Two Slashes

Thousands of people are going to be making a pilgrimage to the western United States over the next few days to fulfill their rites as geeks, nerds, and fanboys by visiting Macworld and CES. Normally, I wouldn’t be too giddy about either of these events in their own right. Call it ignorance, call it a lack of interest - honestly, there’s not much difference between the two in this respect - but this year is different. This year has pulled me in quite more than I would like.

Perhaps it’s the fact that this year marks the last Macworld at which Apple will be giving a presentation, and that such a landmark event will be without the personality of yesteryear. I’m not an Apple fanatic by any means, but to see what’s become just as important as Christmas or Thanksgiving for some vanish into thin air is quite a stir, especially when compounded with the fact that Steve Jobs will not be making an appearance. (As I’ve mentioned other places, I’m not entirely convinced that Steve’s health is what it’s cracked up to be.)

All that said, if I have an interest, I must be expecting some announcement or other to come out of earthquake country. (Making predictions is part of the fun of these events, right?) While my predictions aren’t as humorous (or outrageous) as the MacBook Wheel, based on some of the things I’ve heard (and found off the beaten path) today, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the Mac Mini is making a comeback tour. (Perhaps it will join up with the Apple TV to make a superband?) Apple will probably make some other low-key announcements like upgrades to their product lines, an update on Snow Leopard (OS X v10.6 for those of you not in the know), and probably something moderately important to deal with the “revolutionary” iPhone.

Companies named after fruits aside, the Consumer Electronics Show has also been one of those events I tend to write off without much thought or care as to what comes out of them. I’m not a big gamer, so typically hearing that the Xbox 1080, PlayStation 5, or Nintendo Yuu and a million associated games are coming out isn’t something I typically care too much about. New stereo systems? Whatever. Is Blu-Ray still not dead? *shrug*

CES isn’t without its allures this time around, either. As a long-time Palm fanatic (okay, you got me), it pains me to see them struggling, and as a consequence I’m most curious about what’s going to come out of this Nova project. I’ve been following it fairly closely, and though I hope it doesn’t completely render my Treo Pro (more on that hopefully to come) obsolete, I hope the predictions of it being launched on a device similar to the one pictured here (from Gizmodo) are inaccurate.

I’m also intrigued by Creative’s , whatever it may be. Creative, who’s also been having some trouble as of late with the revenue, is another company I’ve always had a soft spot for. As with Palm, though, my interest is hopefully not wasted, though these images aren’t doing anything to improve my hopes.

To recap, I’m waiting on the “next big thing” to come out of Cupertino (perhaps so I can buy someone else’s product and then mock them later about it when my purchase does more, but that’s another story) and a pair of companies I’ve long supported to either make one last attempt to break free of their problems or die along the way. If that’s any indication, I’ll probably be spending every spare moment at work keeping up with the coverage to make sure things are as good as they can be. Any other interesting news will just happen to be icing on what very well could happen to be a very sour cake (and that’s a waste of icing if the cake is bad).

Is there anything you’re waiting for at CES or Macworld? Do you think my predictions are terrible, or have any of your own? Leave a comment!

(And good luck to Keri, who’s making her way over to Macworld in hopes of getting at least a single Macworld under her belt. Have a safe and enjoyable trip!)

I came back from another semester at school thinking I would have something resembling a normal holiday season. As headache-inducing as the season customarily is for me during a normal year, this one’s poised to take the gold as one of the more frustrating. How so? A series of events I’d like to call the “Chistmas-takes.” (I’m still trying to figure out whether that’s the best way to merge the words. There are just too many good possibilities!)

Not-A-Tree
It’s family tradition each year to get a real, live tree for Christmas. There are plenty of stories and subtraditions to go along with this, including the numerous incidents involving either my father or myself nearly getting knocked off ladders trying to cut the netting, the wide (when netted!) trees that don’t fit through the front door, the trees that are too tall and need to be cut in approximately half just to be stood up in the living room, and the replacement of the tree stand every third year or so because the one currently in use just won’t hold this year’s tree.

