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Will the Last Person Leaving Facebook Please Turn Off the Lights?

admin — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:14:32 +0000

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.

SocialNumber.com

If you really identify with that old Bob Seger song, or if all your life you’ve been saying “You just wait and see! Someday, I’m gonna BE NOBODY”, then SocialNumber.com may be for you. It bills itself as the “First ever anonymous social network”. Which immediately begs the question: if networking is all about meeting people, why would you want to do it ANONYMOUSLY? Or, to reverse the question: if you want to be ANONYMOUS, why would you join a SOCIAL NETWORK?!? Their rationale is to “avoid the fear of negative implications when using other social networks”. Negative implications? Like what? Wasting all day arguing about politics with people you only know through FarmVille? I signed up anyway. More on that below.

Signing up for this site made me feel all cloak-and-daggery. So I figured that I should create a throwaway email for it, and after doing some quick research on webmail that helps you remain anonymous, I gave up. If you sign up for a service like RiseUp, they offer all sorts of assurances about protecting your identity, but if I were a government spook looking for sneaky people, I’d just train one of my recently arrested Anonymous hackers to exploit the servers. So I ended up just using plain old Hushmail. When I finally logged in, I was a little disappointed at the hot topics and numbers of users. Click for a larger image:

Yup, Anonymous, Atheism, and Sex. Unless I’m mistaken, I think you can find this all on Reddit. And if you really want to be an Anon, do you use a commercial website, or IRC channels and other mysterious and high-tech protocols? By the way, if you’re an Anon who DOES use SocialNumber and I’m wrong, please don’t get pissed and take my server down. I mean no offense. Anyway, this site also kept making me think of what Dr. Strangelove said about the Doomsday Device, i.e.: “Of course, zee whole point of a Doomsday Machine eeze lost, if you keep eet a SECRET! Why didn’t you tell zee world, EH?” So, moving on….

Diaspora

I was excited about Diaspora when I first heard about it, because it seemed like it had hopes of becoming everything that Facebook WAS and then abandoned in order to attempt to improve its stock valuation. Unfortunately, every time I log in, I feel even lonelier than I did BEFORE I logged in. The sparse interface is nice, but the users seem sparse too! And many of the posts seem to be about what you CAN’T do, like sharing content the way you’d like. This site got its press last year; I personally think it’s doomed. I hope they prove me wrong. But the last post in my stream yesterday was 20 days old:

Identi.ca

This is a network driven by posts that are no longer than 140 characters. Wait. Isn’t that just Twitter? Well, not really. One thing that makes this one interesting is the fact that it’s powered with open source software that you download. Which is exactly why I DIDN’T try it; I might try later, but I think most users would delay trying it for the same reason. But when Twitter inevitably goes for an IPO, this might be one of the sites to look at. They claim they’re dedicated to remaining open source, and that, in the end, is what is missing in social media at this point.

You can talk all you want about what makes social media tick, but in the end, it’s US, not all the ways someone can exploit it to market things.

Identi.ca at least has a nice clean interface:

Is social networking….

Who Is This Guy Wolfram Alpha?

admin — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 04:14:46 +0000

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.

Things Are Gettin’ Greener On The Server Farm

admin — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:06:02 +0000

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”

admin — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 17:13:42 +0000

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.

We assume we’ll receive at least one e-mail pointing out that Google Motion is not available. Bring it. You’re the fool that’s still reading. We didn’t feel like doing a lot of work this year. Last year, we made the entire site look like CNN for a day, and the year before we presented my obituary, which got incredibly polarized reviews. Some people were quite ecstatic, for the record.

Internet Insecurity

admin — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 04:48:07 +0000

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?

Google Cleans Up Content Farm Search Result Spam – Finally

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 03:11:31 +0000

I would have been even MORE pleased if the top
result for “content farm” were now “Demand Media”.

