As part of trying out the site, I’ve also posted a number of items, all travel posts from this blog. One of the most appealing aspects of Intersect for me is the map interface, which is integrated into Google Maps. In fact, I’ve replaced the standard Google Map on my Travel Logs page that displays places where I’ve been with the Intersect map:

This interface is kind of what I would like to do with Google Maps but am too busy/lazy to, so it’s a nice and easy solution.

A couple of features that I would like to see on Intersect.com:

• Create extensions that would allow people to 1) post to their Intersect accounts from their own blogging platform such as WordPress or Posterous, or 2) post to those platforms from their Intersect accounts. The way I’ve been using Intersect, a post there would not replace a post about a trip on my personal blog, and right now it’s a duplication of effort to have to post here and at Intersect.
• Provide a preview of what the embedded map would look like when I customize the embed code. Right now you kind of have to figure out exactly how much of the big map is displayed in the embedded map by trial-and-error.
• Allow multiple locations for a single post. This would work well for, say, a post about my trip to several different points of attraction within one city. Right now Intersect seems to cover this by drawing a square box over the area covered by the different points, but plotting specific points on the map would be more accurate.

I discovered Plnnr, a new travel site, via Lifehacker last Friday. The site aims to take the hard work out of drawing up an itinerary for your trip. Personally, I’ve actually always found this part of trip planning very enjoyable as it helps me learn more about the place I’m going to and drums up my anticipation for the trip. However, Plnnr also looks like a good place to start your itinerary creation.

Right now, the site only offers itineraries for 18 cities, all in Europe or North America. You start by selecting a city, the date and length of your visit, the general type of activities you prefer (culture, kid-friendly, etc.), the level of intensity for the itinerary, and the level of accommodations you want for your trip. Plnnr then draws up an itinerary by drawing information from a number of Internet sites such as TripAdvisor, Wikipedia, and Frommer’s. You can then tweak the itinerary by telling Plnnr which sights you definitely want to see and which ones you are definitely not interested in. Each time you adjust that setting on an attraction, the itinerary automatically updates to accommodate the change. It also learns the general types of things you do and do not like and uses that to make better suggestions. You can also change each day’s start and end time, as well as how much time you wish to spend at a particular attraction.

To see how well Plnnr works, I set up a test itinerary for a four-day stay in London to see how Plnnr’s suggested itinerary compared to our actual itinerary when we visited London last fall. I designated the attractions we visited on that trip as must-see, and Plnnr did the rest. Here’s what I found:

The Good

• Plnnr seems to be pretty useful in helping you fill in the gaps between attractions that you know you want to see. For instance, the walking time from one stop to the next on our itinerary was generally only about 10 minutes, which meant it showed me plenty of attractions that are near my must-see choices, helping answer the question, “So what else do you want to do on the day that we’re going to see X?”
• The itinerary offers pretty detailed travel directions between attractions.
• The update to an itinerary after you’ve tweaked your attraction preferences takes a very short time.
• Plnnr is working on allowing you to enter your own lodging location, which is very handy for someone like me who prefers vacation rentals listed by individuals over chain hotels.

Needs Improvement

• Obviously, we could use more destinations, which Plnnr’s FAQ says the site is working to add.
• Once the site stats adding more destinations, it should offer itineraries for multi-city trips that help users draw up itineraries for travel days.
• More transportation options: Right now, it’s either walk or take a taxi. I would like to see public transportation factored into the equation as well, especially since they likely would be the easiest way to get around many of the cities currently available on Plnnr.
• A way to add your own custom attractions/locations to visit. I mentioned above that Plnnr is working on allowing people to set their own lodging option. That’s good, but I’d like to see that concept applied to other aspects of the trip as well to give users the flexibility to add stops that may not be the most popular attractions to their itinerary. Also, it would help people create an itinerary that can take into account where they want to dine, which is definitely a key part of the travel experience.
• Improve the time components of the itinerary. The suggested duration of time spent at each attraction and the suggested time of day for your visit seem to be kind of hit or miss. On the good side, the site seemed to be aware that the British Museum really requires at least four hours to do it justice, and every version of the London itinerary included going to Buckingham Palace at 11:10 a.m., just in time for the changing of the guards. On the down side, however, if you got to the changing of the guards at 11:10 a.m., you would not be able to get anywhere near the front of the sea of people that tend to gather for the event. Also, in a test itinerary I set up for Washington, D.C., it suggested spending five hours at the Newseum while only two hours at the National Zoo. I haven’t been to the Newseum, but it’s hard to imagine it would take more time to see than the British Museum. I have been to the National Zoo, and just under two hours seem not quite enough time to really see the whole zoo. When I changed the duration for the zoo to four hours, the itinerary suggested that I visit the zoo from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., even though the zoo closes at 6 p.m.
• Add an “itinerary by budget” feature that takes into account the cost of admission. It would be great if I can tell the site that I don’t want to spend more than, say, $300 on admissions to attractions and then have it figue out an itinerary based on that.
• Develop a mobile-friendly site. I can conceivably see this being a useful tool for people who might want to change their plans on the fly. I tried accessing the site via my iPod Touch, and it didn’t seem to work too well on that.

Right now, it looks like Plnnr is a handy tool to help take care some of the initial work in itinerary planning, with the potential to become a much more powerful and useful tool. You can’t draw up the ideal itinerary with Plnnr alone quite yet, but you can use it to help you get started.

Google has released a Google Translate app for the iPhone that includes a feature that allows you to speak in one language and have the app translate your words into another. I was curious to see how well this worked, so I spent a little bit of time yesterday testing the app. Here’s what I found:

• The app works well for very short phrases. For anything longer than a few seconds, however, more often than not you either get gibberish or an error message.
• Perhaps not surprisingly, the speech-to-translate feature works great if you’re speaking English. The app picked up every English phrase I said perfectly.
• I don’t really speak any other Romance or Germanic languages, so I can’t vouch for how well the app picks up those. I can, however, vouch for the app’s ability to pick up the first line of “Ode to Joy” in German, whether spoken or sung (the remnants of my four-and-a-half years of German classes in high school and college). As for the several other lines of broken and, I’m sure, poorly accented German I threw at the app, the performance was so-so.
• The real test was how the app performs for a language that’s completely different from English in terms of syntax, pronunciation, and grammar — in this case, Mandarin. I spoke to the app in Mandarin for about 10 minutes, asking and answering various everyday questions. The outcome was very mixed — the translations were surprisingly good for some phrases, but laughably horrible for others (though I must admit that it’s amazing the app picked up as much Mandarin as it did). For instance, when I asked, “What year were you born in?” in Mandarin, the app thought I was asking, “What year did you die in?” because the particular Mandarin phrase I used for “born” sounds somewhat similar to a phrase for “die”.

I’d say that currently the app is much more useful for native English speakers than for people whose first language is something other than English. For instance, if you were traveling in China and needed to find a restroom, you can speak the question into the app in English, and have it ask that question to a passerby in Mandarin. Just don’t expect the app to accurately translate what that passerby tells you. It’s not a universal translator yet.

Being a UNC alum, it’s naturally a bit of a struggle for me to praise that school in Durham, but in this case, I have nothing but praise for Duke’s plan to give WordPress sites/blogs to all members of the university next spring, which I just found out today. After seeing Duke’s WordPress plans, I started thinking, “Won’t it be great if UNC had something like it?” A quick Google search revealed that there is indeed something similar going on at UNC, though it’s still in the pilot-project phase. Here’s hoping that such projects succeed and that we’ll see more like them at universities around the country.

