then I could see SMS as an easier way of firing off a quick post than starting up an app. And with SMS posting, I can actually cross-post to several services very easily, just by sending to multiple recipients.

I'd like to see RSS feeds made available for posts. You can already use third-party hacks like this one to pull down a feed of your public posts (or roll your own using the API that was just released), but it would be nice to be able to create "private" feeds based on your circles (something you can do with calendars in Google Calendar). I'm using the hack I linked to above to cross-post my public G+ posts to Facebook by running the feed through Feedburner and Twitterfeed. It would be SO awesome, instead, to just share a post with a "Facebook" circle or a "Twitter" circle and immediately shoot the post out via a custom RSS feed!

Part of the talk when G+ was first launched was about incorporating it with other Google properties... Picasa was of course a launch-day incorporation, but what about other properties? Here are my two favorite no-brainer Google properties to incorporate into Google Plus:

Google Reader. G+'s "Sparks" functionality mirrors some of the functionality of Reader; how difficult would it be for G+ to represent your Reader feeds or lists as Sparks? Or, coming from the other direction, wouldn't it be cool for Reader users to be able to easily do a one-click share to G+?

Blogger. Many G+ users are very nearly using G+ as a blogging platform anyway; why not optionally integrate Blogger blogs into Plus so that there's none of this post-the-blog-entry-then-share-it-on-plus nonsense. Just magically allow the blog post to show up on Plus when it is posted to Blogger. An added bonus: combine blog comments and G+ comments so that if I post a comment on a Blogger/G+ entry in Blogger, the comment also shows up in G+, and vice versa. I would LOVE to automatically have more comments on my blogs because comments flowed in from Plus users! Another bonus integration: automatically (but optionally) convert a blog to a Spark, so when you see a blog post from someone you like (say, a friend of yours reshared it) you could follow that blog without having to circle the blogger.

There's a lot of potential in Google Plus! I hope to see some of this stuff happen in the near term. If Google suddenly today rolled out all of the things I've mentioned in this post, for me it would be like knocking the walls out and letting the sunshine in. I really would love to be able to use Plus as my social networking hub and flow information out from there. With these kinds of adjustments, it could happen.

Netflix

2011-08-09T23:05:00.000-05:00

So, I finally broke down and signed up for the free trial of Netflix. The main idea is to stream through our Wii; I signed up for the 1-DVD-at-a-time service too, but I'll likely cancel that and just go with the streaming. The streaming is much more economical... watch as many movies and TV shows as you have time for on Instant Streaming, vs. watch as many single DVDs as you can receive in the mail and send back, one at a time, for the same monthly price? No contest! There are, however, a couple of things about Netflix Streaming that annoy me a bit, and I wanted to blog about those things... maybe someone from Netflix will read this blog entry and take it to heart. (Fat chance, but a guy can dream, can't he?)

I'd like to see separate Instant queue profiles made available. Obviously, the shows in my queue (Bond movies, Star Trek, The X-Files, etc.) are going to be incompatible with the shows my 3-year-old daughter is going to want to watch (Care bears, Caillou, Strawberry Shortcake, Hello Kitty, Wonder Pets). Recommendations are going to be different, too. It would be nice to be able to select an Instant Queue to view, and maybe even select who's watching. It would be smart marketing, too.
I'd like better parental controls. Right now all you can do is limit the programs that can be viewed based on the MPAA rating... only allow shows rated PG or less, for example. This is a joke! For one thing, "NR" (Not Rated) movies fall in the area on the other side of "R" from "G", which means that the Mario Brothers Super Show cartoon from the 1990s, which my two kids like, is prohibited if I restrict my account to PG-13 or less. And if I turn on parental controls, I can't watch documentaries or more grown-up movies myself. "Control" indeed!
What's with the Android app only being available for like two-and-a-half phones? Make it available to all phones, but just "support" it on your shorter list. If people want to try it on their non-supported phone, why stop them? Worst case, they call support and you tell them their phone is not supported... and then you not which not-supported phones keep getting called in, and you add them to your support matrix as soon as you can!
What's with not being able to exit Netflix and go back to the Wii menus? Apparently you just have to turn the Wii off. User Interface FAIL.
Scrolling to a certain point within a program, or fast-forwarding/rewinding, is positively painful. You're telling me that after I select a new spot, you're going to re-download the entire show? Even YouTube does better than that! Software FAIL.

In general, we LOVE the Netflix service. I have a poky Internet connection (on purpose, to save money) so it's fairly easy to push it over the edge and cause the streaming to re-buffer, but that's not the fault of Netflix; I'm sure with a faster connection I'd get faster buffering. With a few tweaks, Netflix could be not only a killer service, but a killer application as well. Hoping that day comes soon!

Music in the Cloud

2011-03-31T13:00:00.000-05:00

photo © 2010 photosteve101 | more info (via: Wylio)I've been looking for a feasible way to stream my music from the Internet since before the Internet was being called "the cloud."

My first stab at it was something like seven or eight years ago. I found a service that would let me upload some of my MP3s and play them back. It worked, but it was SUPER-clunky, and frankly it was unreliable as well. I used it a little bit, but eventually I just got tired of it and gave up. I don't even remember what the name of that company was; they've since been swallowed up by another company which is all about cloud-based storage and not particularly interested in music. Good thing I kept copies of my MP3s!

In the years since then, I've occasionally taken a look at music-locker services as they appeared, but nothing has really met the requirements of what I wanted. The last service I really remember looking at didn't actually allow you to upload music at all... it just scanned your local copies of your music library and then allowed you to play the (licensed) copies of those same MP3s from the cloud! Ingenious, but no good for some of my more obscure tracks... the ones I prize the most because I've had them a long time or because I worked hard to track them down in the first place. So I didn't waste my time with that service. Others felt so obscure and fly-by-night to me that I decided not to waste my time again until something came up that I felt I could trust to stay around for a while.

Meanwhile, I had discovered that for less than the price of a single CD per month, I could listen to almost any song I could think of by subscribing to Rhapsody. With the right subscription, I could even download the tracks to my portable music player and listen when I'm not at my computer! (Notice that this marginalizes the "scan your tracks and play back our copies" to complete irrelevance... with Rhapsody I can play any track, even if I don't have it in my library already.) Rhapsody doesn't take care of some of my most obscure tracks, but it adds a lot more tracks to the mix, some of which are more obscure than any in my collection. (Rhapsody isn't the only "subscription" music service by a long shot... the retooled Napster is another contender with a similar plan, and there are others if you look for them.) Color me VERY satisfied with Rhapsody, but it STILL doesn't let me play the rare songs from the dusty corners of my music collection from the cloud.

Earlier this year when I heard that Google was working on a new cloud-based music service I got really excited. I already use Google for my documents, my RSS feeds, my calendar, my telephone calls, and of course my email, so a streaming music service would fit in there nicely. (I don't use them for everything I keep in the cloud; I keep my bookmarks in Xmarks, my passwords in LastPass, my pictures in Flickr, etc., but I generally have good experiences with Google's services when I need them.)

After weeks of waiting impatiently for Google to release their service, suddenly this week there was a surprise: Amazon beat them to the punch! Amazon Cloud Drive was introduced a couple of days ago: 5GB of free space to store any files you like, but the part of that service that has garnered the most attention is that MP3 or AAC files stored on your Cloud Drive can be played back using Amazon Cloud Player. This was exactly what I had been looking for! 5GB is nowhere near enough space to store my whole music collection, but it's a start... and it's enough space to store the rare gems... anything I can play back through Rhapsody, I don't really have to store in a music locker, do I?

So I tried it out. It works as advertised: you upload your music, you see it, you play it back through your browser. You can also play it back using an Android phone if you have one, but I don't have one so no luck there, but I happily filled up most of my 5GB with songs that aren't on Rhapsody that I might want to listen to on the go. The player isn't particularly feature-laden, but it plays back the songs. It starts the playback quickly enough, and you can even "scrub" through to the part of the song you like, provided that part has streamed out to your browser. There's playlist support, play entire album, play all songs, that sort of thing. Not a bad start!

But what of Google? When I found out that Amazon had actually thumbed their nose at the music industry (who inexplicably believes that people who have purchased music should have to pay again to listen to that exact music online) and told them that they don't need any stinkin' license to do what they're doing... storing users' files and allowing the users access to those files. The music industry is seething, but they don't seem to have figured out a way to attack Amazon yet; I'm sure they will try to penalize Amazon somehow, because if they don't then other music locker services will also turn their noses up at licensing (it's pretty obvious that this is what's holding up Google, and probably Apple too; both of them have similar plans in the works). Kudos to Amazon for having the guts to push the issue. There is no technological reason why we don't have cloud-based music delivery of this kind; it's all music industry foot-dragging. This forces their hand; after the courts decide what's legal and what's not, I expect these other services to pop up almost immediately.

Will I continue to use Amazon's service after Google and Apple and whoever else get their services running? That remains to be seen. There is of course a lot of Google inertia in my case, and if their service is comparable to Amazon's and not inferior, I'll probably use Google's just because I'm using Google for so many other things. It's unlikely that I will use Apple unless they have a positively amazing service in store; iTunes is such awful software on Windows that it would take a totally mind-blowing service to get me to use that.

But let's look at another option. What if Rhapsody, or Napster or one of the other subscription music services, adds a music locker option to their offerings? Would I use that? Certainly I would! That would put all music that I had any interest in in the same place, behind the same login. I would likely even switch, for example, from Rhapsody to Napster if Napster offered a good music locker and Rhapsody did not.

The thing that makes me the happiest is that thanks to Amazon, the cat's out of the bag. They are too big to ignore, and the next move the music industry makes will determine how quickly or slowly more cloud music services appear, but they will definitely appear. People want them, and people will pay for them if they are good enough. People wanted to be able to obtain music online; the music industry didn't want it so people did it illegally anyway, and eventually, we got iTunes and Amazon MP3 and Rhapsody and hundreds of other legal outlets. If Amazon had to go a little bit rogue to get them to make this next advance, so be it. It will be fascinating to watch what happens in the coming weeks and months. It's going to be an exciting time for music lovers!

Swimming Out of the Shallows (a book review)

2010-11-02T12:04:00.000-05:00

Today I reached the end of a unique experience. I finished a book which I found interesting and highly informative... but I completely disagreed with the author's conclusions. I don't dispute any of his facts, but in my opinion, he's adding two and two together and getting five. Or maybe he's adding two and two and getting negative four. Whatever it is, I think he's placing the blame for bad things in the wrong place, and I think he's seeing evil where evil doesn't exist. He's looking at Benjamin Franklin flying a kite and he's saying, that flimsy kite proves that there will never be a 747 carrying passengers across the Atlantic.

Before I go deeper into my thoughts on the book, I'd like to let the author of the book have his say. His name is Nicholas Carr, and the book is a highly-expanded version of an article he published in The Atlantic Magazine. Here it is. Go take a look... I don't mind. I'll wait right here until you get back.

The book I read is called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The basic premise behind the book is that the Internet has caused us to become shallow thinkers, incapable of deep, sustained thought. Carr says that he first started to notice this phenomenon in himself and in his friends. Journalists who no longer do thorough research, instead opting for the easy "click a few times on the Web and find what you need" method. Literature majors who no longer read complete books. That sort of thing. He believes that this is a trend which has to do with heavy use of the Internet, which is making changes to our brains as we surf, rendering us incapable of creating, or even following, longer trains of thought. He takes a great deal of time describing how the adult human brain, once thought to be quite set in its ways, is actually very flexible, changing all the time. Every time you or I do something, a physical change takes place in our brains, creating a memory or cementing a habit. He then goes into the history of writing, starting from brief scratches on ancient shards of pottery and proceeding through several technological changes: writing on clay tablets, the invention of paper, the refining of single-sheet paper into scrolls and eventually the codex (which we usually call a "book" - sheets of paper bound in a cover); the idea is that the computer is the thing that will usurp the role of the codex, in much the same way as paper usurped the role of clay tablets.

