Posts

Posted on

Android Tablet Sales Growing Steadily

They would probably be growing even more if Apple weren’t running around the planet trying to prevent Samsung’s tablet from being sold. Litigate rather than innovate, Apple.

From the Digitimes posting:

Lin pointed out that Android-based smartphones took two years after launch to surpass iPhone in terms of shipments and sales in 2010 and are currently still seeing the gap with iPhone expanding.

In the future, Lin believes Google’s upcoming Android operating system codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich, which will unify its smartphone and tablet platforms into one system, and smartphone’s strong software application ecosystem, which can quickly enhance applications to support tablet products, will help resolve the issues about Android tablets lacking support for software applications.

With Android tablets’ hardware design and price point to gradually reach a consumer satisfying point, Android tablets should see the same come-from-behind results as Android smartphones, and enjoy similar shipment and sale volumes as iPad in 2012, Lin added.

Posted on

A Decade After 9/11

Sitting here on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I am trying to collect my thoughts on the event and what followed. In summary, the sentiment seems to be somewhere between disgust and disappointment.

As for the events of the day I’ll leave it at vile and pointless. What followed is equally disturbing and even more damaging to America.

Except for the, what was it?, five or seven days after 9/11 when it felt like the entire country changed; people were looking out for each other; palpably kinder and more polite; the pace of things sort of felt like they even slowed down a bit.

Then, before too long, we were in a race to the bottom that continues to this day. The repugnant right wing predictably used the event to drive their agenda to destroy America. Fueled by their own 24 hour propaganda TV channel and countless shout radio outlets, they began to get the dim witted ‘educated’ on their agenda. A sickening 8 years was spent watching a budget surplus turned into a huge deficit. Several trillion dollar wars, hundreds of billions of dollars unaccounted for in the process, hundreds of billions more dollars wasted on ‘security theater’, Abu Graib, Black Water running rough shod over what was once a sovereign country, the overt racism of the Katrina response, tax cuts for the ultra wealthy while the middle class and poor shoulder more of the tax burden, deregulation turning Wall Street into a casino leading to another bout of corporate welfare, the religious-right’s war on science and education, the right openly advocating assassinating political figures simply because they have a different point of view (and nearly succeeding in the case of Gabby Giffords) and the list goes on and on.

Now we are at the point that the Tea Baggers, backed by the aforementioned propaganda machine, leap from one canard to another to try to disassemble the social security net, collective bargaining and medical reforms. The latest misdirection swirling around a suddenly urgent need to cut the deficit. No one calls them out for being in favor for all of the Bush regime policies that created the deficit – such is the state of ‘journalism’ in this country.

So instead of continuing with that post-9/11 sentiment of caring about and for each other and trying to make the best of every situation, America has chosen instead to become a banana republic where the ultra wealthy become more rich and the rest of us can just fend for ourselves. You don’t have to squint too hard to see that the Tea Baggers are nothing but the stooges of the likes of the Koch brothers, with the stooges willfully acting against their own best interests, screwing the middle class and the poor – the very people who account for 70% of the US economy; that is, the people who actually spend their money.

And what about those wars? I saw a bumper sticker recently that read “My country invaded Iraq and all I got was this expensive gasoline”. Indeed. And with the changes coming from the ‘Arab Spring’ they seem to be making the changes for themselves fairly successfully. One might even wonder if those Arab countries value Democracy more than right-wing America does?

If you have read this far and lean to the right (hard to imagine), I can almost hear you shouting ‘you hate America!’, ‘communist!’, ‘socialist!’ or whatever is in vogue on shout radio these days. No, it is more like watching a good friend become addicted to drink or drugs – you recognize the good person they were before while watching them slip further and further down. It is painful and unsettling.

But what to do? If an event as world shaking as 9/11 can’t move Americans to turn away from greed, thugishness and carelessness, what can? I hope that, as a nation, we can find that thing. And soon.

