Mike English's blog

I’ve been playing with Google Wave for about a week now, but I still haven’t figured out what to do with it.  Yes, it has a lot of very cool features, but the as the combination is so unlike existing communication technology, it’s very difficult to know just how to use it.  I doesn’t help that at this point there is virtually no integration with existing communication channels (e-mail, IM, twitter) making it so that you have to be on Google Wave to know if anything is happening on Google Wave.  Most of the friends I’ve invited so far seem to have given up on trying to force this new technology into their lives.  There’s probably some wisdom in that, but I’d like to see this catch on because I do think it has a lot to offer.

Ann Michael has an post at The Scholarly Kitchen that outlines similar woes. From the post:

Google Wave is a cacophony of functionality that doesn’t even try to reveal its value or purpose to the user. You have to be determined to use Google Wave in order to make it work for you. Even then, since it’s a “preview,” the functions you try to use don’t always work. Being a new user you are left wondering if the function doesn’t work or if you’re just not doing it right.

My hope is that Google Wave will become much more useful and user-friendly as more extensions are developed and more invites filter out into the general public.  Once more people start to use it, it’s use(s) will become more defined.

That said, I have a couple invites left.  I’d like to trade them for something interesting (handmade crafts, mix tapes, etc.). Comment if you’re into that idea.

News of Google’s plans for Chrome OS have started me thinking about computer hardware – trying to decide what my next upgrade will be. While I can’t afford anything new in the immediate future (I’m a poor college student), I’m beginning to grow anxious about my aging PowerBook’s health.

Besides my laptop’s impending and inevitable demise, my cell phone contract will be up soon, and I’m considering downgrading from my BlackBerry to a “dumb” phone when that happens. Rates for data are exorbitant when you consider the ubiquity of WiFi coverage these days.

More and more, I find myself wondering if I might be in the market for a netbook. I ridiculed a friend of mine for months after she bought a tiny MSI Wind, but now that I’ve seen how convenient it is, I really think it might be just what I need: a lightweight computer that I can type on and carry almost everywhere.

The thought of phasing out my laptop – my “real computer” – is frightening. However, I recall that I had similar fears about phasing out my desktop when that was my “real computer” and I bought this PowerBook to take to college. Netbooks are a whole different animal though, especially when you consider the growing demands of media.

I’ll cut to the chase. One possibility for the future of my digital life is this: a dumb phone with unlimited text messaging, a netbook of some kind, and a NAS/Media server. It’s the last piece of the puzzle that’s leaving me… well, puzzling.

I’d like to digitize my entire CD collection. I’d like to store the audio on a server in some lossless format (FLAC perhaps) to save having to re-digitize from the physical media in the future when I might want better quality files (than if I had stored them all as MP3s). I’d like to keep my movies on there too, and my photos, and backup all of my documents (including a small but growing reference library of articles and research papers for school). I’d like it to hook up easily to a television or stereo (read: surround sound + HDTV). Oh, and it’d be really nice if I could get at some of this stuff while I’m away from home too.

Humoring my imagination (and helping me wrap my head around the costs of this next generation of computing hardware), can anyone recommend a good NAS/media server (and/or netbook)?

Thanks!
I’ll be looking for myself too, and I’ll post what I find in the comments here.

Wanted:

A small web application that can help log plays for vinyl records to Last.fm and also report them to Twitter.

It would draw album data (including track length times and track numbering) from Discogs.com after the user identifies the correct album (or if they’re a member on the site, selects it from their collection.)

Then it would allow the user to “play” the album, one side at a time, using a timer to “scrobble” each track at the appropriate interval to Last.fm. It would offer the option to “tweet” the play of the album to Twitter with a link to its Discogs entry. It would pause at the end of each side and wait for the user to flip the record and press play before beginning to “scrobble” the tracks on the next side.

Accurate track duration data is essential to the proper functioning of this application.  If Discogs does not have the necessary data, it might be possible to retrieve it from the MusicBrainz database.

http://www.discogs.com/help/api

http://www.last.fm/api/submissions

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/WebService

If anyone would be so kind as to help me out with this, it would be much appreciated.

