SxSW – what’s a beerdrinker to do?
N and I are heading down to Austin shortly to catch the SxSW interactive conference and spend some time with her sister who moved there from somewhere I didn’t want to visit about 6 months ago. So I think I can find my way around a conference. But what about the city? Any tips…beer, BBQ, texmex, or whatnot. Cheers.
PS. Just saw the Tron Legacy preview and it looks pretty awesome.
Facebook isn’t Twitter
I’m a fan of social media sites. Sites like twitter and facebook are loads of fun, and great for staying in touch with old friends, new friends, and potential friends. In a recent post I commented on what I felt were the differences between facebook and myspace. In the end, I believe that myspace is primarily a vanity site, whereas facebook focuses on relationships.
A more subtle comparison happens between facebook and twitter. Both of these sites really focus on relationships, and both are amazing. But they excel at completely different things. This article will look into how they are similar, yet dramatically different, especially in terms of what your audience is.
First, let’s look at how they are similar Both have popular mobile device integration. Both are open to anyone with internet. Both allow direct communication, photosharing, and miniblogging. Both have profiles of some sort. They both get mentioned on mainstream media pretty frequently.
Next, let’s look at some key differences. Facebook requires mutual acceptance prior to establishing a relationship. In twitter this is an option, but most people do not employ it. Twitter has a great open API, whereas facebook recently offered one. Basically, this has allowed a lot of third-party applications like TweetDeck to thrive with Twitter, while the Facebook interface has been the primary manner of updating FB. Twitter also limits communication to a small number of characters, whereas it is possible to send or share almost anything through facebook. Facebook also has a great set of tools for finding possible relationships, whereas the built-in twitter interface for this is quite Spartan. Facebook’s site threads conversations by default, whereas on twitter does not. While both sites have profiles, there is a tendency to have more sensitive information on facebook (phone number, email).
Twitter enables very agile communication. It enables one entity to communicate to a large number of people, who are self-selecting, very easily. The communications are brief, and preferably clear and succinct. Lots of people spin on Twitter etiquette…things like multiple consecutive tweets, retweets, referrals, and more are blogged about ad nauseum.
Facebook is a bit less agile. While you can post to facebook in a similar manner as twitter, using many of the same tools and updating concurrently, the primary mode of interaction with facebook is the conversation. The existence of the trust relationship between friends on Facebook encourages different types of communication as well.
These factors contribute to the types of relationships users of the two sites typically cultivate. Twitter’s agility has made it a very convenient tool for keeping contact with my closer friends. We have brief conversations and typically have device updates enabled. It also allows me to have conversations with strangers who have similar interests. A lot of people see this aspect of twitter as a great marketing tool. Get the word out on something, and it spreads virally. This certainly happens. The consequence of this, and the relationship with like-minded strangers, is that there’s a certain branding that occurs with your twitter voice. A lot of people want to convey a particular message overall from their tweets.
In twitter, there are profiles that will provide almost any kind of information. Realtime updates on Blazer games, one-line jokes, news, recommended books, whatever you’re looking for you can probably find it.
Facebook, on the other hand, discourages relationships with people you don’t actually know. It’s up to you to decide how high or low you want to set the bar for friendships in facebook. These are typically family, friends (old and new), colleagues. I’ve read Defective Yeti for years and follow him on twitter and RSS, and know a lot of his life story, but am not friends with him on facebook. I doubt I’d turn him down, but can’t imagine why Matthew would ask.
This means that on facebook you can be yourself. Relatively. I don’t kid myself that people don’t try to build a facade, but we do in our classic relationships as well. But there’s not the same drive for personal branding as on twitter. Relationships tend to be deeper. While public, conversations are more directed, and there is more background available. Inside jokes are more accessible.
Time plays a bigger role, past and future are more real in facebook. Twitter focuses on what is happening now. What am I doing. What I did rolled off the bottom hours ago. In facebook, what you’re doing is right next to photos of what you did.
So, what’s the point of all this?
In the end, it all comes down to audience. It is important to think about who is on the other end of what you’re broadcasting.
