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.

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.

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.

Like the invasion of Poland in 1939, it should be apparent to the world now that the second great browser war is upon us. Just look at this last week’s worth of news:

June 10th: Apple releases developer preview of Safari 4
June 11th: Google Gears 0.3 released with support for desktop shortcuts
June 11th: Firefox Mobile Concept Released
June 12th: Opera 9.5 released
June 12th: Firefox 3.0 Final Release Candidate Released – 3.0 set for Tuesday June 17th (guide to new features here)

It’s exciting times for a web developer. Though there have been rumblings, one participant in notably absent from the conflict. Is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer the United States in this analogy or the Switzerland?

Though it’s been a poor season of roll up the rim to win for myself, my parents managed to snag one of the Garmin Nüvi 250 GPSs.  I’m heading on a Canadian coast-to-coast roadtrip this summer and my parents graciously offered their prize to help make sure I don’t get too lost on the way.  

The 250 is very thin. The outside sports an SD card reader, mini-USB port, and power switch.  Booting it up for the first time, I was surprised to find that Tim Hortons had gone to the trouble of branding the Garmin with a Tims logo at the start.  My roommates joked that it might also have a “Find the nearest Tims” button.  We were even more shocked to find that it actually does.

According to Garmin, they’ve customized it to include more than 3000 locations.  For me, it seems to display the ten or so closest results, the furthest away being 12 km (gives you an idea of the saturation of Tim Hortons in Southern Ontario).  It’s a very cool feature, and makes these GPS prizes pretty unique for the winners.

I noticed that plugging the Garmin into my laptop to charge mounted the filesystem, which let me poke around for what makes the Tim Hortons GPS special.  As far as I can tell, the main directory has a number of .img files that store the map data.  By process of elimination, it looks like the Tim Hortons data is stored in a file called gmapoem.img.  This is a known filename for dealer customizations, and a quick look through a hex editor of my copy shows a few “TIM HORT” strings in the mix.

Seems like any Garmin owners should be able to get the same “Tims button” by adding the gmapoem.img file.  If there are any interested participants, leave a comment and I’ll send you a copy of the file to confirm this.

Beyond that, looks like this gadget has a number of avenues of customization and a features I haven’t discovered yet.  As interesting things crop up, I’ll be sure to publish my findings.

A lot of excitement surrounds multi-touch interfaces, partially because of the iPhone and partially because the technology is starting to get cheap enough to be realistic.

Here’s a collection of related links I’ve stumbled upon lately (and a few from the past)

Jeff Han’s original TED talk
More of Jeff’s work

Speculation that Multi-touch is Apple’s next big move
How to build your own Multi-touch interface

Multi-touch communities:
Multi-touch interfaces and usability
NUI Group

Yes, the RAZR has been an iPod scale hit. ROKR less so , though a step in the right direction. And my personal favourite, the SLVR, has been doing well for itself too.

But Motorola has completely outdone itself now with what they’re calling the Motofone, which is what I’ve been asking for all along: just give me a good, solid phone. No Video taking, Britney Spears playing, light show raving, king of none phone for me. I just want something to store my numbers and sound reasonable.

Motorola realized that I’m not crazy, built one, and then made it pretty, and now they want to charge me $50 straight up, not after handing over my first born to the cell phone companies.

Not only am I going to buy one as soon as it is available, but if there ever was a phone to start a co-op wireless network with, this would be it. I wonder if Nortel would want to donate a GSM tower…