adamyntium

Category: technology

  • 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?

  • In-flight entertainment on planes: Airlines should just give up…

    …on the seatback screens.

    A few years ago, I would have never thought I’d say that.  Traveling sometimes 100,000 miles a year (and nearly all in Economy class), I repeatedly cursed United in particular for having seemingly no planes with seatback screens… forcing me to be “entertained” by a movie whose lack of visibility was only trumped by its lack of quality & recency.

    Delta — a few years late, I’d say — is now trying to appeal to people like earlier-me with this ad I just spotted in this month’s Wired magazine:

    A few years ago, however, I didn’t have a tablet computer, and now I do (two!).  I love my Nexus 7 and Nexus 10, and find them to be outstanding entertainment companions, especially on a plane.  And given the ubiquity of tablets and the consistent and astounding crapitudinous quality of airline entertainment system UIs, I’m thinking that airlines should instead just ensure that every seat has a power outlet and give up on the small and oft poor-quality seatback screens.

    But Adam, not everyone has a tablet!
    True.  But I’m wiling to bet the intersection of frequent (and high revenue) travelers and tablet ownership is pretty darn high, and certain to get much higher in the next few years.

    Have you ever tried balancing a tablet on a wobbly seatback tray?  Especially during mealtimes?
    I have, and why can’t you enjoy your meal over a little peace and quiet, eh? :p  Joking aside, this is why I think airlines should simply build tablet holders into seatbacks.  But if they make it iProprietary, I’m gonna throw a fit :(.

    I shouldn’t have to remember to preload music and movies onto my tablet!
    You probably forget your car keys each morning, too, don’t you?  No?  Okay, but do you really want to be reliant on the dubious (and often laughably censored) entertainment content from the airlines?  That aside, how about a smart hybrid system like Southwest Airlines is offering, where you can optionally connect to the plane’s intranet-wifi (intrawifi?) with your computer or tablet and pay to watch a movie from their selection.

    *  *  *

    What do you think?  Do you own a tablet?  Are you grateful when you see your plane has seatback screens?

    P.S. — Given the decreasing width of the already narrow seats on planes and the increasing girth (especially of us Americans), I’d argue that — contrary to Delta’s assertion — we actually are typically sharing a seat 🙁

  • Fitness wearables: Enough raw numbers; give us smart advice!

    I’ve been following fitness trackers and wearables with keen interest for years.  So far, I’ve tried out several different devices from Fitbit, the Withings Pulse, and the Basis B1 watch.  They’ve all been intriguing… but so very, very disappointing.

    From my experience, all the current fitness wearables fail to help us identify correlations that could efficiently and dramatically improve our lives.

    Sure, a bit of quantification plus fun gamification encourages many to walk more steps or perhaps get more sleep.  But wouldn’t it be helpful to know how doing action [x] strongly correlates with improvements in [y]?  

    For instance, current wearables can measure things like temperature, heart rate, and sleep quality.  That means that they should be able to measure correlations between exercise, sleep, and stress levels, for starters.  And from these correlations, they could provide useful and actionable advice such as “You tend to sleep much more soundly when your room temperature is between 69 and 72 degrees.  Your room temperature, however, averages 75 degrees; lowering it may result in better sleep.“

    Particularly after providing us with more actionable advice like this, consumers would probably be willing to help wearables collect additional useful data.  Imagine if we could say “Okay Watch:  I just drank a small coffee” or push a button or two to indicate that we just ate finished eating a heavy dinner.  From this, our wearable could add caffeine or food consumption to the data corpus, enabling it to offer personalized recommendations like, “We notice that you experience an average of 27% more sleep interruptions on days when you consume caffeine after 1pm.  Quit doing that! 🙂“

    For instance, on the Withings dashboard, I can see a jumbled plotting of heart rate measurements… taken at different times and in different circumstances.  Thus meaning, well, pretty much nothing.  But my wearables do know when I’ve finished exercising and so could offer me encouraging info like: “Since you began actively exercising again about 7 weeks ago, your heart rate recovery has improved dramatically… from 130 minutes to resting rate down to 78 minutes.  Recovery rate is a strong indicator of heart health [learn more], so keep up the intense aerobic exercising!“

    Additionally, based on aggregate user data, wearables could provide useful encouragement based on others’ experiences.

