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Web 2.0 Has Failed

November 19, 2010 by Gabe S. Leave a Comment

One of the tenets of Web 2.0 was that it would be run by the user.  The internet would be composed of user-generated content and media.  Youtube would allow amateur film makers and artists to become viable parts of the media, Facebook would be a free zone for the exchange of ideas and networking of long separated friends, the blogs would be a forum for new ideas to arise without being part of mainstream media.  In many ways, indeed most ways, Web 2.0 has accomplished that.  Facebook, Youtube, and the blogosphere have enriched and empowered all of our lives and voices.  The problem is that corporations and Ad moguls have realized this, and they are taking back what we have worked so hard to make ours.  We’re losing the web back to its corporate masters.

The first example that comes to mind is Facebook’s advertisements.  To be fair, Facebook launched with the full intention of opening the platform to advertisers, but for a few years it existed in a pretty sterile environment.  But now the advertisements have taken over a large majority of your homepage.  More and more corporate influence is coming into Facebook and I continue to see less and less of my friends.  In the beginning of 2010, Facebook made a big overhaul to your profiles.  Remember your favorite movies, tv shows, books, and activities?  Well with this overhaul they became linked to a reservoir of pages built by companies.  For example, my love of Chuck (the NBC TV series) became a love of “The Official CHUCK Page” because that’s what Facebook thought I liked.  What does that mean?  It means I am now subscribed to that page, so I get updates about Chuck on my news feed.  But I don’t WANT updates from some NBC intern assigned to post quotes from last week’s episode.  It’s obnoxious and only separates me from my real reason to be on Facebook: to see what my friends are doing.

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Filed under Culture, Internet Tagged with , ,

Need Some Help Figuring Out the Web? Ask Google

November 18, 2010 by Gabe S. Leave a Comment

In the past decade, Google has done a lot to sort through the chaos of the internet to make it accessible to us.  Their algorithms have provided us with the most powerful search engine on earth, one that can scour petabytes of information in seconds to give you reliable websites and services for information.  They’ve also expanded into a variety of wonderful and extensive web applications like Google Docs and Youtube which are now integral to our internet lives.  Yet despite all this, the internet can still be a mystery.  People often use these services all day, but don’t really know how it works or what it really is.  What is cloud computing, really?  Or cookies?  Or HTML5?

Well Google wants to help.  And today they have published a sort of digital children’s book called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and The Web.  It behaves kind of like an Apple iBook, but uses HTML5 to simulate the animations.  In reality, the “book” explains in plain english a lot of terms that are now common in internet speak, but not always fully comprehended.  It starts off with big concepts like cloud computing and HTML and Javascript, and then starts to delve more in-depth into topics like security and protecting against malware.  I recommend checking it out, it’s a really simple read that pretty much sums up these complex topics with minimal techn0-babble.  If nothing else, it’s a great demonstration of HTML5′s interactivity.  I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the service is a little bit of a Google love-fest.  They spend an awful lot of time name dropping their own services, reminding you consistently how much they own you.  But hey, it’s their product, let them market it.

Check out the digital comic here.

Filed under Internet, Google

Why I Bought “Scott Pilgrim”

November 18, 2010 by Gabe S. Leave a Comment

If you’ve been a frequent reader of the site, you may remember my love fest with Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. It remains one of the most fun and wholly enjoyable movies that I have seen in the past few years, and I highly recommend it to anyone of my generation.  In the last week, I found myself with $15 in iTunes money burning hole in my virtual pocket.  There was little in the way of music I wanted (of course before the Beatles arrived in the iTunes store), so I spent that on the newly released digital copy of Scott Pilgrim. I was laughed at my by friends though.  They figured I had wasted my money by 1) buying a digital movie when I could rip it from a DVD for free and 2) getting the iTunes version.  But I have my reasons.

The most important one is that Scott Pilgrim vs. The World did not do as well at the box office as I think it deserved.  In fact, it didn’t even cover its production cost.  That is a terrible shame because the movie deserved to be successful.  It drove the medium of movies and games and comic books to new heights all at the same time.  Buying the movie is important then because I want to support the movie financially.  Sure, I could have gotten a free version from a rip, but I am willing to pay for this movie.  Let this be a lesson to all pirates out there, just because we can things for free doesn’t mean we should.  Support the makers of content you enjoy, they are giving you a good and a service.

