I joined Twitter almost two years ago, used it for about 4 months and took a break for 5 months until I was able to link up my Twitter updates to update my Facebook status. Since then I’ve been hearing about impact of Twitter like getting a fellow Cal bear out of foreign prison and increasingly more about it in the news and on TV as a “super cool new thing”.

I haven’t been keeping up with my online news feeds lately so I only recently learned about Ashton Kutcher challenging and racing CNN to the 1 million Twitter followers mark… actually I saw it on Oprah! The interview:

Ashton comments on the far reaching possibilities and power of The Social Web, but the blogosphere, web 2.0 companies, and academia have known this for a long time (remember the viral Saturday Night Live clip on Youtube?):

In some ways it’s a commentary on the state of media. I believe that we’re at a place now with social media where one person’s voice can be as powerful as an entire news network, an entire media network. That is the power of the social web. You, through your own stream, can actually have a voice that’s as loud as a media network. You can create your content through a collaborative effort, you can edit your content, you can broadcast your content, and you can consume your content all in one place. And I thought it was kind of almost like an uprising of the Internet in a way.
[...]
You can really rally people around different causes… There are giant things that we can do through this platform at 140 characters at a time.

Though I have to disagree with Gayle King who said during the interview:

When you think about it, it really is astounding Ashton, that one guy can really take on a conglomerate and win. It’s really the democratization of the media. I think you’ve changed the game of how people now get their information.

But he didn’t change the game, Twitter and other social web companies yes, but not one person, unless you’re talking about the founders and the employees of those companies.

Continue reading ‘Is Ashton Kutcher More Powerful than CNN?’

As more and more of the people I know and the people they know are having kids, I’ve seen more photos popping up on Facebook of newborns and childhood moments. And even though some kids don’t even know how to type, they already have Facebook profiles! It seems the parents are registering their children on Facebook. That was when I realized that the days of embarrassing childhood photos tucked away in dusty albums only visible when visiting the parents are disappearing quickly.

I’m beginning to wonder what kind of consequences their parents’ actions will have on the kids in the future especially since the Internet is forever. There’s already discussion about how Facebook will affect future politicians who are growing up now.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on a new Stanford class on Facebook for Parents (registration has been full since early February) and it’s taught by BJ Fogg, a Facebook researcher at Stanford. He also taught the first course on Facebook apps and the subsequent Psychology of Facebook course. He’s teaching the Facebook for Parents class with his sister who has eight(!) kids. They also have a newsletter. The course plans:

Feb. 19: The ABC’s of Facebook: New user to fanatic
March 5: Ten steps to protect loved ones on Facebook
March 19: Friending, posting & updating: Life skills for the future
April 2: Five ways to stay ahead of kids on Facebook

And their Five Step for Parents on Facebook:

1. Join Facebook.
2. “Friend” your kids.
3. Review your kids’ profile pages.
4. Review who is “friends” with your kids.
5. Select “More About” for your kids.

I don’t know if I completely agree since according to danah boyd’s research, teens “want publics of peers, not publics where creeps and parents lurk“. And checking out the kid’s “friends” when done too much seems like a form of helicopter parenting where parents are asking for roommate switches before their kid starts his or her very first day at college and where parents are going on their kid’s job interviews. (By the way, I gave a presentation about Facebook to College Housing Administrators last year at an international conference and they were amazed at how my university doesn’t release roommate information and were in disbelief as to how parents aren’t freaking out about it.)

As for “friending”, I never friend the students who work for me, but will accept their friend requests and I find that’s true for many of my colleagues. But perhaps it’s different when you talk about the parent/child relationship. Then again, doesn’t some freedom encourage learning instead of sheltering and protecting them in a bubble too much?

When people post photos or other content on Facebook, chances are they’re not thinking about what Facebook can do with them. People are freaking about it now, though (again). The reality is that much of this stuff isn’t news; Facebook has always claimed rights to your photos and content.

Here’s Facebook’s recent Terms of Use statement:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

And one main reason why people are freaking out is the removal of the following text:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

So now Facebook is basically saying you can’t take it back… even if you delete your account. Mark Zuckerberg himself explains that On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information, though.

Maybe I’m not freaking out about this because it’s always been the case that the Internet is forever (my first web page from 1995 still out there in cyberspace proves that). Similarly, Creative Commons licenses can’t be revoked.

So it’s not surprising that there are no take backs and we all agree to the rules of the game when we sign up:

We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change or delete portions of these Terms at any time without further notice. Your continued use of the Facebook Service after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms.

As for me, I don’t post photos I really care about on Facebook (they’re mostly snapshots of people). Instead, I post most photos on Flickr with Creative Commons licenses. I also don’t import the full content of blog posts or write Facebook notes and instead, pull an excerpt from the original source. And I never assume the privacy settings work because you never know, especially since the settings are confusing and unclear that it’s easy to assume you have certain rights and expectations of privacy when it could disappear either through a narrowly communicated policy change or an unexpected technical glitch. Don’t forget about Friendster’s rollout of the anti-stalking anti-privacy feature.

