adamyntium

Category: communication tools

  • It’s (mostly) okay that everyone is everywhere all at once

    It’s (mostly) okay that everyone is everywhere all at once

    Brief thoughts about the fracturing of online communication

    tl;dr: I think a lot of folks are wrongly conflating personal messaging, topical communities, and general social networks (though I get there’s a bunch of overlap). And I think the increasing fracturing of these venues is actually fine, except for the first category… which is indeed quite annoying.

    PERSONAL MESSAGING

    iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Line, FB Messenger, etc. The apps we use to keep in touch with our family and friends, 1:1 and in small groups.

    It’s certainly a pain when the people we care about are spread across so many different services, because it means we have to keep a bunch of apps on our phone, remember which app so-and-so checks more often, etc. And a world where Apple opens up iMessage to the world or embraces RCS… seems, alas, unlikely.

    My personal favorite messaging app is currently Signal, from a non-profit org of the same name that’s created a well-made cross-platform, end-to-end-encrypted service. It supports the things most normal people want and expect from a messaging service, like sending your bestie a photo or short video that doesn’t look like a potato when received. Unless it actually is a potato, in which case… go Idaho farmers!

    TOPICAL COMMUNITIES

    This set includes Subreddits (groups) on Reddit, hobbyist forums, Facebook groups, etc.

    It’s fine that these are fractured! When one wants to talk about, say, Japan travel, it’s no problem that there are 4200 different places to learn and engage. Many of those communities are great and helpful and one doesn’t have to keep up with all of ’em on various phone apps 🙂

    GENERAL SOCIAL NETWORKING

    This describes services such as Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and of course Facebook’s ‘main feed’ (but it’s complicated!*), and so on.
    And it shouldn’t worry us that users are — and likely will remain — fractured across these services.

    After all, in real life we have a set of places where we like to hang out, and they all feature different groups of people, distinct vibes, and so on.

    Folks are understandably concerned about a perceived “winner takes all” scenario here, but the internet has gotten big enough that… that’s unlikely to be an issue.

    Maybe Post will stay small.
    Maybe Bluesky will take off or maybe it won’t.
    Hopefully Spill (a newer Black-centric social network) will grow and thrive.

    There’s room for ’em all!

    My only firm expectation (and hope) at this point is that Twitter finally dies

    I genuinely understand and appreciate that many people have quite fond memories of that place and will be sad to see it go to that great big bitbucket in the sky. But it’s like your cranky-but-beloved granny who got bit by a zombie. She’s not the same granny anymore. Let her go, friends, let her go.

    Image credit: Pieter Brueghel the Elder – bAGKOdJfvfAhYQ — Google Arts & Culture, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22178101

    (* As you can see from the multiple mentions of Facebook in the lists above, it’s a confusing/confounding example because it’s at once so many different things! (messaging service, topical groups, generalized social network, etc.)

  • Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms: don’t believe the anti-hype

    Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms: don’t believe the anti-hype

    Everyone’s hella snarking about the FB Horizons Workrooms project (collaborative work in virtual reality) but mark (ha!) my words…

    • 99% of them haven’t tried it.
    • 95% of them didn’t bother actually RTFA (“Who is gonna pay thousands of dollars per person for this??!?” [it costs $299])
    • Nearly everyone will be “WOW! This is revolutionary!” when Apple eventually copies, er, makes their own version (in fairness, Apple will introduce it in a far more polished way) 😀
    Introduction to Horizon Workrooms, by Oculus (a Facebook company)

    I haven’t tried Horizons Workrooms yet because, well, it’s not like Google is gonna go all-in on this for our remote work… and other than Google stuff, I’m generally not collaborating on projects (and I don’t think all my fellow non-profit Groupmuse Foundation board members have the Oculus Quest headset this software requires).

    But it seems reasonably useful to me. In particular, I’ve really appreciated spatial audio in gamings and social meetups on various apps!

    I know that a ton of us are really Zoom’d out at this point (including me), but there are some very key aspects of VR collaboration that mitigate many problems with ‘regular’ video conferencing:

    • No more constant eye-contact. Seriously, every colleague literally facing every other colleague is so unnatural and sometimes even unnerving, not to mention fatiguing!
    • You no longer see yourself on camera. Whew! Also a big stress relief.
    • And the aforementioned spatial audio is a surprisingly helpful way of quickly getting clued in on who is speaking. It’s just more natural to hear voices coming from different “locations” vs. all blended together via your laptop speakers.

    Not Yet Frequently Asked Questions

    (but I thought I’d answer them anyway)

    “But Adam, won’t the ads be annoying?”

    I’d be surprised if this product gets ads shoved in it, since it’s targeted at professionals vs. consumers. I expect it’ll be a loss leader, a way for Oculus to get people to buy their hardware, or something with a freemium upsell in the future.

    “How can we trust Facebook with private conversations?!”

    If they hope to get big companies onboard (and that’s their path to major profit on this I’d think), they’ll need to include pretty ironclad guarantees re privacy. And lying in that context would screw them over big time.

    “But… cartoon characters? With no legs? This looks like a kiddie game!”

    Fair. But, as I said, this thing runs on $299 headsets, and it has head and hand tracking but no other physical tracking. With the available computing power at that price point (and without a required PC in the background), any attempt at animated photo-realism would be a pretty painful Uncanny Valley experience.

    “Wouldn’t this be uncomfortable for 8 hour stretches?!”

    First of all, those of you in 8-hour-stretches of meetings on the daily… you have far bigger problems worry about than the uncomfortableness of a headset. But that extreme aside, yeah, I can’t imagine a typical VR headset being comfortable for particularly long stretches and, besides, the Quest’s battery only lasts 2-2.5 hours.