Posted on

Cosmos TV Series Being Remade

According to this post there is going to be a 13 part update to the original Cosmos TV show that featured Carl Sagan. And, in my opinion, they picked the perfect host: Neil deGrasse Tyson. Mr Tyson is extremely intelligent, articulate and engaging when speaking about science (or most anything, come to think of it). I am sure they will do a much better job with the CGI than what was possible with the tech available in the early days of blue screens and video.

I thoroughly enjoyed the original when I was growing up and snagged the series when it because available on DVD. My daughter is even a bit of a fan.

The only downside to this is having to wait until 2013 to see the new show.

Posted on

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 And The iPad

With all the predictability of a rocket launch, the Apple fanboys were a-bloggin’ when the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 was released in mid-June. It was pretty evident from the posts that they had not even bothered to checkout the device first hand – they just ‘knew’ that the iPad was better. It was also amusing to note that the things that Apple touts for its own products ‘don’t matter’ when a competitor has a more favorable stat.

Take, for example, the fact that the Tab is thinner – ‘doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter’ goes the fan boy chorus. Hmm, I think back to the most recent releases of the iPod, iPhone and iPad – one of the first things that Apple touted about each was that it ‘only x millimeters thick’ or ‘x millimeters smaller than y’. In reality, is someone going to make a buying decision solely on a few millimeters of size difference? Probably not.

Another difference that was shouted down was the true widescreen format of the device. The upside of this is that when you watch video on the Tab it doesn’t get clipped like it does on the iPad. This was attacked as being ‘weird’, ‘awkward’, and even ‘unusable’ by the fan boys. Personally, I find it quite convenient and easy to use. The device feels well balanced and easy to hold in all orientations.

Next the plastic back plate on the Tab was declared ‘cheap’ and ‘shoddy’ by the Apple fans because the back of the iPad is metal. My experience with the Tab vs iPad on this is that the subtle give of the plastic backing makes me feel like I have a good grip on the Tab versus the sometimes slippery feeling of the iPad’s metallic back. Also the plastic is not quite the fingerprint/smudge magnet that the iPad is.

Now that we have discussed some of the superficial bits, let’s talk about the things that really set the two apart and that is the OS and the software.

One of the things that absolutely drove me nuts every time I tried to use my wife’s iPad was how modal it is. Reminded me of the ‘good ole days’ of DOS. Need to write a doc? Open a word processor. Need to crunch some numbers? Close the word processor and open a spreadsheet. Yuck. It is sort of amazing to me that with all of the work that Apple has done with widgets in Dashboard that the concept hasn’t carried over to the iPad. Well, it has with the Galaxy Tab, and I am loving it. I can drop widgets on the screen and in one view I can see gMail, Twitter, Facebook and the current weather without having to cycle through apps to get the latest updates. That is a huge win for the Tab.

Notifications are subtle and convenient on Android versus annoying and in-your-face on the iPad. Notifications appear on the bottom right of the screen where I can get the details on them (and dismiss them) when I want. The iPad notifications remind me of the Windows “Abort, Retry, Cancel” dialog boxes of years past that break the flow of what you are trying to accomplish at the moment.

The Android Market is much less painful than it’s Apple counterpart. I never understood why it was important to hurl me out of the Apple app store every single time I selected an app to install. This just meant that I had to swipe my way back to the app store, open it back up and find the next app I wanted to try out so I could again be hurled out to some random screen. With Android, I select an app, it installs in the background and I can continue browsing for additional apps or close out of the Market when I want.

The browsing experience on the Galaxy Tab is fast, clean and overall more productive. One of my favorite features is real tabbed browsing on the Tab, not the modal screen-swap browsing on the iPad. Having Flash available is nice to have, but not essential for my needs. Still, it is better to have it and not need it than otherwise.

Another huge win is the inherent openness of the Android operating system. When I am on the web I am attending to multiple channels (Twitter, browsing, RSS, Evernote, blogs) so I am constantly shifting and saving things from one channel to another or saving things for later review. This is dead simple on the Galaxy Tab because most every application has a ‘Share’ menu option in it. So if I see an interesting link on Twitter I can easily view the full page (without having to leave Plume no less!) and then ‘Share’ it with Evernote or gMail or whatever I want without awkward copy and paste and opening and closing of applications. Android 3.1 on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 just works and works the way that I want to not the way some engineer in Cupertino thinks I should work.