My parents decided to forego all of the “frustration” (as they put it) this year and opted for a fake tree, an idea I’m having a rather difficult time warming up to after twenty years of pine scent and sap. And in a way, I do think I’ve got reason to gripe: the “not-a-tree” (as I’ve so eloquently dubbed it) is more of a faux-pine cylinder (at least, from certain angles) than it is a tree-shape, and I just don’t think a tree I can pull into at least four pieces without the need of a bow saw screams “Holidays!” to anyone. Honestly, I feel like I’m celebrating Festivus every time I walk past the “tree”, what with the metal trunk and all.

Not So Gifted
Despite my parents complaining year after year that I’m one of the most difficult people they’ve ever had to shop for, they usually come through reasonably well. It’s all but certain that I should expect a few books under the tree every year, and in most cases the books I end up with are reasonable selections.

This year, however, my mother decided to eschew any Christmas-morning confusion and plain out told me the books I should be expecting. One was the latest in a series of books I’ve been reading since my childhood. To be honest, they’re (disturbingly) below my reading level at this point, but I find them an entertaining read now and then, though it works out better when I hadn’t been given the same book for Easter.

The other book? Well, I’d rather not mention it, but now that I have…erm, Twilight. (Yes, I shuddered when she said it, too.) I’m sorry, but fantasy romance novels aren’t my cup of tea. Nor have they ever been. I think perhaps the closest I’ve come to that genre was the Harry Potter series. And that’s also as close as I would like to come to it, thank you very much.

Tower In The Snow
Christmas Eve generally ends up being the calm before the storm, with a (relatively) quiet family dinner, T’was The Night Before Christmas, and perhaps a viewing of It’s A Wonderful Life.

Not this Christmas Eve, however. Two of my siblings decided that the best way to honor the holidays was by honoring their gender. And they did so alright, ‘erecting’ what can only be described as a five-foot-tall phallus in the middle of the front lawn. It’s since been partially dismantled, but I’m sure the neighbors have more than a few questions for the next person they see setting foot outside my house.

Mugshot
I may have a digital camera, but I don’t often pull it out at family gatherings to take pictures of everyone and everything for posterity’s sake, and I own perhaps a single picture frame, which at the moment probably rests haphazardly in a drawer in my dresser. (One day, I’ll probably have a different mindset, but that’s another topic…)

Imagine my surprise, then, to open up a gift from my aunt to find this keychain picture frame resting inside the colorful paper.

I wasn’t the only one to double-take at the idea, either. Rachelskirts offered up a few of her suggestions on how to use the device, but I’m not quite sure that stuffing it full of pictures of the Pope or Elijah Wood qualify as intended uses for the product. I’m open to any other suggestions on how to put it to use, but pending anything worthwhile, it’s sitting on my desk and will probably be given off at some point.

There have been a multitude of other headache-inducing moments, including my mom figuring out how to use a snowblower for the first time, resulting in a driveway’s worth of snow in the garage, and the series of mishaps right before dinner on Christmas Eve, but those are perhaps better kept to myself.

I realize that this mostly sounds like a giant complaint post, and perhaps you’re right if you’re thinking so. To that, I’ll simply point out that there’s not much of a happy story to be had when the holiday magic is gone.

Humbug?

I posted two weeks ago about some of the biggest failures I could think of involving technology.  While the responses to the poll I issued with the post were generally more than I was expecting, it wasn’t until Wednesday that I realized I had forgotten one of my ongoing projects.

It’s become habit for me to catalog all of the various mistakes and mess-ups I encounter in a visual manner, with the occasional flaw submitted by others for the sake of some variety.  This includes things both on- and off-line, as there’s no easy way to escape the clutches of human error and poor workmanship.  I think the old This Is Broken (the one I stole the name of my Picasa album from) and the Error’d section of TDWTF and the countless hours I’ve spent perusing both are partially to blame for my habit obsession, but I can’t be entirely sure.

Wednesday, when I had an issue with my (admittedly cheap) watch which caused it to somehow forget the rules to the Gregorian calendar (while still keeping accurate time, no less; yes, I took that picture at nearly 2a), it reminded me of some of my favorite entries in my album.  Considering I had already shared some other favorite failures, I figure that one more list won’t hurt.