As for buying it on iTunes, here’s the deal: the Apple infrastructure works for me.  ”Blasphemy!” some may say, but in the end here’s how it breaks down.  I get a good quality movie with extras at a competitive price that will work on 90% of the devices I use to watch movies: iPod, iPhone, my laptop, even my Windows netbook.  People often get too occupied with the principle of DRM and free content when in reality, what they just want is to be able to enjoy the content.

Rent Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. If you like it, buying it.  Don’t rip it.  It deserves better than us stealing it.

Filed under Culture Tagged with ,

Facebook Launches a New Messaging System

November 15, 2010 by Gabe S. 3 Comments

Today was Facebook’s big unveil of “Project Titan” – a new, completely rebuild and unified messaging system that guarantees you will never be without Facebook access where ever you go.  The key idea behind the new messaging service is one I can get around: the vast majority of Americans today have some presence on the internet in some way.  We all have a way to get digitally connected to other people.  The problem is that we all use difference methods of digital connection.  Our parents and grandparents use email, teenagers use Facebook, and others communicate only through text.  What Facebook has envisioned is a unified form of communication, where technology is not the limiting factor.  Instead, you can send a message to a friends and the message will get to that person through at least one of the methods.

Facebook’s system depends on linking your SMS, email, and Facebook chat to a centralized location.  Facebook will even provide you with an @facebook.com email if you so choose (be warned, no IMAP support yet) and then frame every exchange you have with individual people into a central conversation page.  There is a inbox system that lists your conversations according to priority – a nice touch.  When you send an email from/to Facebook, Facebook can determine in what way the receiver of that message will view it: either on Facebook chat, text, or an email.  The only question is how Facebook will know where to send these notifications depending on the situation.  My iPhone has texting, email, and Facebook simultaneously – how will I not get three notifications?  That remains to be seen, but if Facebook has figured it out, I’m excited.

The most intriguing thing about the unified messaging system is really Facebook’s philosophy: they are trying to take a major roadblock out of digital communication.  Ideally, you will no longer have to worry about how you will connect to friends and family.  If you send a message, Facebook’s service will get it there.  I like that Facebook is doing its part to unify the vast amount of ways we can connect together without the need for comprehensive aggregators or multiple devices.  This has the capacity to reach out to multiple generations of digitally connected people.  And at its most base level, Facebook is going a serious overhaul of what was originally a pretty hodgepodge collection of services.

That said, don’t believe the headlines.  Facebook isn’t taking over the world with this, they aren’t really taking on email with this new connection.  They simply creating a larger walled garden of features.  Google has far more reach in all these areas through GMail, GChat, Google Voice, and all their mobile connectivity.  Facebook is just catching up.

Expect the new unified message system to be rolling out in the coming months.

Filed under Internet Tagged with

What is Apple Planning?

November 15, 2010 by Gabe S. 2 Comments

Something weird is going on with Apple.  Today they have a cryptic new splash page up on their front page talking about how tomorrow will be “a day we never forget”.  It has something to do with iTunes, which limits really what it could be.  Chances are that it will be some sort of cloud-based streaming system that Apple has been rumored to be working on.  If that’s what it is I won’t be incredibly excited, but that’s just because I don’t have a big need for streaming music.  That said, if there is some sort of “all you can eat” subscription service coming down the pipes, that might be more enticing.  Also, if the streaming extends to video, that may perk my interests.  Really though, don’t believe the hype.  You have my complete permission to forget tomorrow. Streaming iTunes will be a great add on to the service, but it won’t be a monumental day in history – Jobs would have a press conference for that.

Or it could be The Beatles.  I’d remember that day forever.

Filed under Apple

Rocking out with RockMelt

November 14, 2010 by Gabe S. 2 Comments

On friday my invitation to RockMelt, a new social media browser, came through.  So naturally I have promptly downloaded the software and spent some quality time with the browser.  Yeah, its only been a few days, but so far I’ve come to some pretty good conclusions.  The primary one being this: RockMelt is a total winner, providing some of the best integration with Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds that I have ever seen.