Posted on

More Dubious ‘Journalism’ On Tablets

So the answer to the Faux News-esque Has Apple’s iPad finally killed the Netbook? question is a firm NO. It is right there in paragraph four:

But the real reason Netbooks have fallen by the wayside is that they failed to evolve. After the first couple of generations, Netbooks settled into a comfortable niche of a 10.1-inch display, 1GB to 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and Windows (first XP, then Windows 7 Starter or Home Premium). You could get this basic combo for as little as $299, but some companies would charge more for upgrades such as nicer designs, rugged bodies, 3G antennas, or occasionally a higher-resolution display. But performance-wise, you’d usually be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a $299 Netbook and a $450 one.

Here is another stunning insight:

Tablets, on the other hand, have been growing in reader interest since the iPad launch (with a few ups and downs along the way), and is 56 percent higher in April 2011 than it was one year before.

So, interest in tablets has been growing since the first viable one was introduced. Shocked, shocked I am that there wasn’t more interest in tablets before they were actually being sold. I bet there was a similar uptick in iPods after they were introduced!

Posted on

User Interfaces Need To Evolve

This post titled Don’t Mimic Real-World Interfaces really resonated with me and reminded me of a post that I had done a while ago titled Evolution Of The Mobile Experience.

There have always been those few apps that insist on looking like their physical, real world, equivalent. Calculator apps, date books, calendars, note taking apps, “stickies” — you know what I am talking about. Despite there being better options out there, better ways of displaying the data, designers stick with the known representation of the tool.

Now, though, Apple is taking it too far.

If you have seen any of the screenshots linked across the web about the new iCal interface you know what I am talking about. If you haven’t seen those, iCal is looking a lot like it does on the iPad right now in Lion’s developer preview. It’s ugly, and we should be way past this style by now.

Ugly and harder to use than it should be. Designers need to focus on how to allow the user to fluidly access and manipulate their data not slavishly stick to the limitations of physical items.

Another dimension of this is how poorly developers/designers have approached the touch interface. The industry seems to be mired in button-driven-pull-a-menu-to-do-anything paradigm. Interfaces really need to take better advantage of long-tap context options and gestures to make the interactions more fluid. This is one of the things that drives me bonkers about the iPad – it is so modal; I have to close one app to do something in another. I guess I have gotten used to how easy it is in Android to just share data between apps without having to change apps.

Speaking of Android apps, I think that Feedly is the first really usable news reader that I have encountered on Android. I subscribe to a lot of feeds and that seems to be the death of most readers on mobile devices because the developers thought it would be a good idea to download all your feed updates at once. This typically results in the app going away for a long time. Feedly does it more on demand. And they are clever about using gestures in the app – swipe down and to the left and I have marked that page of articles read and moved on to the next. Brilliant. Much better than ‘pull menu, select mark read, select next page, close menu’ annoyance of other apps.

Posted on

Why Are Downtown Cincinnati Bloggers So Bitter?

I spent a little time this morning browsing the blogs of people who live in downtown Cincinnati. After about 10 minutes I had to stop. Why do they all seem so bitter and angry? On one hand, they spent a fair amount of time talking about how great it is to live downtown, then turn and belittle people who come down from the (evil) suburbs to partake of the urban greatness. Leaves me wondering why I should hang out downtown with such cliquish bitter crowd.

They also seem to love to hate on people who have chosen to live in the ‘burbs (apparently all they we do is drive SUVs and go to the mall). We have nothing entertaining to do, nothing interesting to eat and nothing worthy to see. Look, downtown folks, it is all about choices; I made mine and you made yours – it doesn’t make either one of us right or wrong.