And, Carr believes, the Internet is designed with distraction in mind. Emails arrive. Tweets tweet. Ads flash and distract. Hyperlinks take our attention away from the text in which they are embedded. SMS messages come in our our phones. New blog entries hit our RSS readers. Spending our time being variously distracted by all of these things is, Carr insists, making changes in our brain that make it impossible to not be distracted. I agree with everything Carr says, up to that last sentence: I think that the Internet plays a role in our being distractable, but the Internet is not the perpetrator: the Internet is just the tool that the real perpetrator is using to make us distractable. The actual perpetrator is: ourselves.

A book is a highly static medium. I'm talking about a physical, bound book. It doesn't change on its own. It doesn't react to signals from elsewhere. If you tear a page out or drop it in the toilet, of course that will make a change to it, but it doesn't change on its own. Carr explains that before the codex was invented, human beings thought in shorter bursts. A verbal lecture might hold the attention of someone for a longer period, but other than that, your attention didn't really have to last any longer than it took to read the words scratched on that clay tablet. Because writing was time-consuming and difficult, it was generally reserved for extremely important (and brief) documents such as legal documentation. But when the bound book was invented, and particularly when the printing press came to be and books became quite cheap, anyone could have something in his hands that required many hours of sustained concentration to take in. This resulted in changes in the brains of the readers, strengthening their abilities to concentrate on one thing and filter out distractions. Carr had concluded that because our computers interrupt us almost constantly, the constant barrage of interruptions (which we respond to) train our brains to be distractable.

Let's think about that argument a bit. If ancient man was distractable because his (eat or be eaten) environment demanded it, and "codex" man became a "deep reader" because books demanded it, and "Internet" man is becoming distractable again because his computerized environment demands it, isn't that a return to the more natural state of mankind? I'm not sure there is a way to determine whether "distracted" or "immersed and oblivious to surroundings" is a better way to be, but it seems that it would depend on the lifestyle and needs of the individual. For example, someone who lived in a dangerous part of the world would be well-served by being distractable; it could save their life if something in the corner of their eye makes them instinctively duck.

And really, what is it about most books that makes it so helpful for us to immerse ourselves in that environment? When you have immersed yourself in a book, you have allowed one human being to insert whatever he or she wants directly into the world of your experience. That author is controlling, to some extent, your thoughts and your interpretation of events or facts. Is that actually so much better than a quick jaunt across the Web, picking up facts from many sources and building your own composite picture of reality? I say this as a pretty avid reader myself; I love books, but there are definitely advantages to having instant access to multiple trains of thought. The tyranny of one author controlling your thoughts for an extended period is replaced by many voices competing for your attention, giving you the chance to choose best-of-breed for yourself.

There are a number of reasons people have trouble reading long articles on the Internet, and it's not all because of their email "ding." Reading on a computer screen basically is not fun. I say this as a person who has read an entire book, in pdf format, on a computer. Backlit computer screens are hard on the eyes, and people don't necessarily have the most comfortable reading environment set up in front of their computers. It's not that people can't read a long article on their computer; it's that people don't want to read a long article on their computer. But given a strong enough desire, they can and will. I've done it many times. If you've read this far, you're doing it right now. It's completely possible. You are the captain of your own fate. I predict that as e-readers such as the Kindle and its brethren become more and more popular and inexpensive, people will read longer articles, and even books, much more frequently in digital formats. The technology will continue to adapt to become more comfortable for human beings, just like reading and writing technology progressed to ever more useful forms.

So, does Internet use make it impossible for people to read physical "codex" books? Of course not! You can't say that just because you've trained yourself in such a way that it is difficult for you to focus, your brain is ruined for life and you'll never be able to focus again. The mere existence of technologies does not force you to enslave yourself to them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And their existence doesn't mean that you even have to use them at all!

I like candy. Most everyone does. I'd like to eat lots of candy! But if I eat a lot of candy all the time, my body will become sick and fat. Candy is okay in moderation, but too much is too much. Burger King is convenient and always available, but if I eat Burger King every day, all the time, I'm going to become very unhealthy. Burger King is okay sometimes, but it shouldn't become your constant diet. Too much is too much. And if your constant mental diet is making your brain sluggish and fat (or hyperactive and ADHD), maybe it indicates that you are being irresponsible with your use of the technology. The tech is not at fault; your bad habits are.

And really. Distractions are nothing new, and they are not limited to technology. I spend about an hour and a half every weekday reading physical books on my bus commute to and from work; and believe me, distractions are everywhere. Someone behind me having a loud conversation on a cell phone. People getting on and off. Things outside the bus. Announcements by the driver of which intersection we're at. Some of these distractions are important for me to respond to (for example, I need to remember to get off the bus when I get to my stop!) Some of them are unimportant, and some are just a nuisance. But I get through my books eventually, because I've learned to tune out the unimportant distractions. The same goes for the Internet; I've unconsciously learned to tune out the things I don't need to concern myself with, and only respond to distractions that matter. In fact, sometimes I tune out distractions that do matter, which is why I have to change my "new email" sound every once in a while... I've spent whole days not noticing that I have urgent items in my inbox!

Let's talk about some of those distractions. Let's talk about that email indicator, that Facebook ding on your phone, that text message from @AplusK on Twitter. Are they distractions? Do they break up your work day and keep you from concentrating? Yes? They do? How about this: TURN THEM OFF. If they're a problem, eliminate them. The distraction is not forcing itself into your life; you have brought it on yourself. Eliminate your own distractions. Simplify. Your brain will respond to that, just like it responds to the opposite. If our brains are so elastic that they can be negatively changed by negative environmental factors, then they are also elastic enough to be positively changed by better environmental factors.

It's nonsensical to blame distractability on information overload, too, although it's true there is a real glut of information available to each of us on the Internet, information about pretty nearly anything you can think of. One thing I've seen computers bring a huge change to in my own personal life is Bible study. When I was a kid, Bible study was, obviously, all about books. If you wanted to study a topic, you looked it up in commentaries, topical dictionaries such as Vine's, or study Bibles such as the good old Thompson Chain Reference. You could also take a word-based attack, looking up your word in Strong's Concordance (which contained every English word in the King James Bible, along with original language dictionary for translation assistance). It was kind of slow, but it could get you where you wanted to be. Fast-forward to today, when that Strong's Concordance lookup that took you two hours with the book can happen on your cell phone in seconds. But do you really want to find every verse in the Bible that contains the word "love," or do you want to learn about a specific kind of love? How much God loves people? How a husband loves his wife? How a man loves his neighbor? For that, your speedy word-based lookup is only a good starting point. Those commentaries, topical dictionaries, and other study helps are all out there in digital form, accessible at the click of a mouse, but to really understand the Bible, you have to go deeper. You have to do it on purpose. You have to not take the easiest way out. The problem is not a glut of information; the problem is intellectual laziness. The same goes for journalists that go for the "easy kill" without really checking out their facts (like this utter nonsense, which I heard reported last weekend on my local TV news... reporting the 823-year urban legend as fact). You have to actually care enough to take your time, even on a computer, or eventually you're going to wind up looking like a fool. You have to be wise in your use of the tools at your disposal; scatterbrained research leads to scatterbrained thinking.

Let's talk about communication, because Carr seems to think that digital communication is de-humanizing us because when we text message or IM, we are not face to face with the person we're communicating with. Hogwash. Consider people who, in centuries past, sustained long-distance romantic relationships via letters which had to be carried across oceans in ships. Consider people who stay in touch today with distant loved ones via telephone. Those lovers with the quill pens would have loved to have been able to pick up a telephone, but they used the technology at their disposal. Communication is communication, no matter what form it takes, and over time, communication becomes more human and personal, not less, with the introduction of better and better technology. Today I can start up Skype and see and hear moving video of a friend on the other side of the world. For free! I can call or text my wife's cell phone, and no matter where she is (within coverage, of course) I can reach her. In the past year or two I've become involved again in the daily lives of friends I haven't seen for 2 decades, via Facebook. Without those technologies, none of that communication would be possible at all. Okay, so it's digital; that means that the communication is carried on electronic impulses instead of through the air or in an envelope on a ship. It's not a sign of the decay of human interaction; it's a sign that people will communicate, and if it takes a computer to do it, so be it.

Carr also seems to think that there is a chance that people will try to (and already are trying to) sort of "outsource" their human memory to computer memory. But then he explains himself that that is impossible, and gives the physical reasons why it is impossible. Your brain, despite what may have been taught to you in fourth-grade science class, is not a computer. It's not even very much like a computer. Computer memory is not like organic memory, if only because computer memory is digital and organic memory is not digital. You can have a strong memory and you can have a distant, hazy memory; a computer can only have "yes" or "no". Either the computer knows it, or it doesn't. And most of your memories aren't things that you could even figure out how to offload into a computer anyway; your brain is full of pictures, sensations, smells, sounds, ideas, impressions... all things that cannot even be communicated to a computer, and even if you "offload" them to a computer somehow, they remain in your brain as well. The only thing computers are really good at is "computing" (math), and they do a fairly good job as storage devices for data which is much less complex than the things inside your brain and mine. Tools like Evernote can help you remember your shopping list or the date of the Gettysburg Address or what your kids want for Christmas, if you store those things there, but those tools can't help you remember how the meadow behind your house during your childhood smelled in springtime. I know they call it "computer memory." It's not. It's storage space for ones and zeroes.

Does the Internet cause some kind of brain damage? You might argue that; every single thing you do all day long causes minute changes in your brain, and if those changes are unwanted, you might call them damage. Is this damage irreversible? Not according to Carr's book... it says that the human brain is quite flexible and adaptable. The argument that your brain is so flexible that Internet use changes your brain, but then that the changes are permanent and damaging, is circular, self-defeating, and illogical. At any point you can choose to change your environment. Ironically, in the chapter on "how I wrote this book," the author tells about how he did just that... shut off the email and the IM and the feed reader and Facebook and Twitter, and re-taught his brain to focus. Even he, the arm-waving paranoid alarmist, found that all he had to do to work with no distractions was to remove the distractions. Why is this rocket science? Turn off the "ding" and your brain remembers how to concentrate on one thing at a time. The "can't" automatically becomes a "can."

My best take-away from this book is that it has reminded me to re-examine my own work habits. What is distracting me? What do I need to cut back on so I can work uninterrupted? Am I wasting whole days by remaining distracted from morning to night? More than once since I began reading the book, I've considered my environment and adjusted things, or turned things off, or un-followed or un-friended. or whatever I needed to do in order to simplify. That's certainly been a good, helpful thing. The information in The Shallows is fascinating, but the freaking out is unwarranted. If the brain is as flexible as the book says, it can snap back from almost anything... including Gmail and Twitter. Take charge. Don't sabotage yourself by creating a hostile Internet environment! Use a little common sense, and the Internet will be your friend and not your enemy.

Voice Calls in Gmail

2010-08-28T09:03:00.000-05:00

This week Google released something that we've been expecting for a while... Google Voice calls from Gmail. Actually, you apparently don't even have to be a Google Voice user to use it, but if you are a GV user, the calls route through your GV account. I waited nearly 48 hours after the announcement before it finally showed up on my account, and when it showed up, I immediately used it to call my wife, who was standing next to our land-line, about 12 feet away. She was not particularly amused, but it did work! :) There seems to be an uncomfortable pause between "dial" and "ringing," but it certainly seems to work as well as the other VoIP service I'm using.

Speaking of sipgate... after I blogged about it here, I ditched their client software to try out other softphones. I used QuteCom for a while (once I finally figured out how to find my SIP credentials on the sipgate Web site) and liked it pretty well, but it seemed a little bit clumsy in certain situations (trying to answer a call, for example; I have to answer the call and then press the "1" button, and I missed calls several times) and it didn't really do that well at using my headset when it wasn't the default device... so I tried a few other free softphones and wound up discovering X-Lite. Not only does X-Lite have an "Auto Answer" button, but it can "restore" from a "minimized to tray" state automatically, so when my Google Voice rings, I just pick up the headset and click "1" and I'm on the call. Pretty snazzy!

