Archive for January, 2007

Why I’m not going to review Vista

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at January 31, 2007 in Reviews, Software and Features. 2 Comments

Reviewing offline software is a bit out of the scope of this blog. But still, since I’ve been spending a couple of weeks with Vista, I thought I’ll write a detailed review. But I won’t. Here’s why.

The thing is, it has some good points, it has some bad points, and it has some mediocre points.

But my overall impression is that it’s just not that important. Not Vista or Windows, but a desktop OS in general. The world has changed in the last 6 years. Desktop OS is not the be all and end all of your computer experience. Six years ago you wanted to start your computer up, open up your applications, and work as fast and as efficient as possible. Now, you don’t really want that anymore. You need that. You expect that. Those are the basics. You want something else.

What you want now is to get online, and you want the web to work the best it can, because the web is your new playground.

Of course, you need your applications and games to work. But let’s get realistic: they worked in WinXP, they (except the games) work in OS X, and they work in Linux. New versions of applications will come out and they’ll work with Vista perfectly even if some of them stutter at this moment. But all that is nothing to get excited about. Are you excited when a plumber comes to your house and swaps some old pipes with new ones? Didn’t think so.

You know which applications I used mostly in my couple of weeks with Vista? Besides Firefox, they were: Gmail, a couple of CMSs for the sites I work for, Netvibes, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, a text editor and a bit of Photoshop. Although I write all day (and night), I’ve barely felt the need to open Office 2007, although I have it installed. And you know what? All those worked exactly the same in WinXP. If you’re a gamer, you can get mildly excited over Vista and DirectX10. But not right now, as the games don’t work any better yet. I did, though, try out over a dozen really cool new Web 2.0 applications. But I didn’t need Vista to do that.

The analysts which predict that this will be the last ‘big’ version of Windows are probably right. It’s just not a big deal anymore. Let’s get over it and enjoy the web, cause that’s where the fun’s at.

Save your passwords with PassPack

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Stan Schroeder

at January 31, 2007 in Reviews, Web and Features. 7 Comments

PassPack is a new service that enables you to store your passwords online. You can access them from anywhere using your ID and master password, in this case called “Packing Key”. According to the folks at PassPack, the data is encrypted on the server in such a way that noone (not even them) can see it, except you.

You can read about the details here.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you should try out this service. I’m saying that, if you use a password to access more than 5 sites on the web (in my case, it’s several hundred), it’s a must. When you need a password to access several sites, chances are you’re either:

a) using the same password in all of them
b) constantly forgetting your passwords
c) have your passwords written on a piece of paper or in a file somewhere

For obvious reasons, none of these three options are any good from the security point of view.

Personally, I use a system of passwords which enables me to create a dozen or two variations on the same - relatively strong, from an encryption point of view - set of characters. I use the simple variations for less important services, and more complex one for important ones. This is good, but sometimes I forget which one I’ve used and I have to try out 5-10 combinations to see which one I used in a particular case.

But, now that I’ve found this little service, I’m going to switch to PassPack. It’s simple, it’s helpful, and it works. Register with them, choose a master password, and add your logins and passwords (you can add a note to each one), so you can finally start forgetting them and stop worrying about them.

I’m suggesting two possible ways of using PassPack.

1. You trust them 100%, and you keep all of your passwords there. Simple.

2. If you’re not really convinced that keeping your really important personal information online or in this particular service, then you just use it for non-critical passwords. You know, passwords for all those services you’ve stumbled upon on the web, and you use them but you don’t keep any really important data there. On the other hand, you keep your absolutely critical personal stuff locked in a safe.

I’m going to do the latter. If you’re a Web 2.0 enthusiast, you should try it out too - or suffer eternal damnation in the hell of forgotten passwords.

Goodbye email, it’s time to move on.

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at January 30, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0, Features and News. 3 Comments

From the perspective of many users, email is still a pretty useful and reliable service. But looking at all email traffic, we understand that what we call “email” is actually a tiny part of a huge network of zombie computers designed with one goal: to forcefully advertise products to unwilling recipients.

According to the latest reports, 94% of e-mail in December was spam.

