CS and the City

My annual Flickr pro account renewal came up last month.  Looking at my renewal history, I can see that every time I’ve renewed it, I’ve never done it proactively.  I’ve always a month or so after my previous year’s subscription had expired.  This year was no different.  I let it expire, only to have to renew it again to unlock some of my older photos that I didn’t have a backup of (silly).  This time around, I seriously considered leaving it unrenewed.  I just don’t use it anymore.

I’m what I would call a long-term Flickr user.  I’m relatively sure I had my Flickr account before GMail.  I payed for the pro upgrade before I ever paid for generic web hosting. Flickr was great and I evangelized it to all my friends, as is evident in all the abandoned accounts on my Flickr friends list.

I was attracted to Flickr for three reasons:

• The ability to publish my photos for my friends
• Hosting photos for my blog
• Getting feedback from the community on the photos I took

But four years later, the world has changed.  Now all my friends use Facebook, because they don’t have to pay for it, because Facebook actually innovated on photo sharing by indexing by the people in the photo, and because it integrates into a tool my friends already use.  For hosting photos, I can use the same web-storage I’m paying for already. Though the reality is that I simply don’t blog or photograph as much, and so neither of those are that important to me anymore.

The more revealing part is that, in those four years, Flickr hasn’t changed at all.  The only event that brought me back to Flickr was the account merger with Yahoo.  The only news I heard was the half-assed support for video and the addition of the Yahoo logo.  Beyond that, it’s stagnated. Where is the Twitter short-links?  Where’s the first party Facebook app?  (Edit: found both after digging through the profile settings, foot appropriately in mouth). I’m asking partially because I’m a geek and I love playing with new features, but also because this complete lack on investment on Yahoo’s part has made it so worthless that almost all of the people who used to engage in the photos have now gone else.  My pro membership doesn’t buy me anything.

Unless something major changes, this will be the last $24.99 (a number that, despite Moore’s law, has stayed constant this entire time) I give to Yahoo. I’m not rushing to Picasa Web either.  They’re just as guilty of price stagnation as Flickr (though Face recognition is very cool).  For now, I’ll stick with iPhoto and Facebook (which maintains their own iPhoto plug-in I might add). There’s plenty to do in this area, so I’ll be waiting for someone to come along and impress me.

Epilogue

For anyone trying to get their photos off of Flickr, take a look at PhotoGrabbr, a tool for downloading entire Flickr albums for the Mac. I definitely won’t be dealing with photo lock next year.

This week I’ve been taking a look at the recently announced pubsubhubbub by Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin of Google. The duo proposed and implemented a protocol for implementing near-realtime notifications on top of RSS and Atom. The protocol describes three roles: A publisher, a subscriber, and a hub. The hub basically acts as an intermediary, receiving subscription requests from subscribers and forwarding update notifications from publishers to subscribers.

One of the first things I noticed about the protocol is that subscribers are required to have an internet accessible URL for validating subscription registration and receiving notification pings. This is not an issue for the Google Readers and FriendFeeds of the world, but this does leave desktop RSS readers out of the party.

Also interesting to note is that there’s nothing that requires the hub to be a separate entity from the publisher. In fact, it could be very desirable for the publish to own the subscription hub. Besides removing one notification roundtrip from the protocol, it would also give publishers more control over how often to ping users on updates. Nothing in the protocol requires that a notification be sent every time, so it would be possible to only notify a subset of users in real time (perhaps the ones that pay), and others on a regular basis.

Depending on how deep your RSS Trivia knowledge goes, this might sound awfully close to the rssCloud element, but Brett points out that the key differentiator here is PSHB’s “fat pings“, that is, the entire updated content is sent as the ping to the user.

To reduce latency and polling, PSHB supports persistent HTTP connections from hubs to publishers, but it could use FriendFeed’s SUP protocol to detect updates as well.

Though solving slightly different problems, it’s interesting to compare the SUP’s and PSHB’s stance on polling. SUP obviously relies heavily on polling, despite drastically reducing the amount required. While PSHB has strong opinions against. Polling is certainly less error prone, in addition to being less efficient. For example, how does PSHB handle dropped pings to subscribers? I admittedly haven’t dug too deep, but I assume a reasonable amount of state must be maintained in the hub to handle these cases smoothly.

Ultimately the most valuable contribution of the entire project might be the two outspoken Google employees behind it. Already they are seeing some adoption. The pubsubhubbub demo at Real-Time CrunchUp announced launched FeedBurner support and showed prototypes of Blogger and Reader support. Having evangelists inside the company puts early adoption in other Google products much more likely, which in turn will give the standard much more credibility.

To be fair, the problem isn’t so much one of the Kindle’s. It’s more of a problem with books. I’ve had PDF books for years. PDFs were the cheaper method of getting textbooks for classes that were not always useful and they were often the only source of technical documentation in the days before Amazon (did I just date myself?). Over these same years, I bought many more books. To me, the physical copy of the book was absolutely preferred over reading on a computer. That all changed with the Kindle (and presumably for eBook readers before it).

