Digital New Year’s Resolutions

• January 18, 2012
• 4 notes

For part of my (digital) New Year’s Resolutions this year, I decided to delete my accounts on social media services that I don’t use. (Although I would love to cut Facebook, that’s probably not going to happen.) I love trying out new social media goodies, but it’s impossible for me to keep up with all of them. So over the course of the year I am going to try and use the services I belong to, and if I don’t, they’re getting cut. 

First on the list and certainly, definitely cut, is dailybooth, which I never use, find sort of narcissistic, and is pretty much just full of teenage cam whores and amateur porn (although really, what else would you expect). The rest of the list is, so far:

1. dailybooth
2. flickr
3. picplz
4. foursquare
5. posterous
6. flavors.me
7. google+
8. readernaut
9. goodreads
10. linkedin

Google Reader Gets an Update, Kinda Sucks

• November 1, 2011

So listen, Google Reader:

I know you want to stay current with the times, and make sure you look like all the other Google sites, and a whole bunch of other “good ideas”; but if you’re going to do an update, there are some important things you have to remember. I’ve written them out for you, in handy list form, so you know for next time.

1. Your update has to be functional and beneficial to the user, as well as look nice. We all like white-space, and big buttons, and I actually am a fan of the new black/grey/red/blue Google colour scheme. But when I can’t see clear separation between content items, or between my content and the side column, my brain gets frustrated. I know that when you click on the item you’re currently reading, a handy little box forms around it. I want that box all the time. I want complete borders around every article, so that each item is separate and defined, not frolicking free in white-space land. Why did you think I wanted these borders to go away? Making the borders impermanent makes my eyes jump from item to item in a distracting, attention-deficit kind of way, if I should happen to forget to click before reading. (Yes, there is a foot-bar that separates each article, but its soft lines and gradients-of-grey shading do not help my eyes stick to what I’m trying to read; I still end up distracted by the wasteland of border-less white-space. And while we’re on the subject, why did you make my post titles this bland, grey colour? Why would you think it would be easier to read something if the title of the article didn’t stand out?)

2. Your update has to add desired features, or fix broken ones, not take well-liked features away. I can understand replacing your “like” smiley-face button with the +1. “Like” is now nearly synonymous with “Facebook”, and you’re trying to make the +1 as ubiquitous as that blue thumbs-up. Believe me, I get it; we all want to conquer the Internet. But why would you take away a well liked, oft-used feature with a strong community? Ditching your “share/shared items” feature has alienated your core audience: the original users of Google Reader, people who have spent time and effort cultivating a small but interested group of like-minded content-hunters. People who look forward to being exposed to articles and feeds they wouldn’t see otherwise. People who don’t want to rely on the overly social environments of Facebook or Twitter to find new and interesting items to read. This was your biggest misstep, Google Reader. We don’t want you to integrate with Google Plus because we don’t want to use Google Plus, at least not for this purpose. We don’t want to share things to our “walls”, or “profiles”, or what have you. We don’t want to pass that nerdyQuantum Levitation article on to everyone we know. We want to quietly click “share” at the bottom of that article and have it unobtrusively offer itself to the five, or ten, or fifty people we know who have shown express interest in reading the things we read, in the medium that we read them. We want our friends’ shared articles to appear as unread content in our sidebars, so that they’re there, like a treat, on the site we’re already using.  We do not want to be forced to use another site to share content, Google Reader. There are already multiple external sites that we use when we want to reach a wide audience. We liked the exclusivity, the closeness, the convenience, the built in ease of our Google Reader Shared Community. If we didn’t, we’d browse the web like the rest of the Internet, and post our articles to Facebook or Tumblr or Blogger or Twitter or Wordpress or… you get the picture. Which brings me to my final point:

3. No one uses Google Plus. As a documented fan of the idea, it pains me to admit it, but it’s just not working. Even though it’s cleverly built right into sites I use every day, I can go weeks without looking at my Google Plus profile, or checking in with my “circles”. I have never had a “hangout”, and I don’t want to. Frankly, the only reason I even remember I have a Google Plus profile is because of those little notifications in the Google TopBar*, telling me that more people I don’t know have added me to their “Circles”. Clicking “ignore all” on those notifications is literally the only interaction I’ve had with Google Plus for the past two weeks, and ostensibly I’m your target market. No one likes failure, and I understand the huge desire Google must have to see Plus succeed. Butforcing people to use your service is never the road to success, especially when you’re forcing people to use your service by taking away something they actually like and use. Removing a social service that people enjoy in order to force them to use something they hate seems, frankly, ass-backwards. 

As a devoted fan and long time user, Google Reader, I urge you to keep these three simple facts in mind before any and all future redesigns. I also urge you to take a good hard look at how people use your service, and why, before you go making changes. And if you really want to get rid of a feature, ditch “sort by magic”. No one uses that.

