Category: Life online

Ohmifrog, Amazon, cut it out!

An Amazon plogWhat the eff is a plog™?! Oh oh, I see….! It’s a trademarked word that you made up that means “reverse blog”! How stupid is that!

Ok, here’s how you explain it:

Your Amazon.com Plog™ is a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page. Every person’s Plog™ is different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog™ is sorted in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback to the sender as to whether you liked the post or not. This feedback loop means your Plog becomes even more relevant and interesting over time. Your Plog™ will appear if you are logged into our web site and is visible only to you.

And here’s my gripe: a “plog™” — if that’s really the best you could come up with — and if it’s supposed to inherit anything from its “blog” heritage — should be about original authorship, not about having other people’s content thrown at you.

I mean, hey, great, I like the idea. In general. But don’t call them “plogs™”. Call them “authors’ blogs” and let me subscribe to them when it’s contextually relevant — i.e. when I’m on one of the author’s book pages! Or call it what it really is: “The Personalized Amazon Feed Reader”. I know that’s not as sexy and doesn’t relate to the “authoring” connotation of “plogging”, but y’know, you’re only one consonant away from offering what might otherwise be considered “™”.

Hey, uh… Google?

Two-FaceSo first you get props for telling the government to go eff itself and then you go and basically give the government an awesome loophole to circumvent the fourth amendment.

Brilliant!

No really — you do realize what you’ve done here with Google Desktop, right? By storing in plain text all the contents of someone’s harddrive on your servers, the government now no longer needs a search warrant to go after that data… they only need a subpeona for your servers. If it’s my data, I don’t even need to be notified!

And this is exactly the point that the EFF has made. I mean, hey, props for taking on the government, but history’s proven that no matter how big you are, you’re still not bigger than the government — regardless of your stock price, but dude, they are the ones who enforce the legal system that makes it possible for you to exist. Don’t fuggit that.

And yeah yeah, I know you’ve built in a means for getting my data off your servers, but the fact that it’ll take 60 days seems a bit… worrisome… as well:

If you cancel your Google Account or uninstall Google Desktop, the files indexed in the Search Across Computers feature will no longer be accessible through Google Desktop and may remain on our servers for up to 60 days before being deleted.

I mean, that’s kind of like leaving your credit card receipts and wallet at your ex-girlfriend’s place and not being able to make sure that indeed she’s not using it for nefarious purposes (or sharing it with her new boyfriend who’s in the FBI) for two months. Except my ex-girlfriends don’t tend to keep my data in a vault behind some Fort Knoxian security systems. But I digress.

Seriously dudes, ‘sup wit dat? You’re reaaaaaally startin’ to freak me out.

Out of stealth at 106 Miles

Speaking about stuff and nonsense

Went and was a “contender” at Joyce Parks’ and Adam “I Find Karma” Rifkin 106 Miles gathering tonight against Kevin “Rank that Tail” Burton.

Yeah well, I think there was less antagonism than Joyce might have hoped for, but nevertheless, it was a good chance to actually express some of my varied views on the state of open source, the Bubble 2.0, the whole stealth/beta thing… and a couple other topics. Maybe someone will podcast it, I dunno.

David Weekly told me his biggest takeaway had to do with having some humility when launching something on the web… which, I admit, Flock did not. And which, I admit, caused us to experience a trial by fire that taught us a great deal about the way things are… and about the important of expressing, with clarity and honesty, why you might not exactly have the kind of humility one should have when coming out and boldly pronouncing that you’re going to change the world…

Well, I’ll keep it brief, but the story goes like this: I came to San Francisco a little over a year and half ago. And when I got here, I knew no one. But through the power of networks, open source… getting involved in Mozilla and CivicSpace at the right time, hell, I was able to get the job I currently have now, doing what I’ve always dreamed of doing: taking back control over technology and putting it to work for regular folks (myself included!).

So when I came to Flock and helped formulate the vision for what they should build, well shit, I was full of vim and vinegar and busting to tell the world all about it.