Think about it. If your phone rang a hundred times a day, and only 6 calls were actual calls and not people trying to sell you stuff you don’t need, would you use it? Would you invent clever ways to recognize fake calls and only answer the real ones, or would you give up and move to another way of communicating?

Sure, we do have clever spam filters which make email bearable for us. We don’t notice the 94% of spam - we’re smart and we know how to recognize what’s good and what’s useless. But aren’t we wasting time with it? Email isn’t particularly fast. It’s not even particularly versatile. It’s not secure. It’s not good for sending large files. Why do we use it, then?

Well, since it’s embedded into the Internet on the protocol level, it’s still universally considered two things: reliable and official. Unfortunately, the first argument doesn’t really stand anymore, while the second is only in our minds. How can something be reliable if 94% of it is crap? Email is usually delivered, but even this is not a given. Emails can be faked, addresses spoofed, they can be delayed, the mail server can die and the messages may never reach the destination. Can you imagine a service that has the same level of reliability, or even better? Plenty. Most P2P networks are just as reliable.

Lastly, email is only considered “official” because we think of it that way. A usual conversation in the office starts with “Hey can you…” and ends with “OK, just send me an official email”. Why not an IM? Well, because it’s not official then. I fail to see the difference. But nevermind - even if we keep on thinking of email as the official way of internet communication, this doesn’t stop us at trying new methods. Instant messaging was accepted well; some other service in the future might also be accepted well.

So, what’s my alternative? Web 2.0. It’s about two important things - moving to the Web as a platform, and social networking. This means that we’re not bound to use old Internet protocols. And it means that we are enabled to communicate in many different ways. By its definition, it will make email obsolete.

Should we completely leave email behind? No. It still offers a way to identify yourself. It can be faked, yes, but it does give you a vast amount of credibility over being simply anonymous on the web. That’s why almost all Web 2.0 services require an email for registration. I’ve got an email address pointed out on this site, but it’s not for communication. It’s for identification and initializing communication. If I really want to communicate with someone, I use Meebo. Or Campfire. Email is good for letting me know that you exist, but it sucks for communication. But, I won’t stand in your way. If you like, you can still keep using email. It’s going to be you, 5 of your friends and 94 spammers in a small room. I’m moving on to something better.

Google search now compares local businesses

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Stan Schroeder

at January 30, 2007 in Tips, Web, Web 2.0 and News. 0 Comments

If you type a name of business or service together with a location into Google Search, you will now get a quick comparison of local businesses and services, and - if available - an extract from Google Maps pointing to their location. It seems to work best with a specifically structured query - name_of_business near/in place.

Here are several queries that I’ve tried out and that work:
computer shops near los angeles
concert halls near london
pet shops in paris
which cinema new york

Have in mind that ‘shops near London‘ works, but, if you write ‘shops London‘ it doesn’t work. So, although Google nowhere specifically says so, at the moment it’s best to use the “service near/in place” structure.

*Update: Upon further testing, I’ve found a weird quirk with the service. It doesn’t work at all if you go through a localized Google page, such as www.google.hr. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like having different Google results in different localizations. It’s confusing, and mildly annoying.

You are initially presented with only a couple local business and services, but you can click on “More local business results” and you’ll get a Google Map with many more results. Another important thing, noticed by Apogee Weblog is that AdWords advertisers probably won’t like this, as it draws attention away from the ads. However, Google is (hopefully) about search and not about ads, so I guess that this is the type of sacrifice both Google and advertisers will have to make every now and then.

Media 2.0 Workgroup launches

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Stan Schroeder

at January 29, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 1 Comment

Anyone who’s following the development of Web 2.0 services has heard about the Web 2.0 Workgroup - a group of influential sites which are - each in its respective category - digging through the core of what’s new in Web 2.0 arena.

Now Media 2.0 Workgroup has launched, covering - as they say -” Radio, TV, Traditional Media Outlets, News, Entertainment, Movies, Music, Game Consoles“, as they “all have an opportunity to innovate by ‘getting social’, and each will be impacted by and contribute to the transformative effects of Media 2.0.”

You can find more information about the Media 2.0 Workgroup and what they’re about here.

Members of Media 2.0 Workgroup include Ben Metcalfe’s blog, Jeff Pulver’s blog, and several others.