Does the anger and bitterness come from a perceived lack of awe at the downtown living decision? Should there be weekly articles in the local press about how wonderful the people who live downtown are? Do they not feel vindicated by their decision, don’t feel revered enough that they chose to live downtown? And where is the line? I am sure it exists. That is, the line beyond which you are no longer ‘downtown’ enough to be part of the in-crowd. Yikes, now I am doing it to. Downtown folks, here is what I have for you: respect. Care to share?

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to live downtown; especially if I worked downtown. But I don’t. I work in the evil suburbs (Blue Ash) and live in the even more evil exurbs (Union Township). I enjoy being able to commute to work on my Vespa. I enjoy being a few miles from the fantastic Little Miami Bike trail; my wife and I love to cycle down to Loveland for brunch on sunny Sundays. I am sure I enjoy a pint at the Brazenhead just as much as I would at the Lackman. I like that my daughter has a fantastic school system to attend. I enjoy having the largest YMCA in the country a few mile from my home. I enjoy not being able to see my neighbor’s houses. I enjoy having a large vegetable garden that feeds us through part of the year. Besides, looking at what condos are going for downtown I would pay about twice as much for what amounts to a two bedroom apartment as I paid for my three bedroom house on five acres of land here in the heart of evil-dom.

Technorati Tags:
, , ,

Posted on

Samsung Captivate Update to Froyo

If you are looking for instructions on how to update your AT&T Samsung Captivate to the latest version (2.2 aka Froyo) of the Android OS look no further than Samsung’s site. And, please, avoid all of the sites out there that what you to register before they will give you this same link.

The process takes about 20-30 minutes to complete. After the update, all of your wallpapers and launch page layouts will be gone. No apps or data is lost, just the layouts, so you will need to recreate those.

Other than that little annoyance, I am noticing snappier performance overall from the phone so it is definitely worth the time to update.

Technorati Tags:
, , ,

Posted on

Internet Footprint Maintenance

Found a little time to clean up my Internet Footprint – that is all the sites that I have tinkered around with in the past and for whatever reason, never really found any value in them to keep me coming back. So I have gone back and delete my accounts; though I am sure the info will live on in Google for quite some time to come. Here is this weekend’s harvest:

BrightKite – first location-based service I tried out. They’ve gotten out of that (crowded) space.
43Places – I found that I got a lot of people asking for advice about places I’d been but no one answering questions about places I wanted to go.
43People – This was an interesting thought experiment – for about a week.
GetGlue – Hunch-wannabe without the correlations and meaningful recommendations. No thanks, I don’t need any more virtual stickers.
SCVNGR – Another twist on location-based services swizzled with a sort of treasure hunt vibe. Not really enough going on with this to try out or keep me coming back. Also, no option to delete your account. Abandoned.
Box.net – this was kind of cool when it first came out; especially being able to access files from my mobile phone. Now Dropbox and Google Docs have taken over for this.
Ning – they kind of shot themselves in the head when they switched to a all pay model – that made jumping ship an easy decision.
check.in – promised to provide unified ‘check ins’ for all location-based services. Never really worked that well and probably won’t make it out of beta.
twine – crashed and burned on its own; morphed into evri which doesn’t seem to have a point with all of the twitter search engines out there
plancast – recommends all sorts of interesting sounding events – in Austin, Paris, and NYC. Not terribly useful if you aren’t in those places.
task.fm – reminders; except you need to remember to do to that site to get them – easily replaced this with google calendar and as a bonus automatically gets synced to my mobile phone.

And as previously mentioned – Gowalla is gone and FourSquare is now an entropy exercise.

Technorati Tags:
, ,

Posted on

Tablet Idiocy

It is kind of fun to listen to the ‘pundits’ slobber over the rumored iPad 2. They seem to not have a very long memories when they criticize (with a barely masked worried tone in their voices) the emerging Android tablets.

“There aren’t many apps written specifically for the Android tablet” – yes, and this was very much true with all of the iPhone apps when the iPad came out.

“iPad has more business adoption than Android tablets” – um, which Android tablets? Most of them will be released in the next six months – businesses typically find it hard to adopt technology that doesn’t exist.