And so I did. Publicly. On our website. On our website that asked for your email address. And that was just like the countless other “private beta” sites that cropped up around the Web 2.0 conference.

Which was fine and good and so on, but that now represents something dirty or tainty it seems. Well whatever, that’s not the important thing here.

The issue is how we launched Flock… and how all this beautiful enthusiasm and hope and optimism turned into vengeful anti-hype and disdain. And whether or not, given the opportunity, I would have done anything differently.

The answer, simply, is, “no”.

We endured a trial by fire that any project with our level of visibility deserved. We underwent a continued scorching that demanded to know whether or not we were legit or just the first in what might become a trend in Mozilla-derivative businesses using the success of Firefox to get ahead.

Are we? Well, I don’t know. Really. That’s not the project that I think I’m working on, but I’m just a lucky kid who happened into this mix of things. And I’m emboldened by the success I found on the Mozilla project; on having my ad in the New York Times, on being mentioned in Wired and Rolling Stone. These are things I never dreamed of when I came out here — why would I? But having experienced them — serendipitously — I’m convinced, as I was prior to Web 2.0, that what we’re doing is important, is relevant, has the potential to change things… and for the better.

What we didn’t communicate when we launched was a timeline — was how long it would take to get to the fabled One Dot Oh, if indeed that denomination even makes sense anymore. While I was going off on how we were going to change the web and, by extension, the world, I forget to mention that, Oh yeah, this’ll take us a couple years. So don’t hold your breath… just yet.

But y’know, at the same time — well, I’m glad that we said what we said. I’m proud of the vision that we have for Flock. It’s saying something — it’s taking a risk where it might make more “sense” to stick with conventional wisdom of what a browser is all about… And heck, I don’t know if we’re going to succeed and make this thing happen now, today, this time around. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that we’re asking these questions, now, that browser-makers can start to think about expanding beyond the baseline concepts of “history” and “bookmarks” in the browser and start to incorporate “people”… “web services”… “syndicated content”. And on and on.

Anyway, as I’ve just blabbed all this out, this is part of the humility — the mea culpa of saying, “Man, did we learn a lot!” And yeah, I’m sharing it with you just because, well, it’s worth knowing that if we had it to do all over again, maybe a touch more of humility would have helped, but no, I wouldn’t do it any different than what we did.

Not To Do lists

Not To DoBrad (of Coworking fame) shared with me a brilliant idea last night when I ran into him at Ritual: “Not to do lists”.

Damn, wish I’d thought of that.

As someone leading four or five lives’ worth of stuff to do (my own estimation, since everyone should probably be able to get away with sweating a little less these days), having a “Not to do list” when I’m getting jammed up makes a lot of sense. It means being more aware of what you’re wasting your time on and — as Brad lucidly pointed out — frees up more time to be filled with real good stuff. In fact, in his experience, every couple months when he refreshes his list, adding things not to do, something inevitably better comes down the pipe to make use of his newly available time.

I’ll have to give this a whirl and see how it goes.

Google + My Data = Crazy Conspicuous

Crazy ConspicuousSee? This is what I was talking about. This is the slow steady systematic decline that I was talking about.

Don’t believe me yet, tha’s coo.

Coz see, now that Google can track your email, your search history, your chats, what comes next? Gee, let’s see. Would be nice if you could go back and grab your cell phone convos right? Oh wait, Gtalk and FON will help there… And where you’ve been? Dodgeball’s got that covered. Hell, you can even map that stuff on Gmaps — or one step bigger — Earth.

So what happens when Google rolls out wifi or flips the switch on all that dark fiber it’s got?

Tell you what, yeah, you’ll be able to get movies downloaded hella fast, but Google will also have the most lucrative person-database ever assembled. That Google credit card you just applied for? Ho ho ho. MAN I wish that kind of information about myself.

So look, I’m over it. I said as much before. Privacy is dead. Get over it.

Well ok fine, I’m not really over it, but it sounds more dramatic when I put it that way.