    For instance, “Other [wearable] users who added two additional intense 30-minute aerobic sessions per week saw an average of 27% sounder sleep within 3 months.” Of course, the userbase would have to be sufficiently large, and obviously privacy would have to be baked into the core of such a program.

    Fitbit One

    Wearables need to evolve from mindless and repetitive cheerleaders and observers to smart coaches.

    Because right now, alas, undoubtedly too many of us are suffering from “move it!” and “congratulations…” fatigue.  For instance, I’m interrupted by the same Basis ‘achievements’ notices on my phone day after day.  I’m sure I could take a few minutes to alter the notifications, rejigger the “challenges,” and so on, but why should I have to?  If I’ve achieved the “Wear it” goal every day for the last 42 days, why on earth would I want to see this alert for a 43rd time?  Okay, Pulse, so I hit 10,000 steps today?  I know that.  I was walking on a treadmill for a couple hours!  Tell me something I don’t know, please! 🙂

    Heck, if you’re going to send alerts to my phone, why not prompt me for useful info?  For instance, obviously with opt-in, “Hi Adam, how do you feel?  [Energetic] [Slightly fatigued] [Dog tired]” and then, after a month, note something like “On those days you took a 15 minute nap around 2pm, you were 70% less likely to report fatigue later on those days.”  Or help me determine what my optimal sleep amount is (“Looks like 7 hours of sleep a night is your ‘sweet spot.’  Your reported fatigue increases steeply when you sleep less than that, but remains pretty unchanged when you sleep *more* than 7 hours.“)

    Sure, I could keep a ‘personal log’ spreadsheet (and — I’m such a geek — I actually do!), but computers are much better at finding correlations than we humans are, especially when they have scientists adding in sanity checks to possible ‘correlations’ :).

    So in summary, our wearables should…

    • surface useful correlations
    • provide actionable advice,
    • highlight encouraging trends
    • all while leveraging the experience of crowds and the wisdom of scientists.

    With the amazing improvements in what we can measure in a compact device and the outstanding increases in phone processing power and user interfaces, I’m confident all of this is absolutely achievable.

  • Moto X – Trusted Bluetooth Device tested products list

    The Moto X phone has an ingenious feature which allows you to require a pin or pattern lock, and yet have the phone persistently maintain an unlocked status when it’s in proximity of a bluetooth device that you’ve marked as trusted [see more details on this official Moto X help page].  I believe the Droid Maxx, Droid Ultra, and Moto G also have this feature.

    Unfortunately, Motorola only offers an NFC unlock widget — the Skip — and that’s less convenient, because you have to physically touch your phone each time to it to unlock.

    Therefore, many of us have been seeking convenient and reliable bluetooth device options that’d work with the Moto X.  To this end, I’ve done lots of digging and asking around, and below I’m maintaining a list from my discovery :).  But first, I want to give major props to this thread from the great AndroidCentral forum and the helpful users who’ve posted in it, especially “Distorted Loop” who already started a list in this post. (more…)

  • Is it wise spending our time writing for *other* sites?

    I’ve been contributing to the Q&A site Quora a lot lately, and it’s pretty neat. I’ve posed questions, answered questions, edited stuff, voted on a lot of answers, and so on.  And in a broader sense, like many of us, I’ve also spent probably hundreds of hours in the aggregate answering questions on Aardvark, posting often rather detailed comments on others’ blogs, giving detailed assistance in various topical forums, writing reviews on Amazon and Hotpot, and so on.  And this got me to thinking…

    How does all this compare with the volume of commentary and information I’ve contributed to my own web sites, including this blog and www.adamlasnik.net?  Ack! Let’s just say that the imbalance is at least initially rather shocking and depressing.

    Nearly all of my words… shared not in my cyberhome, but everywhere else?!  At the end of the day, what do I have to show for this, other than a widely scattered smattering of AdamBits here and there, just blips on the planets of giants and potentially-future-giants?