Personally I find the walled off nature of iOS a hindrance for any serious use of the iPad. As I have said before, we travel with both the iPad and a cheap netbook and the netbook is the device that gets used most often. Android just provided a better fit for the way I want to use a computer and it looks like the tablet-specific Honeycomb version of the Android OS is just going to make that even better.

Technorati Tags:
, , , , ,

Posted on

Alternatives To Mozy’s Crash And Burn

What a disaster Mozy’s recent decision has been. They are switching away from unlimited storage and charging rapacious rates for the new capped plans that replace them. 3 times the cost for infinitely less service – brilliant! First of all, I am not sure they can just change the terms of service and not honor the terms of the previous legally binding contracts. I suspect at some point there will be a class action lawsuit against Mozy from existing customers. If that comes to pass, I will happily join it.

In my case, in December of 2010 I created a new Mozy account for my wife’s Mac and committed to a 2 year unlimited storage contract. Mozy is now telling me that on October of 2011 that 2 year unlimited commitment converts to the capped storage scheme – not even 11 months into a 24 month agreement! Further, I was paying less than $300USD for unlimited backup on three computers for a 2 year contract. Mozy now wants to force re-up me for nearly $1000USD per year.

No thanks.

Right now, Crashplan is looking like the best alternative – they offer unlimited backup, a much more efficient and feature-rich client and I can get a household plan that covers backing-up up to 10 computers for four years for less than what I am paying now for three computers under Mozy. Crashplan is even offering a 15% discount to users switching from Mozy. Here is the URL for the Crashplan discount: http://www.crashplan.com/mozyonover .

My initial testing of the CrashPlan Mac client shows it transferring data at about 5x faster than the Mozy client (that is uploading to CrashPlan Central over my crappy DSL). I also have the option of backing up data to a folder on a local (or external drive), to another computer on my LAN or even a friend’s computer across the Interwebs.

It is probably going to take a few weeks to get my base data uploaded to CrashPlan so I can then go back to smaller incremental backups, but there is no way on this earth that I am staying with Mozy and their insane pricing. If you are a current Mozy customer, give CrashPlan a look (and even a free 30 day trial). If you are considering Mozy: don’t – run away from that train wreck and spend your money with a less greedy and ethically challenged business.

Technorati Tags:
, , , , , , , ,

Posted on

Why Don’t Americans Travel?

I think this post on Why More Americans Don’t Travel Abroad gets it partially right. As a person who has been fortunate to have traveled to a fair bit of the world, I have my thoughts on this and I think it comes down to three things really: 1) Ignorance 2) Laziness 3) Cost Misperception .

Ignorance – I’ve seen and heard this one a lot. Here is a sampling of what I have been asked: “Why would you ever want to leave the US – it is the best place in the world!” “Do they even celebrate Christmas in Spain?” “What are you going to eat in Thailand?” “Doesn’t everyone ride elephants in South Africa?” People really think that Spain is just like Mexico – um, yes, in the same way that England is just like Canada or the US.

Laziness – Apparently it just takes too much effort to get a passport and deal with money that doesn’t look like the good ole ‘merican greenback. Heaven forbid you have to deal with people who don’t speak English and that you might have to learn a few words of a foreign language. Here is a secret folks: any place you go in the world, there are people who want to take your money from you and they are more than happy to speak your language (and are amazed if you even make the effort to speak theirs!).

Cost Misperception – Maybe this is an excuse more than anything but apparently people believe that it is really expensive to travel to Europe. Most every time that I have looked, it is the same cost or cheaper to fly to Europe that it is to the west coast. Frankly, I am amazed at the coin that people will drop to go on a cruise or to some barfhole like Disneyland (or even a cruise at Disney). Those costs would more than accommodate a trip out of the country.

I guess I am lucky that traveling is something that my family loves to do, so we save up for a trip once a year. And kids don’t have to be an obstacle. My daughter has been traveling since she was six months old. At the tender age of ten, she has been to 17 countries (some of them multiple times). I am willing to bet that she has seen more of the world in her first decade than most Americans will see in their entire lives.

