Intelligence, Please…

UPDATE: On May 21, 2010, a class action lawsuit was filed against Facebook by Derrick Rose (Peter Wasylyk representing) citing a breach of an implied covenant of good faith and a violation of the Stored Communications Act. Info found here.

I’m going to make a bold claim: Facebook’s days are numbered.

Okay, by “numbered,” I don’t mean that the company will come to an end. I imagine that it will limp on in some fashion, much in the same way that Myspace did. But it has now become Myspace v. 2, ready to be replaced by the next meaningful competitor. The Facebook has lost its schtick.

Myspace is still trucking right along, now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Its business model is similar to Facebook in that it operates on the basis of targeted ads – using Myspace profile information, the company selects the most relevant ad to display to the user. Yet an important distinction from Facebook is that Myspace does most of the legwork. It maintains user data and handles the ad targeting with its own software. Another important distinction is in their respective user interfaces: Myspace allows heavy customization with apps added directly to pages, while Facebook opted for a standard user interface with minimal customization. All Facebook profiles have the same color scheme and initial “feel,” bringing brand recognition to the website.

Though the UI differences helped, this did not drive Facebook’s growth in the beginning. Facebook’s initial marketing point was privacy – any potential new user had to have a valid college email address. Anything could be posted to Facebook, since mom and dad couldn’t see! College kids could laugh at their own antics while resting in the protective privacy wall of the company. People learned to trust the Zuck.

I remember my first experience with Facebook, in 2005 (good heavens. I’ve been a Facebook user for five years). My only friends were fellow high school students (we all had to be invited) and the few college students who had graduated before me. It didn’t take long (2006-2007) for Facebook to open up to the world, though I would argue that the parental invasion did not really start until middle to late 2008. There are currently more Facebook users than United States citizens. Clearly, he who controls the site is a force to be reckoned with in the tech community.

If the opening of the site to all users didn’t raise eyebrows, the Open Graph API did.

In 2010, Facebook decided to open the fire hose. User data could now be accessed by programmers via the Open Graph, a decision made by Zuckerberg and the Facebook executive team. Such a decision changed the Facebook Terms of Service without expressly notifying the users – not technically illegal, I suppose, if the decision was publicized. Still, it’s general Internet bad etiquette. Facebook turned the Open Graph on, failed to notify the users that their privacy settings had been changed, then allowed any programmer to access that information. That would be the thing that pissed the government off.

I do not know what the legal implications of the Open Graph inquiry will be, but I can imagine that there will be legal, privacy, national security, etc., etc. concerns leveled against Facebook before all is said and done. But the privacy backlash will be loud. Four college kids out of NYU have already raised almost $200,000 (note: they asked for $10,000) to fund Diaspora, an open source social network alternative. 30,000 users (drop in the bucket, admittedly) quit Facebook today in protest, with some media coverage. Maybe there is way more smoke than fire – survey says that older users are even worse about releasing data than younger users, and I suspect advertising to my parents is more profitable than advertising to me.

The vast majority of Facebook privacy concerns I have seen have been geek-related protests, as Pete Warden discusses here at TheFasterTimes.com. He brings up three primary reasons why geeks are concerned about Facebook’s privacy changes: real-life social issues (example cited: you “like” a gay club, and discover the hard way that your employer was homophobic), real-life political issues (the Green Revolution in Iran used social tools heavily), and criminal activity (this one has not become a major problem). These are not unwarranted concerns. Still, if the geeks are the ones talking about privacy – then the geeks may just decide to replace the existing network.

I foresee a few potential scenarios:

• Facebook’s users depart en masse after another privacy-related event occurs, or the Department of Justice decides to levy a huge fine over the Open Graph incident. Honestly, I see this one as highly unlikely.
• Facebook becomes the “default” social network, much in the same way that Microsoft IE is still the default browser. User preferences begin to drag them to Twitter, or Orkut, or Diaspora, or any of the regional networks that have cropped up across the world.
• A combination of these two things occurs, and advertisers begin to realize that social gaming is Facebook’s biggest selling point. Thus, Zynga gobbles them up.

Which will transpire? Who knows – but for safety’s sake, I will be mostly off Facebook for the time being. I don’t trust the Zuck with my information.

From the folks over at xkcd:

I’m glad some of you are still putting up with this site, 105 posts (including this one) after the redesign late last year – in fact, the first post after the redesign in December 2009 was also about connecting to other people in a social media environment.

Thanks also to Joseph, Jennifer, Luke, and Jason for hopping on board and helping to broaden the scope of interest and frequency of original content here at the site.