    But for collaborations that last, say, 1 hour… heck, I’ve spent far more than that playing mini-golf on my Quest without any adverse effects :).

    “Speaking of adverse effects, don’t people get nauseous in VR?!”

    Yep, they sure do, but usually from games involving motion (roller-coastering, running, falling, etc). I would be really surprised if many folks felt sick from a virtual collaboration app in VR.

    Curious to know what you think!

    Have you tried this yet? Or even just socialized in VR before? 🙂
    Any sort of collaboration you’d be interested in tackling with this?

  • ExpressionEngine to Blogger — My blog reborn

    Well, that was a pain in the gluteus maximus! I’ve spent a total of over 20 hours (!) setting up a Blogger blog and moving all of my blog entries and comments over from my old blog home powered by ExpressionEngine.  I think I have pretty much everything transferred successfully now, but I’m counting on you, fine readers, to set me straight (in the comments) if I’m mistaken :-).

    Why did I do this?
    I felt I was spending too much time on technical issues and not enough time on, well, actually writing posts and replying to your comments.  The key factors in my decision to change blogging platforms were these two:
    – Frustration with my blogging software (ExpressionEngine)
    – Annoyance with my web host, and dealing with web hosting in general

    ExpressionEngine

    • Probably stemming from some file/template/database corruption somewhere down the line, I ended up having to spend 5+ hours troubleshooting each time I did even minor software upgrades.  EE staffers were always helpful and kind in working with me, but still… 🙁
    • I never was able to find a way to add WYSIWIG post editing (yeah, yeah, I know… you’re gonna make me surrender my geek badge, but hey, it often makes drafting posts easier/faster!). 
    • I never became comfortable with the control panel / dashboard of EE, and sadly I did not feel their new 2.0 was an improvement.  I found the dashboard to be unintuitive, often requiring an enormous number of clicks just to do basic (and oft-needed) things… stuff was never where I expected or thought it should be, and so on.
    • It became increasingly clear that EE was way overkill for what I wanted to do.  Enormously powerful but massively complex, I often had to spend a ton of time to figure out how to do even simple things with my blog.

    Web hosting

    • I had high hopes for NearlyFreeSpeech, but I’ve been disappointed.  I’ve experienced downtime, had my sites move to a new server (with no silent and persistent redirection on the part of the host), and surprisingly found the service not nearly as cheap as I thought I’d be.  I think the kicker was when I learned that they discourage users from serving gzip-compressed html pages to save load on their servers.  Uncool 🙁
    • And in general, having to host one’s own site is just a pain.  Yeah, yeah, I’m gonna miss a lot of things, including the ability to tweak, tune, customize, etc.  But I’m looking forward to never again wondering whether my site’s down because their mySQL server died, apache choked, I forgot to pay my bill, etc. 

    Why Blogger and not, say, WordPress?
    Because I want to spend time writing rather than learning php, patching my software or plugins to protect against yet another vulnerability, dealing with a web host, and so on.  WordPress is truly an awesome, amazing piece of software… even moreso, considering that it’s free.  But after spending a zillion hours tinkering with and cursing at Radio Userland, Movable Type, and ExpressionEngine, I’m looking forward to now shacking up with the not-so-powerful-but-generally-reliable partner of Blogger.

    How did I move everything over?
    Very carefully, and with great, great pain.  Here were the steps involved, as best as I can remember:

    • Figured out how to export my entries and comments from ExpressionEngine.
      • My web host choked when I tried to export everything at once, so I did this in three batches, thus creating three export files.
    • Copied relevant images and other files from my web host’s server to my hard drive via FTP.
    • Created an appengine account, created a Google Apps account, and then, using both of these products, somehow mapped a subdomain of mine to my app.
    • Found a way to use appengine as a web host.  Apologies; I’m too lazy to find the info now, but hopefully lazyweb will help me and then I can link to it :). 
    • Downloaded python to my Windows desktop, plus the Google App Engine launcher.
    • Created a directory on my hard drive to store the images and other blog files referred to in my blog posts, and then uploaded them to my appengine account using the Google App Engine Launcher
      • And if anyone can tell me how I can deploy these files without having to enter in my Google Account credentials every time, I’d appreciate it 🙂
    • Back to the exported entry+comment files:  edited a ton of domain references, including pointers to images that I had uploaded using the EE software.
    • Tried various Windows Grep programs to make batch changes to URLs in the export files, remove a lot of extra line-feeds from those same files, change emoticon smilies to text smilies, and a lot more.  I ended up paying $30 for Multiple File Search and Replace, which frankly isn’t all that great usability-wise, but it seemed to be the best of the lot. 
      • On a related note, I learned (of course, the hard way) that Blogger silently discards any comment that has an img tag.  More specifically, it throws away comments that have any tags other than the following: A, B, BR, I, EM, and STRONG
    • Armed with seemingly ready export files, I then had to convert these exports from MT (MovableType) format into a format suitable for Blogger importing, so I used the handy online MovableType to Blogger app.
    • I then opened up a test blog to test the importing of the files.
      • This is important, because once you import and publish the entries, those URLs cannot be reused on that blog, so if your first import isn’t perfect and you do a batch delete and re-import, you’ll end up with even yuckier-than-usual Blogger URLs :-(.
    • After doing some more adjustments via the steps above (e.g., more grepping to fix stuff), I then created my actual blog (this one) and mapped it to a subdomain.
      • Picked a template, customized it a bit, added some widgets, etc.
    • Then… import time!  Only to find — ack!  About half of my entries were imported with crappy line spacing.  So I spent literally hours going through and editing entries to fix egregiously bad (read: extra extra extra br’s) line spacing.  In retrospect, I don’t think better pre-processing of the export files could have prevented this.  Too many variables (amongst body formatting, comment formatting, etc.)
    • Once I was reasonably sure that I was ready to move things over, it was time to have fun making 301 redirects from my old blog pages to my new blog pages!
      • I couldn’t find any way to query Blogger for a time-ordered list of entry URLs, so I used Xenu’s Link Sleuth.  Unfortunately, that didn’t get me an actual time-ordered list, either, and I ended up having to spend a couple of hours correlating bladam.com URLs with grouped-by-month blogger URLs using an excel spreadsheet. (I was pretty easily able to get a list of URLs from ExpressionEngine to begin with by playing with existing templates).
      • I made sure to create sets of redirects for entries, months, and categories, including fixing old redirects from my last domain change, and then created separate .htaccesses per directory on my old server with these redirects in them.
    • Dissatisfied with Blogger comments, I decided to implement commenting on this blog with Disqus.  But for more than a day, Disqus barfed up an error message whenenver I tried to import my Blogger comments into my Disqus account; luckily, Disqus apparently took some pepto-bismol this morning and the comments imported just fine this morning.
      • Note that replacing Blogger comments with Disqus commenting may or may not have SEO ramifications, depending upon whom you believe.  With no insider knowledge whatsoever — just my own playing around and testing — I have a sense that Disqus is not a happy thing for SEO, but in this case I just didn’t care enough; I’d rather have fewer, happier readers and fewer comment-moderation headaches.

