Category: Geek service

As you may have noticed from my sidebar, I’ve recently joined Facebook. In a short time I’ve come to realize just how effective it is at managing your social relationships; I’ve also joined LinkedIn which is the professional equivalent. I find that the two services complement each other nicely rather than competing.

The great advantage of these services is that you create a walled garden for yourself and thus retain total control over your communication. Facebook provides extremely granular control over privacy on a per-contact basis so you really are able to fine-tune just who can contact you and who you want to stay in touch with.

Tangentially related to this is a recent dust-up between several high-profile “web 2.0” personalities that makes for interesting reading. It started with Robert Scoble, who created a three-part video essay provacatively titled “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years“. Scoble is obsessed with the idea that search engine optimization (SEO) is poisoning the well of search and that adding the “social” element will magically improve relevance. Dave Winer had a fairly succinct rebuttal, Danny Sullivan took issue with Scoble’s explicit equating of SEO with spam, and Rand Fishkin steps through Scoble’s arguments and fact-checks it to oblivion.

Overall, I came away from the fracas convinced that social networking is not some magic bullet and the problems of “how do I find information” and “who do I want to interact with” to be wholly separate ones. I like a walled garden for my identity-driven personal and professional interactions, but I also want to wander in the wild when need be. It’s the same reason I am skeptical of “personalized search” services like Google’s own “Web History” initiative. It’s not the privacy issues that worry me, but rather the imposed limitation on what my search results are based on what my search results were in the past. Why should I assume that for a given search, the most relevant results will necessarily be related to the searches I previously made? Presumably I search for something based on a need for new information I do not currently possess.

If anything, the onus on the user is to craft a better query; to that end Google offers an advanced set of search operators that provide tremendous power and flexibility. Overall, every search is unique, and no amount of personalization or social networking is going to change that fact. If anything, the right approach is to allow a search to stimulate new searches; ie ask new questions rather than spoonfeed me old answers.

I was somewhat bemused by the story of a judge mandating a hacker convicted of a felony to use only Windows rather than Linux:

Scott McCausland, who used to be an administrator of the EliteTorrents BitTorrent server before it was shut down by the FBI, pleaded guilty in 2006 to two copyright-related charges over the uploading of Star Wars: Episode III to the Internet. As a result, he was sentenced to five months in jail and five months’ home confinement.

McCausland–who also goes by the name “sk0t”–has since been released from jail, but on Tuesday he reported on his blog that the terms of his sentence meant he would have to install Windows if he wanted to use a computer during his probation.

Now, I don’t want to hijack my own post by commenting on the issue of whether such a prohibition is legally defensible; though one might reasonably wonder where the line can be drawn. Mandating an operating system strikes me as on the intrusive side of things, regardless of where you fall on felons’ rights. What struck me more about this was the utter toothlessness of such a prohibition. It’s not like Windows and Linux are oil and water, or matter and antimatter. It’s quite possible for the two to co-exist, and even play host to one another.

For example, you could set up VMWare to run Linux as a virtual machine on Windows (the VMWare client is absolutely free). Or, you can setup your machine to multi-boot into Linux; the Wubi project makes doing so as painless as “installing” a program under Windows with no need to mess around with disk partitions or boot sectors or whatever. You can even run the Linux kernel natively within Windows with no software emulation or multi-boot required (more details here on setup). If it’s just the Linux environment you want, and don’t care about the apps, you can even run Cygwin and vi to your heart’s content.

From reading the guy’s blog entry, he’s adopting full victim posture, probably for the sake of his pending lawsuit (to which I have some sympathy, I must confess). But seeing as he’s experienced with Linux already, I doubt for a moment he isn’t aware of these alternatives. Probably it’s wiser from his perspective to protest the briar patch than to show his hand.

Incidentally, if you’re itching to try Linux, the Ubuntu distribution comes highly, highly, highly recommended. Most of the methods described above standardize on Ubuntu.

I am astonished. In just two days of using Google Reader I’m now following over 60 blogs, and have read over 300 articles. All of this in much less than half the time I usually spent browsing the web. The old paradigm of manually surfing somewhere and then surfing somewhere else seems so obsolete, because you never know when there’s new content. If it’s a blog that updates rarely (ie, below the 1 post/day threshold then you might well waste a trip. But with the feed, you only need visit when there really is content to be seen. What’s more, you know the title and an excerpt at minimum so you can also decide immediately whether you want to see more or would rather skip right over it. This is where the time and efficiency improvements come into play – you only end up reading content that is fresh and relevant. I’ve added subscriptions to many smaller blogs with great voices that I always intended to read but never had time; now it is trivial to stay abreast of them.