Continue reading ‘Your Facebook Photos, Rights, and Privacy’

The asynchronous nature of email has increased productivity by allowing people to send information and ask questions 24 hours, 7 days a week. Long ago, when you had a thought or question, you’d save it up with others until you had the next meeting or phone call with a person, but now you can just shoot them a quick email and cross it off your own list of things on your mind. And through the constant stream of emails, it can sometimes be difficult to figure out what’s important and what’s not. This becomes worse when you go on vacation.

You come back from vacation and find yourself in email debt and sometimes take some more days to catch up. (I often leave my email and voicemail vacation message up for a day or two so others know I just got back and hopefully assume that I’m likely still catching up.) I know of people who are afraid of going on vacation or even taking a day off fearing the piles of email that will greet them when they return. I have that same problem and worse, since I have a Blackberry, I’ve often ended up checking some email while on vacation with the instinctive rationale that checking email earlier will reduce the mounds of email I’ll have to deal with when I get back.

I like the way danah boyd, famous social networks researcher extraordinaire (and fellow Cal Bear), approaches email while on vacation… Don’t get it.

I believe that email eradicates any benefits gained from taking a vacation by collecting mold and spitting it back out at you the moment you return. As such, I’ve trained my beloved INBOX to reject all email during vacation… You cannot put anything in my queue while I’m away (however lovingly you intend it) and I come home to a clean INBOX. Don’t worry… if you forget, you’ll get a nice note from my INBOX telling you to shove off…

She actually sets up the email system to delete all the email she receives (using a procmail filter rule to /dev/null) and explains further for taking a much needed break after finishing up her PhD degree and before starting her new job with Microsoft Research, even though some people have called her rude for refusing to accept email.

I was curious if danah had done anything about Facebook messages since she researches social networks and Facebook wants to take over the world’s communication mediums. Turns out that her Facebook profile photo directs people to send her email with the message: “No FB msgs; email plz.” which conveniently works with the communication sabbatical.

The email sabbatical method reduces the risk of email debt and having to declare Email Bankruptcy, something Lawrence Lessig, copyright activist and Stanford law professor, did back in 2004. Here’s what he suggests on how to erase email debt:

1. Email everyone waiting for an email from you
2. Apologize and explain politely you’re declaring bankruptcy
3. Request people to send email again if important

If that’s too much, a compromise would be the DMZ method which starts you with an empty inbox. The debt’s still there, but it’s a way to chisel away at the existing debt while trying not to get deeper in debt.

Maybe I’ll try an email sabbatical when I go on my next vacation. I’ve talked to my colleagues about this and the problem that could potentially creep up is getting cc’d on messages. (I get a lot of indirect FYI work emails). One possible solution we discussed is to archive those messages and let the senders know they’re being archived for future reference. However, if you’re being selective about which email gets through, doesn’t that just make you look bad? Plus, you’ll still need to read the cc’d messages when you return which doesn’t get rid of the stress of catching up.

My two friends and I have been hosting a dinner series for our friends and friends of friends called “Dine For Friends” at various restaurants across the Bay Area for over a year. Two weekends ago, for our ninth dinner, we had a mishap with the communication; our dinners normally start at 7pm, but the restaurant only had availability at 8pm, but we had published 7pm as the start time and the problem didn’t get caught and confirmed until about 6:30pm. One of the co-hosts suggested that we mass notified people by texting the phone numbers they submitted with their registration at eventbrite.com (we use Eventbrite to organize the sign-ups).

We were hoping to catch people before they headed out or at least inform them that it would be a good hour before we were seated. Unfortunately, since some of the attendees were friends of friends, some of whom we hadn’t met, entering each new number on a phone would be tedious and would potentially cost $0.50 each to send ($0.25 to send and $0.25 to receive without a text package).

So to reduce the effort and the potential costs, I sent text messages using email. Since we didn’t know each person’s cell phone carrier and email-to-SMS is based on carrier, I picked what I guessed to be the top four in the Bay Area (there are web sites which will do it, but for privacy reasons I wanted to go through the carriers themselves to avoid giving up other people’s phone numbers to some random website):

• AT&T
• Verizon
• T-Mobile
• Sprint

Continue reading ‘Reaching the Mobile Masses’

Almost a year ago, I bought a Roomba for my home. This past weekend, I gave up on it and returned it for the second time (thanks to Costco and their satisfaction guaranteed return policy).

I returned it the first time last December because its side rotating brushes were getting ripped off. I’m guessing they were getting caught in between the crevices between the floor and the moulding and it wasn’t smart enough to reverse the rotating motion and instead yanked its own limbs off.

The second and final time I returned it was because of the rotating brush problem, plus I found that is not well designed for cleaning. One of the rotating parts on the underside would have hair caught in between narrowly spaced plastic separators at the ends, requiring a very small and narrow tool to clear the tightly wound hair out. Until that happened, the Roomba refused to run.