    Whew!  I think that accounts for much of the process, though I’ve probably forgotten some of the zillions of steps involved in the transfer.  I also omitted the swearing parts.

    What am I sorely missing from ExpressionEngine?
    A lot!  Including…

    • The ability to choose my own URL format for entries (rather than the ugly date format Blogger insists upon).
    • The option to choose my own per-post URLs, for more memorable and scannable URLs to show up in search results and so on.
    • Super-powerful templating in which it’s possible to have almost any view for anything (tag lists, archives, etc.). 
    • A lot of power-user stuff in general… the ability to set meta-descriptions, to futz with html title formats, to have a fav icon, and — most importantly — the ability to have a custom 404 page!

    What is frustrating me about Blogger?

    • A lof the defaults just seem ill-thought-out and often not even changeable unless you muck about in the template HTML, which is what I was aiming to avoid by coming to Blogger in the first place.  For instance, you can’t change the size, the positioning, or pretty much anything about the template attribution :-(. 
    • And, at least in this template, there are scary-awful padding and other css defaults that are a pain to override.  For example, every image is css’ingly placed into this hellish drop-image thing that looks out of place within the already-sorta-drop-shadowed content panels.  Okay for photos, but for every other image (e.g., icons)… ouch!
    • Some things that I’d think should be really basic are just seemingly crazy-hard to accomplish.  For instance, I wanted to include a little blip of text in my sidebar which mentions how many posts and comments my blog has currently.  Simple, right?  Nope.  Despite Googling for this and trying a few suggestions, I’ve not found anything that works.
    • No templates featuring 2 or 3-column fluid layout?  Aw 🙁
    • Inline css, and lots of it, on every page?  Why on earth doesn’t Blogger call a (user-editable) external stylesheet? 😮  In general, reading through the source of Blogger-created makes me want to run and hide.

    What do I like about Blogger?

    • I like having a WYSIWIG editor (though I realize this might be partly to blame for the HTML output). It’s nice to be able indent and exdent in bulleted lists without having to worry about nested ul and li tags and such.  In fact, the editor is pretty handy in general, letting you quickly add labels, move images around, backdate or postdate posts, and so on.
    • The template editor has some neat functionality.  I like how I can change colors and fonts and such with just a few clicks and instantly see these changes reflected in my blog.
    • I don’t have to worry about my data.  While uptime isn’t perfect, I’m rather darn sure that Google isn’t going to lose my posts 🙂
    • It’s free 🙂

    Philosophical considerations
    So I’ve spent way too much of a couple of weekends doing this blog transfer thing.  And for what?  I’m still not sure.  Looking through my bladam analytics, it’s pretty clear that:

    • I don’t have a ton of visitors, typically around 250 a day.
    • And most of those are reading just a handful of entries (often the, ahem, ones with titilating keywords; boy, must those folks be disappointed!)
    • Looking back over a lot of my older entries, they’re either stale, boring, embarrassing, or a combination of those attributes.  Do I even want that stuff still on the net?!
    • Shouldn’t I be spending time outside?  With friends?  Or making new stuff (music compositions, for instance)?

    But what’s done is done, and thank jeebus, it looks like the bulk of bladam (excepting subsequent tweaking) is now done and ready for new blog posts.  That, of course, raises many of the same questions:  is it true that those who can’t do, write?  Or is the act of writing (and the hopeful pleasure and utility others derive from such writing) a substantive enough asset in itself?  That, my friends, is perhaps fodder for another post.  For now, I think I’m going to finally peel myself away from this computer and heave a few very big sighs of relief.

    *  *  *

    Anyway, thanks for reading my first post on bladam-on-Blogger, and I hope you like my new blog’s home and (eventual) design and new content :-).

  • Dear FB, Twitter – We want narrowcasting, not just broadcasting!

    Earlier this week, I wanted to send a Facebook message to my dancer friends in the Bay Area  to invite them to a local event.  I ended up manually sifting through my entire friends list, since there’s no way to invite or message an intersection of friends.  Similarly, I wanted to post a twitter note to my Google buddies in a particular geographic region, but Twitter doesn’t support any sort of useful narrowcasting, either.

    Basically, social service nowadays seem hellbent on having us share our lives and connect with more and more people.  I don’t want that, and I’m betting a lot of you feel the same way:  we want to deepen our relationships with our current friends, share details of our lives with the friends who are most likely interested in those particular details, and so on.