Reasons I like these projects:

• Finally, a quick and easy way for university members to create Web sites! My wife taught at UNC several years ago and I helped her create a Web site for her class. It was a pain just uploading the pages to her server space. I’m sure that’s the case at many colleges and universities around the country, and it’s one of the first and biggest deterrents to people creating Web sites/blogs.
• Instead of developing a cumbersome proprietary platform that’s difficult to use, this utilizes an extremely popular, proven, and open-source platform that many people are already familiar with. It lessens the learning curve and makes it easier for users to find tech support and documentation, not to mention easier to develop enhancements since you have a huge community of developers working with this platform. It also lowers the development cost.
• It ensures a certain level of quality in terms of design. By providing a selection of WordPress themes, you can prevent people from turning their sites into the second comings of MySpace catastrophes while still giving users a wide variety of looks to suit their needs.
• Making it so easy to create a site/blog will encourage more people to start one. Just drawing from past instances where I was trying to nudge students or faculty to blog about an event or project, it would have made for a stronger pitch if instead of “First, go to WordPress.com, sign up for an account, and then …”, I could just tell them, “Go to the university Web site, log in with the same school ID you use to log in to everything else on campus, and click that big button that says ‘Create Site’, and you’re done.”
• This is a big one: It fills a need while helping lay the foundation for a shift in campus culture. Obviously, faculty members have had the need to create course sites for a while, and this provides a quick, easy, and powerful way to do that. However, it also gets the faculty familiar with using the most popular blogging platform in existence. Does that mean they will all start blogging? Of course not. But it does mean that the next time you nudge a faculty member to start a blog, there will be one fewer hurdle/excuse standing in the way. In my experience, faculty members are often too busy to learn a new platform for something that’s not vital to their work. For instance, our faculty have access to edit their directory pages on our Web site through a CMS, and we have very detailed directions to walk them through it, but many have never even tried it, because it’s something very peripheral to their day-to-day work. After all, they don’t get grants or tenure for keeping their directory pages up to date. But they are more likely to learn WordPress for functions that are important to their work — such as setting up sites for their courses — and then when and if they are considering whether or not to start blogging, the amount of time needed to learn the technical aspects would no longer be a factor.
• Hosting blogs for university members allows the university to stake a claim to some quality content. If researchers want to blog about their work, they can just as easily go outside the university and start a blog on WordPress.com or Tumblr or Posterous, but if they are already using a university-hosted platform to create course sites and that platform can do everything that an external platform can, then it’s more likely they would just stick with the one they have out of familiarity. So instead of going to greatfacultyblog.wordpress.com, people will now be coming to greatfacultyblog.youruniversity.edu.
• Another advantage to having all these sites hosted on the same domain is that it helps create a greater sense of community among the various blogs and sites at the university. If you have a site on that domain, you are naturally going to be curious about who else is on there and go looking. That will help improve communication and interaction across campus. With luck, it might even help cultivate a stronger urge to share information, something that’s still in insufficient supply in many academic settings, where the initial urge is still to conceal, or at least to not publicize.

Bill Gates’ recent prediction about the Internet becoming the best single source of education in five years and that the university education will be five times less important touched on something I’ve been thinking about: How technology will and will not change higher education in the near future.

I started thinking about this because of my experience in journalism and seeing how technology has affected newspapers. What struck me as kind of interesting is that if you take away the difference in the two industry’s financial situation, higher education resembles newspapers in many ways. For instance, like newspapers, higher ed

• Is a big industry.
• Has a reputation for not providing satisfactory service to a significant portion of its users (just think about how often someone says that they learned more on the job than they ever did in college, or that they never use most of what they learn).
• Is often out of touch with the people it serves (students).
• Lags behind in terms of truly embracing new technology to connect with its users.
• Is hesitant to embrace social media.
• Uses information systems that are big, cumbersome, out of date almost as soon as they go live, and difficult to upgrade.
• Has small pockets of innovation surrounded by widespread intransigence and resistance to change.
• Recognizes the need to change, yet cannot do so quickly.
• Is hampered by its own outdated performance-evaluation systems that stymie change by giving little incentive and often outright discouragement for employees to experiment with new ways of doing things.

If you think about it, in some ways the only major thing differentiating higher ed from newspapers is that newspapers’ model of scarcity — their hold on the distribution of information — has been shattered while higher ed’s model of scarcity — the universities’ status as the generally accepted and preferred accreditation bodies — remains intact. That is why I think that while technology will undoubtedly affect higher ed in some significant fashion in the near future, I don’t know if I agree with Gates’ assessment that a university education will be five times less important in five years (believe me, if it comes true, I won’t be sorry to be wrong).

Already, a vast amount of information is available online for anyone with the desire to learn, and that’s only going to grow. However, that increase in freely available information isn’t a threat to the financial stability of higher-education institutions as long as they remain the only ones who can give you a piece of paper that employers would accept as evidence that you possess enough basic knowledge and skills to be employable. That’s why universities can afford to put their lectures online for all the world to see.

Let’s say MIT puts all of its lectures and other course material online. Without enrolling at MIT, I can watch every lecture, do every assignments, and even take every test. After four years of going through the exact same curriculum as someone who is actually enrolled at MIT, am I going to be able to walk into a job interview and convince a potential employer that I am just as qualified as an MIT graduate? Most likely not. Right now, if you want an education in the truest sense of the word, you have many options. But if you want to get a certification of your education, there is really only one widely accepted source — colleges and universities. That’s why universities can keep charging — and people will keep paying — tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition. The thing that keeps students and tuition dollars rolling in is no longer necessarily the knowledge that higher ed institutions offer or even the faculty who impart that knowledge, but rather the fact that these institutions are the only ones who can hand out certifications that enable their students to get jobs. The significant time and money that people invest in higher education are aimed at — above all else — obtaining that piece of certification.

I personally think that’s a bit of an absurdity, but I also think that model probably isn’t likely to dramatically change in the near future, much less five years. Universities have little incentive for making such drastic fundamental changes unless their model of scarcity is broken or at least seriously threatened. For that to happen, employers must generally reach the conclusion that a diploma from a university is no longer a stamp of employability, or at least no longer the sole stamp. Yet, what incentives do employers have to change that mentality? They still need an efficient and cost-effective way to gauge which among the hundreds of applicants for a job opening are equipped with the knowledge needed for the position. If nothing else, a university degree at least tells you that someone took a number of courses specializing in whatever field they majored in. In essence, the universities are conducting educational background checks and weeding out unqualified candidates for employers, at no cost to the employers. The universities are making oodles of money from this, and employers are saving oodles of money and time from not having to do such background checks on their own. I see few incentives for either to change their mindset any time soon.

To break that model of scarcity, we need to first have sufficient information on the Internet, available for free or relatively low cost, to substitute for the amount of knowledge you will acquire through a college degree program. I think we already have that, and much more, for many fields and I have no doubt the amount of publicly available knowledge for the taking will only increase. However, what we then need — and this is more important — is for someone to organize that gigantic pool of knowledge into curricula focusing on various fields and then devise an effective, less expensive, and more efficient way to certify that someone has digested the contents of a particular curriculum. There are many possibilities for how this could be accomplished (another post for another day), but the bottom line is that whatever solution they come up with has to be at least as cost-effective and efficient for employers as the current do-you-have-a-college-diploma system. If we can pull that off, then we’ll see a sea change in higher education. This involves more than just change in a few sectors or professions. It requires a fundamental rethinking of how a major component of society should function. That, I think, will take significantly more than five years.

After Facebook has been taking a PR pounding over the last few weeks over its privacy-control issues, its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has finally given a public response. He wrote in a column in the Washington Post today that Facebook will be adding simpler privacy controls and an easy way to turn off all third-party services.

That’s a step in the right direction, but I’m less than impressed with the language of the column. I think Mashable’s report about the column makes a good point:

I find Zuckerberg’s private response far more impressive than this public one. His private email to Robert Scoble, reprinted with Zuckerberg’s permission, included honest phrasing like “we’ve made a bunch of mistakes” and ” I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time”. Those concessions to critics verge upon being a mea culpa, even if they stop short of a direct apology. The Washington Post piece is much less direct: No doubt vetted by multiple members of the Facebook team, it almost seems to blame the users for being unable to work their privacy controls.

The word “sorry” never appears in the column, nor does “apologize”. In fact, the closest thing to a mea culpa is this line:

Sometimes we move too fast — and after listening to recent concerns, we’re responding.