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

Location Based Entropy

I decided that in 2011 I am going to conduct an experiment in location-based entropy. That is, I am no longer going to update my Gowalla and Foursquare accounts and have already removed the apps from my phone.

I currently have 15 Foursquare mayorships (several of them in other countries!) – let’s see how long it takes for someone to ‘oust’ me from all of those locations. I didn’t use Gowalla as much, largely due to its clunky interface and lack of any real incentives so I have no ground to give there.

Foursquare is growing rapidly, but I have not found any real value in continuing to participate. I have also noticed that with Foursquare becoming more popular, a lot of locations have employees as the ‘mayor’ – not exactly what was intended, I am sure. In fact, Foursquare recently provided the means for owners of locations to kick employee ‘mayors’ out so that actual customers have a shot.

Technorati Tags:
, , , , ,

Posted on

Tablet vs Netbook

Here is yet another proclamation on the death of the netbook because of tablet computers. I’m not convinced quite yet. My own experience shows that when we travel with both an iPad and a netbook, the iPad sees some use (in short sputters) but the netbook does the majority of the computing duties. Part of that may be that the iPad in particular is just so darn limited in what it can do (and, in many ways, too cumbersome in the way that it does/doesn’t do things).

Technorati Tags:
, , ,

Posted on

Palin’s Jihad (And The Shamelessness Of The Right)

Ok, so I am going to exaggerate things a bit to make a point.

So basically what happened this weekend is that fundamentalist, right wing extremist mufti Palin (with help from fellow radical clerics Beck and O’Reilly) saw their fatwa against Democrats acted upon by a domestic terrorist from the radicalized province of Arizona. Six people dead (including a young child)and around a dozen more injured because mufti Palin’s utter contempt for how the Democratic process works in this country and the conviction that political differences must be dealt with by threats of violence and ultimately murder.

Funny how things don’t get characterized this way when a white Christian commits the terrorist act. In fact, I am convinced that had there been a shadow of a connection with the Middle East or Islam, the above description is exactly how it would be characterized on shout radio and Fox News. No proof would be necessary beyond the posits of the uninformed pundits. The muftis and clerics would be under arrest. There would be 24 hours news cycles with cries for justice (more blood, more violence).

Instead, we reliably hear the right practically defending the actions of this murderous lunatic and blovating about how ‘it isn’t hate speech’ and that putting targets on named Congress members districts and using the term ‘take them out’ wasn’t a call to violence. We hear them distancing themselves from the terrorist’s political views by saying ‘he’s not one of us, he’s just a crazy person’. And of course the clinging to the gun culture that feeble minds find important: ‘gun’s didn’t kill those people in Arizona, a person did’. Yes, a person with a gun. A person with a gun that (ironically enough) was banned as an assault weapon until 2004 because of it’s high capacity clip. Oh, and suck on this NRA: who stopped the shooter? Not some ‘patriotic’, high minded, gun toting, shout radio regurgitater, but two men with their bare hands.

Amongst the calls to attenuate the vitriol in political discourse, Fox and others are taking this as an opportunity for further fear mongering and political attacks. The comment sections on the local media outlets are filled with the kind of ignorant, right wing parroting that I have commented on before (and come to expect from the backwater thinking that characterizes much of Cincinnati).

I can only hope that the nation learns a lesson from this. Perhaps it will, but post 9/11 memories lead me to believe it will not be a lasting one. Which makes me ask, what will it take for America to become de-radicalized, where disagreements in principle or thought are dealt with in a civil manner rather than at the point of a gun?

Technorati Tags:
, , , , , ,

Posted on

Aberrant Behavior Online vs Real Life

I’ve been thinking further about my previous post on social media. In particular how some people behave very differently online that they do in person. Looking back at the example from my previous post, I have my doubts that the parties involved would have behaved the same if the online communication channel wasn’t available. In the one case, would a person exchange physical postal mail for months and then fire off a grudging missive? Probably not. Or they would skip right to the missive. It is probably the same thinking that motivates spammers – if they had to physically address and postal mail letters hawking boner pills and fake watches they likely wouldn’t. Put the ability to electronically send this same junk to thousands at a push of a button is just too easy.