    A lot of the brouhaha over FBs aggressive more-sharing push has been over privacy, but in the rush to protest “ZOMG, I don’t want my mom to know THAT!” the complementary concerns of narrowcasting have been largely ignored.  I’m personally a lot less worried about someone finding out something I don’t want them to know about, and far more concerned about burning out my friends with info they find irrelevant and uninteresting.

    Is it not madness that I can’t post a note joking about a local politician just to my Mountain View  friends?  This highlights one of a great many situations in which there are no privacy issues (I’m not trying to keep my bad sense of humor a secret from my friends in Europe), but rather that my friends outside MV aren’t likely to care about this topic.  And worse yet, these friends will likely stop reading my posts altogether unless I either post less overall (a bummer!) or magically somehow write entries that are appealing and relevant across my diverse group of friends (pretty impossible).

    *  *  *
    I think I speak for most of us non-hermit’y types in noting that:

    • Our sphere of acquaintances and friends is growing at an astonishing rate… due to the awesome people we meet online, at work, via friends, from family members, etc.
    • We have an innate desire to stay in touch with many of these folks and to share interesting and relevant stuff with them.
    • Relationships are not symmetrical, nor are the related communications desires!  I may hang on the every brilliant and witty word of a friend, but she may be, um, less fascinated with my mutterings (while still wanting to keep in touch with me overall)
    • There should be easier ways for us to finetune who (and what groups) we share with and who we hear from… beyond the scope of privacy considerations.
      • For instance, it’d be awesome to be able to tell our computer: “I want to share this musing with my friends who love hiking and are within 20 miles of Mountain View” or, conversely, “Highlight messages from friends who live nearby me and aren’t talking about politics.”

    But alas, services like Facebook seem to be lately more concerned about giving people a megaphone than letting them share and filter more effectively.  They’re amplifying and extending the noise, which from what I gather, is more likely to alienate people than have them maintain Facebook as part of their daily routine.  And that’s a shame.

    *  *  *

    What do you think?
    – Do you share my interests in narrowcasting?
    – Or do I have an unusually large addressbook and/or overly geeky demands re: sharing and filtering?
    – Are you familiar with any services that are helping folks connect more deeply vs. broadly?

  • Thoughts on social media

    I thought I’d take a moment to share a bit about my personal views and take on Social Media.

    Twitter

    I am ThatAdamGuy on Twitter.
    Some notes…

    • I don’t subscribe to that many people (proportional to the number of people who subscribe to me).
    • I find Tweetdeck to be incredibly awesome.  Indispensible. Before I discovered this program, I practically loathed Twitter. Now after using Tweetdeck (and creating must-read and read-when-time
      lists of people I follow), I actually find Twitter to be reasonably usable and enjoyable.

    Some thoughts on why I still find Twitter pretty frustrating…

    • Lack of context: It seems that the vast majority of Tweets lack context, and even I am sometimes guilty of this.  Especially bad are the retweets and @replies (“@pookiebear42 Heh well i cant believe that LOL!!!!!”)
    • Terrible communications structure:  Twitter is a bad bad super-awful-no-good way to have thoughtful or deeply personal or even mildly productive conversations.  Attempts at public conversation are maddening due to the lack of threading, and private conversations are either inconvenient (yet another inbox) or simply thwarted due to the follow-symmetry required (though — thanks spammers! — that’s probably for the best).  Added to this… the low threshold (one click!) to @reply + lack of context typically can so easily lead to content that — to me at least — is low-value.
      • This wouldn’t bother me so much if not for the fact that people still try to shoehorn substantive conversations into Twitter. For the love of dog, people, even Facebook messaging (which I hate hate hate) is better than Twitter “conversations.”  Let me clarify: one-off @replies (“@thatadamguy, my family’s from Bergen; glad you loved it!”) often make me smile and I do read every single @reply.  But if you send me an @reply like “@thatadamguy, can you explain to me how [foo] works?” I will roll my eyes in disbelief.  No, I will not explain [complicated concept or product or philosophy] to you in 140 characters.  Or in a set of 140 character tweets.  Instead, I welcome you to contact me via means that allow for more natural forms of expression.  Like pretty much anything other than Twitter or smoke signals or grunting.
    • Jarringness:  Reading through large sets of tweets still often causes me to suffer from mental whiplash.  Friend is depressed (I think).  Link to a pie recipe!  Angst over perceived privacy violations.  This person is… huh?  Er, wait, this tweet is from… who is that again?  Ah, this person @replied me, but what are they referring to?  I might be able to check with a click or two, but…
    • Short URLs stink.  Yet another tweet is linking to apparently some cool new photo site or an XKCD comic, but I can’t tell if it’s one I’ve seen 100 times already due to the persistence of the infuriatingly-lame-but-necessary-on-twitter short URL (seriously, how many people still get tweets by SMS?  Why can’t twitter just shorten URLs on the fly for those 42 people?)
    • Assymetry of value/convenience:  In a nutshell, Twitter reminds me of Old Voicemail. Pretty easy to leave messages, but frustrating to slog through ’em.

    So why in the heck do I still use Twitter?

    Yeah, yeah, I am a hypocrite, let me just get that out of the way.  A jerk and a hypocrite.  So I saved you the trouble, okay? 🙂

    Venting feels good and it works!  Essentially, I like venting from time to time and twitter gives me a surprising (and probably undeserved) platform for reaching 2000+ people plus random reps from various companies I rant about, sometimes even leading to happy issue resolutions.

    Gosh darnit, people like me*: Also, I’ve also found that — sometimes inexplicably — people seem to enjoy my micro-ramblings, and that in turn gives me joy. [*Saturday Night Live reference, honest!)]