I can’t help but notice the passive-aggressive undertone in that: “Sometimes we move too fast”, which, by implication, means those who complain about what Facebook does aren’t keeping pace.

Even in the e-mail, you can see how Zuckerberg hasn’t really learned all the lessons from this episode. He says he would rather have something to show before talking about what Facebook will do to address the concerns. But that just falls in with the general lack of communication from the company to its users that contributed to this fiasco in the first place. Think of it this way: If someone calls you up and asks you a question, do you just leave them holding to the sound of silence from your end while you go looking for the answer? Chances are you would give them at least a “Hang on, let me look.”

This line from the column also catches my attention:

The challenge is how a network like ours facilitates sharing and innovation, offers control and choice, and makes this experience easy for everyone. These are issues we think about all the time. Whenever we make a change, we try to apply the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

If people at Facebook are thinking about those issues all the time, then it just goes to prove the point I was making in an earlier post — Facebook’s privacy issues aren’t the results of incompetence, oversight, or mistaken assumptions about what its users want, but rather calculated moves. That people at Facebook think about such issues all the time doesn’t mean anything if they are thinking about new ways to “trick” or “force” you into sharing more than you want.

That brings to mind this snippet from NPR’s Science Friday show last week:

Mr. MOGULL: That’s always the risk, you know? You can’t argue with success. And let’s keep in mind, with all of these social networking services, we’re not their customers. I mean, we…

FLATOW: Right.

Mr. MOGULL: …don’t pay them money.

FLATOW: Right.

Mr. MOGULL: It’s the advertisers who are their customers, and we are their product that they sell.

Since we are not Facebook’s customers, we must question how much of their constant thinking about privacy-control issues is geared toward serving our interests and how much is geared toward serving those of their advertisers. Those two may converge at times on certain points, but in the end, I think they are often divergent, if not in conflict. This is not limited to Facebook or social networking sites. Advertising-subsidized media has the same problem, as I pointed out in a post awhile back about Demand media. Until the users of a product or service become the true customers for the provider of that product/service (i.e. its main source of revenue), there will always be that dichotomy between their interests.

Facebook has drawn a lot of criticism the last couple weeks as it again pushed the boundaries of what information about its users are shared through the introduction of Open Graph and Instant Personalization. You can count me as one of the critics. What I don’t understand is why some are giving Facebook the benefit of the doubt in light of its recent actions and when those actions are placed in context with its past actions.

For instance, Read Write Web has a piece calling the criticism of Instant Personalization a “knee-jerk reaction.” Its argument is basically that this is a cool feature, so don’t be too hasty to opt out. Oh, and your privacy concerns are overreactions. This piece by Mathew Ingram at Gigaom says privacy is a complicated matter, and while the piece acknowledges that the criticism “is all well and good,” it goes on to basically defend Facebook, saying Facebook is just “making some mistakes” and that it shouldn’t be a lightning rod for our dissatisfaction with normal human behavior.

Even some critics of Facebook’s actions seem to be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Jeff Jarvis has a terrific piece about the difference between “a public” and “the public” — the distinction that I think lies at the heart of why Facebook’s direction makes many uneasy. Yet, in the same piece, he cuts Facebook some slack by saying, “Facebook seems almost unaware of its line and perhaps that’s because its is harder to find.”

Can someone please enlighten me as to why we’re giving the benefit of the doubt to a company whose business model relies on getting its users to share as much of their personal information as possible and who has a shady track record at best on privacy issues. In the absence of a financial motive to protect our privacy, we’re left only with the hope that Facebook has the ethical standards to protect our privacy. Yet, its actions have indicated quite the opposite. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a piece tracking Facebook’s eroding privacy policy over the years. The information in that piece is brilliantly visualized by Matt McKeon, and I think it should raise some concerns.

Here’s my biggest issue with Facebook: Its privacy moves are NOT mistakes, as Ingram’s piece says, or an unawareness of the line it’s crossing, as stated in Jarvis’ piece. From the evidence I see, they are implicitly designed actions to make more user information public without drawing their attention to it. That’s even worse than incompetence or mistakes. With a mistake, you recognize you did something wrong and try to keep it from happening again. With incompetence, if your people aren’t good enough to fix the problem, you get people who are. In Facebook’s case, it doesn’t even think it has a problem. Remember Beacon? Or when Facebook quietly amended its terms-of-use policy only to be brow-beaten into redacting it? That “act first, ask for forgiveness later” attitude is a terrible approach to privacy matters. And here they are again, creating features that push more of their users’ information out into the public view by default. Yes, they changed Instant Personalization to opt-in after the initial furor, but the fact that they made it opt-out by default in the first place — after their high-profile debacle with Beacon and despite the fact that nobody likes being automatically enrolled in things that they have to opt out of — shows that not only have they not learned from their past mistakes, they’re ignoring the backlash to those past actions in their push to, as this piece says, shift from “private by default, public with effort” to “public and commercial by default and semi-private with effort.”

And you want to give this company the benefit of the doubt … why? Because it offers neat features and is popular? I like new tools as much as anyone, but the key is the tools have to work for me, not the other way around. I CHOOSE when and how to use something. Facebook shouldn’t do that for me (and not tell me about it).

[DEEP BREATH]

What’s Private By Default? Not Much

Just for the heck of it, I created another Facebook account just to see what the default privacy settings are these days.

Let’s start with the Privacy Settings section. Here are the default settings under Personal Information and Posts:

Your bio and your posts are set to be viewable by everyone by default, and all but one of the other categories are viewable by friends of friends. So everything on this page, except your comments on posts, is viewable by default to people you don’t necessarily know. To me, that’s bad. I think of it this way: Would I go up to strangers at a friend’s party and start volunteering my religious and political views? Or better yet, would I just shout my views out loud at this party without knowing who’s there? Probably not without the assistance of alcohol. This is what the settings on this page amount to. Some people are more comfortable sharing some of these information than others, but shouldn’t that choice reside with the individual, by default?

Next, the Contact Information section:

The default settings on this page are actually pretty much what they should be, considering the extra sensitive nature of contact information. Of course, if these were set to “Everyone” by default, it would likely trigger a mass uprising and exodus — the only Doomsday privacy scenario that would hurt Facebook financially.

Next up, Friends, Tags and Connections:

Basically everything is set to “Everyone” by default. Facebook seems to think my photos and videos are more sensitive, so it gives those items a higher privacy setting, though apparently they are not sensitive enough to be limited to “Only Friends” by default. The problem here is that, from a privacy standpoint, “Friends of Friends” is a lot closer to “Everyone” than it is to “Only Friends”. I can pick my friends, but I can’t pick my friends’ friends. I don’t even know a lot of my friends’ friends who aren’t also friends with me, so to me, there’s little difference between “Friends of Friends” and “Everyone”. To draw a parallel, I wonder if Facebook would feel comfortable about its employees sharing everything they know about the company with their friends.

By the way, here’s the other thing about these settings: When you click on those dropdown menus to change the setting, the choices you get are “Everyone”, “Friends of Friends”, and “Only Friends”. I guess those are the only three privacy settings you get on Facebook. Oh well, I guess I’ll pick … but wait, what is this “Customize” link at the bottom of the dropdown menu? Why, it brings up a menu of options of who can see this information, and the last option on that dropdown list is … “Only Me”. It’s a privacy setting on the same hierarchical level as the other three, yet it’s hidden inside a dropdown menu inside another dropdown menu. Bad UI? Yup. Oversight? Not likely. A designer has to make extra effort to hide an option like this. This didn’t fall through the cracks. Facebook dug a hole and buried it there.

Moving on. Let’s go to Applications and Websites. Let’s see what your friends — note, your friends, not you — can share about you through the games they play and the sites they visit:

Several of those checked-by-default boxes give me some pause, including family and relationship status, videos, and photos. Back in the prehistoric days before Facebook — an age which some allege actually existed — you e-mailed photos to share them with friends. Now imagine some of your friends taking those photos and giving them to third parties looking to use them to make money. What a pal, right? On Facebook, your friends can do that without even realizing it. Basically, Facebook’s settings make your buddies crappy friends by default.