In twitter, you’ve got close friends to complete strangers following you. Why are they following you? Do you care? In facebook, you’ve mutually friended relationships from throughout your life. What do you want to share?
In the end, it’s about having fun and enriching our lives. Both of these tools are amazing, and can be life changing.
I dedicate this article to all of the people who always update facebook and twitter with the same content and miss out on the conversation. cheers!
Facebook vs. Myspace
I’m completely aware that Facebook is pretty handily kicking the figurative ass of Myspace. I am pretty excited about this, because I’ve never been a fan of Myspace as a social networking site. I’ve enjoyed visiting band sites, and I managed to connect with a few people there.
On the other hand, I love Facebook. I talk about Facebook. I advocate its use, and might occasionally be obnoxious about it. But the conversations are interesting.
While interesting, they usually boil down to a few fairly standard themes. This is my favorite: “I didn’t get much out of Myspace, why should I bother with Facebook?” And that’s what I’m going to get obnoxious about in this post.
The word social sucks. Almost as much as the word sucks does. It is as overloaded as web2.0. Because Myspace and Facebook are both social does not mean they are the same. The difference is simple.
Myspace is a vanity site, while Facebook is about relationships and interactions
That’s the major difference. In Myspace, people collect friends. In Facebook, you establish relationships. There’s a trust relationship. Partly due to the amount of information that you provide in your profile. But most of it is in the consensual nature of friendships.
In Myspace, users are free to break (I mean design) their pages as they see fit. Boxes and blinks and blasting bass. Truly annoying and totally broken pages. And relationships are limited to writing to a person’s page or send a personal message.
On the other hand, in Facebook, the information of your established friends rolls past. Like life, you can miss a lot and still distill some quality. In Facebook, you aren’t talking about yourself, you’re sharing your story. And you’re inviting others to contribute and share.
Of course, there are those who say they “Just don’t do social sites.” That’s another article. But in the meantime, just tell them, “You will.”
Twitter for the real world
Twitter is getting some hype lately. The fun part of the hype is that it lacks any real explanation of what twitter is about, and generally any real understanding. So I’m going to help out by offering some examples of how twitter can positively impact your life, and not just by getting endless tweets sent to your phone or browser.
Twitter for sports teams
This one is for the soccer moms and team managers. Let’s say you’re showing up to a game only to find that there’s another sport happening, or no goal posts, or a vast hole in the ground. It happens. In pre-Twitter America, you would need to find a new field, and then assign somebody to wait around until everyone else shows up…because even with a call list somebody doesn’t have their phone and they are running late. And calling everyone on a call list is a hassle.
Enter Twitter. Create a twitter account for your team. Have everyone follow it (players and soccer moms). Send your message: “Game moved to Washington Elementary. June, don’t forget oranges slices.” Simple. Done.
Twitter in Education
I’ve had a few conversations about kids, education, and the new technologies. Latest was last night with a teacher friend. We were chatting about parent conferences, and the impact of them. One of the pain points was in communication around homework. The student insists that they don’t have any homework (untruth). The parent finds out about the problem at the conference when the grade has already suffered.
Again twitter is your friend. Create a twitter account as the teacher. Share the account to students and parents and ask them to follow you. This account is only for classroom-related information. For each class, simply tweet the assignment after the bell. Announce field trips, class news, awards, whatever.
How do you share photos?
There are tons of ways to share photos (and videos) on the web. I currently use three main sites to share my photos, each for different reasons.
- Picasaweb – I’ve been using google’s photosharing the longest, largely because I didn’t want to deal with getting a yahoo id. Which isn’t that tough. I like the album nature of picasaweb, and put most of the photos that I take onto there, treating it like as a bit of a cross between a backup and a social network.
- Flickr – I recently broke down and created a flickr account. It’s been pretty fun. There’s much more of a streaming nature to it, and Flickr seems great for highlights. I’ve been putting my favorites onto there, so it ends up having a lot less pics than my picasaweb. Here’s an example of a flickr photo.