Sorry, everyone. I had really hoped to keep this updated more often, but this semester has turned out to be a rather busy one. I’d like to write something about trust, privacy, and activity streams, but I just haven’t had time to read up on the latest developments. Would anyone care to explain foaf+ssl to me?

Also, when I have time I’m going to be changing some things with the blog to clean it up and make it run a little better. Consider this a heads-up that change is ahead.

I’ll leave you with a nod to Chris Saad’s post about Peered Data Portability.

I really like this graph:

In response to Michael Arrington‘s post, The Meaning Of Friendship.

Bucketing and “fake following” are good enough for now.

Why?

Most of this social data will be public soon because managing changing relationship is a huge time-sink, and the benefits of carefully managed privacy just aren’t worth the efforts. I already have to think of it this way – as if all my social data were potentially public – just because I can’t mentally juggle which bits of my data I’m give to whom. (The users most affected by increasingly public social data are the popular users who receive a lot of attention. But they’re also in the best position to deal with potential problems because they can call on their ‘tribe’ to self-manage aberrant behavior.)

There are a number of problems with trying to manage relationships online as if they were analog equivalents to real life relationships. One problem has to do with two things, presence, and the persistence of data.

In real life, as Arrington points out,
“when you don’t want to be friends with someone, you just find ways not to spend time with them.”

This isn’t only true in a binary sense, but actually applies to how we manage all of our relationships. All relationships are constantly in a state of flux. You’re never just ‘friends’ or ‘not friends’ with anyone. The degree and nature of our relationships has a lot to do with how and when we spend time with people.

In the real world relationships are built up by when the two people spend quality time with each other and relationships can wane when people are apart. In the real world, these events are always symmetric. Online, this isn’t always the case.

Online, someone can read your profile data, or your blog, or your activity streams when you’re not there. Depending on what information you’re sharing, this could be like leaving a copy of your journal or diary at every single one of your friends houses.

Getting away from privacy paranoia, say we’ve already accepted that all of our social data may as well be public, one remaining problem is that this exchange is not equivalent to symmetric relationship building in the real world. It’s difficult to gauge online, without the subtleties of body language &c, the exact nature of our developing relationships. When the data exchange is inherently asymmetric, we may find a lot of people far more interested in us then we are in them. ( = problematic.)

In real life, for the most part, data about us is present when and where we are present. Outside of that it’s only present in our friends’ memories, and perhaps though gossip. Online, our social data is like everything else on the web, persistent. Every exchange is potentially immortalized in a log somewhere, and it’s quite acceptable to leave “wall posts” up forever. The social data is persistent, and this changes things.

Additionally, our relationships aren’t only determined by the amount of time we spend with other people, but how we spend it. Besides the quantitative aspect, there is a very important qualitative aspect to social interaction.

To put it in terms of data, we don’t exchange the same subset of our personal data with everyone. Every relationship is unique, because every person is unique and has slightly different interests. Within certain groups some general subset of data may be more relevant, but our relationship with one member of the group is still not identical with our relationship with every other member of the group; each relationship is unique, qualitatively and quantitatively. Even if the quantitative aspect is nearly identical (maybe you go bowling with the same group every Tuesday and you don’t see any of them outside of bowling,) still we couldn’t say that our relationship with every member of the group is identical. (You wouldn’t potentially ask Bob out on a date, but you might ask Mary out sometime.)

To mimic all of these nuances of relationships in both their quantitative and qualitative aspects would require extremely complex granular controls. It would be a huge time sink to manage manually, but I also wouldn’t begin to think I cold trust a computer to do it for me – at least any time soon.

Instead, I find it better to simply recognize that being “friended” on Facebook is not equivalent to being friends in real life. You can say that I’m “Facebook friends” with Robert Scoble, but that doesn’t tell you what our relationship is beyond the most basic level of trust. For example, I’d be out of place offering an intervention for his FriendFeed addiction – I don’t know him that well.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Following up on the FriendFeed discussion from Robert Scoble‘s post, some interesting questions were raised.