Another example that comes to mind is a former co-worker who began following me on Twitter and Facebook. He stands as the only person (so far) that I have had to ban/block online because of continual obnoxious behavior. In real life he is a likable enough guy and very opinionated. He is ultra-right wing, but claims to be a Libertarian. I always suspected that this was just cover so that he could support the most radical aspects of the Republican agenda but claim ‘I’m not one of them’ when they get caught in their inevitable lies and corruption.

As I said, in person he was fine; online it was just a constant torrent of right wing talking points and Fox News propaganda and spin. The really sad thing was, he couldn’t defend or explain any of it – only parrot the shout radio spew. I debated him a few times and buried him every single time because there were no facts or logic behind his diatribes. This just made him even more radical. Not liking his online shellacking; he began posting lies/distortions about me and what I said in other ‘safe’ forums where he knew he would get no challenge from his other right wing buddies. When he made some pretty overtly racist statements on my Facebook wall, I was done. It would have been one thing if there was some intelligent debate or discussion. Instead this was just tedious, willfully ignorant, offensive, poorly reasoned noise on his part. Banned.

If you need further examples of online bad behavior take a look at the sewer that is the comment section on most posts on the Cincinnati Enquirer site. Maybe I have too much faith in humanity, but I am fairly certain that in real life a person would react with ‘they probably had it coming’ upon hearing that a person had died in a car accident – yet you see this sort of response almost daily on that site. You’ll also see the full regurgitation of the shout radio sloganeering in response to any news posting with even a hint of politics in it.

I guess the anonymizing effect of being online seduces some into the most outrageous behavior. Of course this effect also exists offline as well. As I have pointed out: “there is never a line for the toilet at the public pool”. Yes, people will do the pretty obnoxious things in public if they think they stand a chance of getting away with it – least of which is peeing in a public swimming pool.

Technorati Tags:
, ,

Posted on

Thoughts On Social Media And The Real World

On a recent trip I began reflecting on social media and being social ‘in the real world’. What follows is a somewhat rambling capture of those thoughts.

While there are varying degrees of concern that people who habitually play violent video games are more inclined to violence, there is no similar concern that people who IM or update Facebook constantly are going to become more loquacious and gregarious in real life. In fact it is the opposite that seems to be the case – the IMers tend to be withdrawn and somewhat socially inept. Why is this?

Both LinkedIn and Facebook attract people who don’t really understand the intent of social media but who seem to just be compulsive list makers or collectors. My LinkedIn inbox constantly sees requests from vendors who apparently are just dumping their contact lists into LinkedIn and requesting to network. Sorry, no. I am pretty strict in LinkedIn at only accepting connections for people I have actually met and could provide a recommendation for (isn’t that the intent of LinkedIn anyway?). Facebook hoarders seem to just send out friend requests to everyone who share a common school or workplace or surname. Again, I only ‘friend’ people I have actually met and care to hear from. I recently got a friend request from a co-worker who in real life won’t look me in the eye or respond when I greet them in the hallway. Anti-social in real life, but what to be my friend online? No thanks. It is also kind of creepy to get monthly friend requests from people I have never met – what do they want? And why don’t they get the message.

In recent years I have had old acquaintances approach me via social media and my blog. In most cases, it works out very amicably and it is nice to catch up with the individual. In other cases, it seems to start out fine and then goes amiss. A few examples:

A former co-worker that I hadn’t heard from in probably a decade left a comment on my blog about catching up. I responded in kind and exchanged several emails with her about the interval between our last contact. She announced that she was going to be in town and wanted to meet up with me and another co-worker for lunch. We met and had a nice conversation. I sent a followup email and got a very terse response. A few weeks after that, she deleted her email account, changed her LinkedIn status to ‘peon’ and moved away, never to be heard from again. What was the point of that whole episode?