    *  *  *

    Certainly, though, I can’t wait for a better platform to come along.  No, let me expand upon that.  Better, more useful platforms have come along (hi, Jaiku!), but they never gained traction and thus were decidedly
    less useful.  Network effect = win, at least in the world of social media.  So I am excited about, hopefully someday, enjoying a mass-adopted platform that provides ease-of-publishing and ease-of-conversing.

    What’s that you say?  I’m describing blogs-with-comments? Like so-easy-my-dead-imaginary-hamster-could-set-it-up Blogger or TypePad or Wordpress.com?  Sure, sure, but most of us are lazy and impatient.  Ha!  And yeah, even my curmudgeonly soul has come to realize that blogs and microblogs fill different needs, so I’ve become at peace with this :).

    Facebook

    I generally like Facebook.  Sure, the ads are usually pretty bad, and yes, what the heck has been going through Facebook staffers’ minds during those many bizarre Newsfeed faceunlifts, but hey, now most of it’s pretty copacetic.

    Except for them crippling the people search mechanism, so I can’t find fellow lindy hoppers via Facebook when I travel.  Or do much of anything else useful with Facebook search.  And yeah, those quizzes.
    MAKE THEM ALL GET OFF OF MY LAWN OUT OF MY NEWSFEED!  THEY ARE EVEN MORE ANNOYING THAN ALL CAP RANTS! Those annoyances aside, I think Facebook’s pretty cool.  No, really.

    I try to log in daily to check through a list of friends’ updates, and while I haven’t seen (nor tried to have) deeply meaningful conversations in the comments, I think they work well enough for some friendly back-and-forth
    (and they’ve even helped me get to know some friends-of-friends). Facebook’s continual closedness makes me very sad, though.

    Something as simple as importing my (MY!) Facebook contacts’ info into my Gmail addressbook should be doable without ands-ifs-or-butts.  I mean, come on, Facebook; you rudely ask for my Google account username and password so you can rifle through my friends’ contact info in Gmail, but you won’t return the favor? That’s just rude.  It’s a testament to how enjoyable and useful Facebook is overall that I still regularly use it despite the above substantive objections.  And yeah, admittedly there’s that network effect thing goin’, too.

     

    Orkut

    I don’t use Orkut.

     

    Friendfeed

    I sadly gave up on Friendfeed.  None of my close friends regularly use it, and it was yet another inbox I had to deal with.

     

    MySpace

    I have an account on MySpace, but only so someone can’t steal my favorite nickname and impersonate me. I log in about once a year.

     

    Foursquare

    I am ThatAdamGuy on FourSquare. I don’t get FourSquare.  My ex-officemate politely told me that this is because I am old, and by this he meant totally unhip and more apt to sit in my room and write stuff on a Friday night.  The nerve!  Sometimes I go to sleep early on Friday night and write on Saturday afternoon!

    Er, back to Foursquare.  It doesn’t help that I’ve found FourSquare to not know where I am 30% or so of the time; my phone’s GPS is working fine and Google Maps has me in the right place, but FourSquare oddly doesn’t recognize that I’m eating at a pretty popular and long-time Vietnamese restaurant and yeah, I’m too lazy to manually enter in yet another venue.  Besides, have you ever tried explaining to a good friend / hot date / boss / beefy mafia companion / sugar mamma / patron saint / Grandpa, “Uh, excuse me for a moment while I totally ignore you and type into this thing.”  You have?  Oh, you must be a fellow Silicon Valley resident.  Carry on.

     

    Yelp

    I am Adam L on Yelp.  I use Yelp and like it.  Except for how some people dufusly give bogus ratings like “ZOMG, amaaaazing food and service!  But my girlfriend broke up with me here.  So one star it is!”  But if you read the reviews rather than rely on the star-ratings, Yelp can be pretty useful. I had some fun posting in the forums a few years ago, but haven’t tried it since, so I don’t know what they’re like nowadays. I was Yelp Elite for a year and went to a few Yelp parties, but — being far less of an extrovert than people suspect and not all that much of a partier/drinker — I didn’t find them very enjoyable and didn’t shed many tears when I was downgraded to the hoi polloi a year later.

    I’m also bummed that Yelp hasn’t made an Android app, but luckily their mobile web site is reasonably usable.

     

    Other sites which might be considered Social

    I’ve already rambled long enough.  I use and like Google HotPot, Pandora, lala, last.fm, LinkedIn, YouTube, flickr, Picasaweb, though I’m not sure if they qualify as social sites.  You can find Everywhere I Want to Be on
    my Google Profile if you’re really curious :).

  • Don’t get a G1 (but do keep an eye out for Android Awesomeness!)

    When it took me seven seconds just to be able to answer a phone call, that’s when I realized I had finally had enough.  I’ve never used an iPhone and due to disapproval over Apple’s policies probably never well, so this is not a “G1 Sucks iPhone Rules!!!1” post.  Unfortunately, it’s still a rant against the G1.

    First, let me offer some disclaimers:
    1) I’m a power user.  I’ve downloaded lots of apps, and overall, they rock.  Google Maps on the G1 is awesome.  Pandora’s new Android app made me literally giggle with glee.  And the Android OS, while clearly still a bit rough, has great potential IMHO.  But perhaps because I’m a power user (installing many apps and pushing the phone to its limits), the phone has been more frustrating for me than it is (or would be) for more, heh, normal people.
    2) And speaking of normal people… my sister—who is crazy-smart but hardly an early adopter geek—LOVES her G1.  She pretty much only uses it for phone calls and checking her e-mail, but the latter came in handy wonderfully when her desktop computer was down and also when the electricity was out where she lives.  She’s had no problems figuring out how to use the phone, and seemingly no problems getting it to do what she wants to do with it.  Though granted, when I last spoke with her, she hadn’t actually installed a single app.
    3) I know people on the Android team and I hope they do not hate me after this post.  They’re genuinely good, smart, hardworking folks who IMHO made an admirable effort towards Android Phone v1.  When the phone works well (and let me note, it mostly does), it makes you appreciate the power and opportunities in an open mobile OS

    Alas, though, for better or worse, working well most of the time isn’t sufficient for a phone. Phones should work reliably and consistently well, and the G1 does not.  It comes down to the hardware: Ouch.  Ouch.  Ouch.  Slow, as in, it often takes over five seconds for the home page to show up after you click the home button.  That, combined with the flakiness in making and receiving calls, makes it a pretty lousy phone for phone calls. And regardless of my preference for e-mail over voice calls most of the time, this is still absolutely, positively unacceptable in a phone.