I briefly became enamored of the idea that blogs “should” publish their full post text in their feed, but am now indifferent. True, it’s easier to read the whole post from within Reader (and saves some time too), but if not, its easy to just click on the full post link (assuming it interested you enough). The page will open in a new tab. This way you also get to appreciate the diversity of blog design out there instead of staying insulated in the sterile Reader environment; plus if its a site where you comment frequently you will have to click through anyway. In fact using Reader makes it easier to stay involved with comment threads because you can subscribe to a thread directly.

Of course, clicking through to the full post also helps out the blogger you’re reading, as you will then be exposed to their ads etc. So there is financial incentive to keep your feed limited to excerpts. But blogger beware; if your excerpts are dull or not properly representative of your post’s interesting-ness, then no one will bother to click through. Using excerpts in your feed raises the bar because there’s extra work involved for me to click through to you. This is an incentive to quality writing. I think it would be better for the internet as a whole if everyone published excerpts instead of fulltext feeds, not just for these advantages but also because it removes the incentive for embedding ads in the feed itself. I’d rather my feeds be truncated but ad free than be full but interspersed with sponsorship.

The grandfather of social bookmarking sites is del.icio.us, which basically brought “tagging” mainstream (along with Technorati). Most people I know who use the service end up with unwieldy tag clouds, however, because it’s often hard to enforce a self-discipline on what tags you assign. I’ve spent a lot of time manually pruning my tags but there are still plenty on my tag list that are redundant or obsolete.

There is an option to “bundle” your tags – essentially, tagging a group of tags, to help you organize things better. However, bundles at present are only visible to the user, and do not have a dedicated URL or RSS feed like individual tags do. Using the “+” operator to search for multiple tags, ie http://del.icio.us/azizhp/Iraq+Hillary, functions as an AND operator, whereas to simulate a bundle you’d need an OR equivalent that del.icio.us does not support. As a result, if you want to add a linkroll to your site that only shows tag from a single bundle, you’re out of luck.

However, there is a workaround, albeit a clumsy one: create “container” tags. Then you must manually tag all items in the bundle with the container tag. After doing this, you will be able to access your bundle using the container tag, and can create customized linkrolls accordingly. For example, I created the “2008” container tag for all my tags related to the Presidential candidates.

One caveat: try to avoid naming your container tags identically to the bundle. You can prefix the container tags with the “@” symbol to keep them distinct, or name them entirely differently. This is so that if/when in the near future del.icio.us improves support for bundles there won’t be any namespace collisions between your tags and your bundles. Once that day comes you can simply delete all the container tags if you so wish.

Alas, there still is no way to create a tag cloud from a single bundle, so that still awaits the del.icio.us team’s attention.

I’ve managed to avoid using feed readers for years, but reading wordpress-maven Matt’s post today about switching to Google Reader from Bloglines suddenly made me realize just how much time I waste in the mechanics of web surfing. I just spent the better part of two hours populating Reader with my links and I am already blown away at how much more efficient this is going to be. I literally will be able to do twice as much surfing in half the time. Most of the time saving productivity increase comes from the unified interface; everything is in one place and I can rapidly scan headlines to see what i really want to read. Most blogs helpfully put the whole post into the feed, as well – as do comics like XKCD. And the interface is the same as Gmail, including the ability to “tag” a link with multiple categories and the dynamic interface which means no lag. This is like a revolution. A revelation. Both.

I’m not pleased about investing further into Google. I don’t like all my eggs in one basket, but at least it’s trivial to export my OPML file if I decide to jump ship. In the interim, though, this is incredible.

And whats even cooler is that I am going to setup RSS feeds for searches on PubMed – so I’ll be able to stay up to date on my work as well as my play. Maybe this is the kick in the pants that I needed to get Reference Scan going again…

I think that ten years from now, when we look back and wonder where the extinction of the desktop computer and operating system combo began, this news will be identified as one of the seeds:

Javascript creator and Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich has revealed a new project called IronMonkey that will eventually make it possible for web developers to use IronPython and IronRuby alongside Javascript for interactive web scripting.

The IronMonkey project aims to add multilanguage functionality to Tamarin, a high-performance ECMAScript 4 virtual machine which is being developed in collaboration with Adobe and is intended for inclusion in future versions of Firefox. The IronMonkey project will leverage the source code of Microsoft’s open source .NET implementations of Python and Ruby, but will not require a .NET runtime. The goal is to map IronPython and IronRuby directly to Tamarin using bytecode translation.