It's still a little bit weird originating a call through X-Lite/sipgate/Google Voice, though... I have to open a Google Voice window, place the call, wait for X-Lite to come up, and finally I'm on the call. Placing outgoing calls through Gmail is a lot more straightforward; all I've got to remember is not to close my Gmail while I'm on the call! I'm still hoping for that desktop app... in fact, I've been reading about Python with the general idea of rolling my own VoIP application which will work seamlessly with Google Voice's phone book and be SIP provider-agnostic... but the new Gmail integration has an interesting (and useful) niche.

sipgate

2010-07-23T14:00:00.000-05:00

It seems so simple. I just want to be able to receive calls on my computer using my headset. I also listen to music on my computer all day long, though, and I use the speakers for that. I don't want the headset plugged in all day, because Windows automatically switches everything over to the headset when it gets plugged in, so if I keep the headset plugged in I'll have to listen to my music (not to mention all my other system sounds and alerts) through them instead of the speakers. I want to be able to hear or see that my phone is ringing, then plug in the headset, and then answer the call using the headset.

Finally, VOIP provider sipgate got some more phone numbers (they had run out!), and I snagged one (I think it's in California, because there are no Oklahoma numbers yet, but that doesn't matter to me). I downloaded the sipgate softphone software and got it all installed and set up. I saw that I could set my USB headset as the default audio device... awesome!

So I got everything set up right, tested it (success! A crystal-clear phone call on my headset!), and then unplugged my headset and got back to my regularly scheduled work. And that's when the problem happened.

The next time I received a call, I heard it ring... on my PC speakers! No problem, I thought... I can plug in the headset real quick. After all, my other software switches over automatically when the headset is plugged in. Some of it (like Rhapsody, for example) doesn't switch until a certain point (Rhapsody will continue to play the song it's playing through the speakers, but when the next song comes on, it comes on the headset), but they always switch.

Not sipgate! The only way sipgate will work with the headset, it seems, is if the headset is plugged in both when I start up the software, and when the call initially rings. If the headset isn't plugged in on the first ring, no luck. It won't even switch when you actually answer the call; presumably the software keeps the audio device open the whole time, from first ring to the call is terminated.

Now, when the headset is unplugged from the machine, it automatically disappears from the Control Panel "Sounds and Audio Devices" applet's Audio tab selectors, so if the headset is the default device (which it is on this machine), it is the default device only when it is plugged in... when it is disconnected, another device ("SoundMAX HD Audio" - my speakers) automatically becomes the default, which means when I'm ready to get on Skype or WebEx, I just plug the headset in and I'm ready to go. But just to experiment, I plugged in the headset and then opened up Sounds and Audio Devices from Windows Control Panel and automatically set up SoundMAX HD Audio as the default Windows device. Then I made sure the Logitech headset was the default device in sipgate settings. My music was coming through the speakers (the default device), but, in theory, sipgate should use the headset, as configured on the settings page.

Guess what happened? My calls went to the speakers! The setting in sipgate was not honored at all. I would accept having the computer speakers as the default output and having to switch other software manually from time to time, but the sipgate softphone apparently doesn't allow me that option. I even tried out some software called "Virtual Audio Cable" which I was hoping would allow me to intercept traffic coming from sipgate and send it directly to the sound card, but I'm pretty sure even it won't do that for me... or if it will, it would be an advanced configuration of some kind, and I don't have the time to explore it in enough depth to figure that out.

For the record, the sound quality of sipgate seems very good. The features of the service look impressive. I could definitely see myself using it on an ongoing basis... I could even see someone using it as a kind of voice mail-only drop box that was never even used for outgoing calls. If my company ever starts looking for a PBX in the cloud, I'll definitely throw their name into the hat (assuming they obtain some Oklahoma numbers before then, or make it possible to port over existing numbers). Presumably, sipgate works exceptionally well with hardware VOIP phones (that seems to be a core of their business). But they're not making it easy for poor little me, with nothing but the softphone and a USB headset.

Blue-Screen Mashup

2010-07-20T06:00:00.001-05:00

Yesterday my computer started unexpectedly rebooting. At first it happened sort of randomly during sessions, but after four or five reboots, it became completely unusable. It would boot all the way up into Windows, but as soon as we tried to start up an application, the screen would go dark, then a blue stop error screen would flash up there for a split second, then it would go back to the BIOS screen and start again from scratch! I had no idea what I was going to do, until I remembered a suggestion I read years ago from Fred Langa. The suggestion was that you could document an error screen using your digital camera. Since the screen was gone before I had a chance to read it, I figured that was the only way I was going to find out what the error was!

After a few tries to get the timing down, I got this blurry-but-mostly-readable shot of the screen:

By zooming into the shot on the camera, I was able to make out enough of the text to guess that I had a full hard disk. This made me wonder if I would be able to boot into Safe Mode so I could clear out some space. The Safe Mode trick worked, but it turned out I was not low on space at all! I ran CCleaner anyway, and then rebooted, and after that the machine worked fine. I suspect it may have had something to do with corrupt files in the Prefetcher, but I don't know for sure... all I know is that after clearing out unnecessary files with CCleaner, the machine started working again. So even though the camera may not have directly helped me in the long run, it did help me get past the mental block of not knowing what to do. Try it!

Google Voice Desktop App

2010-07-08T06:00:00.002-05:00

It all started back up in April, with a TechCrunch article. Either that or it started in November, depending on how you figure it. Sit back for a minute and I'll review things for ya.

Okay, let me back up. If you've been reading this blog, you know that I'm a HUGE fan of Google Voice. You also may remember the post when I discovered that Google had bought Gizmo5. At the time I speculated that Google was incorporating the Gizmo5 dialer into Google Talk, Google's (somewhat confusingly-named, since you "Talk" with your "Voice") IM client. (I didn't realize then that Google Talk is a Windows-only product... which probably has something to do with what comes next.)

This past April, TechCrunch broke an article that said that Google was "dogfooding" their upcoming desktop application for Google Voice (the term "dogfooding" taken from the phrase "eating your own dog food," meaning that they were testing it internally before "feeding" it to anyone else). Pretty exciting news! It made it sound like the app was right around the corner!

Hopes were dashed in June when statements from within Google made it clear that the desktop app was probably never going to be released, in favor of incorporating the Gizmo5 technology into Gmail. But then last week, TechCrunch somehow managed to get their hands on something pretty amazing: one of the internal versions of the application! For Mac, no less! Since then, there's been quite a buzz online about it, at least in tech blogs and news sites. There is even an online petition asking Google to release it (if you're interested, please visit GiveUsGVDesktop.com and sign it!) Who knows if that petition and the online noise will even figure into Google's planning at all, but it couldn't hurt.

In the meantime, I've been looking for other options. I saw in this article that it was possible to simulate the Gizmo5 experience using a free service from sipgate (yay!), but then learned that sipgate is also out of commission (they're out of numbers... D'OH!) My other best idea is to use Skype with a free service called ring2skype to simulate the same thing. Sure would be nice to not have to do that, though. Come on, Google... let's have the desktop app!

update: Ring2Skype won't work with Google Voice... you have to key in an extension number to make the call to Skype. It's still a pretty cool service, though!

Google Chrome browser

2010-05-10T06:00:00.002-05:00

I've been a Firefox browser user for quite some time - gosh, it must be at least five or six years at this point. But a month or so ago, I read something that convinced me that I should give Google Chrome another chance. From the beginning, Google has claimed that Chrome was more stable because of it's architecture; each new browser tab is its own process, so crashing one will not, in theory, crash all of them (they even made a virtual comic book about it to explain it better). The article I read said that Chrome has made some strides in speed over the other browsers, and I had been increasingly dissatisfied particularly with startup time in Firefox. Chrome also recently (finally) started supporting extensions, which are a favorite feature of Firefox, so I decided to dip my toes in and give it a try!

First I had to try and find some extensions that resembled the ones I use every day on Firefox. I had been using Echofon as my Twitter client; I didn't find anything I was happy with as a Twitter client, but eventually I tried out the desktop version of TweetDeck and now I use it instead (I even uninstalled Echofon from Firefox). I installed the Chrome version of Shareaholic (which, incidentally, I like better than the Firefox version... come on, guys, let's implement that "save your services in the cloud" thing on Firefox!) and WiseStamp, and both were wonderful. The Chrome version of Xmarks is also terrific. I couldn't find a direct port of Gmail Notifier, which is a staple for me, so I tried Google's tray app (ew) and finally discovered the excellent Chrome extension One Number which not only notifies of new Gmail messages, but also handles notifications for Google Reader, Google Voice, and Google Wave. Nice!

On the whole, I was able to find Chrome extensions that either are the same thing as Firefox extensions, or have basically the same functionality. The one cross-browser extension that I was really disappointed in was iMacros. The Firefox version is pretty solid, and in fact I use it almost every day, but the Chrome version (which, to be fair, is still in beta) is slow and buggy. I actually had to resort to opening up Firefox whenever I needed to use iMacros... not high praise for their Chrome development efforts.

Another thing I use quite extensively on Firefox is called "search shortcuts". If I type g Google Chrome into my browser URL bar, it's the same as if I loaded up Google.com and typed Google Chrome into the search box. If I type gn Google Chrome instead, it looks it up on Google News. Setting this up in Firefox is incredibly easy (if you don't know how, check this link for details), and it uses regular bookmarks, which means that my search shortcuts get synchronized through Xmarks so I only have to set them up once for many installations of Firefox. It is possible to set up something similar in Chrome, but it is convoluted and it does not use regular bookmarks, so you have to set it up on each installation of Chrome. That was my first sign that Chrome might not work out for me.

My next indicator came on my underpowered old machine at home. The first time I tried Chrome, the day it was first released, I found it too memory-hungry to run reliably on a computer without gobs of memory for it to chow down on. I discovered that things haven't gotten much better; eventually I had to quit using Chrome on my home machine. I did keep using it at work, though, hoping that it would prove more stable than Firefox. Firefox is by no means a crashy browser, but it does crater every once in a while; I wanted to see if Chrome could best it in the stability department.

Once again I was disappointed. In my experience and with my usage patterns, Chrome seems to crash just about as often as Firefox... it just has its own special ways of crashing. And it's not at good at recovering my session when I restart it, either. With Firefox, when I crash usually I get most or all of my tabs back when I restart; with Chrome that rarely works, even though it's supposed to. In addition, Chrome doesn't seem to like to be left alone for any amount of time; if I left it running for an hour and went to lunch, often when I tried to use it again it would be non-responsive.

Yesterday I gave up on Chrome and went back to using Firefox everywhere. Except for a few extensions that I liked a lot on Chrome and which aren't available for Firefox, I couldn't really find anything about Chrome that would give it an advantage. Firefox is a solid, mature browser with lots of functionality and a large user base; Chrome is a fairly young browser with some style and flash, but not as much substance behind the glamor as I had hoped. I wish Chrome the best, and maybe at some point I'll give it another spin, but for now, I'm still a Firefox fan.

Online Privacy

2010-04-26T06:00:00.112-05:00

Recently a friend of mine posted this on her Facebook profile:

WARNING! As of today, there is a new privacy setting called "Instant Personalization" that shares data with non-facebook websites and it is automatically set to "Allow." Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites ...and uncheck "Allow", then repost this to your profile.

A few hours later, another friend posted this:

FYI EVERYONE- There's a site called Spokeo.com and it's an online phone book that has a picture of your house, credit score, profession, age, how many people live in the house. Remove yourself by the Privacy button on the bottom right. (passing along, scary stuff!) I personally checked it out and it is really there!! some of the info was off but its there!!! COPY, PASTE AND REPOST

These are basically unrelated issues, but they both touch on something that I don't think people understand very well: Internet privacy. Let's take the first one first, and think about each them a little bit.

