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.
Star Wars and by extension, George Lucas were both huge parts of my childhood. I’ve seen the original trilogy hundreds of times. I would come home from school, but in one of the vhs tapes and let it play in the background while I played with my toys. Every single line of each of the films has been burned into my memory for eternity. Somewhere along the way I lost interest in Star Wars. I got older, grew up and moved on to other things. When I would see my young cousins over the Holidays and they would show me their Star Wars toys, I would say, “Star Wars! I used to play with stuff like this all the time.” I still looked back fondly on Star Wars and was willing to overlook the terrible new trilogy. Star Wars was a warm memory in my heart, until recently.
This week a few bits of news broke. The first is Star Wars would finally be put out on Blu-Ray. The second is that there will some changes. The third, well I’ll return to the third. The changes in Star Wars aren’t the first. When the original trilogy was re-released in the late 1990′s there were some changes. Minor cosmetic changes, updated effects, etc. There have now been so many changes and re-releases that the subject has merited its own Wikipedia Entry. The latest changes are on one hand seemingly inevitable given the history of changes and completely outrageous on the other. Completely replacing puppet Yoda with a CGI one? Blinking Ewoks? (Confirmed by NY Times) Why is this necessary? People would buy these movies on Blu-Ray just because it is Star Wars. We don’t need something “new” about it other than a better format. You aren’t giving people more for their money, you are destroying their beloved childhood memories.
Does this man not realize he is destroying his legacy for a few extra bucks (millions probably, but still…)? He made a set of movies that were universally loved by both fans and critics despite their flaws. He was unduly worshiped by millions as one of the great auteurs of all time. He had cemented his legacy. He had nothing left to prove. So what does he do? He decides to change a bunch of stuff. Why George, why?
Back to the third bit of news. Someone drudged up an old speech Lucas gave in the 1980′s in which he said, “people who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians.” Seriously? (Full Transcript here) If George Lucas had the secret ambition to become the biggest hypocrite in the history of the world, in that he has succeeded. Unfortunately in the end, this is his to destroy. I’m not sure why anyone would make the decisions he has, but it is totally within his rights to do so. As one internet commenter succinctly put it, “I have altered the film. Pray I do not alter it further…”
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 haven’t made any updates for a while, so I’ll say this. I live in New York now and it is pretty great. If you’re ever in the city, definitely look me up.
Duncan Jones is quickly becoming one of my favorite film directors. If you haven’t seen Moon or Source Code, his only two films to date, you probably shouldn’t read this because it spoils to great films. Spoiler warning, you’ve been warned. I’m assuming you’ve seen both of these films, otherwise this probably won’t make much sense.
It is really interesting to see a director develop an artistic style and trademarks that will be seen throughout a career. Some directors are well known for artistic quirks. Hitchcock would always show up in a small cameo in his films. Tarantino always shows people opening trunks of cars and peering into them. Sofia Coppola always has a character gazing out the window of a car, with the reflection of the streets seen in the window. Kubrick’s films always dealt the theme of man’s inhumanity towards fellow man while Scorsese has obvious influence from his Catholic upbringing in his constant portrayal of guilt and redemption. In the case of Jones, the most obvious is moral ambiguity.
Moon deals with an endless supply of clones with a life span of only a few years. If something happens to one of the clones, easy it’s just disposed of and a new one is activated. At the end of a clone’s natural (and short) life cycle, it is also disposed of and again a new one is activated. This seems pretty straightforward at first: big evil corporation employing clones to save money. However, the clones are every outright murdered (although we are lead to believe this could definitely be an option). The corporation attempts to keep the clones satisfied by supplying them with satisfying work and creature comforts. I won’t get into anything regarding the rights / nature of clones, but you get the idea. Morally ambiguous territory.
In Source Code, the moral ambiguity is much more subtle. At the end of the film Jake Gyllenhaal’s character creates a new life for himself when he is able to stop the train’s bombing, but in the process he takes over some innocent guy’s life, or at least I’m lead to believe he does. One on hand he is set free from his life in a vegetative state, but on the other in some parallel reality he has taken someone’s life. And the guy would have died anyway if Gyllenhaal didn’t intervene. Again, morally ambiguous territory.
It is interesting to see this develop in Jones’s films. He even addressed it in one of the Source Code press interviews. It will be great to see this develop in his future projects. Moral ambiguity leads to great discussion and for me that’s the best part of a great movie, the thinking and discussion that follows a viewing and keeps at the forefront of your mind.
Recently my life has become full of chicken and egg problems. The most pressing of which is my upcoming move to NYC and attempt to find a job there.
It works like this, to live in NYC you really need a job. The city is an incredibly expensive place to live. However, to get a job in NYC, you really need to live there. It is a lot easier to show up to an interview or meet with someone on short notice when you don’t have to travel half way across the country first. Which comes first? Hence the chicken and egg problem.
My solution is that no matter what I’m moving there in August. I’ve got a place to live lined up and have been saving money preparing to be unemployed for a bit. I’d rather take the leap and try to make a life in NYC and fail than spend my life wondering what it would have been like, but having never given it a shot.
Wish me luck and if you know any good leads, please contact me.
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.