    *  *  *

    Many of you may be surprised to hear me publicly railing against what some refer to as “the Google Phone.”  I note (with some pride) that my policy has pretty much always been to offer public praise on Google products when I feel they deserve it and private (within-Google) blunt-yet-constructive criticisms of Google products that (to me) fall short.

    But…
    1) This technically isn’t a “Google phone.”  We made the software, but someone else made the hardware.  I’m mentioning this as a technicality, admittedly, and not intending to just pass the buck.  Ultimately, it’s got our name on it and we should (and I believe do) take both responsibility and credit for Android phones that include what’s known as the “Google Experience.”
    2) I can say with firm confidence that many of the phones coming down the pike this year (18-20 is the number publicly pre-announced!) simply ROCK.    And I want folks’ first experience with Android to be one that’s consistently AWESOME, not just “Hmm, pretty good most of the time.”

    You should be asking Santa for an Android phone this Christmas, even if you’re an atheist.  Er, okay, if you’re a non-Christian, perhaps you should just go out and buy an Android phone yourself.  You’ll appreciate the better (much better) hardware, slicker UIs, and a lot more to make you smile.

  • #geekfail — Valuing immediacy over depth, accuracy, and understanding

    Yesterday, I learned about the turmoil in Iran… from the blogosphere.  Some have argued that the immediacy of news on this and other breaking topics is a sign that mainstream media has failed and online media—specifically “real time” components of online media—have triumphed.  I believe such an assumption is not only dead wrong, but dangerous to society.

    Today, I can get more information—and more importantly, more *verified* information—about the situation in Iran from mainstream media.  And in a few days, I’ll no doubt be able to get some insightful background information, valuable context, and more-likely-accurate news from weekly magazines.

    Even online, let’s compare, one day later:
    – http://search.twitter.com/search?q=iran
    – http://news.google.com/news?q=iran

    Some would argue… but Adam, don’t you want information right now?  How can you wait a day or even a week to learn what’s going on?!?!?!?!?!!!!!!1

    To that, I’d reply with the following question:  Why do you value immediacy over depth, accuracy, and understanding?  Or, better yet, what difference will it make in your life to know about the Iranian election mess one day sooner?  Will you be able to change anything?  Help anyone?  What will you and the world lose by waiting a few more hours?

    *  *  *

    So why do I believe this increasing predilection towards immediacy is actually dangerous, and not just misguided?

    • It’s pressuring news media and politicians to report, respond, and act before they have all the facts, before they’ve had a chance to digest what is correct and what is right.  While I doubt that people with access to nukes won’t be relying on twitter “reporting” to make that crucial decision, I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing more and more decisions painfully botched due to a reliance upon “what’s happening right now.”
    • While there’s a chicken and egg scenario here, I wouldn’t be surprised if push towards “real time” is further feeding and exacerbating society’s collective ADD, dulling our interests and abilities in long-term thinking and planning.  What are people reading?  What are they thinking about?  If, as we’ve noticed, fewer and fewer people (including me) are taking the time to write (and listen) beyond soundbites, what does this mean for the peaceful progress of our society?

    Yes, I know I’m sounding like your grumpy neighbor who perhaps just got on the net (via dialup).  No, I don’t think my griping alone will make a whit of difference. 

    But perhaps if enough people say, well, ENOUGH!… immediacy != value, then perhaps the tide will start turning.  Not gonna hold my breath, though.

    P.S.—I realize that there IS value in real time.  In the case of disasters (natural and manmade), services like Twitter have helped with the mobilization of protests and rescue efforts and so on.  So for the citizens of Iran, I have no doubt that tweets may well have served as valuable inspiration and coordination.  But this is not news, this is broadcasting.  And for the rest of the world, I stand by my assertions that there was little value in seeing a flurry of micro-messages about events happening in other places of the world except as—and I hate to label it as such—entertainment.  But unsurprisingly the impulse to be entertained, to be un-bored… is now clearly more powerful than the desire to be patiently enlightened.

  • My experiment testing user engagement on Facebook, Friendfeed, and Twitter

    What did I do?!
    I posted an identically-phrased note on Facebook, Friendfeed, and Twitter at around 1:30am PDT Friday morning. Specifically, I posted this: “Could you kindly help me with a super-quick experiment (takes less than 30 seconds)? I’ll share results 🙂 Thanks!”

    Why?
    I was curious to see which set of friends/subscribers (henceforth referred to as “contacts”) would be more apt to read my note and reply.


    What happened?
    As of nearly 40 hours after posting…

    So does this mean Facebook is better than Friendfeed and Twitter?
    No. Is a particular service a better fit or a more powerful promotional vehicle for some people or for some needs or interests? Probably. But my experiment doesn’t prove that. This is based upon my sets of contacts, and was limited to a single test. I know it would make for a far more popular blog entry to trumpet this with a title of “[servicename] the [other servicename] Killer?!?!?” or “[servicename] Beats the Pants Off [other service name]” or — best yet — “[servicename] Set to Trounce Google?!?” — but I refuse to support such memes or pageview-increasing tactics. At least until I receive a very lucratic offer and then decide to sell-out :D.