A plugin for IE will also be developed. The upshot of this is that Python and Ruby programming will become available to web applications run through the browser, on the client side. Look at how much amazing functionality we already enjoy in our web browsers thanks to Web 2.0 technology, which is AJAX-driven (ie, javascript). Could anyone back in 1996 imagine Google Maps? Hard-core programming geeks who understand this stuff better than I do should check out Jim Hugunin’s blog at Microsoft about what they have in mind; it’s heady stuff. But fundamentally what we are looking at is a future where apps are served to you just like data is, and your web browser becomes the operating system in which they run. I can’t even speculate about what this liberation from the deskbound OS model will mean, but it’s not a minor change.

I was a Eudora user in college and then switched over to Thunderbird in grad school. How times have changed! Ars has the details – the Mozilla Foundation is spinning off Thunderbird to an independent organization. It’s a good move since Thunderbird was always kind of an odd man at Mozilla; the old POP3 model seems so outdated now in this modern era of web-based mail. I exclusively use Yahoo and Gmail for 99% of my own email now, and there’s always Outlook/Exchange (or Notes) on the business front. Then there’s the internal messaging systems of Facebook and LinkedIn, and of course chat (fully integrated to gmail and yahoo). Finally there’s text messaging to round off things, and there are increasing bridges being built between these various platforms (such as twitter, or send email to [phone number]@ messaging.sprint.com/verizon.com etc). Staid old POP just seems like a dinosaur in comparison, and from my experience the POP systems are the ones that are the most vulnerable to spam and virus threats.

Ultimately the desired end goal would be to drop email entirely and communicate entirely via messaging within closed systems. Thats a pretty controversial opinion Iguess, given that the trend has been precisely the opposite until now – remember the day when Prodigy email was finally compatible with Compuserve? how we cheered.. fully unaware of our spam overlord masters waiting in the wings.

But I think messaging systems and social networking sites are better for communication because you have a more trusted “network” and you can vet people before they ever are allowed to contact you. 99% of my email is from people I already know, and the remaining 1% can be referred to a web page or blog or something instead.

Ultimately the freewheeling nature of the web means that Identity becomes a form of currency; email was always identity agnostic and completely egalitarian, with no thought given to vetting or social networks. And that was a loophole that the spammers were destined to drive trucks through.

Mozilla is better off without the Thunderbird baggage; whether Thunderbird succeeds as an independent product will depend on whether they stay rooted in the old POP email model or whether they try to innovate around it and embrace some of the new forms of communication out there. There’s a niche waiting to be filled.

UPDATE: the Thunderbird team makes an appeal for developers to join them.

Josh analyzes the relative merits of Twitter vs newcomer Pownce, and finds Pownce wanting. Pownce is essentially an online chat application, which has essentially one unique feature:

instead of being boxed into 1:1 communication (IM) or X:X (chat) or 1:X (Twitter), Pownce offers all of it in one package. Want to send a picture to your family, but not all your friends? Easy: select recepients and send away. Try to do the same thing in any IM client and you’ll see that it usually doesn’t work and/or takes quite a few steps.

However, as Josh points out, Pownce lacks the public API which makes sites like twitterfeed possible, vastly increasing the utility of Twitter. Frankly, 140 chars of plaintext is enough; I still rue the day that email became html-enabled.

It’s sad but true that the vast majority of Twitterers employ the service for banal ends. However, there’s a lot more you can do. Josh uses it to tie together all his output, from Flickr to blogs. I use it as a roadtrip real-time journal (though twittering while driving/TWD has earned me some deserved reprimands). I also just added the feeds from the “stranger than fiction” and the “marshfield” categories here at Haibane.info to my twitter, to liven it up without flooding it too much. The key is not to overdo it.

The best thing about Twitter is that it’s input is device-agnostic; you can twitter from pretty much anywhere. Until global wifi becomes a reality (ie, never) or EVDO becomes affordable (ie, someday), you simply can’t expect access to the Internet from anywhere, even in the continental US. And more to the point, you aren’t limited to consuming content; you can also create content from anywhere.

Is Twitter perfect? obviously not. A simple feature request would be the ability to send pictures as well as text. That would increase the utility of twitter by another order of magnitude. But as it is, it’s still a novel service with genuine potential for creativity.

Incidentally, if anyone wants a Pownce invite, I’ve got 6 to hand out. Leave a comment with your email address.