*Ed. Note: It has been brought to my attention that the Google TopBar is actually called the “OneGoogle Bar”. What’s more, there is apparently a way to share your Google Reader items with your Google Plus circles from the OneGoogle bar. File this under “knowledge I didn’t have, and will not use”.

Google Plus is Google, Plus

• July 3, 2011

Here were some of my first thoughts on Google+:

• “Hey, it looks kind of like Facebook, but prettier!”
• “Hey, you can share things on it like Facebook, but with different circles of people. Or just one person. Like Gmail!”
• “Hey, wait, what the fuck is a circle? How do I add people?”
• “Hey, alright, I get it. Now I’ve got people in my circle, so how do I share things with them?”
• “Hey, okay, so I post things into this box and hit send to specific groups of people… really like Gmail.”
• “Hey, neat, it uses Gchat so I can chat with people… like Gmail.”
• “Hey, so it’s… like facebooktwittergmail? Why do I want this?”

Then I spent four hours on Google+. 

Because of the integration with Google’s new topbar, I can absolutely see this being Google’s first successful social media venture. The topbar runs across all of Google’s services. If you’ve embraced the new “Preview” theme, as I have, in Gmail, then the Plus UI is mimicked. Regardless, I’ve been told that notifications still appear in your Gmail interface. So whether you’re in your Gmail inbox or Googling something, your Plus notifications will appear in the topbar, and you can reply to them without ever leaving the service you’re using. You simply click your notification and reply to comments or see your tags, and then go right back to what you’re doing. It’s a brilliant idea, beautifully executed.

And so are the circles, because they recognize your want to share different things with different groups of people, and they make them easy to access and understand. By building in circles as a necessity, rather than a “feature” like Facebook’s “lists”, you’re organizing your friends in a way that makes sense, right off the bat. No one uses Facebook “lists”, but everyone will use Circles - because they have to. This will allow for increased privacy and ease of sharing, two things which Facebook users constantly complain about not having. Granted, the settings are there with Facebook, but in my experience most people find them overly complicated, and difficult to figure out. Settings should be intuitive, and major props go to Google+ for giving the user control without really making them feel like they have to take any extra steps.

The app for android is also pretty spiffy, and while I personally don’t want to “Hangout” with my contacts in video-chat windows of (up to) 10 people, I understand why some might find that feature desirable. It also integrates with Google Chat, so all your chat contacts are already available to you in your sidebar. Which is great, because I am an avid user of Google Chat, and pretty much shun all other chat alternatives.

Final thoughts: Yes, this isn’t really different from Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter (or any/all combinations thereof). But the interface is clean, pretty and easy to use, the integration with other Google products is tight but not pushy (unlike Buzz), and social media is fun. I can already tell Google+ is going to be one of my permanently open tabs - and that’s saying something. 

Songs Which Will Always Remind Me of First Year Law School

• May 1, 2011

Offered with no explanation, and in the order I thought of them:

1. “All of This” - Passive Me Agressive You - The Naked and the Famous
2. “Dog Days are Over - Lungs - Florence + The Machine
3. “Everlasting Light” - Brothers - The Black Keys
4. “Everything In Its Right Place” - Kid A - Radiohead
5. “Leftovers (Featuring Diamond Rings)” - Leftovers (Featuring Diamond Rings) - PS I Love You
6. “Lisztomania” - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix - Phoenix
7. “O My Heart” - O My Heart - Mother Mother
8. “Rolling in the Deep” - 21 - Adele 
9. “Freaks and Geeks” - EP - Childish Gambino
10. “Load Me Up” - Beautiful Midnight - Matthew Good
11. “Elenore” - The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands - The Turtles
12. “Fuck You!” - The Lady Killer - Cee Lo Green
13. “Fucking Boyfriend” - The Bird and the Bee - The Bird and the Bee
14. “Ghettochip Malfunction (Hell Yes) [Remix by 8-Bit]” - Hell Yes (EP) - Beck
15. “Got Your Money” - Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers - Wu Tang vs. The Beatles
16. “Two Kinds of Happiness” - Angles - The Strokes
17. “Islands” - the XX - the XX
18. “All of the Lights” - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - Kanye West
19. “Sealegs” - Wincing the Night Away - the Shins
20. “Way Down (feat. RZA, Barbie Hatch & John Frusciante)” - The Spirit of Apollo - N.A.S.A.
21. “Bloodbuzz Ohio” - High Violet - the National
22. “Home” - Up From Below - Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros 
23. “Limit to your Love” (Feist Cover) - James Blake - James Blake
24. “Simply Simple” - Eureka - Mother Mother
25. “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” - You Forgot It In People - Broken Social Scene
26. “On to the Next One” - Blueprint III - Jay-Z
27. “Where It’s At” - Odelay - Beck
28. “Bent” - Mad Season - Matchbox Twenty
29. “Low Rising” - Strict Joy - The Swell Season
30. “Nugget” - Fashion Nugget - Cake

You can listen to this retrospective here. 