If you are using Facebook, some information about you is publicly available, and that's that. There's a lot of stuff that you can hide from public view, but some of it you can't. Your name, for example. Your profile picture. Some of the stuff you are a "fan" of. To find out what of your profile anyone doing a Google search can see, simply log into Facebook, click "Profile", create a bookmark, log back out of Facebook, and then click your bookmark. You may be surprised at what you see... your status updates may be public, for example. There are several levels of security, including "Friends Only", "Friends of Friends", and so on. I won't try to go into very much detail here (because chances are, Facebook will change things and my blog post will wind up being inaccurate) but you really need to look into a few things:

Take a look at Facebook's privacy policy to see if you really agree with everything it says.
Read over articles like this one and this one, which will explain some of the privacy issues to you and maybe help you tweak things.
Really, be aware of your privacy settings. Currently they are under Account > Privacy Settings (like the post mentions) and you might be able to go right there using this link, if you're logged in. But don't look at only that one checkbox; click through every page, and carefully consider every option. Only allow the stuff you really want allowed.

Now, as far as the "Instant Personalization" setting is concerned: my opinion is that the concern is a bit overblown. Basically, what that setting does is it allows sites that you are visiting anyway to know what Facebook knows about you and shares with people who are on Facebook but who are not your "friends." It's how Pandora knew who my friends were when I started messing with it earlier this week; it told me which of my friends prefer Big Band and which of them prefer Sade. When a song from a favorite artist of theirs comes up, I see their Facebook profile picture.

Does that creep you out? Well, then be creeped by this: any child-molester on the Internet has the same access to your information. Every serial killer and wacko can know what "Instant Personalization" knows, just by having a Facebook account and looking you up. Kind of puts Pandora knowing who your buddies are in perspective, doesn't it? If you don't care for that idea, maybe you shouldn't be on Facebook at all. Signing up for Facebook essentially equates to making a very minor celebrity out of you, so expect paparazzi if you go there.

(And if you are worried about Instant Personalization, allow me to introduce you to the privacy implications of Facebook Applications, such as Farmville, Farm Town, Mafia Wars, etc. which have access to much more information than Instant Personalization does. Might want to check those settings, too.)

So let's consider the second post, the one about spokeo. This is a service that compiles publicly-available information and repackages it for sale. The creepiness isn't the spokeo site; that's just plain old commerce. The creepiness is that the information is publicly available somewhere in the first place! Spokeo is like a used bookstore; they don't create the information, and they aren't even the primary source; they just compile it and sell it at a price. In fact, if you check the Snopes article about it, you'll find this link to another panic about a similar site, ZabaSearch, which was freaking people out by doing the exact same thing five years ago (they're still doing it). In fact, I'll add another one: put your land line phone number or address into WhitePages Reverse Lookup and you're likely to find your name (and maybe others who live in your house; it found my wife's name as well). And they'll sell you more information for a price, too. (Cell phone numbers don't turn up the same granularity of information as land lines because of legal differences.) Heck, type your land line phone number into Google, and with one additional click you'll see a map to your house. So the fact is, spokeo isn't anything unique or frightening... or at least it's not unique. It's fairly common on the Internet.

For the record, all of these services have "remove me from your list" functions, but before you get wrapped up in that, consider this: it is possible to get your phone number unlisted from the telephone book, but the majority of people do not. Why? Because you want to be found. The phone book (probably) has your name, phone number, and address in it. That's easily enough information to physically locate you, if someone wants to. And if you've ever told a stranger that it was your birthday, and if you also told him your name, that's just about enough information right there for identity theft (never tell a stranger anything that someone from a bank would ask you as a "security question", particularly your Social Security Number!) In the thoroughly-networked, cameras-everywhere, cell-phone-toting, information-addicted, credit-driven society we live in, information about you is literally in the very air. If you want to get off the grid, throw away that phone with the GPS capabilities, close out your bank accounts and credit cards and go cash-only, and then quit your job and move to the woods, because almost everything you do in this day and age leaves a footprint.

Hundreds of years ago when most of the world was very rural and communities were small, everyone knew everything about one another. To some extent, in small communities (little towns, schools, workplaces, churches) this is often still the case, but otherwise as a society we've somehow gotten the idea that we have some kind of anonymity, that unless we want them to, it's not nice for someone to know things about us. But the fact is, there have always been reams of publicly-available information about each of us out there somewhere. It's how modern society has always functioned. A bank that can't find out anything about you won't lend you money to buy a car; a prospective employer expects the chance to talk to your previous employers to find out if you fit into their organization. We use information to make educated decisions, and computers do nothing more effectively than they store and compare information. Don't be surprised to find details about yourself on the Internet, but do consider which pieces (for example, your Social Security Number) need to be protected, and which pieces need not be guarded as closely. Pick your battles wisely. Otherwise, that cave out in the wilderness might as well be your home.

(To find out what kinds of things about you that Facebook might be sharing with the whole wide world, visit http://zesty.ca/facebook/ and click the "How do I find my Facebook ID?" link to get started. Most of the categories will likely show you nothing, but check these categories, which might show you some information about yourself or others: "feeds", "likes", "links", "tagged", "posts")

Google Buzz

2010-02-17T06:00:00.003-06:00

One week ago, nobody outside of Google had ever heard of Google Buzz. Even those in the tech news industry were mystified, although there were rumors out there: "We have just received an invite to attend an event at Google’s headquarters where it will be `unveiling some product innovations in two of [its] most popular products'," one tech blog said. There was speculation on all sides (I was hoping for a rebirth/reopening of Gizmo5, myself) but I don't think anyone quite expected what they showed us that day. Facebook and Twitter were the front-runners in social networking; MySpace was nearly a distant memory, and Friendster was already a distant memory. Google's social networking site was Orkut, and it was very popular... in Brazil. Nobody expected them to try again!

Since then, Google claims that like nine bazillion posts have been made to Google Buzz, and I'm pretty sure that at least that many articles about Buzz have appeared on tech news sites... but honestly, my social contacts are still all on Facebook and Twitter. The people I'm connected with on Google Buzz are largely the same people I'm connected to on Twitter. Despite all of the hype about how many built-in users Buzz has because of the integration with Gmail, I haven't seen a lot of activity on Buzz quite yet (except mostly stuff that's getting imported from Twitter or Google Reader). I love the idea of Buzz, and I think Google has every chance of building a service that beats the pants off Facebook for sheer robustness (if you've read my rant about Facebook, you'll know that I think Facebook is a very good idea which is very broken), but I have a serious wish list for Buzz... it's good as it is, but as far as I'm concerned it's just not at the point yet where I can tell my friends, "You've GOTTA try this! It's SO much better than Facebook!"

Now, in some ways, Buzz IS better than Facebook. I think it embeds pictures and videos better. It's much less crash-prone. It loads quickly, and it certainly is handy to have it right there in my Gmail. And you can even EDIT your own posts... it's like magic! But there are a few niggling things that Google could probably roll out fairly quickly that would make the experience SO much better. For example, Google needs to set up a way for users to automatically activate the much-described "get the Buzz messages out of my inbox" filter. I honestly wonder if anyone is really using the "Buzz to my inbox" feature... I mean, Buzz is basically ALREADY in my inbox! It takes more clicks to delete the Buzz email than it does to actually check Buzz for new stuff. Google needs a "no Buzz to my inbox" setting.

Buzz needs WYSIWYG editing. Now, Buzz has hidden support for boldface, italics, and strikethrough (does anyone actually use strikethrough?) by enclosing your text in _underscore characters_ for italics or *asterisks* for boldface (or both for strikethrough), but come on, Google... give us WYSIWYG. This is not a hard thing; it already exists in Gmail and Blogger. That alone will give it a leg up on Twitter and Facebook, neither of which has any text formatting capability.

Why is there no "Re-Buzz" or "Share" feature? Twitter and Facebook BOTH have this, and people love to share stuff they've found. I even saw an article today that more people use Facebook as their jumping-off point to the Web now than use Google, which blows my mind! People want to share stuff they find, even if they find it on Buzz. Come on, Google... how hard can this be? There's a lot of potential there for users to meet like-minded friends-of-friends and begin to share directly with those new contacts, too.

And hey... what about a link (other than the now-common Google Reader hack) to "Buzz This Page"? Such a thing exists for Facebook and Twitter, and I use them all the time. Maybe this is going to be part of the upcoming roll-out of hooks into and out of Buzz, but it would have made a lot of sense to give us that capability right from the first.

One thing that's cool about Buzz is that you can "mute" a post. The post slowly fades into invisibility, and it looks pretty cool. But in order to make that happen, you have to select "Mute this post" from a drop-down menu, and I mute posts so often that I can't imagine why you wouldn't want this to be an icon or top-level item instead of a 2-click thing. And I can also see people getting pretty cranky about the fade-out, too... it's just long enough to get on people's nerves. I think it ought to be something you can turn off (although I would leave it on, myself).

There needs to be an easy way to collapse a bunch of comments on a post. Facebook doesn't have this, and oddly it never felt like it was "missing" on Facebook, but on Google Buzz it seems like a glaring omission. A "collapse all" would be nice, too.

And there really needs to be an OBVIOUS way to turn Buzz off. There is a link at the very bottom of the screen, but that link is not "obvious"... I would never have found it if I hadn't seen it referred to in a news post. For something as intrusive as Buzz, there needs to be a big red "off" switch with neon arrows pointing at it, because otherwise people are going to be really unhappy about it (in fact, people have ALREADY been unhappy about it).

There needs to be a landing page for links into a particular Buzz account. The Google Profile basically serves this purpose but it's not particularly Buzz-specific. How about a single page where a friend can see all of my public Buzz posts, and only my public Buzz posts? Twitter has it. Why not Buzz?

Now that I've got all of my "tweaks" off my chest, I want to move on to something else: things I think need to be added to Buzz. With some or all of the tweaks I've recommended, Buzz could be at least as good as Facebook and Twitter, and maybe a little better where finesse is called for. With the additions I'm calling for, Buzz could truly be a SERIOUSLY killer app.

My number one wish is for Buzz to use existing hooks into Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites to turn buzz into an aggregator for existing sites as well as a new platform. I'd like to see a dual-screen situation where you can flip over to another tab and be able to see what you would see if you were on other sites, and maybe even add comments to those sites, and then flip back over to your Buzz account and add posts to that. (Using the tips from this article I've actually set up my Gmail account so that I can access Facebook and Twitter directly from Gmail anyway, but it would be wonderful to not have to resort to add-ons to do so.) Even more critical is the ability to post something to Buzz and simultaneously cross-post it to Facebook and/or Twitter (and any other social networks that will be supported.) The advantages of doing this are, to me, fairly obvious... the user has the advantage of one-stop status update posting, and Buzz can have the advantage (especially in the case of 140-characters-only Twitter) of getting to link through to the Buzz version of the post. This functionality alone, I believe, will bring new users to Buzz. And once they are using Buzz for all of their publishing, Buzz will quickly become their network of choice, with other social sites becoming at best places to play Flash games, and at worst, simply convenient avenues to get status updates into Buzz.

There really needs to be a standalone, not-in-Gmail experience of Buzz. Google has acknowledged that this is a possible upcoming addition, and I think it would be a great idea, if only for people who are maybe a little bit Gmail-phobic and don't want to feel like they are creating a new email account that they don't want. (This may yet happen.) Another new incarnation I could see for Buzz would be adding more Buzz functionality directly into Google Reader. Right now Reader works fairly well with Buzz, but it would be nice to see some Buzz flow back into Reader instead of just having Reader content flow into Buzz.

A consequence of tighter integration with other sites will be something that has come up for me already: feedback loops. If I have my Buzz posts flowing out to Twitter AND my Twitter posts flowing back into Buzz, I will get every post showing up both places twice! As it is right now, I would like to syndicate my Google Reader posts out to Twitter, but they are already flowing into Buzz, and if I syndicate them in Twitter, they will turn up on Buzz twice... and because of that, I haven't syndicated my Reader posts out to Twitter.