Let’s all take our hats off to Google for a moment for finally tackling the problem of their own crappy search results. If you have to do a lot of web research, you’ve probably noticed over the past few years that Google’s search results were getting spammier and spammier, thanks mostly to content farms like Demand Media, something we already belly-ached about a while back. Okay, now lets put our hats back on. Why did it take them so long to fix this? This was definitely a problem as long ago as 2006. It’s inconceivable that the Search Quality Team at Google hadn’t noticed it, and their recent fix seemed to come hot on the tails of the article by Michael Arrington on high-profile tech blog TechCrunch called Search Still Sucks , in which he said the thing many of us have thought for quite some time. So why did it take so long? The reasonable inference is that since Google’s largest revenue stream is ads, and content farms generated millions of page views with Google ad content, it would be a bit awkward to proactively blacklist them all. But that’s what Google has finally done; if you review lists like the ones at Search Engine Land and SYSTRIX, it’s immediately evident that the big losers in Google’s fix are mostly “Demand Media” sites. Which I find vaguely gratifying. If you’re not familiar with Demand Media, check out the PBS MediaShift series about companies like theirs. One of the most telling things about Demand Media is simply who the CEO is. While one has to acknowledge the drive and accomplishments of Richard Rosenblatt, about the only positive thing I can say about a guy who developed a company like MySpace is that he then managed to screw Rupert Murdoch by selling it to him for over half a billion dollars. In creating Demand Media, he’s shown that while he has incredibly savvy, drive, and management skills, he’s either entirely driven by the bottom line at the expense of any benefit to the human race, or utterly delusional. In this Business Insider piece about how Google’s algorithm change “hasn’t hurt their business at all” his EVP of Media and Ops says “We have built our business by focusing on creating the useful and original content that meets the specific needs of today’s consumer“. Yes Demand Media. I’m sure today’s consumer has been clamoring for more crap content to dig through to find any actual useful information. And while my greatest complaint about Google remains more about what I’d call their “imperial overreach” – in that their near-total domination as a portal to the web is the worst thing that’s happened to search in its relatively short history – we still have to give them an incredible amount of respect. The fact that you can dip into a global library of information and extract relevant information in seconds with relative ease borders on mystical. The unfortunate thing is that if we’re using a library as the analogy here, I think we now have the problem that everyone in the world is going to try to shove their book onto the shelves, and there are no librarians on duty, just an algorithm and an advertising department. A friend asked me the other day what I thought the solution to Google’s search problem was, and I said something I’ve said for several years when answering the question: “human edited content“. While the Open Directory Project (which was based on this concept) bit the dust ages ago from internal “link whoring” corruption, it doesn’t mean that the idea won’t work. Wikipedia is a great example of fairly reliable human-edited content. Why couldn’t this work with search? In any case, although I’m suspicious – as others are – of the continued presence of crap eHow.com content in results, I’m already relieved to see fewer “HubPages.com” and “Examiner” results. I just wonder if they’re going to fix that “bookmark site that links to a blog post that links to an article on HuffPo that steals an article wholesale from another site” problem.

Facebook To Demand DNA Sample For Log In

admin — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 03:24:06 +0000

Sometimes I feel like I’m Charlton Heston’s character in Soylent Green, running around screaming “it’s made of people!” while the masses around me munch away muttering through full mouths “but it’s so yummy“. Recently I asked the opinion of friends on Facebook about which e-mail client I might switch to after having a nightmarish experience “upgrading” to Thunderbird 3 (an experience that many have shared, by the way). One thing that surprised me a little was that a few tech-savvy friends said “why not G-Mail?” to which I replied “because it’s a web service not an e-mail client” and added “besides, I don’t like all my messages eternally remaining in the hands of a company whose CEO has so much contempt for personal privacy“, to which one of these friends said “privacy is an illusion”. Which let me use one of my favorite ironic quotes, i.e., Obama’s Cynicism Is A Sorry Kind Of Wisdom. Because while it’s true that certain lifestyle choices insure that most of your life is an open book, that doesn’t mean we all have to roll over, shave our heads, get our citizen ID tattoo, and start living like we’re in the movie THX 1138 or something. Call me a Luddite, but in spite of the fact that I have nothing to hide, I’m not going to give all my trust to Google and Facebook when it comes to my personal communications, and I’m certainly not going to start “checking in” with services like Foursquare or Facebook Places. I feel like there are degrees of privacy, and that we’re all entitled to maintain as much as we like or are able. I was a little annoyed that Google captured me sitting on my porch a few years ago, but I’ve since moved, and clearly, I blew my own cover in that instance out of amusement. But how would you feel about Facebook being your Internet Driver’s License? That idea doesn’t appeal to me too much, for a few reasons. First, on top of the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has already declared privacy dead, ex-Googler and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg agrees, and is probably more eager to sell your data than Zuckerberg is. And since that’s a Gawker Media article I just linked to, let’s just take a moment to remember what can happen to millions of us at once when we entrust our personal information to a site that thrives on verified users but doesn’t care about their privacy. Facebook has done little to improve the security of your information as they’ve grown; anyone can still easily download this Firefox plugin and start hacking nearby users’ accounts with a method called sidejacking, and Facebook’s one time password solution for mobile users has a profound intrinsic flaw that I’m surprised hasn’t gotten more attention. My recent favorite was when I went to log in and Facebook put on a little Security Theater (see nice overview of the process here if you haven’t experinced it yet ) for me by asking for another e-mail, my mobile number, and then asked me to identify my friends in a lineup. Something that apparently has created real problems when people have been asked to identify friend’s dogs and Gummy Bears to get into their account. Becoming the sole single sign-on service provider so far remains the holy grail of huge tech companies like Google and Microsoft, but now it looks like Facebook has a chance of pulling it off. How would you feel about Facebook being the primary issuer of your internet traveling papers?