What isn’t finished, however, is how much control over that information you should be able to exert. You know how much you hate it when you walk into a party and all of a sudden everyone starts whispering, looking sidewards at you, raising eyebrows. Wouldn’t it just be so great if you could turn up the volume of what everyone’s saying and hear just what they think about you — and better yet, see which Dicks Jane is sharing that information with?

That’s the problem here. Once Google rolls out GoogleNet, we’re effed. It’s that simple. There’ll be a “personal information tax” that they’ll charge you just to take a look at your information (alright alright, I hear you snicker, maybe they won’t, but they sure could!).

So there’s got to be competition — and I don’t mean from the other biggies. I mean from us. I mean from the people who’s data they’re harvesting and already claim dominion over. I mean that we need to build our own economy and our own means of leveraging this data — and of course building the means to syphon it back out of the biggies. You think they’re going to give up this information easily, willfully? Sorry Toto, we’re not in Germany, here (can’t count on the government anyway when it’s just as eager to have this kind of information about its citizenry anyway).

So yeah. Just keep it in the back of your head. As Google grows, becomes more powerful, more all-knowing, whatchoo gunna do about? What can you do about it once they know everything about you — and all of your transactions pass through the Google network? I’m not scared of this — and I’m not raising the paranoia flag. Fuck that, it’s too late for paranoia. This is the future and the present; so the only question now is, what do we make of it now that we’re here? And, moreover, how do we put all this data to work for us?

My N90 killed my social life

The honeymoon is overOk, so Loic, I’m totally honored that you thought my contribution to Les Blogs was worthy of Nokia’s generous prize, but I have to say, this thing has caused me nothing but pain since I started using it. If I could give it back and return to how things were December 4, well, at least then I’d have my social life back.

See, I’m connected to my social life with a crutch called Dodgeball. A crutch? Well, yeah, because since I have Dodgeball, I no longer have to plan my nights more than five minutes in advance. I just wait for my friends’ checkins to start rolling in and I’m not already predisposed, I know exactly where the party’s at.

But Loic, sadly, the N90 has taken that away from me. Sure, I could talk to my friends in person and yeah, I could pay more attention to #banc. And sure, upcoming still fills up my 30boxes (iCal, you will die yet! Ha!). But still, without those checkins, I tell ya, my social life, especially while Tara’s been away, has become a rather solitary affair.

Here’s the deal. My N90 doesn’t receive SMSes anymore. And it doesn’t tell me when I have voicemail. Sure, it does that ringy thing when there’s actually someone calling on the other end, but that’s it. No asynchronous communications, whatsoever.

And it’s killing my social life.

Get this: I even went into Cingular (grumble) to see if the issue was on their end and they couldn’t figure it out either. They did tell me, however, that the phone is only three-band, which means that it’ll work great in Asia and Europe, but to forget about any kind of reception here in the states. Ah ha. Bonus.

Yeah and don’t get me started about the battery that drains faster than my bladder after two venti lattes. Nor about the fact that iSync doesn’t know my N90 from an ash tray (10.4.4 killed the hack). Or that I can’t figure out how to get the beautiful photos onto my Mac because the software it came with only works on the PC.

Or that it weighs almost as much as my PowerBook.

Okay, okay. That last bit was a wee exaggeration.

At least it pivots all weird. And chicks seem to dig that. At least it’s got that going for it.

Tantek, what’s the model number of your shiny new Blackberry? I think it’s time for a change. I appreciate the honor of winning the best contribution to the Les Blogs wiki but it turns out after all that I really didn’t need another digital camera.

Getting an aggregator back; SEE 2.3

NNW RebootedHaven’t had an aggregator in months — I had like 800 feeds in NNW and it was too depressing to look at the unread count (yeah, I guess I’m one of those people).

Flock will get there someday maybe, but it’s not ready to replace Brent’s beautiful child.

So, trashed all my subscriptions. Starting from scratch. Three categories: Friends, Software, Must-Watch.

We’ll see how it goes.

Oh, and SEE 2.3 is out. Jazz!