One way that could be eliminated would be to incorporate Gmail's filtering capabilities into Buzz. For example, I would love to be able to filter my Twitter posts and never Buzz the ones that, for example, start with "Read this: " and then I could prefix my Google Reader tweets that way. It would be great to filter posts from some of my contacts, too... kind of an "auto-mute" so that (for example) I never see posts containing the word "beer" from a college-partying friend, or never see posts with pictures attached from a friend who posts way too many photos of his car.

I like that Buzz already has "allow-only" private posting, so if I have my family members organized into a group called "Family" I can create a buzz that is only visible to my family. Google should follow Facebook's lead and add the inverse of this, so that I can "deny" a group as well. So if I have a group called "Denver" and some of my "Family" group members are also living in the "Denver" group, I could "allow" the "Family" group and "deny" the "Denver" group, and only family members who do not live in Denver would see the post.

Last but not least, I really think Google should allow syndicating RSS feeds into your Buzz stream. Third-party sites (like Twitterfeed) are going to do this eventually anyway, and this would allow information from a multitude of other sources to flow easily into Buzz. Allowing input from RSS feeds is a key to getting even more of people's online identity into Buzz. I would also like to see customizable RSS feeds out from Buzz, so that I could create feeds that do not include information from certain sources or that are filtered by keywords or other criteria. This would be another way that users could deal with the feedback loop problem I mentioned before... if I could generate a feed from my Google Buzz that includes all sources except my Twitter information, I could syndicate that feed back to Twitter and never get a duplicate post. It would also be useful to be able to customize the titles of the items in the feeds; the single outgoing Google Buzz feed is configured in such a way that it really needs some post-processing to be useful... and I don't have time to learn Yahoo Pipes (and does Google really want their information to be processed through a Yahoo service anyway??)

Google Buzz has so much potential. Google creates very solid online software... much better than Facebook's unattractive and accident-prone offering. And although Google doesn't have a perfect record on this account, they do have a much better uptime track record that Twitter, whose "fail whale" page that informs users that the system is down has become something of a pop-culture icon (and when your "our site is down" page is famous, that is known as a BAD thing!) My take on the first week of Google Buzz is that Google has gotten off to a somewhat feeble start, when they could have come out of the gate like a race horse if they had only implemented ALL of the functions of FriendFeed, which Buzz is unabashedly modeled after. But in the current online climate, I think Google has a lot of motivation to make the service better, and they have a lot of potential to make it really dynamite. Even if you're not actively using Buzz yet, I think it's a good idea to keep an eye on it. It may be the next revolution in social networking!

Google Voice

2010-01-27T06:00:00.008-06:00

"GrandCentral is the BOMB!" I read on a message board. It was late 2008, and I had never heard of GrandCentral before, but I looked it up and it was looking pretty cool. Using GrandCentral I could get a brand-new phone number for free, and set things up so that calling that number would ring me up at work or at home! I wouldn't have to give people an either-or on a phone number any more! And since it is frowned upon where I work to give out the private "direct" number to people other than immediate family (instead having people call the switchboard and speak to our very sweet receptionist), I figured I might be able to give out this number to friends and not give them the direct line number.

Well, I was right on all counts... I was able to set things up so people could reach me at home or at work, and there are a number of other great advantages I gained as well. GrandCentral, now re-branded Google Voice, also allows me to get my personal voice mails in my Google Voice account (while my work voice mails land in my work voice mail), and even set up a schedule so that my Google Voice number doesn't ring my home phone during the day when my wife is at home but I'm at work. It's great!

There have been so many good tutorials and posts of Google Voice features that I'm not going to waste too much time rehashing easy-to-find information. Even I have already mentioned Gizmo5+Google Voice on this blog, and I've also already mentioned Google Voice's cell phone applications here as well. If you have a cell phone (I do not), you can have GV ring both your land line and your cell phone, and then you can answer whichever one is convenient. In fact, you can switch your call from one to the other midstream (for example, I could answer my Google Voice call at work, switch to my cell phone for the bus ride home, and then when I got home, switch to my land line, and the person on the phone need never know the conversation happened on three separate phones). There are tons of cool features to talk about, but I wanted to mention the very few things that I wish were different about Google Voice.

The one that bugs me the most right now is that Google has not yet re-released Gizmo5 after acquiring it. I even took a look at eBay for accounts... sure enough, they are there to be had! Funny how people will pay twenty bucks for something they could have gotten for free a month ago! :) Once Google reopens Gizmo5 (I expect its capabilities to be folded into Google Talk, myself) I will be able to answer my GV calls through my computer headset. And that will be AWESOME!

I wish Google Voice was able to support SMS short codes. These are the five- or six-digit "text this number with your cell phone" codes that usually connect you with services (for example, in the U.S. you can tweet to Twitter by texting your tweet to 40404, or update your Facebook by texting 32665). The way I understand it, on regular land-line service the number is sent a digit at a time, but on cell phones the number is sent all at once, which makes these short codes possible, and they are by agreement between cell phone carriers. My assumption is that because Google Voice is not a cell phone carrier, it does not have access to those agreements. It's a shame, because SMS short codes are so prevalent these days that I know this one thing is enough to turn people off from using Google Voice exclusively. I use the SMS-to-a-full-cell-number feature almost daily, though, and it works great! Even without a cell phone, I can text friends. It's kind of hard to explain to them, actually!

Google Voice also does not support MMS messages, which are multimedia SMS-style messages (if you've ever texted someone a snapshot on your phone, you've used this). For some people this is apparently a deal-breaker, but honestly, these days everybody's phone has email. Why would you want to send this kind of stuff via text message?

It would sure be nice for Google to roll out wide support for porting cell phone numbers to GV. This has been being talked about for some time now, and I have actually read articles from people who have been allowed to do it... but it's not easy or free (actually, according to Google, it's not even available yet). There is a procedure you can go through to set up your cell phone so that calls go to Google Voice voice mail instead of your carrier's voice mail, so that's partway there, but that's just a consolation prize. One more thing that might cause a long-time cell-phone user to not try it out.

Recently an idea occurred to me that would be a super-cool addition to Google Voice. I sent it in on their feedback form, but I thought I would share it here as a dream feature that I hope they will add one day. For background, I mentioned that I have Google Voice ring my home phone, but only outside of business hours when I can be expected to be home, not during the day when I'm at the office but my wife is home. You can set up individual ring schedules for each telephone you list with Google Voice, and there are two separate schedules, a "weekday" schedule and a "weekend" schedule. So on my "weekday" schedule, I have my home phone ringing only between the time I generally get home after work and the time I generally leave the next morning, and I have my office phone ringing during our normal office hours. On the weekend I have the home phone ringing and the office phone not ringing. If I had a cell phone, I would probably set it up to ring all of the time. What I would like to see would be a third ring schedule, a "holiday" or "vacation" schedule. This would be the phones you want to ring, say, on Memorial Day, which would normally be a weekday "work" day but which you might get off work for, or say on the week that you take the family to Disney World for vacation. When I'm at home on a 3-day weekend, I do need my home phone to ring, but I don't need my office phone to ring, but when the holiday is over, I need to revert to my original settings. Right now I have to change everything manually, which is an unnecessary hassle.

Now, to digress a little bit, GV has a "Do Not Disturb" mode that automatically sends all calls to voice mail without ringing the phone at all. Do Not Disturb mode is easily activated by clicking "Settings" and then the "Calls" tab and then checking a checkbox. Turning it off is even easier; the Google Voice screen has a "'Do Not Disturb' is enabled. Disable now" link right at the top of the screen. I would like to see my proposed "holiday mode" set up to trigger in two ways: one way would be manually, by checking or unchecking a checkbox, and the other way would be on a schedule. So I could set the first and last days of my vacation weeks ahead of time, and then it wouldn't be one more thing I would have to remember between plane schedules, luggage, putting a stop on the mail, etc. With enough flexibility, I could set up the holidays in my Google Voice the first week of January when the yearly holiday calendar is distributed at work, and not have to think about it again until twelve months later. How cool would that be?

I could go on and on about Google Voice's amazing features... voice-mail notifications in my email in-box, receiving and replying to SMS messages via my email account, email-style spam filtering of phone calls, customized outgoing message per contact (I could set it so my mom hears "Hi mom!" when she calls me, for example), contacts shared with Gmail address book, contacts available on the Web and on your cell phone, call "screening" by listening in (like you used to do with your Code-a-Phone machine back in the day!), free calls any time of day to anywhere in the United States. But I'll just end by saying that Google Voice has succeeded in making a huge number of telephone-related things much easier for me. I'm excited to see what Google has in mind for Gizmo5, and I'm interested in using a cell phone with Google Voice integrated into it, and I think Google Voice is a product that just about anyone could use and be thrilled with. I would pay for it if it cost money to use it; that's how indispensable it is. If one of the cell-phone carriers had anywhere near this kind of offering in their plan's online site, they would win customers because of it.

I'm just glad that my mom only has to remember one number to call me at work or home. "Hi mom!"

Cell Phones

2010-01-21T06:00:00.004-06:00

I have long been a cell-phone conscientious objector. There are a number of reasons for this... there is the "people got along for decades without cell phones, what makes them such a necessity now?" argument. There's the argument that they're too darn expensive, and I stand by that one, although you can pretty easily find plain talk service these days for something like $10/month... as long as you're not interested in text messaging, data access, or any of the other things people do with their phones these days. But deep down, I know my main reason for not being interested in cell phones is that I just don't really like phone calls. I mean, I like talking to friends... I really do, and if you can manage to get me on the phone, you may have trouble getting rid of me! But I don't like two things about phone calls: placing the phone call, and receiving the phone call. And clearly, one or the other is necessary in order for a phone call to take place! The idea of calling someone when I don't know whether they're busy, angry, sleeping, or they just don't want to talk to me, fills me with an irrational dread. And the sound of the phone ringing still strikes a little bit of fear in my heart... who is it? What do they want? Will they try to make me do something I don't want to do? Will I have trouble getting them to let me end the call? Will I have to hang up on someone? The proliferation of Caller ID has mitigated this quite a bit, of course, but old attitudes die hard.

We probably still wouldn't have a cell phone at my house if it weren't for one person. That person's name is Hannah, and 2 and a half years ago, my wife was pregnant with her and insisted that her water could break in some remote place (unlikely, since she rarely goes anyplace without me anyway, especially when she's pregnant) and if she didn't have a cell phone, she wouldn't be able to reach help. "I'll only use it for emergencies!" she said, and I didn't believe her for a second (and I was right). I got her the free RAZR from AT&T (since they do our phone service anyway) and she was off to the races. I got her the smallest number of minutes and text messages possible, and with the rollover minutes and the fact that texting was godawful difficult on the RAZR, she never went over either.

Our 2-year contract went by and expired, and she had beat her RAZR all to heck. The corner of the metal button plate was bent up, and one section of it was actually missing. To this day neither of us really knows how that all happened, but it was clear that the RAZR was on its last legs. She was wanting a newer styled phone anyway... the whole flip-phone thing was so 2005!... so we picked her up a green LG Neon phone, one with a slide-out keyboard. The keyboard makes it much easier to send texts and Yahoo IMs (which count as texts), which means that now she's on a $100 plan with unlimited data & texts instead of the inexpensive low-minutes, low-texts plan we had before. That's the cell phone racket... hook you with a low base service cost, and then nickel and dime you to death with "extra" services that they know you really want!