    So what does your little test suggest?
    It means that — with my sets of contacts — I’m significantly more likely to get engagement and actions from my contacts on Facebook.

    Huh?

    When looking at contact interaction, I think we have to take a few things into account:
    • What’s the contact acquisition rate? e.g., how many folks subscribe to / follow you each day?
    • What’s the contact retention rate? How many people stick with you (vs. defriend or unsubscribe)
    • What’s the attention rate? How many actually read what you post?
    • What’s the engagement rate? How many click on your links?
    • And lastly, what’s the action rate? This is just subtly different than engagement, but I mean this to distinguish between clicking on a blog post link and actually posting a comment there.
    And, from my limited test and experiences, here’s the more detailed comparison:
    • Acquisition: I’ve found that I acquire contacts on Twitter far more rapidly than on either of the other services.
    I’ve been gaining followers at a much faster rate on Twitter than on Friendfeed… typically more than 7-10 a day on Twitter vs. 1 a day on FF. In fact, I even plugged Friendfeed to nearly 100 of my buddies via a friendly (albeit form) e-mail, and got a sum total of zero friends subscribing to my FF feed from that. Bummer :-(. FF’s a much harder sell, at least amongst my non-geek friends, than I previously assumed. Balancing that, though, two friends I personally referred to FF a while back are now two of the service’s more active users :-D. Also, note that my Twitter subscriber count got a HUGE boost because I was recently subscribed to by the wildly popular Google account on Twitter.
    • Retention is a bit harder to assess.
    For a while, I used the third party service Twitterless to let me know who unsubscribed from my feed each day. Seemed like I lost about a follower a day on Twitter, which was a little depressing, so I’m glad that feature of Twitterless ceased to function a while back. Though I’ve culled my own Facebook friend list, I haven’t really noticed if/when my friends have unfriended me there. And I’ve also not tracked/noticed people unsubscribing from me on Friendfeed, though I’m sure it’s happened, despite the consistently scintillating quality of my FF posts (HAH!).
    • Attention: Not sure how I could possibly measure that. There’s no user-available “analytics for Friendfeed / Facebook / Twitter” that I know of. Bummer.
    • Engagement, or click-thru rate… in the past, I’ve found that I’ve gotten proportionally the most clicks from Twitter contacts, followed by Facebook and then Friendfeed.
    Contemplating Attention and Engagement… I’m guessing that Friendfeed’s generally-helpful/intriguing “Friend of Friend” option could nonetheless be substantially diluting the total attention that feeds-of-friends get. In other words, when someone subscribes to me on Friendfeed, they then start getting (by default) a stream of not only my content, but also the content of my friends’ items I comment on or Like. More to look at means, understandably, attention spread across more items = less time looking at my items. Then again, one could argue that this is balanced out by the fact that people who aren’t subscribed to me are likely to be seeing my items in their feeds when their friends Like or comment upon my entries. Hmm.
    I’m not quite sure why Facebook engagement seems to be proportionally so much higher than on the other services, but I think it has to do with the friendship-vs-content orientation of my respective contacts. More specifically, I believe my FB network consists of more strong / moderate friendship ties, whereas people following me on Twitter and FF may be more apt to be reading my stuff because, well, they like my stuff (funny comments, links) vs. liking me personally. So given this, when I asked for a quick favor, it makes sense that I’d get a higher response rate from friends vs. fans.
    • Action is where things get a lot more complicated.
    When looking at the magnitude of action — that is to say, getting a single reply (minimal action) vs spawning a lengthy thread of comments (extended action) — then the services are quite different from my experience. On Twitter and Facebook, I’ve found that I quite often get one reply or a small handful replies to my posts. On Friendfeed, more of my posts go without any comments, but… on Friendfeed, I’m more likely to see a post get a large collection of comments. This isn’t surprising to me. Though Facebook has moved more towards facilitating a Friendfeed style of item+comment, Friendfeed’s been IMHO by far the strongest service in town for conversations. In contrast, on Twitter it’s quite easy to post an @ response, but rather frustrating to follow a conversation. I think this explains why I tend to see more robust conversations on Friendfeed, but more frequent (albeit less voluminous) replies on Facebook and Twitter.
    The tone and content of a post also plays a large role in determining the extent of replies for me by service. Examples of post-types that are most likely to elicit replies on the various services (again, for me; your mileage may vary!)

    – Facebook: “Having a rotten day, could use a hug!” [expression of emotion, change in personal status, in-joke shared amongst friends]

    – Friendfeed: “Whoa, check out this robot who recites poetry! WANT! You, too?” [early link to article highlighting a new geek toy or popular geek meme, profound observations or statements of concern, anything about the Kindle, Apple, or Obama]

    – Twitter: “At big electronics store in Japan. Should I buy digital camera here or wait ’til Korea?” [questions that don’t demand a complicated response, simple but unexpected notes (e.g., “Now in Bora Bora for 3 hours!”, “Just got engaged!”)]



    General caveats:

    • Interconnection: Lots of interconnection between the services! Twitter is integrated into FF and FB, for instance. However, I don’t import my twitter feed into my Facebook account, and I also immediately deleted the twitter-post in Friendfeed to help mitigate this issue.
    • Facebook UI change: Facebook just switched over to a new format. This could have increased or decreased attention to my link.
    • Timing: The timing wasn’t necessarily optimal. Posting it so late on Thu night meant that — by the time most people accessed their account on the various services — they likely already had a ton to look at… e.g., my post was no longer “fresh” at that point.

    Personal caveats/notes:

    • Difference in contact symmetry:
      Anyone can follow me on Twitter and FF (assymetry / self-selection), but I pick (and am picky about) who I friend on FB (due to both its symmetrical friends model and my own preferences).