    Yet… all of those other sites clearly offer a lot of value, or I and millions of others wouldn’t be spending so much time, contributing so much of our knowledge and so many of our (hopefully useful) opinions to them, right?  Indeed.  Among other benefits, we get…

    • Recs:  Oft-improved (personalized) recommendations based upon our input
    • Visibility:  Seen by interesting / important / attractive people who might be impressed by our brilliant commentary :p
      • …and, more seriously, seen a lot more people than when we post on our own, much less popular blogs
      • …and from the exposure, sometimes extra contract work or even full-time job offers
    • More time to write:  Freed from having to maintain / structure / security-update our own self-hosted site
    • Less friction:  The opportunity to offer contributions in handy little bite-sized chunks (whereas writing even a single blog post can be hard work and take a long time!)
    • Good karma:  A happy feeling from widely sharing our knowledge and opinions with others who are likely to be specifically interested in such topics.  My post reviewing a specific Zürich hotel on my own web site?  Maybe 25 people have seen it.  Had I posted the same review on TripAdvisor, for instance, I bet it would have gotten at least 10-20x the views (and thus helped more people).
    In a nutshell, contributing our thoughts on someone else’s site is easy, painless, and often philanthropic in a way.

    —

    So what are we giving up by posting elsewhere instead of aggregating our expertise on our own sites? (for the sake of argument, I’m assuming it’s too cumbersome to successfully do both)

    • Ad revenue.
    • Stats/analytics:  More detailed insights into the popularity of our writings.
    • Longevity of our expressions.  What happens if and when Quora goes away, for instance?  Sure, if they’re nice, they’ll enable us to export our contributions ahead of time, but that data set’ll be largely out of context and frankly not all that usable anymore.  In contrast, by forcing ourselves to write coherent, standalone blog posts, we are the ones in control over our words.  Even if Blogger were to go kaput, I could pretty easily export my posts in advance, and they’d be just as valuable posted on another service.  Even service closures aside, on a well-organized site a piece of expression can remain visible and useful for visitors, whereas a post on Twitter or Facebook, for instance, has a half-life of, hmm, maybe three days?
    • Focus.  When we contribute our thoughts on other sites, we’re more typically reactive… responding to others’ questions, replying on an existing forum thread, etc.  If one were to somehow magically compile all of one’s contributions across the web into a big blog, it’d look like… ugh… long-form twitter! :p.  And while blogs (yes, like mine here) can also be all over the place topically, there are also numerous options for creating a thematic blog or site which can ideally be structured and coherent as a whole.
    • Centralized identity.  There’s something positive to be said about having a single “YouHome” where you can direct prospective employers, new friends, buddies you meet at hostels, etc.  Then again, there’s admittedly also a downside to having a conveniently single place where prospective employers, new friends, and so on can GoogleStalk you.
    But oh, the hurdle of creating a self-centralized home of expression!  Before embarking on a blog post, I typically torture myself with the questions: “Is this idea compelling enough?  Do I have time to write it?  Will it fit okay with the recent entries or will I look like a [insert negative descriptor here]?”  For each addition to my web site, there’s the issue of actually creating the .htm page, crafting a title, a meta-description, updating any relevant table-of-contents or side-bar navigation, etc. (I could use a hosted CMS like Google Sites and avoid all the aforementioned process hassles but would have significantly less control over my site, not be able to use javascript on my pages, etc.).
    —
    So obviously there’s no right answer here.  But at minimum, we should be contributing to the great interwebs with awareness… at least cognizant of the benefits and disadvantages inherent in either building up someone else’s business with our words or “hoarding” our words in a cyberplace we own.
    What do you think?  Are you concerned about the tradeoffs described above?  Have I overlooked any pluses or minuses associated with contributing knowledge other other sites vs. one’s own?

  • Dear techosphere — my wishes for 2011

    Hi techosphere!

    I realize I don’t have much right to demand stuff from you.  I’ve been a lackluster blogger lately, and as someone who sold his soul to a big evil Don’t Be Evil corporation, I can’t claim to understand the grinding challenges of running a profitable and popular tech blog.  But that’s not going to stop me from asking, nay, begging you to do a better job in 2011.