From frolf at dabney - Facebook – while Flickr is somewhat social, it’s not social like facebook. I’ve been putting fun pictures onto facebook. Pictures of people, events, stuff that I want to share with friends. This is more likely a facebook selection:
From broomball 2008 - blog – However, if you look at either image it links back to my picasaweb. That may change in the future, at least for flickr pics, but for now it’s really easy to put picasaweb shots into my blog. My blog isn’t really a photo site, photoblog, or photostream. I don’t think of it that way. I use photos to augment stories (probably should do it more).
So each of the sites provides its own value. Picasaweb is a bit more encyclopedic. I’m using picasaweb to provide my blog pictures. Flickr is a bit more photo-centric, either looking at quality shots, quality subjects, or both, or whatever feels good. I guess in my case it’s the latter.
Facebook is more social. It is album-oriented like Picasaweb, but it puts photos in your friends’s and acquaintences’s faces. While I don’t mind people clicking around my public photos at will, I’ll be a bit more selective about what goes onto facebook. I’ll probably not put 500 photos of a mountain on there, for example. But I might do that on picasaweb.
I’m lazy with my picasaweb photos. Pretty much everything goes up there. I relatively few photos. While with flickr and facebook I choose what to upload, with picasaweb, I choose what not to upload. Sometimes. For example, this photo would never sneak through onto flickr or facebook.
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| From frolf at pier 12/08 |
There are other photo sites out there. Do you use something different? Why do you use the tools you use?
flickr too!
I finally broke down and got me a flickr account. Now I have photos at picasaweb, facebook, and flickr. So, now I have wonder…what goes where? I’m thinking that the picasaweb will continue to be my library-type space. Pretty much all my photos go there. Then facebook gets the goofy fun ones, the parties, whatever. And lastly, flickr will diplay my favorites. Some I think are good photos, some are representative of what I’m about, and some just end up there.
So now I guess it’s time to play around with my online galleries and see what really excels where, doing what. Any thoughts on that? How do you use galleries online?
The kids are all write
I’ve been thinking about social web stuff a lot today. The good folks at Nemo Designs were good enough to have a long chat with anners and me about their social interweb. But that’s just the setup, I’m not really going to go into that…it was interesting though.
What I wanted to hit on is the kids and their lack of email! Which is something that’s come up in conversation, and it came up sometime after the aforementioned meeting, but not during. So the argument that I hear goes something like this:
- Email is going away.
- Why?
- Because kids don’t use email.
- Huh?
- Yeah, they’ve studied kids and they use facebook and twitter and stuff and they don’t even have email accounts.
So, my response is…So what? I mean, did you have a mailing address as a kid? I don’t recall getting much mail. And most of it was highly temporal, non-transactional information. Birthday cards, Ranger Rick, um, I think that’s about it. I was way ahead of my time and couldn’t stand sending letters because the transit time was ridiculous and I didn’t want to pay for a stamp.
Read more
Proud to be a geek…
But this makes me miss being a nerd!
Read more about Wednesday’s upcoming excitement here.
Props nader for the links and the reminder.
Beer drinker google ads
Playing with google ads. I don’t have any illusion that they’re going to make be rich, or even more than a few pennies a year, but I’m not in this blog thing to retire early. I’m in it for the fame and notoriety. So you’re probably better off pretending they’re not there.
TiddlyWiki
Okay, this is one of the coolest tools I’ve come across in awhile. Still trying to see how well it integrates into my workflow tendencies, but I’m really hoping that it does. Because it’s pretty awesome.
TiddlyWiki is a wiki/blog that exists completely inside of a single file. It’s all DHTML and such, so it requires no server-side processing to work. What that means is you can just save the file to your computer, and open it in your browser, and it works.
All of your info. It’s in that one file. Configuration. In that file. Or cookies in your browser. So backup is simple. You can run it anywhere. It’s super-easy to setup. Couldn’t be easier: Go to the TiddlyWiki site go to the post that says download, right-click the link where it says to and save it to your desktop (or wherever you’ll find it). Then just go the your browser’s File menu and have it open that file. There are a few simple things to do to configure it, but it walks you through them, and you can live without it anyways.