As far as the name and the concept go, I must admit that I’ve personally never thought of the Web 2.0 phenomenon outside the boundaries of the Web. Yes, it incorporates other media, but, again, mostly through the web. Its short definition from the Workgroup is this: “Media 2.0 is a term used to describe the emerging social media industry.” Looking at it this way, it’s probably a subset, and not a superset of Web 2.0; however, it’s still an interesting topic to discuss. Social content, social news, and citizen journalism - all themes that are very frequently covered on this blog - are tied both to the traditional media and to the web, so I guess that pushing “Media 2.0″ as a concept does make sense.

In any case, I will be closely following the work of the Media 2.0 Workgroup, and you can, too, by using their combined feed in the form of an OPML file.

Google is the new http://

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at January 28, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and Features. 86 Comments

I’ve noticed lately that many users have all but stopped typing domain names directly in the web browser, and started using Google instead. Instead of writing “myspace.com” as the address, they write “myspace” into Google.

I’ve seen this behavior from my coworkers and friends, but it really becomes apparent when you see the top 1000 results of Google searches. Many of the top searches, like “bebo”, “ebay”, “yahoo”, “amazon”, “myspace”, “facebook”, aren’t really searches at all - these terms are mostly written by users who know exactly which page they want, but they’ve gotten used to using Google instead of the address bar. If you’re still not convinced, I give you the crown evidence: Google. One of the top search results in Google (number 6 at the time of this writing), is “Google“. Hundreds of millions of users are trying to get to Google through Google. Does this make any sense? No. But it shows that users don’t think about Google as a specific web page, they think of it as the service, an essential part of the internet experience. They’re using this service to get to the page they want: in this case, Google.

And you know what? They’re right. Google gives better results than the address bar in your web browser. Except for those hundred or so (probably less for casual internet users) addresses you know by heart, there’s a solid chance that name.com won’t be the right one. Perhaps it’s name.net, or .org. Or it’s namesomething.com, and you simply forgot about it. If you write the name of a fairly popular web site into Google’s search bar, you’re very likely to get the right result.

And not only that: In the first couple of search results, Google will probably give you the most relevant results from within the page, in many cases saving you time to browse through the actual web site. Using the address bar is simply not that effective.

What does this mean? It’s good news for Google, that’s for sure. When people think your service is an inseparable and essential part of the Internet, it’s hard for someone else to jump in. But it also means that domain names as static terms scattered across the Internet aren’t the primary way of distinguishing between different web sites any more. If people don’t use the address bar, they won’t go to the site with some exact domain name: they’ll go to the site Google deems most important for the term they’ve entered. The unlikely scenario of some site taking over the user base of a previously more popular site because of a shift in Google search results seems more and more plausible.

Google’s model of measuring hundreds of different factors, most importantly the number of links towards a web site, to establish the importance of a web site, is winning. We already know that it’s more important to have a coolname.org domain to which thousands of site link, than to have a coolname.com which noone links to, but domain names are still selling well, just because of their name. Is it worth it? If Google doesn’t already rank it high, it’s not. Take that into consideration when buying a second-hand domain name.

The community that does the right thing

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Stan Schroeder

at January 27, 2007 in Reviews, Web, Web 2.0 and News. 2 Comments

There’s a new community/social content site in town - dotherightthing.com. The basic concept is digg-like: users submit stories, and vote on them. However, although the content technically is links to other content, the idea is different: they link to actions of companies, individuals and other entities that make a social impact, while the users vote whether these actions are important, and if yes, are they positive or negative, and whether their impact will be severe or mild.

The users are divided into two categories: representatives and personal users. The first group represent a company or some other entity, acting as a spokesperson and trying to supply valuable information about the company. The other group acts as a collective conscience, judging whether the company and its actions are good or evil.

Essentially, dotherightthing is a reputation builder.

Mike Arrington over at Techcrunch has a pretty negative review of the service, criticizing it for being for-profit, and the immaturity of its community. I can’t agree with the for-profit argument; this site can be called an activist site, but they are basically just another community like Reddit, Netscape, Digg or many others, which also needs funding to go on. The fact that a site deals with activist/green/environmental/sustainable development and similar subjects should not automatically mean that they aren’t allowed to make money, especially if it’s through advertising.

The community, on the other hand, is just that: a community. You can’t really control it, contain it, or teach it how to act and what to link. I agree that the quality of the submissions and the comments will make a big impact on the success of dotherightthing.com, however I cannot blame the service if the users aren’t exactly the intellectual elite.

The bottom line, for me, is that I like the idea. I feel that dotherightthing.com is doing something new in the social content / social news arena. While users of Netscape, Digg, Reddit and other similar sites can only bury something, decreasing its visibility and making it nonimportant, users at dotherightthing.com can vote on something negatively, and at the same time draw attention to this negativity. This is a novelty, and novelty is good. Add to this that the site itself is designed well and seems to be superbly coded, and I can only wish them luck and a thriving community.

File downloading, if not for profit, not illegal in Italy?

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Stan Schroeder

at January 27, 2007 in News. 17 Comments

According to this report, the high court of Italy ruled that downloading (copyrighted) files - be it software, music, or movies - is not illegal if profit is not the motivation. The case in question was a lawsuit against two students who set up a p2p file-sharing network, and who were initially sentenced to one year in prison. But the highest judicial institution in Italy overthrew the decision, and set the two students free.

This is an important decision, because RIAA’s brainwash is lately succeeding in pushing the notion that p2p file sharing is a criminal activity per se. It’s good to hear that judicial bodies in some countries understand that listening to a song on the radio, sharing a mix-tape with a friend, and sharing files on a p2p network - if not for financial gain - do not automatically make you a criminal.

Unfortunately, despite this small victory, this is still an uphill battle in Italy. SIAE (Italian Assocication of Authors - think of it as the Italian RIAA) issued a statement in which it pointed out that within current legislation, which entered into force after this case, file-sharing (even if not for profit) is illegal.

In any case, this might be a good time to remember my old list of all the countries in which P2P sharing can most definitely cost you money, and possibly even your freedom.

YouTube adds “Digg this” button

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Stan Schroeder

at January 26, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 17 Comments

YouTube has introduced a hefty amount of new features. Among them is the possibility to block certain users, improved search (plus YouTube videos being indexed on Google Video Search), fixed messaging, more options for customizing channels, and several others. The category section received a much needed facelift, and it now shows two videos for each section on the front page, and twenty featured videos within each section.

You can find the entire list of new options and features at YouTube’s official blog.

The option I personally find the most exciting is the addition of buttons for quick posting of videos to social content websites: Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. These are available in the individual video pages after you click the “Post Video” button.

YouTube adds "Digg this" button

When you submit a video it automatically suggests the right Digg category. This one is placed in Videos -> People

Not that this was particularly hard to predict, but it does fit pretty well into one of my predictions for 2007, which said that everyone (and his grandmother) will have a “Digg this” button by the end of the year.

3 ways to brainstorm online

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Stan Schroeder

at January 25, 2007 in Reviews, Web, Web 2.0 and Features. 2 Comments

There’s a new brainstorming/mindmapping service in town - bubbl.us, and I decided to compare it with two older ones: Thinkature and Wridea. Since all three have a quite different approach, rather than competing, they actually complement each other quite well.

bubbl.us

First, we have Bubbl.us, the simplest of the three. The service lets you create a diagram - you start with an idea in a single bubble, and expand that idea horizontally or vertically. Select the name of the bubble, press Enter, and you get a child bubble. If you press Tab, you get a sibling bubble. If you drag a bubble onto another bubble, it will become its child. Simple and effective. You can save as many diagrams as you like, and you can print them out when you’re done. Fun fact: when you delete a bubble by pressing X in the upper right corner, first it counts down 3 seconds, then it blows up.

All this was created in less than a minute. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

The whole interface can be zoomed in and out (middle mouse button works). It looks very similar to Geni’s interface, and works just as good. Learning curve is non-existant: you’ll be using all that Bubble.us can offer in less then a minute.

Bubbl.us really more about mind-mapping than brainstorming, as the service is not meant to be used by multiple users, however you can simply share the account password amongs several people who can then add to the diagram as they please. The lack of multiuser functionality is my only objection: otherwise Bubble.us is a great little service that does only one thing, but it does it well.

thinkature.com

Thinkature is at first glance the most ambitious service in this roundup. It’s a true multiuser service, which means that it gives you a virtual workspace where you can collaborate with others. This makes it great for ‘true’ brainstorming sessions.

Thinkature - it’s perfect for planning bank robberies.

It also offers the most functionality. You can draw diagrams and flowcharts with boxes similar to bubbl.us, but you can also draw free-form shapes, add images, connect boxes with arrows, and point out various elements on your workspace to other users. Editing, moving and connecting the elements is mostly done by mouse, and it’s pretty easy to get the hang of it. Adding images is done especially well, because it’s integrated with a Yahoo web search, which means you can add dozens of images to your workspace on every imaginable topic within seconds. Of course, workspaces can be saved for later, and you can have as many as you like.

On top of all this, it supports both text and voice chat, so Thinkature can really be used for a true, virtual meeting. Actually, the service is flexible enough that it can be used for a myriad of uses, some of which you can find here.

There are some minor drawbacks. The relative complexity of Thinkature can make it pretty slow - for example, the default, tutorial workspace takes about 15 seconds to load. Also, it’s not badly designed, but it’s definitely not the prettiest service out there. Still, Thinkature is a pretty mature product and it deserves to be tried out. It would work particularly well in combination with another collaboration tool, such as Campfire.

wridea.com

Wridea has been around for at least 6 months, but it’s still in beta stage. It takes a different approach to brainstorming, as it’s based on idea sharing. After signing up, you are presented with a sample idea, which is basically a little text note. You can change the text, categorize it (you have to add some categories first for this to work), and change its visibility from private to friends only (public visibility isn’t enabled yet, but it’s planned for the future).

As you can see, I don’t really have that many ideas.

You can also organize your ideas into pages, manage your friends, and export your ideas into XML format. Lastly, there’s a feature called Idearain, which is basically a visualization of your ideas as they drop down from above, quite similar to Digg Stack.

While all this works pretty well, the basic idea seems to be lacking at this point, as it boils down to writing categorized notes with a bit of text. The list of new features is interesting and it could really add some flavor to Wridea, however the date for which it’s planned has long passed. I hope that the developers haven’t given up on this project and that we’ll still see some improvements in the future.

In this roundup, there is no winner. Each service has a completely different approach, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. For quick diagram/flowchart creation, I’d choose Bubbl.us. Thinkature is the best for brainstorming sessions with friends and colleagues, while Wridea is about sharing ideas, but some of its announced features should definitely be implemented to make the service really useful. Brainstorm away!

Privacy by anonymity

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at January 25, 2007 in Web and Features. 2 Comments

This report from Hexus says that the BSA (Business Software Alliance) is monitoring BitTorrent traffic and sending warnings to users who are “caught” downloading or uploading software protected by the BSA. This is definitely not news, but it’s relatively uncommon in Europe, and in this particular instance it happened to a UK user nicknamed Pipex. I know that warnings such as this have been sent to universities and similar institutions, but Europeans still aren’t used to getting such warnings personally.

This made me remember a concept pushed by Eben Moglen, one of the creators of GNU General Public License, which I’ve had the honor to interview a couple of years back. He’s an avid supporter of using encryption in everything you do on the Internet; not so much to protect yourself from being spied on, but to create a critical mass of encrypted content which would make any efforts from big companies and the authorities to control the flow of information so hard they would basically be forced to give up. He estimates that if about 30% of the net’s traffic were encrypted, it would be too expensive for most parties to spy on users except in rare, special cases. You can find more on this particular theme in one of Eben’s old interviews.

This in turn reminds me of all the p2p programs which incorporate some degree of encryption or another way to achieve anonymity, which have appeared (and, in many cases, disappeared) over the years. Unfortunately, none of these gained a big enough following, so anonymous p2p is still just an idea that awaits true realization. However, under the pressure of lawsuits, the p2p community will be forced to take another look at encrypted/anonymous p2p. Maybe we just need to wait for the right “killer application” which would convert everyone, or maybe it’s the matter of some popular program like eMule introducing encrypted p2p as one of the features.

In any case, here’s a list of several p2p applications that use various techniques to achieve anonymity: Alliance, AnoNet, ANts P2P, Azureus, Entropy, Freenet, GNUnet, i2phex, Marabunta, MUTE, Nodezilla, Rodi, RShare, Share, Sumi, Tor, WASTE, Zultrax. If you know of any others, please let me know.

*note that I haven’t tried out all of the above mentioned software and I cannot guarantee all of it (or any of it) is spyware/malware free.

Why power users will hate Vista

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at January 24, 2007 in Reviews, Software and Features. 40 Comments

I’ve been testing the final version of Windows Vista in the last couple of days and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it. I’m trying to figure an objective approach to it, but it’s really hard, because I simply don’t like most of the things I see. One of the reasons for this is the fact that Windows Vista doesn’t offer anything new for Windows power users - actually, it’s only taking away from them.

I could make a long list, but basically, all the problems stem from several simple facts:

First, there are no more expanding menus. Instead, you have a system similar to web browsing - one menu at a time is visible, while navigation is done with back/forward buttons. Result? Start - Program Files - Accessories - System Tools takes 4 clicks now. In WinXP, it was one click (and a short wait for menus to expand), and going back was just a small movement of the mouse. Sure, you don’t really have to click the items in the new menu, you can just hover over them and they will expand after a second, but most power users don’t want to wait - they want to do things fast. Moreover, the new menus (especially the Start Menu) offer less information because it’s all crammed in a small space. I can’t see any benefits to this new approach - all I see is drawbacks. Of course, you can turn this off in most places and go back to the good old expanding menus, but it means you’re going to have to do it every time you fix someone’s computer.

Start Menu

Which one do you prefer: the old version, or the crammed up version?

Then there are the task oriented menus. Questions, wizards, and tasks everywhere. When you want something done, you don’t want to ask questions. You want to go to that particular option and do something with it. Yet, in Windows Vista, everything is task-oriented, which may simplify things for some, but only complicates things for advanced users. For example, open display properties. You get several subsections, which you have to click again to get to the actual options. However, the option for changing the font size, is - for no apparent reason - listed as a ‘task’ in the left pane of the window. Why? Why is it a task, and why can’t it be with the other options? Why have two panes in the first place? It’s going to confuse the newbies, and it’s going to annoy the pros.

Also, there’s the placement of the options. It’s even harder to find some of them than before. I swear, most power users would probably be happiest if all options in Windows were just a long list with checkboxes, but Microsoft is doing their best to put the options in a million different places. And when the same application appears in several places, it usually opens up with different options available. The worse thing is, the options are pretty much the same as in Windows XP - it’s just a little harder to find your way around.

Here’s an example. The Resource Monitor is one of the most useful new applications in Vista - it monitors all system activity: CPU load, memory usage, disk access, network usage. You would expect this new tool to be in the Control Panel, right? Nope. OK then, Control panel, then System? No. Control Panel, then Performance information and tools? Surely this has got to be it? No.

Resource Monitor

Resource Monitor. From here you can also get to Performance Monitor and Reliability monitor, but not if you’ve opened it from Task Manager. I guess we’ll just have to remember that.

So where is it then? Two places. Start, right click on Computer, click manage. Expand System Tools and click Reliability and Performance. The other place is under the performance tab in Task Manager, but if you open it from here it will open in its own window. So, what I’m interested in is: why couldn’t this option be added in the Control Panel? It’s the logical place for it to be. Everyone is going to look there first. The name ‘Control Panel’ implicates that an application which lets you control your resources will be there. But no. For no reason at all, it’s entirely impossible to get to this option from the Control Panel. *update: it is present in the Administrative tools also, but there it’s not called the Resource Monitor, it’s called Reliability and Performance monitor. And in all the three instances I’ve mentioned here, it opens in a different window, with slightly different options on the side. Go figure.

This is a great example of Microsoft’s continuing strategy of obscuring certain important features (remember Disk Management in WinXP, and tell me how many casual users can find it? Yet it’s pretty damn important, don’t you think?), probably with the idea of simplifying things, but achieving the exact opposite effect. Microsoft engineers sure spent a lot of time thinking about the clueless users, but they haven’t added a single option that would cater to the needs of the pros. The options are reduced; menus are removed, important options are obscured. I bet many seasoned WinXP users will probably be struggling just to get things back to work as they used to, and it makes you wonder: what kind of progress is that?