[Not included here, but included in my memory, is anything and everything by The Hood Internet, as well as the album All Day by Girltalk, Big Shiny Tunes 1 through 6, and the Big Shiny 90s.] 

The CBC and the End of First Year Law

• April 28, 2011

Had I never met the Champagne Socialist, I may have dismissed him out of hand. On February 16th, he wrote:

I used to doubt the usefulness of Twitter because all it really does is replicate one feature of Facebook – the status update. But that’s exactly the difference. Because that’s all Twitter is, and because it’s much more open, it changes the way people use it. [emphasis added]

I can’t stand the comparison between Facebook and Twitter. A truly interesting phenomenon is that people tend to conceptualize the internet in terms of how they use it, rather than as a concrete entity. If I ever do write a thesis, it would certainly be on Internet Philosophy, how each person uses it completely differently and adapts it to their own world view. But the internet, unlike reality, has an accessible actuality. Twitter isn’t just a Facebook status update. Facebook wants your friends to know “what’s on your mind”; Twitter wants to know “what’s happening”. Twitter was intended to reach a wide audience of people you both knew and didn’t know, to be a realtime communication tool. Facebook was intended to let you friends and family, your (non-publicly accessible) peer group, have a glimpse at what you were up to during your day. They are separate websites with separate goals, although they are functionally similar from a user standpoint. 

The author of the Champagne Socialist blog is, in his own words, a “recent but enthusiastic convert” to twitter, whereas I am what some would call an early adopter.  On the other hand, I came late to Facebook. I had been on Twitter, Blogger, Livejournal, Diaryland, Wordpress, Tumblr, Delicious, etc., etc. … I didn’t see the point of Facebook, and felt that Myspace and Friendster (which I had tried) were lackluster services. I didn’t see why Facebook would succeed where they had failed, and didn’t sign up until some point in 2007. I’m still not a huge fan of Facebook, whereas most people today are what you would call Facebook Fanatics. For me, Twitter came first, and Facebook status updates “imitated” Twitter. For most others, Facebook came first. For the average internet user today, Facebook is where the internet starts and ends. For the average user, then, to say Twitter “replicates” the Facebook status is not only fair, but entirely accurate.  

(The rest of that article is good, by the way. It emphasizes the importance of Twitter in the political sphere, something I have only recently come to appreciate. You should read it.) 

The point to all of this is that people use the internet in vastly different ways, a fact that has always fascinated me. Moreover, the way each person uses the internet is the way they consider “correct”; I myself am guilty of this, so that when someone says something I disagree with my first reaction is to write a long, rambling blog post. 

One thing I have never really been into on the internet is streaming media. I am aware of radio on the internet, but podcasts, livestreaming, and even things like ustream have never really interested me. Youtube only holds my attention for a few minutes a day, compared to the hours I’ll spend reading Thought Catalog. But a few weeks ago this blogger/ tweeter / colleague in law school introduced me to CBC Radio 3 online, and it became not only the soundtrack for my exam study period, but a staple of my morning routine. Now I wake up and turn on the CBC, to hear amazing, independent music which I would never have heard anywhere else. 

So now I see the validity in the statement that Twitter imitates Facebook. The CBC was always there, always broadcasting, but for me it didn’t exist until someone forwarded me the link. For most there was no Twitter until they’d already shared with 240 of their closest Facebook friends how they rocked their Psych 101 final. The Internet exists on its own, but it also changes with you, opens and adapts to your purposes. My Internet is different now than it was a few weeks ago. My use of Twitter has changed from following comedians and other things internet to tracking the upcoming election, the progress of my hockey team, and things happening in real life. The first tab I open in the morning is no longer my carefully crafted collection of Google Reader feeds; now I head straight to the Globe and Mail and CBC Radio 3, a window into things that are actually happening. 

My internet changed when I was living in a library basement for 13 hours a day. I lost touch with what was going on in the outside world. I didn’t have time to sift through a hundred comics and blogs for entertainment. My iTunes catalogue became a veritable wasteland of uninteresting, overplayed music. When I had to abandon the Internet as I knew it to work harder than I’ve ever worked, live music streaming, news sites, and an adapted purpose for Twitter kept me going. Whether you get there early, late, or with the rest of the pack, the internet meets you where you are in life. As I finished my first year of law school, I turned on the CBC.