• Far and away, my personal favorite is the picture I took in the produce department at a Meijer near my college campus.  There’s just something about going through a stack of nice-looking oranges and turning up the one that got past quality control that makes you not want to eat oranges again.  Or at least oranges from that store.
• Another mishap I take particular interest in is this product listing on Amazon, which appears to be a particularly gruesome mashup between at least three different products (price, product image, and title).  Either that, or floppy drives had changed their appearance considerably at the time I took this.  It’s a shame I never got around to actually ordering, as I would have loved to see what came in the box.  That original price tag certainly wouldn’t have been worth it, though.  (And speaking of sales on Amazon…)
• Speaking of mixed-up images, here’s a screenshot from Google’s Picasa web frontend while I was uploading photos and testing the (then-)new face-detection and tagging functionality.  Dear lord Google, that doesn’t quite seem to be a face to me!  And his head isn’t up his #*(, so there’s no other reason I can think of to tag the train platform between his legs.  I’m confused!
• I may alter some of my images to take into account things like order numbers or potentially revealing personal information (and this is a prime example), butI couldn’t make this up if I tried.  It seems that DHL has found the secret to speedy deliveries:  top-secret package locations.  Be it wormholes, subspace, or some other as-of-yet “undiscovered” transportation method, leave it to DHL to be the ones who milk it for all its worth.  As I recall, I got this package in record time, too.
• Being a big company like Microsoft, there are often little pet projects that get developed to test new strategies, ideas, or demonstrate components of their existing products.  Of course, these demos work better when they don’t make elementary school spelling mistakes (look at the document headers and you’ll spot it quickly), as the writer of one of their demonstration documents for Office Online has done.  And given that this image is still available from one of their press releases, I wonder just how much embarrassment they need before they can correct something like that.  I know I won’t be using Office Online until they have working spell-check, at least.
• Like the previous example, this one is also an issue of language.  However, I don’t think anyone reading this post will fail to notice what two staff writers and two editors from Reuters did, especially as I’ve outlined it for you in the image.  If I had the money, I would be mailing all four of those people fresh copies of Strunk & White in boxes complete with mechanisms that beat them over the head with the style guide when they first open it.

There you have it.  I’m sure you’ll find some favorites of your own, and I encourage you to keep track of some of the interesting mistakes you encounter in your own life.  If you have anything broken of your own to share in the comments, I’m also all for it.

One question I hear on occasion is whether I think blogging is a dead medium.  With the popularity of sites like Twitter (*cough*) and the recently-purchased Pownce, I can understand the thought process leading to such questions.

Most recently, the question came up in a discussion on a WordPress development mailing list where contributor Paleo Pat voiced his concern for the medium as a whole after having read an older article on Wired.  (My apologies for the link sandwich there, but I figured every breadcrumb needed to be covered.)

The Wired article essentially states that blogging is dead and that people who contribute or develop them are merely wasting their time at this point:

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

The sheer number of platforms available (WordPress, Movable Type, hlscript (and the Justin Frankel/Cockos fork hl--), and Expression Engine, just to name a few) mean that just about anybody with a few dollars in their pocket (to pay for hosting, of course) can get set up with a blog of their own.  And if even the money is an issue, there are even services willing to take care all of the setup for free (a la WordPress, Blogger, and Vox, for starters) at the cost of some level of customization or fine-tuning.

Wired seems to complain that providing easier access and offering more choices are akin to lowering the standards required to put your story online, but I see this as enabling, not hindering.  Why shouldn’t somebody with a few intelligent things to say be able to get their voice out without having to spend three years learning to manage a webserver on the weekend?  Who decided that bloggers should have a diverse acronym dictionary of various web technologies like PHP, CGI, and FTP as mandatory requirements for putting their words online?

Also worth taking a look at are the uses of a blog compared to Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr (as suggested above).  Flickr is a social photography site, not a place to rant about the trivialities of life, which makes that a poor substitute for the real thing.  Also, not everybody is a photographer; while undoubtedly some people will find a level of self-expression and communication through posting and browsing through images, that leaves a huge gap for people to be left out.  Facebook is a social networking site to keep in touch with your peers.  While some people tend to use Facebook as an off-scale blogging platform, “notes” (as Facebook refers to them) are not the real thing, and people tend to ignore them once their friends start cloning the childish surveys that people abandoned MySpace to avoid.  (The ability to post a new note for everything in a given RSS feed is a little amusing, too.) And Twitter…well, let’s just say that this post wouldn’t fit in 140 characters, and that some things are best left elaborated upon rather than compressed to fit such a limit.