RockMelt, at its core, does what I had hoped programs like Adium and Socialite would do: make my access to Facebook, chat protocols, and RSS less obtrusive and tab-dependent.  The system is depends on two columns on the left and right of the primary browser screen.  The left is devoted to Facebook, allowing you to see (or search for) friends who are online, look at your profile, see friends’ activity, post to walls, leave messages, and chat with them.  The amount of things you can do through simple icons is pretty extensive.  You can also star certain friends to a favorites list.  This column is in many ways more in-depth than Facebook’s design, as clicking on friend icons does not just bring up a chat menu, but lets you see what they are up to.  RockMelt also supports Growl notifications, so you can get status updates on the fly, another cool inclusion.

Sharing with friends is also easy.  A “Share” button on the tool bar allows you to post whatever URL you are on to a friend’s page, but you can also simply drag and drop links into a friend’s icon to share it on their wall or in a chat.  RockMelt has effectively taken the Facebook Graft API and applied it to the entire web, regardless if the site has Facebook pre-integrated.  Search is also interesting on RockMelt, though also a mixed bag.  Like Chrome, you can search in the omnibar where you type URLs, but the browser also offers a designated search bar in the right hand corner.  What is unique is that this search bar generates results in another sub menu instead or linking to Google.  It’s nice, but it’s also less powerful than a full google search – no picture or video search results come up.

The right column manages feeds.  RockMelt comes standard with access to your Twitter feed (I don’t use twitter so it’s inactive), your Facebook notifications, and your entire Facebook news feed.  As updates come in, a small badge on the icon indicates the amount of updates waiting for you.  RockMelt also has subtle clues to tell you what you’ve already read on the feed wall.  New updates have a bright, white background, while previously read posts have a more subdued grey background.  Small visual cues like that are a sign of excellent attention to detail.  Along with social network feeds, the right column supports RSS feeds and adding new sites to keep track of is as simple as typing in the URL.  Clicking on the icon brings up subwindows that let you browse content.  Clicking on links brings up the site in the background, which I thing is a nice touch.  You can also drag these sub windows out of the side bar to make them float permanently.

As a general browser, RockMelt works very well.  Being built on Chromium gives the browser some strong source code with good performance.  It performs just as well as Safari and Chrome 7.  It’s also very stable for what is still a beta release.  In my two days with RockMelt, it has never freaked out, slowed down, crashed, or had a single tab become unresponsive.  In contrast, Chrome 7 still freaks sometimes, and Safari became unresponsive an hour ago, requiring a force quit to stop the spinning beach balls.

Is RockMelt perfect?  No.  Chrome extensions are still finicky, and themes work, but seem to mess up the spacing of the UI in some cases.  And as much as I like the columns, I wish I could also hide them at times.  Just so I can focus on other things for a bit.  I have no doubt most of these very minor issues will be ironed out by the 1.0 release.  All in all, RockMelt is a great browser now, and will only get better.  This is the first effort outside of the Chromium-Google alliance, and the RockMelt team has done a great job.  Check out my video overview below for a more visual demonstration of the browser.

[UPDATE] Sorry about the video being private for a little bit, launched a new Youtube account today for the blog and apparently Youtube makes the video private as default.  Should be working now.

Filed under Internet, Software Tagged with ,

I think I’m Getting Spammed

November 12, 2010 by Gabe S. Leave a Comment

Today I have received the most views ever.  But I’m not happy about it.  That’s because these views aren’t reading articles or posts, they’re just random clicks on my home page.  I’m pretty sure that some automated bots and spam machines are just hitting my server and then moving on.  While normally I’d love these high stats, it’s not because of my real accomplishments and that is sad.

I would prefer no hits at all to over 6000 illegitimate hits.  Anyway I can block these guys?