    • Difference in contact type:
      My contacts on FB are far less geeky than my contacts on the other services. They also tend to be typically personal friends rather than acquaintances or fans. In contrast, my contacts on Twitter seem to be largely online marketers, SEOs, and geeks. Same on FF, but with a much higher emphasis of online marketing / uber-geeky folks who are deeply excited about stuff online. Many of my FB friends just dabble a little bit online and most tend to be buddies from school, work, dance, etc.

    • Why Friendfeed / Facebook / Twitter and not [blah blah blah]?
      Because these are the social networking/broadcasting-type services I predominantly use. I have also tried Friendster, Myspace, Orkut, Tribe, Multiply, Jaiku, and likely many other services I’ve forgotten about, but the three above are the ones I’m active on.

    And now for some notes from the respondents:

    In addition to the main survey question asking people where they clicked on the link from, I also invited people to leave a freeform comment. I’m not sharing all of them (due to privacy concerns), but have excerpted (and replied to in brackets) some below:

    • Did worry it might implode my computer with malware, but hey, I’m leaving the company in two weeks! 🙂[Yeah, I hadn’t even thought of how my impersonal-sounding click-here request might be misperceived. Wonder if that lowered the clickthru rate?]

    • You’re my hero, Adam!
      [Aw, and you wrote that even before you read this blatheringly long blog post. Hope you still feel the same way :-)]

    • Uh, it’s WAY too soon to be talking engagement — I mean you just confirmed we were FRIENDS yesterday!
      [What if I added you to my Top Friends app list in FB? Would that win your heart?]

    • When you write up the results, please keep emphasizing that these are just your friends and try not to generalize.:-D
      [I hope I’ve suitably emphasized that!]

    • Although I clicked through from FB because I have FB chat turned on in Pidgin and it shows me status updates right there.
      [That’s a very good point. I wasn’t thinking about how use of third party tools could skew this experiment.]
    • Good idea Adam, though I wonder if it may be slightly different results for others. After all, you are “the Adam Lasnik”. [I doubt my micro-celebrity status (in the webmaster world) would affect things one way or the other. Might be responsible for getting me more subscribers on Twitter and Friendfeed, but that’s why I listed proportional results above :-)].
    I also got another interesting comment which further accentuates the complication involving the use of third party tools with these services… and also touches upon the frustration of data silos:

    Hmm, I think you’re missing a subtlety. I selected Facebook because that was the source of the thing I saw. However, where I actually saw it was in Google Reader. I feel like I spend a lot of time trying to get Facebook stuff *out* of Facebook and into the applications I prefer to use. FB does not really make this as easy as it should be. Also, I usually end up getting stuck with two copies of things when someone, for example, imports their Twitter posts to FB. But at least in Reader I can really quickly scan all the updates in a list, skimming over the duplicate or uninteresting ones. (I just wish I could get a FB feed for a friends sub-list!)

    Oh, and Vinny… thanks for the hat! 🙂

    Wow, that experiment was neato! Can I do that, too? Should I do it? Are you gonna repeat it to see how things change?!

    Yep! Technically. Probably not. Unlikely.

    Frankly, I’m guessing my friends would get highly annoyed with me if I identically repeated this experiment, and — worse yet — I bet that people in the webosphere would get really pissed at you (and me) if this experiment was duplicated ad nauseum. So sorry, I’ve got first-mover advantage. Take solace in the fact that I likely won’t get rich and famous from this, though. Unless I’m offered a book deal along the lines of, “A Completely Unscientific Experiment Exploring User Engagement With Three Darlings of the Interwebs — The Untold Story” for one MILLION dollars. But that also seems at least somewhat unlikely.

    Thanks for reading, though! And hey, while you’re at it, go subscribe to my Friendfeed and Twitter streams 😀

    * * * 

    P.S. — You’re welcome to check out via bit.ly :-D.

    * * *


    And now… YOUR turn!

    Do my experiences match yours? Do you see similar demographic differences in your friend/follower sets amongst the services? What kind of response rates have YOU seen? Other thoughts?

  • Gmail tip: Use "Quick Links" to help you find important mail quickly

    Do you use Gmail?  The new “Quick Links” feature, offered via Google’s Gmail Labs project, can help save you time and highlight important mail.

    WHAT QUICK LINKS DOES
    Think of it as sort of a “Saved searches” feature :-D.  Basically, you can take any search and “save” it so that it appears as an option under a Quick Links menu on the lefthand side of your Gmail screen.  For instance, one of my favorite quick links is this saved search: “TO:me IN:inbox.”  When I click on this link now, it shows me all mail that’s been sent to me personally that’s still in my inbox, weeding out all the “junk” bulk mail… e.g., newsletters, ads from vendors, etc.  Other options could be showing mail just from a specific time period that has attachments, mail that is starred but not in your inbox, etc.

    HOW TO GET THE QUICK LINKS FEATURE IN YOUR GMAIL
    1) Go to your Gmail.
    2) Click on “Settings” at the top of the page.
    3) Then click on “Labs”
    4) You’ll find many add-ons, or labs features which may interest you.  Enable “Quick Links” and/or any other labs features you like.
    5) Lastly, click “Save changes” at the bottom.

    HOW TO USE QUICK LINKS
    1) Type in any search into Gmail (in the regular search bar, or using the Advanced Search).
    2) Click “Add Quick Link” on the lefthand side of your Gmail page.  Voila! 😀

    *  *  *

    For those of you who have used Quick Links, what are some of the favorite / most useful / most creative links you’ve created?

  • Embedding a chat room with Meebo… just testing.

    Intriguing.  I’m attempting to embed a Meebo chat room below.  I’ll keep this window open for a while, and will make sure to be here at 7pm PST (10pm EST) today, Sunday.

    http://www.meebo.com/rooms