Her new phone was the first phone I've really played with that actually had anything approaching usable Internet access (we never used data on the RAZR), and I have to say, now that mobile-enabled sites are so prevalent, it's hard not to make the decision to pick up a phone I can use to look up movie times any time and anywhere I want or write a quick email on the bus on the way home. I'm not sure I'd be happy with a phone like hers that is designed for texting and lighter Web access... to get me to carry around a snake in my pocket, it's darn well going to have to be a smartphone that I can use to look at virtually any Web site I want (my wife's phone on AT&T has trouble with some sites... for example, it can't load the mobile version of meebo). I'm not interested in an iPhone; in addition to being phoneophobic, I'm allergic to products made by Apple. :) Plus, the iPhone App Store doesn't have a dialer app for Google Voice any more, which basically makes it a deal-breaker for me... I love Google Voice!

The only dialer apps for Google Voice are for Android and Blackberry. I'm not too hip to the keyboard-below-the-screen layout of most of the Blackberry phones, so that would leave me with either a Blackberry Storm or an Android phone, and since I'm a big fan of Google products in general, it's very nearly a no-brainer to pick an Android phone. I've been waiting and waiting for something Android to come to AT&T, but I keep being disappointed... and since I'm not particularly getting that good of a deal with my land line/DSL/cell phone bundle, I don't see any reason to be loyal to our carrier, so that gives me options.

Until the first of the year, I was getting very interested in the Droid. Although I've heard that it's a little heavy compared to other smart phones, I like the idea of the slide-out keyboard (that's the big thing I like about my wife's phone). But then very late last December I started hearing about the new Google Phone, the Nexus One. Just the mere idea of the phone being a real Google phone sounded pretty cool to me, and it has some features that the Droid doesn't have (speech-to-text for all data entry boxes, for example), but as I began comparing things, it sounds like between the two, the Droid may just be the phone for me. There's that keyboard, for one thing. And most of the software differences will wind up on the Droid anyway when the new version of the Android OS gets pushed out to it. I actually dig the Droid Eris as well (pictured at the top of this blog post), but it doesn't have the slide-out keyboard.

Will I buy myself a Droid? Given unlimited funds, I probably would head to the Verizon store today and pick one up. I'll need to make sure I have the money to afford the $199 cost of the phone and also support my service plan (sheesh, it's like putting a kid through college!). If I suddenly had the funds to afford a phone, would I ever actually turn the ringer on? I don't know... I suspect the answer would be "rarely." If I felt the need to have a phone for talk, I would go for something much cheaper and not do the data stuff at all, but if I get a phone, for me it will be more like buying a tiny wireless computer/MP3 Player that unfortunately has a ringer on it than buying a telephone with Web access. Of course I'll use it for calls, but you'll be more likely to find me using Rhapsody, Google Maps, twitdroid or Evernote than Google Voice. Maybe the cell phone price wars that seem to be heating up will change that (or maybe not), but for now, you'll have to send me an email and I'll get it when I get home!

FURTHER READING: Here's an interesting Nexus One vs. Droid vs. iPhone shootout you can use to compare apples with (non-)apples a little bit...

MORE FURTHER READING: Wireless plans from Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint compared

meebo

2009-12-10T06:00:00.013-06:00

I've been using meebo for quite some time now as my primary IM client. I started out many years ago using the individual IM clients, and then I discovered multi-client IM with Trillian and, later, Miranda IM, and LOVED the ability to use many IM protocols with only one piece of software! What I didn't love was that I couldn't boot up my computer at home and look back at the IMs I had exchanged with someone while I was at work, because chat logs were stored locally. And I STILL had to install the software to be able to use it in a new location. These days you can install your multiprotocol IM client on a thumb drive (I have a portable copy of Digsby handy now, if I ever want to use that!) but that is a relatively new development, and anyway, what if I'm at the library and can't run software off my thumb drive?

Meebo (along with other Web-based IM clients) addresses all of these concerns. All you have to do to try out meebo is go to the Web site and supply the login and password for one of the many IM networks they support (the ones on the home page... AIM, Yahoo, MySpace, MSN, Facebook, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, etc. ...those are only the tip of the iceberg). Meebo is compatible with all of the major browsers, so in general it should work for you (I regularly use it in MS Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows). Once logged in, you will see a list of your contacts on that network, including any categories you might have placed them into (friends, family, school buddies, whatever), and you will be able to chat with them just as you would with a traditional client. You will even hear a little "ding" sound when you send or receive a message. The "ding" can be silenced, but it cannot currently be reconfigured to a different sound.

If you set up a "meebo account" with its own separate login and password, you can add multiple IM accounts to your meebo account. With one password, I log in daily to accounts on AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, Google Talk, Facebook, and even Jabber accounts on Jabber.org and Neosmt.com! Meebo adds new networks fairly frequently, so if you have an account on another network, even one that is a bit obscure, give it a look... it might be on the list!

When I first started using meebo, all IM windows existed within the main browser window. That limitation is now a thing of the past, and now you can (and I do, quite frequently) "pop out" an IM window so that it looks almost exactly like an IM conversation in a traditional piece of IM software! You can then "pop" it back in if you like. If you pop out a window and then close it, the next time that contact IMs you, the window will even start out popped out. I don't care for that (although it's a pretty cool trick!) so I generally pop the windows back in before closing them.

Meebo supports your basic set of smiley-faces (called "emoticons"), and they have a few of their own, like a "(pacman)" and a "(ghost)", a monkey and a pig, and even hidden emoticons like a "(pirate)"! (You just have to do a little research to find out about the hidden emoticons. ;) ) One problem with all "alternate" IM clients (and really, with IM clients in general) is that emoticons are sent as text and not as graphics... so if you send someone a monkey emoticon in meebo and they're not using meebo, they probably won't see your monkey. And if they send you some weird emoticon from their IM client, you might see :*>J-] or something even crazier-looking. Some emoticons are common across most IM clients, but sometimes it helps to search out online lists of the emoticons in your friends' IM clients to see what they're trying to show you. Unless all IM client builders agree on a common set of emoticons (not likely!), this is just part of using IM. If you stick to :) and :( and maybe a ;) or two, you'll be all right.

One thing that has been bothering me lately about meebo is that if I am typing in one IM window and someone IMs me from another window, the first window loses focus and the end of whatever I'm typing winds up in the new IM conversation. This is an annoyance, but I'm pretty sure this is a problem common in IM clients, so I can't fault meebo TOO much for it. In the past I've had trouble with meebo taking a long time to start up or occasionally hanging in the browser, but these kinds of bugs have a way of suddenly disappearing; the coding staff at meebo clearly works hard to clean up their own messes so that the experience is as smooth as possible.

There are mobile meebo apps for iPhone and Android, and there is a "phone-friendly" version of meebo that comes up on cell phone browsers (although we haven't been able to get it to work on my wife's LG Neon). If you have an unlimited data plan but sending IMs from your phone eats up text messages, using a Web IM application like meebo might be your ticket to sending IMs whenever you want (plus, it supports most any IM protocol you could want, while most phones only support one or two!)

If you are using meebo on your computer and you crash your browser, your meebo session goes down too. This likely doesn't happen very often to most people, but as a Web site programmer, crashing my browser can sometimes be a fact of life. There are a number if ways around this. You could simply run meebo from a different browser if you have one installed on your computer (a different window of the same browser will often crash right along with the first window, so that's probably not a helpful strategy.) You could use something like Prism (Firefox) or Bubbles (MSIE) to essentially convert meebo into something resembling a desktop application (I have used it with both, and was happy with both). Or you could do something which seems like a step backwards... install the Meebo Notifier (Windows only) desktop application! Another big advantage of using the Notifier (which is how I currently run meebo most of the time) is that you get pop-up, WIndowsey notifications when someone IMs you... you don't even have to have the browser window open! (Conversely, whcn someone IMs you, if you don't already have a browser window open it takes a significant amount of time for the software to open, causing people to wonder why you're not answering them... I keep the browser window open and minimized when I'm using the Notifier).

Audio/video teleconferencing on IM clients seems to still be a little bit of a jumbled landscape, and interoperability is sketchy. Meebo does support audion and video conferencing, even with users that are not using meebo, although the conference for them will take place using a third-party Web app and not directly in their IM client. I have my doubts about how often people use that kind of capability anyway; I think most people use Skype for their video phone use. I've used meebo for this myself, though, and the experience was unexpectedly easy.

The one thing I really wish meebo would do... and I know it's on their radar, but I wish they would go ahead and get it done... is grouping of contacts. My brother, for example, routinely logs into three IM networks, but we generally chat on MSN Messenger. There's no reason for me to see his name three times; it would be great to see his name once and be able to click on it and chat using MSN Messenger if he's logged into it, or if he's only logged into one of the other networks, chat with him using Yahoo Messenger or whatever else instead. I have several other friends with multiple accounts, and it would be so nice to link those suckers up so that I only have to keep track of one name.

Another IM client I've looked at recently, Digsby, does allow you to group your clients. Digsby is not a Web-based client; it is a supercharged desktop client. It supports many IM networks, and it even does some really cool stuff with social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Plus, it can help you keep track of your email accounts! The only problem I have with Digsby is that it seems to have a really large memory footprint... it takes a considerable amount of time to start up, and on a slow system, Digsby is going to be pretty sluggish, while meebo has been quite nimble for me, even on underpowered desktop systems. One thing Digsby does share with online IM services like meebo is that the information about your accounts is stored on the Digsby servers, so if I go to a friend's house and log into Digsby using my Digsby login information, all of my IM clients will be set up instantly (the new version of Trillian, called Trillian Astra, seems to have this, in addition to a Web version!) But the fact is, meebo is versatile, easy to use, and very fast. New features are added quite frequently, and the company is very proactive abotu fixing any problems that arise.

I can't think of any compelling reason to use any IM client for day-to-day use other than meebo. The "official" clients are sometimes necessary for a few infrequently-needed tasks such as blocking users or changing settings, but overall, meebo is, in my opinion, best-of-breed for IM clients. Give it a try!

New Piece of the Google Voice Puzzle

2009-11-23T19:00:00.004-06:00

Today I discovered some news that's pretty interesting... if not brand new, only a few weeks old. I've been using Google Voice for some time now (ever since it was GrandCentral before Google purchased it), and I've known for a long time that it supported something called "Gizmo." I looked into Gizmo a while back to see what it was, and it's a voice-over-IP (VoIP) system, much like Skype. At the time I didn't have a headset anyway so there was no way for me to make a Gizmo call, so I didn't look into it further at the time.

A few days ago I was given a headset for use on WebEx conferences at work, and today I took a look at the Gizmo Web site to see if I might want to start using Gizmo in conjunction with my Google Voice account. Turns out there might be no need... new user account activation has been suspended, because Gizmo has been bought by... wait for it... Google! Take a look at the blog post about the acquisition.

There's a lot of speculation about what Google is up to, and by much more plugged-in people than I, but here's what I know:

July 2005: Google buys Android, a company that made software for mobile phones.
July 2007: Google buys GrandCentral. Eventually they re-brand it as "Google Voice" and add some new features.
October 2008: Google Android cell phone operating system is released as open-source software.
October 2008-present: Android-based phones begin to filter out into the market; a big marketing push for the "Droid" Android phone happens just before the holiday season (have you seen Verizon's demo?). Some see it as the first serious contender for the iPhone.
Mid-2009: rumors begin to circulate about a "Google Phone" (Android phone with Google branding, with hardware specifications by Google and with no customizations to Android.)
November 2009: Google buys Gizmo.

(I will have to note right here why I'm mentioning Android. Part of the lure of Google Voice is that you can use it with multiple phones, but the way it does this is that when you tell Google Voice to place a call, it first calls you and then when you answer, it calls the other party. Not a problem, but not the way phones usually work, either, or at least not since the days when you called a human operator and she called you back when your party was available! On Android phones, it is possible to fully integrate Google Voice into the phone's OS, so that when you dial a number on the phone, it seamlessly uses Google Voice. No callback to you at all! So if you use Google Voice, having an Android phone is very much to your advantage.)