Filed under General Tagged with

Thinking about Moving to Android

November 10, 2010 by Gabe S. 1 Comment

Over the weekend I made a 20 hour road trip between Washington D.C and Oxford, Ohio to be initiated into my new fraternity: Beta Theta Pi (as you can see, I’m doing this whole college thing pretty intensely).  If you’ve never been on a road trip with 40 fraternity brothers before, all I can say is that it’s…. quite an experience.  Regardless, my trip took me through the bowels of Maryland (where I experienced the gas station chain “Sheetz” with their “Shmuffins” and “Shmiscuits”), West Virginia, Southern Pennsylvania, and Ohio.  With the exception of a direct flight to California when I was 4, this is the farthest west in the United States I have ever gone.  Most of my time has been spent on the East coast between Atlanta and the Northeast.  Out in rural Ohio, 3G was gone with limited pockets of functional EDGE.  On a long trip like mine, having internet for entertainment is pretty desirable, but I was left high and dry.  However, a friend of mine was humming along swimmingly besides me on 3G with his Epic 4G from Sprint, the 3rd largest network in the US.  AT&T was blacked out while Sprint reached deep into no man’s land.  It was annoying to say the least.  This is on top of the fact that I often have trouble getting reception in D.C, a major metropolitan area!  My frustration with AT&T is just one more reason I am highly considering moving to the Android platform.

I love my iPhone to death.  It has been nothing but a treat and major asset to my life.  But at the same time, Android has rapidly matured and has gained a lot of momentum against Apple.  I’m seeing new apps and capabilities on Android phones not possible with the iPhone.  Hardware quality has really flourished with beautiful staples like the Galaxy S, T-Mobile G2, and Droid Incredible.  While the iPhone 4 is basically a slab of sexiness, it would be ignorant to disregard the excellent Android devices out there.  As my frustration with AT&T grows and the quality of Android devices increases on networks like Verizon, it’s getting harder to resist the temptation.

During my trip, I was enamored with my friend’s Galaxy S – based Epic 4G.  The screen was absolutely fantastic, typing was a dream with the physical keyboard on Swype on the soft keyboard.  He had it rooted to create a wireless hotspot without paying extra fees to Sprint.  It was equipped with the superior “LaunchPro” UI which has an incredible amount of integration and customization.  There’s a lot to like about Android, to be sure.

If the iPhone came to Verizon, I would jump the AT&T ship in a second.  But the question remains: why wait that long?

Let’s open the floor.  If I was in the market for an Android phone, what device and which carrier should I turn to?

Filed under Mobile

Meet RockMelt: A Social Browser

November 8, 2010 by Gabe S. 5 Comments

In the world of computing, I face few dilemmas more daunting than which browser to use.  About 6 months ago, on the eve of Firefox 3.6 release, I even published a basic break down of the multiple browser options so I could weigh their pros and cons.  Ironically, in those 6 months I have removed Firefox from my list of usable browsers.  Today, I share my time between Safari and Chrome due to their more aggressive update schedule and use of the faster WebKit engine.  Unfortunately I can never decide which one to stick to.  I love Chrome’s split process model, the omnibar for searching, and its restore on crash feature.  However, Chrome doesn’t play nice with the security needs of my University’s VPN so I still have to launch Safari in order to get online.  Running two browsers = waste of resources.  Safari seems just as fast as Chrome, but lacks some of the features I like on Chrome.  It’s a juggling act between the two as my tastes change.

That juggling act may be getting more complex in the coming weeks.  Today, a friend of mine directed me towards a project called RockMelt.  This is a new browser labeled as a “social network browser” running on the Chromium platform (the open source project that Google uses to make Chrome).  The most novel thing about RockMelt are two columns, one on each side of the window, reserved for social network access.  The right column has your Facebook profile, Twitter feed, and ideally other streams that you can pin to the column for constant updates.  The left has your friends profiles and other information.  RockMelt is designed around the notion of sharing, going so far as to include a share button in the menu bar for quick access to Facebook.  Alternatively, you can simply drag links into your friends’ icons to share web pages.

RockMelt seems like a really cool project.  I’ve registered for an invite to the closed-Beta which should be coming in the next few days so I’ll tell you all how I like it.  Coming off my last post about looking for aggregation software and their failures to be replacements for Facebook, RockMelt could be the answer I’m looking for.  Here’s hoping that RockMelt runs quickly, is stable, and plays well with GW’s VPN requirements.