After centuries, books are about to have their very first format transitions. Here comes that famous blogger hyperbole: Print is obsolete.

You’ve probably been through at least one of these before: Buying Blu-ray to replace DVDs that replaced VHS only a few years before it or upgrading from vinyl to cassette to CD to MP3 in a matter of a few decades). Each transition becomes increasingly costly for consumers as their libraries tend to get larger over time.

What remains to be seen is whether book authors will gorge on users paying to convert their library or, perhaps having felt the pain of format obsolescence for themselves, allow their fans to enjoy the content they already have a legal right to for free. I’m certainly being an idealist but I’m hoping its the latter. Time for some empirical evidence.

The Experiment
I have a small number of books on a range of subjects sitting my to-read queue. All are in various stages of completion. I would rather continue to read using my fancy new device, but I’m very opposed to purchasing a new digital copy when I have a perfectly readable analog copy.

To this end, I propose the following experiment:

I will email each of the books’ authors with a simple proposition: I will return my copy of the book to the author (or give it to a friend, second hand store, whatever is the author’s preference), and in exchange, I will ask them to give me a digital copy of the book. I’d love if they were able to gift me the Kindle version, but I will take any digital version they have and do they heavy lifting to get it onto the Kindle. They are, or course, free to reject my offer (as I expect most will).

If I were to write a review, the title of this post would be the eventual conclusion. That said, let me bullet point out the pros and cons:

Things I really like

• Great Customer Service: My first one was defective when received (Back button was broken). A call to customer service had one automated menu, a real person, and a next-day replacement in under fifteen minutes
• I can convert PDFs using Amazon’s converter
• I can read anywhere, while only hauling a perfect sized tablet around
• Cute female book nerds everywhere are stopping me to ask “Is that the new Kindle?”

Things I don’t like

• Amazon is wasting the annotations feature by just dumping the results in a txt file
• The bookstore’s coverage is relatively weak
• I’m buying into the worst of DRM lock-in: I can’t give books to other people and I can’t read the files outside of my Kindle (and the Kindle app on iPhone)

When Facebook first added the “Friends You May Know” section on their homepage, I was relatively impressed. It did a good job of finding people in my social group. In the end though, I only found one or two people I had not yet added myself. After that, it was another useless piece of the homepage sidebar trying to get me to pimp Facebook to people I know; Invite Your Friends (aka Spam Your “Friends”) and Find Your Friends being the others (Even the ad slot is a friend inviter half the time).

The problem with the Friends You May Know feature wasn’t in the graph algorithm, it was with me. It was indeed identifying people I knew, but knowing them was not the same as being friends with them. I called it the People I Know, But Don’t Really Like box.

To fight back against The social graph analyzing Man, I started hitting x next to each of the recommendations. As I did I would battle back the algorithm as it ran out of new recommendations for the day, only return a few weeks later with a group of people I was a little less connected to. Slowly but surely the recommendations became meaningless. Until it finally hit rock bottom.

Yesterday, Facebook recommended Jessica to me. It explained that we both went to the same University so surely we know each other. Jessica and I had absolute no mutual friends. Not one. I was surprised that algorithm had become so desperate for me to grow my social graph that it had begun resorting to recommending complete strangers. I wondered what other strangers homepages were recommending becoming friends with me, or maybe I was the only one so hostile towards the recommendations.

I knew all of its efforts would be fruitless. I had already realized what the algorithm or the clever coder behind it simply did not consider: I had no more friends. Facebook has done such a good job that my friends list was simply, complete. I could imagine the meeting in Facebook HQ where some quiet intern asked “What happens when they run out of friends?” only to have their question waved off. “Inconceivable!”

Well I’m here to tell you Facebook, I have reached that state. Facebook – Please quit bugging me to add friends, I will as I make new ones. Instead, do something really cool with all that sidebar space. I’m sure you’ve got some great ideas.

And have some self-confidence. Just because my Friend list is growing does not mean I’m jumping ship for Twitter any time soon.

I’ve always been a bit confused about the reckless amount of hyper surrounding Twitter. The functionality it provides is nothing more than 90s era IRC with cute animated birds and a 140 character limit. I was convinced the people who live and breath Twitter were making general assumptions about the reach of Twitter based on their smaller social group. Turns out Vallywag thinks so too.

Said Vallywag post is titled “Do You Twitter? How Adorable” and it makes the point that Twitter has “consumed the media elite”, but their view of it’s success is distorted because they only see how their colleges use it. “By the numbers, though, Twitter is an inconsequential nothing.”

My Twitter page is essentially tweets from a handful of variably frequent posters and the few dozen remaining followers that do nothing other than add icons to my followers list. I do very little tweeting myself excepting the odd response at one of those aforementioned heavy Twits.

Twitter, for me, is just one more site I need to check every day. My followers/following list is without exception, a subset of the social graph I already have represented in Facebook or Google. The only thing Twitter serves to do is further segregate the conversation I have with my friends.

