I switched from Firefox to Chrome a few months back and haven’t switched back. In a nutshell:
-faster, uses less resources
-better bookmark manager
-search from the url bar
Makes me wonder, what other services that I’ve used forever should I reconsider?
The internet will eventually disrupt all existing industries. Think about the ones it has already fundamentally changed forever: music, software, retail, travel and your phone. What’s next? Television.
Consider the following:
And now there is this Washington Post story about Steve Jobs talking on the subject. Television is definitely the next big industry to be disrupted by the internet. It can’t come soon enough.
David Pogue writing in the New York Times recently said the following:
Every time I’m tempted to write about some tech product that’s been around awhile, I’m torn. On one hand, I’ll be blasted by the technogeeks for being late to the party. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem right to keep something great hidden under a barrel from the rest of the world.
I feel that way about a lot of web services. The service Pogue mentions is Dropbox. I recently was telling my Dad (and new iPhone owner) about it. Then a few days later I was telling a friend about it. I’ve used it forever and can’t believe there are still people out there who haven’t heard about it or people didn’t realize that this was the service they needed to make their lives much easier. David Pogue’s review makes a better case than I could ever do, I urge you to check it out if you need some convincing. Or just click here to sign up and try it for yourself.
Every few weeks I like to re-evaluate who I am following on Twitter. The idea is that my attention is limited, I want to be constantly adjusting the signal to noise ratio of my Twitter feed. The easiest way to eliminate people is just un-follow them when I see them tweet ten times in a row. For other people I just take away their retweets. Other ways to manage the stream are less obvious.
I usually use Friend or Follow or a similar service to establish who is still following me. Some of the people I follow are in this grey area where the content the put out isn’t great, but I feel some sort of social obligation to continue to follow them. A simple check of who isn’t following me is a quick way to justify dropping these people.
The final way I would like to further hone the feed doesn’t exist, but it should. I would like to see someone build a third party app on the Twitter API that sorts my followers my more complex methods. The one I would use specifically would be something like sort by “tweets per day over last 30 days.” See all of the people I follow sorted in this fashion would be a great way to quickly evaluate which ones to drop and which ones to continue to follow.
On this note there is definitely a future need for automated curation here. There needs to be some way to tell Twitter to selectively filter out tweets from my own followers on certain subjects. For instance there are a lot of sporting events I don’t really care about. On Saturday my feed is cluttered with people talking about College Football games. All those people who watching shows like American Idol? I could definitely go without those. At this point I tollerate it and continue to follow these people, but if there was a way to further tweak the signal to noise like this I would be a huge fan.
This a brief overview of how to import Facebook friends into Google Plus. With Google Plus finally opening up to everyone it seemed like a good time to explain this to people. I did this a few weeks back, which is why everyone I’m Facebook friends got early invites (or at least should have).
1. Create a new e-mail account through Yahoo. The name doesn’t matter, you’ll only use it for about fifteen minutes. It is very important that this is an account that is new and has never been used before.
2. Within your new Yahoo Mail account import your Facebook contacts. Go to the “Contacts” Tab, then “Import Contacts” then click on “Facebook.” You’ll have to be logged in to Facebook or it will prompt you to do so. Go ahead and click through all the prompts until you have a bunch of contacts in your Yahoo account (where you previously had none because it was new).
3. Export your Yahoo Mail contacts into a .csv file. Go to the “Contacts” tab and go to the black “Actions” drop down and click on “Export All.” The option you want to select is “Yahoo! CSV.” Go through the prompts and save the .csv file to your desktop. This file is a format readable by Microsoft Excel that will list Name and Email address for all of your Yahoo contacts, which at this point are all of the email addresses your Facebook friends used to register for Facebook.
4. Import the .csv file from your desktop to Google Plus. Before going through with this you might want to go through and selectively edit. Keep in mind that these are the e-mail addresses people used to register with Facebook and they might not all be up to date. Once you have the list of people you want to add all at once, go to Circles > Find People > Upload Address Book.
I recently reached out to a fraternity brother on Facebook because I no longer had his cell phone number. Facebook pulled up our last correspondence – from 2007 – a message sent by me as Chapter President to him while he was pledging the chapter asking him to make sure and get an extra t-shirt made for a person we added late to the pledge class. Strange to see that almost four and a half years later.
It makes me think, how long of a digital trail are we unwittingly leaving? In some cases we are leaving one that will apparently last forever. Good to know, scary to think of the implications.
Facebook messenger is finally here, but it is no longer the app I want. I’ll explain.
Back in May I wrote a post about how there was a need for a standalone messaging app and obviously some people at Facebook agreed. Read the full details on the app launch via TechCrunch.
