Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Twitter's appeal: People love the mundane

I'll have to admit, this Twitter grows on you.

A couple of years ago, I hadn't even heard of Twitter, and even a year ago I wondered what the point of it was.

Twitter is called a "microblogging service," which allows one to post whatever he wants online, as long as it's no more than 140 characters. Twitter basically asks the question, what are you doing now?

And most of the posts (called "tweets" in Twitter parlance) indicate that a lot of people have no real life, and should stay away from computers. I mean, how many posts about the mundane can you endure?

It's this mundane stuff that seems to be much of Twitter's appeal. And, it's become huge. According to ComputerWorld, people are tweeting from the car, the theater, from restaurants, even from the can. But, the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology studied these short messages -- actually from Jaiku, a microblogging platform that Twitter is practically edging out of existence -- and suggests most of the posts are beyond inane. And the Oxford University Press studied 1.5 million "tweets" and came to the same conclusion.

Newsweek columnist Daniel Lyons calls Twitter "a playground for imbeciles, skeevy marketers, D-list celebrity half-wits, and pathetic attention seekers," citing folks like Shaquille O'Neal, Kim Kardashian, znd Ryan Seacrest as regulars in TwitLand.

"It's morbidly fascinating, kind of like the forbidden thrill you get watching Maury Povich's show or professional wrestling," Lyons wrote. "You know it's awful. You know you shouldn't enjoy it, yet you can't look away. That, I'm afraid to say, is why I've come to believe that, of all the hellish things that have been spawned in the fever swamp that is the Internet, Twitter may turn out to be the most successful of them all—not in spite of its stupidity, but because of it."

Lyons said that one recent study -- though he didn't cite it in his article, so the findings are immediately suspect -- said that 40 percent of tweets were "pointless babble." Only 40 percent? My own study, using a time-honored methodology called "pulling numbers out of my butt," suggests close to 70 percent of tweets are mindless, worthless wastes of server space.

Shoot, I don't want to know what you're having for dinner, unless I'm invited. I personally don't give a rip that you're going to the bathroom now, and I REALLY don't want to know how it came out. Are we on the same page here?

Twitter is one of those things where the machine is invented first and you find out what you can use it for later. And, so far, a few put it to good use. It was someone on Twitter who brought us up to speed, real-time, on the election protests in Iran a few months ago. Someone else used the microblogging service to send us the first pictures of that plane crash in the Hudson River in January, the one where the pilot did such an incredible job of keeping all his passengers alive.

I've picked up a few blog ideas from tweets, and some interesting reading has come my way through Twitter. A few job leads. And, I notice businesses use Twitter to introduce product lines, throw out ideas, you name it. Used properly (and I'm sure there's a trick to it), one with good leadership chops can build his own ready-made parade to get in front of.

When you do the Twitter thing, you find out who else is using that service, and you may elect to "follow" a person. Or someone else may opt to follow you. For a minute that seemed too strange for words, like I'm being stalked or something. But that's how word about something can get out quickly. I have a mixed bag of followers on Twitter. Most are legit, the kind of folks I wouldn't mind chatting with over some coffee. But other followers are nothing but smarmy hucksters with an agenda. But since I'm the one making the tweets, I'm calling the shots. I'm pretty selective about who I follow, but am less discriminate about who chooses to follow me. Hey, if the sketchier followers click on the link and make it to this article (and if they're not easily offended), we're all cool with it.

Admittedly, I wasn't really sure what to do with my Twitter account once I opened it. I used it for a while for short, newsy items via text message directly into a sidebar on one of my blogs -- like dispatches from last November's election -- until I found out how to post directly to the blog from my cell phone. But after that I figured out how I can use Twitter.

I'm finding it another vehicle for getting word out on my blogs. Both -- The Column, Reloaded and The Workbench, Reloaded -- automatically drop links into Twitter through a service called Twitterfeed, so you can open my prose directly from there. As soon as I started using that, my readership jumped considerably.

Occasionally I'll send out a tweet on something else I'm working on, sort of a teaser for this blog. I've done this from the computer, and often via text message from my phone. (If you see a ~E at the end of a tweet -- or a short blog entry -- it means I turned my cell phone into remote control. I love showing off.)

Ooooh, I'm doing something really stupidly mundane now, and I've got to let my followers know all about it. A 140-character review to follow.

(Lest I forget: Follow me on Twitter!)



Plug-in turns Explorer into nemesis Google browser

Who would've thunk it?

So you don't like Internet Explorer. You'd rather play hand grenade volleyball than use IE to browse the web, but the computer isn't yours. It may be one of those work-issued laptops and you're stuck with what you have.

Google came out with a plug-in that basically turns IE into Google Chrome. I find the whole concept a real hoot, as there is no love lost between Google and Microsoft. According to TechCrunch:

... Google seems to dislike IE so much that it has spent its own time improving it. Google claims its goals are noble. Talking to Group Product Manager Mike Smith and Software Engineer Alex Russell, they tell us that they simply want to make a more seamless web experience for both web users and developers. That said, they are only targeting one browser, IE, right now ... and that seems fair. IE, which is of course made by Google nemesis Microsoft, is both the largest web browser and the one with a poor history when it comes to web standards. Things have gotten better since IE6, but that’s really not saying much ...

The way I understand it, ChromeFrame builds a whole new frame inside of IE that is really the Google browser. You'll lose some resources because you're running two browsers, but Chrome is plenty fast. Even with the extra load on your system, using the "fake" Chrome on top of IE is still a sight faster than running IE straight.