That easy! Or instead of your desktop, save it to a thumb drive. Take your wiki anywhere! (Please make backups)
In addition to TiddlyWiki, a bunch of people have created mods and themes for it. And then there’s a site called tiddlyspot that hosts a few modded TiddlyWikis (I’m playing with MonkeyGTD now…a fancy free GTD implementation). With that you can have your wiki online, then whenever you’re going offline just save that file. Then synch up next time you’re on.
Check it out, it’s really pretty amazing.
Video Games Live Orchestra
Okay, I’m a bit late to the party, but this is pretty sweet. How many of that bad boys haven’t you plugged two bits into? They’re on tour, the bizarre thing is the order of cities. They are all over the map. Must’ve been the original Pacman algorithm.
Ignite Portland
Went to Ignite last week, it was pretty sweet. The premise is a bunch of presenters get up and talk about something presumably interesting for a little while. The catch is that they have exactly five minutes, 20 slides (power-pointish), 15 seconds each, and they roll automatically. That keeps things moving and keeps you on your toes. And from experience (not at Ignite), talking about something for five minutes can be tough. It’s about two minutes longer than is comfortable, and you could see that. After about three minutes, almost every presenter went through a change, momentum slowed, the words didn’t come as easily. But they all remained stoic, and the presentations were really good.
My favorites were how to be an undercover prostitute and the one about eating sushi. But that’s because they’re the ones that apply most directly to my life. Depending on what you’re into, you may relate best to a discourse on pepper, the history of stick figures, wtf is biodiesel, or venture capitalism in portland. Or one of the others.
I was a bit surprised, as I’d expected there to be a bit more of a technical focus. But this was fine, I love random stuff too. But what I don’t love is lines. And there was a huge line to get into the place. Getting off the bus I ran into a fellow nerd-buddy heading to the event as well, so we walked the line down thirty-seventh, and took a left on Clay where the line bent, and continued nearly to the end of the block. As we walked, blowing off the show and grabbing a pint sounded like an increasingly good idea. Some lady friends remained in line while we went to Oasis Cafe for some tasty malty beverage. They called us when they got in to say that it looked like there were still seats. The line still extended into the distance, so we continued sipping our pints. We finished and decided that we’d give it a shot. They had stopped letting people in, but we were queued up near the front and with a little luck and conniving, we were able to join our friends on the “inside”.
The event was around two hours, for the most part is was good. Informative and/or entertaining. It’s still young, so I imagine that things will get smoother. I think they should do away with the free food part. It’ll help eliminate freeloaders and fence-sitters. That or move it away from the center of the city. The size is good, the energy is great, I’m excited to see where Ignite goes.
UPDATE: added actual link to the event.
Imagine this
You’re in the Pearl District meeting some folks, it’s going to be hours. But you need to park, and it’s the Pearl so you have to pay to park. Two hours max. So you figure out the green monster and get your two-hour slip, and stick it to your window where it will eventually be sucked inside the passenger door. You pull out your cell phone and make a call: “Remind me to pay parking in two hours,” and go off to your meeting.
Two hours later, you receive a page: “Pay parking.”
The amazing thing is this is no longer hypothetical. Not only that, but it’s free. By linking Jott with Sandy, you can do just that.
Jott is a free service that transcribes your calls and sends them as messages to email or various services. You just call the number, tell it who to send the message to, and it send the message.
I Want Sandy is a free service (Portland-based!) that accepts messages in English and converts them into notes and reminders. It’s the same people as stikkit.
By linking the two, you end up with a very powerful reminder system.
Update: Here’s a page that has better instructions, and it looks like the Jott site’s been updated to include the Sandy hookup link automagically.
Is google losing their edge?
I love Google. I use a number of google applications. Google’s search is and has always been fantastic. I have a gmail account and a picasaweb account. Blah, blah, google’s does a lot of great things and makes my life better. Thank you google!
