Two Slashes

This post is partially because feel this weekend deserves an excellent recap, partially because I want to acknowledge some of my newfound friends, and partially because I don’t want to make the same mistake I made by not posting about the tweetup I attended a few months ago hosted by Tricon.

A brief explanation of the occasion is probably in order first, I suppose. For those of you who were not in the loop, the 20 Something Bloggers decided that this weekend would be a great time for (the first) summer meetup, a way to meet the people behind some of the blogs and forum postings keeping the community alive, and, as a central location for a good number of the group (as well as being an event-filled and tourist-friendly location for those who would be traveling), it would be held in Chicago.

Thursday
Of course, no trip to a blogger meetup in Chicago would be complete without Rachelskirts or her friend Sean, so we jumped on an inbound train and found ourselves in the Windy City one long (though fun-filled) train ride later, just in time for the “official” pizza dinner.

After some wackiness with the Giordano’s we originally had planned to eat at, we ended up spending quite a bit of time waiting outside Pizzeria Due (an extension of Uno’s ), chatting, deciding that street sweepers were worthy of grand theft auto, and generally enjoying each other’s company before heading in to discover that Dell Mini 9s (like mine) make excellent cell phone chargers in a pinch, realize that some people easily confuse Dr. Dre with Dr. Who (*ahem*), and determine that I’ve helped enough people out to earn the rank of “The #$&#ing Man.”

Friday
Long train rides aren’t necessarily entertaining or comfortable when riding solo, so I skipped the events on Friday (in the physical sense), instead opting to poke and prod at everyone on Twitter.  (In retrospect, being underage and spending the evening at a bar probably wouldn’t have been the most pleasurable of times, anyway.)

"You're doing it wrong!"

Saturday
Saturday was supposed to be the official 20SB wine tasting, but Rachelskirts, LovelyAnomaly, and I decided that we didn’t want to participate. (Well, that wasn’t much of a choice for me, but I wouldn’t have gone anyway.) Instead, the three of us took a hike (a painfully-crowded bus, actually) north to visit a nature museum, decide that the age limitations on children’s play areas don’t apply to us, (in Rachel’s words) “hack” the exhibit kiosks (because visiting about:blank is akin to hacking, apparently), and (with many thanks to the Subway that thoughtfully had its operating license suspended the day before) discover what Lovely and Rachel described as the best darn crêpes ever.

A little more wandering, an El ride, and a confusing map of the Merchandise Mart later, we found our way to Bucca di Beppo, where we caught up with the rest of the group and met Tim, perhaps the best server I’ve ever met (and little did we know his name was actually Tim until we got the receipt – we were simply calling him that to give him a name until that point). Too much food, good atmosphere, and plenty of people to talk with.

Sunday
I might not have had a chance to physically meet up with everyone (again), but I did get a chance to claim that I have seen the present-day version of the time machine from Back to the Future, find a $150 keyboard marked down to $10, assist with softmodding a Wii, and work on other things related to the next episode of TechCentric, so I can’t complain that the day was wasted.

Monday
Why might I be including Monday, the day after the meetup officially ended? Well, if taking the hijinks back online wasn’t enough, Monday has been a crazy day of people trying to find those last few stragglers on Twitter, Facebook, the 20SB site, their blogs, or wherever else they may be, swapping stories, and helping each other write up their experiences (when you have a group of bloggers hanging out, it’s expected that they all write up something about it, right?). Oh, and deciding that MomInRealLife owns everyone’s phones, of course.

It’s been fun meeting and trading jokes with some of the people behind the curtain, so to speak.  I’m glad I went, and I’m more than willing to do it again (sooner than next year, even).  Here’s to the success of the 20SB Ultimate Meetup!

Every time I get to read about the RIAA (or, as the case may be here, ASCAP) and their crazy schemes for raising royalty money, I grow a little more confident in thinking that these organizations are doing nothing but trying to alienate their members with each passing day.  And, so far, this thinking hasn’t let me down.  I’m especially loving the idea to charge for incoming calls proposed by ASCAP as reported by TechDirt a little while ago.

I’m not trying to defend the phone companies (they’ve got enough wrong with them to warrant a small novel), but let’s stop here for a second and think.  It’s downright impossible for the phone company to keep track of what ringtone your phone emits, let alone that there’s no reason for them to want to collect that data or care that one person is alerted to calls by Garth Brooks while another listens to Pink Martini or a third plays back the bridge from a Creative Commons-licensed song they found on Jamendo.  Obviously, we have licensing issues to take into account, because there’s certainly no way AT&T is liable for a song in the public domain.

Then there’s also the difficulty of determining whether whatever song they’ve identified is even being played publicly.  For example, I have an ‘instrumental’chop of The Limousines’ “New Year’s Resolution” currently set as the ringtone on my Treo.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that AT&T knows this (perhaps because their friends at the NSA have nothing better to do and tipped them off).  Now, how do they determine which of the following scenarios is currently in effect?

1. My phone is in ring mode.  The phone will proudly play The Limos to anyone and everyone standing near me every time my mother calls.
2. My phone is in vibrate mode.  The phone will play absolutely nothing, even though it wants to play something, but instead will silently bounce around if placed on a table while being called by Don.
3. I have a pair of headphones plugged in.  Regardless of the ring/vibrate setting, my phone will pipe “New Year’s Resolution” into my ears while the phone waits for me to pick up a call from Google Voice.