You would have to be completely dense to not see all of these things coming together. Google is clearly serious about this telephony thing. I've been wondering why Google hasn't been introducing any new features in Google Voice lately, despite the fact that they have a "suggestion box"-style form on the Google Voice site; clearly they've been holding off because they expected to incorporate some cool Gizmo tech later on and avoid re-inventing the wheel. So presumably as soon as Google feels comfortable that the Gizmo architecture can handle the number of new users they will be throwing at it, the Gizmo features will be incorporated into the Google Talk client (which already does PC-to-PC calling... and which uses the same XMPP protocol for chat as the Gizmo software does) and Google "Talk" and Google "Voice" will (finally?) merge into one uber-service (this might also explain why Google Voice and Google Talk have remained separate for so long up to this point). Add in the reported Google Phone hardware, and you've got a pretty full-blown telephony system going on here. Look out, AT&T! Look out, Verizon and Sprint! Google may be coming to town, and they may take a bite out of your apple!

Update: I figured out a way to get to the Gizmo Knowledgebase, and learned something else that I find interesting. Not only can the Gizmo software chat with MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and AOL Instant Messenger (and Google Talk), but it can actually place VoIP calls to contacts on those services! So if Google incorporates that tech into Google Talk, GT may well become the first of the "official" IM clients that can talk to just about anyone who uses instant messaging. The only thing Gizmo doesn't support on those calls is the video portion of the equation. I so wish I had signed up for Gizmo before they closed it up for new users! Maybe current Google Voice users will get first crack at it once they open things back up.

[Full disclosure (of irony): Blogger (the service on which this blog resides) is owned by Google. I don't work for Google, and I'm not shilling for them. I just thought it was funny that I was talking about this on their own blogging platform. Acquired in 2003. No, I don't see Blogger as part of the telephony picture. :) ]

metapad

2009-11-23T06:00:00.097-06:00

Anyone who spends any amount of time using a computer discovers that a good text editor can be your best friend. I even found that to be the case back in my brief stint using a Mac/Amiga setup at work in the mid-'90s. Even further back, back when the world was young, I loved a DOS editor called PC Write. Not only could this thing control printer formatting and edit files of almost any size, but it could actually find-and-replace things like tabs and newline characters. That editor was the first piece of shareware that I ever paid to register... it was that good. It even had a built-in thesaurus!

I hung on to PC-Write for several years even after I got into the Windows universe, but eventually I realized that it was just going to be better to go with something that was integrated into Windows... for example, you couldn't easily copy and paste to and from the Windows clipboard from PC-Write. I needed to start using a Windows program. Windows Notepad is handy mainly because it is a true text editor (in contrast with Wordpad, which is liable to insert who-knows-what control characters into your document) and because it's pretty much always present on any Windows machine (and basically always the same, although I haven't used it on Windows 7 yet). But if you want to do anything other than typing characters and some light find and replace, Windows Notepad just doesn't cut it.

So we techies tend to find our own favorite text editors. If you don't have one yet, why not give my favorite a try: metapad! Metapad does not have an installer; you download it, unzip it, and click the icon to run it... I typically create a "metapad" folder in the C:\Program Files directory and unzip it there, then I create a shortcut to the executable in the Program Files folder and add C:\Program Files to the XP environment variables (right-click My Computer, choose "Properties", "Advanced" tab, "Environment Variables" button, add "C:\Program Files" to the end of the Path's "Variable Value") so I can just type "metapad" into the start/run dialog and get on the way to editing right away. I also set it as the default editor for .txt files, and sometimes some other file types as well. But because no installation is required, you can carry it around in your pocket on a flash drive as well (and I do). I plug in the flash drive and click the icon and I'm in business.

Metapad can do everything that Windows Notepad can do, but it takes several of those things to the next level. In a PC-Write-like feature, it is able to find and replace newline characters and tabs; I use that frequently when cleaning up snippets of code or when editing csv exports from MS Excel or other sources. There is an option to turn hyperlinks within the file into live links, so you can click directly on them and open a browser to the site. Word Wrap can be on or off, just like Notepad, so you can display files just as they actually exist or you can make sure every character is visible. You can mark a block of text and change it to all-uppercase, all-lowercase, "title case" (every word capitalized), "sentence case" (first word of each sentence capitalized), or "invert" the case of the marked block (every capital letter switched to lower-case and vice-versa). You can jump directly to a line number, which can come in very useful when editing code. And check this out: there is no file size limit! If you load a file that is larger than the memory of the computer can hold, metapad uses some clever paging to load as much of the file at once as it can, and it loads the rest of it as needed. Good stuff!

There are editors out there with a billion functions in them, ten of which you will use and the rest of which you will immediately forget that they even exist, or if you remember that they exist, you'll immediately forget how they work. Metapad has a fairly small number of functions, but the ones that are there are easy to use and worth discovering. There are a few functions that I haven't mentioned here (external viewer support, commit word wrap, support of text files from different platforms, etc.) but the feature set remains very basic... just what you need for the task at hand, and nothing more. It's like the perfect little Swiss army knife, the one with just the blade, the can opener, and the nail file, but not the toothpick/tweezers/magnifying glass/extensible fishing pole. It has just the feature set you need with no fluff. Give it a try!

Facebook

2009-10-30T06:00:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been thinking about all of the ways that Facebook fails to live up to its potential. It's an incredible concept and on that level it works well, but when it comes right down to it, Facebook fails as an example of a good application. How, you ask? Well, let me think:

Facebook is slow. I can't believe how often I sit there waiting on a page to load. There's a statistic for Web design: if it takes more than ten seconds for the page to load, people will give up and load a different page. I don't know if Facebook has hit that threshold yet, but they certainly do try my patience.
Facebook is accident-prone. I see error messages on Facebook almost every day. Ever see the cryptic and inexplicable "Profile Unavailable - Sorry, this profile is not available at the moment. Please try again shortly"? How about the even more cryptic "Database Write Failed - An error occurred while writing to our database. Please try again later or contact customer support"? And those are only two of what seems like a multitude of cryptic, unhelpful, and downright scary error messages that come up right in the users' faces. Users shouldn't see error messages consistently like we do on Facebook... the problems can, and should, be fixed. This is a BUSINESS site, for crying out loud. An error on my hobby site I do for free is one thing; somebody is presumably getting PAID to keep this stuff working. Even worse: sometimes users post something and it never shows up on the site at all. For no apparent reason. With no error message. They just never appear.
Facebook is hard to configure. There are some things about your profile that you can control, and other things that you can't. In the left-hand column, for example, there are certain things that you can add, using apps designed to do that. However, as far as I can tell, it's always GOT to be your profile picture on top, then "Information", then "Friends", and THEN whatever else you want on there. What if I want my Flickr pictures up under "Information"? Can't do it. And even things that you can configure sometimes have hidden gotchas. For example: ever notice that on your "Info" page you can list things like favorite TV shows, music, etc. and it will automatically create a link to other people with that same interest? Except if there happens to be a comma in whatever you put in there, in which case the links are all jacked up. Or if you put something like "The Beatles, Eric Clapton, & etc." in which case you will get a link to everyone else who also enjoys listening to "& etc."

How about this: I've put in a bunch of email addresses that I use, so that if someone searches for my work email address they'll be able to find me, but really I only want people to contact me at my Gmail address. Can I "hide" the other addresses on my info page so people don't try to contact me at those? Apparently not. Same thing with my work history... I don't think anyone really wants to know everywhere I've worked since 1994, but I do want all of those people to be able to find me if they're looking.
Facebook is hard to use. There are still things that I know good and well I can do on Facebook but can't find them when I need them. Case in point: find someone on your "Home" page whose updates you can do without in your newsfeed. Hover your mouse cursor over one of their posts until you see the "Hide" link. Click "Hide" and all of their posts should disappear from your news feed.

Now, un-hide them so they show up in your feed again. See if you can figure out how to do it without using Google. I couldn't!

Here's another example: in the "Inbox" area where you can send private messages to people, you can actually send one "private" message with multiple recipients. Problem is, when any of those recipients replies "normally" to the message (the blue button at the bottom of the screen, which says "Reply All"), the reply goes to everyone on the original distribution list! It is possible to "branch" off the "original thread" and reply to only the sender. See if you can figure out how to do it. It's right there in front of you, if you're looking! But it's FAR from obvious.

One more quick example: ever try to quit being a "fan" of something and remove it from your "Pages" list? Try it. I dare ya. It's easy to do... it's just impossible to figure out HOW to do it. An application has failed to be user-friendly if obvious tasks like this are hard to accomplish without a lot of concentration (and occasionally, a search engine).
Most apps are a menace. To use them you have to basically agree to let them read your mail, carry your checkbook in their purse when they go shopping, and take naked pictures of you as you sleep, but most of the apps have no need of the information they request. Even worse, some of the apps are what I would consider viral. I don't mind "verifying" that I was your classmate in school or that I'm your third cousin or whatever, but I don't want to give the "tru 2 ur skool" and "hiya, cuz!" apps permission to read all of my friends' names and check their medical records for evidence that they have embarrassing diseases. But apparently even to courteously say "yes, I went to school with Fred", I have to also become a user of whatever jacked-up Facebook app that Fred is trying out (and will ultimately decide that he doesn't even like). Plus, a good portion of the apps are just plain slow (which brings us full circle to my first point).
A new one since I posted this article on Facebook itself: major changes to the interface without any warning. Well, that's not entirely true; if you follow the Facebook blog you'll basically know what's going on. So, how about putting that blog on the login page, linking to it from the user's home page, SOMETHING like that? I didn't even think there was a Facebook blog until I Googled it. Did you? At any rate, major changes to the interface (like the one that happened last week) need to be announced in a way that users will know what's going on. The users don't like it... as evidenced groups called things like "bring back the old news feed" that pop up every time they roll out a new feed.

So why use Facebook at all? Because of the people. Since I've gotten on Facebook, I've reconnected with people I haven't seen since literally I was in my early teens. I've become re-acquainted with some of my dearest friends from other periods of my life, and in some cases, I've realized what it was that I liked so much about certain people in the first place. In some cases, I've found that I like people more now than I did when I knew them in a previous life! You guys who are reading this are the reason why I put up with all of Facebook's quirks. I'm having a great time (in between annoying error messages), and I hope you are too!

Friendster helped me spam my friends

2009-10-27T12:45:00.000-05:00

So, I thought I would take a look at Friendster and see what it was all about. An account is free, right? I got logged in, but then realized that there's not too much you can do without... well, without friends who are also on Friendster. So I decided to load up my address book from Gmail and see who it found.

That was mistake #1.

Then since I don't like to give out my email password, I thought I'd export my contacts as a .csv file and import them into Friendster that way.

That was mistake #2.

Turns out that when you import a .csv file to Friendster, it apparently assumes that you want to send an invitation to everyone in that list. No veto. No "look them up and see if they're on Friendster and if not let them alone." No nothing. It just instantly emails everyone in the .csv file!

Now, I had cleaned it up a little before uploading, but there were still some people in there I would have rather left out... fortunately, for most of those people my contact information was old so those emails bounced anyway. For the others, I sent out an email explaining what had happened and telling them that I didn't mean to spam them with Friendster invites. "I don't even particularly intend to use it forever," I told them. "...Just wanted to get the flavor. The flavor of spamming my entire address book isn't particularly tasty!"

Lesson to learn: social networking sites don't always act like you think they will. Make sure you know what you're doing when you tell them who your friends are!

Moving Web Site = Not Fun

2009-10-23T06:00:00.001-05:00

I've been having problems with 100 Megs Web Hosting for years. They've shut down housekeeping scripts that I set up on CRON jobs (and not told me they did it), they've shut down other scripts that they suspected of something, and finally last month they shut down my entire account. At that point I did two things: I pestered them until they turned the sites back on (which is basically the only way to get them to do anything), and then I did something I should have done years ago: opened a hosting account with APlus.net.

