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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.

Maybe the title of the post is a bit of an overstatement. It is actually very cool and rewarding to see that someone over at The Economist is thinking about the same questions as I was almost three years ago.

Essentially my hypothesis was that increased access to information would make a country more free than those with less access to information. (Disregard the obvious question about which way this relationship goes. Are countries more free because they have access to information or do they have more access to information because they are more free?) My original thinking was related to the internet, but it quickly became clear that I needed to expand that idea into communication in general. There just wasn’t enough solid data available to only focus on the internet. This was three years ago and the best data I could find at the time was another few years old. In the past five years alone, the number of internet users has doubled.

A very simplistic version of what eventually happened was that I took a combination of the percentage of the population of a country with access different types of communication (phones, radios, internet, etc.) and compared that to the Freedom House Index score of the country (a measure of how free a country is). I did this for about 180 countries. In the end there was only a slight correlation and I couldn’t event start to claim there was causation. I can still remember sitting in my professor’s office telling him I think I needed to start over. His advice was great. He essentially told me that it was beyond the scope of this project to actually come up with some big revelation and find out that two things were definitively connected. The point of the project in my case was to go through the process of doing research and learn how it worked. It would have been nice if at that time Freedom House was compiling internet freedom scores like they are today. That would have saved me some serious time and headaches.

In the end, it is really interesting to see how in my case the lack of available data ended up shifting my thesis topic away from the original question. In that vein, it was incredibly satisfying to come across this article in The Economist. With people asking if social media played a role in some of the Arab revolutions, it makes sense that serious thought is going into the question. I’d like to believe that unfettered access to information is making people more free, don’t you?

The image in question is below, here is the original article.

Plan on owning an iPhone in the future? Bookmark this post!

A former colleague recently announced on twitter he had finally purchased an iPhone. Next the inevitable question followed, “What apps should I get?” With the on going Verizon iPhone rumors, I think I’m going to wake up one morning inundated with this question. With this post, I’ll have a response ready.

This post attempts to outline the must have applications for first time iPhone users. I’ve categorized them all and included prices and links to the iTunes download. If you have additional recommendations, post them in the comments.

Games:
Angry Birds ($0.99) – This is literally the most popular iPhone app of all time. There is also a free “lite” version you can download to try out, but trust me, this one is well worth the money. Every few weeks the developers put out an update of 21 extra levels. To date there are 252 levels available. You will be hard pressed to get more bang for your buck than this app.

Shibuya ($1.99) – This one is a fast paced, Tetris-like, puzzle game. Bricks drop from the top and you have to match them up by placing them in the correct order. Occasionally the game developers give this one away for free, so be on the look out. If reaction speed and (simple) puzzles are your thing, then be sure to gives this one a try.

GeoDefense Swarm ($1.99) – Classic tower defense game at its best. This is one of those games where enemies spawn and you have to build defensive towers into a maze to stop them before they reach the other side of the level. There is a lot of strategy and thinking involved here. For the huge fans there are additional levels available for purchase.

Plants vs. Zombies ($2.99) – For a long time this app was the most downloaded in the app store until it was finally dethroned. This is similar to the tower defense game above, but with less intensive thinking and a more playful side.

Music:
Pandora (free) – A simple sign up process is all that stand in between you and limitless, free music. This app generates playlists based on your tastes in music and then learns and adapts to your preferences.

Shazam (free) – This is the app that lets you record a song playing in a bar or on the radio and then tells you the name of the song. It was featured in tons of commercials. Get it just to show off to people.

Movies:
Flixster (free) – Of all the apps that let you search local movie theater times, this one is by far the best.

IMDB (free) – Can’t think of the name of that actor? Look no further. The search function is the most useful part, but it also offers movie news.

Netflix (free) – You can stream content straight to your phone, but the much more useful aspect is checking and modifying your queue.

Social Networking:
Twitter (free) – There are a ton of different Twitter clients available, but the official one known as “Twitter for iPhone” is the all around best.

Foursquare (free) – Out of all the location based apps, foursquare’s is my favorite. It gets frequent updates and rarely crashes. Not to mention there are a lot more users of this service than the alternatives.

Facebook (free) – From time to time there are unofficial versions available, but none of them are ever very good. Get the official app and set up the mobile preferences on Facebook.com from a computer.

Search / Information:
Wikipedia (free) – Probably the best part of owning a smart phone is having a world of information at your fingertips. Most of that information is best found within Wikipedia.

Instapaper (free) – This service allows you to sync articles between devices. It is really helpful when I click on a link from the twitter app. If I see something that is interesting, but several pages long, I’m not going to sit and read it on my phone. I’ll use this app to save it for reading on my laptop at a later time.

Google (free) – If the best part of owning a smart phone is having a world of information at your fingertips, this app takes it a step farther with voice commands. Need to know an answer to your questions? Just speak into the phone and an answer will arrive.

Productivity:
TripIt (free) – Combine all of your flight information, rental car confirmation codes and hotel maps in one place. This will change how you travel. This has literally saved me hours of time on trips, not to mention removing the necessity of carrying around a bunch of different print outs.

Evernote (free) – I keep notes of tons of different things. To do lists, movies I want to watch, books to get from the library, a beer or wine I enjoy, the lists are literally endless. Evernote allows you to sync notes across different computers and smart phones. A lot of my notes are just pictures. Say I drank a beer I really enjoyed and want to remember to order it in the future. I just take a photo of the label and Evernote converts it into text which is easily searchable later on.

Dropbox (free) – Sync important files between your phone and computer(s). Have a spreadsheet of contact info you need access to on the fly? No problem, just upload it to Dropbox. Need to send a file to someone? Done. Need to transfer files between computers? Done. Great app with a ton of different uses.

Mint (free) – If you’re already managing your money with Mint.com (and why wouldn’t you be?), the mobile app is a must have. Out shopping? Just a click away is your budget.

If you have additional recommendations, post them in the comments.

The iPhone will finally be available to Verizon users – Not only will this happen, it will be announced and on store shelves within two or three months.

Photo sharing will explode – In the last few weeks alone we saw the launch of startups like Path and Instagram. Services like Gowalla and Foursquare are adding photos. Photo sharing will be huge in 2011 with tons of different services competing to be the leading service on the mobile platform. Increasingly everyone has a good camera at their fingertips 100% of the time in the form of their phone. People want to compulsively share those photos.

The year of the IPO and talk of the tech bubble – There is strong indication that all of these companies will go public this year: LinkedIn, Skype, Groupon, Pandora, Zynga and Kayak. The FCC has started an investigation into second market which could also force companies like Facebook to go public. All of this will contribute to the media starting to talk about there being a tech bubble just like the dot com bubble.

Further irrelevancy of old media – Time’s pick for Person of the Year confirms it, old media doesn’t get it. As the year goes on, we are going to have more and more stories like this.

Mobile payments will finally take off – While I was in Japan this was huge. A lot of pieces are in place for this to take off stateside.

About a year ago I put down some of my predictions for the world of technology. You can read my original post here. Here is how my predictions ended up.

Foursquare (geolocation) – Correct
Facebook IPO – Wrong
Streaming movies will overtake DVD – Correct
Apple Tablet – Correct
The emergence of the all in one mobile device – Wrong

I think 3/5 isn’t too bad. I think the those two that I was wrong on will still happen eventually, just not as quickly as I thought.