By my understanding and thought, only that first scenario would be even remotely a public performance and only in such a case would AT&T have to pay for the playback of my (awesome) ringtone.  And, admittedly, it’s hard to call any ringtone a public performance when (usually) the clip being played is less than thirty seconds in length because the call is picked up or sent to voicemail.  Get a bunch of people in a large crowd, each with a different 30-second chunk of a song, and call them in the correct order, and maybe you’re onto some artsy project that needs licensing, but, for the typical cell phone user, I think that’s just dumb.  And let’s not even get into how many people need to be within x feet of the phone in order for it to be considered a public performance or anything like that.

Naturally, if your carrier had to pay for your pleasure, they’re going to want their profit margins exactly as they were (if not a little more padded), and the call is obviously your fault, so there’s nothing like passing on the cost to their customers (just like they do for incoming SMS messages, for example).

If this gets even a little support outside of the usual groups, I can’t see things going well for consumers.  And if you we do start paying for our ringtones…by all means, make full use of your library.

Chances are, if you’ve logged into Facebook anytime in the past two days or so, you were probably greeted by the following notification above your news feed informing you of Facebook’s switch to usernames.  (Of course, it was also probably readable , but I like trying not to overrun the sidebar.)  For a service that has long required you to refer to yourself by number, almost as if you were helpfully and willfully subjecting yourself to a prison sentence (and there are reasons for me selecting this metaphor in particular, but they’re outside the scope of this post), the ability to individually identify yourself on your own terms is quite a jump.

Despite this huge change for Facebook, though, I think I’ve still seen more posts about Twitter (alright, I get it, it’s the hot new thing thanks to Oprah, but there’s only so many times I can read about a new startup *cough*Spymaster*cough* without looking for the nearest stabbing implement to use on myself) show up in Google Reader or on Digg or Reddit.  So, what’s the big deal?

I suppose you could think of this in terms of license plates.  You could go with whatever random assortment of letters and numbers your state assigns you when you register your car, and play along regardless of if you get W376JSB or 3826273, or you could jump through whatever hoops are required and get a plate that has your name, IRC nickname, or favorite type of cheese on it.  This is Facebook’s equivalent to giving you vanity plates for that Camaro of yours.  You know, unless prison numbers are your thing.

Of course, all cool news has to come with some strings attached, and Facebook is of course not one of those extremely rare exceptions.  However, according to the Facebook Blog, they’re rather tame things like that you can only use the “Romanized alphabet” (I think someone meant to say “Latin” here, and it’s not me), numbers, and periods.  (There’s the obvious technical issue of using things like question marks, hash marks, and ampersands in a URL here to blame.)  That shouldn’t be a big deal, though.  It’s not like you can put an interrobang on your license plate, though Facebook also warns that they’re looking into extended character support.  Of course, once you claim a name, you can’t change it (which is not the case over at Twitter, though MySpace still wrote your name in permanent marker the last time I was there), so there’s no gaming the system to reserve “CutiePie” for your girlfriend…you know, unless YOU want to be referred to as “CutiePie” (and who wouldn’t?).

Once you reserve that name, you get the awesome perk of being able to use facebook.com/yourusernamehere to refer new friends directly to your profile instead of making them search for you, dig through all the people with similar names to find the one with the right network and picture (if you have a reasonably useful picture, that is), and worry for three days about whether they attempted to befriend the right person or not.

Being the technical weenie I am, the rules Facebook imposed also gave me a slew of ideas of how Facebook could improve this system.  I put my head together with Nick Schwab, and we came up with the following in less than a minute:

• Since those “Romanized” characters are more or less the only legal characters in a domain name (excepting the hyphen), it would be easy for Facebook to give users a subdomain rather than append their name to the end.  In an ideal circumstance, both methods would work the same way, but it might provide for more “ownership” of that username and profile if a subdomain were used instead.  (If you’re not following me, think yourusername.facebook.com as opposed to that example above.)
• Facebook could use these unique URLs (either the method I’ve suggested using subdomains or Facebook’s original implementation) to support OpenID, an identification technology that you might have heard of considering its extensive use here on this blog.  Considering Facebook seems to want a piece of the identity market (Facebook Connect, anyone?), allowing users to use this would be a feature I suggest they implement.
• Again, excepting hypens, the character range covers everything usable in an e-mail address.
  • Perhaps Facebook will allow users to send e-mail to username@facebook.com, which would be a great way to get in touch with people without them having to make their e-mail address public.  Admittedly, this kind of detracts from the use of Facebook’s built-in messaging.
  • If Facebook went after the subdomain system I outlined above, they would be in a great position to provide an e-mail-based interface to the site, something that would make Facebook accessible from an even wider range of devices and platforms.  Perhaps sending a note to wall@username.facebook.com would allow you to post on someone’s wall remotely, while message@ would provide the same functionality as sending a private message.  Want to post some photos?  Attach them to a note and fire it off to photos@, where they’ll immediately be added to an album titled by your subject line.

Some people aren’t as happy about the change, though.  I vaguely recall one person (I don’t recollect where I saw it or who said it, so if it was you, speak up in the comments) comparing Facebook to MySpace in this respect, saying that the former is moving towards the latter in terms of usability and obnoxious features, and another person suggesting that this is just the next step in Facebook’s transition to “become” Twitter.

Of course, I could be the world’s biggest idiot for getting excited over this (to the point where it’s managed to be added to my Google Calendar), but I’ll gladly be one of the first people to claim their name.  So, what do you think?  Are you going to be eagerly waiting for a chance to prove how much of a “Cool.Kid.123″ you are, or would you like those prisoner numbers tattooed onto your neck?