Cloud Confusion
The survey of more than 1,000 American adults [...] shows that while the cloud is widely used, it is still misunderstood. For example, 51 percent of respondents, including a majority of Millennials, believe stormy weather can interfere with cloud computing.
Citrix Systems » Most Americans Confused By Cloud Computing According to National Survey.
Twitter Digest for Week Ending 2012-08-26
- RT @pbump: Yesterday, The Onion made a grim joke about going a week with no mass shooting. They've now updated it. http://t.co/zLWOfF8g … #
- RT @01_gav: RT []: YOU GUYS, FANFICTION OF 50 SHADES OF GREY IS BEING PUBLISHED IN OCTOBER. WE'RE THREE LAYERS DEEP & THIS DREAM IS … #
- I wrote something, about Twitter: http://t.co/K9OyTW8a #
About Twitter…
You’ve probably noticed that Twitter recently announced a few changes to how they’re going to handle access to their API (part 1, part 2). This wasn’t particularly well received in tech circles. It’s certainly no coincidence that the more drastic changes and restrictions were announced mid-August when business is slow and people are away on holiday, but the public backlash is palpable nonetheless. For some good commentary on the situation and speculation where Twitter might be headed with this new direction, you could do worse than reading what Marco Arment, Ben Brooks, Rafe Colburn, Shawn Blanc, Watts Martin, Kyle Baxter and MG Siegler had to say. One common strand of argument is that by restricting access to its API and by extension limiting third-party developer’s ability to innovate, Twitter is biting the very hand that contributed significant features (such as @replies, #hashtags and even the logo bird). This is all the more troublesome because innovation from inside Twitter appears largely stagnant. They bought a couple of amazing third party Twitter clients and made them their own, only to subsequently abandon them (i don’t hold out much hope that we’ll ever see an update to Twitter’s official Mac client). Instead of innovating and improving their product, they seem determined to close off their platform in a desperate attempt to defend their existing turf.
It’s a bit early to foretell the eventual fallout of these changes, but a few early signs emerge. While early commentators began to worry that Twitter is effectively trying to shut down third-party Twitter clients, actual Twitter client developers don’t seem particularly concerned, or at least put on a happy face for fear of potential repercussions (exhibit a, exhibit b). Nevertheless, early ramifications of the policy changes are already manifesting: Twitter cut off Instagram‘s and Tumblr‘s access to friend-finding functionality.
Amidst growing discontent among techies, a number of interesting Twitter alternatives are rearing their head, most prominently Dalton Caldwell’s App.net, which positions itself more as a Twitter-infrastructure-replacement rather than a social-network-replacement and distinguishes itself through its for-pay funding model – joining the service costs $50 and has subsequently drawn both (brilliant) satire and criticism for being exclusionary.
What strikes me as most interesting about App.net is how they’re going about building their platform. Normally when tech mavens grow discontent with their tools, services and infrastructure and decide to do something about it, there’s a strong impetus to drastically re-invent and re-conceptualize the thing they’re trying to improve upon – re-inventing the wheel, so to speak. App.net seems to be taking a much more humble and pragmatic approach: rather than reinventing Twitter they seem determined to rebuild it. They acknowledge that Twitter as a platform worked pretty well a few years ago and they are building from that foundation. At this point App.net looks a lot like an alternate-reality version of Twitter, the kind of platform Twitter might have turned into had they decided to pursue the Twitter-as-a-platform model rather than the Twitter-as-a-media-company model back around 2010 (for an interesting take on that decisive fork in the road i highly recommend reading what Alex Payne had to say about the future direction of Twitter back in 2010). However, in building a Twitter competitor on similar principles a number of concerns remain: App.net being a closed, centralized platform, ultimate control over its future direction still rests in the hands of the platform provider. It is only a matter of time until the visions of the platform provider and its user base diverge (just as is happening right now in Twitterland). Considering that early App.net adopters are piling up hopes and expectations in a platform that’s still in alpha and far from finished, disappointment might settle in much sooner than with organically grown platforms.
Tent.io is another potential Twitter alternative that’s been gathering a lot of attention lately. Where App.net tries to establish a Twitter alternative based on a similar centralized architecture but with a different funding model, Tent.io proposes an open, decentralized protocol for social networking (they are taking the reinventing-the-wheel approach i was alluding to before), but as Dave Winer rightfully points out, “formats and protocols by themselves are meaningless”. As far as i can tell there isn’t a single implementation of the Tent.io protocol, so it’s little more than a pipe dream at this point.
