Will the Last Person Leaving Facebook Please Turn Off the Lights?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 24, 2013 by admin in Technology
Thursday, January 24th, 2013Is social networking dead? Of course not. It just doesn’t feel good. And the latest Facebook alternatives like Diaspora, SocialNumber, and Identi.ca aren’t exactly thriving. Theorize all you want about social media, but in the end it’s all about US, not the platform.
 If you’re a nobody who wants to meet nobody, SocialNumber may be just what you’re looking for. |
People have been asking for some time now (myself included) if Facebook is dead. A couple of years ago, an article with that title was usually a whiny piece by a socially inept nerd who probably felt just as peeved at every party they attended as they did on Facebook. But the answer to the question “is Facebook dead?” has evolved quite a bit. Some say social media is healthier than ever. But that piece was published as SEO linkbait by a marketing consultancy. Of course social media is alive, if your income is derived from telling people to use it. But the argument used in that article – that Nielsen data indicates that “more people than ever are using social media” – is one of the best arguments that it IS dying. AOL, MySpace, and just about any other previous “big thing” you can name had the largest number of users at exactly the moment they sucked the most and began their decline. If you ask people who are more interested in accurately understanding how social media actually functions rather than how to exploit it, you’ll get a different kind of answer. Like Social Media is Dead and marketers probably killed it. Or it’s not quite dead, it just needs CPR. And if you ask people who look at the money, you get an equally unenthusiastic response, with observations about Zynga, Facebook, and Groupon’s stock performance. Remember when Groupon was valued at SIX. BILLION. DOLLARS? And while a lot has been written about Google+, that’s about the extent of it. Except for rabid Googlephiles, the place has tumbleweeds blowing through it. So what about other conduits in the social media realm? Twitter and Pinterest are noisy as hell, and provide little in the way of meaningful connection for people who speak in more than 140 characters or don’t like communicating with thumbnailed images. And Instagram, Spotify, and others? They’re fun, they’re shareable, but they’re really just part of the “entertainment system of social”. So what’s next? Who knows. That’s the whole idea behind the concept of disruption in tech or media realms. And are there alternatives to Facebook? Well, the last few options to get any buzz remain a little less-than-populated. We checked out two of them – Diaspora and SocialNumber – and have shared screen shots below to make some points. And a third called Identi.ca actually looks pretty intriguing, but you have to install software to actually participate. We may do a followup piece on it, but you can rest assured you won’t be hearing about it on cable news in the next year. So below are some quick thoughts on Diaspora and SocialNumber, but now I have to get moving and share this piece on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, like a good little social media murderer. Because our boredom isn’t killing Facebook; our marketing, spamming, and “self as brand” behaviors are. Read the rest of this entry »
Who Is This Guy Wolfram Alpha?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 8, 2013 by admin in Technology
Tuesday, January 8th, 2013And how did he get so smart? However he did it, I think I’ll be hanging out with him instead of Google more often.
That’s an actual search box. Give it a spin. |
I remember when Google was new. It not only seemed magical in its ability to present me with what I was looking for, it was truly elegant in its simplicity. No wonder it decimated competing search engines so thoroughly that most of us barely remember names like “Lycos”, “Alta Vista”, and “Excite”. Like everything exceptional though, there’s always the possibility that the people involved will start “drinking their own bathwater”, as the old saying goes, and that exceptional thing eventually becomes remarkably unexceptional. More and more, that’s my experience with Google search. It’s still pretty utilitarian much of the time, but often the top results are utter junk, largely because of the pervasive and self-concerned goals of the SEO wizards that target those results. And turning to the other two of the big three – Yahoo and Bing – may give a little more diversity in results, but often the results are nearly identical, because in their heart of hearts, they would love to be Google. One alternative that I tried randomly for a while was Millionshort.com, which ironically helps you remove Google’s top results to get BETTER results. It can be surprisingly effective, but always feels like you ordered a piece of pie and scraped the whipped cream off the top. It’s an odd workaround. So in my endless search for better search recently, I rediscovered Wolfram Alpha . We first talked about this amazing search tool back in 2009, but the other day, while I gave it a spin to do something I know it’s good at – i.e. helping you explore and calculate the physical properties of a material (in this case it was Gold), I was rather stunned at how it had subtly evolved into a fantastic general search tool. Give it a spin yourself; that’s a functioning search box in the upper left. You may be surprised at how smart the results are. As their tagline says: “It’s not a search engine, it’s a computational knowledge engine”. We’ll be doing a followup soon; today I spent about an hour doing side-by-side searches on Google and Wolfram Alpha of common things like hotels, cities, entertainers, politics, science, and technology, and I’ll share screen grabs and links to the often exceptional results. You may find it especially cool if you have terminal Wikiphilia like me. For now though, I have to get back to obsessive searches about things I just learned about two seconds ago. Below is a video explaining what it’s really all about. Read the rest of this entry »
Things Are Gettin’ Greener On The Server Farm
[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 26, 2011 by admin in Clean & Green
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011Did you know that two Google searches generate as much CO2 as boiling water on your stovetop? Big tech companies are finally taking bigger steps toward addressing their data center’s environmental impact, which often rivals that of entire cities.