So after going through and adjusting all the stuff under Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites, I’m done with my privacy settings for applications and websites, right? Oh if only it were that simple. Go under your Account dropdown menu and go to Application Settings. Here you get a list of applications that you are running on your Facebook page.

Click “Edit Settings” and check the privacy level. Surprise, surprise, they are all set to either “Everyone” or “Friends of Friends”. Now, most of this stuff isn’t exactly top-secret sensitive material. But again, photos and videos are set by default to be visible by people other than those you know, and I can see how some people may not want the groups they are in to be visible to everyone. Also, the “Only Me” setting in this section is hidden under three dropdown menus. Man, they REALLY don’t want you to find it.

Ok, enough with privacy settings. I joined Facebook to share stuff with friends, not to wade through page after page of check boxes and dropdown menus (and that’s why Facebook defaults everything to public — it’s banking on you not looking too closely). Let’s go to the wall and post a message. What’s this little lock here?

It sets the privacy setting for my post. It’s set to “Everyone” by default. I don’t like that. Let me set it to “Only Friends”. Click, pick, done. I get this message the first time I change the settings:

I write a post. Ok, next post. Oh, the privacy setting is back to “Everyone” again. Sneaky. True, if you click on the lock and then on Customize, you can make it default to the level  you want. But again, an extra menu to navigate to when that option should be in the same place with the rest of the privacy settings. It’s another one of those little touches to get people to share more without drawing their attention to it.

Look, I’m not a prude about sharing information. I have five blogs (it’s an addiction). I argue with strangers on Twitter. I write about my family. I post Flickr galleries of what we had for dinner. I upload videos of our trips. But in all those cases, I’m putting up information about myself with the clear knowledge that it’s going to be viewable by the world (though my site traffic stats tell me my privacy is in no danger). That influences what I do and do not share. I may have choice words for some idiot on Twitter, but if it’s something that might reflect poorly on me later, I beat back the urge to tweet it. I may share a lot about my life on my blogs, but there are things that I won’t write about. On Facebook, it’s a different story because it started as primarily private, and the current line between private and public is murky, easy-to-miss, and complicated-to-adjust. I may want to tell my friends I’m out of town next week or that I hate so-and-so, but would I want the world to know that? Well, unless I dig through several layers of options, the world could easily know that by default, because my sharing with everyone is more profitable for Facebook than my sharing with just a few dozen people. Maybe Facebook is living proof that no service can/should be trusted to serve both our private and public sharing needs, especially when it has a vested interest in one over the other.

Comparison to Other Sharing Sites

Just out of curiosity, I wanted to see what the privacy settings look like for a couple other social/information-sharing sites.

Flickr:

What I like about this is that all your privacy settings are in one place. There’s no need to go to several different pages, and there aren’t multiple dropdown menus to navigate.

YouTube:

YouTube’s privacy settings are actually split between the “Privacy” and the “Activity Sharing” tabs. However, they are still pretty straight forward and don’t involve going into several layers of hierarchy to turn something on or off.

Twitter:

Obviously, Twitter has very few privacy settings. Your tweets are either public or private, and they’re public by default. That underscores the difference between privacy expectations on something like Twitter, where talking to strangers is the whole point, vs. Facebook, where a significant chunk of users (if not most) only want to interact with a select number of people. Yet, even on Twitter, a network that’s overwhelmingly public, it asks me whether I want to turn on location tweets instead of just turning it on for me, which is what Facebook does with many of its features.

Looking at these comparisons, it’s pretty sad that Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter — all networks that are perceived by their users to be much more public than Facebook — have clearer privacy settings than Facebook does. Considering the brainpower it took to build Facebook into the juggernaut it is today, it’s impossible to believe that the hoops you have to jump through on Facebook to make something private are merely oversights or results of incompetence. The people at Facebook know full well what they are doing, and furthermore, I think they fully expect to get the kind of backlash they are getting now. They probably also fully expect it to die down with a little time. Then they’ll get back to contracting the boundaries of what’s private on their network little by little and continue adding “Like” buttons across the Web. Maybe their goal is that at some point in the near future, the combination of the incremental erosion in privacy controls and Facebook’s ubiquitous presence across the Web will render privacy concerns a moot point from Facebook’s perspective. You may have worries about your information on Facebook, but when Facebook has a hand in everything you touch on the Web, you may have no choice but to get dirty.

So am I quitting Facebook?

No. Because I work in the communications realm, I need to understand the technology being used. I am, however, being careful with it. I have two accounts, one for work, which is set to be much more public, and one for personal use, which is set to share with basically only my friends. Even on my personal account, I have removed almost all of my personal information. While I can keep some of them private right now, I have no idea whether that’s going to be the case in the future or, more disconcertingly, whether Facebook will bother to tell me when that’s no longer the case.

UPDATE (May 17, 2010)

For an example of a quintessential Facebook apologist piece, see Ben Parr’s “In Defense of Facebook” on Mashable. This is about as bad an apologist piece as I’ve seen in the Facebook controversy, which is why I just had to rant a little about it here. Among other things, Parr says:

Protecting our privacy starts with us, not Facebook. While the company should have more clearly communicated its recent privacy changes, if you didn’t want your pictures shared with the rest of the world, you shouldn’t upload them in the first place.

And if I just wanted to upload some pictures to share with my friends, and the site I was uploading them to promised that they would be private? Parr totally misses the point here. The problem isn’t that Facebook wants to make information public. Plenty of social networks do that, and people are fine with it. The problem is that Facebook collected much of its users’ information with the promise that such information would be kept private and that users would have control over it. If Facebook had its current privacy policy back in 2006, users would have never provided as much information about themselves as they did. This goes back to my point above that when I post on a blog or on Twitter, I know what I’m posting is viewable by the world and I post it with that intent. On Facebook, people post with the notion that it’s private for themselves and their selected circle of friends, because that’s the notion Facebook pushed in order to convince people to share personal information. Facebook collected personal information by promising privacy and now it’s trying to monetize that information by publicizing it.

Imagine if Gmail decided to make your e-mails public by default. Would you still write the same e-mails as you have been? What Parr’s “if you don’t want to share it with the world, don’t upload it” argument is saying is that you either share with everyone or you share with no one, which is total BS, especially when the network you put those photos on explicitly promised that you CAN share with only those you choose. Keep sipping the Zuck Cool-Aid there, Parr.

I’ve liked Chrome’s speed ever since it came out, but for a good while after Google’s browser was first released, I stayed with Firefox because it offered much more functionality and features with its add-ons — until Google opened up Chrome to extensions. Within a couple weeks after extensions were added, Chrome leapfrogged Firefox as my primary browser.

I still love Firefox and use it for certain things that Chrome still can’t handle well, such as working in WordPress or opening files instead of saving them. Nonetheless, the extensions have allowed me to get close to the best of both worlds — the speed of Chrome and the functionality of Firefox. Here are some of my favorite Chrome extensions:

Click&Clean: This is really a feature that needs to be built into Chrome itself, but until that happens, Click&Clean is what I use to clear browser data such as cookies and the cache. My only complaint is that while Firefox clears its browser data silently when you close your browser, Click&Clean pops up a screen that sometimes stays on for more than a couple seconds, and on my slower computer, it often just opens an empty browser window instead.

MeasureIt: A handy tool for designers that allows you to measure a part of the screen. I started using this tool while I was still on Firefox, and it was one of the main reasons I stayed on Firefox, until the Chrome extension came out.

Eye Dropper: On Firefox, Colorzilla was kind of the companion tool to MeasureIt. I’ve found Eye Dropper to be a solid substitute for it on Chrome. It lets you sample colors from a Web page. The color wheel is also a nice touch.

Chromed Bird: Probably the best in-browser Twitter client I’ve used. While many of the extensions on this list are things that replicate what I was able to do on Firefox, I feel like Chromed Bird is one extension that’s superior to any Firefox counterpart I’ve been able to find (and believe me, I’ve looked). I like it because it’s very compact (a small icon that you click to open a drop-down box rather than a whole sidebar or another toolbar) but still offers all the important functionalities, such as the ability to retweet the old-school way and the ability to search Twitter within the extension itself.