Of course there are going to be people aiming to make money from their blog, but that’s just about typical of anything these days.  If you want to make money from your car, you would convert it into a taxi, correct?  Now, look at the number of cabs and compare that with the overall number of automobiles.  It’s a small ratio, right?  I don’t see how blogging is any different.  And on a related note (also mentioned in the Wired article), you’re going to have to deal with people who start riots.  “Insult commenters” are a part of everything, although sometimes they go by different names.  Is the point of a blog to escape them?   No.  You hear about all the people who throw paint at people wearing fur clothes; their statement may be physically destructive, so be happy you’re just dealing with a sharp-tongued snake.

Is blogging dead?  Not by a long shot.  It’s just that times change, and people need to learn to adapt to the available mediums.  Blogging isn’t the expression catch-all it once was, but it still has its purposes.

What do you think?  As usual, comments are invited (encouraged, actually).  If you vote, perhaps explain why you voted the way you did?

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Warning:  I’m on a bit of a social/communications kick at the moment, so if you’re not in the mood, you’d best be reading something else from my blogroll.

Situation #1: You just met a roomful of people you want to stay in touch with.  You want to add them to your social circles on Facebook and LinkedIn, but there’s not enough time left for you to write everyone’s name down on the back of a napkin and, frankly, you’d be too worried about not being able to spell their name correctly or read what you wrote once you’re back at the computer.  And you’re sure that everyone else has the same problem, because they’re all social butterflies like yourself.

Situation #2: You’re at a meeting with a few prospective clients for some Internet-oriented startup.  How do you swap information quickly and easily without digging through your pocket for a business card?

What would you do in these situations?

Solution: Get yourself a Poken and use it.

It’s not often  that anyone finds themselves in a situation involving the need to mass-share information (actually, I can’t think of a single time that’s happened), and it usually takes getting to know and trust someone before most people make the jump from “acquaintance” to “friend” (which, by custom today, probably includes the indication of friendship on a social site).

A new startup called Poken (sharing the name with their product) doesn’t seem to believe in there being a such thing as an “acquaintance.”  Or, at least, they view social networking friend lists as a gigantic list of people you’ve ever been stuck in the same room with.  And to alleviate either of the situations above, they’ve designed a device that you simply touch to another to instantly trade your social networking information with each other.

As much as the company would like to say it isn’t targeting them, I find it hard to believe that anyone other than a teenager would want to possess one of these things.  However, the website backing the service (at this point, anyway) seems to suggest they’re aiming for a professional market.   Honestly, what professional wouldn’t feel at least slightly embarrassed about pulling an anime-styled panda out of their coat pocket to “high-five” their counterpart’s frog?  While the dongles are quite obviously child-friendly, I’ve yet to meet the teenager who wanted to share their had a LinkedIn profile, and the lack of MySpace support (*gulp*) probably gives even more reason for the young to avoid.

Ridiculous nature of the devices aside, there’s also the issue of acquiring them.  They’re not available individually in the United States (yet?), but you can order them in packs of twelve (and then share the humiliation with eleven of your friends) for the low cost of $180 per dozen.  For the math-challenged, that’s $15 for each adorable social electronic animal.

The website that makes everything work could also use a little help in and of itself.  As I mentioned, the only services you can link to your Poken are Facebook, LinkedIn, and what appears to be a Swiss social networking site called Usgang.  It’s plagued with URL generation problems of the same sort Facebook had early on in their interface replacement (I wonder what http://www.doyoupoken.com/[...]/logout.jsf?panel=statsdetails is going to do… ) and hands you reward points (redeemable towards discounts on more Poken if you save enough) for trivial tasks like logging in.  Yes, I’ve earned two points simply by logging into the dummy account I made.