For my part, I’ve been building a small script that polls and synchronizes my status across Facebook, Twitter, and GTalk (I’d like to add Live Messenger too, but there’s no easy API to get/set, *hint* for those MSofties reading this). Of course, that only solves my side of the conversation. The other direction remains fragmented.

When I started writing this review, I was half way through my fifth flight on Virgin America in three weeks time.  I felt knowledgeable enough to write an informed review on the entire VA experience.  But as I started to flesh out my mental notes into something more concrete, I realized why I enjoyed my flights so much:  The Virgin America plane is one big gadget.

Red is the name of Virgin’s in-flight entertainment system, and the most featureful I’ve used in my travels. It has radio and an impressively complete Music library, Music Videos, Satellite TV, TV on Demand ($1.99 per), Movies on Demand ($7.99 per) , and Video Games.  The Virgin Airbus is the first plane to pass the “Can you play Doom on it?” test (and all the cheat codes work!).  One of the other really hyped feature of Red is the seat-to-seat chat and plane chat room, but I did not see a single person in the chatroom during any of my flights.  I think this might be more “wow” than actually useful.  On the other hand, a feature that is very useful is the ability to order drinks and food directly from Red at (almost) any time during the flight.

Despite the plentiful entertainment options, Red is very much still in beta.  There were several points where the system was slow and unresponsive, once requiring a reboot.  This must be a somewhat common occurance as flight attendants occasionally warn about the need to reboot during the take-off speech likening it to their passengers’ Windows PCs.

Some of the features aren’t built yet: Read, Shop, and Email keep telling me to try again on my next flight. Red allows you to create to create musical playlists, but there’s no payoff if your list disappears as soon as you get off the flight.  It screams to be tied into a personal account (so much so that a login button is present in the home menu, with no functionality behind it).

I’m also convinced that several of the Satellite TV channels are pre-captured streams.  For example, on all of my flights, the Sci-Fi channel seemed to be playing the same two episodes of Battlestar Galactica over and over, and the video feed didn’t seem to break down in turbulence like CNN would.  Speaking of which, the satellite’s reception seemed to relatively poor compared to the similar system on WestJet flights.  This wouldn’t be as big of a problem if they offered a fresher selection of on demand video at a cheaper price point (read: free).  Geek style points for offering Diggnation and Boing Boing video for free though.

On the technical side, I have a supicion that Red is built on Linux.  After rebooting, my screen faithfully displayed the familiar X Windows Server backdrop before moving into Red.  Another sign? One of the games in the system is called Linux Circus.

Overall I’m very impressed with the system, but they’re going to have to iterate quickly on both the features and the content lest Red becomes a novelty rather than a necessity.

Without having to use Saft either! (Though I think this will only work on Safari 3.1)

Here’s the magic, just pump this into your terminal, restart Safari and you’ll be ready to go:
defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

Another year, another reluctant Pro upgrade of my Flickr account. I’ve been taking less and less photos over the years (I partially blamed my camera: a DSLR which I recently sold). Despite Flickr adding a number of cool features, I just haven’t been compelled to keep up. Looking at my Flickr Friends, it looks like I’m not alone. For now, I’ve bought the upgrade to access some older pictures I no longer have copies of. Next year, I hope that I won’t be faced with the same locked in.

I’ve become compelled to move to Picasa Web Albums. Today, Picasa announced facial recognition integration to automate the process of “tagging” people, a function that has become the killer feature for Facebook’s photos.

But a couple things are holding me back from moving to Picasa:

• I’m at a loss as to why I can’t buy an unlimited account like I can on Flickr.
• Picasa software doesn’t run on my Mac (Not a massive problem as there is a Picasa Export tool for iPhoto)
• No one uses Picasa besides the Google crew

I’m wondering if I have the wrong expectations for my web-based photo management. Perhaps I shouldn’t be treating the web layer as global storage and management so much as the presentation layer. Most of my albums on Flickr and Facebook are a subset of the photos I have in iPhoto anyway. Many pictures never make it out of iPhoto because they are blurry or just boring. It’s easy to see iPhoto (or Picasa) as the main library, Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa as just galleries.

The problem with this configuration is that, despite the web simply being a way to share photos, much of the metadata (titles, descriptions, comments, keyword, geo, and face tags) is scattered across the sites. I’d love if Picasa (or Flickr, or Facebook for that matter) became my defacto management layer, pushing content to all others and pulling metadata back. Maybe I’m letting my architecture astronaut side get the best of me.

Leopard (OSX 10.5.4 but it looks like earlier versions were affected) seems to have some sort of bug that causes easy_install or setup.py install to crap out with an error like this:

No eggs found in /var/folders/Ev/Evg2gG5nFyKz5eSgYhyKuk+++TI/-Tmp-/easy_install-Qm7ReE/simplejson-1.9.2/egg-dist-tmp-9qR_OW (setup script problem?)

I ran into this on a number of different packages: simplejson (above), appscript, and others. The fix seems to be this seemingly unrelated bad boy here (discovered here). The fix? This command:

sudo easy_install http://www.jaraco.com/ASP/eggs/setuptools-0.6c8_svn15fix.egg

Ugh.