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Blinks

Thursday, 03 April, 2008

I know some of this is old news but these links have been kicking around in my inbox for a while ...

Technology

• How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free: Apparently it's really hard to delete yourself off Facebook completely. Since this article, however, Facebook have amended their settings so now it's a lot easier. The issue is interesting because it raises the question of who owns private information: you or the one you divulge it to when you sign up?
• One Friend Facebook Hasn't Made Yet: Privacy Rights: Again, a bit of old news about how Facebook doesn't provide as much control over who can see what about you. Since this article was published, Facebook has slowly been improving.
• To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You: An interesting article about websites collecting data about you, advertising and privacy. Seems like the boundaries of privacy are becoming more and more fluid. I wonder where the idea comes from, or whether it was a given because it was so hard to connect before the invention of the telegraph, telephone and the internet as we were all confined physically and geographically.
• Facebook Is Extending Its Network to Blood Donations: Useful for when there's a blood shortage in a particular area.
• Women flock to social networking sites: says the SMH, with this observation: “Sites such as MySpace essentially promote a fantasised identity where relationships are based on common network interests while Facebook is grounded in real identity and online connections are simply an extension of real friendships.”
• Osama bin Laden's “Second Life”: Should we be worried about potential terrorists communicating and networking in virtual worlds?
• A Hello Kitty MMORPG (via Guan): Go on, I know you're dying to join!
• Online Scrabble Craze Leaves Game Sellers at Loss for Words: An article about the rise and rise of Scrabulous with this telling comment about the board game industry:

  “The big thing that Hasbro is missing is that this is targeting a young audience that in general is not into board games,” said Venkat Koduru, the 15-year-old founder of the Facebook group “Save Scrabulous.” ...

  To some online marketing experts, Scrabulous represents a turning point for the board game industry, which has struggled for years to recreate itself as new generations turned to alternatives like the Xbox and the GameBoy. ...

  Jayant, who is responsible for the game's player interface and customer support, said, “People rarely find time to sit down anymore with their family and friends, to invite people over, to prepare the tea and biscuits.” Even though it is easy to cheat at Scrabulous, he says he thinks few players actually do. “You may be doing it for personal glory, but it really takes the fun out of the game,” he said.

• Desktop Darwin's surprise discovery: Nice that Google Earth can still allow people to be explorers in the tradition of Columbus and Magellan.
• Celebrities tell you where to go—on your in-car navigation.
• If You Can't Let Go, Twitter: It's good technology but why isn't Twitter catching on? Is it because it's more about having a monologue than a dialogue?
• The quest for the perfect game face: Meaning avatars in video games. The article had this to say about what people want from a MMORPG:

  Mori, a Japanese roboticist, was fascinated by the emotional and psychic reactions humans have to “humanoids.” Famously, Mori noted that “human beings themselves lie at the final goal of robotics,” but the closer roboticists came to simulating a realistic face, the more noticeably a human would recoil from its appearance.

  Players in “Second Life” don't care to move simply from A to B, and they don't expect a “game over” screen. Instead, they want to poke at the edges of their world and wander freely from island to island and house to house. They want, in other words, something like reality.

  Kind of ironic given that MMORPGs are about escaping from reality.
• However, this judge ruled that Facebook friends are not real friends:

  Dr Dick, who last year conducted a extensive study of MySpace use by teenagers, said most people now saw the networking sites as more of a communication medium than a circle of friends.

  Although many “friends” listed on users' profiles were really acquaintances, problems still arose if one was to conduct a “cull” of them.

  “Removing someone from your friend list is almost a declaration of war,” Dr Dick said.

  Interestingly in my early days on Facebook, I was called “tight” by someone for refusing their friend request ...
• That said, this article says that a whole new generation of web companies are working at 3D live chat rooms (how Futurama!) I love the second paragraph of this article characterising the current state of social networking:

  People visit each other's MySpace pages and Facebook profiles at various hours of the day, posting messages and sending e-mail back and forth across the digital void. It's like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator.

• Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain: Girls are more likely to run websites and design for other people's websites. Yet there's a gender imbalance in computing careers. Is this due to gender stereotypes? Or is it due to women being trained to make up narratives about themselves—to see themselves as “objects”?
• I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really.: This New York Times journalist takes a secular Sabbath from technology, and discovers some surprising things about what the Sabbath is all about:

  On my first weekend last fall, I eagerly shut it all down on Friday night, then went to bed to read. (I chose Saturday because my rules include no television, and I had to watch the Giants on Sunday). I woke up nervous, eager for my laptop. That forbidden, I reached for the phone. No, not that either. Send a text message? No. I quickly realized that I was feeling the same way I do when the electricity goes out and, finding one appliance nonfunctional, I go immediately to the next. I was jumpy, twitchy, uneven ...