Last week they launched the app. The timing was curious. At the same time London was in full on riot mode and now MP’s have set a date for a formal inquiry into the methods rioters were using to coordinate. They have singled out Facebook, Twitter and RIM (makers of the Blackberry) for inquiry. Details can be found here. RIM’s Blackberry Messenger (BBM) service appears to be the main target. The thought among some (not all) MP’s is that the UK government should have access to messages to either identify perpetrators of crimes or outright censor the messages. Serious free speech and privacy implications aside, here is what worries me about Facebook messenger. Facebook already at least censors these messages in helping the MPAA and RIAA fight piracy (evidence here). What’s to stop them from extending this censorship in times of perceived crisis? Slippery slope to say the least.
Here is what I now want. A standalone messenger app that works on either mobile device or computer. It behaves like text messaging in that the messages are generally shorter. It would detect where I am at the moment and direct messages only to that location. For example if I’m logged in on the computer and using that to chat it wouldn’t blow up my phone at the same time. It would be encrypted. It wouldn’t log messages or at least it would delete any older than a few days. It wouldn’t be owned by some company ready to sell me out for a few pennies. All my friends using it. It would be great.
Does something like this exist? If not, someone should build it.
I few weeks ago I finally got an iPad. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find out how much it has changed my reading habits. Every night I spend at least an hour reading online news. The app Flipboard curates articles from about 50 different sources and puts them all in the same easy to read format. It’s great for the convenience factors, but also because I’ll put off trying to read anything on a computer screen because the iPad is so much easier on my eyes.
Flipboard also combines with another app called Instapaper. While I’m using Flipboard to browse through news I can tag anything more substantial (10 page NY Times features for instance) as “read later.” Once I do this, these articles are all pulled into the Instapaper app and available on demand at any time (even when I don’t have an internet connection). It works the same way with my iPhone. When I am looking through Twitter I can tag anything as “read later” which is especially convenient when you consider no one wants to read a five page article on their phone.
All of this “saving for later” adds up in a few different ways. First, I find myself reading more five to ten page articles than more substantial books. Increasingly before I go to bed I’ll pick a few significant articles to dive into instead of reading another chapter out of one of the books on my nightstand. Second, I find that if anything is going to take longer than five minutes to read, I’ll immediately save it for later. The unintended consequences is that even if something is really timely (such as all the Bin Laden information), it will be a few days until I really delve into it. I’m not sure if either of these are necessarily bad things, in the end I’m reading more regularly and that makes me happy.
Why doesn’t this exist? (if it does, why don’t I know about it)
The only time I every use Facebook is on my phone. I wasn’t selective enough with accepting friend requests at first and now my feed is filled with people I only vaguely care about. The people I want to know about don’t even really use it at all, further aggravating the problem.
The only functionality I use on the iPhone is the messaging. It is almost like I have e-mail, texts and facebook. Three different ways to send messages for three different (but sometimes overlapping) audiences. Everything else in the Facebook app is worthless to me and on top of that the alerts for when I have new messages are never timely.
What I need and want is an app that just handles fb messages, is that too much to ask?
When most people think about Aol, slow dial-up internet is the only thing that comes to mind. Most people are actually shocked to hear that the company still exists. After undoing the debacle that was the Time Warner – Aol merger most people thought they just faded into irrelevance and disappeared.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize a company with an obsolete technology as its core business isn’t going to continue to grow forever. Even when dial-up subscribers were its bread and butter, Aol created original content. They were a walled garden years before Facebook. You could either use an ISP that gave you access to the internet, or use AOL and get the internet PLUS original Aol content! I guess this approach made sense at the time. They added value for the customer through original content, which was useful because in the early days of search engines it wasn’t always easy to find information out there on the web.
Fast forward a decade later and they are now a content company that just happens to have a base of a few million dial-up subscribers. I don’t remember their original content being that great to begin with, but obviously no one asked me. In a key distinction from the content farms that clog up search results with keyword laden, but poor quality content, Aol is going to hire an unpaid army of bloggers. Hoping to hire nearly 8,000 bloggers in just eight days, AOL will have an army of free labor to produce content around the clock. This is of course, after they unceremoniously fired most of their paid ones.
Aol is also bolstering its media empire with high profile acquisitions. Back in February, they paid $315 million for the Huffington Post. This is only the most recent in a series of acquisitions where Aol has spent billions. In fact, in the very first acquisition ever made, they acquired an ISP that eventually turned into dial-up era Aol.
Originally I thought Aol was just struggling to stay relevant and spending boatloads of cash to do so. It turns out they have been doing it all along. Throughout its history, the company has been constantly spending tons of cash to stay on top and it seems to be working. My guess would be that these guys aren’t going away any time soon.