So, if you’re a Google (or Android) fanboy, you may be pleased to read Mr. Scoville’s article regarding the new Droid phone. An article entitled “It’s incredible!” seems like it should be read in the voice of an overly enthusiastic Japanese schoolgirl, but you can read it in George’s voice instead if you like.

I am not generally one to take fanboy-istic tones in my writing, as I am not prone to such emotions. I like my iPhone, having played with an HTC Android phone (the Hero) and a Blackberry Bold. I liked the super-customization of the Android system and I pine for my Blackberry keyboard daily. iPhone is a personal preference, it is not the end-all be-all of phones. Nor is Android, I imagine. I like customization and competition and if Apple and Google are at each other’s throats, it means only good things for the smartphone market.

Things are coming full circle for me now, in terms of technology. Gentlemen like George and myself led the tech boom. We were the early adopters, the nerds who couldn’t let go of the internet and video gaming when it wasn’t cool. Now kids are shelling out iPhones at 10 years old and playing Farmville or one of its derivatives. Social gaming is an interesting phenomenon, as silly as Farmville or as intense as Modern Warfare on Xbox Live. But social gaming has some evolving to do.

I was discussing old games with my friend Hank and we recalled the glory of one game in particular: RollerCoaster Tycoon. For those of you who did not play such a game, allow me to drop a screenshot on you:

RollerCoaster Tycoon (mismatch.co.uk)

RollerCoaster Tycoon was one of the kings of strategy games. Fun, lighthearted, but you had to plan or you’d end up failing your mission objective and have to start all over. You couldn’t just save and try again – you were really doomed to failure at least an hour before it actually happened.

I look at RCT and see how things have all come full circle.

With some tweaking, I imagine both the Droid Incredible and the iPhone could run all the requirements of the above game. Hardware has now come to the point where we can compress computers of the late ’90s into our phones. FarmVille is the next iteration of RCT, just more socially conscious.

In the ’90s, it was the geek community convincing the general populace that companies like Amazon could be trusted with credit card information. Now it is the geek community warning the people that they aren’t keeping their pants on with the metaphorical windows open. Geeks are now realizing that our constant connectivity needs a slowdown as our real-life societal fabric is taking time to evolve.

As for me, I am going to play more Tycoon, where I do not have to “socialize” to play a game. I shall proceed then to watch various episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, while I contemplate parallels between the constant interconnectedness of the Borg Hive Mind and my discomfort if I am turned off of Twitter for more than ten minutes.

No BlackBerry model I’ve ever run across has really been known for a wide range of really useful applications – in fact, even after years of cornering the smart phone market (and perhaps because of it), it took (as we say in the South) forever and a day for Research in Motion to a) roll out a handset-based application store (AppWorld) and even longer to b) modify/update AppWorld to be more user-friendly, much less c) more useful to BlackBerry owners.

Although I never owned an iPhone, it’s my understanding that first-generation handset owners had to download applications via the iPhone app store in iTunes, and then sync those applications to their device via USB connection – and it wasn’t until the release of the iPhone 3GS that a device-based application store was made available to owners. Someone please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong about this. In any case, the iPhone is a closed platform, and developers have to go through a process longer than getting hired by the federal government (which, as of a couple of days ago, is now a bad metaphor) to roll their application out to users, while Apple tests the application against possible combinations of other applications to make sure the device (or the individual applications) don’t crash. This, of course, has its advantages, and it’s characteristic of Apple to overthink UI on the front end so they don’t have to invest so much in fixes on the back end – MacBook owners know what I’m talking about.

You can probably imagine, then, that it’s been pretty new for someone like me to browse the custom searchable Android Market on the HTC Incredible. The Android platform, thanks to the folks over at Google, is completely open-source, so the offerings in the marketplace are widespread to be sure, even if all the content isn’t necessarily worth downloading (and I’m with Joe The Prophet – Google doesn’t automatically get a pass on their creepy factor just because they’re giving something back). Thanks to both 3G network and wi-fi connections on the handset, and – oh yeah – a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, not only are the downloads blazing-fast, but the device’s ability to multitask without crashing is unlike anything I’ve ever seen (okay, “hype then gripe” – I’ll be looking forward to HTC’s release of an extended life battery, not that the current battery life is awful or anything; it’s hard to power this much portable awesomeness – I forgive you, HTC). Nashville Predators fan friend Paul Nicholson has a great list of Android applications, but I thought I’d share a couple favorites with you here (in no particular order):