I think the Poken solves a problem that never existed in the first place.  Consider most cell phones made within the past few years, and PDAs even older than that.  Almost every device you can name includes an infrared or Bluetooth-based way to share your information (or somebody else’s, should there be a reason to, but presumably it would be best used on your own) with someone else, the methods for accomplishing this have long been standardized, and the transfer of information can also be completed without handing anything to a third party.  Also, given the fact that everyone from teen to the technologically-enhanced power-businessman has a phone capable of contact sharing these days (also with these technologies, and dozens more besides), there’s a pathetic niche at best for which these devices actually serve a meaningful purpose.

Also, there’s benefit to getting the information on paper as opposed to letting one of these devices handle it.  If you’re the businessman handing out cards, you can write any other relevant information on the card, and it’s physical evidence that you met.  Ditto with getting the names and numbers on a napkin.  I’d love to see you do anything like that with a metaphorical handshake.

From a security standpoint, I have to raise the flag when it comes to giving everyone the ability to play “Six Degrees” with your friends list.  Sure, it’s a necessary part of social networking, but seeing as Poken isn’t a direct social networking site (and I’ve already given you a few alternatives, thank you very much), is this really necessary?  Perhaps Kevin Bacon would appreciate the idea, but beyond that, I’m hard-pressed to think of a single situation where posting your information in more places than required is a good idea.

There is one thing that I do believe is covered well, or at least deserves credit for being considered, and that’s dealing with creeps you’d rather not share your information with, but you still want theirs.  You can activate a “discrete” mode when you share your information with someone, and all they get is ghost information about you until you can investigate their profile more and then approve their ability to see your identity.  As they mention on the Poken site, it’s “better than memorizing a rejection number.”  Apparently they’re expecting guys to go crazy asking females they know to share information so then they can mark themselves as a couple on Facebook so then there can be drama when… *RESET*

However, my cynical rant seems to be in the minority; the original post that prompted me to write about this is in awe of the service and the potential it could provide.  What do you think?  Are you ready to “high five” (or rather, “high four,” as the Poken hand only has four digits) everyone you meet with what could very well amount to your contact information, or would you rather take the more conventional paper/PDA/phone route?

I figured I’d try a different approach for once and see where that got me.

Given the sheer number of products and services we hear about on a daily basis, it’s easy enough to forget the ones that couldn’t quite reach out and make themselves a universally-known (in some cases, literally) entity.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less deserving of our attention.  For your enjoyment, here are some of what I believe to be the most amusing failures I can recall throughout the history of technology.