Quite some time ago I moved my domain purchasing to APlus from Go Daddy when Go Daddy started using sexually-charged advertising to grow its business. The reason I went with Go Daddy in the first place was because I knew the founder also created the Bible software I was using and loving at the time: QuickVerse. When the advertising started going the way it did, I realized that either the company had been sold, or the founder wasn't that big of a Christian in the first place. At any rate, I found APlus, and I was just about convinced to move my hosting there... and I would have, too, except for a few technical issues that were a problem. But, I figured, now was the time.

I hope I didn't jump too soon: APlus is spinning off their shared server hosting to a company called Hostopia.com... and forum posts seem to indicate that their customer service hasn't been the same quality as previously. My account wound up being one of the "not-upgraded-yet" accounts; I guess all of the hosting servers are being "upgraded" as part of the switchover, but I have yet to experience the new setup. I do know that the current setup is impressive, allowing the Webmaster to control a lot of things with the control panel that I had to do manually on my 100 Megs account. There are some things that are harder (such as accessing an external data source; because of their firewall setup you have to individually request them to open a port for each data source, by IP address!) but mostly things are easier, and there are multiple ways to get support (voice telephone, live chat, email).

I did want to document one thing. On my sites I like to let php parse my .html files; security by obscurity, although I don't particularly hide that I use php for my coding. php can be run either as a CGI or as an Apache module. On 100 Megs it was running as a module, btu on APlus they run it in CGI mode. It took me a day or two to get the syntax right in my .htaccess file. Here it is:

# CGI version
AddHandler x-httpd-php .html .htm .php
# Apache module version
#AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm .php

The hardest part, and something I ultimately had to find out from tech support because I didn't find it documented on the Web, was that the CGI syntax does not include "application/" on the name of the handler. Maybe this blog post will help somebody else out. Tech support recommended both the AddHandler and the AddType, but you should only need the one appropriate to the way php is running on your servers (although I don't imagine it would hurt to have both in place if you're nervous). I've commented out the AddType line with hash marks in my case.

Twitterfeed: The Sequel

2009-10-19T06:35:00.000-05:00

Last week I posted a blog entry about Twitterfeed... but then just a few days later Twitterfeed itself got a makeover! The big change that immediately became obvious to me was that now Twitterfeed can post to Facebook in addition to Twitter. I've had my Twitter account and my Facebook account linked up so that my blog posts would show up on Facebook, but this allows me to decouple them and let the blog posts go separately to Facebook. I like the idea of the "description" going to Facebook and just the "title" going to the more character-restricted Twitter, but your tastes may vary.

Twitterfeed is also now reportedly supporting Pubsubhubbub, which is a technology which should allow feed posts to show up on Twitter/Facebook nearly instantaneously. When I tried it on the day that Twitterfeed posted the announcement about the new upgrades, it didn't seem to happen that way, but it should be come apparent over the next week or so whether that is working.

They have also added some Google Analytics integration; I don't actively monitor my Google Analytics, so I can't really comment too much on this.

Glo Bible - Cool Queries

2009-10-16T06:00:00.001-05:00

A new piece of software launched this week, and I was so impressed with just what is shown in the demo videos that I blogged about it at one of my other blogs. I was especially blown away at the ease with which complex queries of the data can be constructed... take a look particularly at "Glo Demo Part 2 of 2", about 4 or 5 minutes in, where the answer to a complicated Bible question is figured out in mere minutes. Here's my blog post, which has the demo videos embedded in it.

Twitterfeed

2009-10-12T08:00:00.001-05:00

If you follow my Twitter account, you'll notice that whenever I post to one of my blogs (there's a list of them on the right-hand side of this page) a tweet always shows up. I don't do this manually; I use a great service called Twitterfeed:

http://twitterfeed.com main page

Twitterfeed is a simple service... you set it up with an RSS feed and with your Twitter account(s), and then when new information is added to the RSS feed, the link automatically gets posted to Twitter. I don't limit its use to my blogs, either... I use a service called WorldCat.org to keep track of books I read and movies I watch, and it can output RSS feeds as well. So when I read a book, everyone following me on Twitter automatically knows it! That's just for fun... the best thing is that it helps me publicize my blogs without having to think too much about it.

Something else I like about Twitterfeed is that it allows you to create an account using OpenID. This is accomplished using a nice service called RPX which handles all of the confusing parts of implementing OpenID. If you click "Sign in with OpenID" you'll see this screen:

RPX-powered login screen

Click the logo of one of the services on which you have an account, log into that service (if you are already logged in, as I usually am with my Gmail account, you're all done without having to log in again at all!), and your Twitterfeed account is ready to go! It couldn't be simpler. I'm planning on incorporating RPX into the redesign of my Guide to Petra Web site, coming up soon. As it is now, people have to go through a series of click-a-link-in-this-email steps to use the interactive portions of my site; this will work MUCH more smoothly!

You can set up multiple RSS feeds with one single Twitterfeed account, and you can actually post to multiple Twitter accounts as well. It also supports some services I hadn't heard of... laconica, ping.fm, and HelloTxt are in the drop-down. I've tested it with more than one Twitter account, and it worked great. You "link" the account using OAuth (basically, you log into the Twitter account from Twitterfeed) and then you put in a "Feed Name" and the URL for the RSS feed. And then you're done! Of course, there are some great "Advanced Settings" you might want to look at:

Twitterfeed settings for this blog

My favorite things to change are the "Update Frequency" (I set it really long because my blogs seldom update more often then once a day) and the "Post Prefix" (which is added to the beginning of each tweet), but there are also some other settings you might want to look at... whether the tweet is the title from the feed, the description from the feed, or both, for example, or whether the "newness" of the posts is determined by pubDate or GUID (if you don't know what that is, try one and see if it works as you expect... if it does, you're good). You also have the option of using any one of a large batch of URL shorteners... I use bit.ly (you can even give it your account information, if you like to use a bit.ly account) but TinyURL is there, and SnipURL, and a couple dozen others.

Once you have some feeds set up, the feed dashboard (which shows a list of all of the feeds you are automatically sending to Twitter) provides some interesting information; link click-throughs are tracked and displayed as bar-graphs. If you use Feedburner, as I do, you can even set things up so that you know how many click-throughs came via the bit.ly (or other service) link, and how many came directly through the Feedburner link. If you are thinking of using Twitterfeed for a business purpose, these kinds of metrics could be very informative.

The only time I've found the service to be anything but reliable was during a recent Twitter outage... but during the outage, Twitterfeed communicated status reports frequently through their own Twitter account. There was never a time during the outage that I felt like I didn't know what was going on with Twitterfeed. It truly is a set-it-and-forget-it situation; it just works, day-in, day-out. It's the glue that connects my social network friends with my blogs, and I've seen more comments than ever before on my blogs in the weeks since I started auto-tweeting my new posts. It's been a great help to me in getting my blog posts noticed!

Google Wave: What I'd Like To Use It For

2009-10-02T08:00:00.004-05:00

This week there's been a lot of chatter about something called Google Wave. The reason the buzz ramped up this week is that Tuesday Google announced that they would be expanding their beta-testing to 100,000 more users (plus their friends and relatives, apparently, because each invite comes with more invites for buddies attached). Wave is not something that is easy to explain in a few words, although the concepts are not hard to understand. It's kind of like email, except with the immediacy of an instant message and the editability of an online document. I know, that doesn't seem to make sense, so you have a couple of options to get you up to speed for this post. You can go to wave.google.com and watch their eighty-minute video... but who in the heck in this Twitterized, cell-phone-infused world has eighty minutes to sit and watch a video online? Instead, I recommend that you take a look at this one. It's a lot of fun to watch, is quite a bit shorter than the ten minutes they mention at the beginning, and it'll help you wrap your head around the basics:

Back? OK, so that kind of explains it. If you're still having trouble or want some more detail, I thought this Lifehacker article was helpful. Go ahead, I'll wait for ya.

...

OK. So Google Wave is looking like the coolest thing to come down the pike in a long time. Basically, it's a platform that a bunch of other things can kind of piggyback on. Now, I've been reading some articles on how people envision that Wave might be helpful in what they do... businessmen, for example, or newspaper writers or even filmmakers. For myself, the first thing I thought of when I saw it was, "That looks MUCH nicer than Facebook!" Indeed, some have speculated as to whether Wave could eventually do in both Facebook and Twitter, and I agree that it may give them (or the bug-riddled Facebook, at least) a run for their money at some point (of course, if they're smart they may actually incorporate the Google Wave technology themselves and then it becomes a question of who has the cooler interface and the most users, but anyway). But the more I thought about the capabilities of this thing, the more my mind started going in another direction.

Where I work we've been on a quest to find an effective trouble-ticket system. Our business is almost completely centered around what we can do with our Web sites, and customized computer coding is what I do all day long. When something is wrong with one of our sites, we get an email or a phone call, or sometimes we get a "drive-by" request (those are pretty common when your office is on the way to the bathroom for a lot of people!). Once upon a time we hired a contractor to build a trouble-ticketing system for us. It worked OK, and it was integrated with our internal systems, but there were still some things about it that were inflexible and caused problems. To a computer programmer, writing a ticketing system (someone logs a problem into the system, it is classified and prioritized, someone works on it and solves the problem, the ticket is closed, end of story) seems like a deceptively simple task, but things get complicated VERY quickly. Who can see the ticket I'm working on? The person who submitted it? What if they called it in on the phone and someone else keyed it in? Can they see my comments? I need to add a comment that is critical for developers but which might be confusing for end-users. What do I do with the screen shot the user emailed to me? What about this pdf they sent in as an example? Trust me, it gets crazy quick. So we abandoned the home-grown system and began shopping.

First we tried out a system called Trac which our I.T. director had used at a previous job. Trac is a combination wiki/ticketing system, and there are some things it does incredibly well... automatically linking text in the format "#123" to trouble ticket #123, for example. We ran into problems, though, when we tried to figure out ways for our customers to see the status of their tickets. There's just no obvious way to show part of what's in the system; it's pretty much an all-or-nothing proposition. So the I.T. director went shopping elsewhere.

Enter Jira. Besides the fact that the name makes me want to say "Gojira! Gojira!", the software is able to do all of the things we need it to... there is a flexible permissions system that allows you to show things to only the people who need to see them, but there are other great bells and whistles (like pasting in a screen shot directly from your Windows clipboard... how cool is THAT?) that impressed us so much that we are likely going to adopt it as our new ticketing system very soon. (It is a commercial product, by the way, but I am receiving no compensation for mentioning them.)

But just for a second, let's think about how Google Wave could be used as a trouble ticketing system. The hypothetical Wave-based ticketing system need not reside on Google's servers; the platform will be open-sourced, so the ticketing service could be a private machine owned by the company using it, or it could even be on a third-party hosting provider. Each new ticket would be a wave (when "wave" is lower-case, it means a particular "message thread" or "document", as opposed to the upper-case "Wave" referring to Google's product as a whole). When a ticket is opened by internal personnel, all of the stakeholders could easily be added to the wave; if the ticket comes from an external source, when the staff became aware of it they could add stakeholders to the wave themselves. As progress is made on the ticket, technicians could update the wave, and even add questions for the client; the client could modify or add information as necessary. I was particularly intrigued when I visited the Wave extensions page and saw the Ribbit extension. Assuming enough storage space is available to store them, the wave could conceivably hold the entire contents of a conference call, recorded for reference back if needed! Tickets could also be submitted via telephone and immediately and automatically added to the appropriate waves. Those audio tickets would be exactly what the client requested, with no intentional or unintentional translating done during data entry. The phone call IS the request.

The possibility of adding robust phone call/teleconference recording capabilities to the wave would be what would make it a killer app for trouble ticketing. One of the most frustrating problems we have with some of the people that we do work for is that a request is placed via telephone and either misunderstood or forgotten, and then it winds up never getting taken care of properly (or messed up, which may or may not be worse!) To be able to go back and follow every part of the ticket wave through its complete development, to have that granularity on the project, would be invaluable. It would be like the difference of getting where you want to go via horse cart, automobile, or jet plane.

Why oh why couldn't I have been one of those first 100,000 to request access? :)