1. Vaya Cornholio, Para Llevar (this isn’t just a sound board – this actually launches YouTube clips at the touch of a button)
2. This is the Droid I Was Looking For
3. Chuck Norris Put the “Open” in Android’s Open-Source Platform
4. This Developer’s Skills Are Complete “Okay, I think we’ve hit our dork quotient!” (confession: also available for iPhone)
5. What is the Matrix? Welcome to the World of the Real
6. This Could Be Dangerous to My Financial Health
7. Kudos to Sunlight Labs for This Baby (this is a project of the Sunlight Foundation, an open government/transparency advocacy group here in Washington – I had a good time discussing dyamic transparency enterprises with their policy director John Wonderlich when we visited the White House earlier this year - I believe this is also available for the iPhone; I suppose I’ll have to wait a bit longer for GovWatch, the first Congressional committee application, brought to you by the folks on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, currently available only on iPhone)
8. Another Must-Have App for Mr. Smith
9. Jesus Had the Whole World in His Hand, but I Have the Universe in My Pocket
10. Every Libertarian and Conservative Needs This

That’s about all for now – hopefully I’ll have more to say about the HTC Incredible again soon. I haven’t purchased any parallels or accessories for it yet, but I’m sure I will – and when I do, I’ll blog about those too.

I believe in well-crafted blog posts, in which pronouncements of grave significance are brought to the people from On High. I also believe in making passing comments from time to time on “the state of things.”

I imagine that I will soon be departing Facebook. I have been trying to get a lock on my digital profile for some time, but Facebook keeps kicking me in the crotch every time I think I’m making headway. Google can be bad too, but I have Google’s strategy down.

I logged onto Facebook today to find that my profile has to be linked to a set of pages based on interests, or all those interests will be deleted. I happily deleted all those interests. Currently I am from nowhere, live nowhere, and have never been to school or worked anywhere. I am happy to be this way.

I have no real issues with sharing my information on the web. Were I to control this information myself, I would most likely broadcast it to the Google robots and anyone else wishing to sort and index my information. However, it is the lack of control that frustrates me here. I have no desire for my Netflix viewing habits to be broadcast to the world, mainly because I am sure my wonderful girlfriend has been watching romantic comedies and the like over instant queue, and I can’t have that sort of crap affecting my reputation.

Diaspora (www.joindiaspora.com) looks to be like a pretty good upcoming alternative, or at least an interesting idea. I can get behind Diaspora. It lets me control the terms of my web engagement – a very good thing. If my underwear-modeling pictures are to be broadcast to the internet, I want to make sure only the Calvin Klein ones are shown and not the Hanes. Hanes make my butt look weird.

Off to go do something adventurous, like build roller coasters.

This is cross-posted from my blog, Whim’s Random Walk.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the library this week writing a paper for my Anthropology of Religion final. To break the monotony, I’ve been reading Chris Brown’s blog Smart Football. Back in March he was inspired by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution to post a list of ten books that have had the most influence on him. I thought I’d do the same, so here, in no particular order, are the ten books that I think have influenced me the most: Read more…

This will be just one in what will likely be a series of short reviews on my newest toy, the HTC Incredible with Google Android phone. I’ve described this as the iPhone killer, but that isn’t my term – it has been touted as such in other publications far more technical and experty than certainly this blog. And speaking of this blog – I’m writing this post on the Incredible right now. The WordPress app for Android so far blows its BlackBerry counterpart out of the water (and, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve never blogged at this site from an iPhone).

But enough small talk – let’s talk about the 8 megapixel camera built in to this bad boy:

There are very few things of which I am a purist.

I don’t mind Meatloaf’s new stuff and I really liked the Who’s halftime performance at the Super Bowl. I don’t mind night-time baseball games. I love Mork and Mindy AND Happy Days. I’m not a Vegan.

However, there is still one area of my life which I refuse to allow modernization ruin my fun. I have found that as technology evolves and this ”thing” becomes more popular, the changes have come to really dilute its value. And it seems recently that I’m the only one who feels this way.

I am a loyalist to Captain James T Kirk and the original crew of the United Star Ship Enterprise.

I did not grow up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation the way most people of my generation did, so I don’t have this weird nostalgic connection to the otherwise lame and boring spin-off.

Since the new movie came out last year, there has been a rise in debate in my personal life over which was the better series. This has extended to many sub arguments over character comparisans, villain comparisans, ship comparisans, and even over the philosophical firepower of individual episodes.

Alas throughout these discussions I have conceded that my wealth of knowledge on TNG is not remotely comparable to my exposure to TOS. So therefore I have decided to give Captain Jean Luc Picard — the bald, French captain with an English accent who allowed a Klingon to serve on his bridge — another chance.

I added all 7 seasons of TNG to my Netflix and am mentally preparing myself. God help me.

For a list of reasons on why Jim Kirk beats the crap out of Piccard and gang, click here. Some reasons include:

81. Kirk was NEVER infiltrated by the Borg and used against the Federation…
72. When Kirk was Picard’s age, he retired from Admiral and took to climbing rocks…
37. Kirk once made a cannon out of bamboo, sulphur, potassium nitrate, charcoal and then fired diamonds into the hearts of his enemies…
13. Kirk can infiltrate Gangsters, Nazis, and even the Pentagon — easily…
4.  Kirk traveled through The Great Barrier, met God, and wasn’t even impressed.

Note that the link is branched off Duke University’s site.

(author’s note: My masters is in Historic Preservation, so I studied a bit about urban planning. Unbeknownst to many, what I do (or did, and will do again) is actually a big part of urban planning and economic development. This is probably the first of many blogs about this topic because I find it so interesting! To be honest, I don’t care to read about politics which is why my blogs have been about drag queens and meatwiches. However, I do like to read intellectual theories (the movers and the shakers) and their analysis of today’s economic climate. So as I read up on it, I’ll let you know what I find. It’s fascinating stuff, I promise.)

Imagine a world where you wake up, put on a comfortable outfit, walk into work without fear of being reprimanded for following someone else’s antiquated rules of “professionalism,” and start your day doing a job that you absolutely love. This is a job where you are free to be creative, free to speak your mind (politely, mind you), free to object, free to contribute; a job with little fear of your ideas being squelched by upper management. Now, step outside of your office, or studio, or apartment and look around you. People are skateboarding, biking, running, having conversations, sharing ideas, producing a creative energy that makes people want to live and stay in your city. People are happy. Everyone is free to be themselves; to be creative. This in turn, produces innovative technology, and art, music, and breakthroughs in science…

Does this sound too good to be true? Some people think it might be.

Richard Florida doesn’t. He’s the guy that came up with this utopia dream. Florida, who has a PhD in urban planning from Columbia University has researched and studied for years the theory that a rise in the creative class is shifting the economy. Like right now at this moment. And it is imperative that we prepare for it. What is the creative class? According to Mr. Florida, it is composed of scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and architects, and also includes “people in design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content.” If you don’t fit into this category, no worries, the crux of Florida’s argument is here is that EVERYONE has that capability of being creative. Nobody is exempt. For example, you might be an electrician. This doesn’t mean you don’t have new ideas to contribute to the titillating world of light bulbs and wall wires. Because we know you do!

Why is there a shift? Well, Mr. Florida takes us back to the year 1900, when more than half of the population in the U.S. worked in or around agriculture. A few people worked in the industrial center and less than 5% worked in the creative industry (this includes design, art, entertainment, culture, etc.) As time went on, more and more people left the farm and started working in factories and in more city-based areas. By 1950, more than half of the population worked in the industrial segment of the economy. Farming became more mechanized as technology was growing. But still there was less than 10% of the population working in the creative sector of the economy. The technology boom of the 1980s to the mid 2000s created 25 million new jobs in the creative industry. Manufacturing jobs were and are still declining in number. (And farms? What are farms? ) Currently about a third of the jobs today are creative jobs: science, design, research, art, to name a few. According to Mr. Florida, this recent shift in the economy has changed the kind of communities we want to live in, the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the…way we do our hair…

Now, to prepare ourselves for this paradigm shift, change starts at the local level. Cities must abide by Mr. Florida’s “3 T’s: Technology, Talent, and Tolerance.” Technology is important for obvious reasons. Talent must be encouraged and young people must be welcomed and supported, not turned away from employers from lack of experience. These young people have new ideas and fresh energy! Why turn them away? It is also imperative that cities become open-minded and willing to accept all people: gay, straight, Mexican, Irish, black, white…whatever. As Mr. Florida notes, one of the great things about America is the fact that this country was the first to open its doors to immigrants. That’s how we got people like Carnegie, Einstein, Pulitzer, etc. These people all helped shape America and they came from other places! After all, we are the melting pot!

OH MY GOD. Isn’t this fascinating??!!

So, in a nutshell, Richard Florida is this guy who came up with this idea that the “creative class” needs to be nurtured and enticed to different cities throughout the country. This creative energy will then somehow increase productivity, create jobs, stimulate economic growth and lift America back to its feet!! Instead of creating dividing lines, Florida is suggesting that this creative energy will break barriers and create productive conversations that come up with solutions to this big ole mess we made with our economy.

Now, I know that this theory isn’t fool proof. But think about it for a minute; let it marinate. Thoughts?

Next blog: Why people don’t like Richard Florida.