DayHiker: A quick and easy way to check your Google calendar. If nothing else, you gotta love that icon.

Search Center: When extensions first came out, one thing I looked for was something that can replicate the quick-search box in Firefox that allows you to quickly search different sites without having to go to the site first. There were some extensions that did that, but only for a limited number of the most popular sites. Some of them alleged that you can add other sites, but I could never get them to work. Recently, though, I discovered Search Center, and it actually makes it easy for me add a site search engine.

FittrFlickr: This extension pimps up Flickr by, among other things, adding a lightbox feature for quick picture viewing, adding quick links to see the different sizes of a photo and the EXIF data, and implementing keyboard shortcuts.

Handy Google Shortcuts: There are a few extensions that all do basically the same thing — make it easy for you to access the different Google applications. This is the one I use, and I like it.

Better Gmail: This was a must-add for me. It gives you more control over your Gmail interface, such as hide ads, highlight the row that you’re mousing over, and fix the page width.

Picnik Extension: I had the Firefox equivalent of this tool, too. It lets you send an image or a screenshot of the current page from your browser to Picnik, the online photo-editing site. It’s a quick-and-dirty way to grab and edit images, especially while you’re blogging.

Lightshot: I just discovered this today and it looks like a promising substitute for the Screengrab add-on I had on Firefox. It takes screenshots and lets you select specific areas of the screen to capture as well. One plus it has over Screengrab that I’ve already discovered: If you’re running two monitors, Lightshot actually captures both screens, not just the one that the Chrome browser is running on.

Just wanted to share a couple nice links I came across over the weekend:

• Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline
• Criticism of Apple’s handling of the lost iPhone incident:
  • Video: Fanboy Jon Stewart Rips Apple For Gizmodo Search
  • A Lost iPhone Shows Apple’s Churlish Side

For me, here’s the thread connecting these two storylines: Both Apple and Facebook offer very good (or at least, in Facebook’s case, very popular) products/services, and both are positioning themselves to really redefine and control the future of how we operate online. If developments in the past decade in how we find, access, and consume information were dominated by a company whose motto is “Don’t be evil,” will the motto for the power players of the coming decade be “It’s ok to be evil as long as you build a good/popular product”? I’m not saying that Google hasn’t done questionable things (hello, Google Buzz), but I think you have to admit that there’s a bit of a difference between a company that vows to not be evil in its corporate mission statement and companies that give no pretense of aiming for anything other than doing what’s best for their businesses.

She was probably right. And then a day later, I went and did this:

So, here are the blogs I’ve got going right now:

• Matters of Varying Insignificance: Running since 2008 (though the early months of the blog were lost thanks to a hacked server), this is my first and still primary blog, where I write about anything and everything, but mostly journalism and travel since those are two of my main interests.
• WYSIWYG: A photo blog I started last year as my interest in photography grew. I update this sporadically, usually right after a trip where I take a few hundred pictures.
• JZ’s Posterous Potpourri: An odds & ends blog I started last month as a way to acquaint myself with Posterous. The platform quickly grew on me, and this blog has replaced the Odds & Ends section on Matters of Varying Insignificance, primarily because it’s ridiculously easy to post tidbits to Posterous.
• The Zhus: A blog I started a couple months ago when I decided to start working on a book about the extended family on my father’s side. I wanted to start the blog as a way to keep myself on track with the book. This actually started out as a Tumblr blog before I discovered Posterous, and again, I loved Posterous so much that I decided to move the blog to that platform instead, though the old Tumblr blog remains and still gets an auto update when I post to Posterous.
• Chicken Feet & Clam Chowdah: The aforementioned cooking blog, which sprang to life from our fondness for cooking and eating.

So there you go, five blogs, and somehow, without spending every waking moment blogging, I manage to post to these sites pretty regularly, with the exception of WYSIWYG, where the posts come in spurts (by the way, the feeds for the other four blogs are all in the right sidebar of this blog).

For me, part of the reason for all this blogging is that it’s fun. But it’s also about exploring various platforms and learning more about the way information is distributed, discovered, and shared on the Web — an essential part of my work. I don’t know if my blogging efforts are fragmented to the point where it hurts each individual effort, but I do know that I’ve been learning something with each one. I started this blog two years ago to learn about blogging, and the experience has taught me a ton about the craft and about attracting readers, working with CMSes, designing WordPress sites, promoting your work, constructing my digital presence, and grooming some semblance of an online community.

Notice how my blog-creating pace picked up considerably after I discovered Posterous. I know I’m sounding like a shill for the company, but the platform really has impressed me with its ease of use. It’s so easy to post stuff that I don’t even have to think about it; just send a quick e-mail or click the bookmarklet in my browser and it’s done. Heck, it’s even easier than Twitter since you don’t need to sit there boiling everything down to 140 characters. That’s why I’ve written before that I think it’s going to be platforms like Posterous that will make blogging truly ubiquitous among the general population.

Now, somebody take my keyboard away before I start another blog!! (Hmm … I could do a blog about our pottery making …)

From working in a university setting for the past three years, here’s what I’ve learned:

• Communication between departments on a college campus, or even just between units within the same department, sucks. People often don’t know what’s going on outside of the immediate circle of individuals and units they deal with on a daily basis. Also, you either don’t get enough information about something, due to the lack of a clear channel of communication, or you get the same piece of information multiple times due to redundant channels such as the multiple listservs one might be on.
• The technology for on-campus communication sucks as well. For instance, a lot of the faculty and staff I’ve come across use Blackboard as a group-communication tool. While I’m sure Blackboard is fine for instructors to share material with students and such — the niche it was designed to serve — it really doesn’t measure up as a mass communication tool. For one thing, it’s closed. There’s no way to push information out from Blackboard. For another, it’s not designed to be a social network. Yet people on campus use it for those purposes because, frankly, that’s the one tool that everyone on campus have access to. Of course, collaborators off campus can’t get into your campus’ Blackboard site, so that necessitates creating yet another location for sharing information with off-campus individuals, which means when you post or update one piece of information — say a set of research guidelines — you might have to update it in several locations, and chances are you’ll forget at least one of them.
• Technology-related projects on campuses usually tend to be big, top-down, wide-ranging efforts trying to meet the needs of a million different interests. Unsurprisingly, those qualities invariably make the end product a mediocre solution for any one of those interests, and you end up with some cumbersome system that’s buggy, took forever to implement, and will take forever to upgrade. And you’re stuck with it because you sank a ton of money and resources into implementing it, and if you switch systems, chances are you’ll end up with a replacement that’s cumbersome, buggy, took forever to implement, and will take forever to upgrade.

That’s where Google comes in. For starters, Gmail is likely better than most campus mail systems and, of course, it’s free. However, to me, the e-mail component is really just a side benefit. The main advantage is that it will get everyone on campus onto Google and give everyone access to the same set of terrific tools that Google offers, which is ideal for collaboration. There have been many times during my work when I thought, “Google Docs or Google Wave would be perfect for something like this,” only to have it followed by “but everyone would need to have a Google account.”

Imagine just a few advantages of a campus where everyone is using Google’s applications:

• On-campus collaboration will reach a new level with Wave.
• E-mailing files around will be replaced by sharing them on Google Docs.
• Every faculty member will have their own space for hosting and sharing files (Docs), photos (Picasa), and videos (YouTube) related to their work, and it’s easy to make them public if the researcher chooses to do so.
• Faculty members would be able to easily create decent-looking lab pages and wikis with Google Sites, and if they want to blog, they basically already have a Blogger account.
• Various units on campus can create Google maps related to events and research, and those can be compiled into content-rich, multi-layered campus maps.
• Event listings from every department on campus can be easily compiled, filtered, and shared with the public. Oh one can only dream.

