Internet

Put the Keyboard Down and Back Away From Facebook

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So, I bought this little iPhone app called “Sleep Cycle alarm clock“.

It’s an interesting idea. It uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to monitor the motion of your bed while you sleep. Like so:

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It uses the motion of the bed as a proxy measurement for your REM states. When you’re not moving much you are more likely to be deep asleep and when you move more it means you’re more likely nearly awake. You set a 30 minute time window in which you wish to awake and the app wakes you up when your motion peaks so you wake up alert instead of dragging yourself up out the depths of REM and starting the day feeling vaguely stunned.

It’s a neat idea and the basic idea is scientifically sound but that’s not what I’m blogging about.

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The Delocalization of Events

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A small, single-engine plane has crashed into a building here in Austin. It’s national news being covered on all the cable networks.

The site of the event is about five miles to the South of my house. I’ve driven by that building literally thousands of times…

… but for all that the crash directly affected me it might as well have been on the other side of the planet. Had my spouse not called, I wouldn’t have know about it until I did my lunch-break scan of Instapundit. I can’t even see the smoke. Everything I know about the event comes from the TV news.

In short, I have as much information about this local event as does someone elsewhere in America or, indeed, even the world.

Prior to the Internet, most news was local. An event such as this would have been known to the local population via the local media, and then only an abbreviated story would make it to the national news and no one outside the country would ever have heard of it.

What are consequences of this delocalization of news? Any individual only has so much time to spend consuming news. If we spend time consuming reports from all over the world, that means we displace our consumption of local news. We end up in the perverse situation wherein we know more about a community on the other side of the world than we do our own.

Will this further decouple us from our local communities? I know that in recent years I have paid less attention to the local news than I did pre-Internet. Will we grow more concerned about distant problems over which we have little to no input, and neglect local problems that we could actually fix?

I don’t know what the future will bring but this event feels very surreal.

A Google Privacy Stumble

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If you use Gmail you may have noticed a new feature called “Buzz”, which is Google’s attempt to create something like Facebook.

Email and Facebook-type social networking services are different in function and in their users’ privacy expectations. Google erred by 1) assuming that users of email, the less intrusive service, would want to be signed up by default for the more intrusive social networking service, and 2) configuring the privacy settings of the social networking service in a way that can casually expose a user’s private information before the user has a chance, or even knows, to change the relevant settings.

Here is an example of the kinds of problems Google’s new scheme caused.

Here are instructions for restoring the (relative) privacy of your Google account.

Google will probably correct its blunder soon if it hasn’t already. But it’s interesting that they blundered in this way in the first place. They showed a Microsoftian level of cluelessness about privacy and security. It’s as if the Google offices were a monoculture of young computer geeks for whom clever new features are first and foremost cool toys with business upside and no downside, rather than complex systems that sometimes interact in unexpected ways and may have the potential to harm people who have something to lose. Oh, wait…

Google’s “don’t be evil” motto, always a cynical joke, deserves at least as much ridicule as does the DHS terror-threat color code. People in China learned this some time ago.

Don’t be stupid. Don’t trust Google or other free Web-service providers with information that you can’t afford to make public.

UPDATE: An attorney offers scathing and insightful critique of Google here and here. The second linked post gives additional advice on deactivating your Buzz account, including a link to Google’s own instructions for doing this.

Wikipedia Account Prep

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Whether you love Wikipedia or hate it, if you have strong opinions about just about anything you are very likely going to want to go over there at some point and give them a piece of your mind. If you don’t prepare beforehand, you’re very likely going to be ignored or called names. Here’s how to avoid that fate.

1. Register for an editor’s account.
2. Pick two or three topics you’re interested in that are a bit off the beaten path and tend not to be controversial.
3. Create some solid, boring edits in your non-controversial topics, at least 10 edits if you’re not running an anonymizer or 100 edits if you’re coming in through an anonymizer like TOR.
4. Put up a basic description of yourself on your user page that’s noncontroversial.

Once you’ve done these things and your account has a bit of longevity to it you’ve passed the participation hurdle of Wikipedia and you’ve paid your dues. The classic Wikipedia excuses that are used to not listen to new users don’t quite apply to you. If a page is semi-protected, you can still participate in the discussion and any voting.

You also might consider continuing the non-controversial edits, just for fun. Outside hot button topics such as politics and furry webcomics (really, don’t ask), Wikipedia actually does very good, neutral work on a whole host of topics. If more people were involved, especially in underrepresented groups like conservatives, it would be a better tool for everybody.

Unsung Technological Advances

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One truism on Technology is that the initial media splash and the early adopters skew trends by making them seem to have more impact than they actually do. It is often the slower, longer “tail” of a trend that causes the most significant change, even if by then the media has passed the story by because it is no longer “hot”.

Two items happened last week that show a profound technology advancement that is by now ubiquitous and thus rarely commented on by the media. These two items are 1) the vast scope of online gaming and 2) Craigslist and its impact on retail.

While watching the Bears get killed on Sunday during half time, my nephew put on Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 which just got released in November, 2009 for Xbox. Already, there were masses of individuals online playing the game – there were over 800,000 users online AT THAT MOMENT. He joined a game, which was simple, and the intelligence split up the team members based on their levels so that the two teams were balanced. It is just amazing how easy it is to join these games and play infinitely, against other human opponents – this used to be hard to do (Dan and I played online a long time ago) and now it is not only a snap but there are hundreds of thousands of opponents ready to play a huge variety of missions at any time day or night. Also, Xbox, which was viewed as behind Wii and PS3, is now a leader in online gaming which is a huge differentiator against the other consoles, while this wasn’t viewed as a critical factor at the time the consoles all emerged.

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