tech

There are 188 posts filed in tech (this is page 14 of 19).

Year of Social

The season is changing and here, in Boulder, Colorado, it means colder nights and shorter days. It’s time for animals to wrap up their food gathering operations and finish working on cozy homes for the all too familiar winter.

 

This hibernation is also coming to a very important aspect of my life. Last year, at about the same time, I dumped Facebook in favor of Twitter. I had been inactive on the micro blog since long and returned to it, only to discover so many new and amazing connections and services. I found people worth talking to and got help where I needed it. I also posted a lot on this blog here, taking it through many iterations, themes and (free) hosting providers. Now I’ve moved it to a paid provider – NearlyFreeSpeech in order to maintain a better uptime ratio.

Continue reading →

An iPhone 5 video

Here’s an article I found on iClarified that shows the iPhone 5 being compared to a puny 4S and then being booted up. The metallic sides of the phone have given way to a more subtle look and the audio port has been moved to the bottom of the phone.

Interesting… 🙂

Here’s the actual video…
http://youtu.be/kaVzt-_zajE

Of late, I’ve noticed that Gawker is too much of a tongue in cheek blog. Most of their headlines are scathing, almost as if they’re doing so to get more hits on the site. First they criticized App.net and called it snobbish and a waste of money and now they published a headline about Obama on Reddit that sounded like they got paid by the anti-Obama camp to do the headline. I don’t understand why they’re doing it and if it’s succeeding, but this gold-digging behavior on Gawker’s part does not bode well for the website. No one wants to keep listening to the lone rants of an angry man (both articles are by Adrian Chen) and we as netizens would much rather look at brighter sides of the stories than concentrate on the first bad thing that comes to mind.

App Review: Prismatic

First of all, this is a dual review – the Prismatic web and iOS apps. Secondly, I’d like to start by saying that both apps are awesome! You can pretty much stop here if you want to and go download Prismatic for iOS or go to http://getprismatic.com/ to sign up.

What makes me talk about Prismatic with so much confidence and what the heck is it?

Prismatic is a news reader app. It’s in the line with Google Reader, Flipboard, Pulse and a hundred others. But what makes the iOS app so amazing is that it’s optimized for speed. The company took a lot of time (literally) to build an iOS app that matches the awesomeness of it’s web app. They built everything from scratch so much so that even Apple sent them a letter saying that it’s Engineers are looking into how an app can be designed so well.

I am definitely keeping the app on my iPhone and also as a favorite web page. But I’ve got a beef with the app makers.

1. Why concentrate on only things you find in my social networks? When we first sign up, we have the option of connecting our social networks so that the app can monitor our likes and allow us to choose which ones it’ll be displaying to us. But this is not adequate. I read a lot of news and I hate it when my apps display duplicate news items. This app, in all it’s glory, still duplicates most of the news I read because it just finds my preferences through my social networks. Instead, I’d prefer if the app extrapolated from those preferences and worked to get related news to me.

2. The web app and the iOS one both have a serious deficiency of “read later” or bookmarking services. Given that most news articles of value are longer than a couple of lines and it takes the average reader a lot longer to read it, a read later service is a must for news apps.

I hope the team at Prismatic understands the above problems and fixes them. It’s a great app and I’d love to continue using it. BTW, if you’ve read about this app elsewhere, you’ve read people calling it a Google Reader killer. Is it? No, it’s not.

App Review: Everyday.me

Whenever a trend comes to the social network scene, it comes with a flood of apps and services that do the exact same thing. I recently signed up for a service called TimeHop. It’s a neat service that emails you every day with details of posts that you made on your various social networks exactly a year ago.

 

Everyday.me is an iOS app that connects to your Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts and basically records everything you post online every day. Also, the service sends you emails every few days reminding you of things you did a few years ago. Sounds familiar? Yep, TimeHop does pretty much the same thing. What’s the difference? Well, Everyday.me collects all that information that you post daily and saves it ON THEIR SERVERS. Awesome way to have your data protected isn’t it?