• (Swatch) Internet Time - If there’s one thing we definitely have enough of here on Earth, it’s time zones and ways to tell time.  Time zones, 12- and 24-hour time, daylight savings time…  Alright, listing that is boring, and having to take all of that into account while talking with people on the other side of the world is like taking a needle to your eye.  Swatch, being the omniscient corporate entity they obviously were, decided that all of this could be resolved with the introduction of an arbitrary standard called Internet Time.  Internet Time divided the day into 1000 equal parts of about a minute and a half apiece and was designed to be consistent across the globe to eliminate the need for time zones.  However, when you take into the account the fact that this was introduced just as the Internet was becoming mainstream, the issue with scheduling things in “blips” with people who have no idea what you’re talking about makes you look like a fool to the majority of the world, there’s no standard for writing the day (just the time), and the fact that ‘@’ was (and still is) most often recognized as part of an e-mail address, it’s not hard to see why Internet Time never made it to the big time.  (Sorry, pun intended.)
• Cuil - I wrote about Cuil once already, and I got quite a bit of feedback both here and on Twitter about it.  But for those who aren’t in the know, or haven’t seen my previous post about it, Cuil was touted at one point as the Google-killer, the end-all-be-all to searching.  Backed by some venture capital and a few of the genius minds who helped shape Google, Cuil was supposed to redefine what a search engine was.  Instead, it ended up showing just how pointless it was to try and humiliate Google right out of the starting gate.
• Microsoft’s Seinfeld Ad Campaign - Microsoft insists that the ads were intentionally about nothing (after saying that they were supposed to be a longer marketing campaign), but if that were the case, why were they produced in the first place?  I’m sure Jerry Seinfeld has plenty enough to do without helping Bill Gates try on shoes.  The only reason I can think of for this travesty even ever being unveiled was because Bill had some random “Things To Do Before I Leave Microsoft” list which was topped by making a pointless ad campaign with Jerry Seinfeld.  Well, Bill, now that you’ve got your wish, “What pointless thing would you like to do today?”
• Online Currency - Just as with Swatch’s idea of converting everyone to a unified time platform, several companies thought the way of the future was to develop “online currency” that could be used as an alternative to the real thing.  Get some credits for visiting a website?  No problem.  Viewing an ad?  Why not?  Want to buy something or send some money to that far-off relative?  Why not send them some e-money rather than worry about things like exchange rates, especially since retailers accept this mock currency as a legitimate form of payment.  It sounds like it might have been a good idea, had they put some thought into why they sounded just like they were illegally printing their own money and then corrected it.  I think I’ll stick with Paypal, as at least they keep my currency in US dollars.
• Lively - It’s curious enough that I should have something from Google on this list, but Google never expected to be knocked onto their backside when they launched their answer to Second Life with little fanfare and little reason for anyone using Second Life (especially those investing in the game) to make the jump.  Lively shuts its doors at the end of the year (so it’s not dead yet), but being the top performer in one area doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be the greatest elsewhere.
• The Phantom - An apt name for this ghost of a console, The Phantom is perhaps the precursor to the downloadable content now available from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft.  In short, The Phantom was designed to be a console that acquired games over the web, eliminating the need for pressed disks, cartridges, and whatever other physical delivery method you can think of.  Unfortunately, the product never reached fruition, and the only part of their work to make it to market was their excuse for a keyboard.
• Windows ME - Alright, so it’s probably unfair to have two items by the same company on this list, but I really think that Microsoft managed to outdo themselves by even bothering to ship Windows ME.  Having spent several years living having to deal with this monstrosity, I can tell you that Microsoft should have thought ahead and given everyone prescriptions for headache medication with every license.  Between ME and Vista, I’m beginning to believe that Microsoft’s business model is to release a stable, usable operating system as a quick follow-up to versions that create plenty of uproar.  (See ME v. XP, Vista v. Windows 7.)
• Disposable (”Rental”) DVDs - What does fruit have in common with a DVD?  If you said that they both can rot, you’re not far off.  Who would have thought that people didn’t like the idea of paying for movies that expired like produce?  (I’d like to add that this idea seems to come up quite often; while The Register reports that the idea was spawned earlier this year, I distinctly recall Disney running a pilot program a few years ago.)

Do you have any other failures you’d like to bring into the limelight?  Is there something I’m forgetting, or do you think one of these is more worthy than the others?  Or, alternatively, is there something you believe to be one of the greatest developments since sliced bread?  Leave a shout in the comments and vote for your favorite.

(Also, I do believe I owe some thanks to The_Ugster for a suggestion or two.)

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Congratulations to anyone who followed that link from my Facebook status.  You’re a shining example of a person who randomly and trustingly clicks links from friends without considering whether they’re spam or not.  Either that, or you already recognize that domain…that section of the post at the bottom is especially for you.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be posting about my experiments here, as they’re not at all related to the topics I regularly discuss.  However, together with a little help from a friend or two, I’ve tried to poke and pry at people’s online habits with my past few tests.  What did I find?

The Birthday

Ah yes, my birthday was last week.  (Any and all birthday comments will be deleted and/or edited.)  Of course, only a few people even bothered to remember or acknowledge it (alright, so perhaps even the majority of my family didn’t care, but that’s beside the point).  For this experiment, I spent the two months prior scrubbing almost every reference to my age or birthday I could find from the Internet, well ahead of any search engine bots that may want to cache it as my birthday drew nearer.  The test?  To see whether people really rely that much on notifications from web forums or social networking sites to keep track of trivial facts like birthdays.