In another case, a woman that I went out with briefly in college contacted me via LinkedIn. She seemed kind of depressed at having just lost her job (and not having luck finding a new one) and seemed to want to connect with the past for some reason. We emailed back and forth with me trying to be supportive and not getting too entangled in her venomous tirades against being single, jobless and largely friendless. Then, a few days before February 14th, I got a scathing email missive from her about how I ruined her life by not sending her flowers for Valentine’s Day when I was in college. Really? Not that I was living off of about $30 a week and eating meals out of a vending machine. If I had the money to spare, I probably would have – but I didn’t, so I couldn’t. After the VD missive, no further word from her. Was that really the purpose of contacting me? To blame me for every bad thing that has happened to her in the last two decades? I don’t get it. I am no saint, but I also don’t think I have that kind of influence over people or events.

The last example happened on Facebook. Another woman I dated in college sent me a friend request that I accepted. After the usual quick history exchanges, we would regularly comment on each others postings on Facebook as we share a number of common interests and a similar sense of humor. This went on for about a year, then suddenly not only did she unfriend me, but banned me in FB. The only reason that I can think of is because I told her (via a private message) that she looked great in her new profile photo, but that quality of the photo was low. Seriously? What kind of vanity or insecurity does that reveal? I would have never thought that paying someone a compliment would create that sort of response. But as the previous examples show, people can behave erratically online as in real life. Disappear here, indeed.

When I travel, I like to try to connect with fellow travelers. Trains seem to be an excellent ‘social medium’ for these conversations. I’ve had some great conversations with folks from Uruguay, Chile, New Zealand, and Wales (to name a few) to pass the time while on the rails. But sometimes, there is a bit of a disconnect. On a recent trip, two women sat down next to my wife, daughter and I on a very full train. They were speaking English and the conversation I was having with my daughter made it clear that we shared a common language. The older of the two women didn’t say a word to us, sat down, crossed her arms and stared off into space. The younger one sat across the aisle furiously updating Facebook, sending emails and reviewing photos on her phone. After about an hour of silence I asked her where she was from and she looked at me in utter surprise that I had spoken to her. Again, social online, deer-in-the-headlights in real life. After a while, I let her to most of the talking about what she had been doing in Spain since August (apparently not a lot).

Photography is another shared interest that has led to some real life encounters. I have been using Flickr for years and at one time there was a very active ‘Living In Cincinnati‘ group that would occasionally have meetups for fun and photo ops. One member of the group even arranged for some of group members to have their photos exhibited at a local coffee shop (me included!). I actually wound up selling one of my prints because of the exhibit. My observation about photographers in the digital age: the ones who think they are really good aren’t; the ones who really enjoy taking and sharing images are a delight to hang out with. I’ll take laid-back and playful to the ‘You can tell I am an awesome photographer because I have a $5K camera that I never take out of auto-mode’ and ‘I spend hours in Photoshop tricking up an image because I don’t know what composition is’ annoyances. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have the time to visit/contribute to Flickr as much as I did previously. From what I can tell, the LiC core members seem to have moved on as well as there is little or no activity on the group RSS feed.

I am an avid Vespa rider and participate in both the local and international scooter discussion sites. These are a great way to keep in touch with folks that you might only see a handful of times a year at a scooter rally. These are really not much more than old-school bulletin board systems and perhaps the simplicity of it is what makes it work so well. Maybe someone will come up with a social media site for riders – Scootr, perhaps?

One thing I observed in Spain is that Spanish women will look you in the eye when they walk down the street. I like that. Beats the ‘hundred yard stare’ that most American women sport. Dunno, somehow it makes them seem more alive and engaged rather than always merely on their way somewhere. This made me think of what could be the future of social media/real world interactions. What if there was an augmented reality application like Layar, but people focused rather than building focused. So you could hold your phone up in a crowd and using face recognition or some sort of near field technology you would get an overlay of the interests, language, etc of the people in the crowd. This would be a cool way of tying online social profile to real life interactions. I’d buy that app!

Technorati Tags:
, , ,