I did like the fact that it transitioned well between carpet and hardwood floors and it even climbed the slight elevation between the hardwood floor and the bathroom tile, though not always and sometimes it closed the door on itself partially because of the way my bathroom is designed. The lighthouses that keep the Roomba confined to one room before moving on didn’t necessarily guide the Roomba to the farthest room, but physically taking the unit and starting it in that room worked fine as a workaround. I especially liked the scheduler feature, but with those two main issues, my place wasn’t ready for a Roomba yet.

If a new Roomba comes out, I wouldn’t mind giving it another chance, though. In the meantime, I’m considering a Dyson instead. Many of my friends have one, but I’m still a bit hesitant because many of them were raving on the Roomba, yet a few don’t really use theirs anymore.

UPDATE 06 Dec 2008: Last week I received a letter from iRobot acknowledging the problem with the rotating side brushes. They offer to replace it, however it’s not clear if the new replacement part is manufactured differently to prevent the brushes from being ripped off again. Since I’ve returned the unit, thankfully I don’t have to deal with it.

College should be about broadening horizons, academic learning, and social development, not about policing file-sharing.

The entertainment industry already has an oh-so-brilliant aggressive campaign to sues its own customers. Now it has convinced Congress to pass a college funding bill with anti-P2P provisions intact under the guise of several higher education benefits with additional provisions:

A statement issued by the joint House and Senate committees responsible for harmonizing the two versions of the bill explains that universities will have to begin authoring formal piracy deterrence plans. The statement also recommends several commercial anti-P2P technologies including Audible Magic’s CopySense Network Appliance and Red Lambda’s Integrity filtering tool. —arstechnica.com

In an info session with a university lawyer, she summed up the requirements of the Higher Education Opportunity Act recently passed by Congress:

1. Education - educating users about illegal file-sharing
2. Technology - having technology in place to combat illegal file-sharing
3. Alternative - providing an alternative to illegal file-sharing

I suppose it’s fortunate that the institution where I work is already doing all three. The first requirement, sure… it makes sense for colleges to educate in general, but requiring them to have technology in place to deter illegal file-sharing and an alternative solution to fight the entertainment industry’s fight is outside the scope of the business of college and some poor (and literally, poorer) colleges will likely be scrounging to meet these requirements. Luckily, Ruckus is free to all college students.

The entertainment industry has not done well in setting an example. The RIAA’s effort on education has big flaws as I mentioned previously, the MPAA has violated copyright law in their enforcement attempts (sounds like the copyright owner had a similar experience as me in having difficulty in contacting them for corrections), and the MPAA has presented grossly inaccurate research results on movie piracy.

Also, there’s been a long standing issue about how the entertainment industry has bullied colleges into allocating their limited resources to do their dirty work yet they are not even significantly contributing to the added cost in personnel, technology, and infrastructure to accomplish this, especially since they are recommending commercial anti-P2P packages.

The mission statements of colleges don’t include any goal even remotely close to playing cop in the file-sharing fight and it shouldn’t. It’s not their place or responsibility. Could the entertainment industry meddle even more into educational institutions and their responsibilities? Unfortunately and sadly, the reality is likely.

While in Hong Kong, I did some sightseeing with some American friends who were part of our group. They hadn’t been in Hong Kong before and my Hong Kong born friend had introduced them to the Octopus card so everyone in our group got this prox card (by paying a deposit), which is a convenient way to pay for public transportation as well as some goods in various shops like grocery stores. (On another note, I’m still waiting for Translink to become fully available in the San Francisco Bay Area.)

One day, our American friends were checking the balance on their card by waving their card using kiosks inside the MTR metro station. The information on the screen appeared in English. I thought I remember seeing the information appear in Chinese so I waved my card and sure enough, it was in Chinese. This might be the case from asking for the card in Cantonese whereas my American friend asked for it in English; it seems that the Octopus is configured based on the language you use with the MTR employee when getting the card. What a great user friendly low-effort idea!

My friend’s parents also recently moved to a new residence and the way they access the building is with a special Octopus card that also has their photo on it. My cousin tells me that the residences providing access control via the Octopus card are managed by the MTR corporation. Brilliant idea since most people in Hong Kong ride the MTR.

I flew on Cathay Pacific with their new seats and noticed that the user interface for the entertainment screens weren’t as intuitive as I thought it would be. It took some confusion to figure out why it wasn’t behaving as expected. While the remote was docked, I expected the arrows to work as oriented; the right arrow becoming the up function, the down arrow becoming the right function. I also witnessed my mom struggling with the selection logic despite the screen displaying text in Chinese. I wondered if they did any user studies before introducing this UI.

Joining the evil forces of the RIAA and MPAA, Hasbro has sued the makers of Scrabulous convincing them to pull their app from Facebook by legal bullying. I wonder if I can get to it while in Asia. In the meantime, according to gawker.com, it seems that you can still play it at their website… not sure how long that will last before Hasbro squeezes them there, too.

They should’ve worked with the app creators to acquire it rather than punishing Scrabulous fans which include the app’s creators. The creators made Scrabble cool again influencing a comeback even for the real wooden tiled game. At work, we even brought the board with the turntable up to our staff retreat because some of us had started playing Scrabulous on Facebook.

New York Times has an article on it - Game Over: Scrabulous Shut Down on Facebook.