Granted, a birthday is nothing to be excited about, and in its own right might be considered useless or trivial information, depending on how well you know the person (and it’s more or less useless in an online perspective, but I digress).  And just to make things interesting, even after all of the information I removed (and now need to remember to re-add), I decided that I would cough up a few subtle hints.  (Alright, maybe my definition of ’subtle’ is skewed, but I’m not going to argue that point here.)  Net results:  A single congratulatory tweet (and what probably would have amounted to a second had I qualified a number in one of my tweets), one response via Skype after making it almost painfully obvious (you know who you are), and absolutely no response from any of 269 Facebook users friended with me (which is, admittedly, just a little pathetic).  All in all, a quiet great birthday by my standards. (I don’t want the attention, so perhaps my motives were a little flawed…)

Now that I’ve confused you enough, let’s try to take all of that and try and sum it up into something simpler:  Apparently people find Facebook (and other social networking sites) suitable replacements for a calendar.  Admittedly, there might be some benefit in having your friends make sure THEIR birthday is correct rather than have you transcribe it into your agenda a week early, but ultimately anyone who could and/or should have remembered (by my expectations) failed.

The Bait

With my birthday said and done, a friend of mine suggested that we play with some heads on Facebook by intentionally leading people to think that my birthday was a day later than it actually was by coughing up the appropriate status messages and wall posts.  Again, not a single person took the bait and left anything resembling a birthday greeting.

The thing to note about this, though, is that the friend I worked on this with only shares a portion of my friends mutually, and so comparatively there’s a much smaller pool of people to attempt to draw from.

Facebook Link Check

As you might have surmised from the leading line of this post, I decided to try one more test with Facebook simply to see if anyone was paying attention.  The action was simple:  click a link to visit this website.  No URL shrinking, mentions of rewards, or anything - just a link to Two Slashes.  And even though it’s been about an hour and a half since I posted that link, people have clicked it at least a few times, including while they were in the middle of searching through other peoples’ photo albums (actually, there are two referral links already).

Since this experiment is more or less still in progress, I’ll come back to edit this post if anything interesting or unusual comes out of it, but I don’t think there’s going to be anything all that exciting to discuss.

On the other hand, though, this eagerness for people to visit my site without too many hints that I even control it demonstrates once again that people are blind to what could happen should one of their friends get phished and start sending out some spammy URLs.  Not just on Facebook, but anywhere in general.

Conclusions

All of this makes me think of a single line from Men In Black:

Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.

Well, from my experiences, I’d be willing to go so far as to say a single person is just as intelligent as the collective (and that’s stupid).  And that’s especially amusing to me following this short on why the Internet is making people more cognizant.

So, it’s been a long time coming, but I was finally bored to crack open some of the development tools and get back to work on some of the projects I have hosted here, at least insofar as some bug-fixing.  (Which is funny, actually, since I have legitimate work and schoolwork to do…)

One of the first projects to get an upgrade is Rolling Paper, the nearly pointless little wallpaper-cycling utility I wrote eons ago to randomly swap wallpapers in a given time period, almost turning your Windows desktop into a picture frame.  (Hint:  If you’re looking to do that without any of the desktop icons in the way, you might want to check out HideIcons while you’re at it.)

While Rolling Paper hasn’t picked up any new features (I know, I need to fix that little one-folder problem…), it has picked up an important bugfix.  A bug that resulted from my stupidity and a bit of zealous copy-pasting with some of the settings code that made it impossible to use the software more than once or twice without manually rewriting the configuration every time you used it.  If you happen to be using it, you might want the update, available now on the Rolling Paper project page.

Over the past few days, some of the more popular postings that seem to appear on Digg end up having to do with Google’s search suggestion feature.  While the intentions of these suggestions are entirely noble, they can also be used both to prove the skewed nature of today’s society and the inherent “security” that people seem to derive from their use of the Internet nowadays.  Interested, I decided to do a few queries of my own and see what they resulted in (images linked so you can peruse them at your own leisure and discretion; they’re screen captures directly from Google):

• “Why shouldn’t…”
• “Is it possible for…”
• “Where in the world…” *
• “Who can…”
• “Is this a…” and “Is this an…”

I suppose, in a sense, this is a reasonable way to gauge the intimate levels with which we as a culture seem to have lifted from the Internet.  Some of the types of search queries that are suggested are of the same caliber as those one might ask privately to someone such as a counselor, and many are quite surprising.  Other queries also suggest what some of the common thoughts and concerns of the public are; given that the U.S. presidential elections have just ended, it’s not surprising to see that a few of my images mention the candidates, voting, or the current economic instability.