A couple of years ago, we talked about your Facebook Footprint, pointing out that two Google searches produce the same amount of CO2 as boiling water on your stovetop, and that Facebook has a carbon footprint equal to half of New York City. So have things changed much? You’d like to think that the brightest minds at innovative companies like Google would have a solid forward vision as they build the massive data centers that power the things that you do every day on the web, but do they? Well, it’s hard to tell. In spite of the fact that large tech companies like Google and Facebook don’t think YOU deserve much privacy, they treat information about their data centers like state secrets. None of the major tech firms in a Greenpeace roundup fared especially well, primarily because of a lack of transparency on the part of the companies in question. But it appears big tech firms are finally making SOME kind of effort. AMD and HP are partnering to explore the potential of solar-only distributed data centers. After considerable pressure, Facebook installed solar panels at their Oregon operation earlier this year, and suggesting maybe there’s some kind of financial sense to the idea (although this is a common argument against green energy) even Standard & Poors is getting in on the action. And Apple – in spite of being such an innovative company when it comes to devices and the revenue streams attached to them, is one of the late joiners in the game. For more comprehensive roundups if you’re interested, check out this special report from DataCenterKnowledge.com or this one from EcoFriend .
Google Introduces “GMail Motion”
[ Comments Off ]Posted on April 1, 2011 by admin in Technology
Friday, April 1st, 2011If your laptop has a built in camera, Google’s new GMail Motion adds a gestural interface to your computer, partially freeing you of the mouse and control pad.
We’ve talked a lot about the disappointing state of the user interface before; in fact we’re still a little underwhelmed by the iPad. Which is why we’re so excited about the new Gmail feature (still in beta) called GMail Motion. It adds an intuitive, gesture-based functionality to your computer, requiring only a camera, now pretty much a standard feature on laptops. We probably will continue to hem and haw about Google’s escapades, especially after the hilarious story circulating yesterday about how when Google cleaned up their content farm search spam problem, they wiped out their own content briefly, i.e. Google Places. The follow up was even funnier, when, after denying they were in bed with content farm Demand Media, Google execs partied on the Demand Media CEO’s yacht, named – no joke – The Adsense. CEO Dick Rosenblatt’s followup call was even funnier, with his “dude, don’t talk about my yacht” demand. No wonder they call it Demand Media. But we digress. This new Google Motion tool is pretty cool, you can see how it works and sign up here, or just watch the vid below.
Internet Insecurity
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 24, 2011 by admin in Technology
Thursday, March 24th, 2011After the recent breaches of ultimate, top-level security resources like RSA and Comodo, giving sites like Facebook twice as much info for “enhanced security” seems like a faulty strategy.
Earlier today I had an experience that reminded me that – like many of us – I should really get more on top of managing my various internet accounts and their passwords better than I do. I was trying to log in to my YouTube “Director” account, and YouTube was trying to link the account to a Google acccount. I wouldn’t have minded this, except when I tried to link the Google account and the YouTube account – which had the same username, by the way – YouTube would tell me that the account was already linked to another Google account, which it wasn’t. After twenty minutes of password resets and cookie deletions, I finally managed to log in to my own account. And then GMail suggested I add additional user information as part of Google’s interpretation of Two-factor authentication. I opted not to do so. Why? Because I simply don’t believe that either Google or Facebook (which is trying to do the same thing by asking for your phone number as part of your account verification) is enacting these programs strictly for security purposes. Both Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Eric Schmidt of Google are on record as saying that they don’t believe that privacy is in your future, that anonymity is intrinsically bad (Zuckerberg has hilariously said “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”), and that we all need a verified identity on the web. This would make a lot of sense if you could in fact trust any web service to absolutely protect the information you gave them, but you can’t. In just the past week, two of the web’s ultimate sources of security verification – RSA and Comodo – have been hacked, a breach that Comodo’s own CEO Melih Abdulhayoglu likened to a web version of the September 11 attacks. And this of course is all hot on the tail of the well-publicized “Anonymous” attack of security firm HBGary. I’m no security expert, but I’m perfectly capable of thinking like a criminal. And my criminal mind tells me that giving twice as much information to an entity I can’t trust – i.e. any web-based service – really leaves me twice as vulnerable in the event that the entity is compromised. Which it almost certainly will be some day. I have made a casual but consistent effort to keep my online identity usefully accessible, without sharing my entire identity in one place, and will continue to do so. Common sense tells me that one-point interactions with services like Google, Facebook, banks, and other services, with a variety of e-mail accounts and varied passwords, is a decent strategy. But I think I need to ramp things up a bit. This article about password usage on Lifehacker – while screaming with irony because Lifehacker was one of the sites hacked when Anonymous went after Gawker – does hit on some key points. The author says he has 90+ accounts to manage. I’d put my number closer to 30, although if I add the accounts of clients, it may be more like 50 or 60. I’m beginning to do a bad job of managing them all, but plan to tighten things up where I can. At least I don’t use any of the 500 most common passwords. What about you? Do you trust sites like Google and Facebook with your full name, phone number, and other personal details? Or do you keep things closer to the chest?