    • Focus on thoughtful coverage rather than fast coverage.
      Yes, yes, I know you covered the leaked whatsit 42 seconds faster than OtherTechBlog.  I know you think the world is just pee-in-their-pants excited to read live-blogging revelations like, “Oh wait!  He’s now walking up to the stage…”  And even if this admittedly (and sadly) gets you a big traffic boost for the moment, no one is going to give a flying patootie about this shallow commentary two days later.  Substantive, thoughtful reporting will garner you far more long-time traffic and loyalty.
    • This ain’t the Killing Fields.  Cut out the “killing” crap, won’t you?
      With few exceptions, the “winner-take-all” mentality is both stupid and false.
    • Every time you blather that “[x] is the new [y],” a dog kills a kitten.
      ’nuff said.
    • Quit it with the “Ex-Googler” and “Former Facebooker” headlines, please
      Former employment at these firms pretty much means diddly-squat as a predictor of future entrepreneurial success. I’ve seen innumerable admirable successes and embarrassing flops from former Googlers/Facebookers, and probably around the same ratio of wins/failures as from other geeks.  Yeah, I guess, “Well-respected engineer experienced in [x & y]” makes for a longer and less-compelling lede, but still…
    • Monitor your comments and/or use a comments system that allows trusted users to flag spam/spammers!
      HINT:  When you have the same asshole successfully comment-spamming exactly the same URL for months, you’re pissing off your readers and you have a problem.  Get a better commenting system, hire an intern to moderate spam and ban spammers, or both.
    • Avoid the pile-on (or, just because it’s all the rage on Twitter doesn’t make it news)
      Sure, it feels good to kick the big guys when they’re down, but it’s uninformative and lame and a waste of your time and your readers’ time.  Ask yourself:  was there really substantial harm, and in particular, harm that hasn’t already been identified 42,000 times by others online?  Are you offering insight, or are you merely channeling the journalistic “skills” of Geraldo Rivera?
    • Engage thoughtfully with your readers, and give love to those who contribute value to your blog
      I have to call out LifeHacker specifically as a blog that does a great job with this.  I regularly see the authors thoughtfully and substantively engage with their readers in the comments, clarifying points, apologizing for mistakes, and so on.  This starkly contrasts with authors’ absence or hubris and snarkiness I see displayed on at least one other prominent tech blog.
    • Be respectful of other people and other companies by refusing trade traffic for integrity
      I don’t hold out much hope on this one, but it has to be said:  When you publish an internal, confidential document, you’re a amoral jerk (unless by doing so you’re exposing a ring of child traffickers or a dastardly plot to poison the water supply of New York, etc. etc.).  You and your readers typically gain nothing but schaudenfreudic glee or lookie-loo gratification, while threatening the safety, security, and/or morale of those associated with that document.  What are you hoping to accomplish, aside from boosting your blog’s popularity?  In the end, you — yes, you! — cause companies to be less open with their employees (communicating with less internal breadth, frequency and transparency), and so little by little you are harming corporate culture and negatively affecting the happiness and productivity of tens of thousands of workers… the same workers who produce the cool stuff you make a living writing about. Ain’t that counterproductive in the long run?

      Similarly, when you publish photos of an unreleased product, you’re hurting the morale of people working their ass off on that product, potentially damaging the competitiveness of that product and company, and generally being a douchebag for desperately prioritizing page views over Doing the Right Thing.  Not only that, but 8 times out of 10, you’ve got it wrong.  Sheesh.

    —
    Gah, in re-reading this, I seem especially negative, particularly on New Year’s Day.  Sorry about that :\.  But something’s gotta change… not only in how bloggers cover the world, but in how we readers consume information and support blogs.  From 2011 forward, I pledge to spend more time rewarding those blogs and bloggers who blog responsibly and thoughtfully with my pageviews and comments and links.  I hope you will do the same.
    In the meantime, help redeem this entry 🙂  Why not highlight some tech-oriented bloggers below that serve as good examples?  I’d love to shake up my Reader subscriptions a bit!

  • 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 :).