The other advantage is that Google’s apps are easy to implement. True, they may not be as powerful as some special proprietary programs for certain specific needs, but what they are is an excellent 80 percent solution that can be quickly deployed and, if need be, scrapped without significant investment of time or resources. That’s a departure from a lot of the current software being used on college campuses, which are cumbersome, expensive, and time-consuming to develop. Perhaps working in such an environment would encourage people to approach projects differently — think small, nimble, and bottom-up, and not be afraid to experiment, because the cost of a failed experiment is so low. Furthermore, the open nature of Google’s platform could help change the culture on campuses, where people’s first inclination is still often to hold on to information rather than sharing it, either with collaborators or the general public.

That said, I can also see some concerns with turning over all the key communication functions on your campus to one company. To a degree, I share those concerns, too, especially since part of me thinks one day Google is going to push a button and something like this will happen. Still, there’s a huge upside to getting a college campus onto a nimble, open (and free) platform. And hey, if Google does turn out to be evil, you can easily ditch its set of tools and you would have suffered relatively little financial loss.

A couple days ago I started working on a post about how, despite my anti-iPad ravings on Twitter lately, I actually find a lot to like about the device and would probably consider buying one when and if it adds a few more features and comes down in price a bit. However, after what transpired at Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 event yesterday, I’ve axed that draft, because now I’ll have to think long and hard before buying anything from Apple.

Before yesterday’s event, I saw Apple as a company that was too full of itself but who made good, albeit overpriced and overhyped, computers and gadgets. Before yesterday, the main reasons I didn’t own more Apple stuff were that they were expensive and that I didn’t like the company’s pack of sycophant fanboys. However, yesterday’s iPhone OS 4.0 event showed me several things about Apple that really give me pause:

• Hypocrisy: Much has been made about Apple’s tight control over what gets into its Apps Store. That position of tight policing was reaffirmed during yesterday’s Q&A session with Steve Jobs after the introduction of iPhone OS 4.0. From Engadget’s liveblog of the event:

11:29AM Ryan Block from GDGT: What about running unsigned apps? Steve: You know, there’s a porn store for Android. Anyone can download them. You can, your kids can. That’s just not a place we want to go.

Yet earlier in the same Q&A session, someone asked whether there would be an approval process for the new iAd platform that Apple rolled out yesterday:

11:12AM Q: Will there be an ad approval process? A: (Jobs… super long pause) Um… well there’s going to be some process… but these people are paying to run ads. So, I’m not sure it’ll be anything other than a light touch.

So if I can’t get my objectionable content into the Apps Store, I can package it as an iAd (which looks basically like an app within an app), promise Apple a 40 percent cut, and I’ll have a much better chance of getting it through? Hmm …

• Viciousness: What made even bigger noise yesterday was the change Apple made to its developer’s agreement that effectively bans the use of Flash in developing iPhone apps. The move neuters the Flash-to-iPhone compiler, one of the key features in Adobe’s imminent release of Flash Professional CS5. I’m not an app developer, so this has no practical impact on me. But what bothers me is that given the timing of this move — mere days before Adobe is to launch CS5 — it sure looks like a giant F-you to Adobe, which has been in a much-publicized spat with Apple over Apple’s refusal to support Flash on its mobile devices. You can’t help but get the impression that Apple waited silently for Adobe to dump resources into developing a key feature and then yanked the rug out from under a company that 1) produces indispensable software for an entire industry of loyal Mac users (I’m that rarest of designers — the one who just shrugs when asked if he prefers PCs or Macs), and 2) isn’t even a competitor in the fields in which Apple operates. While I think Adobe is big enough that it will weather this and move on, imagine when Apple decides to do the same thing to a smaller company.

I’m no tech insider, so I don’t know if such dirty maneuvering are commonplace. What I do know is that very few companies have the clout that Apple does, which brings up my next point of concern.

• Power: If it hadn’t been obvious enough before, what transpired yesterday with Flash showed the ridiculous amount of clout Apple has. Even before yesterday, I was already a bit concerned with the fact that Apple’s refusal to support Flash on the iPad has basically ensured that Flash will not exist on most Web sites built from here on, even though there are other tablets on the way that do support Flash. My concern doesn’t stem from whether I think Flash or HTML5 is a better platform (for the record, I think HTML5 is), but rather from the fact that we are in a situation where a single device from a single company can pretty much dictate which technology the Web will be built on. Moving beyond the Flash-vs.-HTML5 debate, consider what happens when and if Apple decides something else that’s currently ubiquitous doesn’t play nice enough with its gadgets and uses its clout to kill it.

Combine hypocrisy, viciousness, and almost absolute power, and it spells trouble. Apple has always carried itself with arrogance, but what’s been happening recently has gone beyond the mere snarkiness embodied in the “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” ads. That was funny, maybe even likable in some ways, and relatively easily overlooked. What we’re seeing now, however, is something much more sinister. Apple has always operated with a control-freak, “our way or the highway” approach, which is tolerable when it was only controlling 10 percent of the personal computing market. But its mobile-gadgets empire has expanded its clout exponentially, to the point where it can put industry leaders like Adobe in a headlock, and Apple’s recent actions certainly lend credence to the old “absolute power corrupts absolutely” adage.

Of course, from a consumer standpoint, most of this has little relevance. The Apple-Adobe fight is, in the end, geek-on-geek violence. Apps will keep popping up, and Apple still makes sexy gadgets and status symbols that their users swear by. But just as people have become wary of Walmart for its business practices, low low prices notwithstanding,  I think we should be wary of the kind of company Apple is showing itself to be as its power grows.

I’m not the kind to make absolute declarations like “I’ll never buy from Apple again,” because it does make good products and because as a designer, Macs are overwhelmingly the computer of choice in my field, so I’ll likely encounter situations where I need to go that route. But now, when I consider whether to buy an Apple product, its features and exorbitant price will no longer be my only considerations. I can overlook arrogance, but not evil, and Apple seems to be increasingly leaning toward the latter.

UPDATE (4/15)

From Nieman Lab comes today’s example for yet another cause for alarm: A Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist can’t get his cartoon app approved because Apple disapproves of the satire. What’s even more disturbing is the language in the rejection letter Apple cites in one of the stories linked to from the Nieman Lab article:

“… We’ve reviewed Bobble Rep – 111th Congress Edition and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section  3.3.14 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement which states:

“Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

Banned for ridiculing public figures. Hmm, is there anything that sounds more un-American than that? Imagine if your Internet service provider decided to do the same thing, blocking access to Web sites it deems inappropriate. Somehow I don’t think the ISP would get as many people defending its actions as Apple has. One might point out that we’re talking about apps on a phone here, not the Web. However, the mobile Web is expanding rapidly and predicted to overtake desktop Web in a few years. Also, mobile apps are creating a whole new corner in the information marketplace, and it should definitely be a concern to us, right now, what the acceptable conventions of this new arena are. Does our tolerance for censorship of information change because the device with which we access that information changes?

I started tinkering with Posterous and am really loving its simple and ridiculously easy-to-use interface. Its post-by-e-mail feature is so simple and yet offers much more functionality than the post-by-e-mail function in WordPress. You can even post to other sites — such as Flickr, Facebook, and other blogging platforms — via e-mail through Posterous (though I’m still trying to get it to work correctly with this blog). Even more impressively, you can pick and choose which platforms to autopost to just by combining specific e-mail addresses (i.e.: flickr+wordpress@posterous.com).

I have been aware of Posterous for a while but hadn’t started playing with it until recently. After all, I already have two blogs on WordPress and accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Tumblr (and probably a couple others I’m not remembering). The last thing I need is another blogging platform to maintain. But Posterous’ idiot-proof simplicity has won me over. Platforms such as WordPress have made blogging relatively easy for a sizable segment of the population, but I think it’s going to be something like Posterous that will make blogging ubiquitous by making it even simpler to use by making it possible to post more than basic text using just e-mail — a platform that almost everyone is familiar with.