Years ago, before I discovered Mozilla, I came across what was then called Crazy Browser. It also ran on top of IE, but it offered a popup blocker and tabbed browsing. At the time, popup blocking was in its infancy (you needed a third-party application to do it), and tabbed browsing -- the greatest invention for ADHD Web surfers -- was still several years in coming for IE though Mozilla was playing with a kludgy rough draft of it. And even on my dial-up connection, Crazy Browser was blistering fast. I found this especially amazing because IE (I was then using the abortion called IE 6) was, to put it kindly, glacial. Call it fuzzy math -- extra memory used to run Crazy Browser atop the IE framework should not equal faster, but it really did.

Crazy Browser more or less disappeared off the face of the Web, but I see it's back. Just for grins, I downloaded it to check it out.

I've tested out the real Chrome, and I like it so far. It's a little goofy in handling bookmarks, but I think most of that is because I'm not used to it. It's a fast browser -- to my nonscientific touch-annd-feel tests, it's right up there with Opera in the speed department, and of course it handles my Google applications easily. For the most part, though, I use it for posting blogs and little else. I'll admit I haven't really scratched the surface as far as Chrome's capabilities; I don't know if it has all the extensions and plug-ins you'll find in, say, Firefox, but it's a whole lot better than using IE.


In case you're interested, you can get ChromeFrame here.


Torvalds: Creeping feature-itis bloats Linux

Linus Torvalds is getting nervous about the growth of his creation.

At a LinuxCon conference in Portland, Oregon, Torvalds said the Linux operating system is "bloated."

In 1991 Torvalds, then a student in Finland, created the original Linux kernel -- the base of the free operating system -- and is still involved in developing the kernel.


... while the open-source community has long pointed the finger at Microsoft's Windows as bloated, it appears that with success has come added heft, heft that makes Linux "huge and scary now," according to Torvalds ...

My own thoughts here: You mean he finally figured this out?

Before the DVD became popular, the size of a Linux download was measurable in CDs. I always preferred the smaller, lighter versions that would take up, at most, one CD. One version of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, though, weighed in at 14 CDs.

This bloat factor took off as Linux packagers tried to make a more user-friendly (read: more like Windows) system. And one of the selling points of Linux -- that you can run it on computers long deemed obsolete with each new version of Windows, became more of a stretch.

My own favorite Linux distribution, the Slackware-based Vector Linux, morphed in the past few years from a run-on-anything download of less than 400 megabytes to a bit over 700 megabytes. More features, more eye candy, but ... more bloat. To be sure, you can still get some extremely usable out-of-the-box versions that can run on anything from a Pentium on up, but they're getting a) harder to find and b) less visually appealing than before.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Firefox now on more than half of computers

I'm glad to see I'm finally in the majority about something here. Firefox is my go-to browser (I'm using version 3.5.3).


This is from MozillaZine. Have to admit, this site is a little biased, as Firefox comes from Mozilla. I feel better, though, that they quote from other sources:

... it finally happened. After years of building momentum -- and more than a few false starts -- Mozilla's Firefox Web browser has finally reached critical mass. There are now more users running some variant of Firefox (50.6 percent) than not running it, according to the latest statistics from the exo.performance.network, which tracks the actual usage and configurations of thousands of PCs globally, providing a real-world snapshot ...

A couple of things come to my attention here. Firefox is not normally bundled on Windows computers. To get it, you have to take the initiative and download it. This suggests users are getting more savvy about their computers, and less likely to use whatever software set they're given.

And it's an indicator of how lacking Internet Explorer really is.

I've fooled around with nearly all the browsers that are used these days -- IE, Firefox, Seamonkey (which is really just the old Mozilla code with a new name on it), Opera (which I really like), Google Chrome (which is promising), and Netscape (which still exists). Plus a handful of browsers you may not have heard of -- Lynx, Konqueror, Skipstone, and eLinks. Not to mention Iceweasel, a rebranded version of Firefox which is more in line with the the GNU (free software) user agreement.

I do have my crochets with Firefox. I've had problems with it blowing up in memory and eating system resources like popcorn, though it seems to be less of an issue with 3.5. And it's real easy to load up extension after extension, making it one real bloated piece of software. But I still recommend Firefox.

People may pay $100 bounty to crack your Facebook account

It's a jungle out there.


... security vendor PandaLabs has discovered an online service offering to help those so inclined to hack into any Facebook account they choose for a price: $100 ...

Be careful out there!

A totally peripheral note: Must these idiots be referred to as "hackers?" Ask anyone in the programming community, especially those folks who create some really good free software. They call themselves hackers, and it's not the same thing. Hackers build things, they say, while "crackers" tear things down.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Careful of the ad, even if source is copacetic

This is must reading if you spend any time online.

... while reading the New York Times online, I was confronted with an attempted security attack, apparently delivered through an advertisement. A window popped up, mimicking an antivirus scanner. After "scanning" my computer, it reported finding viruses and invited me to download a free antivirus scanner. The displays implied, without quite saying so, that the messages came from my antivirus vendor and that the download would come from there too. Knowing how these things work, I recognized it right away as an attack, probably carried by an ad. So I didn't click on anything, and I'm fairly certain my computer wasn't infected ...

Source: Freedom To Tinker blog.

Like the man so tiresomely said in Hill Street Blues, "Be careful out there."


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