The mere fact that people are willing to accept the advice of complete strangers, without qualification or question and as found by a search engine with little more intelligence than a walnut, and trusting enough to ask these questions of a headless, emotionless entity in the first place suggests both that people are too insecure with themselves and their peers to confide their deepest secrets in other human beings and that they believe that the research they glean for their issue from the Internet is the best help they can get given this insecurity.

With all of this in mind, it’s not hard to connect that this blind trust, if you will, is perhaps one of the reasons such problems as spyware and phishing even exist.  If people were trained not to have this trust, but instead more of a distrust for machine and what comes out of it (and as a result of this training, develop an attraction to the warmth and individual attention that defines humanity), we would be able to eliminate a vast majority of the “evils” afoot.  Such training might even teach people enough about their privacy that they won’t turn their social networking profiles into flagrant and public advertisements of their misdeeds.  (If such training were to include the repeated usage of my favorite quote (”Trust is a weakness.”), I would be impressed.)

As kids, there’s no doubt that one of your mother/stepmother/grandmother/guardian’s favorite things to say was, “Don’t talk to strangers.”  The computer, although at this point a staple of nearly every technologically advanced household, may not be an intelligent and sentient being to talk to, but people forget that their computer has conversations of its own.  And, based on some of those Google suggestions, it’s telling everyone some of the things you might not want publicized at any cost.

* Alright, I added this one mostly as a joke.  Interestingly enough though, the top result is NOT what I was expecting.

Through some useless late-night meandering, I managed to come across this snarky blog post from AOL mocking Gmail’s latest addition to their popular e-mail/instant messaging platform, the ability to send SMS messages to cell phones (which has since been redacted so they can fix a few lingering bugs).  While it’s not ordinarily a big deal, some people without the appropriate plan and/or equipment might find it useful, as might someone overseas who doesn’t want to pay the “long distance text messaging” fees some wireless carriers seem to find all too important nowadays.

I find it interesting that AOL would attempt to play a humor card while they tout their own rusty horn, especially when you consider this is the same AOL that uses Google to power their search engine. Excuse me a second while I point out that this makes everyone at AOL look like a pack of three-year-olds without a babysitter and add myself to the numerous people who agree.

As someone who’s had rather interesting personal experiences with AOL over the past decade or so, I find their behavior here fairly lame.  Given those same experiences, though, I guess I can’t be too surprised.

I do have some words of advice for AOL, though (and I can think of a few others who can take something away from this as well, in a more generalized form, of course):

• When you’re trying to mock a company who may be trailing you in one area, it might be wise to consider whether you’re partners with them or not in another.  Nobody wants to do business when the only words you can say are, “I’m better than you,” especially when you seem to have forgotten that you’re not.
• Just because you’ve managed to beat someone to market with something as silly as an IM to SMS bridge doesn’t make you better.  I can’t exactly call most of Google’s offerings bloated, but I do suggest you go take a look at the whale you call your Internet portal and see how much fat you can trim out.  If it can’t function, I don’t care that it looks all glossy and shiny and can make little noises to notify me that somebody’s picking their nose.
• Perhaps there’s more to the Google branding than meets the eye, especially in professional terms.  Before you make a snide comment about Google only allowing users a Gmail domain, perhaps consider that nobody is going to use an address such as nicktabick@crazyforemail.com to conduct professional business.  (I find that address too stupid for personal use, either.  I also believe I’ve seen that address in my Spam folder before, but I digress…)
• If Halloween is a grand occasion to make fun of one of your partner/competitors, I wonder what Christmas is going to be like at the AOL offices this year.  However, for everyone’s sake, it might be better to ensure that the liquor, sugar, caffeine, and everything else that might get one of the press writers giddy is safely locked up lest someone posts a follow-up entry making fun of Time Warner.

Perhaps someone at AOL had a few too many candy bars before they came in for work (or, from the look of the timestamp on their post, on their lunch break).  Nice try, but next time around, use the sugar rush on something more productive - like decent software.