I love my WordPress blogs and am not about to give up the power and control that platform offers, but I am looking for ways to incorporate Posterous into my online activities. Right now, I envision myself using Posterous mostly as a one-stop posting depot for my myriad other accounts when I’m traveling. I try to blog daily or close to that frequency when I’m on leisure trips, like I did when I went to China in 2008-09. However, I’m usually doing so much stuff every day during the trips that by the time I get back to the hotel room, I’m pretty tired and don’t want to spend a whole lot of time writing, toning a few pictures, waiting for them to upload to Flickr, and then insert them into my post — all on an older laptop with nowhere near the speed of my desktop. With Posterous, I can tone the pictures and write my post offline, then send everything in one e-mail and let Posterous autopost to multiple platforms for me. Also, Posterous would make it easy for me to quickly send in random things I come across using my phone and post them on my blog or Flickr account. I think I’ll try to use this workflow for my trip to Atlanta in a few months, and if it goes well, for my visit to England later in the year as well.

Are the examples the writer gives to back up his claims legit? Sure. But that’s akin to someone pointing to the inane portions of the Internet and saying there’s nothing good on the Web, or someone pointing to the harlequin romance novels section as evidence that bookstores offer nothing but crap. Like any medium, there are plenty of crap on Twitter, but there are also a lot of good stuff, too. You just need to know where to look, the same way that you know when you walk into a bookstore to stay away from the trashy romance section and head straight toward whichever section you’re interested in. However, the way Twitter is set up, it’s kind of like heading into a bookstore where the books are all mixed up and scattered about, with little signage within the store itself to tell you where to find the best-sellers and classics.

Hey, if you don’t like Twitter because you’re just not into the concept of sharing or social media, that’s totally fine. To each their own. But if you don’t like Twitter because you feel like there’s nothing of substance on there, then your disdain is unwarranted because you’re just not looking in the right places. So here are a few ways that I’ve found to be effective in locating the good and avoiding the crap on Twitter:

• Pick topics that you’re interested in, and look for people who tweet about them: I’ve found that Twitter often works best as a tool for immersing yourself in a particular topic. For instance, being a former journalist, one of my interests is obviously journalism, and I’ve tailored my Twitter feed to include a large number of good sources who share insights and links to interesting pieces about that topic. I’m literally flooded by a deluge of information about journalism through my Twitter feed every day. The same with my other interests, such as zoos, photography, and traveling. And it’s much easier to find good Twitter sources if you’re searching by what they are tweeting about rather than who they are. Until I realized that, I didn’t really get the appeal of Twitter either because I just didn’t know whom to follow.

Be sure to check out the people followed by the people you follow.
• Whom do the followed follow? Be sure to check out whom the people you follow are following, and the people who send tweets to the people you follow (to find people who are sending tweets to JaneDoe, search on Twitter for “@JaneDoe”). Also, look at their Twitter lists. These are great ways to find people who share a particular common interest. It’s like a trail of breadcrumbs that can lead you to good sources.
• Follow RTs to the source: RT on Twitter means retweet — retransmitting something originally tweeted by someone else. When retransmitting, it’s common courtesy to put RT and then the user name of whoever originally tweeted it. If you find a retweeted link or insight interesting, following it back to the originating source and see if they’re worth following.
• Use Twitter directories such as WeFollow: You can search for topics that interest you and see who in each category has the most followers. Depending on the category, the ones with the most followers may not necessarily have the best, or even good, Twitter feeds, but it’s a starting point. Pick some of those accounts, and repeat the steps outlined in the previous bullet points. Again, this is searching for Twitter users based on what they are tweeting about rather than who they are, which gives you a much better chance of finding useful feeds.
• Do your favorite bloggers have Twitter accounts? Go on their blogs and look for links to their Twitter feeds.
• When all else fail, Google: Just go to Google and search for “[topic of interest] on Twitter”. You’ll be surprised how often that turns up something interesting. Aside from turning up individual tweets, the Google search could also find lists of good Twitterers compiled by others. That’s how I found a comprehensive list of zoos that are on Twitter that otherwise would have taken me a long time to track down.
• DON’T FOLLOW CELEBRITIES: The only “celebrity” I follow on Twitter is William Shatner, and that’s just because I’m a Star Trek geek. I’ve found a lot of celebrity Twitter feeds to be of the inane, narcissistic, “here’s what I had for lunch” type that critics of Twitter mock. They’re also more likely to have ghostwriters penning their tweets. I guess when you can get legions of followers just based on who you are and not what you tweet, there really isn’t much motivation to tweet stuff of substance, especially when the mundane, everyday details of a celebrity’s life is probably what the people who follow them are after.  If you’re looking for more substance, however, look for non-celebrities who mindcast instead of lifecast.
• Followers come and go: Tweak your feed to suit your needs. For instance, I’m planning a trip to England, so I went and looked for people who tweet about traveling in England and followed some of them while organizing the others into a Twitter list. When my trip is over, chances are I’ll just go ahead and stop following them or paying attention to the list.
• Quality counts, but so does quantity: Obviously, you should follow only Twitter accounts that offer content that interests you. However, if you’re only following a handful of people, chances are your Twitter feed won’t be all that interesting to look at. It wasn’t until I was following about 100 accounts that my feed began being consistently interesting. It only makes sense: A lot of people contributing to a feed beats a few people contributing to a feed, and since you get to decide who contributes to your feed, you can cut out the crap and distill the feed into something where a high percentage of what comes across is substantial and interesting. Most of the people in my feed send only a few tweets a day, and not a single one of those feeds are interesting all the time, but when put together, they form a steady stream of interesting information, insights, and links.

Since its introduction, the iPad has drawn a fair amount of criticism, a significant part of which centers around its limited content-creation features and lack of ports that have become computing standards. Defenders of the device have often said that this is a device that’s meant for “normal” consumers, not geeks, and that from the average consumer point of view, the device does what most of them need to do on a computer, without the headaches that a computer brings. One article on TechCrunch said that this device is for older, non-tech-savvy people like our parents. That got me thinking: What do my parents use their computers for, and can the iPad meet those needs?

Meet my dad:

• 60 years old
• A scientist
• Knows how to use a computer but is not tech savvy.
• Has a couple of Dell desktops that he and my mom (who’s definitely not tech-savvy and doesn’t use a computer that much) use in some form or fashion everyday.
• Has a plain vanilla cellphone, and that suits him just fine.
• Twitter? Facebook? What’s that?
• Doesn’t have a laptop and really has no need for one as he rarely does computing on the go.
• He drives to work, so there’s no reading during the commute.
• Rarely watches videos on his computer. Prefers movies on his big-screen TV. The only online videos he looks at are the occasional YouTube clip.

Here are some of the things my parents use their computers for:

• E-mail, Internet.
• Word processing, spreadsheets.
• Frequently upload photos from their camera to Flickr.
• On a semi-regular basis, my dad has photos of cell cultures from work that he needs to crop, tone, caption, and save. Currently, he does this with an old copy of Photoshop, which I installed for him and showed him how to use.
• Occasionally make photo books from their pictures using the book-layout program from Blurb.
• An ongoing project of converting old home videos to digital files and burning them to CDs/DVDs.
• Another ongoing project of scanning in old family photos so they can be stored digitally.

Looking at that list, the iPad handles the first two items fine (though you have to shell out for their iWorks apps). The third item — uploading pictures to Flickr — is manageable as well, though, again, you have to buy the special camera adapter kit (it’s such a crock that you need a cable other than the one your camera came with). As for the fourth item — toning lab photos — I suppose he can download a Photoshop app or use a low-end online editing program, though he would be missing some more advanced features that he uses occasionally. As for the last three items, I’m guessing he’ll be SOL if he wants to do them on the iPad.

While e-mail and Internet make up by far the biggest slice of my parents’ computer usage, they are by no means the only things they need a computer for. The other items on the list, while not daily needs, are important enough to them that they would never replace their computer with a device that can’t do those things. And not being computer geeks, it’s much more likely that they will just buy one machine that meets all those needs rather than buying an iPad and another computer. The same likely holds true for my father-in-law, who mostly uses a computer for e-mail and Internet, but also for one other relatively minor thing that happens to be very important to him — scanning in his watercolor paintings and turning them into postcards to sell when he goes to an art show. Again, an iPad might meet 80 to 90 percent of his computing needs, but that last 10 percent is pretty darn important to him, and he’s more likely to buy one computer to meet 100 percent of his needs rather than an iPad to meet 90 percent and another computer for the other 10 percent. If the iPad were no more than a couple hundred bucks, my parents and in-laws might consider getting it as a toy, but for the same cost as a desktop that can do everything they need, I don’t see them getting it in addition to a computer.

