Antisocial Networks

Posted on 25 October, 2011 by

I’ve been using Google+ for a while now. I was on the beta and I’ve been using it ever since. Here’s a look at why I prefer it to facebook.

I’m not a big fan of Facebook. I’m on it, I use it and it has a couple of nice features. The events function is great. I can’t remember the last time I was in an office, where you couldn’t use email to set up a meeting with people. Letting people do this with their friends and personal contacts is great. Allowing people to set the status from a private party, to a public event, where anyone can show up, is a great way of having new people turn up to your event.

The down side of facebook outweighs the good. I’ll skim over some highlights.

First there is the habit it encourages of not actually staying in touch with people. Instead of picking up the phone or firing off an email saying “Hey, what’s up?” people stalk you. Oh he went on holiday, that looks nice, Oh she broke up with her boyfriend, shame, he seemed nice, etc. This means you have, so-called friends, you haven’t spoken to in years. Sure, there are people you speak to every day and facebook isn’t going to change that, but for the people you’d speak to a few times a year, it’s a different story and a lot is lost through the filter of what we post on facebook.

Next is the privacy thing, others have written very well on why facebook has said: age of privacy is over. So I won’t repeat that here, but I will say that that is complete bull and they only say it so they can make more money. And therein lies the crux of the problem, facebook wants to fool people into sharing more. They do it through propaganda like that and by screwing with their privacy settings.

So when I click through from a comment and find some stranger’s facebook wall shared with me+world, I assume it’s a mistake. Even if there happens to be an interesting post on that wall, there is no way I am going to comment. To me, that would be like wandering down a busy street, walking past a home with an open window, over hearing an interesting conversation and sticking my head through their window to join in.

Compare that with Google+, where every single post has to be assigned a privacy setting. This means that when I see an interesting post from a stranger, I was meant to see it. If comments are enabled, I’m invited to join in the discussion. This has happened to me countless times since I joined Google+ with only one encounter being negative (They turned out to be nuts). So I’ve met people I would never have met before, I’ve had polite disagreements with people, where we’ve exchanged different points of view and I have people in my circles I would never have had the opportunity to interact with, if it wasn’t for Google+.

Additionally, Google+ is very young, with new features in the works. I can’t say how those will impact the service until I see them, but given the approach taken so far, I’m hopeful about what we will see and how it will let strangers become friends, or at least acquaintances.

What do you think?

Posted in Social Networks | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Siri

Posted on 24 October, 2011 by

There is a lot of talk going on at the moment about Siri. What it does, what it doesn’t do. I’d prefer to look at what it could become. I think it has the potential to turn into something game changing. I think it’s the beginning of the end or the keyboard and mouse.

Right now, Siri only works on the iPhone 4S and only with a few built in apps. However, it’s only been out a week and rumour has it that the Siri development team is the largest within apple. So we know more will be coming, we also know that apple take the best features of MacOS and IOS and cross pollinate them.

So when would this happen? It could be the answer to a question I’ve been asking myself for a while now. Given that MacOS X (ten) has run out of big cat names and finished with Lion, I think it’s safe to say the next move will move beyond MacOS 10.x. So the question is, how do you take MacOS 10 and turn it up to 11? To me, the answer is Siri.

Apple loves to be the first to obsolete technology and people have been asking for touch screen iMacs for years now. However Steve Jobs has said (check out 1:57) that touch screens don’t work on vertical surfaces and I think he’s right. You can’t type an essay or even an email at that angle.

But what if you are dictating? And what if you iMac is wall mounted? What if it’s hooked into your appleTV, so it can hear you in your living room as well as your study? To me, that is how you take MacOS and turn it up to 11. Steve job once said “Just give me Star Trek.” It was a wise crack, but its through jest where some people are more willing to tell you what they think.

There are huge challenges from taking something that works with a few apps on a phone and giving it the power to operate an iMac. If apple stick to their usual release cycle, they have about 18 months to get it done. That probably a tall order. So instead, like the phone, this will start simple, an email, some music on iTunes, a document in pages.

With time though, Siri could be running a lot more for us.

So the question becomes, is that a good thing?

Like so many tools, this will depend on how we use it. If we stop talking to people and only have out PDA talk to your PDA, then this is going to leave us feeling very alone in the world. If instead, we use it to free up our time to spend it with friends and family, for example, by dictating emails while we’re stuck in traffic, then it could do a lot of good for us. The danger is, of course, is whenever we find a way to free up time, someone else will use that time to work and they’ll be competing with you for that next promotion. That’s why technology won’t give us the answers, only the tools…

Posted in Artificial Intelligence | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Why am I here?

Posted on 24 October, 2011 by

Why are any of us here? And why can’t we all just get along?

I‘m not convinced we will find the answers in technology, but I do think technology provides us tools to find the answers for ourselves. In this blog I’ll be exploring new technology and giving my view on how it makes the world a better (or worse) place.

I have always enjoyed travelling. I’ve always been so pleased to find wonderful people in every corner of the world I’ve found myself. So much so, I’ve recently started hosting couch surfers, through couchsurfing.org. This has expanded the number of people I’ve come into contact with and strengthened  my view that the place of our birth and where we are raised, does not dictate who we can and can’t get along with.

We are constantly fed messages and images to the contrary. News stories about what a dangerous world it is out there, how those people aren’t like our people. They keep us in our homes and they keep us content with our lot. I see technology giving us the tools we need to escape these messages, but they are tools we have to use.

Sadly not everyone we encounter in life is cool. There are some people out there who selfishly think that they can do their own thing, regardless of the consequences to others. They attack people with different points of view, or send unwelcome messages or images. By bringing more people together, we also expose ourselves to that minority and give them a great audience for their attacks. I believe in free speech, but not in the freedom to attack others and attacks can be non-physical, they can be verbal.

So the technology isn’t finished yet. We don’t yet have a way or consensus on how to deal with these issues. That’s OK, we all have the power to make changes, we can develop it over time and develop ourselves right along with it. It will be an adventure!

Join me :)

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment