I’ve never been so happy disconnecting gear. I cancelled my Verizon FIOS TV today. It was costing a total of about 120/mo for Internet and TV. This included $30/mo in box “rentals”. Initially the boxes were free, but that deal expired. I don’t really watch TV anyway – Netflix streaming though the XBox 360 and XBox Live is a lot nicer than managing a DVR, waiting for things to record, then skipping commercials. Has anyone in cable and/or network TV noticed how obsolete their product is? Even Disk rental via Netflix is better. I also got rid of that crappy ActionTek router that I had spend hours configuring just to get me connection to work right with the TV.

The bad news is that the new connection while better (25 Mb/sec down and up, as compared to 20/5 previously), is more expensive: $70/mo. As I recal, I started out at $40. Verizon no longer offers 20/5. It’s either $55 for 15/5 or $70 for 25/25. The pricing/feature war with Comcast is apparently over. The other thing is that I got an e-mail notifying me of a 1 year contract that was not mentioned by the helpful sales rep, and that I never signed or verbally agreed to. It’s got early termination fees and everything. Wouldn’t it be great if Verizon retained customers on the strength of their service instead of imaginary contract lock-in?

When the 4th generation Touch was announced, I decided it was the to replace my 1st generation. Mainly it was the inclusion of the cameras and the mic. Finally this thing is a real portable Internet appliance.

The resolution has taken me by surprise. It’s really true, I can’t see any pixels even with no vision correction and the thing 8″ from my eyes. That, and the faster processor are worth the price alone.

It’s an iPad killer.

It looks as though someone has hacked my wordpress installation. I’ve found some javascript in the footer template and removed it. I hope that fixes it. Looks like I need to update my installation, and maybe check some other things.

I’ve also upgraded to wordpress 3.0.1. Things should be safe now – we’ll see if google agrees.

I was thinking about why Facebook is so popular, despite really adding nothing new to the Internet. It’s really the packaging: type in a URL, go there, look for friends, read posts, post things, etc. Anyone can do it. The downsides: confusion about how it works – who sees what, privacy issues, and the fact that it’s really just a spam engine, are generally lost on less sophisticated users.

Before trying to tackle the usablity and packaging issues, I think it would be interesting to come up with a guide on how to do social networking with standard, open protocols, open source tools, etc., in a way that lets the participants own their network. With this first instalment of what I hope is a series, I want to lay out what social networking on the internet really is, at a conceptual and user scenario level. I’m going to ramble a bit, but this is a blog, not a textbook, so cut me some slack.

To get started, you need a way to find people and initiate a connection. This connection has privileges – people you’re connected to see your broadcast information, and information they send to you, either directly, or broadcast, gets special treatment. For now, let’s call this list of people a whitelist. Facebook treats these connections as reciprocal, but I’m not sure they have to be.
So there are two steps to getting started: finding people, and asking for permission/participation in communication.

Finding People
The history of the internet makes this difficult. E-mail addresses are the most important way to identify people, as they are unique. But we there’s no easy way to find someone’s e-mail address. Also, people’s e-mail addresses change over time. Worse still, the history of spam, malware, and scams has made people understandably hesitant to publish there e-mail address.
So we’re left with services/sites like Facebook and linked-in, Google profiles, as well as simple web searches to find people and a way to contact them.

White-Lists
For e-mail, white-lists can be implemented in the e-mail client via filters. Blogs such as WordPress can be configured so that comments require moderation. Once a comment has been approved, the sender of the comment is essentially whitelisted.

Once we have our network, in the form of people and their whitelists, we need to have some means of communication. I think there are three important types:

1) Direct
A direct, person-to-person communication. Examples are e-mail to a single person, or an IM message.

2) Multicast
A direct communication to a list of recipients. E-mail lists, and e-mails with multiple recipients are multicast communication.

3) Broadcast
In essence, this is publishing information on the web, often via a blog, or a posting on some other web site.

Note that one large issue with Facebook is that its users are lead to believe that their postings are Multicast (to their Friends), but in fact they’re essential Broadcast, via Facebooks’ Friend-of-Friend exposure, plus their willingness to provide APIs to partners, and the general complexity of their privacy model and its implications.

My reasons are pretty simple. I want to own my content. I don’t want my social network monetized for corporate benefit, or at least I don’t want to contribute to that effort. A proprietary walled garden is bad for the internet as a means of free expression and communication.

I’ve been on e-mail since 1988, and run this site and been on IM since 1999. All that will continue.

The Internet has always been about social networks. Take control!

I’ve been on the fence about Facebook for a while now, and recent erosion of their privacy policies, and general annoyance with it as a user has tipped me off. It’s not so much that I’m worried about my personal privacy. After all, I have this blog, my work is on the internet, and has been for some time. It’s more that I have a problem with the idea of a business model that monetizes personal connections and information. In short, the only way I’d be happy with Facebook is if it failed as a business.

It’s not that I see inherent evil about making money on social networking, it’s just that I’d prefer to pay for the service directly. For example, this blog has no advertisements and costs me money to run. I pay Media Temple, and they keep the servers running. I’d love to see a subscription-based, advertising-free social networking site. But for now, I’m going back to this blog as my opt-in, broadcast medium. People who need to find me can use Google, Facebook or various other means on the open Internet to find it. For my part, I’m going to try and update it more frequently. For your part, if you have a blog or personal site, send it on over, and I’ll put a link to it here.

I’m also going to think about what it would take to build a community-driven, non-profit social networking site. It might be something as simple as a white-list service, where you’d define who you’d like to send broadcast messages to, and who you’re willing to accept broadcast messages from. The technical site would just link up e-mail and messaging as a minimum. On the legal side, I’d like to set it up as some sort of foundation that can never be sold for it’s assets (user-base); an issue many non-profits have to take care of to be able to assure their contributors aren’t sold down the river.

Back in October, I joined the ranks of those speculating about the IPad, stating that it should really be just a bigger IPhone. Well, it seems Apple agreed, and delivered a bigger IPhone, much to everyone’s universal praise and condemnation. The media coverage and general noise is kind of frightening, and even I have to add one more post to it.

I won’t be buying one, as I don’t have $500 to blow on upgrading my IPod touch, or money for a cellular data plan. If I did, I’d rather spring for an Android mobile phone, or wait for an Android or Lunix-based tablet, mainly because the closed-source, walled-garden approach is not something I can continue to feel good about supporting, and is already lagging behind more open technology and business models (see IPhone cut and paste, lack of IPad camera(s), etc.).

So, great prototype, Apple.

I’ve taken my photo gallery offline. It’s seeing constant comment spam attacks, and there appears to be no easy way to stop them. I’ll probably move the content elsewhere, either on a platform that allows disabling comments effectively, or move to the “cloud” via flickr or some such crappy site.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of this attack – the legitimate traffic on my gallery is between 10-20 hits a day – almost nothing. The comment spam bots hit it with 2000 hits a day. What’s worse, is that this loads the mysql server at media temple such that they’re requiring that I pay an additional $20/mo for a mysql “container” – some sort of extra virtual machine. I run a Captcha, and I’ve turned off access to comments. There must be some
hole in Gallery 2, as I’m still getting spam.

This is all because of spammers attempts to get page ranking on their scam sites by inserting links in comments on my gallery. The fact that Google is onto this gaming, and the comment spam has no effect doesn’t matter.

So, I’m annoyed at having to take time out of my day to address this, and ultimately lose the ability for independent participation on the Internet via my photo gallery. The Internet as an open, independent, non-commercial medium is at risk without regulation and enforcement to stop these chilling effects. Without regulation, all the internet will be is Google, flicker, Facebook, and MSN, soon to be mega-merged into a single AOL-like “service” .

The document metaphor paved the way for the mass adoption of personal computing, providing a set of concepts and language that most users were already familiar with. This metaphor is so pervasive it’s really hard for us to step aside from it now, roughly 30 years later. Even on the web, where we’re being weaned off of Documents little by little is still primarily built around the transmission of documents at its core.

Early on, Documents solved the problem of user adoption and translation of work processes to computers and networks. But since then, work process and users have evolved, and the problems preserved become more and more onerous. It’s time to take of the training wheels and ride the bike.

The biggest problem with Documents is managing the copies. The web grew out of hypertext and networking as a means of solving this problem, providing URLs as a way of safely referencing remote documents, rather than having to have copies locally available. This grand vision has been partially successful in reducing the need for copies. But some copies are made to preserve various states of documents over time, resulting in version control issues that are solvable, but introduce a level of complexity that is difficult for most users to manage.

In practice, documents are created, forwarded via e-mail, editing, forwarded again, creating a sea of mostly-redundant documents riddled with small changes, some irrelevant, and some of critical importance. The e-mail trail leaves little or no meta-data to distinguish one copy or set of changes from another. Software developers have used source-code control systems to manage copies and versions with great success, but these systems are difficult for non-programmers to use.

Another problem with Documents is a multitude of formats and media types, and lack of accepted standards for them. This means that many documents are only usable for users on specific computers with specific software packages installed. Once again, the web has partially solved this problem with standard formats and rendering definitions, though it has been a constant battle to preserve a universal standard, with competing corporations intentionally departing from standards to stake out their territory. This is a particular problem with media such as sound and video.

What does the world look like without documents? For the most part, it’s already here: Wiki’s, Blogs, and search engines. Sharing information via a wiki is really the most effective solution. Search engines solve issues about cataloguing and largely eliminate the need for taxonomy.

Web applications such as wikis and blog software help with the format problem by relying on web standards, and can also streamline version and change management, as well as attribution. Information can be copied from these sites for convienence or off-line reference, but there’s not any doubt about where to find the authoritative version.

What does this mean for Microsoft Office, OOXML, Open Office and Google Docs? It’s means they’re a waste of time, a large vestigial organ of computing. The key problems going forward are Internet Standards, better connectivity, security auditing, support a diverse set of devices, and backup and archival of information on the web.

I frequent various on-line forums to follow my interests, and much of the interaction is participation in forum or discussion software. One example is Seasoned Gamers, and community founded by a group of adults that played Halo 2 on XBox Live. Seasoned Gamers has since taken on a life of its own, beyond Live, Halo, and even beyond gaming. Due to its origins via Live, member’s identities use a gamer tag, which is required to be unique across all of XBox Live.

My Live gamer tag is gregnnn, a minor variation of my real name. Most folks use gamer tags that are completely different from their real name. I’ve interacted with this group for a bit more than three years now, and I identify members by gamer tag. Both Season Gamers’ forums and Live use avatars – small-ish icons or pictures to visually identify individuals.

There are a couple of problems with the use of gamer tags and avatars as on-line identity. The biggest of these is that people change them. People change avatars from time to time, and some folks even change their gamer tags. This can dilute or destroy identity, in the same way than changing your name and your appearance periodically in real life would make it hard for your friends to keep track of you. Given the global uniqueness requirement, many gamer tags are unpronouceable and hard to distiguish. This makes it hard for me to recognize some folks, and I often find myself mixing up identities.

The other problem is that this on-line identity is separate from your real identity. Maintaining some anonymity has it’s uses, particularly if you don’t want to suffer the consequences of your on-line persona’s actions in real life. But the downside is that you’ve diluted your presence and subjected everyone to a mapping problem between your identities. I wouldn’t depend on the use of an on-line persona as means of protecting your personal privacy, or insulation from you behaviour on-line. Most people do not have the knowledge, skills and discipline to stay completely untraceable on-line.

So, I’ve come to some conclusions about on-line identity and its uses:

Pick One
Don’t dilute yourself across multiple identities. I’d go with your real name unless privacy is really important to you. Whatever you pick, use it everywhere, that is, one user name, one e-mail address. Mine is: Greg Nichols/gregnnn/greg@atomicspatula.com. If I could own nichols.com I’d buy it in a second. Note: Atomic Spatula isn’t me, it’s a place.

Make it Good
It’s fun to see people who start out with Live gamer tags come to grips with their mistake, realizing that ” xXx LeetSniper xXx” isn’t going to play well for a 30 year-old adult on a forum about gardening. If it’s not your real name, pick something that you’re comfortable with everyone using everywhere. As for avatars, I’d go with a reasonable headshot. I like Seth Godin’s recommendations on this, though I’d say there’s a lot more at stake than your “personal brand”. Us humans have invested millions of years of evolution into facial recognition. It would be silly not to use it. I use my real name where possible, and I really need a better head-shot avatar that I’ve got right now.

Don’t Change It.
Changing names or avatars is something you should do very rarely. It’s akin to plastic surgery or name changes in real life, and not something you’d do on a whim.

Finally, I’d consider what the goals are in maintaining an on-line identity. You’d like it to be the foundation of personal recognition that you build a reputation on, whether it’s for professional purposes or purely social interactions.