However, I’m feeling more and more that google just isn’t getting it like they used to. The internet has changed, it grows more dynamic, more personal. But while new sites keep popping up that enable users to do more, google looks the other way. They are building and building, or more likely buying and buying, but they aren’t reaching out, they aren’t connecting. I have two examples of this that I think are very relevant.
First, Blogger. Every blog on Blogger should have an RSS feed. Natively. Period. Authors should have the option to turn them off, but RSS is the real deal, and having to use a feedburner widget is a hassle.
Second, PicasaWeb. I love my picasaweb account. The interface is clean and fast. But the community seems tacked on. And that’s not even my real problem. My real issue is that Google has not built partnerships with other sites. Everywhere you go, you can integrate your flickr data. But with picasaweb, there’s nothing. I can’t go to moo.com and use my existing photos on picasaweb to make cards, I have to select them in iPhoto, export them, and upload them again. Same with sites like dopplr.Hassle!
I keep getting a Microsoft feeling from Google. Like the people who really ‘get it’ have lost to business, marketing, and management. Like they have a 20-year plan and can’t reel it in enough to see what’s actually happening today. Acquire, assimilate, devour.
Storm: the next generation of virus
Storm is a next step in evolution of computer virus. Basically, it’s more organized than your typical trojan horse or virus, having three (?) different roles: breeder, brain, and drone (my terminology). The drones are the most common, and basically install on your computer and await instructions from the brain. The breeders try to spread, and the brain acts as a command and control center.
The scary part is that lying dormant, this thing has access to pretty much everything (secure or no) you do on your computer or the internet with that computer. In the meantime it’s just waiting for instructions.
I wrote a lightly fictionalized description, and Bruce Schneier has the frightening article at Wired.
So, what can you do about it? Well, make sure that your anti-virus software is up-to-date. Also, never open attachments from someone you don’t know. Make sure that your OS is patched. Mac and Unix (Linux, BSD, etc) are currently much safer than the alternative, but that doesn’t mean to be complacent.
new addiction
light lately, but that’s because I’ve been writing little mini-fictions over at ficlets. Here’s me. The account system is pretty neat, let me know if you have trouble getting signed up if you’re into it and I can help you out.
Nike+
Alright, beerdrinker got a shiny new red iPod Nano for xmas from my mom. It totally rocks. It synchs with my iCal and address book (surprise! yay me!), it plays music, it’s tiny, and it sounds good. Pretty much kicking my Zen Micro to the curb. The only thing it doesn’t have is a voice recorder…and that is a bummer.
But what I’m really stoked about is the Nike+ addon. (Disclaimer: I am a Nike employee. But I’m sincere. Nike, please don’t fire me, I’m saying good things!). I hit the store and picked up a pair of Air Max 90+ shoes (I’ve been running in Air Moto Max IV but I wanted to try something new). They are a sweet pair of kicks, stylishish and comfortable. I had to put my prescription orthotics in them to get appropriate arch support, but they are nicely cushioned and stiff enough to protect my poor banged-up toe.
I also grabbed the Nike+ insert doohickey. Setting this thing up was a piece of cake. Stick the dealie in the shoe, attach the insert thingy into the base of the nano, and a new item showed up on my iPod menu. Then I went for a run. Well, run/walk. Testing the waters a bit since the surgery. I actually felt better afterwards than before! I was surprised that there’s only one insert. I’m a bit perplexed as to how it measures distance and speed accurately…I’m guessing that it has an accelerometer in there, but wow. What bitchin technology. And no, I’m not worried about being stalked, even though that’s been getting a lor of airtime. If you’re worried about that, you probably should just stay home. It transmits like 60 feet, but someone would have to go through a lot of trouble to get any useful info. And if they’re willing to go that far, you’ve got bigger problems.
There are some nifty features too. You can pick a power song, and play it at any time during the run for motivation. There are a bunch of podcast and mix tracks available just for the Nike+. Nike has some for sale through iTunes that include coaching, but I haven’t checked any out yet.