Google’s Chrome OS Takes All Your Computing To The Cloud

admin — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 21:49:50 +0000

The tech industry was abuzz the last few days with talk about Google’s introduction of their Chrome OS and notebook on Tuesday. If this means nothing to you, Wired has a good in-depth look here, but in a nutshell, Google announced that they’re launching their cloud-centric operating system and web-based software store in conjunction with a lightweight laptop that has no hard disc drive, comes with a 100MB a month Verizon wireless data plan, and essentially runs all your software and stores all your files on the web. A true cloud computing experience. While I must confess to being a bit of a Goldilocks-like would-be early adopter, always pouting “this porridge is too hot” or “this porridge doesn’t have USB“, I have to say that I have absolutely NO IDEA why they’re pursuing this strategy. Well, actually I do, and suspect it’s based on some of the same trickery that Apple used to get us excited about their new device (the iPad) when what they really were selling us was a platform to buy more stuff from them. What I don’t understand is why you or I would want to follow them down this road. Or up this sky, as the case may be. The selling points that Google highlights in cute videos – like instant web, same experience everywhere, always connected – are great. But underlying all of this “don’t worry about your files and software, we’ll take care of that for you” approach is something that still troubles me. I’m sometimes accused of being a little paranoid, and forced to pull out the old William Burroughs line that “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on“. But here’s the thing. While cloud computing makes a lot of sense for a variety of enterprise scenarios, why on GoogleEarth would you want ALL of your software running on a Google server somewhere, and more importantly, all your PERSONAL FILES? The recent US government-mandated shutdowns of WikiLeaks from providers like Amazon and PayPal should be a potent reminder that if you want to keep control of your stuff, don’t give control of it to a large corporation. And perhaps especially not one whose CEO has such interesting views on privacy. Or one that has such a curious relationship with a company like Verizon. Or that wants to take your CAPS LOCK key away. But seriously, in spite of my perpetual tech cynicism, I’m intrigued to see where Google goes with the Chrome venture, enough so that I’m signing up for their pilot program in the hopes of being a test user. See Google’s introductory clip below.

New Google Technology Makes Humans Superfluous

admin — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 03:55:00 +0000

Words could never begin to express the sense of relief I felt today when I read on the Google Blog that they’ve finally developed technology to do away with the human element altogether. After more than two years of generating original content every day, I run out of juice occasionally, and I was starting to worry that I would become one of the millions of user-generated content generators that fails to generate, and ends up apologizing for why I haven’t posted recently. By the way, if you need to filter the 111,000,000 results from that link, there’s a blog for that. And although I have some regrets that this new Google technology will render my existence unnecessary, in a way I’m looking forward to doing whatever it was that I did before the Internet came along. If only I can remember what it was without Googling it. In any case, until Google activates this new, completely human-free web, you may be interested to know that that as a user-generated content generator, you can already build an entire web site without even resorting to the content farms I was making fun of a few weeks ago. That’s right. Primal Pages lets you enter a phrase, and then assembles existing content from around the web for you. After you answer the question “What are you thinking about?”, you really don’t have to make any more conscious decisions except whether or not to click the “publish” button. As their tagline says: “If the website you need doesn’t exist, let Primal Pages build it for you in seconds.” I for one welcome this human elementless web, although I didn’t go down without a struggle. I thought that if I made a YouTube clip of a letter to Google using Google Scribe, that the Internet search deity might lend an ear. Clip below.

My last attempt to communicate with Google:

One of the things that I love about the combination of autocomplete and “Google Instant” is that before I even finish typing “world’s biggest poop” I have a whole page of poop to look at.

Dear Google: Please Stop Finishing My Sentences For Me

admin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 03:44:03 +0000

When a friend of mine’s two year old son doesn’t like something, he uses an expression which I find handy. He says “I can’t like it“. That’s my reaction to Google Instant. As googletastically amazing as I’m obliged to say that it is – for fear of being perceived as a Luddite – it mostly just gets on my nerves. There are a number of reasons I’ll probably keep the feature disabled, but primary amongst them is the fact that it mimics one of my few pet peeves, which is when people try to finish my sentences for me. My thinking is far too erratic most of the time for people to ever get it right. I mean, it wouldn’t bother me if they did get it right, but they almost never do. And since Google’s results have become so blogjammed anyway, I feel like I’m just getting often mediocre results faster. Which I don’t find all that gratifying. One of Google’s biggest sell points is that since they’ve determined that it saves you 2-5 seconds per search, they can make the cute claim that “If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second“. Personally, I have the time to waste. If I live to the age of 75, I have about 786,240,000 seconds left. And if I did 50 searches a day for the rest of my life, that would only be about 456,250 searches, which – with the cantankerously slow “old school” method, clocking in at around 9 seconds per search – would only take me about 4 million seconds. I’ll wait. For the record, I have other objections that have to do with tools that control us rather than the other way around. A few of them are summarized nicely in this piece, which points out not only how much control the feature gives Google over word usage, but how the new feature affects how ads are displayed. I think Google Instant is more about creating Buzz than a good user experience. What about you? By the way. Thanks for not interrupting.

Google’s introductory video ends with the slightly disturbing remark “You can think less about how you search, and more about what you find”

Sure. Google that for me, Google. Just spare me the commentary.

Apparently this conversational frustration plagued Yahoo Instant Search back in 2005: