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At Facebook, we always look out for the privacy of our users. That’s a key reason users feel safe sharing their information on our site.
Uh, no. I don’t feel safe sharing information on your site, which is why I limit what I post there. Anytime anyone publishes information online they are making a conscious decision to take it out of the private sphere. Anybody who thinks differently is either born yesterday or hasn’t been online very long.
In a terrific example of burying the lede, the point of the linked post above can be found in paragraph six (of seven):
Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.
Check out this post at TechCrunch for a less skewed read on Facebook’s ploy. UPDATE:Arrington follows up today with a post in which he lays out his reaction a bit more fully, and I think he’s dead on.
I think Facebook’s intentions aren’t to let users get data out of the network until Facebook is absolutely forced to do so, and then only on Facebook’s terms (see Facebook Connect). The fact is, this isn’t Facebook’s data. It’s my data. And if I give Google permission to do stuff with it, I’m damned well within my rights to do so. By blocking Google, Facebook has blocked ME. And that, frankly, kind of frustrates me.
Let me put this another way. How dare Facebook tell ME that I cannot give Google access to this data!
In other words, Facebook is the RIAA of the social networking world. The fact that everyone is more or less tied to them, doesn’t make them right.
Pretty stupid.
Lately people have been tweeting (posting to twitter) about certain service providers’ outages. This happened with comcast recently.
My question is, since twitter has a reputation for frequent bloggering, where do you post your reaction when twitter is down. It was, in fact, bloggered when I began composing this post.
Yes, I know that I’m like the last person in the known universe to hear about this, but I’m catching up on episodes of The Guild, an web sitcom about gamers by gamers for gamers everyone. Each episode is three minutes long so catching up is quite easy.
I was hooked before the end of the first episode.
I’ve already learned new terms like
AFK (away from keyboard)
and also “doorstepped,” as in, I’ve doorstepped some of this blog’s readers.
So, like, watch the guild. Put down the controller, step away from the keyboard, and watch The Guild.
UPDATE: At John’s request, I’ve added an explanations below each picture.
Yes, I know it’s been done before but I don’t feel like going to bed yet.
Mine…
The picture above was taken by yours truly during the serotoninroad trip of September 2007 (the photos are no longer up at flickr so you won’t be able to see tham at that link). It was taken at approximately 9am at Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park, Montana. The haze which is plainly visible is lingering smoke from the fires that devastated a large portion of the state last summer. The two windows you see are twhirl (on the left), which makes easy work of simultaneous twitter and jaiku posting, and digsby which keeps track of mail, chat, and facebook alerts.
The three icons above lead to the programs folder, windows explorer, and the recycle bin respectively.
And so, good night.
I doubled the notebook’s RAM today. This was done on a whim. A few days ago I was thinking, “How would I add memory to my computer,” even though I didn’t really intend to do it. So I got onto some forums where everybody talked about how brain dead simple it was to do, but didn’t actually say how it was done.
I found a neat little tutorial on the dell website about it, with pictures even. It told me what kind of card I should order. Since I have 1 512Mb card in my computer already, the dell page told me to install another 512Mb or to install two 1G cards for a total upgrade. The 512Mb card was $20. I had no idea memory was that cheap. I bought one.
In the process of ordering, I noticed that next day delivery was free. Free! That was a no-brainer too.
The memory card arrived today. I printed out the little tutorial page with the pictures on it, performed the minor operation on my computer and turned it back on.
The results were immediate and astounding.
Why didn’t I do this sooner?
TechCrunch recently featured two posts about single site browsers (ssbs). Funny that we actually have a specialized name for something that used to be the standard.
The more recent post at TC explains why one might want a browser that displays has one site and allows little or no user control (otherwise useful buttons like forward and backward, oh, and a location bar).
One of the draws of ssbs is offline access. What you create with these things are not simply browser windows but webapps. I’m not exactly sure how the offline aspect is supposed to work since I’m rarely without access. I guess I could just turn off my wifi briefly and check it out. Maybe later.
The post examines a few of these creatures, among them Prism, which I already have on this notebook, and Bubbles which I’ve just now installed. TC’s verdict is that Bubbles still needs a fair amount of development. My verdict is somewhat different. I’m a neophyte with almost no knowledge of script writing and relatively simple needs (I want to look at my email when I’m not near a wifi signal, I want to look at notes I’ve made on a web based note app). I prefer Bubbles because it syncs the content of the window as you resize it plus it. Prism did not do this on either of the two sites I tried, I’m sure it can be made to do that though. Bubbles also comes ‘boxed’ with some additional functions like email notifications and one click app creation for a small set of predefined sites including both gmail and gcal. I’m going create a bubble for ubernote and see how the offline thing works later when I have to make my worship set list.
Have any of you mac people tried fluid? As a wannabee hope-to-be-someday mac user, I’d love to know how/if it works.
In an unrelated vein, has anyone out there discovered a multi-port usb power adapter that has prongs for a wall outlet as well as a car lighter plug?
I like ubernote. You should try it.
The only thing it needs is a really, really good looking… er, I mean, really easy desktop widget/app thingamabob that syncs from the website with a single click.
Shifd is good too, and it features desktop functionality if you have Adobe AIR installed. The online interface isn’t as well designed as ubernote, nor is it as versatile in terms of formatting.
Either of these applications are great for taking short or long notes that you want to read later. I’ve started using ubernote for making my weekly list of worship songs because I can easily reformat the text and print it out for the other band members by simply pointing my browser at the website (the family dektop is attached to the only printer, but I’m usually making the song list on my notebook when I’m not at home). Can’t do that with Shifd. I wish there was something that had all of these*.
The real day-maker for me was finding out that Sandy (the virtual personal assistant I mentioned some months ago while talking about a to-do list webapp called stikkit) can tweet! That’s right, she’s on twitter; you can follow her and she can follow you. Need to leave yourself a short note that says something like, ‘you have an important meeting in 30 minutes you dork’?’ Sandy will tweet at you. I’ve used this feature myself and now we have the tissues and coffee filters that we would not have had if I was trying to remember them on my own.
Thank you. We now return you to nothing in particular, already in progress.
*I am aware of but have never used Remember the Milk, but I may try it and see if it’s all that and a bag of chips. If it is, I’ll let you know… or you can let me know. Either way.
The other day I started using twitter. My initial impressions? It’s okay but not great. I actually prefer jaiku but the community there is so small!
What I like about twitter the quick, not too much thinking required, spontaneous nature of the posts. Also, the 140 character limit for ‘tweets’ brings one’s wit or lack thereof into sharp relief. There is a sort of art to writing a post that is exactly 140 characters long. Such a post is called a twoosh.
Zalm is on twitter. So is Stephen. And Julie. And Will. And Rick. And…
Which brings me to what I don’t like. It is hella tough to follow a conversation over there. In fact, it’s so hard that you might as well not do it. More in fact, most of twitter’s functionality is hidden. There are apparently lots of things you can do with it, as I’m slowly discovering, but I really don’t have the time to invest in learning a whole new instrument.
I’m into this whole social web thing for one reason: conversation. To the degree that twitter makes conversation possible, it’s worth my time. The opposite is also true.
A web app called quotably has saved twitter from uselessness, at least for me. It facilitates the following of twitter conversation. This is most apparent if you give it your twittter username and password. Do that, and marvel. Then, if you want to have your world rocked even harder, check out the RSS feed of your quotably home page. Sweet, ain’t it!
Quotably is nothing short of brilliant.
This evening the love of my life is hosting a chicks-with-food party at our home. Needless to say, I am not there.
Instead of exiling myself and my laptop to the bedroom for two hours, I decided to head down to my formerly regular haunt, the Lionville Starbucks to check out the new freefi arrangement for Starbucks cardholders.
After purchasing a pound of espresso roast beans with complimentary tall coffee and a toffee almond something or other, establishing myself in a corner and firing up the notebook I noticed that this particular *$ still had a tmobile sign in the window. Sure enough, no At&T showed up in the network list. AT&T is the provider for the free service. For real! Says so right here.
I asked the barista about it.
“Huh?” he said. “If you have a tmobile card there’s free wifi.”
“So is that new free wifi deal for cardholders only in limited areas,” I asked, knowing full well that the company’s own press release says…
All 100,000 U.S.-Based Starbucks Partners to Receive Free Wi-Fi at Starbucks Stores
He said, “The only arrangement we have is with tmobile, now and for the foreseeable future.”
“…”
I was flummoxed. I mean, okay maybe I missed something in the original announcement, but surely a Big Green employee would know the details, right? It’s not like this announcement flew under the radar. After a brief internal debate, I decided not to tell this guy about his employer’s plans. It wasn’t going to get me anywhere anyway, so I sat down and drank my coffee, ate my disappointing toffee almond something or other, unplugged, delinked, embarked.
Now I’m at a real internet coffeeshop, the Artisans Cafe in Phoenixville, where I can read the full press release, including the part at the very, very bottom where it says…
The availability of AT&T Wi-Fi service at Starbucks will take place on a market-by-market basis with store implementation beginning this spring and completed by the end of the year.
Okay then *$, I’ll see you in December.
serotoninrain 
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