I personally think it’s a good idea to replace an increasingly locked-down centralized service with a decentralized alternative, but i’m not quite convinced that Tent.io is the solution in this case. I agree with Brent Simmons and Dave Winer that RSS (no, it’s not dead) would make a decent starting point for building an open alternative to Twitter. Unfortunately there are two big user experience problems with RSS that no one has successfully solved yet – discovery and subscription. Twitter solved both of these problems magnificently: they made it very easy to tell someone how to find you by popularizing the now ubiquitous @handles and they made it very easy to subscribe to your Twitter feed by simply clicking one button. These might not seem like intractable problems to solve, but let’s not forget that RSS failed spectacularly in both areas in the past, and not for lack of smart and talented people trying. The question remains whether it’s even possible to tackle these problems in an open and decentralized fashion.
The west’s hypocrisy over Pussy Riot is breathtaking
For the British and US governments to get on high horses about Russian sentencing is hypocrisy. America and Britain damned the “disproportionate” Pussy Riot terms. In America’s case this was from a nation that jails drug offenders for 20, 30 or 40 years, holds terrorism “suspects” incommunicado indefinitely and imprisons for life even trivial “three strikes” offenders. Last week alone a US military court declared that reporting the Guantánamo Bay trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be censored. Any mention of his torture in prison was banned as “reasonably expected to damage national security”. This has no apparent connection to proportionate punishment or freedom of speech.
Simon Jenkins in the Guardian.
Cellphone tracking: What happens when our smartphones can predict our every move?
A team of British researchers has developed an algorithm that uses tracking data on people’s phones to predict where they’ll be in 24 hours. The average error: just 20 meters.
That’s far more accurate than past studies that have tried to predict people’s movements. Studies have shown that most people follow fairly consistent patterns over time, but traditional prediction algorithms have no way of accounting for breaks in the routine.
The researchers solved that problem by combining tracking data from individual participants’ phones with tracking data from their friends—i.e., other people in their mobile phonebooks. By looking at how an individual’s movements correlate with those of people they know, the team’s algorithm is able to guess when she might be headed, say, downtown for a show on a Sunday afternoon rather than staying uptown for lunch as usual.
Now imagine what Facebook must be capable of knowing about you. (via)
Like living organisms
Like living organisms from Local Androids on Vimeo.
Like living organisms; a breathing artificial skin garment with pulsing veins (air is pumping through the veins to simulate a pulse), the pulse increases when you approach and the neckpiece deflates on touch as sign of trust.
Project by Local androids, with help of engineers: Ralf Jacobs, Daniel Schatzmayr, Berend-Jan van Dijk
On display at Technosensual until September 2nd.
Twitter Digest for Week Ending 2012-08-19
- RT @CCP_PrismX: A query walks into a bar and joins two tables. The waitress asks why it needs two tables for itself. The query replies: … #
- RT @MorgonFreeman: I hate the word homophobia. It's not a phobia. You are not scared. You are an asshole. #
- RT @maxwillens: I don't like that "Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan" is an anagram of "My ultimate Ayn Rand porn." I love it. #
- RT @flaneur: Oh man, http://t.co/LBCuCkLU just made my Friday #
- RT @paleofuture: isn't it weird that we DRIVE on a PARKway and PARK on a DRIVEway and LIVE in a NIGHTMARISH DYSTOPIA WE WILL NEVER ESCAPE #
- RT @jackiekircher: guys guys guys – shift + spacebar scrolls UP. WHY DIDN'T ANYONE POINT THIS OUT BEFORE? #
- RT @odannyboy: “It is an illusion of prosperity to believe that each of us deserves everything we get.” http://t.co/MqAIkcXb #
The Psychology of Walls and Fences
Walls, then, are built not for security, but for a sense of security. The distinction is important, as those who commission them know very well. What a wall satisfies is not so much a material need as a mental one. Walls protect people not from barbarians, but from anxieties and fears, which can often be more terrible than the worst vandals. In this way, they are built not for those who live outside them, threatening as they may be, but for those who dwell within. In a certain sense, then, what is built is not a wall, but a state of mind.
The Psychology of Walls and Fences – NYTimes.com
Arrivals for Foursquare
Arrivals is a simple list of where your foursquare friends currently are. It is intended to be displayed on a spare second screen such as a tablet or phone without intrusively drawing attention.
Arrivals by Dan W., Toby Barnes and Richard Birkin.
The internet considered as a fifth dimension, that of memory
Proust wrote in and into the network of references, a series of hyper-referential reveries, but those references are his alone. The superhuman effort of his writing is to bring them to life for those of us who weren’t there by explaining and illuminating them—beautifully and brilliantly—but all he is doing is pointing towards the agony of recall that we now, all of us, experience all the time, the sense of being at the centre of something incredibly important, if we could only grasp it, if we could only remember; but that which we think we want to grasp is already slipping away from us, receding and becoming memory.
We have to go into the network, because we cannot go into space, because four and a half thousand years ago they figured out how to colonise space, and a hundred years ago they figured out how to colonise time, but they haven’t yet figured out memory or experience and that is the network.
The internet considered as a fifth dimension, that of memory | booktwo.org