Check out RockMelt at their website, and watch the video to see it in action: RockMelt

Filed under Internet, Software Tagged with , ,

Can Apps Beat the Web?

November 8, 2010 by Gabe S. Leave a Comment

As I sit at my computer on a daily basis, I find that Safari (or Chrome depending on my mood) has no less than 7 or 8 tabs open on my browser window.  This should not be an uncommon phenomenon.  Actually, given my raising on an anemic iMac G5, I’ve always been pretty cautious about having too many tabs open on a browser so performance doesn’t fall off the face of the earth.  Compare this to my mother, who has unending amounts of tabs open on Firefox, sometimes 15 or more.  Suffice to say, while tabbed browsing is very useful and is a landmark improvement over multi-window browser, things can get cluttered.  The biggest complaint I have with tabbed browsing is how many chat tabs I have to keep an eye on.  See, my friends like to use Facebook chat, but my family uses Google Chat instead.  I have to keep track of two chats at a time, trying to listen for the barely audible “pop” sound from Facebook, while relying totally on visual cues for the silent G-Chat.

At the same time, tonight I was having a chat with a friend on Facebook about this issue, wishing there was a way to combine these into a single aggregator so I could go to one place for all my instant messaging needs.  That was when I remembered Adium!  Adium is a great messaging client for the Mac that I used to use back when AIM was relevant.  Over the years, I stopped using Adium but development has pressed on for the app.  Adium can aggregate and link to your Google and Facebook accounts, allowing you to chat with all your contacts from a centralized program.  The notion of having a single place to go for chatting is intriguing so I downloaded it.  But then I began to wonder: could I take that farther?

There are staples of my tab bar.  Sites that WILL be on my browser no matter what.  Facebook, Google Reader, and Gmail are the first three tabs on my window at all times.  I began to wonder if I could reduce that.  Years ago I resigned that the online Gmail client was plain better than using another client like Apple’s Mail or Microsoft Entourage (may it rest in peace), but is there something I can do about Facebook and Google Reader?  Turns out there is.  It’s called Socialite, and it is a social network/RSS aggregator akin to Adium.  Linux distros like Ubuntu are known for using aggregators like Gwibber, but they are not that common on the Mac or Windows.  Still, Socialite is an application that I am aware of, so I figured why not give it a whirl?

My plan was to develop a challenge: for the next two weeks, I would not launch Google Reader or Facebook on any browser on my computer.  I’d spend a significant amount of time with Adium and Socialite to see if these customized applications can do a better job than the interfaces provided by Google and Facebook.  I hoped to yield some interesting insights into how Facebook and Google can improve their services, and how these applications can improve.  But you’ll notice this is all in the hypothetical past tense.  Why didn’t I go through with the challenge?  Because even though I wanted to believe that these could be alternatives, in the end tabs win the day.

Socialite is a very pretty program, and as an RSS and status aggregator it does a great job.  However, it’s simply not a Facebook client in the end.  I cannot go to Facebook pages, search for friends, or see the contents of links/pictures that people post without going through extra clicks.  As a separate program, it also uses far more resources than any extra tab would use (it even calls upon my GT330M in automated graphics switching).  What I DO like about Socialite is its integration with Growl.  Growl is a notification utility that you can install.  Other software vendors bake in Growl support so that you get new notifications whenever a change occurs in the application.  gfxCardStatus uses growl to tell me when I’m switching over to discrete graphics, Skype can tell me when people are sending me messages, even my HP printer uses Growl to give me updates.  Socialite and Adium’s use of Growl is impressive and deep – every single status update generates an update along with its content.  That is appealing, but a good notification system can’t make or break anything.

As for Adium, its a good program with nice customization.  But resource management when you’re tethered to a battery must be priority number one and the program simply requires more processor cycles than a tab will in my browser.

People keep saying the web is dead, that apps are taking over what web pages used to do.  Well on the desktop, I don’t think that’s the case.

Filed under Internet, Software

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