 

Anyways, Coming to the most important part of this blog post, Am I keeping this app? Points –

1. Beautiful UI

2. You can see all you do in a stream, from across all your social networks.

3. You can tag your  posts for your own reference since all of it is totally private

4. All your data that’s kept on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram will now also be stored on their servers.

 

So? Am I keeping it? No. It’s out of my phone. Sorry guys!

Devil’s Advocate: Why you shouldn’t be worried about App.net’s culture

After I wrote about App.net’s apparent culture problem today in this post, I read some more about it. Specifically, I went ahead and read the API Spec. Then, I came upon this article by Matthew Ingram on GigaOm that talked about how App.net is not really a twitter clone but a lot more than that. The article makes a pretty important point. So, going with the flow, here’s my two cents about how the article I wrote earlier might just be wrong –

When we look at App.net as common users, we see a stream of posts, a lot of apps that are being built on top of it and the customary box asking us our thoughts. That’s the face of the App.net Alpha as we see it right now. But let’s step back and look at what Dalton had promised us. Dalton talked about a realtime feed, a financially sustainable API and a viable solution to today’s ad-supported social network conundrum. But enough of the lengthy words. In essence, Dalton promised us a platform and an API. That’s it. Above and beyond that, he pretty much said, go, do whatever you want to. Continue reading →

How will App.net’s Culture grow?

I’ve been reading a lot of discussion on App.net about how the concept of reblogging/retweeting is going to grow on the network. Since I don’t know how the idea of a retweet (RT) grew on Twitter, I went hunting for information. Turns out, Wikipedia details out the growth of the RT on twitter in this article here. Turns out, the concept of using @ to signify a user and RT to signify a re-post grew organically among twitter users around 2008. This troubled my mind a bit. So, in essence, the growth of culture on twitter was independent of what the company wanted and instead, was in the hands of the users.

Now we come to a discussion on App.net. This discussion right here – Echoes, RPs and “>>” talks about people using the “Share” button on Google Chrome via an extension called Succynct by developer and App.net member Abraham Williams. The point to note is that since the platform is still in it’s infancy, a proper lingo for re-posting has not yet been decided and the creator, Dalton Caldwell has just been using the lingo “RP” for RePost. The conversation flows to discuss the concepts of “>>” and finally, that of “Echo”. Here is where the biggest problem lies. The developer, having a distaste for “>>”, says that in the next build of his extension, he’ll consider adding the “Echo” keyword.

App.net started as a way to hand over control of the flow of conversation to the people. The promise is that no longer will we be plagued by advertisements and spam bots. The promise did not talk about who would have control over the ideas and the culture. This means that people building on top of App.net have the ultimate control. Now here’s the thing – A common user of App.net pays $50 per year while a developer pays $100. Obviously, there will be a lot fewer developers than users. This also means that those making all the apps, extensions and services on top of App.net will be very few. Compare this with Facebook, Twitter and other ad-supported networks. Anyone can get up and create an app. Thus, the onus of deciding lingo rests either on the common users who popularize concepts (as in the case of Twitter) or in the hands of the company (Facebook).

App.net is pretty young right now and because of the promise made to it’s users, the company has rested control of the culture into the hands of the common users. Or maybe not. The disparity between paying users and paying developers means that a concentrated few will get to decided how things formulate. The reason, if it’s not clear to everyone is that a lot of users for all social networks nowadays are mobile. That means that the default web interface for App.net is not going to dictate culture as well as iOS apps do. Even when users are on their desktops, extensions like Succynct will rule the platform and create culture.

Maybe these predictions will come true and maybe not. But the fact remains that as long as App.net retains this business model, the power to create something on top of it will not be in the hands of the masses. Perhaps when App.net has proven it’s point and penetrated a large chunk of the market, it should revisit it’s developer strategy and open doors to many more people, thus making sure that it remains true to it’s goals.