Susan mentioned that Robert was acting as “bionic human socnet filter” after which I asked if we were all becoming part of a social super brain. The discussion turned to the segmentation of the social web with George Smith commenting that:

“Birds of a feather flock together. And sometimes it’s people with polar opposite views arguing. But I don’t think one place really has a large enough spectrum of human discourse…yet. We have to remember there is still a large portion of the population that does not participate in these conversations.”

The web is often hailed as great boon for democracy and learning with freedom of information and global interconnectedness, but I think George makes a good point. The social web is, and tends to be segmented because that’s simply how people are tending to react to the capabilities of the Internet as a new communication medium.

So what brings people together?

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m about to upgrade to WordPress 2.7. I’ve hacked apart my theme and some plugins, so it’s possible things could break. I don’t anticipate too many difficulties, but I thought I’d give you all a heads up before I go ahead with this.

See you on the other side!

-Mike

[Edit 12-23-08: Wow, that was easy.
 We'll see as things go on here, but so far nothing's turned up broken.]

As Joseph, David, and Chris were all traveling this week, TheSocialWeb.tv posted video from Le Web as this week’s episode.

Dave Morin does an excellent job highlighting the value of Facebook‘s social graph data. – Real names, real friends, etc. as I pointed out the other day.

But I also think Michael Arrington raises an interesting point when he says that Facebook is not actually interested in being open. He goes on to say that “open” doesn’t always win, but is actually what the weaker competitors do when they band together to compete. I agree that it may not be in Facebook’s best interest to adopt the standards of the open stack at this point, but is openness really a sign of weakness? Or could it be rather a sign of strength when a social network adopts an open attitude – a sign of confidence in their network, and the commitment of their users to the community that their network provides? Is Facebook worried that being more “open” will degrade the value of the social graph data they’ve hoarded? Are things like Friend Connect, MySpaceID, and OpenSocial enough to force Facebook to adopt standards like OpenID and OAuth?

Much as I generally dislike the MySpace community, I’m really excited by Max Engel‘s enthusiasm about the open stack. If MySpace continues with its commitment to “open” ideas, a lot of users stand to benefit.

The biggest problem for “open” as I see it, is not having a place to control your identity that is both independent and centralized. A lot of sites are implementing bits and pieces of the open stack, but as far as I’ve seen, only a few of the large existing networks are trying to implement the whole thing. If I’m going to connect the dots between my accounts across the web and tie them all to one source for my profile information, I don’t want that source to be under someone else’s control. I don’t want my Facebook profile to be the definitive ‘me’ on the web, and I definitely don’t want it to be my MySpace page. I’m glad that we’re starting to have more freedom to choose, with a growing list of OpenID providers and all, but I still don’t see a comprehensive solution that works for me. I want complete independent and centralized control of my identity.

I’ve made some slight modifications, and now I have Sixjumps‘ Facebook Connect plugin up and running on Mike English dot Net. Come check it out.

This means that you can now comment using OpenID, or by logging in through Facebook Connect. I’m all about giving you options. (If someone wants to try linking an OpenID to their profile after logging in with FB Connect, let me know. I’m curious to see how that works.)

(please be patient as I continue to tweak things – remember that this blog is a work in progress.)

What makes Facebook so important? It seems that conversations about social networks always circle back to Facebook somehow. Why?

Well, I see a few reasons for this. First, Facebook has what is probably the most valuable social graph data. Accurate names and profiles are maintained by most of the users. I speculate that by slowly rolling out the service among colleges, and focusing on being a social utility, Facebook encouraged this social behavior. They didn’t add too many features or too many users too fast. As new users joined the network they copied the behavior of the earlier adopters, which was to provide accurate data.

But accuracy isn’t everything. You can find accurate profiles on LinkedIn for example, but LinkedIn doesn’t have the reach Facebook does. Facebook has penetrated the social networking market especially among college students (the original target audience) to such an extent that it is treated as a given, a ubiquitous utility, the way Google is treated for search. Facebook has entered the college student’s vernacular lexicon as a verb.

This is why Facebook is important. Not just because it’s done such a great job perfecting the social UX, – a vast improvement over MySpace‘s earlier efforts – but because ‘everyone you know’ is on Facebook, maintaining fairly accurate profiles.

It’s the data. Real data about real-world contacts.