That’s one reason I think the “this is for the average consumer, not geeks” argument doesn’t hold up — it seems to assume that the average consumer has no computing needs other than Web surfing and basic word processing/spreadsheet. While the average non-geek consumers might use their computer primarily for e-mail and Internet, chances are that most of them will have a handful of other minor but important computing needs that crop up from time to time. You don’t have to be a geek to need content-creation features, the ability to have more than one program open at a time, or a USB port. While they may be infrequent needs, they are important enough for the average consumers to take into account when purchasing their next computer. And if they aren’t “geeks” and aren’t tethered to a computing device all day long, then what are the chances that they would spend double the money to buy two devices when they can fill all those needs with just one device?

I don’t doubt the iPad will sell a ton of units when it becomes available, but I think the majority of those sales will be to people who are closer to the geek side than the average consumer. A lot of the praise for the iPad so far has been about its potential, and I definitely recognize what it, and other tablet devices, can become. However, from a consumer point of view, the question is not “What can the iPad do in two or three years?” It’s “What can the iPad do right now, and should I spend money on the version that’s available?” The potential of a gadget is something geeks worry about. Your average consumer doesn’t buy a device for the profound technological shift it symbolizes or what a future incarnation of it might be able to do. Even if you can build rocket ships and perform open-heart surgery with future generations of the iPad, it doesn’t change the fact that the Gen 1 version that you’re looking at right now can’t do those things. I’m pretty sure I, or my typical-consumer dad, won’t want to buy the iPad as it is now. Maybe we’d reconsider by the time Generation 2 or 3 comes out and the device actually lives up to its potential (and possibly get even cheaper).

Thanks to Telltale Games, Guybrush Threepwood is back, with a vengeance!

While I was growing up, I became a huge fan of adventure games. The love affair began with me typing “Push rock” and seeing a giant boulder roll over and crush Sir Graham. And then I discovered LucasArts’ adventure games and was immediately hooked. Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, The Dig, the entire Monkey Island series, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Grim Fandango. I played them all and loved each one. This was an era when a great game meant a great story rather than flashy graphics, and LucasArts was the master of that craft, serving one delightful mix of great stories, irreverent humor, and creative puzzles after another. They were such enjoyable gaming experiences that even after I’ve beaten the game, I’ve gone back and played each one multiple times over the years, just to experience the games again.

And then, sometime around 2000, after the release of the fourth Monkey Island game, LucasArts apparently decided that the only games worth its time were Star Wars games. It canceled sequels to Full Throttle and Sam & Max, and just like that, an amazing lineage of adventure games came to an abrupt end. The rest of the adventure-game genre was drying up as well. After yearning for years for a new adventure game from LucasArts, I had given up hope and presumed the adventure game genre to be dead.

Then, last year, we discovered a new Sam & Max game. We played it and loved it. In many ways, it was the classic LucasArts game, displaying the many traits of its impressive pedigree that made adventure games great. However, it wasn’t made by LucasArts. Instead, it came from a company called Telltale Games. Then, a couple weeks ago, I discovered that they made a fifth installment in the Monkey Island series — easily my favorite computer game franchise. My wife and I have been playing it for the last couple weeks and love it. Again, it’s right in line with its predecessors — great storytelling (I guess that’s to be expected from a company called Telltale Games), hilarious puzzles and dialogues, and an array of eccentric characters.

While downloading the game from the company’s Web site, I poked around the site and found out that Telltale Games was actually founded by a couple of former LucasArts developers who wanted to bring the story games that LucasArts turned into an art form back in vogue. Their games are slightly different from the traditional LucasArts adventure games in that they are episodic and released on a monthly basis. I actually kind of like the episodic format, as it divides a game up and gives you a clear goal for each stage of the game. And from what we’ve seen, each episode is chocked full of puzzles, making for at least a few hours of play on their own. It’s just great to see somebody finally breathing life into adventure games that understand how to be entertaining by engaging the player’s mind instead of just serving up a boatload of cool graphics. Here’s hoping another golden age dawns on the genre.

Watch out. Courtney got me a Flip Ultra HD video camera for Christmas. I’ve been playing with it during our holiday trip up North, and so far I’ve been pretty happy with it. The camera turns on very quickly. Just hit the power button and you’re ready to aim and shoot in about two seconds. The microphone on the front of the camera does ok picking up the voice of the person holding the camera and whoever you point it at, but if you point it away from the speaker, you’ll have a hard time hearing him/her, and it doesn’t do well at all when there’s a howling wind blowing. The picture quality looks good on the camera, but appears a bit choppy on the computer screen. However, once you upload it to YouTube, it’s fine, and that’s all I really wanted this camera for anyway. I love the small size and light weight, as it slips easily into the front pocket of my DSLR bag, so I can carry it around with my photo camera while traveling and quickly switch to shooting some video without having lug another bag around.

Now that I have a new toy, I’ve started a YouTube channel specifically for clips I post to this blog. I think it’s going to be mostly travel clips, starting with the one below, which I shot with the Flip while our plane was descending into a snow-covered Philadelphia. The channel might also feature various clips I stumble upon on YouTube. Keep in mind that I’ve just started playing around with videography, so I’m in the constantly learning and highly experimental stage, and you get to suffer through the results.

Don’t worry, Google. I’m still a loyal user of Google Maps and have no plans to switch, but I do find the Bird’s Eye View in Bing Maps very helpful in gaining a better sense of what’s in a particular area, and that’s where its usefulness for me comes in. We’ve been planning a trip to England, and so I’ve been conducting reconnaissance of the locations that we’re thinking about staying in through Bing Maps. For instance, Google Maps gives me walking directions from a hotel to an attraction, which is great, but it always comes with the “This route might be missing sidewalks” disclaimer, which of course leaves me wondering if these directions are taking me across a six-lane interstate. With Bing Maps’ Bird’s Eye View, I can actually see enough details to determine whether there are sidewalks along the route, how wide the roads are, etc. It also gives me a better sense of how far a walk it is (whether that 15-minute estimate in the directions actually seems reasonable). Also, if I’m looking for something specific — say, a rental car location — I can actually see what the building looks like, making it easier for me to spot it when I’m actually there looking for it.

Bird’s Eye View of an intersection in Bath, UK.

Two small complaints/would-like-to-have’s:

1. The embed code uses iframe, which doesn’t play well with WordPress or many other CMS editors. I had to download a plugin to make this work on my blog. An alternative embed code would be nice.
2. Instead of picking small, medium, or large for the map size, it would be nice if you can just enter a map width (especially since you can already enter the map height).

I’ve been on one of those kicks lately. We are currently clicking our way through Star Trek: A Final Unity, about as good a Star Trek game as I’ve seen. I also dug out Star Trek: Judgment Rites. It comes on 14 3.5-inch floppy disks, which just seems hilarious in retrospect. I remember when I had to delete a bunch of files off a really old computer just so I could install this game, and then spending the next hour checking back intermittently to switch disks. I also rediscovered my copy of Earl Weaver Baseball II, which comes on two floppy disks. I spent many an hour in my teenage years leading the Negro League All-Stars to victory over their pasty counterparts with one 600-foot homer after another by Josh Gibson.

I have to admit, part of me admires the programming skills it took to write fun and (for that time) visually appealing games that fit in as little as 3 MB of space. As Courtney pointed out, it takes more space than that to download a new dress or a piece of furniture for your Sim. And these were games from which we have derived hours of enjoyment, even more than a decade later. I guess it goes to show that the really important things that make a game great don’t require oodles of disk space, killer graphic cards, or massive amounts of memory.

So what’s your favorite old-timey game?