  But recidivism quickly followed; there were important things to do—deadlines, urgent communications. You know how it is. I called Andrea Bauer, an executive and career development coach in San Carlos, Calif. She assured me that, oddly enough, it takes work to stop working. “It takes different formats for different people, and you have to build up to it; you can't run five miles if you've never run at all.” Increasingly, I realized that there is more to the secular Sabbath than an impulse, or even a day off from e-mail. And there are reasons that nonsecular Sabbaths—the holy days of Christians, Jews and Muslims—have rules that require discipline. Even for the nonreligious, those rules were once imposed: You need not be elderly to remember when we had no choice but to reduce activity on Sundays; stores and offices—even restaurants—were closed, there were certainly no electronics, and we were largely occupied by ourselves or our families.

• Brain cancer fears over heavy mobile phone use: And this article makes me think of the final scene in Thank You For Smoking ...
• Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK): How the rise of new technologies like the mobile phone has changed the way families interact. This is a fascinating article touching on things like mobile phone etiquette, communication misunderstandings (capital letters being interpreted as yelling), connectedness and secrecy:

  Children increasingly rely on personal technological devices like cellphones to define themselves and create social circles apart from their families, changing the way they communicate with their parents ...

  “For kids it has become an identity-shaping and psyche-changing object,” Ms. Turkle said. “No one creates a new technology really understanding how it will be used or how it can change a society.” ...

  “Cellphones demand parental involvement of a different kind ... Kids can do a lot of things in front of their parents without them knowing.” ...

  Text messaging, in particular, has perhaps become this generation's version of pig Latin. For dumbfounded parents, AT&T now offers a tutorial that decodes acronyms meant to keep parents at bay. “Teens may use text language to keep parents in the dark about their conversations by making their comments indecipherable,” the tutorial states. Some acronyms meant to alert children to prying eyes are POS (“parent over shoulder”), PRW (“parents are watching”) and KPC (“keeping parents clueless”) ...

  Ms. Blanton wonders if things might have been different if they had text messaging back then. Her son now sends frequent text messages to his grandfather, discussing baseball and fishing. “I can write better than I talk,” said Ms. Blanton, whose relationship with her parents is now close. “I think we would have had a better experience.”

• On a related note, Amy Goldwasser in “What's the matter with kids today?” explores what freaks parents out about their kids (e.g. that kids are documenting their lives and their parents' lives) and suggests the internet is not to blame:

  [W]e can't see that the Internet is only a means of communication, and one that has created a generation, perhaps the first, of writers, activists, storytellers ... When the world worked in hard copy, no parent or teacher ever begrudged teenagers who disappeared into their rooms to write letters to friends—or a movie review, or an editorial for the school paper on the first president they'll vote for. Even 15-year-old boys are sharing some part of their feelings with someone out there.

  We're talking about 33 million Americans who are fluent in texting, e-mailing, blogging, IM'ing and constantly amending their profiles on social network sites—which, on average, 30 of their friends will visit every day, hanging out and writing for 20 minutes or so each. They're connected, they're collaborative, they're used to writing about themselves. In fact, they choose to write about themselves, on their own time, rather than its being a forced labor when a paper's due in school. Regularly, often late at night, they're generating a body of intimate written work. They appreciate the value of a good story and the power of a speech that moves: Ninety-seven percent of the teenagers in the Common Core survey connected “I have a dream” with its speaker—they can watch Dr. King deliver it on demand—and eight in 10 knew what “To Kill a Mockingbird” is about.

• Tech's Late Adopters Prefer the Tried and True: Why there are still people out there using Netscape 4: “New, of course, is not always better, and people hang on to existing technologies for a variety of reasons, including loyalty, satisfaction with what they have, fear of time-consuming upgrades and even inertia.”
• Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking: Yes, there are companies out there which still mainframes. The development of technology is a Darwinian process: those that adapt, survive: “Television, for example, was supposed to kill radio, and movies, for that matter. Cars, trucks and planes spelled the death of railways. A current death-knell forecast is that the Web will kill print media.” I'm sceptical about the last one about print media, but it will be interesting to see what gizmos stick around 100 years from now. I'm particularly interested in what will happen to the car (this article talks about how people love the comfort and convenience of them so much, they probably wouldn't go back to things like public transport, despite the cost. Incidentally, this article claims that one of the chief reasons people are moving out of Sydney is the traffic).
• Why Apple fans hate tech reporters: Farhad Majoo writes, “[M]any fans of Apple often seem to want more. They care little for honest opinion. They want to pick up the paper and see in it a reflection of their own nearly religious zeal for the thing they love. They don't want a review. They want a hagiography.” Yes, I do find the zeal of some Mac users a bit over-the-top sometimes.

Hmm. It's interesting the patterns of thought that come out of this exercise every time I do it.

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