But what I’m really digging is the community website. My buddy Sean challenged me to see who can run 31 miles first in the New Year. Loser buys a half rack of beer, winner’s choice. After I run I just connect the iPod to the ‘puter and it uploads my info to the website, then I can check out our progress. I also have a personal goal set for the month of January to carry me past Sean’s initial challenge. So if you see me cruising around with painted fingernails, you’ll know I didn’t make 50 miles this month. I logged about 2.5 miles today, and Sean has none…I bet he’s sandbagging. That or just walking around Disneyland with the iPod connected.
By the way…I really don’t enjoy running. But the Nike+ thing is getting me going for now. It helps me set small attainable goals and tracks me doing it.
It’s not perfect though. My main complaint is a small one. When playing the power song, the song in the background is paused, and when the power song finishes you’re returned to where you left off. It’s not a terrible thing, but it seems like it breaks the continuity of the workout a bit, instead of dropping you back in with the playlist moved forward that amount. Oh, well. We’re doing it to sweat.
By the way, you should be sure to checkout the website. You can’t access all the features until you’ve logged your first run, but there’s some good stuff. The resolutions videos are particularly ridiculous.
Off Gentoo
After running Gentoo Linux on my personal machine for several years, I’m leaving it. Done. Not looking back. I’m installing Ubuntu right now.
I’ve battled Gentoo with every significant upgrade. I like to do things the right way, but I found myself reconfiguring my wireless LAN and video card way too often. Nothing fancy, but with every upgrade, samba broke, I could no longer print, and usually I had to figure out a cascade of failed dependencies. It was fun for awhile. The machine worked well, I got my hands dirty, but I’ve got better stuff to do now than dig through forums, documentation, and google trying to figure out the magic incantation to make my computer work again. Gentoo is a great concept, and I believe that it has a place in the linux world. In particular, it could be a fantastic datacenter management tool.
On the other hand, Ubuntu is based on Debian, my favorite Linux distro yet. However, they appear to be tilting it more towards the end-user, focusing more on common architectures in order to pass releases more rapidly through the cycle. So, it’s up and I’m gonna play with it. cheers.
nuff said (almost)
this is pretty funny. worlds largest windows crash. thanks m@. btw, I run linux at home, and prefer solaris for the bigstuff, but HPUX works too.
Running Linux
Alright, enough about Windows. But not enough about beer. But that’s another tale for another time. Recently I received a copy of the latest edition of Running Linux (number 5 is alive). The author credits go to Matt Welsh, the author of the original, and Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, and it is published super-recent. Before I get started, full disclosure is that I do some work occasionally for O’reilly and they sent me this copy to check out (but not do any work on). Well, I’ve checked it out and this ditty is what I think.
First things first: Edition 5 is significantly fatter than the 2nd edition that’s hung around my desk for many years. It also contains more information. That’s good, because we like to look for linear scaling or better as you fatten up a book (those montrous blahblahblah bibles were garbage with information spread out and scattered). Running Linux’s index is a solid and useful 39 pages.
This latest edition of Running Linux (and I speak comparatively to several editions back) is much friendlier. The main reason for this is that Linux software has gotten much friendlier, and it deals with prettier, easier, more consistently usable software. However, Running Linux remains a power-user book. Dummies stay away. There are overviews of software packages to read Word Documents, but it also shows how to use groff to write a man page. There is a discussion of office sweets and personal information management systems, but it also discusses nuances of GPG. And it goes over some popular package management systems, but it also has pointers on reading core files. Good times!
Running Linux is broken into several sections. End user programs, networking, programming, system administration, and more are covered. There are far too many topics to cover completely. If you have nonspecialized work to do on a Linux system. By nonspecialized, I pretty much mean you’re not writing drivers or running Oracle RAC (or Ham radios). This book has a lot. But that doesn’t mean it’s the end-all linux book. It covers a ton, but it’s pretty agnostic. It does a good job explaining the general solution, but google or more in-depth tomes will occasionally be useful. I promise.
Anyway, like I said, Ed. 5 of Running Linux is pretty sweet. The one gaping omission to me is the Mutt mail client. For power users. Instead of buying some silly Bible book, get this one, it has a lot. And it’s actually pretty well-written, with fairly casual vignettes.
Pics
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